You and Ed have got me curious about going deeper into Young. I skimmed both of his books and watched his videos on YouTube and look forward to studying him in depth. I’m especially interested in his take on Aristotle and Peirce.
This weekend, however, I am focused on Peirce’s Existential Graphs. I met a nice guy at the library who is coaching me and he has assigned me some papers to read .Also I’m reading Joan Richardson’s excellent book on Pragmatism. If I make any progress on this project this weekend, I will delve into Young and Bucky, who are both in the pragmatist tradition I think. All of these conversations feel very promising.
As some of us have studied Gebser and Sloterdijk together, and are studying various theories and approaches, Bucky and Young and many others, it might be useful for us to check out this brief tutorial by my friend Bonnie Roy.
Her take on Cultural Shadow has been very useful for me. As a gay man with lots of trauma around being stigmatized by hostile parents, teachers, landlords, employers, political regimes, I have learned a lot about mixed messages and how they are delivered and how to evade them. I have been attracted to the study of double and even triple binds by necessity.
It has been very useful for me to work out the damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of delimas that many marginalized groups deal with. By zooming out of my own alienation and learning about how others who have been stigmatized have dealt with that cultural shadow, I have more behavioral flexibility and less stress. With insights into our collective traumas and gathering our inspirations and insights we can begin to invite Symbiopoesis .
Symbiopoesis is a new concept that I borrow from Donna Haraway, which replaces the notion of autopoeisis. I think after having some experience using the word I will figure out what it actually means. This is a rehearsal for a performance that has not been scheduled yet. I feel that others are finding new language to express new ideas starting to emerge, and we are perhaps reaching a threshold. This is what I imagine Gebser meant by intensification of consciousness, setting the stage for the next unfolding.
I don’t know whether this is a legit copy or not, but there it was as one of the first results in my Google search.
Interestingly, perhaps, the file was posted to the website of an event called the ‘Nomadic Arts Festival,’ organized by a group called ‘Tracing the Path.’
Tracing the Pathway is an artist-led collective that explore the relationships between body, site and encounter. As artists, curators, and researchers, they produce site or situation-specific interdisciplinary artworks and events. Their work develops microcosmic worlds as catalysts for exploration and exchange. Their processes are soft, processual and organic, developing a practice that is always open-ended and subject to change.
So I can see why they might be interested in Ingold’s work. Myself, I am appreciating his recovery of organic, participatory, locally (and even personally) grounded ways of knowing, which I think @Geoffreyjen_Edwards, you highlight well, contrasting these with the objectifying (historically dissociative) kinds of relationships proceeding from the Cartesian starting point with its various pro-jects of dominion via its two constitutive ‘-jects’ (i.e., self/other)—however, I’m with @achronon on (non-categorically) avoiding (most) absolutisms when it comes to defining what constitutes ‘true knowledge.’
The Cosmos seems to accommodate subjects, objects, processes, flows, bubbles, tori, narratives, gnosis, and linear as well as non-linear modes of knowing, motion, and creative manifestation. Is a torus what a 3-dimensional sphere looks like in 4 dimensions, i.e., a hypersphere? I get this intuitively. Unfortunately, I could not produce the actual mathematical visualization…maybe Young will help.
Is 5D the space where consciousness becomes conscious of itself as consciousness? My only concern with positing consciousness as a ‘thing’ is precisely that it may overshadow the becoming-with dimensions of lived experience, which almost never involve a perception of ‘consciousness as consciousness’ per se, but almost always have something to do with my ‘being in the world’ with awareness. (Waring?)
Doesn’t ‘consciousness studies’ at some level simply become research into the art of being (or becoming) alive?
If at any point you want to organize a live conversation, just let me know when and I’ll set up a Zoom webinar link. (I would suggest a separate planning thread for logistics.) I am also planning to integrate a calendar app so participants here can schedule things on their own. I’m still working on the technical parts of this, but it’s very doable and should be coming soon.
