Category Archives: Religion

Peirce, Luhmann, Bateson – Sign and Socios

Søren Brier, Professor of Culture and Communication Studies, Copenhagen Business School, gives a presentation as part of the University of Oregon Conference on Biosemiotics and Culture.

Bonus:
Professor Peter Ochs, UVa., has posted his terrific chapter from Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (Authors: David Ray Griffin – John B. Cobb Jr. -Marcus P. Ford – A. Y. Gunter – Peter Ochs – SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought articles about American Philosophy,  1992)

Charles Peirce As Post-Modern Philosopher

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Teaching Story: What do you really want?

Library, Melk Abbey (inspir. for Name of the Rose), Austria

A young man decided to move his family, his wife and two daughters, to a set of small rooms in a building in Isfahan. His family’s new home was located a short walk away from the Sufi school the young man wished to join.

The man had just finished his regular studies and now hoped to support his spiritual aspirations. A small dowry and his wife’s support were his only practical foundation. Yet, the young man did not decide to move until he had received a letter of assurance from the school, stating it could modestly employ him.

With this letter in hand, and his family moved in, the young man walked to the school, stepped into the stone doorway, and gently knocked. After a moment, the door opened to reveal a very old man. The old man held the door half way open.

“I have come from the district of Lake Urmia to apply to your school. I have this letter in support of a small stipend.”

The old man didn’t budge, and told him, “We’ve been expecting you. The Pir has requested I grant you a job only in the light of following these instructions.”

“I am humbled.” responded the young man.

The old man stepped into the archway and closed the door behind him. Standing face to face with the young man, he reached into his robe and pulled out a leather bound book.

“Your job is simple: come to the school every day at 11am and sweep the doorway and then sit here, the man pointed to a bench cut out of the archway’s support, and greet visitors. If the visitor is holding a book like the one I am about to loan to you, summon me with four knocks and admit them into the inner hallway. After prayers, come back and go around to the rear of the building and sweep the entrance to the rear doorway. There is a bench there too.”

The man held the book in front of him with both hands.

“Nobody enters the school through the rear door. People leave the school through the read door. When you are doing your job there, the extra courtesy is necessary as someone departs the school through the rear door, ‘God be thanked.’ At 1 in the afternoon, come back to the front, sweep the exterior entryway, and, spend the remainder of the hour sitting here on the bench and helping visitors.

Extending the book so that the young man could grasp it, the young man slowly brought the book into his possession.

“The book you have now is blank. On its pages you are to write your reason for hoping to join our school.”

Clutching the book, the young man bowed and lifting his head, told the old man,

“I will review my reasons and summon the single most excellent one and inscribe it on the first page of the book.”

The old man bowed, “I will see you tomorrow at 11 in the morning.”

star2

The young man waited until the old man had gone back into the building and shut the door. He heard the snap of the latch, and turned and walked to his new home.

The next day, the young man began his new job, and, he also hoped, he had begun to transit a short term before his being admitted into the school. On his first day he admitted two young men. Nobody left through the back door. He went home at 2pm.

On the second day, he admitted no one, and no one left, but, at the very end of the day, the old man from whom he received the book, stepped out onto the front entryway just as the young man stood up from bench to go home.

After greeting the young man, the elder asked, “Have you entertained and inscribed your reasons for joining us?”

Thrilling to hear the question, the young man lifted his book and gently opened it to the first page, turned it around, and with a graceful thrust, supported it while showing the page to the old man.

The old man looked down, read what the young man had penned, looked up, and told the man,

“I am not the judge of reasons. Nevertheless, I know that there are more reasons than this single one. Please write down all the reasons and do not omit a single one.”

The young man heard this beseeching request and bowed, turned the book back around, and closed it and lowered it. Again, waiting until he heard the snap of the latch, he left and walked back home.

So it was began a long sequence of days. Every now and then he would admit a young man through the front door, and, much less frequently, he would greet a departing elderly man as he left the building through the rear doorway.

Late every evening, the young man would contemplate his reasons, and enter new ones into pages in the succession of pages of the book.

Every day, at the end of his work day, the old man would read the new entries and return the book to the young man, and always remark,

“Surely, you know of more reasons?”

At first, that there were more reasons surprised the young man. Soon enough, the young man came to both reason or conjure new reasons effortlessly.  He’d go to the school, do his job, let a few men in and honor the fewer old men departing, and, he’d end each day with his presentation and the old man’s, by now, ritual injunction.

The young man’s efforts to discover his additional reasons became more difficult as time wore on. Along with this, for the first time, that other young man were entering the school, and that each entrant carried their own book, began to test the young man’s resolve.

star2

He persevered even as his nightly contemplations became woven with doubts. His biggest doubt was this: ‘where in this book full of reasons is the one reason?’

He wrote this down in the book. He followed it with a passage,

‘I have no more reasons. There are no more reasons.’

The next day, the fortieth since the young man had arrived for the first time at the front door of the school, the young man opened the front door for two young men, and, he honored a single very elderly old man departing from the rear door.

At the end of the day, the old man stepped out into the entryway and extended his hand with the palms faced upwards to receive the young man’s book. The young man set the open book on the old man’s palms. The old man lowered his head and read the three most recent passages.

Raising his head slowly, the old man waited for the young man to raise his eyes to meet his own. The old man’s palms, now empty. remained turn heavenward.

“Young man, would you please follow me?”

He opened the door. The young man, in a state of shock, stepped through the front doorway. Both men were in a small hallway. The old man opened the inner door. He swung the door to his chest and softly told the young man,

“On the other side of this door is a library. You will not have to search for the single half filled shelf. Please place your book on that shelf. Next, proceed to go through door at the very rear of the library.”

The young man calmed himself, took a deep breath, silently thanked God, and stepped through the inner doorway. He came into an immense illuminated room. To his left and right stood from floor to ceiling many tiered book shelves filled with books. The books were bound the same as his own book was bound. The young man slowly walked down the single aisle that ran between the library’s left and right book collections.

He walked almost to the end of the room and its shelves of books before he spotted on his right a low shelf. The shelf was partially filled with books, and below it was, apparently, the last empty shelf in the entire, immense library. He placed his book on the shelf. He turned in a complete circle to take in the entire library. Then he turned toward the second door, opposite the door he had come in through at the other end of the long aisle.

He walked up to the door, placed his right hand on the knob and turned it, opening the door. He stepped through the door and discovered he was standing in the rear doorway he knew so well. A young man reached out and gently held his right elbow.

“God be thanked.” The young man dropped his head, let his hand down, and bowed. He then sat down on the bench.

“There is only God to be thanked.” He told the seated young man. With that, the man walked back around the building toward the street. As he turned down the street to go home, he mused to himself, ‘This has been a day like no other.’

When he got to his house, he suddenly felt elated. Turning the door knob, he swing the door open. A very young girl he did not know greeted him,

“Grandpa!”

sufiteka

 

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Friendship: The Quest

Venn diagram for the sake of showing our overlap from the meta-perspective

Venn diagram for the sake of showing our overlap from the meta-perspective

From the perspective of my own vulnerability and woundedness, my friendship with Ken served my adult healing process. It is exactingly fit to the description: my being profoundly recognized and known. How would Ken describe the ramification of our friendship from the point of view given by his own core narcissistic needs? Although I knew Ken and knew him well, the only aspect I’m able to certify is that he benefitted from my not ever personally criticizing him. Our relationship was much more confessional in the direction of me explaining my personal stuff to him.

The currents of personal exchange, predicated by our sincere and daring submission to the beingness of vulnerability and openness seem to me to provide the foundation for what our relationship mainly was concerned with: wide-ranging inquiry and intuitive exploration. He thought we were doing shamanic collaboration, whereas I thought–from my flatland viewpoint–that we were experientially joined for the purpose of co-creating actual impressions out of contingencies. You can see his esoteric view doesn’t require any penetrating conceptualization because the foreordained is the ultimate ‘just so.’

The time requirement is, paradoxically, the essential requisite for the invocation of co-creative spontaneous learning of the sort able to escape time. Cutting hunches often seems to arrive from outer inner space. Each seems to be the result non-linear processes, and each is of unknowable origin. Ken and I didn’t spend anytime at all aligning our vastly different personal cultures even as we granted the fundamental distinction between the foreordination of the vertical worlds and the contingencies of the life worlds. Yet both higher/lower and life worlds are esoterically dimensioned.

Stephen Calhou, Kenneth Warren

We casually termed this last year, synchronic learning. The regular definition, Synchronic: concerned with events existing in a limited time period and ignoring historical antecedents, doesn’t suppose the same stuff Ken and I were supposing, because we supposed something closer to synchronistic learning.

Kenneth Warren

(Ken’s repurposed my social cybernetic domains and set these to a schema. In turn his schema draws on  The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Fabrication of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.)

This schema figured into our co-creation of The Heaven and Hell Archetypal Evaluation.

I never had to remind Ken that I was developmentally underdetermined. On the other hand, every now and then he would remind me that he wasn’t overdetermined, (or fixed in his beliefs.)

Just so you know I am not pushing belief in any constellation, cluster of interests, causal narrative, etc. – The booty once stored on my Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria has been emptied of all but the monkey. Like I suggested months ago in my basic neo-Taoist twinkie feast (see Chi A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life by R.G.H. Siu) we circumambulate the light downloaded into chi processed in the living organism evolving into the higher chi order of human twinkie canisters spinning off virtual presences, energy forms, phantoms into which human belief is hooked. Conspiracy theorists etc. drop anchor or go postal in this great cultic transfer site where abides superego/gregores. What I love abt. El Cristo Rey (a royal god image) and the Peasant brigade vid, so palpable you can taste mezcal’s worm turing in the soul’s secret sharer.

