terra-gnostic

Toward a Unified Music Theory

2011-02-13T15:19:00.000-08:00

It is clear that an event you have attended has been a success when you leave with more questions than answers. I have just spent well over 20 hours with a group of people madly passionate about the pursuit of meaning in sound and music- people who agree that the deeper one travels into music's inner workings, the more deftly it eludes one's grasp. I find it akin to those strange star clusters that you can only see in the night sky if you avert your gaze. Look slightly to the left and there it is; look at it directly and it vanishes into the deep black of the surrounding space.

I have chosen (or perhaps "it" has chosen me) to begin an exploration that might ground music in the field of philosophy in such a way that may grant entry, for the non-musician, into the vexing realms of modern composition, improvisation, sound design, etc. etc. etc. These etc.'s are not simply lazy avoidance but truly reflect the infinite genres we face in modern music. But why the infinite genres? Why the uncontrollable urge to divide, to separate, to atomize the myriad expressions of the human experience through the medium of sound? This is the problem to which I've been called to present possible solutions, possible integrations - a philosophy that unifies al music under one, highly complex yet beautifully simple, umbrella, whilst still respecting vast differences in approach. My multi-thousand dollar Phd and dissertation will most likely cover but one messy slice of this great pie. What I hope I might accomplish though, is creating a field of inquiry that unites rather than divides modes of musical expression.

{So the questions:
~How might we begin a definition of the "sound object"? further can sound be objectified? Its transitory nature seems to defy it.
~ Why, as Ken Hollings so beautifully put it, is it possible that "music is the mistake"?
~Why have composers, like Pierre Schaeffer, who have struggled to divest music of the imposed meaning of 500+ years of history, resorted in the end to imposing their own meaning on sound?
~Why have artists, dedicated to ultimate freedom of expression, chosen venues whose nature is ultimately restricting? The Dada artists for instance in the cabaret, Varese in Corbusier's massive architecture?}

These questions may never be adequately answered, but they need to be posed, dialogued, explored. Music may possibly be the least discussed of all forms of human expression. By "discussion" I do not mean the vapid, subjective drivel that passes for most "reviews". By "discussion" I mean a deeper exploration of what it means to be human, and what it means to express that humanness through the medium of sound. The questions will surely lead to more questions, but perhaps we will be a bit closer to the truth - asymptotic and elusive, but the goal nonetheless. Every attempt at an "answer" will inevitably be shot down, but questions are immortal. Questions like, "Maybe music is the mistake", need to be asked. Even though it will piss people off. Even though it is dangerous. Perhaps, because it is dangerous.

Where Do We Keep Our Loved Ones?

2010-11-11T06:43:00.001-08:00

Every couple of months I grab my guitar (and sometimes the banjo) and lead a "sing-a-long' with the residents at my father's assisted living facility. It is always a sweet hour, watching the faces of many who have lost large portions of their memories to dementia and Alzheimers, be brought back to happier times through these old folk songs. Music has a way of retaining its integrity in the soul that seems more durable than events with no rhythm or melody.

There was one woman in particular who, today, seemed particularly touched by my songs. She would smile, shake her head, and say, "I wish my son were here! He used to play all of these songs! I'll have to tell him to come down here and listen to this. He used to know all of these songs." I asked her if there was one in particular that she would like to hear in honor of her son. She replied, "No, no, it is just all of them. He'd play all of them." So we did Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" in his honor.

After getting my dad settled back in his room, I just happened to run into this woman on her way to the dining room... with her son. I shook his hand and asked him if he was still playing music. He glanced down at his mother, with so much love it was palpable, and said, "No, that was my dad. My dad used to play the guitar and the banjo and the harmonica, and even the squeezebox. He used to know all of those old folk songs." Mom didn't seem to notice that there was any discrepancy in the story. She was still smiling and remembering. Remembering those folk songs.

I wondered in that moment where we keep our loved ones. For this woman, her son and her husband occupied the same space in her heart. They were the same. They were simply loved. I am well aware that at a certain point, even those memories fade; leaving a person with no memories. But I think that we can rest assured that we are still there, in the soul; that behind those eyes that no longer recognize, there are loved ones - playing, smiling, laughing, crying, perhaps singing a folk song, linked forever in that part of us that is all too human; the part of us that loves.

Dignity and Immutability

2010-08-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

This is my father. His name is also Paul, though our middle names are different. So too was his father's name Paul. Born in 1919 in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, in a small town near Butler called North Washington, he never knew his own father. As much as I have uncovered reveals that Paul Sr. left his wife and three children to move West due to asthma. I have a distinct feeling that the reality was more complex than the story. What I do know is that my grandfather's legacy haunts my small family. I am my father's only child, born when he was 45 years old and, most likely, resigned to a life without children. Surprise. Like many fathers and sons our relationship was not without struggle, but we have grown, over the years, to love and accept one another. As a matter of fact, there are times when the love I feel for my father literally hurts my heart. Though his expression of it was hard won over the years, I now know that he loves me too. My family was small - three. In 1991 it was reduced to two. I am now watching it fade to one.

Our culture is ill equipped to deal with death. As a result, its citizens are ill equipped to deal with death. Few wish to talk about it; fewer still address personal mortality in any real and meaningful way. It is something that will occur “later”. So when the time comes, as it inevitably will for each and every one of us, that we lose a loved one or face our own demise, we find that even the strongest faith or belief in some transcendent reality can be shaken to its core.

In my own journey witnessing my father’s decline (which appears to be accelerating towards its zenith) I find that the dualities of my belief system stand in stark relief to the transcendent quality of his passage. Prior to being put on hospice care, days and weeks were spent in hospitals and doctors’ offices where any number if indignities were imposed upon my father. Anyone who has spent any time at all in the hands of the allopathic medicine community can attest to the fragmentation, disintegration, and brokenness of western medicine. My father tolerated the poking and prodding, the uncleanliness, the dispassionate treatment of a myriad of doctors, nurses, technicians, caretakers, etc. that paraded through his room with a level of dignity that is impossible to capture in words. This is why I began documenting what I saw as visual representations of this perception. His hands, though riddled with tubes, tape, and needles rested placidly in his lap.

Though too weak to stand, he sat in his chair gazing out at the street scene under his window, periodically asking questions I had answered not five minutes before. In his gown and blanket he reminded me of yogis I had seen photographed. Through the indignities of his situation, his intrinsic dignity remained. I wondered, is this the soul?

Therein lies another strong dualism: though the body decays, something palpable remains that is immutable. One can feel it in the presence of any individual, but in the dying it is particularly strong. I can think about my father merely three months ago, when he was walking, dancing, alert, and active and trace his decline to the present moment where he is weak, small, retracted, and incoherent. I can visualize this as a senseless and cruel set of circumstances reducing what I formerly knew as my father to a mere shadow of his former self or I can visualize this as a series of moments against the backdrop of an unchanging soul – a rising and falling of cosmic manifestation within the trajectory of divinity.

Though I struggle each and every day with the immanent loss of my last remaining parent, I also know that I am in the presence of the most sacred and universal of cycles – a cycle that gives value to existence and can serve as the deepest of reminders of that from which we are born and that to which we return – spirit.

On Happiness

2010-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Three weeks prior to leaving for Costa Rica, on the last day of my graduate school courses, a week before graduation, I watched my father get hauled into an ambulance - unable to speak, a huge abrasion on his face from where he hit the floor, and barely conscious. It was the first time I had been in the presence of the aftermath of a stroke, and it was horrifying. The next days were spent in the hospital where he seemed to have somewhat recovered. It seems to be one of our more difficult tasks as humans to understand that we have very little control over the fate of others, that we really have very little control over anything. It is perhaps even more difficult to be happy despite our situation.

I, like many in my community, have been sickened by the catastrophe in the Gulf. I have felt as though the hole in the ocean floor literally extended to my heart, but it was my powerlessness that darkened my soul - even more than the destruction of habitat, more than the innocent lives taken by our greed and consumption, more than the flippant, smug attitudes taken by the powers that be, more than the fact that even a catastrophe of this magnitude may not wake up humanity to the perils of a fossil fuel economy. I felt this same powerlessness as I sat by my father's side in the emergency room; watching as he suffered, unable to to anything except keep him covered and lift his head when he choked on his own saliva.

I realized, though, as I flew with my beautiful wife over thousands of miles of pristine landscape - mountains, desert, plains, steppes, woodland, forest - on our way to Central America, that, yes, human impact upon our planet is stupefying in its hubris; and yet by focusing my attention only upon the ugliness I do a horrible disservice to the beauty. Legend has it that if humans stop believing in the Gods, the Gods will disappear; they will be replaced by whatever we worship in their stead. Even science has realized that strict empiricism is impossible - that our observation affects the observed. So is it not in the best interest of the cosmos to be appreciated? We mourn our planet's passing yet it has not yet passed. Was it not the same with my father? I spent my time worrying about his death while he sat next to me breathing in the same air as I. I began to ponder: What if our only purpose on this planet were to be happy? What if it were as simple as that? I am blessed with this life - around me miracles abound. Is not the sheer fact of existence enough to fill a soul to brimming...if one were to allow oneself to truly take it in? I realized that I was tired. Tired of living my life in fear of the future and regret of the past. I can no more predict the future than I can change the past. My greatest contribution may be how I live this very moment: Will I sit, despondent, with my head in my hands, fearful of what tomorrow may bring and ignore the flock of finches playing in the cordyline tree? Will I walk down the street immersed in regret about yesterday and refuse to smile at a little boy and his mother walking their unruly little dog?

How much power is there in a smile, in taking an interest in another human being, in feeling love and gratitude for what we have rather than fear of what we may be losing? A star gave its life so that we may have it - so is it not our duty to shine as brightly? It took 13.5 billion years for the cosmos to create self-reflective consciousness. Even if the human moment is merely a flash in that timeline, I believe that we owe it to the universe to look back in wonder. We are one of only a few species on the planet that has the capability to smile. I find it hard to believe that this was an accident.

Ondrej Smeykal: Didj from Another Dimension

2010-01-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

I am reviewing the best didgeridoo player you have never heard of. On his second cd "Didgeridoo Solo II" the music drifts in like an archaic wave of consciousness, from a time before an egoic sense of self divided us from all that is, lulling us into a womb-like, but false, sense of security. I remember his tricking me like this at his show as well, waiting for my consciousness to drift back to the Dreamtime, before abruptly transporting me back to the 21st century with music shifting back and forth between duple and triple meter, but relaxed and natural as if were an 'of course' kind of an event. I know now that this was no trick, just infinite compassion on his part - he knew that if the cap were too soon blown off of my consciousness, that the rest of the show would be a wash.

Smeykal plays with the sonic dimensions of consciousness: small bits of melody are created which take up residence in the mind's ear even after they are no longer present in the sound structure itself. Close your eyes and you can imagine that something of a more modern ilk is occurring on the stage: house, drum and bass, Reich, Stockhausen... It seems impossible that this music, this soundscape is being created real-time on an instrument whose roots trace back over 10,000 years.

Impossible polyrhythms and molodies emerge from a primal drone. Smeykal mics his nose, so the breath can be used as another sound source - percussive and syncopated. Barks, growls, hoots - ancient didgeridoo language - are layered within complex rhythmic structures and laid skillfully within the overlying bed of sound whose relationship only multiple listenings can reveal.

I spoke with Ondrej after his last show here in the Bay Area. (I actually wanted him to sign his beautifully packaged, handmade [by Smeykal himself], embossed, woodcut adorned, cd's for me.) He is a humble, approachable, young man, endearing Czech accent, very sincere and appreciative. In the short time I had, I asked him about one of the pieces he played - one with long phrases in 7/4 and smaller phrases embedded within it, also in 7. (A mind-boggling feat in any musical medium, but on a didg, unbelievable.) His answer was simple. "It is simply breath," he said. "Every structure that emerges is based within natural cycles of breathing."

Smeykal embodies what I would see as a truly integral approach to music: complex layers of modernity which are transparent to an art form still in touch with the Dreamtime. Complex music theory and magical trance walk side by side, merging with one another, respectful of one another, and sharing each others' strengths, creating a music which transcends genre, place, even time. Seeing Smeykal is an opportunity which should not be missed. Alan Tower, a local didg master (http://alantower.net/), describes him as "a didg player from another planet". I would whole-heartedly agree and add that this music points to a mutation of consciousness which is the collective destiny - Integrality: a consciousness transparent to the Archaic, the Mythic, the Magical, and the Rational. Each held with equal weight in a sphere of timelessness. See him, listen to him, and be treated to the flavors of what is to come. (www.smeykal.com)

Dixie Chicken on Mofi

2010-01-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

I came into Little Feat late, at least too late to see the original line-up live. Lowell George died in June of 1979 and his band had entered my aural space around 1980 or so. (St. Louis was not exactly a high traffic town for bands that were a bit off the beaten path). I owe a debt to my next-door neighbor - a year or so older than me - for my long friendship with Little Feat. I was one of those hungry record collectors, who could be propelled to near orgasm by a fresh sound, a new idea, a turn of phrase that bent my consciousness into some new configuration. (Thousands of recordings later, I can say truthfully that this fetish has remained unchanged; the eargasms are just harder to come by -as it were.)
Most likely I was busy de-seeding some crappy weed from the dealer in the big white two-story down the street when that song came blasting out of Andy's parent's stereo. "Dixie Chicken" was the obvious hit on the record. Hits usually met with my disdain. If it's popular, it can't be good was my paradigm at the time. My resistance meter went sky high. This was way too commercial for me. But the pot was still filled with seeds and hulls so I remained a captive audience. The rest of side 1 was excellent rock & roll, beautifully played, meticulously arranged. And then ... and then..."Kiss it Off" oozed out into the room. Like some thick, dangerous swamp, it crawled across the floor, up my pant leg and began to do its work. You could tell Lowell meant it when he sang: "You were holy and you made me wonder how/But you looked like a devil who would seize and shake you down/On the hopes of a tyrant/No one makes it over".