This is how I understand it, and I likewise stumble trying to visualize this. I suppose that’s why mathematics is often invoked so that such a grasping is possible. Unfortunately, I haven’t the slightest idea how that works. It was the re-reading of Young’s Appendix II that got me agitated in response to @patanswer’s ruminations on Elgin, Quigley, and Young. It’s one of those situations, for me at least, where I’m sure I understand all the words and formulas, but I’m still very unclear on what they actually mean or what they are “really” telling me. So when the next step is taken …
I think the answer to the question is “yes”, and your concern with the reification of consciousness is well-placed and to be taken very seriously. What is more, it is this fractalization of awareness that makes my head hurt … sort of like turtles all the way down and consciousness all the way up. Being apparently is always becoming, but like the uncertainty in the subatomic realm (you can know the velocity of the particle or its location, but you can’t know both at the same time), perhaps you can “know” (be consciously aware of) being or becoming, but not both at the same time. Which is sort of how I understand …
This recent work suggests that consciousness operates in 11 dimensions, not 5 or 7. I’ve seen this work reported in a couple of places now. What is interesting for our discussion is that it supports the link between geometry and mind. Also, 11 dimensions is interesting, because there is strong circumstantial evidence that the universe may be 11-dimensional. So our brains maximize the information processing capabilities of the universe…
" It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe."-Ingold
This is exactly what we were doing in the Clean Space demonstration, Marco, moving and describing. Space becomes psycho active, a silent partner, that we give voice to. Clean space is an embodied practice for making explicit how easily we forget and remember… anamnesis…we remember that we forgot…that word on the tip of our tongue… that fragrance in the air… the weave at the back of the fabric…the dream that slithers back into the night as the sun arises calling us to prayer… the sudden flash of bright light on the screen when the strip of film melts in that old Ingmar Bergman movie, the Hour of the Wolf…
Paying attention to this subtle interplay gives direction to an unstable situation.
Find the space that knows about that unstable situation…
Is there a space that knows about that? Yes there is. What do you know from there about that?
The Observer participates…
When she moves.
And then she returns.
She marked the space of her return. She labels that space. She re-entered an indicated space.
And then what happened?
Self-reflexivity. The Laws of Form emerged out of habits. This is what she knows.
And who is she that she can know that? She is the Angel of Death…she is the Mother of Beauty…
In the beginning there was movement.
We come from there.
And we forget and then we remember and then we forget again.
Many Angels according to Swedenborg used to be Humans. And so we re- incarnate again and again so that we can know the place for the first time. In/out, both/and, neither/ nor, either/or…and the still point…and the dancing… all in war with Time for love of you…and Ye shall know them by their fruits…the poets get there first…
Always? …yes,. Always…
And the Torus becomes a Klein bottle, which is much sexier than a doughnut…
" Charles S. Peirce held, contrary to the opinion of his time, that the human mind can visualize non-Euclidian spaces and spaces within strange topologies. To do so, we just have to imagine experiences we would have in such a space." -Joan Richardson
I offer some notes on last night’s vision quest. There is a lot of work going on in the intermissive zones and I offer these notes as investigations into uncharted regions of our collective consciousness, which is different from our collective unconscious. At the end of this report I offer a few reflections that may prove to be relevant to other researchers here or in other zones. It is my intention to create the conditions for an emerging poly-phasic culture, which is well on it’s way.
As I am addressing meta-theorists who may be open to a first person account I am looking forward to updated third person initiatives. Creating a first person account of non ordinary experiences is difficult as we are separated by a common language. We don’t I fear transcend language yet but maybe we can. I am open to believe that we might participate more fully in our unfolding embodiment.
8/29
I practiced chakra clearing with colors, the John Friedlander method, and for the first time I felt a very strong affect difference in the quality of the energetic frequencies, and there was a subtle quality in the upper chakras that was intense, each had a distinct feeling tone, in the head, throat, heart areas. I contrasted and compared, much as a pianist plays separate notes that form a chord. I started to experience the typical body distortions as I moved between subtle and physical maps of the bodyspace
I repeated the 23rd Psalm, with a silent plainsong chant style, feeling the rich medieval like interior vibration of the verse. I’m aware of my fondness for this verse even though I don’t subscribe to the world view of God as a Shepherd. I have found that in the liminal zones it is helpful to touch some sense of centeredness-in-a-cultural-milieu before I take off into areas of the unknown. The 23rd Psalm stabilizes when I feel a self generated fear state.
I was in bed with someone who gave me a glass of water. I felt that it was my brother T, as a child, for we shared a bed when we were children, but when I rolled over in bed he wasn’t there. Then I noticed the presence of an adult in the room and they wanted to merge with my energy and I became fully lucid and I asked, “Who are you?”
I received a vague response from them, they didn’t answer me and just made some energetic moves and I saw a visual image of a man’s face, an older man morphing into various faces and I didn’t care to allow a merger and I focused attention and sent them a bolt that burned a hole in their forehead, which actually smoked. I let them know that I was not interested in their patronage. I felt this was an intruder. He faded away.
