The Image of the Human

This is the moment to wake up to the idea the world we live in is drastically dysfunctional? Why?  There was some sort of gestalt with the beginning of the scientific-economic era that redefined the human being to be a skin encapsulated ego, a singular atom disconnected in space.  We were emancipated supposedly from the moral and mythical universe of all the irrational ages that preceded the modern age of reason.  Walter A. Weisskopf helps here.   He writes:

"During the ascendency of economics, theology and philosophy declined in importance.  Assumptions about human nature in economics were incidental byproducts of what was supposed to be empirical and logical truth.  The very question of what a human is cannot be and is not answered by any segmented discipline such as economics but only by a philosophy which encompasses the totality of experience.  This philosophy of life has been destroyed by modem life.  He goes on:  nevertheless the history of economic thought abounds with statements and  implicit assumptions which put together present an image of man."  In other words the earlier theorists (such as Adam Smith) looked at the values that they felt would make the system work and wrote that these are human nature.  The author explains that there was a great need for moral justification of this new system and it came from a variety of sources.  What were once vices were now turned into virtues.  He writes:  "money-making for its own sake, the taking of interest, buying cheap and selling dear, exploiting the fluctuations of supply ad demand for one's own advantage - all these and other activities which form the daily routine of economics life in the modern were considered morally reprehensible throughout Western civilization until the advent of capitalism."  The market would act as an "invisible hand" so that private vices would become public benefits. 

It is much more complex obviously, but what emerged was a new image of the human being. 

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley wrote the famous book The Perennial Philosophy in 1945.  He writes that the Perennial Philosophy  is   "the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being- the thing is immemorial and universal."    To say that Huxley was erudite is an understatement but what is important is that he was practical.   He was a seeker of wisdom (that is what philosophy is) and sought to help others through his writings

I am reading an article about Huxley's view of the importance of art.  The essay by Dana Sawyer is very articulate about Huxley's philosophy and metaphysics.  He wasn't hesitant to challenge the limitations of materialism and positivism.   Huxley pointed out repeatedly that we need not look beyond the physical world to find phenomena that science cannot quantify.   Love and beauty for example.  Sawyer articulates several ideas from Huxley that inform the truth and the purpose of this blog. 

 I quote him  "...in the west we have assumed axiomatically that ultimate truth is a product of thinking and can be grasped directly by the rational mind via a system of ideas.  Truth is the province of thinkers and so philosophers can get directly at it.  Huxley considered this an epistemological error. In his system, the mind can only grasp an intellectual analogue of Truth, and this differs as much from the direct experience of Brahman, the Absolute truth, as a cake recipe differs from a cake..."   Brahman in Huxley's context is (the manifest source of spiritual energy, the ground of all being) 

You could say that the West separated being and thinking.  Unfortunately, many of us identify with our thought processes.     Descartes's famous "I think therefore I am"  (French: "Je pense donc je suis")  plays a part in this. 

Huxley offers a different metaphysic that rediscovers Being.     Here is a quote:

Our essential Nature is usually overshadowed

By the activity of the mind...

When the mind has settled,

we are established in our essential nature

which is unbounded consciousness.  

     -Yoga Sutras of Patajali

  

 

Silence

In an earlier post (Depth is Invisible) this was written:    The idea is this one "...as we shall see, virtually all esoteric spiritual traditions insist that human beings possess "inside information" about the universe, to such an extent that discovering what a human being truly is is the key to fathoming the implacable mystery of the cosmos itself."  In a secular, materialistic society that is the modern world this is a radical idea.  Robert Inchausti in his book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People  gives a chillingly accurate view of what each of us is up against.   Here are a few.  He writes:

 " ...A perpetual revolution of economic life that generates endless new individual needs and endless new poverties-laying waste to the planet’s ecology...an increasingly managed information system centered around a mass media that exalts received ideas over direct experience-creating in the process pseudo-environments and modernized stupidity disguised and given credibility through the sheer pervasiveness of their presence...Under a global market economy, the practical reason of ordinary people is largely subsumed within an amalgam of money-making projects and development schemes.  There is no direct commercial pay-off to thinking philosophically and so no reason to be intellectually engaged beyond the demands of

technological innovation."    As Bob Dylan sang,  "It’s easy to see without looking too far
that not much is really sacred"   

The first step might be the hardest.   To really question what we think we know and move beyond the incredible noise that prevents us from going within. Silence is the path to the "inside information" about the universe.  

