Cosmos Café -- Deja vu all over again ... or another spin of the wheel? [2023-01-26]

Thanks again to everyone for the worthwhile get-together yesterday.

FYI @Ariadne / Maia, here are the bilbliographic details for the book I mentioned:

Zajonc, Arthur (2009) Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love, Lindisfarne Books, Great Barrington, MA.

Like I said, this is more or less a how-to manual for developing a meditative/contemplative style for study and research, though he does provide background from yoga and Eastern thought to round out the approach. You’ll notice, too, that the book was published by Lindisfarne Press with is part of the Steinerian/Anthroposophical publishing arm, which kind of explains their willingness to print it, as it isn’t exactly mainstream academic literature, even if more academics probably pursue it than are willing to admit it.

Still, looking at the subtitle, it would seem we were, or Zajonc is, tapping into precisely what Dr. McClintock was into with her plants. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I agree, Ed, and thanks for the observation. I have read Zajonc’s books and recommend them. He is evolving a physics of qualities and is someone to watch out for. The book you mentioned is a pragmatic manual of how to train awareness to tune into the subtle ranges of our senses and this overlaps considerably with Wolfgang Smith’s project. He is a radically Platonist Physicist. A similar research is conducted by Dr. Ibrahim Karim, an architect using ancient Egyptian Temple Science to develop a physics of qualities . When I have finished his books I can make a recommnedation to the Cafe.

Modernism is mired within wobbly Cartesian assumptions, setting the stage for an AI fiasco, a wave of alienated robots replacing us, spawning nihilistic thought forms that have locked us into an abiotic, anti-rhythmic system . Coomunicating alternatives is not easy. And this impasse has turned rapidly into what might become another world war. The good news is that the news is so bad more people might be open to change their outlook. Look what has happened in Germany this last year. It makes you dizzy.

During this time of collapse, I’m looking for thinkers who have, like Bernardo and McClintock , crossed the line, and created different maps for newer territories. This is what Steiner embodied in his program of Spiritual Research over a century ago . I’m hopeful that our small salon can amplify and intensify what these thinkers are bringing forth and can resonate with a vast undeground movement. If we are lucky we can obsolesce a deadly physicalist paradigm which has blocked our human human intelligence for a long time. A Physics of Qualities which Wolfgang outlines could be of use in this struggle but I don’t insist. I’ve ordered his recent book and will do a report. Matt Segal in this skilled interview gives Wolfgang a chance to articulate a Neo-Platonic vision. By the way, I’m open to reading the McClintock bio orany of the Zajonc books. I want to study people who have crossed over and broken the rigid boundaries established by the physicialist, reductive mind. A new way of knowing our Being is happening already. This is a pivotal moment in human history. Let’s make the most of this rare opportunity.

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On Smith’s Wikipedia page, it says

Smith’s understanding of the relationship between corporeal and physical objects extends to his interpretation of biology, where he has become an opponent of Darwinian evolution, as the fundamental element in a species would be its form, not its causal history, which evolutionists favor.

This sounds strikingly similar to the stance Goethe takes in his plant morphology. Maybe they’re onto something. What is more,

Smith has also taken a stance towards a relativistic rehabilitation of geocentrism.

This immediately struck me as almost a kind of variation of Vaihinger’s “philosophy of the as-if” which Federico Campagna picks up on toward the end of his Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (which our friends at Weird Studies, Phil & JF discussed in Episode 134). Although Campagna does describe the philosophy as somewhat “vertiginous”, he does find something of value there which he can then weave into his own argumentation (a technique that is not foreign to Gabriel either): in other words there can be value, for example, in certain instances taking a geocentric, rather than a heliocentric observational stance. There seems to be quite a bit working its way into the mainstream from the margins these days.

Interesting fellow, this Dr. Smith.