I became lucid and noticed there were two sources of bright light on the left and the right side of my visual field and in the middle were various scenes that were morphing. I just witnessed without intention this visual display and felt different kinds of vibrations. I found myself in different zones with more clarity than usual and as I walked along a vast corridor with interesting architectural views I put my dreaming hands on the floor, and felt the solidity, and did a few spins to stabilize the inner ear of the dream body.
I had a long discussion with Gary, who is physically alive and lives on the West Coast, and who asked me when I was in a lucid state to contact him. I called him out of physical sleep, but he wasn’t quite there." Where am I?" he asked. He was like he was stoned on a drug, not asleep or awake but I was aware that we was in a different place, a dream place, an ordinary living room and he was puzzled by this I told him we were in a dream space and I showed him some flying movements to persuade him but the movements were a bit heavy, take off was difficult probably because I was performing before a skeptical person. I decided the shared lucidity wasn’t going to happen and I left him, to return to sleep.
I was with a dream conference and discussed with a group my interest in dream work and tried to work out a large dream project. I declared that it wasn’t enough to become lucid in the dream state but that we must work to become lucid in the waking state.
How to awaken collective lucid waking states? I imagined that in the Industrial Revolution people had to change their collective behaviors and that is analogous as some of us are becoming aware while awake of our lucidity, awareness of more zones of participation, simultaneously and so alternate frames of shared reality can be registered. Surely our social structures will evolve or break down under the strain. I explain that only a few people will initially be able to make this transitional awareness happen but that it would become more available to more people and more participatory. We were telepathically picking up on each other.
A very pleasant woman appeared and she and I embraced as if we were old friends. She played some music for us and I shared with her some secret stuff.
I sorted out with this group mixed feelings. I felt that I had to focus more of my attention on what my personal mission was. And even my vision for the visionary, what would that be? How could we coordinate multiple visions?
I was frustrated by my lack of focused intention, and lack of stability and so made a declaration that I wanted my participation to be grounded in the service of other people rather than just gathering my own data for personal glorification. I was going to need to do more homework and be better prepared for the hybrid states to be realized consciously by larger groups. This will present humans and non-humans with a much more sophistication in every field of study.
I return to the physical self/world interface, refreshed and relaxed.
* * *
I speculate wildly here that what I am dealing with is the fifth dimension as a collective creation, brought about many human and non human actors, with various kinds of agency, and different kinds of sense making, which makes some communications hazardous, and some compatible and pleasant. This is an open field experiment, I would say there are many fields, and made of light, dark and a wide range of colors and sensations, not easily interpreted. Translation is a dynamic art going on between dimensions but I believe we are making progress as individuals on some occasions. But is frustrating that most members of our species is lagging behind and is mostly asleep.
I look forward to the next adventure today which will be to go to the library and study Peirce’s Existential Graphs, with a buddy of mine. We are studying the relationship between sign and space.
Hi John: This morning, I woke up from an anxious dream where I was traveling and supposed to catch a flight (or train or bus). As boarding time approached, I realized my black briefcase was missing. There was something important in the briefcase and I couldn’t depart without it. As I rushed around searching, asking people for help, I realized that I didn’t remember what was actually inside the briefcase or why it mattered. (Nor, I noticed later, did I know where I was supposed to be going.) I began trying to remember…and couldn’t, which is when I woke up.
I immediately began reminding myself that it was “just a dream,” coaxing my body back from its credulity in a ‘sand castle’ reality. Then I thought about my waking state: And what is this? Later I went for a walk around the neighborhood, admiring the beautiful summer day and the adorable homes, where fellow humans live. In the park, a woman was sitting on large beach towel with her friend, using some kind of drug, gesticulating wildly, screaming into the sky.
I think the 5th dimension is listening to us…
(And the feeling that there is something I am forgetting to say.)
As I watch the news reports of the flood waters rising in Houston, I see and remember those long forgotten street names, Telephone Road, Kirby, Bissonette, big streets that are now under water, the big streets that I traveled as a boy in the back of the car, or as a stoned teenager, in the driver’s seat. As an act of defiance, I grabbed the keys of the car, drove around at night looking for signs of life, driving past the honky tonk bars and the empty diners, stayed up past my curfew. Many nights, as a teen ager, I would drive around for recreation, adventure, dreaming wildly about things to come, feeling lost and out of place in that Big Cow Town. I got into lots of trouble, got busted, thrown into jail, had many bloody fist fights with my Dad, and all of that so difficult back then I now review as kind of miraculous!