In the threads generally or tweets, it seems, we are in a state of madly accelerated contra-naturum Ahrimanic phantom-making. Each tweet a virtual presence of misplaced, poorly harvested, badly circulated human chi. No real grip on the real, the empty (the foreordained out and back), the nameless, the name of the actor, the causal. No bead on the effect and the compounding. Out of Tao. All affects with everyman aglow on a brain ripped on causal phantom of himself – certitude the superego defense of the ass-kicked ego. (Recall the civic phantom scarier than the PD in the LO Hyper-local dojo OP). The virtual is all the virtuous and vice-drenched representative phantoms launched from human twinkies and fed by uncooked and undercooked baked goods over time, now mechanically accelerated in the digital age.

I am an afficiando of culture wars. I’ve been hip to Martin for a long time, because I love to read traditional Roman Catholic sites. Another wizard of Oz, a psy-operator in the virtual machinery that breeds phantons and hijacks chi for the entropic grinder/apocalyptic binder. Again the question I have is the gatekeepers, how effective or lax, what slips through, what gets blocked. Again, one never know for sure. But one does know however inept, or subject to variance, breakdown, or fake-out, the gate-keeping and framing of influence, redaction, propaganda, etc, in support of the phantoms that juice power – imagined and authorized by law or voices or angels what have you – is an human actual operation. (KW Aug-29,2014)

During the period last year, that ended up with the liberation of psychoastrology and the development of the Cube-O-Probe, we rolled through and over the historical variety of explanatory regimes underlying the asymmetric/yang traditions of normative, top-down, astrology. Then he took the Cube-O-Probe cubes and beta tested them with astrologers and friends and nieces.

Kenneth Warren

In our work as partners, IN4tuity, in the library space, our entwined esotericism was background to our coming back into the ‘timefullness’ of psychodynamic evaluation, abductive analysis, and sensemaking. Yet the implicit ‘fourth’  blade (in our chop shop) remained: (now timely or timed,) intuition.

Dr. P:

Emotion and Intuition and Feeling seem to be crucial domain that we are working in a course correction to stamped-out, dried out metrics and objectifications and their “environmental impacts” on the life-flow, human experiences and vital organs in the library – sensitizing director, staff, board to the human asset and helping them to align together as caring stewards of the ethos.

Might you be able to normalize any of this material that points to my deeper sources:

Here’s a response I wote some time ago to John Giannini in response to an early draft of a book on intuition he was writing:

John:

In providing a reading, one always tries to pull the writing in one’s one own cognitive direction. I hope this provides more insight than confusion.

1 Basic Assumption/Primary Paradigm/Intentionality of the Function

Drop a few tight propositions about Intuition to claim your primary paradigm for the book.

I think the reader’s understanding would be better served if you nail a few more choice statements of your own about Intuition that will then ramify through the statements of Maslow and, Pagels and Kafka.

What I am suggesting are a few choice formulations/hypotheses with hooks on Intuition. These provocations will hook not only into the Maslow and Pagels and Kafka statements but also press thematically into the material that you will later supply.

In other words, present the provocative scaffolding that will open a strategic position for your own authorship in advance of your citation of others. In short, put your convictions about Intuition before your connections to Intuition.

I’ll toss a few examples from my notebooks that may not be tested or true statements about intuition but I offer them here, simply to convey a broad sense of tactic (not necessarily the language or terms) to be used in your intro:

Intuition is the intentionality of the not yet known; it redounds from the flux of things into symbolic experience to make the flow of information from the unconscious more intelligible to the ego.

Intuition is the divisible faculty that persists through the process and premise of indivisibility.

Intuition is an open and indefinite unity (Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological dimension), an original drawdown from an inexhaustible reservoir that supports improvisation and novelty.

Intuition is the surplus presence of life moving in patterns of meaning that cannot be touched directly.

Intuition offers a momentary return to self-organizing experience at a preverbal, existential level.

Intuition is the darkness where the gods dwell; it is the force of the religious complex; it is the numinous meaning schema of the divine.

Intuition is the ground of complex and heightened experience; it reveals through a flash of interacting activities a personal connection to a place of novelty (Whitehead’s process philosophy?) in the cosmic order.

Intuition generates personal convictions about anomalous, other-worldly, supersensible and uncanny realms.

2 Divine and Saphire

A small amplification and definition of “the divine” as a meaning schema in your theological model seems needed. As the intro stands now, you drop the term “divine” onto Sapphire’s “intuitive unconscious process.” It seems sudden and exaggerated to such a loaded term so suddenly with any set-up.

Parsing the meaning schema in your theological and psychological registers would bring a tighter measure of clarity.

Is intuition the divine affect that moves one to a felt sense of presence that unwinds from the object/information flow of universe to shock one’s previous verbalization/narrative of one’s life and to encourage the perception of an alternative intentionality?

3 Asymmetrical and the Symmetrical

My initial reading suggests that you might ponder a little further how the asymmetrical (Yang?) and the symmetrical (Yin?) aspects might be featured in your model.

Does the Intuition “emerge” from the complex interaction between the asymmetrical (Yang?) and the symmetrical (Yin?) archetypal impulses that contain in it any aspects might be featured in your model.

I read your move in Compass of the Soul to the Coupling of types as a symmetrical move.

Is your Coupling move a Yin feminizing qualification of the Yang asymmetrical emphasis of Cambry? If so you might be able to mark your intention in the context of the Tao.

Intuition is the energy that binds/returns the asymmetrical leading edge of experience to the symmetrical circumference.

Ken

Our partnership joined Ken’s left hand with my right hand, just as it negotiated insight from the time-bound beforehand asymmetry to the instantaneous psycho-transmogrification posed by the synchronic emergence of symmetry.

Kenneth Warren, Stephen Calhoun, Cube-O-Probe

Intention: what now without my friend Ken? Cube-O-Probe cuts through and then there is the WATER ELEMENT turned upside down!

Ken attached this image to an email.

Ken attached this image to an email.

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Friendship: Negative Capability, Unfinished Impositions, Irony

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

The Caller, Stephen Calhoun (2013)

Loss of a person, of a close frriend or of a family member, presents a challenging process which won’t let go as it impels me through its requisite travail.

At the same time, the outward conventions of concern and courtesy basically allow for a restoration of human contact in the collective terms of concern and courtesy, and, sure, in the terms of grief and mourning.

These expressions are helpful, even as the expressed kindnesses and concerns seem to me to reach around the really bare, and profoundly forward-pitched facts. Of course, I would do the same thing, in approaching somebody’s loss, in approaching a ‘death in the family.’ Except, at the same time, I would be always holding back my usual, or my habitual, curiosity.

I would reign in my researcher’s soul.

What is actually going on?

I previously mentioned, or I think I did so, that in the weeks between meeting Ken for the first time and our second meeting, he reported to me that he had read my entire web site and blog. At the time he made this report, I didn’t know really what kind of ‘reader’ was Ken. Still, I was very impressed because he had begun what we came to call, ‘the forensics;’ and I had begun the same process. Furthermore, apparently, we shared this similarity, we both knew more data is better than both a little data, and, the thin positive capability through which a little data and bad guesswork are joined together.

Gone! Okay, what is actually going on with you Stephen? This is the question that can be addressed to me.

I do bring in, and try to warmly receive, the heartfelt substitutions for this non-obvious question. Oh, it was not a non-obvious question to Ken. When my mother passed away in early 2012, he asked me,

“What is going on?”

And, he kept asking. I’ll miss his researcher’s tenacity! If somebody doesn’t ask me this question, he or she is missing the boat. I’m not missing it, I’m in it.

I have put much of the actual goings on ‘with me’ in the aftermath of my loss, ‘out there,’ here, on my blog. (This blog is iteration number three, begun five months after meeting Ken in the fall of 2004.)

To review:

1. Shocked!

Friendship
2. the LOVE BASIS
3. COMBINATORIAL questing
4. active DECONSTRUCTION
5. the ANIMA PROBLEM
6. interlude: what you don’t know, give into
7. interlude: process and reality
8. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, Irony

Ken would have appreciated why the number of posts is eight. Hey, I’m throwing out clues here!

He and I agreed on a great great deal, although as I have tried to make clear, Ken was entangled by his enthusiasms, whereas I am mostly afraid of my own; (so, I trained myself to be a fallibilist.)

Also, I feel as if I need to be careful. But, it isn’t also true that anybody should feel he or she is to be a second fiddle. Heck, go for it. Life is unpredictable. And, you’re unlikely to figure out in advance when your last breath is steaming down the tracks.

Close relations are my second highest value–and are so for reasons I’m able to express. Ask me. Go for it.

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

The Green Man (Stephen Calhoun

Ken and I spent a lot of time deconstructing what to us–to maybe only us–was the single most bloody problem in the ‘scape of modernity, (that:) the fundamental problem is relational incapacity, not deficits in rationality or critical thinking.

Note, the structure goes from Shock to Negative Capability. It goes from oh no, shit! to soul!

Yes, it was terrific and quite medicinal, perhaps even karmically medicinal, to feel really extremely thoroughly known by Ken, yet, I’ve mapped out the foundation to be: going from the LOVE BASIS to the COMBINATORIAL. Ken and I were sensemakers, this is what we did over many thousands of hours. Why?

What is actually going on?

