When I am modeling at my best it is like a night at the opera. I am the conductor in the pit feeling the earth move and the singers and the music and the night sky beyond…full of stars…we are the night…beyond love and death… a Cosmic event
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I found myself easily influenced by others’ maps, as if your images had always been present in my mental imagery.
If I had been in the moment, with John asking directly, a tapestry would be circling around my head space. My head is the central node and, as if I was in a swivel chair examining a 360 degree digital tapestry, it will hone in on whatever may arise. A thought of the past (typically behind the head space) or future (almost exactly as TJ described, third-eye and all) would appear upon the tapestry. The present is a literal examining of sight, sound, other senses.
Sometimes I will swivel around and directly examine the mental activity…this is where the fractal depth comes in, one thought leading to another, floating further out into an indefinite space and time. Other times, when I am in a more meditative and receptive state, there is no need to swivel around and attach to the thought, memory, feeling…the swiveling man is not present so much when this all encompassing presence takes over.
I do have a strong sense of the toroidal, uh, something (energy, motion, perpetual flow,etc.)…especially when the separation from the self occurs. I am a sphere/bubble until an encounter with another, whether another person or the ground of being, in which I mostly cease to exist and become inverted into an everything bagel.
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And easily influenced…as if your images had always been present in my mental imagery…and is there anything else about that ‘as if’?
I am a sphere/bubble until an encounter with another…and mostly cease to exist…and when an everything bagel… what does that everything bagel want to have happen?
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It can be as if the I knows you, your own description becomes my own. I am an ever-consuming,connecting core, shooting out tendrils and latching onto novelty, or hints of novelty (potentiality?).
what does that everything bagel want to have happen?
If identified with the bagel, it wants my “I” to become immersed within the world of possibilities, within its all encompassing energy flow, within the bagel. If I am not of this bagel, a void appears where the sphere once sat. It is a slower energy within the bagel and there is not much “I” floating about. Just an awareness of the surrounding “all around”.
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I had quoted Master Yoda on the video: “Always in motion is the future.” (LOL)
But the past is always in motion, too. Not in the sense that events can be changed but certainly the meaning of various memories and the shape of future hopes interact with continuing life experiences. The relative significances of the pictures are constantly ebbing and flowing.
Applied on a larger scale (because I gotta! LOL), some decry ‘revisionism’ without understanding that each generation (or group within) must ask its own questions about history and interpretations of significance will vary.
That is interesting. Marco’s image of a cascade resonated with me, but I knew it wasn’t what had first come to me when you asked him. My comparative temperament kicks in almost immediately when I hear an intriguing idea.
(Aside: I remember the fun I and some friends in college had as the Iran-Contra affair was brewing [TJ dates himself] when we spoofed the lyrics to ‘Synchronicity I’. So long ago, but like yesterday now that it’s linked to this discussion:
Money made invisible… Cover-up predictable… Evidence connectible… Logic unacceptable…
Motive undeniable… Witness unreliable… Guilty charge in principle yet nothing is admissible…
And yet I need to pull out a yearbook to remember some of the names of those friends now. It’s always funny what ‘sticks’ in the mind and what doesn’t - and when.)
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And when I am an ever-consuming, connecting core, shooting out tendrils and latching onto novelty, or the hints of novelty…is there anything else about that novelty?
And my “I’ …and when my “I” whereabouts is that “I” when my " I”. Can you indicate with hand where that “I” is?
And immersed within the world of possibilities…is there anything else about that world?..
And encompassing energy flow?..is there anything else about that energy flow?
Meta-comment. Please forgive my intrusive comment here but as a modeler I feel that it is sometimes useful for the group process as the members of the group become aware of their awareness that a meta-awareness developes of the shapes and sizes and movements. I sense ( meta-aware) that you are embodying your metaphors. Perhaps metaphor is your mother tongue?
I can say much more but will press the pause button until I have more skill in transmitting from our mother star!
Thank you for sharing and please feel free to map on paper and share with us. Our curiosity is infinite.
This kind of ‘transmission’ happens best through drawings, movement, and discourse that is connected to the multiple dimensions and multi-sensory…
keep up the good work, Doug…
and I hope we can do more of this on a live call…I hope this is useful for you…we have missed you! We send you blessings!