I was hooked. Maybe it was the pot, but by the time "Fat Man in the Bathtub" came on, my head was doing the white-man-bob, my fingers air-instruments galore and my imagination was basking in the dusky streetlamps of New Orleans - boozy and destructive. This was completely intoxicating music. I was way too young then to truly appreciate the complexity of this masterpiece. I think I may still be too young - because each and every time I listen to this album something new and beautiful reaches out of the speakers and opens my eyes to some new possibility. Andy claimed that Little Feat was his "all time favorite band". I balked at the time but I think I understand now... sorry Andy.

I now have the brand new, remastered, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab version of Dixie Chicken in its third rotation of the day. I can practically smell that cheap Mexican pot now, a casserole stewing alchemically in the oven, because it is like hearing it all for the first time. Lowell George's scruffy face right here in my California living room weaving his voodoo music - that indescribable depth, humor, sincerity, and soul. Thanks Andy for opening my ears. Thanks Mofi for restoring this masterpiece to a sound that once again crawls across the floor and up my pant leg.

Buy it here: http://www.mofi.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=161&idcategory=0#details

The Journey (a fictional tale)

2010-01-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

The Journey
by: Paul McNees

Part I.
Thurston picked up his satchel and moved on. He had grown tired of the sounds of crickets and birds. But… Perhaps one more stop. Yes, here in this small thicket. The woods had grown extremely thick and dark (quite unlike his small florescent cubicle back in the city). Even though it was only mid-day he could feel the pressing presence of nighttime all around him. He glanced at his watch, yes, only mid-day. He gently set down his satchel upon a patch of moss and hid himself in the small thicket.
A small tunnel had formed at one end, which he only had to bend slightly at the hips to move his body through. He turned around and glanced back to whence he had come. His satchel sat cold and lonely, possibly shivering slightly, upon the small patch of moss. Thurston was suddenly filled with a deep sense of sorrow and pity at the sight of such a sad spectacle. It brought to mind a bitter memory, which he had lovingly stored away for future vindictiveness against some foe unawares.

File cabinet B: in all likelihood stored under T for Trauma. Subset C: childhood trauma.

Camera focuses on satchel. Move to extreme close-up. Satchel fills the screen. Camera fades back revealing braided rug, fine antique furniture. The pacifying sounds of ticking clocks swells but something overrides: Mother taunting child.

“Well if you’re gonna go, go!”
“Mamma I don’t really wanna go! I don’t wanna run away!”
“C’mon let’s go pack a bag for you…Let’s see, you’ll need socks, underwear…”
“Momma!”
Child is throwing articles out of the satchel as fast as Momma can pack them. Momma wins out. Bag is packed and Momma takes child by the hand and leads him to the front door.
“Momma!”
Child is in hysterics.
Door opens.
“Momma, NO!”
Satchel is set out on a dimly lit porch. Child is shoved out after it.
“Give us a call when you get settled in, OK?”
Momma closes door. Child begins to whimper.

Camera closes in on satchel. Fade to file cabinet where Childhood Trauma #106 is confidently stored away. File drawer is closed and Thurston peers out through a tangle of branches.

He feels safe in here. That ever-comforting womb-like appeal. He knows, however, as he did even then in progressive fetal stages, that he cannot stay in here forever. His satchel is waiting patiently for him as he exits the thicket. Thurston doesn’t think it was really afraid. He doesn’t believe that inanimate objects are capable of deep feelings such as fear. Fear is an emotion far too complex for a satchel. Yet he lifted it and cradled it in his arms like a newborn infant. Just like Momma held him when he was a little boy. Especially after Daddy had just beat him with the switch for being bad. That was when Momma held him the tightest. She would hold him until the bleeding on the backs of his legs stopped. It would always take a few days though for the welts to go away.
Thurston stood at the edge of the thicket and gazed down at the path he had chosen to follow. He rested his chin on his newborn satchel. That path was teeming with life. He could hear it and feel it. So much different from the city. The city did not contain so much life as much as it did just movement. Just people bustling here and there, to and fro. Carrying their little file cabinets in their heads. Their handy storage bins. Thurston grinned. When he grinned, his cheeks dimpled. He didn’t care to remember how many times in his 29 years someone had stuck a finger in those dimples. Uncle Tom had to have been the most frequent offender. Uncle
Tom always came to the house bearing gifts and laughter. The gift was usually liquor and the laughter – slightly hysterical. A certain look resided in his eyes that revealed something other than sanity. His brackish hysterics could turn to violent anger in the blink of an eye. And he always had his finger in Thurston’s dimple. Even when Uncle Tom molested Thurston, he commented about his dimples. “Don’t frown, Thursty!” he would say, and he would kiss Thurston’s little lips and fondle Thurston’s penis and buttox. Then Thurston would have to do the same thing to Uncle Tom until Uncle Tom would squirt his pearly white jism all over Thurston’s hand.
The thicket was behind him now.

❊❄❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊

I am Thurston’s father. Call me Leamish. My first name is of Armenian descent on my mother’s side. A grandmother of mine was raped, beaten and taken as a slave during the wars with the Turks. Her name, too, was Leamish. She was bought again by a wealthy English sailor who eventually fell in love with and married her. He became my grandfather. When I was a child I went by the name of Lee because of the embarrassment my female name caused me. I have raised my son, Thurston. as best I could. I gave him a man’s name.

❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊
Part II.

Mid-day broke unevenly into evening and, reaching his destination from a slightly circuitous route, Thurston knocked humbly upon the rotting wooden door. The woman, Thurston’s mother (aged, pathetic, rasping from years of cigarette aggravated emphysema) cautiously squeaked open the door and extended her withered arms in a declined invitation for a hug. Thurston had found this to be the best method for establishing the power structure immediately. Momma’s eyes swum in her head like opaque bubbles stuck in some peculiar, quite uninhabitable surroundings.
“You’re late”, she said – before hello, before how-have-you-been.
Power structure shifts.
Thurston recovers.
“Your expectations about my time of arrival were skewed mother. Not unlike the many other bizarre perceptions of your surroundings.”
Never give excuses. Always shift blame. Rule of power maintenance #1.
Silence.
Thurston peruses the room.
Mother: So how have you been?
Power remains stable
Thurston: Fine mother, fine. Missed you at the funeral.
Mother: Has that happened already? Note of surprise in voice, sardonic.
Thurston: Well…he died last week you know. We had to get him buried sometime now, didn’t we? We didn’t want him to just lie around and decompose. That would lack a certain nobility that I think he rather deserved.
Mother: Oh yes! Suicide is a terribly noble method of bringing a close to one’s life isn’t it. There is no question mark .
Thurston: Well it certainly ranks far above slowly rotting away in some stinking hovel out in the middle of nowhere with the sole purpose of providing one more disruptive odor to this already rather pungent world. All this said with the greatest calm and forced eye contact.

❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊

I am Thurston’s father. Call me Ichabod. My mother was a prostitute, my father a sharecropper in eastern Prague. Both moved to England in 1945 at the end of the Great War. Five girls were born preceding myself. My mother died in childbirth whilst bringing me into the world. This saddens me. Afflicted with sclerosis of the liver and bad teeth, my father fled to the city to live the rest of his meager days in the accompaniment of other alcoholics and general failures. This also saddens me. I was raised by my oldest sister, who is, to this day unmarried. She sacrificed her life and her beauty for five waif siblings. This saddens me most of all. When I met Thurston’s mother, she was a seamstress in a clothing factory. She was a pitiable creature. I took her away from all that.

❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆

Part III.

Leaving Momma standing, tears welling, autistic rocking, hands wringing. Walking into yard, down cellar steps. Dead leaves crunching underfoot.
Momma knitting death shawl.
(Still, those indefatigable traditions…Keeping the magic alive.)
Old door creaking open on hinges rusted, disintegrating.
Only the ghosts know the secrets of this cellar’s darkness.
Thurston thinking, “Bring back the sun. God damn the sun.”
The sun’s infinite pouring light only reminds him of this cellar’s darkness. It’s light spilling onto stairs with each step a little darker.
Momma blinded by tears – moving – sadness settling on the dusty furniture mingling uneasily with the anger.

Thurston’s satchel lying untended.

Thurston hoping to find an abatement of anger in this dark, moist cavern. He only finds fear. Standing for a moment he peers about him. Nothing. There is nothing here. Just rotting memories. Those memories that grow and change with our experience. The entropy is diffident. It can only transform. He knows he cannot find his answers here. The answers to his hatred – his hatred mingled with love and blindness. He lets his shoulders relax.

He
blows out
a breath
of air
as if
to
pollinate
the wind
with
his
troubled
soul.

He is in the bowels of his mother’s home. Swallowed. She marches around upstairs. He can hear her weeping. Her vile weeping. Her salty tears falling on the dusty hardwood floor. Liquid pain. If she died, would his burden be lifted? Would the cord be finally cut? Would he leave this house once and for all, not turning ‘round to see it diminishing in the shadows cast by trees?
Or would he carry
this pain to his grave,
once more covered by
the thickening leaves.

The sun had found the mouth of the cavern as it always did at this time of day. Thurston was annoyed by its peaceful consistency. It poured in its golden light displaced here and there by the dust stirred up by Thurston’s presence here. As he moved toward the light the dust parted before him. This was not the belly of the whale, Thurston thought. Nothing has changed. I am not closer to God.

❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆◆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆◆❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆

I am Thurston’s father. I am not known by any name. My mother was made of light and my father was made of stone. My rape came on the wind of an icy night in February. The night Thurston was born, the leaves fell from the trees and covered the ground in a tapestry of fire. The next day, the light shone brightly by the world was frozen on its axis. Thurston cried. For a fortnight he cried, unceasingly, filling his cradle with tears thick like the embryonic fluid that still dripped through the cracks of the floor beneath him.
His satchel had already been packed and stood patiently by his bed as Thurston lay floating peacefully in his own salty tears.
No photographs were taken of his childhood. No memories preserved. Though I was always there he never knew me.

❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❆❊❊❆❊❆❉❆❊❆❊❆❉❆❊❆❊❆❉❆❊❆❊❆❉❆❊❆❊❆❉

Part IV.

As Thurston appeared in the doorway to the living room, his mother was circling his satchel making a harsh, grating noise with her chaffed wrinkled hands – wringing them as if to rid herself of some nefarious residue.

“Stop that!”, Thurston cried and again more softly, “stop that.”

She stopped and stared at him like a scolded yet defiant dog. She was silent.
Thurston came toward her but they were divided by his satchel, which sat confidently upon the floor between them.
The light was beautiful now. Golden, soft. But it more angrily displayed the filth inside Momma’s unkempt little hovel.
Thurston reached forward with his right foot and slowly scooted the satchel aside until nothing divided him and his mother but internal walls. He reached out and took hold of his mother’s dry hands. They were much softer than he expected. He looked up into his mother’s face, which held interchangeably, fear and great sadness. He slowly brought her hands to his lips and gently kissed them. He rested his cheek for a moment on her trembling fingers and with infinite slowness released them. Without again looking up, he reached for his satchel and followed the sun’s rays toward the door. The dust floated like stars in the stillness. Momma stood and stared at the soft imprint of Thurston’s satchel in the dust. She returned to her knitting.

The door creaked and then was silenced by a soft

click.

Once outside

Thurston

breathed deeply the quickly cooling air.

The night awaited

him but he

knew his

way

well.

Meister Eckhart and The Great Turning: Creation Theology as Ecological Model

2009-12-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

Meister Eckhart and The Great Turning:
Creation Theology as Ecological Model
by: Paul McNees

Introduction:
The memory is as clear as if it had happened yesterday. It was Sunday and I was attending church service. It was just something that I did. I was all of 18 years old. I had been doing this for as long as I could remember. I was standing up and sitting down with all the rest of the congregation, reciting the words written out for me on the pamphlet I was handed as I walked into the sanctuary. I was doing what I was told just like everyone else. But this day was different. There is nothing in my memory that I could particularly chalk it up to, it was just different. That Sunday I began to look around at the other members scattered about the pews and what I saw was terribly disturbing. I saw a people who no longer really cared. They were doing their Sunday duty and after the service was done and the doughnuts were eaten and gossip was exchanged, they would all go home and live their lives exactly as they had before. God really didn’t change anything. That was the moment of my fall from faith.

I’m not exactly sure what my faith rested on before that moment, but I think it had something to do with community. Once my community had gone off to college I found myself unmoored and could rely only upon the teachings and the ritual. Perhaps it was the rebelliousness of teen-hood or perhaps something more insightful but by the time the year was out I was only seeing the hypocrisy. I never went back... much to the chagrin of my family. I began to cringe at the mention of God and especially Jesus (whom I had wanted so badly to love) and refused to call myself a “Christian”.

Recently I found a note my father had written to me but never sent. It said something to the effect of, “I hope you can find Jesus and accept Him into your heart, Paulie, so that you can join your mother in Heaven.” It was a heartfelt message from a devout Christian and it broke my heart. My father truly believed that his son would not be spending eternity with him and my mother. What an incredible burden that could be remedied so easily¬ - all I had to do was accept Jesus as my personal savior and it would all be ok. Why could I not give him that? Well, for one thing, I did not believe it and I found it reprehensible to lie about something that important. I suppose the next question might be – why is it important if I believed it to be a crock? The answer to that question may lie in the fact that I still cried during Amazing Grace or Lord of the Dance. My tears meant that I was touched by something ineffable in the Christian story, something true, something important. But it was not to be found in Heaven in some hypothetical afterlife, it was to be found right here, right now. Odd that I would begin to find my answers through the veil of tears shed for our planet.