 

Integral Consciousness

Jean Gebser  wrote his magnum opus The Ever- Present Origin more than fifty years ago.  This monumental book is about the structures of consciousness.  He names them the archaic, the magical, the mythical  and the mental-rational.  He writes at the beginning:  "The present book is...the account of the nascence of a new world and an new consciousness.  He calls this the "integral' consciousness which integrates all of the previous ones.  When ones reads a book such as this and meditates on the ideas one understands that the way humans have experienced reality differently.  He writes about Petrarch who in 1339, describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux (southern France) about the discovery of perspective.   Gebser again: "for his time, his description is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European Man's attitude toward the world."
The idea is that there was a transformed change in the our relationship to space that was different than the previous stage.   Here is Gebser:  "the over emphasis on space and spatiality that increases with century since 1500 is at once the greatness as well the weakness of perspectical man.  His overemphasis on the 'objectively' external, a consequence of an excessively visual orientation, leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the "I," which is in confrontation with the external world.  Gebser calls this attitude ratio.  Man becomes the measure of all things.  This is the "Perpectival world that we know so well.

Georg Feuerstein wrote a book that gives an introduction to Gebser entitled Structures of Consciousness which comes recommended.    At the end he writes in a chapter The Spiritual Import of Gebser's work. 
Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence; goal-oriented, purposive thought is replaced by unintentionalness; the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative motion is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process; prejudice  is replaced by the renunciation of value judgements, that is to say, the emotional short-circuit is replaced by unsentimental tolerance...

There is much written about Gebser's important work online.  Here is one site.  http://www.gebser.org/ 

The many crises today demand a transformed consciousness and Gebser is one of those who can facilitate (in his writings) this transformation. 

Mind Jazz W.I. Thompson

William Irwin Thompson is a writer that practices mind jazz.  He is a cultural historian par excellence.  A book he wrote in the early seventies is entitled At the Edge of History has this line:  "one can say almost anything about human culture now and it will be true, for everything is going on at once."  I think because he is a cultural historian he understands that cultures are guided by a narrative.   These narratives inform and give answers to the basic question that humans ask.  There is a shadow to all these narratives usually hidden to the ones responsible.  One of his fascinating insights is the idea that right before a momentous change in consciousness, there is experienced the most evil.  Why?  Because there is major resistance to fundamental change. We see this phenomenon happening today.
He writes in Self and Society:
"Whatever ideological face this mental structure of simplification through emotional intensity takes on, the creature within is characterized by a revulsion to complexity and a messianic sense of self-empowerment that God or, science, or some deified historical process as giving the chosen ones the license to kill...in fact, they would rather have Armageddon than move through a cultural transformation into a new mathematical-artistic mentality of Planetization."

Here are one of his descriptions of our electronic-post literate culture.  "as one turns from newspaper to book to watch the evenings news, one feels as if the news were like Muzak...it's there to lie about the frightening reality of our situation.  Information has become our Second Nature, but in spite of our incredibly advanced electronic media, we can sense that television does not embody the truth, that it is a consensual delusion, a droning Muzak inside an electropop mediocracy.  The citizen, informed or otherwise, no longer exists: there is only the pageantry of celebrities and the media's loyal subject."
Thompson appreciates Marshall McLuhan for his insights. "The Medium is the message."   Thompson writes:  "At each stage in the cultural evolution of humanity, a new medium of communication comes forth, and that medium then effects a shift to a new form of polity.  We begin with origins of language in the African savanna, and we end up with the disintegration of literature on the Internet."
 He writes about the evolution of consciousness in many of his books, especially Coming Into Being and Imaginary Landscape -Making Worlds of Myth and Science.   His website http://www.williamirwinthompson.org/ 