You are clearly self-modeling…
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And when on a larger scale…how much larger is that scale?..whereabouts is that?
And questions about history and interpretations of significance will vary…and is there anything else about interpretations of significance?
Where do those interpretations of significance come from?..
How do you know significance?
And when my comparative temperament kicks in…when it kicks in…where abouts kicks in?
And then what happens?
Feel free to update map and share…
We can discuss these updates further when we go live…and perhaps we can gather more data between now and then?
A meta-comment. And is there a relationship between all of this and our definitions of synchronicity, telepathy, remote viewing, the para-normal ?
Is there anything else about the group within?
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Sense8 was an exciting show when I first saw it, though I didn’t follow the whole story. But I thought it was a perfect example of the technical meaning of “metapsychosis”—except, extra ‘geometric’ in its conception, designed with a kind of integral social geometry of interlacing spheres.
One thing I’ll note is that it can be scary to have other people’s thoughts “speaking to you” when you’re apparently alone. This is perfectly normal, of course. But the show (Sense8) does a great job of showing how destabilizing it can be when one opens up to the other in such an intimate way.
I will check out your article this weekend when I’m further relaxed into being and not being.
I decided to delete it, Marco. I don’t think anyone can help me with this one. It makes me too uncomfortable. I am okay with that. Thanks anyway.
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As I said over in the Globes thread, since you made your comments here in our last online conversation, I thought this would be the better place to post this. I beg your indulgence right at the onset, for this is, unfortunately, l-o-n-g.
The question that has been haunting me ever since your comment has been, "What is gained if the Magical structure is shorter and (since we’re dealing with a relatively “closed” timeframe) the Mythical longer? I’m not sure if I am really understanding the import and impact of the statement. And since I haven’t yet found a convincing answer for myself, I’m going to return that ball over the net to you, but I’m going to explain why I’m not (perhaps yet) convinced:
If we calculate backwards, just for the fun of it, we’re in the 21st century, just barely. If we take the Renaissance as the approximate date of the agreed appearance of the deficient mental; i.e., the rational, structure of consciousness, we have about a *500-year * (or 600 … I don’t think the century makes much of a difference) span. I also think we would agree that we can “date” the arising of the Mental structure with the Greeks and their philosophizing around 500 BCE, that is a *2,000-year * timeframe. When the Mythical structure became prominent is the issue, and I don’t really see it happening before the so-called “agrarian” revolution, to which I would include the mastery of animal husbandry, at least in the sense of true herdsmen, alongside sedentary “farming”. The “higher” cultures of Sumer and Egypt coming most certainly later, though they are without a doubt more recognizable. If I understand you correctly, you would like to move this date back considerably (?), thereby shortening the Magical structure significantly.
If we calculate forwards, we have the difficulty of determining when humans (and we’re talking only about humans at the moment) appeared. This is, as we all know, a matter of serious and, sometimes fascinating, debate. The genus homo refers to those ancestors of ours who may be considered “human” in the widest sense of the word. There’s no way of knowing when our simian forebears became enough like us to be characterized as ancestors, but it was probably about 2-3 million years ago. Prior to this we have our australopithecus ancestors (who showed up about 4 million years ago) and the first real “tool-making” apes, homo habilis makes its appearance about 2.8 million years ago. There is general agreement that homo erectus, who is definitely considered a direct ancestor, appeared around 2.5 million years ago. And, homo sapiens, our own cohort, could have been around for the last 200,000-300,000 years. We are talking about immense timeframes here.