Religion and Our Relationship to the Environment
It is no great secret that Christianity (at least the Augustinian form) has been partly to blame for the dualistic nature of humankind’s relationship with the planet and the natural world. As Lynn White said in his 1967 essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny – that is, by religion.” (Gottlieb, pg. 188) He goes on to say that, “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” (ibid) It is not my intention in this paper to place blame or indulge in a litany of historical references regarding the Church’s interpretation of the Bible as God’s plan for humans to dominate nature. I will instead take that as a given (One could refer to This Sacred Earth, mentioned above, for a number of critical essays on the subject.) and move on to what I see as a possible path for religion to participate in, rather than thwart, a fruitful relationship to the natural world. I am not suggesting a return to primitive Neolithic roots (animism) or an undermining of the basic teachings of the Church. What I am suggesting is a radical revision of modern Christianity’s eschatological philosophy and a broadening of the basic teaching of compassion. As we will see later, these two are linked through one primary shift: the shift from anthropocentric monotheism to ecocentric panentheism. The beauty of this shift is that nothing is lost and everything can be gained. The thoughts and concepts of this approach will be encapsulated in the superimposition of the fourfold path of Meister Eckhart through Matthew Fox and the fourfold path of The Great Turning as illustrated by Joanna Macy. The paper will be divided into four parts: 1. Creation (via positiva) and Gratitude, 2. Letting Go and Letting Be (via negativa) and Grief, 3. The Breakthrough (via creativa) and New Identity, and 4. Re-creation (via transformativa) and Going Forth.

In each section I hope to illustrate the striking similarities of Macy’s compassionate vision of Deep Ecology and Eckhart’s profoundly modern teachings of Creation Spirituality. One key point that I would like to remain cognizant of throughout is this: Facing our Hubris – Can we allow ourselves to experience the mystery and beauty of nature, recognize our own guilt for participating in its destruction and still hold on to the miracle of what it means to be human? This may be our most profound challenge.

Creation (via positiva) and Gratitude

Grace

etymology - Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin gratia - favor, charm, thanks, from gratus- pleasing, grateful; akin to Sanskrit grnāti- he praises
1 a: unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification b: a virtue coming from God c: a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace

To label Meister Eckhart a theologian is to deny him his titles as mystic, feminist and ecologist. To label Joanna Macy an ecologist is to deny her titles as mystic, feminist and theologian. According to Eckhart, “Even he who knew nothing but the creatures would never need to think about any sermons, for every creature is full of God and is a book.” And Macy, “Just as lovers seek union, we are apt, when we fall in love with our world, to fall into oneness with it as well. We begin to see the world as ourselves. Hunger for this union springs from a deep knowing, which mystics of all traditions give voice to.” (Macy 2007, 27) As I write this, outside my window there sits an elegant mourning dove calling to its mate, two hummingbirds engage in a wild chase around a huge pine, a tiger swallowtail butterfly alights on a freshly opened daisy and the star that is our Sun shines brightly upon it all. As I write this, I am alive and breathing the fresh spring air and contemplating the miracle and the fragility of all these creatures’ existence. If I allow myself to go more deeply I realize that I am composed of the very same stuff as the dove and the butterfly and all of it was created inside a star that gave up its life so that we could all exist. Still further, we all float inside a universe whose numinous beauty and mystery lies in its simple (and yet so complex) isness. “Isness is proper to God alone and the fact of the isness of created things is a divine fact, a divine presence. ‘Each and every being owes to God the fact that it exists, is one, is true, and is good. And every being not only possesses each of these from God himself, but it possesses them from him without any intermediary.’” (Fox, article) This Creation is the ultimate act of generosity. There is no why, there is nothing asked in return, it simply is. What other response could we possibly have from this perspective except gratitude? It is here that the path begins, for upon what firmer ground could we begin our work than from the miracle of existence? This gift is not simply given in a moment only to lie in a state of entropy but one that is continually in the process of creation. Here Eckhart merges beautifully with current theories of modern physics. Eckhart taught, “I have often said God is creating this entire world full and entire in this present now.” (Fox, 2000, 65) Quantum physics is now finding that the nature of a vacuum is generativity. Particles appear out of (seemingly) nothing in a continuous foaming forth. Matter seems to be in the process of eternal creation.

If one were to truly allow this idea to sink into the fabric of their being, there would be no option but to feel connected, to understand one’s place in a web of mutual dependence, to borrow a phrase from Macy’s lexicon. Most of us, however, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, have been indoctrinated with a sense of separateness, of springing not from a fountain of generosity but from the filth of Original Sin. I believe that Macy and Eckhart would agree that gratitude from such a place would be next to impossible, but were one to look around oneself at all creatures and see in them, and oneself, the nobility of the seed of God, one would be hard-pressed to feel anything but a sense of grace.

Letting Go and Letting Be (via negativa) and Grief

“What is it that we do? We fear. We do not fear ghosts but we fear the ghosts of ourselves.” -Loren Eisley

“We will journey into God as we journey into ourselves. If we can face the darkness within, we can face the darkness that is God.” (Fox, 2000, 170) And from Sermon Twelve: “...when all images of the soul are taken away and the soul can see only the single One, then the pure being of the soul finds passively resting in itself the pure, form-free being of divine unity, when the being of the soul can bear nothing else than the pure unity of God.” In ancient Buddhist traditions it is taught that the further we explore our inner world through meditation the closer we get to finding... nothing. {Gate, Gate, Paragate, Para Sam gate Bodhi svaha! - Gone, Gone, Gone beyond Gone utterly beyond Oh what an Awakening!} There is nothing to be found at the core of our being, no self, no ego, nothing to hold on to at all, just pure emptiness. So also as we move further and further into our exploration of matter – as we delve into the molecular world what we find is space, emptiness. But before that, before the emptiness, what do we encounter? Most of us who are honestly engaged in self-reflection or meditation find pain, grief, anger, attachments and cravings. Herein lies the Letting Go. It is what Macy would call Positive Disintegration - honoring our pain, despair and grief.

This is Eckhart’s via negativa. In order to become truly effective in the world and to give birth to divine knowledge we must empty ourselves and pass through a dark night of the soul – a night where we face our pain, anguish, fear and guilt and let it go. Most of all, it seems to me, we have to let go of our hubris and our desire to know. For as we approach this emptiness there is little to know and there are no whys. There is simply isness. But never in Eckhart do we find simplicity, even here, in the emptying out he plays with the paradox of something verses nothing. In Sermon Fourteen he illustrates this dialectic in a most creative manner. In addressing the issue of purity of heart he says “...that heart is pure that has put an end to all worldly things...you must be free of nothingness,” (emphasis mine). He goes on, “Let a burning coal be taken and placed on my hand.

If I wished to say that the piece of coal was burning my hand, I would not be correct. If I were to state accurately, however, what is burning me, I would say that ‘nothingness’ is doing it. For the piece of coal has something in it that my hand does not have. Beyond, this ‘nothingness’ is burning me. If my hand, however, had in itself all that the coal is and can endure, it would have quite completely the nature of fire... I say quite truly that, to the degree that you are grasped by ‘nothingness,’ you are imperfect. Therefore if you wish to be perfect, you must be free of ‘nothingness.’” (Fox, 2000, 200)

Even as we empty ourselves of all the obstacles to experiencing our interconnectedness and divine grace, we must also let go of the very experience of emptiness! Any attachment it seems would reek of purpose and to be completely pure we must also let go of purpose. It is important to experience our grief for its own sake, strictly for the emptying of it, otherwise we run the risk of facing our pain to absolve our guilt, which would place us on the wrong track. As Eckhart states above, to truly have everything we have to let go of everything, including nothingness. Once we have everything there will no longer be desire and therefore we will become a clear channel for divine creativity to flow through. According to Macy, “positive disintegration occurs when a person courageously confronts anomalies and contradictions of experience. It is like a dark night of the soul, a time of spiritual void and turbulence. But the anxieties and doubts are, Dabrowski maintains, ‘essentially healthy and creative.’ They are creative not only for the person but for society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.” This point is key: that the process of letting go presupposes the process of letting be which allows for true creativity to take place, which is our very nature!

Humans have spent the last five hundred or so years in an unbridled quest to subjugate nature, to discover her secrets, and eventually to completely separate from her processes. We now find ourselves at a crossroads. The old way leads to more destruction, alienation and suffering. The new way is a radical new awareness of interconnectedness and healing. There may be no way for humans to slow the tide of cataclysm now enveloping the globe but it is possible for us to heal the spiritual rift between our planet and our species. As Matthew Fox puts it, “Consequent on letting go, there occurs a deepening experience of reverence for all things – God, self, others, creation. It is a process of letting be...Here lies the crux of this journey: letting God be God (and not just our preconceived ideas of God) in us. It is for this reason that we abandon even the names we have given to God. ‘I pray God that he may quit me of God.’” (Fox, article) Would not the ultimate creativity spring from a well so deep that it has even abandoned or at least brought into question the very preconceptions on which we have structured our lives? And so we find in Macy’s work, “What ‘disintegrates’ in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and ideas...We do not need to protect ourselves from change, for our very nature is change. Defensive self-protection...makes it harder to adapt. It not only reduces flexibility, but blocks the flow of information we need to survive. Our ‘going to pieces,’ however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.” (Macy, 2007, 96)

The Breakthrough (via creativa) and New Identity
It is here in this third phase where the tension of phases one and two come into an important dialectic. As Eckhart explains, “A great master says that his breaking through is more noble than his flowing out, and that is true...In the breakthrough, where I stand divested of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am beyond all creatures and I am neither ‘God’ nor creature, but rather what I was and what I will remain now and ever more.” (Fox, article) Fox relates the idea as follows, “To create, the artist needs to let go radically of living; and to live, the artist needs to let go radically of creating. The via negativa, then, becomes the bridge that heals and links Paths One and Three and thereby encourages rather than discourages further birth and creativity. The first of the births that occur is that of the individual: an awakening, a rebirth, a birth of oneself. For this awakening Eckhart invented a word. He called it ‘breakthrough.’” (Fox, 2000, 292)

The very same dialectic occurs in Macy’s deep explorations. Through the process of facing our separateness, our pain, our darkness, a new identity is forged. But this new identity is imbibed with the breakthrough to our oneness with the planet, with other beings, and with all of creation. “What happens for us then is what every major religion has sought to offer – a shift in identification, a shift from the isolated ‘I’ to a vaster sense of who we are...As living things evolve on this planet, we move not only in the direction of diversification, but towards integration as well.” (Macy, 2007, 107) I believe that it is here that one encounters the full radiance of Eckhart’s (and I believe Macy’s, though she practices Buddhism) panentheistic vision. If we take as a given that all is in God and God is in all things, including and interpenetrating them, then subject/object relationships no longer exist. Viewed from a strictly ecological/cosmological perspective, if everything is made from the same star-matter whose source is the seamlessness of all creation, then our experience and the universe’s experience are one and the same; each of us is unique and yet totally inseparable from the whole. There is no subject, no object, only us.

From this place of equality and emptiness creativity can flower forth. It is living like a true mystic - without a why, without justification, creativity just for the sake of creating. But the tension still exists in the perpetual process of letting go. Though an artist creates something tangible outside of herself, the essence of the creation still resides within. As long as the artist is continually divesting herself of her attachments and preconceptions there will always be room for more inspiration. This is, for Eckhart, a key to understanding our relationship with God. Though He has created us, we still remain within Him. So however distinct we may feel, we are still included the greater whole. Applied to ecology this concept would create a profound shift in our relationship to the planet. In fact, this shift in consciousness is crucial to our survival as a species. Anything short of this level of radical transformation will be like trying to dig our way out of the problem with the same tools that got us here in the first place – linear, mechanistic, hubristic thinking.

Re-creation (via transformativa) and Going Forth: Compassion
At this juncture in history, it is imperative to do everything we can to usher in a new planetary era. I believe, as do many other contemporary scholars, (Richard Tarnas, Christopher Bache, and Joanna Macy to name just a few) that the human species is on the threshold of a planetary initiation, one that will wake us up to our interconnectedness with each other, the planet and, eventually, the cosmos. This shift is already manifesting in the collapse of global financial structures, climate change, and mass extinction of species. Humans are becoming acutely aware of their impact on systems previously seen as eternal, unchanging and only remotely connected to one another. As mentioned above religion plays a huge role in determining people’s relationship to nature and destiny, and therefore it is the responsibility of institutionalized religion to play a role in this new ecology. “There are divine implications in the decisions we make in this life since in a certain sense God depends on people to carry on the work of re-creation. ‘Just as little as I can do anything without him, he cannot really accomplish anything apart from me’. Without the hard work of humankind God is not continually reborn and therefore God dies. ‘We slay God.’ and we, human history die in the process.” (Fox, article)

Paths One, Two and Three of Eckhart and steps One, Two and Three of Joanna Macy’s work toward the Great Turning have led to the same peak – compassion. Armed with gratitude we have the fortitude to enter into the dark, face our pain, grief and hubris and let it go. Once emptied, there is room for the creative breath of inspiration to flow unobstructed from the very core and essence of our being. From this place we no longer need to imitate nature because we are nature. Interconnection implies generosity, because if nothing de-termines you from me how could I possibly withhold? “It simply requires a flow of energy from the truth of the unity of things in God and God in things. It is a logical consequence of the consciousness of panentheism and of the new awareness that letting go affords us. There is no dualism in this love of God and neighbor.” (Fox, article) And according to Macy, “Do not think that to broaden the construct of self in this way will eclipse your distinctiveness or that you will lose your identity like a drop in the ocean. From the systems perspective, the emergence of larger self-organizing patterns and wholes both requires diversity and generates it in turn. Integration and differentiation go hand in hand. ‘As you let life live through you,’ poet Roger Keyes says, you just become ‘more of who you really are.’” (Macy, 2000, 154)

So as I think back on the story of my youth from the Introduction to this paper, I wonder, what was it that destroyed my faith? Was it simply what I perceived as unenlightened, cattle-like behavior, or was it something deeper, perhaps a deep seeded fear of becoming “one of them”, of losing my identity? I, like so many other human beings, have valued my character, my originality and my distinctiveness above all other qualities. I have held this in such high esteem, in fact, that I believe that I have sacrificed the development of true compassion. This is a difficult pill to swallow indeed. Yet, perhaps this is my own hubris and, more important, has been my path for a reason. At this stage there is not much point in turning around to look back because there is too much to look forward to. It does not really matter anyway, because as Eckhart might say, it is not a matter of Will to stay on the path, we are already, and have forever been, on it whether we know it or not.