Why? …such a good question. We never discussed explicitly dialogical recognition (Charles Taylor,) yet when we together took up the cause of the noetic public library we sorted out a deep congruence about the micro problems come to coalesce around the macro problems of–within the pragmatics of praxis in a library–reification, instrumentalism, objectification, dehumanization, and, well, how it is, apparently, easy to rip the fucking heart of a library out of its cavity, and place in this cavity a bunch of 3D printers.

Similarly, most societal problems at the scale of the kind of civics citizens actually can effectively practice, are initiated in the first order by the atrophy of the human ability to actively know one other. Ken and I understood our diagnosis would deconstruct this order of knowing. Then, for the sake of reanimating the civic heart and civic capacity for making sense, we worked over how in a city or in a library how citizens might collaborate on a new, deeper (3rd) order of interpersonal and intrapersonal knowing cum relationship.

In the light of the ideal of authenticity, it would seem that having merely instrumental relationships is to act in a self-stultifying way. The notion that one can pursue one’s fulfilment in this way seems illusory, in somewhat the same way as the idea that one can choose oneself without recognizing a horizon of significance beyond choice. Authenticity a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where better and higher are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire. (Charles Taylor)

Ken and I spent zero time slapping each other on the back when we discovered, for example, we both were familiar with Paolo Freire. It was all matter-of-fact because it is who you are, not what you know, and, so, study for the love of the quest. Train first! Deploy, drill down, together stick our hands in the muck.

What is actually going on?

When we turned this around, our critical chops came to meld Ken’s learned Saturnian thrust with my edge-seeking Promethean swing. Ken possessed this aspect, one that was like the boy with a hammer, the boy who would swing his hammer at everything; and, I, an actual complexed puer, possessed a kind of penetrating Apollonian cynicism, and, also I, a Batesonian, was able to stand back a bit. (Well, I didn’t want to get accidentally rapped by the hammer.) Yet, when we got going. . .

we’d cover stuff very very quickly. ‘Marx was not even a horrible psychologist, yet Russell was on the money in noting Marx was a Christian heretic.’ ‘Jung only had an inkling that he had birthed a psychology and its daughters from his lapsed Lutheran brow, and that his psychology’s wider applications were somewhat covertly undermined by this creation story.’ ‘There are short paragraphs in the Tibetan Canon, or the best haiku, which could right now replace and improve every word Ken Wilber has ever scribbled.’

‘cover’ doesn’t mean getting it correct.

Ken, by the way, fulfilled the demands of authentic relationship with many many people. He and I were in a synergistic profoundly complementary relationship, and spent no time gratuitously or otherwise aggrandizing how great was our relationship, except we did once briefly consider some of the contingencies and fortuities and errors which had to slowly collapse, like a holy wave function organizing its effective reality, or ‘reality,’ and do so over two lifetimes, all for the sake of being able to efficiently and cleanly deploy together the practical and/or explosive tools our dialectical instigations, spontaneous poetics, and channeled intuitions, came to evoke and muster.

Did it help our effort that we happened to have both traveled through some of the same ideational and metaphysical lands? See: Interlude #3 tomorrow.

Nevertheless, our learned congruency was like a picture pasted to the jig pieces of a puzzle. With time, and it still is going to take time no matter what, two people working together can piece the puzzle together without having to refer to the ‘parted’ picture on the surface of each piece.

What Ken and I disagreed about: particular ramifications. For example, the ramifications implicitly of this perspective:

Ken, you should just give up trying to trick me.

Ken respected where I could not go. I had occasion to remind him earlier this year that “such respect then leads irrevocably to my Promethean liberation of Astrology and Psycho-astrology,” (and how I came to amputate various fixities from their thin causal relations.)

I had planned to take him (this summer) through The Reduced Bateson Set. (Oh well.) We had begun to recast some of the developmental fixations in learning theorizing and in specific theories, like the theory of my friend, David Kolb. Obviously, to where the action learning of our entwined dialectical picking and drumming would have led to, is about as unknowable as an unknown could be.

I had submitted a Cube-O-Probe, as a visual poem, to House Organ. Ken rarely specified the ways in which our workplay was influencing his numerous other projects. But, he was a boy with a hammer! He took his set #2 of Cubes and fearlessly interpreted their message on behalf of astrologers, poets, and nieces.

Kenneth Warren
One deep congruency we arrived at, we came to right at the beginning. Love basis.

Another lesser, and vital congruency, brought forth one of the essential fundamentals able to support our mindful and creative travels: as it happens, an exquisitely sensitive humane esotericist breaks bread with a mercurial edge-seeking flatlander because the whole cause of inverting assumptions and sometimes having to mulch them is shared and equally served by two radically different sensibilities–except for, as Rumi noted, our “fleshy hearts.”

We traveled and never went anywhere. We made a road trip to the Target in North Olmsted for the sake of a veteran who had just rented a crib in Lakewood but didn’t have a bed.

h/t Lakewood Observer

h/t Lakewood Observer

We made a bunch of trips to Wadsworth in support of our fellow traveler, Daniel and his public library.

“Ken, would you please try to keep at least one hand on the wheel?”

YoungFrankenstein

When I had reason to remind Ken that I am, by disposition, a “deep ironicist,” he told me this assertion perplexed him. I told him,

“Come on Ken, you’re the one who titled me, Dr. Puck.”

Then, I explained to him what imperatives are driven by chops, negative capability, good/bad fortune, large collections of devices and heuristics, multitudes of perspectives, plus the ability to rappel down to the “meta,” and, I went on,

“then there are also all those just-in-time intuitions blowing into your scheme like neutrinos stream through the material world, except you and me grab at ’em and we bring the intuition back alive, from wherever was its ‘wild,’ and you stick ’em to your wall, They always seem to stick.”

“Yeah, Ken, your sort of an ironicist too.”

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Filed under adult learning, analytic(al) psychology, education, experiential learning, Kenneth Warren, Libraries & Librarianship, philosophy, psychology, Religion, science, self-knowledge, visual experiments, my art

Liberating the Stars From Space & Time

©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. Oj?da

[The] principle the map is not the territory and name is not the thing named made famous by Alfred Korzybski, strikes at many levels. It reminds us in a general way that when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain. But in a more abstract way, Korzybski’s statement asserts that in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported, the Ding an sich. Above all, the relation between the report and that mysterious thing reported tends to have the nature of a classification, an assignment of the thing to a class. Naming is always classifying, and mapping is essentially the same as naming.

Korzybski was, on the whole, speaking as a philosopher, attempting to persuade people to discipline their manner of thinking. But he could not win. When we come to apply his dictum to the natural history of human mental process, the matter is not quite so simple. The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and the territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side, is probably unable to distinguish name from thing named. It is certainly not concerned with this sort of distinction. It therefore happens that certain nonrational types of behavior are necessarily present in human life. We do, in fact, have two hemispheres; and we cannot operate somewhat differently from the other, and we cannot get away from the tangles that that difference proposes. (Every Schoolboy Knows – Gregory Bateson, from Mind and Nature)

Part Two of Two

Part One: Imaginal Cybernetics, the Demonic Daemon, Deep Play

1. “I can’t explain it, really.”

In my life I’ve observed, even been thoroughly entangled, in very hard-to-explain, and, dare I say, magical, stuff. In the catalog of life experiences, there would need to be a chapter devoted to spectacular instances of truly strange occurrences.

However, apparently by my innate disposition, the grandest insight I’ve gained into any of the specific events was not an insight at all. It was a ‘grand meta,’ and so only it remains one of the several anchors to what I call my flatland.

Grand Meta One: Everything that is experienced earns at least one account.

Actually, every experience earns a first person account plus any number–stretching to an endless amount–of secondary accounts. Accounts are stretched between those of an uninhibited type or, at the other extreme, of the severely limited–qualified–kind. Accounts utilize any useful means. Such means are not required to meet any standard of commensurability. It is critical to recognize that the subject may not be able to access an account.

This brings us to Grand Meta Two: Any single account is always related to multiple possible ramifications.

However, I have in mind a synthetic definition of ramification. Ramification is a consequence that grows out of an account.

Out of our certainties, ramifications grow.

2.

astrological chart

It was in sometime in the mid 1980’s, maybe around 1985, that my first wife, thought it would be interesting to have a good friend of hers, an anthroposophical astrologer trained in the introspective tradition of Rudolph Steiner, do my birth chart. I was in my early thirties, a hippy, not really committed to anything much besides the stuff of our carefree life.

I read the fourteen pages of the astrologer’s decidedly psychological reading. It all rang true. I was unconcerned about any account for the reasons the accurate reading followed from a technique, the astro-geometric system of astrology. I asked Benson, the astrologer, why the reading seemed so well matched, he made a point to emphasize that this is the result of his contemplation on the chart more than it was the result of the content of the chart.

This chart and interpretation has always struck me as cogent and valuable. I’ve returned to it many times over thirty years. It is a canny statement of seeming astro-psychoanalysis. There’s a secondary account possible, itself a ramification grown from the stuff of my chart’s inception, that supposes the reading is a very keen parlor trick, along the lines of stringing common diagnostic abductions together after one learns something about the subject’s narrative.

That secondary account does not prevent the reading today from evoking my personal response. I tell you, it’s a good reading. It’s apt. Is it more apt than an arbitrary interpretation might be? Who knows? I can’t explain it.

3. Architectural Jello

Universes-two-kinds

4.

People have over millennia experienced that there is, to give it one over-arching heading, a world-behind-the-world. Obviously, then, there are countless primary accounts of: there being a world hidden beyond the world we can easily grasp. There are the differential meta accounts for how the grasp that is effective in one world is incapable in this other world-behind-the-world.