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For me, personally, the seminal text in this regard is the Unknown Author’s (or the “Known Author’s”, to use Phil & JF’s preferred terminology, as mentioned in the Death-card podcast) Meditations on the Tarot: my go-to book on the subject. It is written as a series of letters to an Unknown Friend, and spends no time on the games or techniques to which the Tarot may be used, rather it is a collection of particularly focused meditations on the cards themselves. It is a rich mine of not only Christian Hermeticism, but of relevant esoteric lore in general. This is definitely a book that is best read in a group, but the whole group needs to be rather dedicated to the task: a letter (chapter) per month is probably the best pace for a serious reading. You might want to check it out sometime.

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I have it! On my bedside night table. I have been slowly working my way through it… though haven’t gotten very far yet. I agree it is extremely rich… sort of a miracle of a book, in my opinion.

I was glad to hear JF and Phil referencing its “Known Author,” and you too, since with so many materials on the subject, it’s been hard to gauge where to go for the “real deal.” My other recent reading includes The Kybalion.

I agree it would be ideal to read these kinds of works in a group, with monthly meetings. We may need to work ourselves up to that. I don’t myself feel quite ready yet.

Btw, did we decide the reading for our next session in 2 weeks? It seemed we were settling on something by William Irwin Thompson…

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RE: MOTT
Glad to hear you at least have it! My last reading of it was: first, the Fool, then the Magician, then the Kybalion (I think a must read, and a must-to-contemplate … the Seven Principles), then the rest of the letters in order. It’s one possible path, but it is also not one that one can rush. At least that’s my humble opinion.

We didn’t decide definitively, for I said I’d revisit what I was thinking about the Thompson reading I had suggested earlier. As it’s now late where I am, I’ll post something tomorrow so we can decide what we want to do.

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Thank you, Ed! Much appreciated.
My library does not have the book, so will look on Ebay used books. Also turns out my library doesn’t have Thompson’s Imaginary Landscape either, due to a recent major loss of books (long story).
This area is a deep and long-time interest to me, not only as a topic of study but as a daily practice.
Thanks, again

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One thing I’d really like for our (or another) group is to not only do reading/discussion, but to choose a particular “practice” aspect of this area of knowledge. We could take our time deciding on what that might be, but practice is the dimension so often missing from knowledge-gathering/sharing.
When I mentioned I was reading McClintock, I neglected to say it was my 3rd reading, and that much of it is very nerdy genetics, so I don’t think it would be a good book to read for our group. One of the ones you or Ed mentioned would be better. Once we choose which book, we could start thinking about…a lab section (practice) :slight_smile:

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Thanks! Have listened to Matt Segal several times, different talks and really enjoyed them.

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A tantalizing idea, Maia, and thanks for the suggestion. As I mentioned I consider myself a practitioner and an esotericist and try to find a balance in what to share in a public forum where belief structures are re-organizing. Since we are in a collective spiritual emergency I tend to disclose more than I should in the attempt to gently persuade others it is okay to speak from these anomolous experiences that plunge us into the deeper mysteries. Mature guidance is available if we can communicate a first person perspective without getting re-traumatized. At our next ensemble effort I can share some simple exiercises for opening up the subtle body. There are active and passive forms of meditation and I have found most teachers prefer one and ignore the other. This produces practitioners who bliss out in a lotus pose but get into trouble when they leave thier meditation pillow. Or those who get lost in grandiose fantasies. Stiener advocated Self-Intiation without a guru to follow. As I have been studying his practices ( triggering the experience with my deceased mother) it has become clear to me how useful these practices are during ourcurrent time of grief and uncertinty. Grounding is required. I would be glad to share what I’ve learned from Steiner and others. We could arrange some kind of ten minute exercise for our Cafe sessions at the begining or the end of a theoretical conversation. I could share a practice and perhaps you would like to share a practice, too?Then we could balance our left and right hemispheres in the moment,so that abstract conceptions can find a home within our perceptual systems. And if there is an appetite we could do a special lab for practitioners to compliment the intellectul heavy lifting we tend to perform in the study groups.