I believe that it is so with the planet as well. We are being initiated into planetary consciousness; the choice lies in whether we wish to be on the ride consciously or unconsciously.

References

Eisley, Loren. The Star Thrower. New York, NY, Harvest Books, 1978

Fox, Matthew. Meister Eckhart on the Fourfold Path of a Creation-Centered Spiritual Journey. Article, Handout

Fox, Matthew. Passion for Creation; The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart. Rochester, Vermont, Inner Traditions International, 2000

Gottlieb, Roger S. (editor) This Sacred Earth; Religion, Nature, Environment. New York, NY, Routledge Press, 1996

Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley, CA, Parallax Press. 2007

Emanuel Swedenborg: Hope and Action in the Birth of the New Mind

2009-12-22T15:34:00.000-08:00

Emanuel Swedenborg:
Hope and Action in the Birth of the New Mind

I was having a conversation over lunch this week with a former Montessori colleague. We were animatedly discussing how to talk about cells with young people – what makes cells come alive, both literally and figuratively. In order to attempt an understanding of these mysterious beings, we must first look toward our experience. Our cells are all living systems within our bodies, communicating with one another and in telepathic communication with our Self. We think about moving our hand in a sweeping gesture and a sweeping gesture manifests itself in space and time. The miracle of all this is that the cause and effect are instantaneous and simultaneous. The thought creating the gesture and the gesture itself are outside of the confines of time and space. When did this telepathy, I wondered, become defined, delineated by our skin? Perhaps con-fined is a more appropriate word.

How did our cells learn how do communicate in such intricate and wondrous ways? Let us travel backwards in time to the molecules that produced these living cells. But another mystery awaits us there: How did these specific molecules know how to arrange themselves into complex proteins and DNA? How did such impeccable order arise out of such seeming chaos? Again, we travel back – to the atoms themselves that formed such complex molecules. A “simple” example is a water molecule – two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. We say, “Well, they bonded!” But as we probe further and ask a scientist how they bonded, what drew them together, they might answer with another concept like gravitational attraction or electromagnetic attraction. We probe further (most likely leading to the vexation of our scientist friend): But what is this attraction you speak of? How does it work? This is the stuff that drives all of creation. What is it? You will most likely get no answer, and if you do, it will be that you are asking the wrong questions.

I don’t believe that these are the wrong questions; quite the opposite really – I believe that they are probably the most important questions. I did have an answer for my Montessori colleague, but it was not discovered through traditional scientific empirical research. It was discovered through the mystics. What is this intelligence that pervades all of creation? What is it that attracts one molecule to another? What is it that has created life and consciousness? It seems to me to be Love – a pervasive love that guides the complex properties of the cosmos, from the grand to the minutia.

Again we can look to our own experience as an illustration: Emanuel Swedenborg describes one’s ruling love as one’s core values, and also “the vital force that pervades the soul and the body, both in general and in every particular.” (Johnson, 2003, pg. 17) If one then ascribes to Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence then it would follow that we, as individuals and as a species, are reflections of the cosmos and that love is the core value of the cosmos. What I find most hopeful in all of this is the possibility of the redemption of the human species, and that redemption’s impact on today’s global crises. Teilhard, in The Phenomenon of Man, quotes J.B.S. Haldane in a footnote. He says, “Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.” (Teilhard, 1975, pg. 57) What would this Great Being look like?

All around us we see the stirrings of great change. Marilyn Ferguson said, “The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind – the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought.” (Ferguson, 2009, pg. 1) Ferguson describes the forging of alliances with like-minded people; how these people seem drawn to one another through some mystical magnetism - not unlike the attraction of hydrogen to oxygen that forms our great oceans. Brian Swimme says that, alone, hydrogen atoms are just hydrogen atoms, but when enough of them join together they form a star. Swedenborg might describe this phenomenon as creating a correspondence of Heaven on Earth. It all goes back to ruling love. “We end up in the higher spiritual worlds in a society of people like ourselves because of our ruling love. Thus our ultimate spiritual function lies in our ruling or supreme love, which we can begin to realize in this world.” (Van Dusen, 2001, pg. 58)

How might one see this change coming about and how does the work of Emanuel Swedenborg play a role? First, I believe it is important to understand that, according to Jean Gebser, integral consciousness is irrupting in our species as a natural part of the process of evolution. Georg Feuerstein describes it in these terms, “Whenever the energic fluctuations within a given system (such as cells, stars, urban traffic) reach a critical point, they reorganize the system itself, giving rise to a new, more complex pattern, or higher-order whole .” (Feuerstein, 1987, pg. 136) Some, with this information, may take on a certain fatalistic perspective, that divine providence will lead the way and humanity can be allowed to simply float in its wake. This would be an example of the kind of action-less faith that Swedenborg advises against. “The essentials of religion are consideration for others and faith...Faith alone is mere thought, not sufficient in itself because it has too little of our life in it.” (Van Dusen, 2001, pg. 33) In Swedenborg’s own words, “According to angelic wisdom, unless volition and discernment, or desire and thought, or charity and faith, devote themselves to involvement in works or deeds whenever possible, they are nothing but passing breezes, so to speak, or images in the air that vanish. They first take on permanence in us and become part of our life when we perform and do them.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.216) I like to see this as manifesting our highest purpose, our “ruling love”, for the benefit of all of creation.

Swedenborg’s thought guides us in another philosophically important manner: Causes. According to Aristotle, there are four interacting Causes: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The standard illustration for how these causes interact is in the building of a house. The material cause is the wood, the nails, the tools used to build the house. The formal cause is the design, the thought, and the planning that brought the house from an idea to an actuality. The efficient cause is the actual work that went into the construction of the house. The final cause is the Home – it’s purpose for being. In the Cartesian worldview, only the efficient and material causes are recognized as empirically valid: One dead atom strikes another dead atom and the detached observer recognizes an event. Swedenborg, on the other hand, draws a more recursive, systematically open, picture of the causes. The terms he uses are different but the meaning is the same: For Swedenborg they are called the purpose, the means, and the result, which would correspond, respectively, to the formal cause, the material/efficient cause, and the final cause. But an interesting thing happens in Swedenborg’s causal system – the final cause and the formal cause are basically the same. He says, “A purpose cannot exist in itself alone, but must exist in something that takes place because of it, something in which it can dwell with its total being, something which it can accomplish by its effort as long as it lasts. The reality in which it ‘lasts’ is that final end that is called its result.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.168) It is a reciprocal union, which corresponds to the fact that humanity is also a reciprocal union of spirit and matter. Nicolas of Cusa would have seen it as a coincidentia oppositorum. So for Swedenborg, the fact that our imagination is alive with possibility points to divine reality – it is the manifestation of “ruling love” in our consciousness that is already a fact in the celestial realms. But, the all too human paradox still haunts, it is not enough to simply let the idea rest idly in one’s waking dreams; it must be materialized in the means. It must be made manifest in life.

At this stage in history it is more important than ever that we attempt to restore the balance of our relationship to our selves, one another, our planet, and the divine. With that we also must reignite the awe and wonder of creation and realize that we are everyday, as Jung says, “tripping over the numinous”. Emanuel Swedenborg has provided us with a model (himself) and a roadmap in realizing the divine on Earth. “We need to realize that action and reaction are involved in everything in the universe, no matter how large or small, whether alive or lifeless.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.263) We are witnessing the reaction of our all-too-earthly consciousness in the spasms of our Earth. The myopia of modern science, technology, and unlimited growth has created what Swedenborg would surely call Hell – a downward spiral, both literally and figuratively. But through our actions we can manifest reformation. Through our effort, time, and will, not to mention creativity and imagination we can reverse the “spiral characteristic of the action and reaction of the earthly mind” and reverse it into an upward spiral. “So before our reformation we are looking down toward hell, while after our reformation we are looking up toward heaven.” (Swedenborg, 2003, pg. 156) Swedenborg calls this change of state regeneration – it comes from our effort but it is a gift from God, or Grace.

On the threshold of reflection, Teilhard remarks, “The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born.” (Teilhard, 1975, pg. 165) Another world is born indeed.

It is happening right now. Another world is being born. We have the choice to usher it in with imagination, hope, love, and wisdom, or its birth can be a long painful one with the crush of labor wiping out most of the biosphere. Both possibilities exist; both possibilities are accessible to us. Swedenborg says that we always have the choice of living in heaven or hell. Even when we die, through God’s love, we are not punished by our actions, but are allowed to choose in which existence we feel most at home: heaven or hell. Personally I choose heaven. I know that each moment provides an opportunity to choose. Sometimes I choose wrongly and feel regretful, but I am also aware that in the next moment there will be another choice, and I will have gained wisdom because that is simply the nature of being alive. When I confessed to the universe my pain and emptiness, and my desire to live to my fullest potential, it lovingly replied:

Dear Paul,
It is human what you feel. So human. You are already there. Just believe it. You have the support of the whole universe to become who you are. You are loved.
Love, Ω

I take this to heart.

Sources:

Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser. Lower Lake, CA, Integral Publishing, 1987

Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. New York, NY, Tarcher Cornerstone Editions, 2009

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Divine Love and Wisdom. West Chester, PA, Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 2003

Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York, NY, Harper Collins, 1975

Van Dusen, Wilson. The Design of Existence. West Chester, PA, Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 2001

Embracing Ignorance, Chance, and the Opposites

2009-12-08T06:52:00.000-08:00

Embracing Ignorance, Chance, and the Opposites: The Coincidentia Oppositorum through Cusanus, Jung, and Morin

A profound shift in human consciousness is occurring. Jean Gebser called it the mutation from the Deficient Rational to the Integral stage of consciousness. Marilyn Ferguson referred to the shift as the Aquarian Conspiracy. Carl Jung, if pressed, may have called it the unus mundus, or One World. Teilhard de Chardin would have used the term Omega Point. Edgar Morin said that humanity was entering the Planetary Age and embracing Complexity. Thomas Berry claimed that the Cenozoic era is ending and the Ecozoic beginning. Whatever term one chooses, one could view the shift as having an essentially alchemical nature, in that a transformation is taking place that seems to have no traceable causality, but seems to be due to certain combinations of elements and their resultant (but unpredictable) transmutations. Morin said, “Humanity is caught in a tragic and uncertain struggle in which symptoms of death and birth wrestle and fuse with one another. A dead past refuses to die, and a future is stuck in the throes of labor.” (Morin, 1999, pg. 76) Aside from his prophetic account of the current state of human affairs, Morin captures, in this quote, the very foundation of humankind’s existential quandary – the clash of opposites in an otherwise unified cosmos. How can one be both finite and infinite; simultaneously living and dying; spirit and matter? Philosophers throughout the ages have attempted to transcend the opposites, and though the contents of the arguments have changed, the spiritual tenor has not. The concept of grappling with the opposites has had many names – the coincidentia oppositorum, the conjunctio oppositorum, and the complexio oppositorum – but I believe that, within the current shift in consciousness, the goal will have changed from something spiritual or metaphysical to something more pragmatic. I do not believe that the fruit of the argument will terminate in some version of eternal rapture, but in the acceptance of the oppositorum’s role in the evolution of consciousness as a process as opposed to an endpoint. Edinger claimed, “The opposites are truly the dynamo of the psyche. They are the motor, they’re what keep the psyche alive.” (Edinger, 1994, pg. 12) Edinger’s perspective, in this case, is through the lens of the individual, but one could apply the same idea to the collective psyche.

Humankind is now faced with paradoxes of incredible existential importance: we have created technologies which have enabled us to see the outermost reaches of the cosmos and, at the same time, are destroying our own planet; we can view the natural world in both grand systems and minute atomic detail, but in so doing have removed ourselves from its very vitality; nations of incredible wealth have been born all over the globe, but only at the expense of the impoverished periphery. These are opposites of a most immediate sort. We desperately need a thinking that transcends itself. We need a thinking that incorporates the mystical, the magical, and the logical/rational. We can no longer afford to deny the existence of the numinous in our hyper-rational attempts to conquer the unpredictability of nature. We must embrace the opposites, embrace chance, and embrace our ignorance as a starting point for the next phase of our evolution as a species.