Mind Parasites

Each post leads to other ideas.   I mentioned two books that I feel offer many openings.  The two are One God Under Cosmos (Godwin) and Pushing Ultimates (Paz).  Both authors are erudite but write in a way that can be understood.  They offer compelling visions of life and the human being, but also give, in my view, insightful analysis of what keeps us from reaching this human potential.  
Godwin's book is about four singularities: matter, life, mind and spirit.  He writes in the chapter on mind:  "...we are the only species that comes into the world with an almost infinite potential that may or may not be fulfilled."  What keeps us from reaching this potential?  Here he writes about the new understanding about how the human mind actually develops, "until fairly recently, no one considered bonding and attachment to have any great significance for how the the human mind actually develops."  Modern attachment theory is very significant.  We are born into a matrix.  This matrix is a "a fluid, shifting, unitary space between (usually) mother and infant, as if they were a single organism."  Our "earliest social interactions are imprinted into the biological structures that are maturing during the brain growth spurt that occurs in the first two years of human life, and therefore have far-reaching and long-enduring effects."  This situation can lead to pathology.   He emphasizes this insight "that our earliest relationships, in the degree to which are they unsatisfactory, lead to a paradoxical situation in which the poor parental bond  is internalized and turned into a psychic entity that compulsively seeks to reenact the situation later in life."  
The author calls these effects "mind parasites" -- complexes, fixations, repetition compulsions that operate independently of our conscious will and tend to subjugate it."

These "mind parasites" Godwin suggests, are what keep us from reaching our true potential.  "the belief in these entities is often prelude to action, generally unpleasant.  That is, mind parasites are projected into the outside world because they cause internal anxiety.  But projecting them outward does not actually eliminate the anxiety.  Rather it simply "mentalizes the environment, so that the the objective world, rather than the subjective world, is experienced as a dangerous and threatening place"  What happens on a individual level parallels what happens on a group level.  The book articulates interesting and insightful ideas about the prevalence of group violence in the past/present and the origin of scapegoating and group sacrifices.  This is still going on today.  One just has to watch TV to see the dynamics of "mind parasites" in action.

To facilitate our unlimited potential means that we strive for the truth and this means we must be open and courageous to question what we have learned.  Paz writes: "an open minded person is consistently prepared to revise his/her version of reality, if doing so brings it in line with a more substantial truth of how things really are." 

Reenchantment

  The book The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman is a classic as far as understanding how the modern materialistic-scientific culture developed.  An insightful analysis of the thinkers Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo and Isaac Newton on the shift in how reality was perceived.   There was a shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to "how."    . M. Adams writes:  "the governing concern was to understand the world in a way that would give humans beings power to manipulate and control things and to remake the environment after their own liking..."

Berman highlights how modern science became the mental framework to see the material world.   He writes, ...we are confronted, then, with a structural totality, or historical gestalt, and that science and capitalism form such a unit."   It is important to understand the momentous shift that took place from the middle ages to the modern world.   This was the 'great transformation' to emancipate humanity from religious and natural limits.  In the process the human being became identified as a self contained individual motivated solely by economic motives. 

Outmoded Concepts

Earlier posts talked about paradigms and how science in the modern world became the lead story.   It is no accident that metahistory books end up writing about the development of science and the effects of those developments.  The lead metaphor was that of a machine.  Robert W. Godwin writes that " science continues to stand upon a number of outmoded concepts that are not the outcome of its methods, but rather, a priori assumptions projected onto reality."  He lists three:
     Determinism draws its central metaphor from the mechanical clock and that all processes on the universe are entirely determined...
     Materialism means that the universe is ultimately composed of stable, individual parts that interact with other parts, all of which are fully external to one another.
     Reductionism is a approach that attempts to account for all of the phenomena of any level of reality in terms of a more simple or basic one.

 The scientific enterprise stripped the world of value and meaning.   These assumptions led to a disenchantment of the earth and a devaluation of the human being.   It left the human being lost, an exile, as Camus described.   The empirical methods of science while useful in many ways sucked the life and soul out of the earth and life on earth because they are immeasurable.

The conceptual views that guided the modern worldview are outmoded. 










 
 

Many Mysteries

There are many mysteries in which humans can contemplate.   The myths that inform cultures are creative narratives that guide those cultures in the fundamental questions:  Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?   

An important insight is that ideas originate from a historical and psychological context.  Ideas don't originate from a vacuum.   I recommend William I. Thompson as a writer that writes about the historical context in a erudite and imaginative way.  In our present materialistic culture, science is the storyteller in many ways.   Science tries to delude us into thinking it is beyond storytelling and myth.   Thompson is the one of the most imaginative at telling us otherwise.  Thompson helps us understand that what we accept as truth is "socially constructed,"  by a group that has something to gain.  