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Yes, thanks for the suggestion, Maia. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on what you are envisioning. With such in mind, it would likely be possible to organize the reading more effectively to flow into this.

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Whoda thunk? Tomorrow is today already. (And how weird is it replying to myself? Yikes. :face_with_spiral_eyes:)

Thompson’s book is subtitled “Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture”. It is a very different reading of the archaeological and anthropological record, which was far ahead of its time when written over 40 years ago. Thompson does not fall into the mainstream Rousseauan/Hobbsean assumption that primitives were not just, well, primitive, but childlike, even violent rather than innocent. Sure, we have had perennial problems getting along with one another, but the very notion of “culture” presupposes that groups larger than families or clans can, and do, associate long enough to develop structures that facilitate such associations. In a sense, he offers one answer to the question, "How did we, as a species, get started on our road to, well, “progress” or “perdition”, depending on how you want to critique our current state of being.

What he also introduces in this text, is his notion of Wissenskunst [lit. “art of knowing”] which he juxtaposes to the German word for “science”, namely Wissenschaft [lit. “knowing-ship”]. In the German mind, any structured, ordered, focused, or systematic way of exploring some field of study is a “science”, not merely math or physics or economics. The word Wissenschaft avoids the pejorative overtones of the word “science” in English, and his notion of Wissenskunst prefigures in many ways current alternative approaches to subjects such as philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, and more, such as, say, Campagna’s Technic and Magic or John’s suggestion of Avanesessian & Hennig’s Metanoia (both mentioned elsewhere).

This most certainly applies to Graeber & Wengrow’s recent re-reading of the early human record in The Dawn of Everything: A New History or Humanity. In stark contrast to, say, Harari’s Sapiens: A[n anything but] Brief History of Humankind (that I read in parallel to Graeber & Wengrow :flushed:, and which I consider to be the “party line version of the story”), Graeber & Wengrow consider an alternative path of unfoldment of what it means to be human and why. They believe the evidence shows a much greater degree of interaction amongst large numbers of humans over a very long period of time; interactions that were not necessarily (but also, at times) violent. In this regard, their tome more or less covers the same ground as Thompson’s ruminations, but focusing more on the anthropological and archaeological aspects, rather than the magical/mythological and biological emphasized by Thompson.

Thompson’s book is manageable (ca. 250 pp.), but Graeber & Wengrow’s is anything but (weighing in at around 700 pp.). To get a feel for both and to provide a sound basis for both cognitive (and practical) consideration of the two, however, reading Thompson’s “Prologue” (ca. 38 pp.) which presents an overview of where he want to go with his case and Graeber & Wengrow’s “Conclusion” (ca. 34 pp.) which presents a summary of their presentation might be a worthwhile exercise.

Of course, it would not be necessary that we read both before getting together: it is certainly thinkable that we engage one for one get-togehter and the other for the next one, and maybe have then a third even – to pick up on Maia’s suggestion – for a “lab section”, whereby such could perhaps be possible for each individually as well. (I’m not clear enough yet on what or how these practical sections might be structured to say one way or the other.) At any rate, that is the short version of what I was thinking eight months ago.

The other book that was mentioned was Thompson’s Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science. This is still “early” Thompson (from 1989) and could be thought of an example of what he was talking about with his notion of Wissenskunst. It’s been a long while since I read it last, but what I do remember most poignantly is his absolutely brilliant interpretation of the Rapunzel fairy tale, in which myth and science are shown to be mutually reinforcing rather than oppositional and debilitating. This is overall a manageable text (<200 pp.) and, given Thompson’s writing style, very accessible. So this is certainly something worth thinking about reading together, and it might also be well suited to “lab sections” as well.

What is more, I did some checking around, and if anyone does not have ready access to either book, all are available online at the Internet Archive, which costs nothing to access (other than a registration): Graeber & Wengrow is generally available; Thompson’s books are “borrrowable” online.