For the sake of keeping this very down-and-dirty meditation brisk, call the naturally material world the front world and this other world the back world. Clearly, one class of consequences that grows out of primary accounts of the back world, questions the existence of the back world. (In noting this, nevertheless, I understand that there are positive primary accounts. These, in referring to any object of experience, earns an account.) Still, we know nowadays the accountings for the back world are numerous and multivarious. Most such accounts are not compatible with each other.

For example, there are the secondary accounts ramified as a consequence of the experience of the back worlds given by the primary accounts of the Abrahamic religions. These secondary accounts constitute the various theisms made explicit in both the formal philosophizing and the folk philosophizing, and in the historical social-constructive norming, norming discoverable as consequential ramifications of social experience and its accountings. Narrow paths and deviations arise out of the prolix socialized accounts.

There are private accounts too.

When the Pope speaks of Angels, an account is earned. Possible ramifications tumble outward too. The Pope of course means real angelic beings existing where angels exist.

  • Angels are creatures made by God. They are pure spirits and personal beings. (Each angel is a person.) They are both powerful and intelligent. Note: Some people are inclined to think that the word “person” applies only to human beings. On the contrary, “person” applies to each of the three divine Persons of the Holy Trinity, to angels and to humans. (Catholic Teaching On Angels)

chain_of_being

No single theology or cosmology characterizes the New Age. Rather, the New Age is united in rejecting the dominant theology of western monotheism, most explicitly Christianity and Judaism, though implicitly Islam as well, through an emphasis on the individual rather than religious authority embodied in institutions. This attitude, a key trait of American metaphysical religion, stands in contrast to the cardinal tenets of the traditional Christian and Jewish theology: a single transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent deity as described in the Bible, alongside a view of the cosmos as created and sustained by such a deity.

The most common theologies within the New Age envision God as within each individual. Though New Agers tend to avoid categorizing themselves along traditional theological categories, scholars label such New Age beliefs monism, pantheism, and panentheism. Monism declares that the summation of the entire universe is the divine, and that each individual within the cosmos represents a small sliver of god. Pantheism upholds a similar position, that god is within all things. Panentheism postulates that all things are in god, but that god transcends the sum of all these things. All three philosophies lead their New Age adherents to envision the self as the seat of the divine. New Agers tend to envision god as impersonal and diffuse, part of all living things. Such a theology enables New Age practitioners to see the divine in humans, nature, the earth, and inanimate objects, though some New Agers limit god to living beings. Such a holistic approach to the divine helps explain the environmental ethos that also characterizes so much of the New Age movement.

This cosmology also explains why New Agers seek self-development and self-evolution. New Age practitioners generally agree that all individuals must focus on an ultimate goal of developing the god-aspect within themselves. The various practices of the movement, what some scholars have called spiritual technologies, aim to develop the self and bring it into awareness of its nature as divine. Such spiritual technologies-for example yoga, channeling, aura-reading, and crystal work-aim to assist the practitioner in self-development. *

A less popular theology within the New Age movement envisions a universe filled with multiple divinities. Scholars call such a position polytheism, though few New Agers would themselves use this characterization. Polytheism appears most frequently amongst New Age practitioners who also identify with Paganism, since the latter religious tradition assumes polytheism as a foundation. Some New Agers envision the world as filled with two deities, the cosmic ideals of male and female, whereas others believe in entire pantheons of divinities. However, like their coreligionists who accept pantheism or monism, New Agers who adopt a polytheistic theology reject the dominant western religious paradigm. Ultimate Reality and Divine Beings – Benjamin E. Zeller – Patheos

* [plus: astrology]

The New Age Cults

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Coincidentally Fragile

NWO-Serendipity

via Tom Woolley, Samson University

 

Confusions about probability cause probable errors. A possible conjunction supposes a chance of eventuation and has a chance of happening, yet after it has happened its chances of happening collapse to unity by virtue of the happening having occurred.

If/When
When Jesus is Lord of your life, there are no coincidences. Dick Luchtenberg, Journey to Freedom

“There are no coincidences in life.” Glenn Beck

“It is my purpose to show that it is logically impossible to ascribe any power to chance whatever… If chance exists in its frailest possible form, God is finished… If chance exists in any size, shape or form, God cannot exist.” R.C. Sproul. 1994. Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology

“If one likes one could ascribe this randomness to God, but it would be a very strange kind of intervention: there is no evidence that it was directed toward any purpose. Indeed if it were, it would, by definition not be random.” Stephen Hawking

Time to consult the Cube-O-Probe. Probe, in what direction might fruitful territory be discovered for further investigation of the aspects of coincidence and a priori requisite in the quiddity of eventuation?

probe

Comment: The Probe suggests an obvious investigatory dialectical vector between the practical consideration of the marriage of the apparently opposite chance and foreordained, with the completely knotty problem of seeking essential morality within this same interplay. Here also is the ping-ponging between theological and Newtonian determinism, and maybe this could give into finding dual forms for morality. Once again the Cube-O-Probe charts the way!

 

clown-probe

 

Doxastic commitment, or “soul in the game”: You can only believe predictions and opinions by those who committed themselves to a certain belief, and had something to lose, in a way to pay a cost in being wrong. Nassim Taleb (from the Anti-Fragile Glossary)

“The general principle of antifragility, it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.” – Nassim Taleb

coincidence (OED)

[a. F. coïncidence, L. type *coincidentia: see coincident and -ence.]

1. a.1.a The fact or condition of being coincident; the occupation of the same place or part of space.

1626 Bacon Sylva (1677) §224 There can be no Coincidence in the eye, or Visual Point.    1715 Cheyne Philos. Prin. Relig. (J.), The coincidence of the planes of this rotation with one another, and with the plane of the ecliptick.    1831 Brewster Newton I. x. 222 The singleness of the picture arises from the coincidence of the two pictures.    1870 R. M. Ferguson Electr. 33 This want of coincidence of the points of vertical dip and of maximum intensity.

fig. or transf.    1650 Fuller Pisgah v ii. §5 By a casuall coincidence some straggling words of the Athenians may meet in the mouths of the veriest Barbarians.    1847 Emerson Repr. Men, Plato Wks. I. 304 The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr.

b.1.b (with pl.) A case of coincidence.

1837 Whewell Hist. Induc. Sci. (1857) I. 153 The method of making visual coincidences.    1880 Adams in Times 28 Dec. 10/2 The new line-spectra, the real basic lines of those substances which show coincidences.

2.2 Occurrence or existence at the same time; simultaneous occurrence or existence.

1650 Fuller Pisgah iii. iii. §8 There might be a casuall coincidence of this feast and his presence at Jerusalem.    1681 More Expos. Daniel 257 There is a Coincidence, at least of time.    1722 Susanna Wesley in Eliza Clarke Life (1886) 130 There hardly ever was a greater coincidence of unprosperous events in one family.    1837 H. Martineau Soc. Amer. III. 297 A happy coincidence of outward plenty with liberal institutions.    1878 Huxley Physiogr. xx. 342 The coincidence of twelve by the clock with noon by the sun-dial?is exact only four times in the year.

3. a.3.a Exact agreement or correspondence in substance, nature, character, etc.

1605 Bacon Adv. Learn. ii. v. §3 Is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion?    a?1716 South Serm. VII. v. (R.), Those who discourse metaphysically of the nature of truth?affirm a perfect coincidence between truth and goodness.    1831 Brewster Newton (1855) II. xxiv. 352 The coincidence of the religious views of Sir Isaac Newton with those of John Locke.    1876 Grote Eth. Fragm. iii. 58 These two ends of action are sometimes found in conflict, but more frequently in coincidence.

b.3.b (with pl.) An instance of such agreement or correspondence.

a?1661 Fuller Worthies (1840) I. 201 A local coincidence, which?cannot be paralleled.    1736 Butler Anal. ii. vii. 356 Evidence arising from various coincidences.    1790 Paley Horæ Paul. Rom. ii. 13 Such coincidences may fairly be stated as undesigned.    1867 Freeman Norm. Conq. (1876) I. App. 724 A remarkable series of undesigned coincidences in favour of the belief.

4.4 A notable concurrence of events or circumstances having no apparent causal connexion.

a?1682 Sir T. Browne Let. to Friend (Camelot ed.) 185 That he should also take King Francis prisoner upon that day [of his nativity], was an unexpected coincidence.    1821 De Quincey Confess. Wks. 1863 I. 96, I felt it at the time?as a singular coincidence, that twice, etc.    1823 Byron Juan vi. lxxviii, A ‘strange coincidence,’ to use a phrase By which such things are settled now-a-days.    1829 Scott Guy M. Introd., The fact, if truly reported, is one of those singular coincidences which occasionally appear.    1865 Livingstone Zambesi xix. 378 It might be only a coincidence.

5.5 Of persons: Agreement or concurrence (in opinion or sentiment).

1795 Hull Advertiser 28 Nov. 3/1 Mr. Sturt?expressed his co-incidence with the sentiments of [the Petition].    1800 Wellington in Owen Disp. 647 You are already apprized of my entire coincidence in your opinion.    1800 Syd. Smith Six Serm. 60 A modest coincidence with received opinions above our faculties.

†6.6 Falling together, conjunction blending. Obs.

c?1645 Howell Lett. (1650) II. 88 The Latine tongue, with the coincidence of the Goths language and other northern peeple.

7. a.7.a Physics. The indication of the occurrence of ionizing particles in two or more detectors simultaneously (see quot. 1958). Also attrib. Cf. anti-coincidence.