One very relevant question, in terms of Gebser’s model, of course, is, When does the Archaic structure begin? For the sake of convenience and argument, I would postulate it is whenever humans definitely become human (in a direct lineage sense, of course, and not without a bit of tongue-in-cheek). Raymond Tallis in volume 1 of his what-makes-a-human trilogy, The Hand: A philosophical inquiry into Human Being argues that “agency” in a real, human sense is a direct result of finger-thumb opposability and the effects this has on our mentation. (And, BTW, I can’t recommend this book enough, for here Tallis, the medical doctor, brings his sound anatomical knowledge to bear upon his philosophical speculations. For him, and I tend to agree, “using tools” is one thing (e.g., using a twig to “fish” for termites) and “making tools” (e.g. trimming a twig for fishing that I then take with me to fish for termites somewhere else) is another. I think he has a point. Our australopithecian ancestors were using tools, but it probably homo habilus who really started “making” them, and it could be there that our simian family tree forked. If he’s on to something really worth thinking about, we could say, at least in Gebserian terms, that this perhaps marks the appearance of Archaic consciousness. That was somewhere around 2.8 million years ago. The next two species identified anthropologically are homo erectus (as early as perhaps 2.5 million years ago) and then our own homo sapiens perhaps around 300,000 years ago.
Now, jumping ahead drastically, Feuerstein in his Structures of Consciousness postulates that Magical consciousness was superseded by the Mythical around the time of the cave paintings discovered in Southern France (that is, about 40,000 years or so ago). Feuerstein points out that it is clear from the archaeological finds that the Cro-Magnons had evolved a symbolic universe that was religious and shamanistic. Part of this appears to have been a keen interest in calendric reckoning, and with it we may presume the existence of a fairly complex mythology (Feuerstein, p. 75; and I will return to this point further below), both points making this, I believe, a reasonable anchor date, or at least a sound point of reference.
For the moment, however, we have a huge expanse of time (from -2,800,000 to -40,000, or roughly ) that has to be "divided up between Archaic and Magical consciousness structures. For Feuerstein, then, we’re looking at a timeframe of about 38,000 years for the Mythical structure of consciousness. Even if we take the appearance of homo sapiens as a rough marker for the rise of the Magical structure, which I don’t think is unreasonable, then we have a list that looks something like this:
-2,800,000 – -300,000 = 2,500,000 years: Archaic consciousness structure
-300,000 – -40,000 = 260,000 years: Magical consciousness structure
-40,000 – -500 = 39,500 years Mythical consciousness structure
-500 – 2017 = 2,500 years Mental consciousness structure
This listing is only of the structures as identified by Gebser, for we should remember that the last 500+ years (ca. 1500 – 2017) represents the deficient mode of the Mental, the Rational consciousness structure. I’m not sure we really know where to start thinking about efficiency and deficiency in the previous structures. What I see here in general terms is that the Archaic structure lasts for millions of years, the Magical for hundreds of thousands of years, the Mythical for tens of thousands of years and the mental for thousands. If a strict pattern of compression of time structures were in effect, then we’ve only got hundreds of years left for the Integral, if we even make it that far. If Young and his process model have anything to say, the Mental may be a “turn” phase and truly unknown possibilities lie before our species (if it even remains the species that it is that far into the future).
My point is, however, I would think that the Magical structure was in effect, if you will, longer than we may think, and I personally suspect that the date for the appearance of homo sapiens may be found to shift back even further in the past. Recent archaeological finds have raised questions about a lot of dating that we thought was pretty sound. But let me go back to the phrase “fairly complex mythology” which I mentioned earlier in conjunction with Feuerstein’s thoughts on Magical/Mythical consciousness.
The key element at play here, to my mind, at least is the appearance of “writing”, and I am using this term in the absolutely loosest way possible. To me, the cave paintings which are the most poignant indication of a shift in mentation to what had gone before, are a kind of writing; that is, a transdimensional representation of reality. I realize that we have evidence of worked stone and bone prior to that, for the most part statuettes and figurines which are three-dimensional representations of three-dimensional reality. The difference in painting is that the artist is now representing a three-dimensional reality in a two-dimensional manner. The field of depiction is the flat surface, the plane, and all of it is used. I think this is a hugely significant shift. Later, in the Mythical structure (the pictures have been abstracted one degree to pictographs (e.g., hieroglyphs) and ideographs (e.g., cuniform writing or Chinese characters) which are arranged linearly, either left-to-right, right-to-left, or top-to-bottom. There is no “set rule” on which direction is the “right” one. That shift comes, as McLuhan points out, with alphabetic writing, which is for him the mind-changer par excellence. Both he, in The Gutenberg Galaxy and his scholarly mentor, Howard Innis (in Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication) have focused a lot of energy on this particular point. It would probably be worthwhile to take a closer look at how their ideas map out in comparison to Gebser’s structures, for example, but that is also a much larger project than I envision undertaking at the moment. Be that as it may, once we are into alphabetic writing we are into a point-by-point (which could be understood as one-dimensional) representation. And one of the serious issues that we are dealing with today is the fact that even that mode of expression is being further abstracted into virtual communication which is, in some senses, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But, that’s just a thought; I haven’t thought it through yet, and anyway, I digress.