And I did escape and Life came at me, a destroyer and a preserver. I got to Manhattan, back in the mid-70’s, just as disco and punk rock began to collide, just as the social networks were forming that would allow the emergence of a new counter-culture and a new epidemic, AIDS, which became a dynamic reference point, that mobilized scattered attention spans. We fought for the emergence of a new culture in the wake of that catastrophe.
Trauma recovery is an art, as we let go of the chronic painess of painful memories, and as we release our nuero-muscular locks around those memories, the pain is amplified, briefly, before the trapped energies exit the nervous system, providing for a fresh capacity for holding a visionary future, unmixed with distortions and projections, formed from the long dead pasts we try to re-enact. While preserving what we learned from such catastrophic experiences, we are awed by the consortium of intelligences, from many dimensions, that can assist us.
It is true that we must forgive,( I learned this the hard way!) if we want to function well, but we must never forget. We will need to pay attention to our attention, skillfully, and on a much broader scale and a deeper, more embodied way than the social media that is shaping our current collective attention is able to deliver.
We shall need to pay special attention to the cracks in our attentions, as we transition from activity to activity, from group to group, from zone to zone, from clock time to dreamtime, gathering data and conducting comparative studies and updating our skills. Then we can make an honest evaluation of what we really want to have happen. We can learn to take one honest step, and then another one…
That oppressive Houston, I escaped from when I was in my youth is gone, the creative communities that Manhattan co-sponsored when I moved here, those communities that worked in the margins and the cracks and the undergrounds, that I loved so dearly, are also gone.
The Mayor of Houston prepares the public for a New Reality, after that great Trickster Harvey, having rearranged the living room furniture, as well as the memories of that tragic city and perhaps the entire Gulf Coast, becomes another memory stream. The same thing was true when Sandy re-arranged our priorities here in New York, but with the capacity for memory loss, that the current regimes encourage, I imagine sadly that we are going to lose many cities, and some lovely ones.
We are no longer becoming what we were becoming…and with all of that what do we want to have happen now?
I slowly and partially emerge from a week in the life: end of fiscal year reporting, major head cold, back-to-school preparation, son with a thumb fracture (he’s OK, just needs recovery time), and the like. But I am still very much interested in the proposed ‘self-reflective/observer-participant/conscious universe’ discussion in whatever form we choose to give it.
Has anyone else had the mischievous thought that we should have group-read Ingold’s Being Alivebefore tackling Sloterdijk? In any event, thanks for the link @madrush ! So far, I’m finding interesting counterpoints (though harmonious ones) to Young, again a universe where borders (surfaces) are zones of interaction rather than barriers.
In my mind, this almost off-the-cuff observation
could really serve as the first proposal of Humaniversal Doughnutology (if I were insane enough to want to create a philosophical system of any kind ). But the implications - the consequences, if you will - of an approach in which Being is the most important world principle will differ from one in which Becoming is, right? I mean, we can emphasize the “dynasty” or “nation” in history and downplay the interims or we can see seeds of change in everything. The former risks Toynbee’s “idolization of the ephemeral” and the latter in our current ultrarationalist ‘phase’ risks the nihilism of extreme postmodern deconstruction. Yet I would lean toward the Becoming personally; I think we (collective) may even be able to handle the ‘life-as-flux’ model in a healthy way if we pay attention to our attention, as John repeatedly, rightly, points out.
In what ways might the ‘integral city’ be better prepared to handle the natural disaster, for instance?
An Integral City ( which Houston never was) would be attentive to ecology and some basic fairness. The Nature/Social/Culture interplay, in an Integral City, would give lots of people opportunities to co-create compelling futures, without the tension between BIG OIL and everything else in life.
I recall in the third grade , my teacher, Mrs. Wallace, a sweet, soft spoken, middle aged, Southern lady, showed us the bone, of what she claimed came from the corpse of a nigger, whom she saw, tarred and feathered, when she was a child. She had witnessed the event and seemed to glow with nostalgia when she described those good old days. I recall how Mrs. Cahill, my fifth grade teacher, said the great law of life is, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. So much for social studies.
My instruction, brought to you by the Houston Independent School District, was so poor that I can hardly remember anything except the occasional drills, when we practiced diving under our desks, in case of an atomic bomb attack from near by Cuba.