1930 Physical Rev. XXXV. 651/2 Enormously increased resolving power can be obtained by the requirement of multiple instead of paired coincidences. The attainment of very great freedom from accidental coincidences is of greatest importance [etc.].    Ibid. 652/1 Automatic recording of the amount of the penetrating radiation coming from particular areas of the sky, using two tube-counters and a special ‘coincidence circuit’.    1938 R. W. Lawson tr. Hevesy & Paneth’s Man. Radioactivity (ed. 2) xxv. 280 Insertion of sheets of lead between the counters only slightly diminishes the number of simultaneous discharges (coincidences), and this proves that we are here confronted?with cosmic rays.    1940, etc. [see anti-coincidence].    1958 Van Nostrand’s Sci. Encycl. (ed. 3) 369/1 A true coincidence is one that is due to the detection of a single particle or of several genetically related particles. An accidental, chance, or random coincidence is one that is due to the fortuitous occurrence of unrelated counts in the separate detectors.

b.7.b Computers. Equivalent signals received simultaneously in an electronic circuit; the reception of such signals. Also attrib.

1947 Rev. Sci. Instruments XVIII. 907/1 In order to reduce chance coincidences to a minimum, it is necessary to use a coincidence circuit.    1948 Ibid. XIX. 565/2 Methods can be found for modulating one of the E.M.T.’s?so that the E.M.T.’s themselves form a coincidence or anticoincidence system.    1950 C. B. Tompkins et al. High-Speed Computing Devices iv. 37 An electronic gate is a circuit with a single output and two (or more) inputs so designed that an output signal is produced when, and only when, input signals are received on both (or on a particular set of) input leads. Such circuits are variously known as gates, coincidence circuits, Rossi circuits, or logical and circuits.    1953 A. D. & K. H. V. Booth Automatic Digital Calculators xi. 111 Coincidence sensers. In computing machine design it is frequently necessary to have available means for ascertaining the identity of two quantities.    1964 M. J. Pedelty in Tou & Wilcox Computer Sci. x. 248 The essence of the system?is that signals are ‘broadcast’ on a ‘to-whom-it-may-concern’ basis. Coincidence gates and delays can then be used to detect certain pulse patterns from the ‘broadcast alphabet’.

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Re: Sam Harris Solves the Problem of Islamic Faith

KW

(My friend L was turned back at the comment guardhouse on October 23. I have entertained her response to the post about religion and Ken Wilber here, and, provided some clarifying comments.

I’m familiar with ken wilbur’s work, and always enjoy his take on matters philosophical and anthropological, psychosocial. at least, i did when i read his books many years back. i am not aware of this ‘integral theory’ as so-named. so in reading the above, this is the possible reason why it is not clear to me why the chagrin is so obvious.
i’ll also admit to not having seen the maher and affleck face-off, although i did of course hear reports.

and, one more thing is that, for me, ‘religion’ is a very broad term  – i see it as mainly institutional, despite the exhortations around the christian teaching i experienced as a youth, to see JC as a ‘personal saviour’. i always found this a bit of a cop-out, although i understood what they were getting at.

i also do not believe in god – or any overseeing entity.

islam i see as a set of prescriptions, christianity also in some ways, and buddhism too. each have their sets of ‘leeways’ for these prescriptions. different people are attracted to different prescriptions as it suits their way of thinking. buddhism makes sense to me as it is logical, and does not depend on a discrete entity outside the self and the general. it does not, at base, believe one can ‘petition the lord with prayer’ (although prayer itself is another thing, and not merely owned by one religious institution).

but beyond religion, there is also personal experience of.. being.

one aspect of religion, linked to their prescriptions, but not at all the same in many instances, are the teachings, the helpful aids in deciphering one’s sense of ‘being’ – the guides from those who have gone before, who reach out and say, you’re not the only one to have experienced this.

this is helpful.

OK, but because of all these drawbacks on my part, i am unable to understand the seeming vehemence of your stance re the ‘integralists’.

i have not read alain de botton’s latest ‘religion for atheists’, but i think i will.
that is all for now.

L.

Vehement was part of the impression I evoked–hmmm.

“Religion” is the term any person might deploy to signify and describe whatever it is he or she is willing to, able to, gonna offer, about being–I like that–and about stuff greater than one’s self, and, about all the other stuff which might inhere to answer to the question, “What to you is religion?”

Religion would be so broad in this meta-sense that it could encompass all answers to the question. This could be a good way to start an inquiry that isn’t anchored in developmental suppositions. The present Integral view is almost entirely developmental, so it misses a great deal of stuff about religion.

Gregory Bateson: In the purely material world there could be no irony, and a monstrous lack of humor of all kinds. But in the world of patterns and ideas, irony is everywhere; and by irony you may (perhaps) reach that small enlightenment which is a moment of seeing the larger gestalt. [from Sacred Unity]

Although I think it unnecessary to qualify this insight in terms of the material world, still the insight seems to me to point in the direction of comprehending what I would term the ‘religious abduction.’ What does a person understand to be the explanatory domain of religion? This move for the sake of clarifying the varieties of explanation about religion should next encompass the believer, the unbeliever, the atheist, and agnostic; and I am certain the patterns would be profuse.

Religion? What has been learned, what could be learned, and what are the messy, dangling ends? What are the boundary conditions?

I am a Humean agnostic, which is to say that the normative religious ideas able to be projected upon me by either the non-ironic believer or atheist, (“as if” my main metaphysical deficit is to not see what is obvious to such a person,) strike me as being nonsensical on their face.

Am I really just a lapsed Catholic living in a Universe entirely created to unfold the glorious scheme for my coming to know as much–that it was created for this purpose? And, atheism?

Religion when taut and not playful and miserably antagonistic toward irony, and, worse, not able to sketch out its scope for learning aims to erase all the answers, or at least subsume responses from the creatura. The Integral nowadays reaches for its own version of a joyless ‘we’ve figured it out so you don’t have to do so.’ Nonsense too, not funny, and only ironic if you are standing out of it far enough way to see the buzzing of its gestalt and contextualized by, among many gestalts, the gestalt given by all the prolix answers to: ‘what to you is religion?’

(Related: what to you is self-development?)

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Sam Harris Solves the Problem of Islamic Faith

[KGVID width=”640″ height=”360″]http://squareone-learning.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Sam-Harris-solves-the-problem-1.mp4[/KGVID]

Shortly after viewing the intensely puerile tag team tussle betwixt Affleck/Kristof/Steele and Maher/Harris (on Real Time With Bill Maher, October 3rd,) I knew it would take a little while, but that I would soon get an email sent from the ramparts of the Integral Empire pointing out that the Real Time combatants just don’t get religion like the Wilberians in actuality do get it.

Sure enough, on the 18th, Dustin DiPerna weighed in on The Daily Evolver (email newsletter) with Bridging the Chasm: Sam Harris, Ben Affleck, and a Needed Dose of Integral Theory. In turn, although the link back is not available in the newsletter, Mr. DiPerna contributed a longer article to Integral World, the safehouse for heterodox views of the integral. Finally, at The Daily Evolver itself is Jeff Salzman’s article/podcast Dog and God.

Predictably, came the appeal to the integral framework’s notion of levels in the flux of person and religious system.

DiPerna: Islam, like all of our world’s great religious traditions, is enacted according to the specific levels of development of the actors involved. To be sure, Islam has a particular shape and flavor that has consistency throughout all interpretations. Folks like Harris tend to emphasize the consistent dimensions of faith, often intentionally highlighting the aspects that many consider the most challenging to stomach, as a methodology to provoke or even dismiss entire traditions as “bad ideas”. But just as each tradition has a flavor and shape itself, it is equally true that every human being has a lens and worldview that brings forth particular elements of the tradition according to the world that he or she can see. There is not one version of Islam that is either “Good” or “Bad” but there are at least five versions of Islam, all dependent upon specific levels of interpretation. Each of these levels is not arbitrary. The levels are consistent across traditions and can be correlated with very specific stages of psychological development.

Whether we use the work of Harvard researcher James Fowler’s Stages of Faith or the early models of developmental progression found in the works of Jean Gebser, we see a very similar metric that can be used to explore five basic levels of development. These levels can be referred to using the shorthand terms: magic (Stage 1), mythic (Stage 2), rational (Stage 3), pluralistic (Stage 4), and integral (Stage 5). Each level has particular characteristics and hallmarks of how it shows up in the world. Furthermore, each level has both moderate and extremist orientations.

If an interpretation is dependent, and decisively dependent upon the lens and worldview discoverable at the scale of the individual–and this is implied by religion enacted according to the specific levels of development of the actors involved–then there are as many versions of a religion at such a scale as there are actors.

This follows from DiPerna’s organic analysis that uses the blunt conceptions, via Jean Gebser, of integral analysis. A reader such as myself then can anticipate the arrival of the prescriptions.

DiPerna. Integral orientations (as with all later stages) sees the entire spectrum of growth and development. In doing so, this stage of religious orientation seeks to build bridges connecting various levels of interpretation. Understanding that everyone starts the developmental process at stage 1, this level sees the importance of building conveyor belts of potential growth and development in each tradition. Rather than merely sitting in a circle in dialogue (as the Pluralistic level might do) the integral stage combines discernment and compassion acknowledging that some views are broader, more compassionate and more inclusive than others.

In his podcast, Dog and God, Integral insider Jeff Salzman will get to this same Stage 5. (His discussion of religion in the context of stage of development begins at 11m into the podcast. download )

A reader such as myself, (having followed along with the Integral framework since 1979,) can anticipate the arrival of the prescription.