To get back on topic – the Magical structure of consciousness – I think it is important to keep in mind the five features which Gebser identifies as describing it (EPO, p. 48): (1) its egolessness, (2) its spacelessness and timelessness, (3) its pointlike-unitary world, (4) its interweaving with nature, and (5) its magical reaction to the world. The examples Gebser uses are also from our hunter-gatherer past, and in the earlier phases of that existence, it would seem to me that myths are rather undeveloped. This is not to say that there weren’t stories. I think those long-nights around the campfire, when they weren’t teaching their young to communally dream or the like, entailed the telling of tales, but I don’t think they had the intensity or significance that they later had.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the film The Gods Must Be Crazy. I am fully aware that this is at best indicative, but the attitudes and behaviors for the bush-people in this film are much more reminiscent of Gebser’s five elements than they are of a developed mythological structure. When “the evil thing” (a Coke bottle, had been thrown out as litter from a plane flying overhead and was found by one of the family group, and whose very nature (transparent, harder than anything they had ever seen, singular in nature and, hence, could not be easily shared … something they had never had before suddenly was “needed” by every one of them) had to be eliminated, one of the bushmen (the leading character of that group in the film) “decides” to throw it off the end of the world, and the next day, with the good wishes of all the family group, sets off to do just that (which provides the plot for the rest of the film). This has always struck me as very Magical, in Gebser’s sense: he has no idea where the end of the world is (spacelessness), he can simply walk until he finds it (timelessness); it is “evil” for it is anything but natural and disturbs the unity of the clan. Along the way, he encounters others, who do not understand him when he speaks, so they are, in a sense, dumb, but they are referred to, from his point of view, as “gods”, for the gods may generally always provide for them, but, as the title says, can be crazy as well. There is none of the sacredness of myth that we find, say, in the Sumerian or Egyptian cultures, which are definitely mythical. Even when you read their tales that have been collected, you see that there are typical figures in their mythology (mother, father, trickster), but they are not particularly well-developed characters, for they have no need to be.
I realize that here again we are faced with the impossible task of pinpointing the shift from magical to mythical, but the feeling I get from this type of situation is that the magical may have been a longer period, extending much farther into the past than we may suspect.
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OK, this is really bad … the second time I responded to myself 
… but it seemed the most logical way to add an afterthought to what I just posted 
.
Obviously, the quantitative length of a timeframe for a given structure of consciousness is not the deciding factor in its relevance or importance. Nevertheless, another reason why I think this structure may have been dominant (and we are really only talking about the dominant structure, the most clearly recognizable structure, at any given point in time or during any given timeframe), is the foundational aspect of Magic structure of consciousness itself.
This thought actually struck me while I was reading @care_save’s Trumpocalypse essay series. I think the defining “result” (really, for lack of a better word) of this structure is the notion of power. Magic is all about power. It is also the Magic structure of consciousness in which technology (that is, the repeated and sustained use of tools, as well as the use of tools to make tools (recursivity)) becomes part and parcel of the human experience. Power is about control, and the use of tools, in particular, is about control as well. It is about being able to influence, modify, and otherwise alter one’s environment.
All technology, we should remember, is a result of (psychological) projection. We “discover” something in ourselves that we can put into the world outside ourselves that assists us in being able to deal more effectively with what’s there: the mastery of the use of fire, a chipped stone axe (not just any old rock), a fire-hardened point on a spear (combination of various technologies), etc. We improve our consumption (digestion), enhance and exceed the capabililties of teeth and fingernails, extend our reach, etc.