Whatay’all think?

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Matt is a wunderkind. I recently finished a reading of Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy, with Matt and his partner, Ashton, two of the bright lights shining in the Bay area. I liked the group experience of reading this magisterial tome but after three months of reading Steiner’s philosophy I had a yearning for practice. That has led me to work with Dr. Robert Gilbert, who has wonderful online courses geared to practice. Steiner is a hard act to follow as his practices are scattered across 350 volumes and so Gilbert offers a distillation. I would be glad to make a report to the Cafe on all of this ongoing spirtual research.

Matt has a rare gift for sponsorship and he has alerted my attention to many interesting thinkers. I advocated for a debate with Bernardo which actually happened a few months ago. There were uneven results as Bernardo doesn’t like Whiitehead and hates Hegel. I asked Matt about this and he expressed frustration with Bernardo’s analytical idealism. As a non-expert I am grateful that I can zoom in and zoom out of these many offereings and even share some of my own intuitions with these excellent scholars. Academic philosophy bores Matt and this is a good omen. He is a wild philosopher. I think this is true of Bernardo as well. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy.

I have been an advocate for the disppossessed and have been in the trenches for a long time and am looking for ways to make sense with communities that are in serious confusion. I want to get out of the trenches. I find hope in all of these offerings now being made available to many of us who never got a chance to enter the ivory tower.

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That helps me understand why Steiner advocates for spiritual science, which for those in the grips of the deficient mental makes no sense. Luckily, our group seems free of those hangups and so we can cultivate a different set of criteria. We can put put back on the table what the reductive physicalists have taken off the table and labled taboo. We have been consistent with protecting the space from predators and those who want to manipulate or seek attention for narrow minded materialist agendas. It is also probably why our group stays small. Action groups get more traction when they are small.

But the next wave of this new iteratation of the Cafe ( glad to discover we are still alive and kicking) could safely move beyond these debates. You can’t learn to swim by getting on your belly on top of a piano bench and wiggling your arms and legs. To learn how to swim you have to eventually get into the water.

I’m drawn to Technic and Magic and have a pdf. I have been frustrated by reading online and now avoid it as much as possbible. I read Riddles of Philosophy online and disliked the digitalized version. I couldn’t find it in print until the reading was over. Finding material is not easy anymore as the used bookstores have all but vanished and supply chains have disrupted a lot of small stores from making swift orders. I avoid Amazon as much as possible. I hope you can locate a copy of Metanoia as it draws upon the latest research in cognition and literature. I think this would be fun to contrast and compare with Thompson. It’s your judgement call as to which Thompson book to start with. I enjoyed both of them and would welcome a review.

About a lab session. I think Spritual Research can be cultivated in our sensoriums and in our group dynamics with mature adults. If you haven’t got a structure to hold the tensions between extremes of luciferic and arhimanic influences then there can be a problem. Christ, in Steiner’s lexicon, was the center that holds these tensions and harmonizes them. A lot of groups are therapy oriented (very important) or academic ( also important) and yet I am drawn more to the possibilities of an action group which operates beyond the pleasure of intellectual stimulation or therapy. I sense that is what our group wants to become. And we are now trying to find a viable structure in the midst of crisis and techno intrusions. A big challenge. I believe we are mature enough as we have re-stabilized after a deep rift in the social fabric. Maybe our group has returned to center. As long as we can press the pause button if we over heat and learn how to cool off the system we will be fine. Co-regulation is an artform.

I just got a notice that my copy of Wolfgang’s book has arrived. What bliss! I’m in heaven. Someday I hope we can read some Plato. How about the Timeus? That would be wild.

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Well, I think I’ve got one coming from France, but it could take it a while to get here (as I had to order it through Amazon US!). What a bunch of hooey! I got Campagna’s book, which is also published by Bloomsbury Academic with no problems at all. I don’t get what the deal is with this one.