Embracing Ignorance
“I show at the outset that learned ignorance has its basis in the fact that the precise truth is inapprehensible.”(Nicolas of Cusa)

Nicolas of Cusa begins De Docta Ignorantia by likening an inscribed polygon to an inscribing circle. He says, “The more angles the inscribed polygon has the more similar it is to the circle. However, even if the number of its angles is increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal [to the circle] unless it is resolved into an identity with the circle.” (Cusa, 1981, pg.8) This type of asymptotic logic is key to Cusanus’ approach to truth. The stage was set for Cusanus’ thinking four hundred years earlier by a Benedictine monk named Anselm. Famed for his proof of the existence of God as “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived”, Anselm transcended experiential and rational thought by bringing into question the very nature of thinking itself. Though Anselm, perhaps, did not fully realize the limitations of attempting to attain the infinite through finite means, his true genius shone forth in his attempt to reconcile the two prevailing systems of thought at the time – the Platonic (the universals are real) and the Aristotelian (the universals are mere names). “To Anselm the most natural kind of thinking is that which does not lose itself amid the emptiness of mere discourse or let itself be confined by representations, but rises to the essential.” (Jaspers, 1966, pg. 22) In the following expression of Anselm’s argument, object and thought are brought into direct contradiction so that the thinking itself is transcended:

If I think of the being beyond which no greater is thinkable as non-existent, by that same token I have not thought of the greatest thinkable being. As soon as I conceive of the greatest that can be thought as existing only in my idea, it also vanishes in my idea; it is no longer the greatest. Either I must abandon the idea, or I must conceive of its contents as real. (Jaspers, 1966, pg. 5)

Where Anselm attempts to transcend logical object thinking (God is or God is not), one is left with the feeling that his proof takes on the quality of a prayer or an invocation. But while stretching his own limitations of thought to encompass and embrace the infinite he opened the door to a more profound, thorough, system of thought based on a quite opposite assumption: God is and is not.
In a vision of prayer, Nicolas of Cusa saw God as being surrounded by a great wall “girt round by the coincidence of contradictories.” He said,

The spirit of discursive reason guards the door, and unless he be vanquished, the way in will not lie open, Thus it is beyond the coincidence of contradictories that Thou mayest be seen. That which seems impossible is necessity itself... This is why for him who approaches Thee, they meet in the wall surrounding the place where Thou abidest in coincidence. (Jaspers, 1966, pg. 33)

From this rather Kafkaesque starting point we can see that the only way to come to any understanding of the divine is to be willing to fully abandon what one thinks one knows. In his discussion, Cusanus translates “that which nothing greater can be conceived” to the coincidence of the Absolute Minimum and the Absolute Maximum. This pair of opposites becomes the substance upon which his whole system is built. Proceeding through a series of brilliant proofs – from impossible and infinite triangles coinciding with infinite lines, to the coincidence of an infinite triangle and a circle – Cusanus leads the reader, eventually, to the infinite circle which he likens to the Absolute Maximum. The infinite circle, he claims, is “infinitely more one, or more identical, than any oneness expressible and apprehensible by us. For the identity in an infinite circle is so great that it precedes all oppositions. For in an infinite circle other and different are not opposed to identity.” (Cusa, 1981, pg. 35) In the context of time, past becomes future, future becomes present, and all become one eternity – beginning and end meeting in oneness. The infinite circle is the perfect representation for the Maximum as its center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere. By taking a circle to its Maximum, to infinity, each part of the circle therefore becomes identity – its diameter, its circumference and its center – and loses its separateness.

It is the Beginning of all things, because it is the center; it is the End of all things, because it is the circumference; it is the Middle of all things, because it is the diameter. It is the efficient Cause, since it is the center; it is the formal Cause, since it is the diameter; it is the final Cause, since it is the circumference. It bestows being, for it is the center; it regulates being, for it is the diameter; it conserves being, for it is the circumference.
(Cusa, 1981, pg. 36)

Within the space of one paragraph, Cusanus embraces both Platonic and Aristotelian thought, while, simultaneously, pushing past the limits of human understanding, and pointing to divine revelation. Modern cosmologists struggle to comprehend the very same findings embedded in the story of the Big Bang and the expanding universe – all of creation proceeded from an enfolded Singularity, whose existence was everywhere and nowhere. From any point in the universe, all matter is expanding rapidly from that point; therefore the center of the universe is all points in the universe simultaneously and its periphery extends to infinity. How do we begin to comprehend this level of reality?

Cusanus might say that we begin by realizing that there exists a contracted Maximum within each of us – that for any understanding, there must be contracted seeds of the essence of the thing understood within the intellect – and so we begin by looking inside. “Universals exist contractedly in the intellect before the intellect unfolds them by outward signs for them – unfolds them through understanding, which is its operation. For it can understand nothing which is not already contractedly in it as it.” (Cusa, 1981, pg. 75) But it is only through learned ignorance that one may realize the intellect’s infinite immortality. “Since the intellect’s desire does not come to an end, the intellect – on the basis of its temporally insatiable desire – apprehends itself as beyond corruptible time and as immortal.” (Cusa, 1981, pg. 148)

It is important to keep in mind that it is not through reason (ratio) that the incomprehensible is made comprehensible but through the intellect. Reason requires categories, comparisons, and distinctions for it to function properly, but “the absolute cannot be adequately conceived of in rational categories, but only in the coincidentia oppositorum; and yet the moment the absolute itself is expressed in words, it is reduced to rational opposites.” (Jaspers, 1966, pg. 35) The distinction between reason and intellect is an important one for Cusanus - by intellect he is pointing to something beyond the brain. For him, the work was not about flattening his experience to a two-dimensional plane where it could be discerned and apprehended. To interpret his work in this way would be missing the point – which was full participation with the mysterium tremendum. In this way Cusanus was more a phenomenologist , and thereby a product of the Middle Ages, than the type of rationalist who would appear just around the corner in the Renaissance, leading to the extreme dualism of the Enlightenment. To examine Cusanus simply in light of his mathematics and geometry, even his theology, would not be doing justice to the level of complexity he contemplated. A careful study of Cusanus’ work will reveal a thinker who did not fall into dualism (finite/infinite, spirit/matter), and did not dispose of difference through some sort of convenient holism.

The relation between God and the world, as conceived by Cusanus, is dominated by this fundamental idea: The bottomless gulf between the infinite and the finite is bridged by the idea that the finite participates in the infinite. Plato speaks of participation (methexis, participatio), of how indefinite Becoming participates in the eternal ideas. Participation means to be an image, i.e. to be informed by an Idea. Everything that the world is or that is in the world is, in so far as it is, an image of the original Form. (Jaspers, 1966, pg. 87)

Though in some ways a man out of time, Cusanus was a man of his time and therefore thoroughly steeped in the European Christian tradition. Therefore, God, Christ, and the Trinity remained the basis for all of his work throughout his life. To the post-modern mind, this could be off-putting, possibly even to the point of utter dismissal, because, from the post-modern perspective, God has become a rather impotent starting point. I would suggest, however, taking a more phenomenologist stance. If one reads De Docta Ignorantia, not to understand the arguments or even to follow the logic, but to experience the tremendous power of going deeply into the opposites, one will surely begin to feel the stirrings of awe, wonder, humility, and even humor regarding our limited understanding of all things divine. Cusanus participated in the mysteries of the coincidentia, and though a few centuries of flattening, dualism, and reason took Western culture onto a detour that would bear the fruits of modern science and the schism of body, mind, and soul, the spirit of his work was not lost. It would go underground with the Rosicrucians, reappear again in German Romanticism, and then, rise to the surface, more fully realized, in the twentieth century through the work of Carl Jung.

Carl Jung: Embracing the Opposites

“The ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites, and if it understands how to hold the balance between them. This is possible only if it remains conscious of both at once.” (Carl Jung)

Where Cusanus explored the inner experience of the opposites by projecting them upon the abstractions of math, geometry, and religious experience, Jung uses alchemical symbolism to explore the entity manifested by successfully uniting the opposites – Consciousness. The process of alchemy represents, for Jung, a path to wholeness. He sees the process as pointing to the Self as a complexio oppositorum. Though extremely difficult to pin down, and not the main topic of this paper, Jung uses the term Self “to designate the totality of man, the sum total of conscious and unconscious existence.” (Jung, 1966, pg. 100) Psychologists in Freud and Jung’s time asserted the presence of a limen, or a threshold between the conscious and unconscious. Hence the term: subliminal. According to Edinger, “The world has to be rent asunder and the opposites must be separated, in order to create space in which the human conscious ego can exist.” (1994, pg. 12) This motif appears in creation myths the world over. The Book of Genesis is a beautiful illustration of the division of the One into the Many – light and dark, water and land, man and woman. Even forming Adam from the mud of the Earth and breathing life into him via the Spirit could be interpreted as a separation of human consciousness from world/Gaia consciousness.
Medieval alchemists were attempting, through their work, to create a unio mentalis – a reunion of human consciousness with divine consciousness - an interior oneness. To the modern mind this could be interpreted as the union of the conscious mind with the unconscious. Rationalism, being the realm of light and reason, pushed the unconscious further into darkness. The modern human, swept up in the zeitgeist of the era, slipped into a solipsistic struggle with duality, where the tremendous power of symbolism, myth, and dream has manifested into a nightmare of global collapse, psychopathology, and neurosis. As opposed to modern times, the medieval alchemist could plainly see that events could occur simultaneously with no physical causality (what Jung would call “synchronicity”, what in physics would be called the quantum). A symbol was not simply a disembodied sign, but an entity that is what it represents. According to Jung,

For a man of those times there was no intellectual difficulty in postulating a ‘truth’ which was the same in God, in man, and in matter. With the help of this idea he could see at once that the reconciliation of hostile elements and the union of alchemical opposites formed a ‘correspondence’ to the unio mentalis which took place simultaneously in the mind of man, and not only man but in God (‘that he may be one in All’)
(Jung, 1970, pg. 470)

The difference between modern people and the people of the Middle Ages that I am attempting to illustrate here is one of great importance in coming to an understanding of how rational Western consciousness has lost a sense of connection to the mysterium tremendum. Through its reliance upon empiricism, the relationship between phenomena has become like so many billiard balls rattling around upon a flattened plane of existence. The mystery of the coniunctio has been submerged and all of those aspects of it we wish to deny are now in the realm of the shadow. Jung believed that by accessing the unconscious, and thereby owning one’s shadow, one could activate great psychic healing. He said, “If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we would know where to begin.” (Edinger, 1994, pg. 25) Edinger added to this,

These individuals with insight into their own actions are those who have, to a greater or lesser extent, experienced the coniunctio. They are carriers of the opposites. If society is to be redeemed, I think it will be done through the cumulative effect of such individuals. And when enough individuals carry the consciousness of wholeness, the world itself will become whole. (Edinger, 1994, pg. 25-26)

The Mysterium Coniunctionis is based upon an arcane collection of ten pictures from an alchemical text called Rosarium philosophorum. For my purposes I would like to start at picture five which is shown at the beginning of this section. But to summarize briefly what has come before we’ll take a quick glance at pictures one through four:
1) The Mandala Fountain – This picture is really outside the sequence in a way. It represents the prima material and the ultima material – so both ends of the process. It is likened to the primordial One (which is not considered a number as counting starts with having more than one). “Psychologically it would signify the foundation of the psyche prior to the birth of the ego.” (1994) So no real independent consciousness exists here.
2) Emergence of the Opposites – “This represents the separatio corresponding to the original act of creation that separated light from darkness... consciousness has been born, consciousness means human beings.” (1994)
3) Stripped for Action – The opposites are actively pursuing a relationship. They have been stripped to their “naked truth”.
4) Descent into the Bath – The couple is now united by the medium of water. “They have begun a state of mutual solutio.... Solutio is an image of a descent into the unconscious that has the effect of dissolving the solid ordered structure of the ego. For the alchemist, the solutio meant the return of differentiated matter to its original undifferentiated state, to the prima material.” (1994) This is the symbol for rebirth.

5) *Union, Manifestation of the Mystery* – If one had a map of the evolution of consciousness in the West, this is where we might find the arrow with the words “You are here”. Our ability to hold onto our dualistic, rational view of the world and our place in it has been shaken both on the microcosmic and the macrocosmic levels. On the macro, one can no longer draw any delineation between space and time. On the micro, all conceptions of Newtonian causality have been shattered by quantum physics. What we assumed were the building blocks of all matter have turned out to be a never-ending series of smaller substances with greater amounts of empty space. Our manifest reality is basically at war with a new emerging paradigm; what we once held as opposites are melding in some bizarre coupling that is beyond our understanding. The next card is called “In the Tomb”. It is the image of the mortificatio – death. The ego has been dealt a fatal blow. “Because when the opposites are united and when one sees behind the mechanism of the opposites, then the dynamo of the psyche is broken.” (1994) What does this imply on a collective level? In my opinion, it means that the prevailing Cartesian paradigm must die in order to give birth to something new. We see the struggles of death throes all around us: huge monetary bailouts for a capitalistic system that is hobbling on its last legs, catastrophic effects of climate change, and the use of more technology to fix problems created by technology, are among the most dire symptoms. Finding a way out is like traversing a Celtic knot – we either find ourselves hopelessly lost, or back where we started. According to Edinger, “Commonly (the fifth step) would be the cut-off, the place of the short-circuit, and there’d be no going on to Stage 6 but rather a reversion to Stage 1.” (1994)

We stand poised in this 10th year into the 21st century at the brink of great change. What it will entail on our part is as yet unknown. Fortunately some of the groundwork has been laid. Edgar Morin has provided the world with an elegant and humble method for entering this new era of the Manifestation of the Mystery – Complexity.

Morin: Embracing Chance

“One must understand that, as everything that lives is bound to die, each culture is worthy of living but must know how to die.” (Edgar Morin)

As I mentioned earlier, the two main breaches of the scientific paradigm in the 20th century cannot be understated: In microphysics we lost the interdependence of subject and object, and in its place have arisen randomness, a de-reification of matter, and (most importantly for this topic) the eruption of logical contradiction in empirical description. Emerging in macrophysics is the unity of space and time. We can infer from history that scientific paradigm shifts have not restricted themselves merely to the discipline of science, but have pervasively seeped into the collective consciousness of Western culture, which is now, for better or worse, global culture. There is barely a single area on the globe left unexplored and therefore touched by the West. Any area that is not being used to house Western culture is being used to feed it, clothe it, supply it, medicate it, and is therefore subsumed by it. When one also takes into consideration the fact that information itself can travel to the ends of the Earth in microseconds, we must come to the conclusion that we are truly living in a Planetary Age. The dominant western paradigm, however, is a far cry from planetary. Morin would call it a paradigm of simplicity. Morin says,

The paradigm of simplicity puts order in the universe and chases out disorder. Order is reduced to one law, one principle. Simplicity can see either the one or the many, but can’t see that the One is perhaps at the same time Many. The principle of simplicity either separates that which is linked (disjunction), or unifies that which is diverse (reduction).
(Morin, 2008, pg. 39)

If 20th century science has taught us anything, it is that the universe is a trickster; its overriding laws forever escape our grasp. The idea that our existence is governed by something perfect and eternal – be it God or the laws of physics – is a powerful myth. As long as science denies its own mythology, it will continue to run blindly into the ineffable. We really have no choice but to eat what is on the table - the paradox of order and disorder – yet another complexio oppositorum - and embrace the qualities of chance and chaos as a natural part of the process.