The Magic structure of consciousness is the one that is always manifest, even if, as we have developed, it becomes less and less recognized and ever more taken for granted, as a given, hence never questioned or dug into in order to better understand our relation to it. Consequently, we more often than not activate deficient, rather than efficient, aspects of it. What is more, and perhaps for this reason, it has shown itself to be very active even when other structures have “taken over” or become dominant. For example, I see the witch hunts of the Middle Ages as a magical reaction to a phenomenon (numinous power) which was clothed in the dominant mythology of the time (consorting with the Devil). (Of course, I see our modern-day overfascination with sports in a similar light: the clan defined by colors uses a lot of rhythmic drumming and chanting to inspire our team to not only defeat, but to crush, annihilate and obliterate (so that they’ll never be heard from again?) the enemy.)
Again, just a thought I’m working on.
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12/02 Modeling Dream Time ( Geometry in the Monstrous)
I am tossing a baseball with tremendous force into an upper space that is diagonal to the space I inhabit. I can see another man in that upper space who can catch the ball. The upper space that he is in is a hallway, just like the one I am in, but is at a parallel to the plane upon which I operate. Tossing the ball takes a lot of effort. The ball feels like it weighs a lot but it somehow can move to the other man in the adjacent space. It is like throwing the ball into the above.
A dark room, in a bed. I sense a swirling orb shape above my head in the dark room. It is like a disco ball, spinning, and giving off sparks, which fly off of it into the dark. I float up to it and feel a kind of merger with the energy which is ecstatic rapture, and I can feel the energy flowing through my energy system, including the physical body asleep in the human world.
I feel the presence of a male entity, benevolent, and we commune with one another.
I ask, " What is our relationship to the earth?"
He says," We are para to the earth." I wake up into the physical, contemplate, then return to the dream time.
I visit a community of humans who are practicing transmitting energies to other groups of humans both physical and trans-physical. They are using texts to do this. They use language forms that carry across the intentions of the authors of the text. There is speech that corresponds to the text, and it is sound driven, more incantatory, that carries the power of the transmission. This group is working out the codes. I walk through this village like area and see these rooms/spaces ( no ceilings) in which these groups gather and practice these energetic communication arts. I am at a distance from their practice but I can feel and tune into their intentions even though I don’t understand the spoken language I get a rough translation into English prose. The language sounds a lot like biblical statements.
I see how entities who are in between matter and mind contact and share healing energies. A woman ( a hybrid, in the physical aspect) is in a room with two opaque screens that join at a 90 degree angle. There is no ceiling. The man( who is in a trans physical aspect), is in the corner, on the inside, and transmits to the woman seated in the center of the room. He appears as a shadow. She lets him know how well the energy comes through. Then he goes around the screens , leaving the inside of the area of the room and transmits from the’ outside’ of the room. He is invisible on that side of the screen. She indicates the right rate of energetic transfer.
I am then at a table in a sort of cafe area, and he has a strong aura and I trust him. I say to him, " I live in chaos."
He tells me that he loved his father.
I say," I hated mine. My father spit on me and told me that he wished I had never been born than to be a queer." I contact the vast hatred towards the evil father.
The man indicates telepathically how I am contaminating his love space for his father with my energetic invocations of the evil father. I immediately self-correct and take responsibility for my energetic malpractice. I understand that I can hold the pain of the past without polluting others. I apologize for the unintended consequences of my self disclosure. I hold the multiple realities all at once. I can register the effects of the trauma without re-activating the trauma and causing unnecessary stress and contamination to the other entity I am in contact with.
Some damage has been done so there is a psychic repair going on between me and a team of benevolent practitioners. We are known to each other through different planes. I get that there is a powerful transmission of energies from a circular motions made by hands near the heart of the other and a sense of space increases as well as a sense of affective bliss, that is communally given and received, and there is a sense of intention and proper proportion. We are regulating the speed and intensity of the energetic flows which are important to maintaining the quality of the incarnated physical beings of our species and other species as well.
There is a long rehearsal period as I work with several different entities on different levels with different exchange rates. This is very pleasant.
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I’m wondering, John, whether you wanted this posted in the Globes thread … well, given the title at any rate.
(If you’re like me and sometimes have multiple windows open to different threads on the platform, it is very easy to crosspost without even realizing it.)
But, I would have read it in either place. It is a very magical post, in the sense I’ve been pitching for that consciousness structure.