DiPerna. Rather, what is needed is the critical comprehension that individuals, with different levels of development, are enacting Islam (and all other religious traditions) according to their own worldviews and levels of development. And even more importantly, we must come to the understanding that there are paths that can be highlighted that can help individuals move along that developmental spectrum from magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral versions of each tradition. As development unfolds, interpretations of faith move from being more restrictive, ego-centric and ethno-centric in view to orientations that more compassionate, open, and world-centric.

Sam Harris, transcript of the clip: 

There are hundreds of millions of Muslim, who are nominal Muslims, who don’t take the faith seriously, who don’t want to kill apostates, who are horrified by ISIS, and we need to defend these people, prop them up, and let them reform Islam.

Harris’s view is obviously crude and unreal, and, for someone who spins dimes into bullion on the anti-mythic religion trail, his prescription is shockingly and shamelessly a product of his being deeply ignorant about what religions generally are about, and how religions come to change–let alone, be reformed.

Salzman’s cop from DiPerna is less crude but is no better:

Integral teacher and scholar Dustin DiPerna, also inspired by the Maher/Harris/Affleck flap, wrote a terrific essay for Integral Life on how development trumps religion.

Were Salzman, DiPerna, and Harris deep critics of their own biases, I’d have some hope for the development of better prescriptions with regard to the problem of religiosity and its variable contexts. Although, I don’t know of anybody in the post-conventional community who is so devoted to such radical solutions that he or she is willing to evangelize for free, directly to the target audience. As far as I can tell, Harris mostly preaches his degenerate prescriptions for religion to people who already have ejected themselves from religion’s clutches, or, have little experience with religion.

It would be quite remarkable for it to someday be demonstrated to be the true case that religions actually are driven to evolve in the direction promoted by the Integral idealization, an idealization itself rooted in the nowadays diffuse and defused transpersonal and noetic counter-culture of the late sixtes and early seventies. Wilber’s own philosophy soon enough came to be reactionary, constitute a logo-therapeutics, realize a messianic brand and industry, and engage a magnificently one-sided, touchy but no feely, developmental track today termed the Super Human Operating System. Could this be the inkling of the first world post-religion?

This is to suggest that those higher Integral stages are themselves geared to enlighten, but, at the same time, in the shadow of those later, higher stages, are currents strong enough to evoke the clearly promethean demiurge that supposes the point of a human life is superior development, and, this is given so as to, among many effects, trump religion, blind the religious as it were by the light of higher consciousness, bend the lower stage aspirational wills by contact with consciousness liberated from its worldly objects.

This leads to the chicken/egg problem that can bias investigation of religion. This problem is in extremis in the Integral milieu. The problem clearly comes to the surface when, for example, Harris offers a potential for reform of Islam to be caused in the crucible of ambivalence. I take this lightly to be a person speaking about changing something he is innocent of. Do we understand what the amiable endpoint of Islam will be, from being able to conjure a Fifth Stage?

I consider the Integral view on religion to be largely incapable as a hermeneutical tool. Still, it would be a remarkable coincidence if it turns out Ken Wilber has in fact discovered the optimal stages of human development, and these, as DiPerna states, have come to trump religion!

Harris? Salzman? DiPerna? Wilber? Does such a person carry close to them a criticism of their own prescription? After all, at least with all the starry-eyed advocates for centauric development, it can be presumed he or she has developed powerful tools with which to deconstruct and parse via the AQAL, and further analyze, and, process via the ironic turn, the beneficial and costly ramifications of their own prescription, and such prescriptions would be born from their own experience, biases, expertise, and ignorance.

The complexity of human and social phenomena was long ago subsumed by the abject claim, given here by DiPerna, “Integral orientations (as with all later stages) sees the entire spectrum of growth and development.”  Certainly, as a social cyberneticist and Batesonian, the analytic operating methodologies for systematically evaluating spectrums of growth and development as expressed in Wilber’s own body of work is amusingly and ironically reductive, naively one-sided, rarely counter-factually argued in a very spotty literature, and, is shamelessly innocent of the apparently dull details of, to name two gigantic fields of study, psychology and religion.  So, you say “entire” and I hear: gigantic.

There was a time around the turn of the century when Ken Wilber’s vision for the Integral Theory was that it needed adherents to go into the academy and become better schooled and eventually some exchange and synergy and informed evolution on both ‘sides’ might result. But, then stuff happened, and Wilber didn’t ever lead this charge. Instead, he built with help, the Integral Technologies, technologies just recently termed the Super Human OS.

Install this OS and trump really old stuff?

schuon_esoteric_exoteric

Meanwhile, neo-traditionalist, ‘not-of-the-world,’ radical Takfiri Salafism, can’t be understood to center Islam, but, those particular jihadi offshooters are on an intensely devotional mission to convert the unbeliever everywhere, or be martyred making the attempt.

I doubt a unitarian-like revolt from the fringes could make a difference, Mr. Harris.

My own prescription only has to do with what anybody might decide to do in taking initial steps for the purpose of understanding any complex human matter, such as religion, or a religion.

First, how do you identify what your tool set will be?

What are the given problems and opportunities given by where you start your investigation from?

What are the nature of your biases ?

What frameworks and tools for knowledge/sense-making are congenial or seem to carry a prospect for intrinsic motivation?

What do you need to know firstly?

Where will you start, and why start there?

How will you gather up resources and mentors?

What will be the qualitative measure of your inevitable partial understanding?

What will you not understand if you are unwilling to “do” or experience the religion?

Second, speaking very broadly, there are fields for investigation of religion, and religions. For the anthropologist, religions are largely in the local context of historical and present-day development and concrete practice at the small scale where individual, family, community practices, beliefs, representations, imperatives and prohibitions are able to be studied. How is this all to be understood to be a driver and sustainer of, or otherwise support, individual and group actions, practices, beliefs, knowledge?

For sociologist, religions are largely in the larger scale context given by how institutions and relationships between social groups come to bear upon both local practice and the organization of local practices, beliefs, representations, imperatives and prohibitions into the larger social scales, and, organizational practices and routines, of a society or well-defined group. How is this all to be understood as a driver and sustainer of institutions and their practices?

For modern historians, the development of a religion asserts how a religion came to center or otherwise instantiate crucial social impacts and changes at the scale of community or tribe or group or nation or region or continent or planet, and, at all of those scales altogether.

Psychologically or social-psychologically, the nature of religion refers to its aiding cognitive cum psychological organization of individual and intrapsychic and intersubjective and group: identity, meaningfulness, symbolic systems, inheritable interpretation of history, ethics, birth/life/death, family, theories of mind (or consciousness,) development, aspiration, and relations to the profound objects and possibilities larger than one’s own single mortal self. In a psycho-anthropology, how is this all to be understood to be a driver and sustainer of, or otherwise support, individual and group actions, practices, beliefs, knowledge?

There are also many other fields and disciplines, like philosophy of religion, plus, all the various fields possess lots of disciplinary subsets.

My gloss here is intended to sketch lots of choices, showcase complexity. Also, this gloss supposes all sorts of tacit relations and subject matters between the disciplinary fields. Obviously, I recognize my own investigations are at the level of what is called the ‘folk,’ and so I also recognize whatever I do happen to know is more lightly disciplined and more subject to error than that of most masterful experts.

As far as I know, most of the thrust of Integral investigators is inexpert too. There is to my knowledge not a single deeply informed integral treatment on the subject of religion, (or on any other subject for that matter!)

I sense the deep irony unintentionally embedded in the various Integral prescriptions.

It is clear to me that even if the post-religion implicit in the higher stages of Integral development drives the good will of those who urge upon Islam reform for the sake of Islam evolving to become trumped by the Integral (!), the various Integral self-proclaimed scholars do not yet seem to me to be at all conversant with religion as a social scientific object of study, let alone conversant with Islam proper.

As for Bill Maher, I enjoy his New Rules, but he is, in the main, an asshat and charlatan.

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Relishing the Friend

The-Exo-God-sm

The Exo God, S.Calhoun 2014

Rumi: “ The cup wants to be lifted and used, not broken but carried carefully to the next. The cup knows there is a state for you beyond this one that comes with more vast awareness. The cup looks still but acts in secret to help. Sometimes you pour cup to cup, nothing happens. Pour instead into your deep ocean self, without calculation. If eyesight blurs, use a railing to follow.”

So another way that we limit ourselves or contain ourselves, is through being useful. It’s another way that we keep our rim dry, to take a utilitarian view of the spiritual life, when what we’re really trying to do is way beyond any kind of usefulness in the ordinary sense of the word. So Bhante talks about this in ‘Wisdom Beyond Words’ as the greater mandala. And it’s really, I means it’s just pure genius this chapter on the greater mandala which some people don’t know about, I think. So if you’re interested do look that up.

So he talks about this greater mandala, and he says that the Bodhisattva operates within this greater mandala. It’s a mandala of relishing, of enjoying, of taking delight, it’s a mandala of aesthetic appreciation.

Vajradarshini: “Kavyasiddhi what are you doing today?”

Kavyasiddhi: “Well Vajradarshini I’m mainly just relishing people, taking delight, and enjoying what arises, within that I will be, you know, earning money, washing my clothes, having a run, but that’s by the by really.”

excerpted from the excellent essay, We Have A Huge Barrel of Wine But No Cups  by Vajradarshini Audio Available at: http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/talks/details?num=OM779

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Between Heaven and Hell

Hell
Hell, S.Calhoun (2014) symmetry experiment

Heaven&theGarden-of-Eden
Heaven and the Garden of Eden, (2014) S.Calhoun, symmetry experiment

Without contraries is no progres-
sion. Attraction and repulsion, rea-
son and energy, love and hate, are
necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what
the religious call Good and Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys reason;
Evil is the active springing from
Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.