Edgar Morin’s method is far too complex to do justice in these few pages. We must therefore content ourselves with examining just a couple of key points. In Morin’s work, the subject (which according to Kuhn is an inextricable part of any scientific process ) is recognized as reciprocal to its object so that “subject and object emerge like two ultimate, inseparable consequences of the relation between the self-organizing system and the eco-system.” (Morin, 2008, pg. 23) From this stance the subject is immediately put into relationship with the object. In a sense the idea of subject and object disappear under this kind of scrutiny, as there can be no subject without an object, and therefore no object without a subject. It is the field of experience that begins to come into focus rather than elements of distinction. Morin goes beyond cybernetics and even systems thinking by using the them as platforms for more complex ways of approaching phenomena in terms of self-organization and relation of subject and object. In considering Morin’s work it is important to keep in mind that he is not attempting to offer up a “theory of everything”, he is simply giving us a roadmap in order to more effectively deal with what is already here. He says,

In one way I would say that the aspiration to complexity carries in it an aspiration to completeness, because we say that everything is interdependent and everything is multidimensional. But in another way, consciousness of complexity makes us understand that we can never escape uncertainty and we can never have total knowledge because ‘totality is nontruth’. (Morin, 2008, pg. 48)

The roadmap is more of a strategy than a program. A beautiful illustration of the difference between the two can be found in the world of the musical “compositions” of John Cage. The most infamous example of musical strategy verses musical program is his piece 4’33”, during which the pianist seats himself at his piano, lifts the keyboard cover, places his hands in his lap and waits... for four minutes and thirty-three seconds; after which he closes the keyboard cover, stands up, and takes his leave. The “music” is the uncomfortable, confused sounds of the crowd waiting for something to happen. By setting up certain parameters, Cage allowed space for something unexpected to happen. From the perspective of someone anticipating a series of notes, played in some sequence, with some level of melodic/harmonic activity and structure, 4’33” is simply noise. To Cage, however, it was relatively predictable noise that had its own structure, an organic structure defiant of any programmatic style of music. With this in mind, I’d like to look at three basic principles of Morin’s system of complexity – the dialogic, organizational recursion, and the holographic principle - and explore how they relate to the complexio oppositorum.

The principle of the dialogic is based upon the idea that there are always, in any given system, at least two valid logics at work. These two logics are not simply juxtaposed to one another but are actually necessary to one another. The current theory of cosmic evolution clearly is dialogical: both order and disorder have been instrumental in both creation and destruction. From Brian Swimme’s perspective, it takes the cataclysm of a star giving up its life (disorder) for life to have emerged at all (order). Morin says, “ Order and disorder are two enemies: one abolishes the other but at the same time, in certain cases, they collaborate and produce organization and complexity. The dialogic principle allows us to maintain duality at the heart of unity.” (Morin, 2008, pg. 49)

Organizational recursion unifies the two principles of product and producer. Here Morin uses the concept of a whirlpool, where in every instant the action of the whirlpool allows the whirlpool itself to remain in existence. He also uses the illustration of the individual and society: society creates individuals through structures like education, culture, and knowledge; but individuals, in turn, create the society which then feeds back upon them with its influences. “The recursive idea is, therefore, an idea that has broken away from the linear idea of cause and effect, of product/producer, or structure/ superstructure, because everything that is product comes back on what produces it in a cycle that is itself self-constituting, self-organizing, and self-producing.” (Morin, 2008, pg. 50)

The holographic principle is inextricably linked to both the dialogic and recursive principles. It states basically that the whole is in the part and the part is in the whole. The old adage - “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, is transcended by the holographic principle. The adage implies a certain linear, evolutionary style of thought that still derives its logic from a Cartesian worldview. Morin likens it to an idea formulated by Pascal: “I cannot conceive the whole without conceiving the parts and I cannot conceive the parts without conceiving the whole.” Morin says, “This apparently paradoxical idea immobilizes the linear mind.” (Morin, 2008, pg. 50) Meditating on this quote reveals both the dialogic and recursive principles, and their interweaving.

In studying Morin’s work, one feels the expansiveness of the complex unity of all phenomena. One feels a sense of freedom and transcendence rather than the confines of a grid of causality. “Every system of thought is open and contains a breach, a gap in the opening itself. But we have the possibility to hold meta-points of view. The meta-point of view is only possible if the observer-conceiver integrates himself or herself into the observation and the conception.” (Morin, 2008, pg. 51) Systems open to systems open to systems – ad infinitum. There is duality at the heart of unity and unity at the heart of duality. This is the essence of the complexio oppositorum. Morin’s system of thought gives us a way in, some rules to play the game, a way to embrace what we would normally perceive as chance operations or chaos, and a way out of the atomistic paradigm which has captivated the West for so long and at such cost. There is a caveat however.

A paradigm, although it must be formulated by someone – by Descartes, for example – is fundamentally, the product of an entire cultural, historical, civilizational development. The paradigm of complexity will come from the collection of new conceptions, new visions, new discoveries, and new reflections that will align and come together... One can be the Saint John the Baptist of the paradigm of complexity and announce it is coming without being its Messiah. (Morin, 2008, pg. 51-52)

You Are Here:

Admittedly, the precipice of birth and death is far from where most of us would choose to be perched. It is, however, the truth of the matter and we can choose to be stupidly happy - denying or justifying all that we see and hear, or we can choose to ride the collective wave, and surf it, rather than be swept away by it. Western culture has projected its collective identity onto a false paradigm. That paradigm has been slowly crumbling for at least the past 100 years. It is like the painful termination of a long and “blissful” relationship, which was based not on honest and healthy reflection but upon unconscious, unhealthy projection. “If one’s life has resided in a particular external object and then that life, that energy, leaves the object, then nothing is left of that connection. But then the missing life has to be located and it’s rediscovered within. The projection has a chance to be integrated.” (Edinger, 1994, pg. 70) When one wakes up to the falsity of one’s projections, it can be literally a soul-shattering experience. Everything that one believed about oneself and the other is suddenly revealed as a fiction that one based one’s whole life upon. What’s worse is that through one’s co-dependent merging one has lost one’s identity.
Let us return now to the Rosarium pictures, particularly Step 7: Separation of Soul and Body. Edinger says, “As long as we have pieces of our psyche deposited, like bank deposits actually, in various objects or activities or people {or paradigms} in our outside environment... and one of those containers of one’s psyche dies, one goes through a grief reaction because a piece of one’s self dies at the same time.” (Edinger, 1994, pg.76) I believe, as do others such as Christopher Bache and Joanna Macy, that the collective psyche is grieving – but perhaps we are grieving not only for humanity and the biosphere, but also for the loss of our paradigm – a paradigm that had become an integral part of our collective identity.

The next picture holds some hope though: in Picture 8: Gideon’s Dew Drips from the Cloud, a purification takes place. The story of this card is based upon a verse from Judges where Gideon is asked by Yahweh to lead an insurrection against the Midianites and deliver Israel to freedom. Gideon asks for proof of God’s allegiance by a sign: that dew is left only on a fleece, but the ground around the fleece be left dry. Jung interprets Gideon’s dew as “a sign of divine intervention, it is the moisture that heralds the return of the soul.” (Edinger, 1994, pg. 84) Cusanus likens this to the Christ event, “And this (resurrection) was not at all possible apart from death. For how could what is mortal have put on immortality otherwise than by being stripped of mortality? How would it be free of mortality except by paying the debt of death?” (Cusa, 1981, pg. 129)

From purification, we arrive at Picture 9: Reunion of Soul and Body. The illustration by William Blake is a lovely representation:

Perhaps through making transparent our deep interconnectedness to our cosmos, our planet, and one another; through coming to terms with the infinitude and ultimate complexity of the design of existence; allowing synchronicity, chance, and ignorance a place at the table of our thinking, we can purify the death of the fragmented ego and allow ourselves to reconnect with our body and with our soul. The last picture in the Rosarium series is number ten – Resurrection of the United Eternal Body. According to Edinger, “It’s a picture of the third stage of the coniunctio...It (is) a kind of cosmic union... the idea that the whole cosmos is a simple organic process.” (Edinger, 1994, pg. 96)

I believe that we have come face to face with a God-image of our own creation and have been receiving hints of a grand nature that it is a false God. Whether these hints are from our dreams, the collective unconscious, or from the planet, matters not at this point in history. As Jung says,

It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path.
(Jung, 1973, pg.98)

There is no quick fix to the array of problems we now face as a suffering species inhabiting a suffering planet, but I do believe that engaging the oppositorum offers a fruitful dialogue from which to begin.

References

Edinger, Edward. The Mystery of the Coniunctio: Alchemical Image of Individuation. Toronto, Canada, Inner City Books, 1994
Jaspers, Karl. Anselm and Nicolas of Cusa; from The Great Philosophers, Volume II. New York, NY, Harcourt Brace, 1966
Jung, Carl. Answer to Job. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1973
Jung, Carl. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1970
Jung, Carl. Psychology and Religion. Birmingham, New York, Yale University Press, 1966
McCort, Dennis. Going Beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2001
Morin, Edgar. Homeland Earth. Creskill, New Jersey, Hampton Press, 1999
Morin Edgar. On Complexity. Creskill, New Jersey, Hampton Press, 1999
Nicolas of Cusa. De Docta Ignorantia. Minneapolis, MN, The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1885

The Techno-Econ-Organism - Its Impact and Its Demise: The Birth of the Integral in Society and Education By: Paul McNees, 2009

2009-12-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

Introduction

Here at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we live approximately eight to ten generations into the world of industrial capitalism. Though it has, indeed, brought in its wake what many would call comforts and luxuries, industrialism has also wreaked havoc on the biosphere and, I would argue, on our worldview and self-conception. Human beings seem to generally hold the notion that it is our thoughts and behavior that shape culture - we are somehow in control of what we have created. But, as simple genetic experiments have revealed, environment and selection (natural and unnatural) have the capability of breeding out what may be perceived as intrinsic traits of any species of social animal. Dmitri Belyaev’s experiments on the domestication of the Russian silver fox are an excellent example. After only ten generations of selecting foxes based on behavior alone, Bleyaev ended up with a population of foxes who “no longer showed any fear of humans and often wagged their tails and licked their human caretakers to show affection. They also started to have spotted coats, floppy ears, and curled tails.” Belyaev showed, moreover, that the resultant change in physiology and tameness was in direct correlation to levels of adrenaline produced in the bloodstream. “This is feasible, because foxes that are not afraid of humans are going to produce less adrenaline around them.” (Ibid) Though no proof for this assumption has been exposed, one must wonder what significance to human society (as most scientific research as geared) would this experiment reveal?
As I will attempt to show in this paper, we, as citizens of industrial society, have been bred within a technological/economic system that was born somewhat preternaturally and lives as an autopoietic entity. This soulless organism that we refer to as “market society” or “industrial society” (if I may use this analogy) has been conducting a similar experiment upon humanity, which many among us are ultimately waking up to.
Through Karl Polanyi’s examination of the birth and rise of industrial society out of “primitive” market systems and Lewis Mumford’s and Jaques Ellul’s observations regarding the rise and effect of Technics, one might trace the cultural invention of a system bent upon breeding a race of mammals that would be best suited to serve its (the system’s) needs. The question is, what kind of race would that be? What would be its primary traits? How would it behave? What would be the impact upon future generations? And how might this race finally extract itself from its symbiotic relationship with the organism?

The rise of the market and the decline of intrinsic value

Through extensive research into anthropological studies of “primitive” markets and economics, Polanyi shows that a human’s economy is “submerged in his social relationships. (Humankind) does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end.” (Polanyi, 2001, pg.48) The markets, throughout most of history, were mechanisms designed to provide societies with the necessities and comforts of daily living. They functioned under strict guidelines that were put in place to ensure the sanctity and purity of an environment increasingly reliant upon the cooperation and creativity of its occupants. They followed basic principles of reciprocity and redistribution, in the service of symmetry and centration. There was no motive for personal gain only the desire to efficiently allocate goods and services in the hopes of equal and peaceful relations amongst the population and their neighbors. This is certainly not attempting to imply that there were not acts of aggression and power involving the hoarding of goods by those in military control; but the market itself was not the mechanism through which this power was obtained.
Even as trade grew out of specific locality and incorporated foreign exchange and the import of goods from different climatic regions it remained complementary and non-competitive. Only internal trade was inherently competitive as “it includes a very large number of exchanges in which similar goods from different sources are offered in competition with one another.” (Polanyi, 2001, pg. 63) This is not to be confused, however, with local markets which, even today, still function on principles of reciprocity and redistribution. Polanyi, through a meticulous tracing of the regulations of local and long-distance trade in Europe during the rise of mercantilism, illustrates that internal trade was a construction of the state. Without going into great detail regarding Polanyi’s argument, it is important to understand that by breaking down the barriers between towns and countryside, towns and provinces, and eventually continent and continent some principle of unification was necessary – “the instrument of unification was capital, i.e. private resources available in form of money hoards and thus peculiarly suitable for the development of commerce.” (Polanyi, 2001, pg. 69) This was, however, not the turning point in the evolution of the self-regulating market, as it is evident that as national markets grew so, also, did regulation over those markets. It was not until the bizarre notion of controlling market systems through prices that one witnesses the inversion of society’s relationship to the market.
In order to move from the state regulated market to a self-regulating market three assumptions needed to be in place: 1) humans behave in such a way as to maximize monetary gains, 2) supply of goods at a price = demand at that price, and 3) there is a presence of money providing purchasing power. Polanyi goes on to say that, “Self-regulation implies that all production is for sale on the market and that all incomes derive from such sales. Accordingly, there are markets for all elements of industry, not only for goods (always including services) but also for labor, land, and money, their prices being called respectively commodity prices, wages, rent, and interest.” (Polanyi, 2001, pg. 72) Polanyi refers to this concept as commodity fiction. Since commodities are defined as objects produced for sale on markets, it is fairly obvious that labor (human beings), land (nature), and money (tokens of purchasing power) are not commodities. Thus, the move from state regulated markets to a self-regulating market further objectified both humankind and its environment, and in the process, abstracted any remaining sense of intrinsic value placing it outside of the individual into tokens of wealth. According to Polanyi, “In disposing of a man’s labor power...
...the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.” (Polanyi, 2001, pg. 76)

Important to keep in mind is that we can trace the line of thinking to no particular individual or group; one can only ascribe “blame” to the dues ex machina of the system itself. So, with the dawning of free market society humans have been tagged with a value; not a value based on who one is or even what one does, but a value based upon how much one is worth in regards to the perpetuation and growth of the market itself. It is the market that determines one’s value. With this is mind we can return to the earlier question: What kind of race is being bred from within this system? Since, as Polanyi puts it, the commodity fiction is the “principle according to which no arrangement or behavior should be allowed to exist that might prevent the actual functioning of the market mechanism”, the system may be breeding a race so removed from its natural environment that it no longer sees or cares about the environment’s degradation; a race so removed from its sense of purpose that it will be subservient to the will of the system. Hence, the system creates a race of beings that is not only bred specifically to feed the system’s hunger for expansion and growth but a race that educates its young for the same purposes.
In order to obtain a deeper understanding of humankind’s absorption into the market, I would now like to explore the concurrent and symbiotic emergence of the machine society. For that I will turn to the work of Lewis Mumford and Jaques Ellul.