I’d like to hear some feedback from the others before deciding on this. Any thoughts anyone?

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Well, finally managed, in spite of everything else, to listen to the whole interview. I’m going to change the “interesting” of my initial comment to “intriguing”. I’m particularly glad that Matt just allowed him to answer. A couple of random thoughts:

  • His notions of “irreducible wholeness” and “irreducible wholes” are very reminiscent of Leibnitz’s monism. I wouldn’t necessarily equate them, but I think they’re closer than we suspect.

  • His excursion into the two worlds of “irreducible wholes” and “sum-of-parts things” (@ 51:21 ff.) really struck home. His characterization of the “really real world” as opposed to the “empirical world” was closely parallel to what Gabriel was trying to make clear in part, but as a New Realist, he couldn’t allow himself to get to Platonic (obviously) and missed his chance to make it clear enough.

  • His notion of “vertical causality” resonated very strongly from with my memory of the Known Author’s (I’ll stick with Phil & JF’s approach here) repeated use of the Hermetic interactions between the vertical and horizontal in the Letters on the Magician, Death, The Moon, and The Judgment. It would be interesting to revisit these letters in light of the idea of “vertical causality”.

  • Allocating Geometry to the Platonic Intermediary Plane caught me a little off guard, but a moment’s reflection revealed that it makes a lot of sense actually. What is more, I found it resonated particularly strongly with the work Stan Tenen was doing at the Meru Foundation on the Hebrew text of Genesis and his “Geometric Metaphors of Life” … in particular in terms of “practice” (or praxis, if you prefer).

Just some immediate impressions. He certainly does give us a lot to cogitate on.

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OK, one last post for today … a fun fact/photo regarding the Meditations on the Tarot:

Notice the stack of books on the front of John-Paul’s desk: the bottom two are the cassette of the two-volume hardbound German translation of the original French edition. It was published by Herder Verlag, a primarily Catholic publisher in Southern Germany; Hans Urs von Balthasar, a well-known (in these parts at least) Swiss Roman Catholic priest and theologian (who JP II wanted to appoint as a Cardinal, but who died before the consistory) even wrote an introduction to the translation. Not exactly the book one might expect on the Pope’s desk.

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I personally like " Imaginary Landscape:Making Myth and Science" for the title & content
“and could be thought of an example of what he was talking about with his notion of *Wissenskunst”…

"The Art of Knowing " seems to be my Core way of Engaging the Many Worlds (Inner/Outer),
Plus I’ve come to Feel/See a Core Way of Engaging this Moment Centers around “Spirit of Healing” that is a few degrees different from the current of Fixing(making Static). Healing
as I understand it , is about Wholeness in a Dynamic Organic sense,which is Unity- Diversity ,non- conceptual /conceptual…Ever Present-Origin…Earth-Heaven…Mystery…with Humanity Stuck In The Middle/Muddle!!! I guess in a sense we are still playing in the Dirt of
Creation?
R (2)

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A lot to catch up with here! But I still would vote for IMaginary Landscape with each of us, perhaps, coming up with one “spiritual investigation” exercise to do either during the group or on our own with a sort of report to the group at next meeting on our experiences?
I can’t reproduce the sequence of connections and insights, but I started writing a short story this morning on the topic of “Entering Kinship”, which is a McClintock-like relationship cultivation with a non-human…
Later on, I started writing a poem “to” (second person address, or epistolary) my partner, Charlie, who died in 2005, about, it turned out, my strange repeating dreams in which he seems to be always one step ahead of me, so to speak… Whenever I write poetry, I do it as a form of “entering kindship”, a way of communing deeply, you could say, and without knowing or planning, I let the images and words flow out, discovering what connections and insights show up.
So these might be seeds for two kinds of “practices” we could do.
If we decide on Imaginary Landscape at least to begin with, I will order a used copy via Ebay, since I am kind of allergic to reading long things online!

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