[Update: I just went to the Globes thread and saw you had posted this there as well. Good job.]
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Exactly! I see both of our observations emerging out of similar kinds of transactions. I can move this conversation over to the Globes thread as there is much overlap between these threads and the investigations we are opening up.
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Who owns the past? I recall that TJ said something about History being a product of the Mental. Chronology is established and consistently adhered to by historians not allowing the Future to intrude is a standard practice according to Collingwood. How do we separate, for, example, the field of Literature from the field History?
History and Science both ride piggy back upon the Magical and the Mythic. Maxwell’s Demon, Shrodinger’s Cat, Kekule’s benzine ring, Einstein’s trip on a beam of light with a mirror in his hand ( from which emerged his theories of light) all of that is brought to you fresh from the borderlands of the Magical Mind.
And we may have access to a new expressions of this power of the Magical as the mature men and women of this planet refine their consciousness so that they can tune into the Magical while maintaining perspectives, something that the Magical doesn’t do naturally. This capacity to embrace multiple frames of reference with multiple sensory channels is possible and desirable but requires a method. That is what the Mental needs to get much better at. The quantifying, objectifying , reductive science we are currently burdened with, holds us in a hyper modernity that is increasingly fragile. We need a Goethean science, a science of qualities, and we can do this by something as simple as trying to put a complex dream into words.
The magical realms are hugely more powerful than the Mental. I am not sure how long humans were primarily in the magical structure but I do sense that without healthy magic we have no chance of survival on this planet.
All magicians and sorcerer’s apprentices were trying to stabilize access to the trans-physical , no easy task. I see little difference in what modern scientists are trying to do with their elaborate stories which they call theories.
That is what I am trying to establish with Modeling, a mental efficient practice!
We can then harness our capacity for metaphor, myth and the unique narratives which each of us are trying to make more coherent. That is why I emphasize the ability to ground eureka in an action and to amplify. The possibilities for serendipitous learning is increased exponentially. We need to prepare our minds for the next wave. It will be intense. There will be a tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth!
Myths are largely frozen in time. Narratives are more fluid and dynamic and registers the odd and the idiosyncratic.
That is why I find much of Jung and his archetypes so unsatisfying. Uncovering the unique and one of a kind is much more interesting and ecological. We are more, much more than universal types.
When more of us are able to remote view with stable results what kind of past will we then be able to unearth? Remote viewers have had success in locating historical sites buried for centuries, in the desert.If you could touch an ancient artifact and pick up a memory of the one who once used it, what kind of history would we be re-constructing?
I dont think we are there yet, but we are getting there. I saw this discussion with Hayden White, and it struck a resonant chord with some of the issues raised by Ed and TJ.
And how does all of this fit with Kerry Welch and our ever present dance of brain wave states? When we can orchestrate these waves we can tune into a much vaster intelligence networks than what comes through the World Wide Web.
Hence my urgent call that we collectively develop our God given modelling skills.
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Wow! Can’t leave these threads for a minute! (LOL) This is mainly in response to Ed’s commentary above, but there are so many great thoughts and observations here…
@johnnydavis54: Happy “Infinite” anniversary, John!! See below for my agreement that the magical structure is more than meets the technological/historical eye.
@achronon: A good post is never long.
In my hasty pursuit of the idea that deficient modes seem to manifest themselves relatively quickly in magical and mental, as opposed to mythical structures, I did not emphasize several important points, the first of which is extremely important:
- The magical and mythical structures didn’t disappear when they ceased to be “dominant” cultural expressions of encountered reality. In that sense, the magical is the oldest of all, “historically” speaking.
- No hard-and-fast timetable can be established for the “dominance” of archaic, magical, or mythical structures. Even the mental structure ‘count’ depends on a few things: yes, the Greeks and the Hellenistic period characterized by the heyday of Alexandria, but does it “stop” with the fall of Rome and “return” with the Renaissance or should the apparent ‘dormancy’ be ignored?..
- I’m going on a broad and certainly debatable definition of myth. You were generous enough to see where I was going and possibly include Paleolithic art and late shamanic developments in a kind of mythical structure (“separation” of terrestrial and spiritual worlds), but correct in seeing room for questioning. In short, it may not be right to equate ‘myth’ with ‘mythical structure’ as the latter could be said to depend on written cosmology even if the stories themselves were already in existence.