The megamachine and the technological society

What is the human being’s relationship to technology and the machine? I believe that is one of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves at this moment in history. Who is in control of whom? (If I can be so bold as to use a personal pronoun in reference to a system or a machine.) Technology has subsumed human life to such a degree that machine metaphors (especially in relation to artificial intelligence) have become part of the vernacular of everyday conversation: “My battery is low.” “It felt like I just downloaded the whole thing!” “I need to reboot.” “I don’t have the bandwidth.” “That paradigm has become the Operating System of the whole culture.” And so on. Perhaps the most striking example is from Ray Kurtzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The book’s main hypothesis is based upon, what he perceives, as the rapid acceleration of technological advancement, especially in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Kurtzweil claims that at a certain stage, humans and machines will merge into a singularity, and through this merger (in a kind of perverse twist on Teilhardian thought) the universe will wake up to itself. He says, “In the aftermath of the Singularity, intelligence, derived from its biological origins in human brains and its technological origins in human ingenuity, will begin to saturate the matter and energy in its midst. It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation ... to spread out from its origin on Earth.” Whether or not his claim has any verity is of little concern in this context. What I find fascinating is the diaphaneity of the boundary between human and machine, and the misperception of the human species as “homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker.” (Mumford, 1966, pg. 80) Though Kurzweil takes the man-machine paradigm to a rather immoderate conclusion, he is not alone in his sentiments or his worldview. How has the concept of technics gone from an expression of our vast imagination and creativity (as Mumford suggests) to the desire to acquire mastery over nature? How has this “mastery” eventually severed our relation to nature and created subservience to the machine itself? Has it become impossible to disengage ourselves sufficiently from technology to realize that “tool technics and our derivative machine technics are but specialized fragments of biotechnics: and by biotechnics one means man’s total equipment for living?” (Mumford, 1966, pg. 79)
Mumford claims, “At its point of origin...technics was related to the whole nature of man. Primitive technics was life-centered, not narrowly work-centered, still less production centered or power centered.” (Mumford, 1966, pg. 81) Humanity’s relationship to technology began to change around five thousand years ago in Egypt with the construction of the great pyramids. In order to construct these breathtaking monoliths, a machine was needed that could manifest both intense precision and incredible horsepower. This machine was made entirely of human parts; Mumford called it the Megamachine. The Megamachine characterized a culture “in which work at a single specialized task, segregated from other biological and social activities, not only occupied the entire day but increasingly engrossed the entire lifetime.” (Mumford, 1966, pg. 81) Modern philosophy has habitually blamed René Descartes for the separation of mind and body, human and nature, which has led to so many of the crises we now face as a global community. In reading Mumford, however, I would argue that the “Cartesian worldview”, in many ways, pre-dated Descartes by almost 5000 years.
Simply by the act of employing humankind as “factors” in the construction of massive projects which were so removed from the necessities of daily living, the beginnings of a techno-social psychology were set in motion whose natural omega point could be nothing but Cartesian. Humans began to perceive themselves as no more than cogs in the wheels of industry. Their value as thinking, feeling, creative beings was gradually subsumed by their employment in an infrastructure that was originally designed to serve the greater good – be that God, the city, the state, etc. – but gradually only served the perpetuation of the structure itself. In modern times, even careers assumed to have the greatest integrity (teaching, for example) are merely cleverly cloaked agencies to continue the successful running of the machine. For the new technical milieu, according to Jacques Ellul, has “all its parts ... mutually implicated to such a degree that it is impossible to separate them or to settle any technical problem in isolation.”
I mentioned teaching, in the above paragraph, as an example one such agency. One need only look at most modern classrooms to see evidence of a thriving techno-social paradigm: rows of desks facing a podium, textbooks approved by the government, testing in order to rank the population in terms of their worth in the continuance of the machine (be it technology or the market), young people coming and going to the sound of buzzers and bells all doing the same thing at the same time – rote memory exercises in service to better “education”. Humankind is a problem-solving species but one need only to take a close look around oneself to see that most, if not all, of our problem solving is simply fixing, technologically, the problems created by technology. Ellul describes it lucidly as follows, “Technique comprises organizational...

...and psychological techniques. It is useless to hope that the use of techniques of organization will succeed in compensating for the effects of techniques in general; or that the use of psycho-sociological techniques will assure mankind ascendancy over the technical phenomenon. In the former case we will doubtless succeed in averting certain technically induced crises, disorders, and serious social disequilibrations; but this will but confirm the fact that Technique constitutes a closed circle. In the latter case we will secure human psychic equilibrium in the technological milieu by avoiding the psychobiologic pathology resulting from the individual techniques taken singly and thereby attain a certain happiness. But these results will come about through the adaptation of human beings to the technical milieu. Psycho-sociological techniques result in the modification of men in order to render them happily subordinate to their new environment, and by no means imply any kind of human domination over Technique.”

I do not wish to imply that our unconscious submersion in the machine has the potential to turn humanity into a race of automatons, or, as Kurtzweil suggests, merge our very biology with that of the machine. I believe that there is far too much evidence to the contrary to support either of those hypotheses. To use an example from art, as Jean Gebser (whom I will turn to in the final section of this paper) did so convincingly in his book, The Ever-Present Origin, the sublimation of humans to the machine has appeared consistently in the science fiction genre from its conception. In modern film the concept found its best expression in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001- A Space Odyssey (actually based upon a short story titled The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke written around 1948) and, more recently, The Matrix, by the Wachowski brothers in 1999. Both films are concerned with intelligent machines assuming power and dominion over their human counterparts. Both films portray the human “waking up” to its sublimated position and willfully disengaging from the machine. Both films end with an obvious death/rebirth akin to the mythical hero journeys so beautifully sketched out by Joseph Campbell. There are small pockets of humanity all over the globe that are “waking up” to our current situation – that humanity’s value is (falsely) in direct correlation to its usefulness in keeping the techno-economic organism alive and that, somehow, a new story needs to be told that reinvigorates the human potential.
What may or may not be obvious at this stage in my paper is the symbiotic nature of the market organism to the techno-organism – that they are irrevocably intertwined; one cannot be tampered with without disturbing the other. Most profound however, is the “neural” connection of our species to the techno-econ-organism. One species cannot be examined, anymore, without considering the other. And herein lies the dissonance one feels in grappling with solutions to the problems inherent in the system. Yes, humans are waking up to our predicament, but, like a Celtic knot, whenever we follow a thread of logic to create a solution, we either end up lost or back where we started. A perfect example of this is questioning education. We may ask a teacher who is committed to changing the educational paradigm, “What about ditching the 3-R’s as the core of the educational curriculum and replacing it with something else?” The answer would range from, “Oh no, how could they get into college or find a job? (In order to keep the machine functioning.)”, to something more nebulous like, “That sounds great, but how would they learn the basics? (In order to keep the machine functioning.)” We are so intertwined in the machine’s survival that we confuse it with our own. It is a Möbius strip of logic. We want to change the system, but we have to work within the system to change it, therefore the system needs to keep running.
In order to find a framework for an adequate discussion of this matter I would like to turn to the work of Jean Gebser.

The Integral Mutation of Consciousness

As human consciousness evolves from the Deficient Rational into the emergent Integral stage, Gebser notes that angst, anxiety, and feelings of ‘no escape’ will be the symptoms of the Integral irrupting into consciousness. One is reminded of the characteristics of Stanislav Grof’s second perinatal matrix, where the neonate (or adult experiencing a holotropic state) is suffering through the first spasms of birth, some of the experiences being: an unbearable and inescapable situation that will never end; various images of hell; feelings of entrapment and engagement (no exit); agonizing guilt and inferiority feelings; apocalyptic view of the world, dangerous epidemics; meaninglessness and absurdity of existence; “cardboard world” or the atmosphere of artificiality and gadgets, etc. One sees these same sentiments expressed by Lewis Mumford, “We have the misfortune to live under the sign of Caliban...

Hate, fear, suspicion, violence have become almost endemic. In America, abnormality is fast becoming our norm: automatism our overruling providence: irrationality itself the criterion of reason. Fantasies of wholesale extermination and annihilation no longer fill only the minds of certified paranoiacs: their studious translation into the practical devices of atomic, biological, and chemical warfare has dominated the activities of leaders in science and government for more than a decade.” (Mumford, In the Name of Sanity. 1954, pg.166; from Feuerstein, 1987, pg.127))

For those of us trying to figure out how to address these profound issues (knowing that the Integral is still slightly out of reach and our only tools for thinking about the problem are within the Efficient Rational) there is a sense of frustration, impotence, or surreality. Bob Dylan expressed the confusion and paradox beautifully in Ballad of a Thin Man:

You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
(Bob Dylan, 1965)

There is one possible method I would like to suggest to employ our efficient rational capabilities in pondering the seemingly impossible loops we are faced with in this post-post-modern age. That method is to shift our attention from the objects themselves to the relationships of the objects to one another, or the space between. It is clear that objects, in the Newtonian sense of the word, have lost some, if not most, of their meaning and significance since the discovery of quantum physics and the theory of relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gebser claims that, “What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light reigning between objects – the tension and the relation between them.” (Feuerstein, 1987, pg. 128) By shifting our attention thusly we may begin to glimpse the concrete perspectivalism which has gripped human consciousness for so long and pulled us headlong into the objective rationalism that has contributed to so many of the global perils we face today. In other words, the shift that is necessary (and is already occurring) is a shift from spatial perspectivity – which lends itself to dualities – to a temporal perspectivity – time as an intensity or quality. As Gebser puts it,
“...for the most part the pathological condition of our present civilization stems from the date of the introduction of perspectivity...which executed the alignment of aspects to a predetermined point and thereby effected a distortion of reality. For, the part is to a certain degree always a betrayal of the whole, for which reason the sum of the parts also only yields a fictitious whole but not an efficacious whole.” (Feuerstein, 1987, pg. 128-129)

This “distortion of reality” can be seen in all aspects of civilization from our relationship to the natural world to our worship of technology and fetishism of money; but it appears most despairingly in our relationship to our selves and other human beings. By perceiving human beings (consciously or unconsciously) as objects whose value is determined in direct proportion to their contribution to the techno-econ-organism, we reduce people to statistics or points on a graph, with little to no intrinsic value. It is no wonder that pathologies like those mentioned by Mumford above pervade modern society. It is no wonder that students in most schools today see no purpose to their education. (What are they being educated for after all?) But once one begins to focus upon one’s relationship to technology, one’s relationship to the market, the relationship of the market to technology, the curricula of our schools’ relationship to keeping the techno-econ-organism alive, one will then be shifting one’s attention away from the object itself (spatial) to the complexity of the relationships between the objects (temporal). It is from this aperspectival approach that dualities and fixity begin to dissolve and, instead, begin to function as dynamic polarities - free from egocentricity. According to Gebser,

“Only where the world is space-free and time-free, where ‘waring’ gains validity, where the world and we ourselves – the whole – become transparent and where the diaphanous and what is rendered diaphanous become the verition of the world, does the world become concrete and integral.”

Of course, as Gebser so lucidly illustrates in his magnum opus, this shift in perspective/consciousness is already happening. Its revelations can be seen in art, literature, science, health, and music – to mention just a few. So, why the urgency, one may ask? The urgency lies in the fact that the survival of our species depends upon this shift in consciousness and, within our current phase of consciousness, we are at an all too obvious dead-end. No level of thinking or problem solving within the deficient rational will get us out of the predicaments we have created for ourselves (i.e. global financial collapse, dwindling resources, ecological crises, etc.). That is, we can no longer try to use technology to fix problems created and perpetuated by technology; we can no longer use the market to fix problems created and perpetuated by the market; we can no longer use our educational institutions to perpetuate the myth of either of these institutions – technology or the market. What then becomes the purpose of our schools? I have no concrete solutions to that problem. What I do have are some vital questions we can begin to ask ourselves about education and its role in assisting the Integral Stage to irrupt into modern consciousness:

➢ What is the world we are educating our young people for? What does it look like, considering the probable results of global crises?
➢ How do we begin to foster a sense of intrinsic value into the individuals within our school system? How do we allow students to perceive their own unique combination of gifts and mentor their ability to manifest them?
➢ What is learning and how does it really function?
➢ Why are the 3-R’s at the core of most every curriculum and what assumptions does that reveal?
➢ What worldviews do the students occupy and how did they arrive at them? What worldviews do the “teachers” bring to the classroom (consciously or unconsciously) and convey to their students (consciously or unconsciously)?
➢ Are students viewed as open or closed systems? Are teachers viewed as open or closed systems? In other words, is the relationship of the teacher and the student seen as a one-way or a two-way street?