The Big Bang theory is a great example about the power of stories to misguide people into believing an idea that is being shown is wrong.  There is a certain segment of science that offers this as the truth about the origin of the universe.   It is now known by many of us that there are too many anomalies for the Big Bang theory to be a theory that is true.  Here is a link for some background on this.  http://www.cosmologystatement.org/  

A line from Schopenhauer  All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.





 

This blog is a way to share ideas that hopefully can facilitate a more holistic worldview that can transcend the limiting paradigms that hold back human beings from realizing their true nature. 

This writer starts with some fundamental premises: 

The universe is good and human beings are able to experience this goodness.

The modern world is guided by maps (paradigms) that are very limited which leads to suffering.

Here is one book that I recommend that has helped with my questioning. 

A book by Lew Paz, Pushing Ultimates – Fundamentals of Authentic Self-Knowledge comes highly recommended.   What can one learn from this book?  The search for genuine self-knowledge and authentic self-awareness is a difficult path that requires courage and perseverance.  One must learn to question just about everything.  The above book offers many insights about how difficult it is to be able to think for ourselves and the many ways in which we delude ourselves.  He mentions two types of bias he uses throughout the book: “confirmation bias is the mind’s tendency to confirm only data that enhances one’s opinions, and oversight bias is the conscious and subconscious avoidance of information adverse to those opinions.”  (P.33)

The author wants us to increase our "radius of comprehension"  by learning about many disciplines.  He writes at the beginning that "authentic knowledge begins when we probe beyond appearances, beyond ossified traditional belief systems and sterile scientism."   More to come.

What is the truth and why are we called to search for the truth?  That is a mystery.  Aldous Huxley wrote that what us makes human is growing up in a human culture and by the time we are conscious (in our teens) we are enculturated to the culture, usually unconsciously.  We take this for granted and this becomes the truth to us.

So many of us never question this process and just assume that this is the way it is.  We go through life just accepting the consensus.  A few are called to question this consensus reality and become curious and begin the lifelong process of searching for the truth. .  I like the way Joseph Campbell describes this process as a "call to adventure."  We leave the familiar to seek the unknown.  There is a crack in our cosmic egg and this gives us energy to seek alternatives and question the known.  

Seeking

"May we live in interesting times"

I can’t remember who said the statement above, but it definitely seems to be relevant today.  As we look around the world we live in a few observations can be made.  One, the world at large is beset by many problems.  As people look into these problems, they are finding that most of these problems are related.  Two, many of our problems don’t seem to fit into old frameworks.  Old theories don’t seem to explain things.  The maps that guide us into the future seem to be distorted.

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace calls these internal maps "the mazeways."  We look around and see old familiar forms falling apart.  One just has to glance at the daily paper to read about the problems.  War, crime, inflation, pollution, unemployment, the list goes on and on.  What is troubling about all these phenomena is that the old, tried and true solutions do not work anymore.  It seems as if old solutions make our problems worse.  In other words, as Korzybski said, "the map is not the territory."  Our internal maps instruct us to act a certain way.  In the past this "way" might have been appropriate, but reality is always changing.  The old ways of thought are good for a time, but as time moves on we may find ourselves rigid, static, and fearful.  Eventually, the evidence becomes overwhelming.  Change is imminent

This is a recurring cycle in history.  A society starts off with new ideas.  These ideas become the vision for the majority of the people. There is a common consensus that all will work out.   The future always looks brighter.  As time moves along though, certain anomalies keep popping up.  People begin fragmenting into different parties.  The synergy so necessary for a healthy society, starts to loosen.  Everyone  perceives their needs to be different from everyone else.  This leads to many breakdowns.  In government, powerful special interest groups become the norm.   The future looks increasingly darker.

In his book The Image of the Future, Fred Polak, a Dutch futurist, wrote that our images of the future play a crucial part in what shapes our society takes.  In healthy societies, the images were positive.  When there were weak images, the culture was decaying.  He ended by saying, ‘bold visionary thinking is in itself the prerequisite for effective change."

With a positive vision of the future, crisis opens the door to understanding.  Problems become opportunities to which we can open to new ways of seeing, to visualize new maps, maps that fit the new territory.  This new territory is much different in many ways.  It will take cooperation in all spheres of life.  In this way humans will be able to work together to solve our many problems.

The above essay is a brief description of the context we are in.  It is a ever-changing world.  We are at a crossroads.  We need a restructuring of the way we tend to view the world.  Humankind is going to have to let go many of its past assumptions.  Failure to change these basic assumptions can only lead to more problems.