Energy is Eternal Delight.

Those who restrain desire, do so
because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer or
reason usurps its place and governs
the unwilling.

And being restrained, it by degrees
becomes passive, till it is only the
shadow of desire.

The history of this is written in
Paradise Lost, and the Governor or
Reason is called Messiah.

And the original Archangel or pos-
sessor of the command of the heavenly
host is called the Devil, or Satan, and
his children are called Sin and Death.

But in the book of Job, Milton’s
Messiah is called Satan.

For this history has been adopted by
both parties.

It indeed appeared to Reason as if
desire was cast out, but the Devil’s
account is, that the Messiah fell, and
formed a heaven of what he stole from
the abyss.

This is shown in the Gospel, where
he prays to the Father to send the
Comforter or desire that Reason may
have ideas to build on, the Jehovah
of the Bible being no other than he
who dwells in flaming fire. Know
that after Christ’s death he became
Jehovah.

But in Milton, the Father is Destiny,
the Son a ratio of the five senses, and
the Holy Ghost vacuum !

Note. — The reason Milton wrote
in fetters when he wrote of Angels
and God, and at Uberty when of
Devils and Hell, is because he was
a true poet, and of the Devil’s party
without knowing it.

excerpts from William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (fulltext)

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Eyes Have It

Rumi quatrain

O dear friend, I am bound to you through friendship.

Wherever you may step, I am the ground for you.

In the creed of loverhood it is never allowed

That I should see the world through you and not see you.

I am joyous, because I am free from worldly joy.

I am drunk, because even though I don’t drink wine, I am elated.

I don’t have a need to be concerned about anyone else’s state.

May this secret glory [continue to] be a blessing for me.

May the heart of love never gaze at this base world!

What is there to gaze upon except Love?

I will reject my eyes on the day of my death

If they forsake love due to gazing at this life.

How long will I [need to] experience colors and smells from the world of time?

It’s time for me to meet that one of exquisite character.

When I look at him, I’ll see my own image.

And when I look at myself, I’ll see his image.

Translation by Rawan Farhadi and Ibraham Gamard (src)

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You’ve Been Warned

problemofthefeminine

Kali

Kali was first manifested when the Goddess Parvati knitted her brows in fury when the demon, Daruka, threatened the Gods. It was then that the three-eyed Kali first sprang forth from Parvati, fully armed, and immediately putting an end to Daruka. It is for this reason that Kali is considered an aspect of Parvati.

Other stories tell of how Kali fought and killed two demons. It was then, celebrating Her victory, that She drained the blood from their bodies and, drunk from the slaughter, She began to dance. Kali became overjoyed with the feel of their dead flesh under Her feet, and She continued to keep dancing, more and more wildly, until She finally realized that Her husband, Shiva, was underneath Her, and that She was dancing him to death.

Realizing this, Kali’s wildness did slow down, but only for a short while; it is believed that She will eventually continue Her dance and that when she does, it will bring an end to the world. Yet, her followers still believe that once faced and understood, Kali has the ability to free Her worshippers from all their fears. Once this occurs, then Kali metamorphasizes into another aspect, that of a loving and comforting Mother.

There is yet another version of Kali’s manifestation. The Gods were not able to kill the demon, Raktabija. Each drop of his blood that touched the ground turned into another Raktabija. Thus, every time he was struck, millions of his duplicates appeared all over the battlefield.

At this point the Gods were totally desperate, and they then turned to Shiva for help. Shiva, though, was so deep in meditation that he could not be reached. The Gods then turned to Shiva’s consort Parvati for help. The Goddess Parvati immediately set out to do battle with the demon, and it was then that She took the form of Kali.

Kali then appeared, with Her red eyes, dark complexion, gaunt features, hair unbound, and Her teeth as sharp as fangs. She rode into the midst of the battle on a lion, and it was only then that the demon Raktabija first began to experience fear.

Kali then ordered the Gods to attack Raktabija, while She spread Her tongue over the battlefield, covering it completely, and preventing even one drop of the demon’s blood from falling. In doing this, Kali prevented Raktabija from reproducing himself again, and the Gods were then victorious. Dolls of India

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Dance A Round

Sema'a No. 1

Sema No. 1 – from a photograph (2014, S.Calhoun)

Paradox

Paradoxes: best wakefulness in sleep, wealth in having
nothing, a pearl necklace

fastened around an iron collar. Fire contained in boiling
water. Revenues growing from

funds flowing out. Giving is gainful employment. It brings in
money. Taking time for

ritual prayer and meditation saves time. Sweet fruit hide in
leaves. Dung becomes food

for the ground and generative power in trees. Nonexistence
contains existence. Love

encloses beauty. Brown flint and gray steel have orange
candlelight in them. Inside

fear, safety. In the black pupil of the eye, many
brilliancies. Inside

the body-cow, a handsome prince.

Rumi, version by Coleman Barks

 

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The Strong Voice

Anne Baring The Dream of the Cosmos: online | Amazon

The Real Challenge of Our Times:
The Need for a New Worldview

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved. Matt. 9:17

To reclaim the sacred nature of the cosmos – and of planet Earth in particular – is one of the outstanding spiritual challenges of our time. Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology

The threat of global warming, the urgent need to free ourselves from dependency on oil and the current financial crisis could be the triple catalyst that offers us the opportunity of bringing about a profound shift in our values, relinquishing an old story and defining a new one. Our lives and well-being depend upon the fertility and resources of the earth, yet in relation to the earth, it would seem that we have been autistic for centuries. Now, instead of treating our planetary home as the endless supplier of all our needs, without consideration for its needs, we could rethink beliefs and attitudes which have influenced our behaviour for millennia.
Because of those beliefs we have come to look upon nature as something separate from ourselves, something we could master, control and manipulate to obtain specific benefits for our species alone because ours, we were taught, has been given dominion over all others and over the earth itself. It has come as a bit of a shock to realise that our lives are intimately bound up with the fragile organism of planetary life and the inter-dependence of all species. If we destroy our habitat, whether inadvertently or deliberately by continuing on our present path, we may risk destroying ourselves. We have developed a formidable intellect, a formidable science, a formidable technology but all rest on the premise of our alienation from and mastery of nature, where nature was treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject.
Yet now, the foundation that seemed so secure is disintegrating: old structures and beliefs are breaking down. It is as if mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our evolution that we might never have made were we not driven to it by the extremity of circumstance. Many people are defining a new kind of relationship with the earth, based not on dominance but on respect, responsibility and conscious service. Because our capacity for destruction, both military and ecological, is so much greater today than it was even fifty years ago, and will be still greater tomorrow, we have only decades in which to change our thinking and respond to the challenge of this evolutionary leap.
There is a second problematic legacy from the past: the image of God shared by the three Abrahamic religions. This has presented God as a transcendent creator, separate and distinct from the created order and from ourselves. Western civilisation, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of this fundamental split between spirit and nature—between creator and creation. Only now are we brought face to face with the disastrous effects of this split.
Once again, as in the early centuries of the Christian era, it seems as if new bottles are needed to hold the wine of a new revelation, a new understanding of reality which could heal this split. But how do we create the vessel which can assimilate the wine of a new vision of reality and a different image of God or Spirit? How do we relinquish the dogmatic beliefs and certainties which have, over the millennia of the patriarchal era, caused indescribable and quite unnecessary suffering and the sacrifice of so many millions of lives?
I cannot answer these questions. But I do know that as the new understanding, the new wine comes into being, we have to hold the balance and the tension between the old and the new without destroying the old or rejecting the new. It must have been like this two thousand years ago when the disciples of Jesus tried to assimilate what he was telling them, something so utterly different from the belief-system and the brutal values which governed the world of their time. Even today, the revolutionary teachings and the different values he taught have barely touched the consciousness that governs the world of our time, however much political and religious leaders proclaim allegiance to them. What would Jesus have thought of WMD, depleted uranium and cluster bombs, and the massacre of helpless civilians in war, let alone the destruction of vast swathes of the earth’s forests to supply crops for biofuels? What would he have thought of the fact that colossal sums of money are spent on the military when 17,000 children die every day from hunger and disease?.
The need for a more conscious relationship with both nature and spirit, bringing them closer together, is intrinsic to the creativity of the life-impulse itself—urging us to go beyond the boundaries of the known, to break through the concepts and beliefs, whether religious, scientific or political, which currently govern our culture and constrict the expansion of our understanding and our compassion.
What is the emerging vision of our time which could offer a template for a new civilization? the remainder of the essay

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Nye(t) to the Single Observation of Any Type

Ham Scam

It finally happened: I was hanging around the tv late at night and channel surfing and ran across a CSPAN rebroadcast of the Nye vs Ham debate. It was just what I would have expected: a wipe out, but, after all, Ham is arguing on behalf of positive facts as ridiculous and unfounded as the assertion that the earth is flat.

Bible_cycle

I went online to be the voyeur of the troll fest inspired by the debate. I found the same dead-on-arrival creationist arguments, and shameless and tenacious ability to proudly argue against biological science without knowing anything about biological science.

God At Work

I wish Bill Nye knew enough basic philosophy of science to dispatch Ham’s blather about the difference between observational and historical science. If a creationist argues for the unfalsifiable veracity of the observer’s observed account, the principal vulnerability isn’t only that the assertion is ridiculous on its face, but that, in science, a single observation, even if taken as true, never counts as verification by itself.

toles-noah

To verify, you need lots of observations. That isn’t a requirement of methodological naturalism–scientists don’t need to be explicitly committed to any philosophy of science–it’s a requirement for the sake of confirming that what was true enough in one instance will also be true in a current instance and likely true in a future instance.