Of course, all of this rests upon the assumption that each one of us is personally invested in manifesting the aperspectival in ourselves first and foremost. For as Feuerstein says, “The way out of the dead end of the deficient rational structure of consciousness is the way of personal participation in, and cooperation with, the emergent mode of consciousness.” Gebser adds, “All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse.” (Feuerstein, 1987, pg. 165)

Conclusion
It seems obvious that, unlike Belyaev’s silver foxes, there is a way out of the experiment. We do not have to become floppy-eared, panting, hand-licking, subservient slaves to the system. However, it is not possible without waking up, facing fully the implications of our somnambulistic participation with the system, and confronting the painful reality that none of the tools we have used in the past will provide solutions to the problems we have all helped to create. I believe that there is hope for humanity. I also believe that we may be too late to fix the global crises that may eventually lead to our demise. I also know that to be fully present to the integral mutation is to be able to hold both of these and work with the tension between them. It is important to hold on to the fact that, on the one hand, technology has been instrumental in the collapse of the biosphere; on the other hand, it has allowed the creation of a true network of global consciousness. It is important to hold that seeing ourselves and others as distinct and separate from each other and the planet has resulted in our abuse of the planet as a bottomless vessel of resources, and our abuse of each other as cogs in the wheels of industry; on the other hand individuation was a necessary step in ushering in a more mature phase of human existence. Our wont is to resolve the dualities, but it is within the tension of the dualities wherein lies our hope for salvation. If we are to educate our young to be stewards of a new phase of human existence, they must learn to be comfortable with complexity, mystery, magic, and myth. They must be equally at home with all of the brilliance and ingenuity brought forth from a full engagement with the mind, language, symbol, and logic. Most of all our young need to see themselves as unique expressions of the cosmos, a product of almost 14 billion years of evolution – an evolution far from finished. They are not only subject to the process of evolution but co-creators and participants within it.
So perhaps this story could begin: Here at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we live approximately 14 billion years into the cosmogenesis of the Absolute...

Whatever is written next is up to us.

Sources

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Order. (from Philosophy and Technology edited by Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, New York, NY, The Free Press, 1983)

Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, An Introduction and Critique. Lower Lake, California, Integral Press, 1987

Kurtzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near. New York, NY, The Penguin Group, 2005

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and the Nature of Man. (from Philosophy and Technology edited by Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, New York, NY, The Free Press, 1983)

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2001.

Apprenticeship of/by/for Nature

2009-09-18T17:28:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to the land at Tunitas Creek Ranch and the banana slug: who lives the sensuality of the "not-quite-touch". She lives intimately with all she touches, never once breaking contact.

What is it to walk through the world in a way that eschews our predatory nature?

In the mere act of 'looking for things', we pierce with our gaze, we penetrate with insight. What would it mean to simply be receptive? Perhaps it enters the world of listening; allowing the world to enter through our ears, our bodies.

I watched three hawks circling and it occurred to me that our acts were not so very different: they were looking for prey; I was looking for inspiration - something to feed my hungry soul. I began to wonder about the long evolution of predator/prey relationships. Since the first cell that devoured its own kind, life has fed off of life. I began to look around at the myriad forms of predation: The spider meticulously builds her web of silk - invisible unless dampened by dew or catching the light in just the right way - and waits for her prey to come to her. The snake smells the air with her tongue, noticing subtle changes in her energy field; she strikes like quicksilver. There are no second thoughts. The trees simply receive and grow both towards light above and sustenance below, her roots are the predator, constantly probing the earth for the water and minerals that keep her alive.

I inhabit all these realms and all these spirits inhabit me: My spirit is the plant - at once growing towards the heavens and simultaneously reaching down into Mother Earth for grounding and nourishment. I am the hawk - ever-circling to spy something that moves (me) in my environment, to devour it and regurgitate it back with new understanding to my human family. My spider nature lives in the web of my thoughts and understandings, patiently waiting for something to send a ripple of new energy. My sensual mollusk nature relishes in touch but contracts at a nearing shadow; fearing that which it does not understand. Even my butterfly energy, flitting from bud to bud, has its purpose - it follows its allurements to probe for the nectar of love and wisdom. To be human is to discriminate the energy we manifest. My hope is that all of these beings integrate into a light that is uniquely me and that that light emanates clearly to all beings. Only then will I be truly human.

A Creation Myth

2009-09-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

In reading Brian Swimme's book "The Universe is a Green Dragon" I was inspired to share this myth I wrote and performed with live music during his class last semester. Enjoy.

The Silence and the Song

In the beginning there was silence, utter and complete. The silence was unbearable to the heavens as it created a blackness of spirit and a blindness of the mind’s eye. It was within this silence that the first sound was sent forth. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere. It carried across the heavens as a great wave, carrying with it everything that was and everything that will be. All of time and all of the songs were carried within the energy of this one primordial tone. Out of its own joy of being the sound began to divide and multiply; now it was two and then three, four, twelve... an infinite number of variations and every possibility was created from the very seamlessness of its nature. There was love and allurement between the tones; so much that they joined themselves, creating something new but still retaining their individuality, their dignity... but together a power of vibration set forth a new wave of creation. Some joined together to create the Sun, more the moon, A great chord was struck in the heavens as great beings circled the Sun. This wonderful symphony went on for eternity, ever shifting, ever evolving, ever creative of melody and song.

And the song was felt throughout the universe, and it was celebrated and loved, but still went on unheard.

The heavens wept that no ears were present to soak in and be changed by the song of the universe. It’s tears fell through the skies and from them arose the creatures of Gaia, as Gaia was fertile and ripe for life. And the creatures participated in the song: the whale sang hers in the great depths of the ocean, the coyote sang in Gaia’s deserts, the Eagle in her skies, even the crickets sang as a choir of angels in harmony with the frogs and the wind and the rain.

From the great songs glowing and vibrating upon the face of Gaia something new arose: our kind, humankind, who had ears to hear and voice to sing and eyes to reflect the great spirit of the song. But even this was not enough for so generous a universe. And out of the sky tears of joy glistened and became words - words that could not only sing but give voice to ideas. And these words became as vast and varied as the stars in the sky.
But soon humankind grew so much to love their own voice that they sang too loud to still hear the voice of the crickets, the eagle, the whale or the coyote and then even the sublime song of the universe was drowned out by the incessant song of the human. And so with no one to hear their song the other creatures began to retreat into silence – silence that echoed the first silence but this time without the promise of the seamless singularity. And the humans sang and they sang as the world around them grew silent but their own song was so beautiful to their ears that they did not notice. Through the din more and more tones were created and became a dense mass of sound. In their desire to be heard the tones began to individuate. The tones became increasingly dissonant, tense, and longed for harmony.
It is the very nature of the universe for dissonance to tend towards harmony. This is why, of the thousands upon millions of billions of possible notes, the universe sings only the most beautiful.

And so, humankind, being part of the universe, created by its very own rhythms and resonance, began to harmonize. There was no effort. They merely had to listen. And the harmony again opened their ears to the music forever around them and in them and was again a part of them.
That is why the eagle and the coyote and the whale, when they sing, they sing the very same note. They sing together as a symbol of their unity and love for one another. They sing together as an act of love for the universe and as a sign of hope that humankind will not forget their song.

On Cynicism and Hope

2009-01-30T09:29:00.000-08:00

We stand at a crossroads. A crossroads where attitudes divide. A crossroads that allows us to choose a new way of interacting with our government, our planet, our species and ourselves.

There is no doubt that the past 8 years have put an unsightly blemish upon the demeanor of the human race; it is upon those who cared for the preservation of the planet and those who cared for retaining the status quo. Both, though this may seem impossible to both camps, were doing what they thought was right. Some acted from greed, but most acted from fear.

We have a right to fear. The very ground we have worked so hard to concretize (literally and figuratively) is crumbling beneath our feet. The economy is disintegrating, we will soon deplete the planet's supply of fossil fuels, species are dying out at a rate exceeding any mass extinction for the past 60 odd million years. Our planet is warming, the seas are dying... the list goes on and on. We have a right to fear.

Yet there is another side to this truth. Yes, we are responsible for the destruction, there is no denying that anymore. The facts speak for themselves. In facing this truth the human species has fallen to blame, cynicism, negativity, hopelessness and has forgotten the miracle of what it is to be human, to simply be alive. We are in the midst of another Copernican Revolution. The prevailing concept of our place in the universe is irrevocably altered and we have still not caught up. We are not alone in the history of Western thought, though. We must think back to Copernicus' time, Galileo's time, where a heliocentric view of the universe was scorned by the most brilliant and the most humble of the population. Something that is held as so commonplace an idea as the Earth moving around the Sun was once so preposterous that only a handful committed to the idea, even amidst the scorn and ridicule of those who were most revered. Quantum physics has revealed an impossible (and most inconvenient) truth, a truth that science has for so long held as a maxim that it has become cliche: There is no free lunch, i.e. you can't get something from nothing. This has now been proven false. Every moment there are billions of particles springing into and out of existence in what we once thought was a vacuum. Creation is happening as we speak. Like magic. Life itself is magic. And this, I believe, is a view point that has the potential to change our relationship to the planet, the universe, and, most importantly, to each other.

If only we could hold the idea in our hearts that we are (literally) all cousins in this species. We have all sprung from the same star, from the same energy, from the same ever-present origin. None of us is any greater or any less than any other... we are simply cousins. The miracle of life that is within us, is within the tree outside your window, in the common housefly busily living its flash of existence against the pane, in the lizard warming itself on a rock in your garden and in the invisible particles springing into and out of existence all around you. Which brings me to Hope.

Through our own guilt, or blame, we have fallen to denigration of the human species. I have heard it referred to as a cancer, a blight upon the Earth. That the Earth would be better off without us so the sooner we cause our own extinction the better. This is obviously not helpful thinking. All one has to do is think for a moment of our amazement at watching a bird in its courtship ritual - clearing an area for an intricate dance - or of a school of dolphins joyfully diving and twirling through the air for no better reason than it feels good. We think of a puppy coaxing us into play or a baby taking its first steps and we know that there is something powerful in the world that must be preserved. Perhaps it helps to remember that it is that same playfulness and connection with the numinous quality of the universe that we hear when listening to someone sing, play the guitar, dance, paint a magnificent piece of art or make us laugh. I think it is still possible to allow ourselves to be fascinated and enlivened by human beings.

I was having a wonderful conversation with a new/old friend (thank you Facebook) who said that, though he is still wary of any form of government (Obama included), he feels now a sense of relief that he no longer needs to be "fighting back". For the past 8 or more years we have been holding back the gates at the onslaught of mindless disregard. We have taken on the tactics of our "enemy" - Fear. An environmentalist is probably the last person anyone would have wanted to have over for dinner, as the dinner conversation would have inevitably eroded into how many new dead zones there are in the ocean due to global warming, or how unprepared we are for the ensuing riots when we finally run out of oil. The "We're all going to die" speak has never to my knowledge made someone get up from the dinner table feeling enlivened to take action to organize a community garden. If anything it causes quite the opposite reaction: I'm going to now sequester myself away in my bomb shelter with enough food and water to get me through the holocaust. Hope is why over 300,000 people applied for work in the Obama administration. Hope for a realization of humankind's greater capacity.

Humankind has the capacity for greatness, luminosity and elegance. We are the same matter as the hawk, the whale and the redwood. We are that same miracle of life and we have the ability to be self-aware - a blessing and a curse. But perhaps that self-awareness is simply the universe looking back on itself, evolving, changing, allowing a new consciousness to dawn upon humanity. One that, instead of alienating us - as the Copernicans did - unites us and draws us ever closer to our potential.

The Space Between

2008-10-16T17:14:00.000-07:00

As many may already be aware, Pythagoras spent much of his time exploring the roots of harmonic theory in hopes of creating what he would call a Music of the Spheres, or a system of musical ratios based on rational numbers in order to express the perfection and plan of the cosmos (a term he coined which gave rise to "Universe"). As Nichomachus relays the story, the key was revealed to Pythagoras as he was deep in thought and strolled past a blacksmith shop where he heard these perfect ratios being rung out with hammers upon their anvils. Pythagoras apparently barged into the shop, seized the hammers and proceeded to suss out the meaning behind what he heard. This led to his discovery of string length and tension being of equal proportion to tone and ratio of tone.

Pythagoras proceeded to develop a tuning system based upon these ratios consisting of two tetrachords adding together to make the octave. E F G A & B C D E', each consisting of a perfect fourth and separated by a sesquioctave (semitone). Nichomachus cleverly sidesteps the issue in his accounts of these tunings and for good reason: Turns out, Plato had (centuries before Nichomachus) developed a 4 octave tuning system based solely on mathematics and the ratios therein. Again this system created the diatonic scale (dia - two, tonic - tone) separated by a semitone. Problem was, this semitone turns out to be an irrational number! The square root of 2 when simplified. Pythagoras and his followers did not like irrational numbers; they found them troublesome and poor examples of the perfection of the cosmos. So the issue was skirted.

Pythagoras had encountered this number before, however; in his theorem of right triangles where the sum of the squares of the two short sides of a right triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse. The theorem works beautifully when the sides are 3, 4 for instance whereupon the hypotenuse will come to the square root of 25 or 5. What if, though, both sides are 1? We now end up with the square root of 2.

Let us jump ahead a few centuries to the discovery of the golden mean. The golden mean is found in all things that we as human beings find proportionately perfect: architecture, paintings, the shell of a nautilus and the proportions of the body. The golden mean is based on a very mysterious number: the square root of 2.

My query then; I am forced to wonder, did Pythagoras and his followers accidently stumble upon the very number around which all perfect proportion rests? How odd that this mysterious "space between" the tetrachords turned out to be the very number that allowed these notes to swirl infinitely through space and create perfect beauty.

Welcome.

2008-10-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome, friends, to my blog. Though at the moment there is nothing here (besides this disclaimer), it will be a spot for ruminations on music, cosmology, art and ecology and other beauty that crosses my path.