So I have no real argument with this:
The Gods Must Be Crazy was a great film, and I recommend it too. It is the most direct examination I can think of at the moment of how different structures work, and the hilarious interactions that can result. (Other interactions, as history has proven, can be absolutely not hilarious…)
The ‘thrown spaghetti’ here was that the “temporicity” of the mythical structure seems to have been able to provide a substantial period of relative stability for large-scale societies, i.e., that what Eliade called the “terror of history” for traditional man is at least as effective a compromise with the ‘Lacanian real’ as the modern insistence on making a grid for it all, and possibly much more effective. The “rational” emerged from more efficient applications of the mental structure almost as soon as the perspectival arrived, as Gebser noted. It struck me that it could not have been long for sorcery, witchcraft, pollution of healing spaces, and the like, to have appeared in the magical structure along with more efficient uses. But, among good points well taken, it is likely not fair to imply the same level of ‘crisis’ as for modern times. Both are nominally ‘technological’ in orientation, in comparison with the mythical, but our modern dependence on technology is of course miles ahead in lack of balance than that of magical man.
And all of which was supposed to look forward to an ‘integral’ structure (if we ever get there) that has the potential to be another long-lived period of stability because of effective incorporation of knowledge states…
Thank you for helping me further refine thoughts, as always.
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I have read Feuerstein several times and the bit about the Paleolithic painting is a point that I picked up in my own overview of Gebser (at gaiamind.org), but it wasn’t until I read him again week before last that the other shoe finally dropped, so to speak. Of course that last Feuerstein reading was in the wake of McLuhan and Innis the couple of weeks before that. The Gutenberg Galaxy is worth a look, I think, but the condensed version of it is his War and Peace in the Global Village which prompted me to read the Galaxy and Innis. I know that part of my post about “writing” is pretty confused, but that was a flash-in-the-pan while writing. I had started out to make a whole different point that got lost in the meantime. Probably wasn’t all that important anyway.
And we certainly agree on this point. I mean, we at least have evidence of some kind of stability. Prior to those societies were flying by the seats of our pants (which is why I find The Gods Must Be Crazy informative, at the least. (And I particularly like the part where he talks to the baboon until he “convinces” him to drop the “evil thing”, for at least the baboon “listens”; whereas his encounter with the very pale “gods” is always much less rewarding.)
Where we also agree is that deficient aspects of any given structure most likely appear relatively early. My curmudgeony take on human nature always finds me gob-smacked that we get anything right at all. It is the efficient aspects that drive the unfoldment, but it can’t take very long at all until someone wants to use the new-fangled capabilities/technologies/… for what turn out to be questionable, if not nefarious, purposes. I’m sure you will agree that when it comes to learning from history, for example, we, as a species, are somewhat learning-resistant.
But on a slightly different note: have you read anything by Collingwood other than The Idea of History? He happens to be one of my favorite 20th century thinkers. Not exactly mainstream or well-known, but it was from Collingwood that I have developed my own form of his question-and-answer method (which he applied primarily to history, once he had used it philosophically to his own satisfaction and started doing things he actually wanted to do). A Collingwood fun-fact: in English his autobiography is called, oddly enough, An Autobiography. The title of the German translation is Denken (“Thinking”).
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LOL! With the whole statement, but especially with the part I bolded, complete agreement.
Unfortunately not. He is on a list of thinkers whose conceptions of history I’ve engaged but whose broader body of work I would examine if I ever get the knack of operating in true time-freedom. (LOL) I understand Collingwood was a accomplished archaeologist and also had some interesting things to say about art.
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Colllingwood was one of those admirable fellows who had something interesting to say about just about anything that crossed his path.
As for time-freedom: … well … right … I get it. (One of the “advantages” I had while living near Stuttgart was that I had an hour-and-a-half commute (one way, if all went well) on the bus and train (including 7 minutes of walking on one end and 2 minutes on the other); I got a lot of reading done, but it meant getting up at 4:15 every single morning. TNSTAAFL.)
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I don’t know what my name is at 4:15 AM. 
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