Ham, not to his credit, seem oblivious to his coming off as wanting it both ways too: instead of just asserting that the Bible is a record of truth and that equally true and necessary miracles do all the heavy lifting, he wants to promote a pseudo-regime of pseudo-science for the naturalistic sake of falsifying foundational knowledge in biology, geology, cosmology and relativity–all the while his inane version of (what to him) is a science assumes its best (supreme!) evidence is not able to be falsified because it immunizes itself from any and all inquiries that could be brought to bear on it by naturalistic science!

Hey, the Bible doesn’t say it can’t be proven false or improved upon, right?

wasittoday

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson-Bill Moyer

Very worthwhile…

‘Celebrity scientist’ has always rubbed me a bit oddly. Tyson’s research isn’t the highlight of his Wikipedia entry. He’s a communicator! About science!

The Perimeter of Ignorance

We need an army of communicators about science in a nation where something like only 20% of the populace understand that creationism and intelligent design are bunkum.

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Who’s There?

death barks

Abstract
Individuals who have been subtly reminded of death display heightened in-group favouritism, or
“worldview defense.” Terror management theory argues (i) that death cues engender worldview defense via psychological mechanisms specifically evolved to suppress death anxiety, and (ii) that the core function of religiosity is to suppress death anxiety. Thus, terror management theory predicts that extremely religious individuals will not evince worldview defense. Here, two studies are presented in support of an alternative perspective. According to the unconscious vigilance hypothesis, subtly processed threats (which need not pertain to death) heighten sensitivity to affectively valenced stimuli (which need not pertain to cultural attitudes). From this perspective, religiosity mitigates the influence of mortality-salience only insofar as afterlife doctrines reduce the perceived threat posed by death. Tibetan Buddhism portrays death as a perilous gateway to rebirth rather than an end to suffering; faith in this doctrine should therefore not be expected to nullify mortality-salience effects. In Study 1, devout Tibetan Buddhists who were subtly reminded of death produced exaggerated aesthetic ratings unrelated to cultural worldviews. In Study 2, devout Tibetan Buddhists produced worldview defense following subliminal exposure to non-death cues of threat. The results demonstrate both the domain- generality of the process underlying worldview defense and the importance of religious doctrinal content in moderating mortality-salience effects.

Unconscious threat and judgment bias in Tibetan Buddhists
Colin Holbrook
Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture and Dept of Anthropology Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Paulo Sousa
Institute of Cognition and Culture and School of History and Anthropology
Queen’s University, Belfast

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How Fire Is Made


Alan Alda and The Center for Communicating Science for creating such an educational and creative venue!

Thus I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Gaya, at Gayasisa, together with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus.

“Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

“The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

“The ear is burning, sounds are burning…

“The nose is burning, odors are burning…

“The tongue is burning, flavors are burning…

“The body is burning, tangibles are burning…

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

“Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

“He finds estrangement in the ear… in sounds…

“He finds estrangement in the nose… in odors…

“He finds estrangement in the tongue… in flavors…

“He finds estrangement in the body… in tangibles…

“He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

“When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: ‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'”

That is what the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were glad, and they approved his words.

Now during his utterance, the hearts of those thousand bhikkhus were liberated from taints through clinging no more. link-accesstoinsight.org


Richard Feynman

How Fire Is Made Ahmed el-Bedavi (d. 1276), founder of the Egyptian Bedavi Sufi Order. Retold by Idries Shah. “Tales of the Dervishes“

Once upon a time a man was contemplating the ways in which Nature operates, and he discovered, because of his concentration and application, how fire could be made.

This man was called Nour [Light]. He decided to travel from one community to another, showing people his discovery.

Nour passed the secret to many groups of people. Some took advantage of the knowledge. Others drove him away, thinking that he must be dangerous, before they had had time to understand how valuable this discovery could be to them. Finally, a tribe before which he demonstrated became so panic-stricken that they set about him and killed him, being convinced that he was a demon.

Centuries passed. The first tribe which had learned about fire reserved the secret for their priests, who remained in affluence and power while the people froze.

The second tribe forgot the art and worshipped instead the instruments. The third worshipped a likeness of Nour himself, because it was he who had taught them. The fourth retained the story of the making of fire in their legends: some believed them, some did not. The fifth community really did use fire, and this enabled them to be warmed, to cook their food, and to manufacture all kinds of useful articles.

After many, many years, a wise man and a small band of his disciples were traveling through the lands of those tribes. The disciples were amazed at the variety of rituals which they encountered; and one and all said to their teacher: ‘But all these procedures are in fact related to the making of fire, nothing else. We should reform these people!’

The teacher said: ‘Very well, then. We shall restart our journey. By the end of it, those who survive will know the real problems and how to approach them.

When they reached the first tribe, the band was hospitably received. The priests invited the travelers to attend their religious ceremony, the making of fire. When it was over, and the tribe was in a state of excitement at the event which they had witnessed, the master said: ‘Does anyone wish to speak?’

The first disciple said: ‘In the cause of Truth I feel myself constrained to say something to these people.’

‘If you will do so at your own risk, you may do so,’ said the master.

Now the disciple stepped forward in the presence of the tribal chief and his priests and said: ‘I can perform the miracle which you take to be a special manifestation of deity. If I do so, will you accept that you have been in error for so many years?’

But the priests cried: ‘Seize him!’ and the man was taken away, never to be seen again.

The travelers went to the next territory where the second tribe were worshipping the instruments of fire-making. Again a disciple volunteered to try to bring reason to the community.

With the permission of the master, he said: ‘I beg permission to speak to you as reasonable people. You are worshipping the means whereby something may be done, not even the thing itself. Thus you are suspending the advent of its usefulness. I know the reality that lies at the basis of this ceremony.’

This tribe was composed of more reasonable people. But they said to the disciple: ‘You are welcome as a traveler and stranger in our midst. But, as a stranger, foreign to our history and customs, you cannot understand what we are doing. You make a mistake. Perhaps, even, you are trying to take away or alter our religion. We therefore decline to listen to you.’

The travelers moved on.

When they arrived in the land of the third tribe, they found before every dwelling an idol representing Nour, the original fire-maker. The third disciple addressed the chiefs of the tribe:

‘This idol represents a man, who represents a capacity, which can be used.’

‘This may be so,’ answered the Nour-worshippers, ‘but the penetration of the real secret is only for the few.’

‘It is only for the few who will understand, not for those who refuse to face certain facts,’ said the third disciple.

‘This is rank heresy, and from a man who does not even speak our language correctly, and is not a priest ordained in our faith,’ muttered the priests. And he could make no headway.

The band continued their journey, and arrived in the land of the fourth tribe. Now a fourth disciple stepped forward in the assembly of people.

‘The story of making fire is true, and I know how it may be done,’ he said.

Confusion broke out within the tribe, which split into various factions. Some said: ‘This may be true, and if it is, we want to find out how to make fire.’ When these people were examined by the master and his followers, however, it was found that most of them were anxious to use firemaking for personal advantage, and did not realize that it was something for human progress. So deep had the distorted legends penetrated into the minds of most people that those who thought that they might in fact represent truth were often unbalanced ones, who could not have made fire even if they had been shown how.

There was another faction, who said: ‘Of course the legends are not true. This man is just trying to fool us, to make a place for himself here.’

And a further faction said: ‘We prefer the legends as they are, for they are the very mortar of our cohesion. If we abandon them, and we find that this new interpretation is useless, what will become of our community then?’

And there were other points of view, as well.

So the party traveled on, until they reached the lands of the fifth community, where firemaking was a commonplace, and where other preoccupations faced them.

The master said to his disciples:

“You have to learn how to teach, for man does not want to be taught. First of all, you will have to teach people how to learn. And before that you have to teach them that there is still something to be learned. They imagine that they are ready to learn. But they want to learn what they imagine is to be learned, not what they have first to learn. When you have learned all this, then you can devise the way to teach. Knowledge without special capacity to teach is not the same as knowledge and capacity.”

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What Remains

Mountain


SCalhoun – Mountain

Zazen on the Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away .

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Li Po (701-762 )

 

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Everyone is going one place or the other, ‘cept corporations

Jesus and Satan

On Heaven and Hell, God, and the Devil:

You believe in heaven and hell?
Nino Scalia: Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?

No.
Nino Scalia: Oh, my.

Does that mean I’m not going?
Nino Scalia: [Laughing.] Unfortunately not!

Wait, to heaven or hell?
Nino Scalia: It doesn’t mean you’re not going to hell, just because you don’t believe in it. That’s Catholic doctrine! Everyone is going one place or the other.

But you don’t have to be a Catholic to get into heaven? Or believe in it?
Nino Scalia: Of course not!

Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.
Nino Scalia: I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, “Who am I to judge?” He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?

Can we talk about your drafting process—
Nino Scalia: [Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

You do?
Nino Scalia: Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
Nino Scalia: If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
Nino Scalia: You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

No.
Nino Scalia: It’s because he’s smart.

So what’s he doing now?
Nino Scalia: What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?
Nino Scalia: I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work.

Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?
Nino Scalia: Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament.

Right.
Nino Scalia: What happened to him?

He just got wilier.
Nino Scalia: He got wilier.

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
Nino Scalia: You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so,so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it.
Nino Scalia: I was offended by that. I really was.

Excerpted interview with Justice Scalia; ‘Nino’ reportedly was his nickname; or so my father told me while recounting his junior attorney at Jones, Day.

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