I remember that even then they expected huge waves of population growth and recognized it would be wise to invest in a futuristic public transportation system. I really loved that idea, my childhood imagination, was inspired by the vision of a train in the sky, linking downtown with suburbs in an intimate contact, by passing the gridlock, reducing the pollution, but public transit was scrapped. Car culture is the only culture that Houston cultivated.
The ugly sprawl was a direct result of that failure to face what was coming. More cars, more roads, more cars, more parking lots, more pollution and thus were created the current conditions for Harvey and the beginnings of the Great Lakes that Houston is quickly becoming.
The Great Lakes that Houston is becoming could easily have been avoided if short term profits and the erasure of a safety net had not destroyed the quality of attention. A population forced to fend for itself, and demands everything be dirt cheap will not think too much about the future. Houston kicked that can down the road.
I could imagine something different when I was a little kid but that was not appreciated by the realists who were in charge. I imagine an Integral City would have at least a thirty year long term focus, rather than short term focus for the profit margins of the next three months.
A friend of my mine, smart, optimistic, up beat went back to school to get his Masters in Urban Planning. I saw him after he graduated, depressed and cynical, adopting a basically nihilists world view. Make a lot of money he said and get out. Any theorist who has a clue about an alternative view would be worth studying.
One consequence of quantum uncertainty is that even though you can’t measure location if you are measuring velocity, you can still be aware of its reality. Both location and velocity are “real”, they are “there”, it is simply the case that your awareness may only apperceive one at a time. I don’t think it’s a matter of being OR becoming, rather it is integrating being-and-becoming.
The trouble with most philosophies – and I think this applies to Heidegger (and given his self-proclaimed ability to supersede him, Sloterdijk) and Hegel and Kant and many more, following the turtle droppings all the way back to Plato, perhaps – is that they dealt with being at the expense of becoming, or they foregrounded being and simply ignored becoming. Their value for us, though, is in what they had to say about being, I suppose.
Other, more recent philosophies – and here names like many of the pragmatists but moreso Whitehead, even Collingwood, to an extent – were concerned with process; that is, with becoming, but in a similar manner to their contrastors, at the expense of being, or they foregrounded becoming and simply ignored being. Their value for us, however, is in what they had to say about becoming, I would think.
For me, then, the integrating eteology (and as far as I know, Gebser is the only one who has sensibly talked about what comes after philosophy, especially as understood as that discipline that the Heideggers & Co. and the Whiteheads & Associates were practicing), the waring of this particular phenomenon is how to grok being AND becoming in spite of the philosophical uncertainty involved.
In the subatomic realm the problem is created by the fact that the photon needed to see the particle is larger than the particle itself and hence disturbs that particle in the process of observation. We don’t (at least I don’t think we) have that problem out here in the macroscopic realm, but we do have the problem of being aware of both sides of any proverbial coin.
If you really want to screw with your head, read (or re-read, if you already have) Abbott’s Flatland then try to follow the logic flow into a 4th or higher dimension. Even trying to ware “time” as a fourth dimension is too much for most people, and I can assure you that any talk of a 5th (or as @Geoffreyjen_Edwards noted in his dimensionality post, potentially 11) dimensions will make eyes roll and heads spin (with or without spewing pea soup).
All the aforementioned philosophers were operating (or at least writing) in three dimensions; they were all Cartesian-bound. They were all totally immersed in the Either-Or. But the process philosophers, and the Youngs, and Fullers, and Bertrand Russell when he was flying high, and a lot of quantum physicists and mathematicians (Gödel comes immediately to mind) were trying to present a non-Cartesian, if not higher-dimensional, view of what-is-becoming. I think some of them actually made it, but all of them were striving toward an As-Well-Also.
That’s the real challenge for all of us … at least as I am cogitating right now.
Now, having said that, I will admit that the quotes that I’ve seen from Ingold have been rather interest-piquing, and the fact that he’s researching “the line” (or at least taking that as the starting point of ALL of his current researches) is an eye-catching starting point, to be sure. But I’m skeptical (perhaps just curmudgeony, who knows) for the simple reason that once burned, twice shy. Let us not forget that M. Sloterdijk promised a philosophy of space that turned out to be very different from what any of us really expected, and I, of course, doubt that he will be able to extricate himself from the three-dimensional spherical cell of his own making. Michael’s comment on the strong regressionary nature of his womb-based predetermination resonated with me for it captured part of my issue with him: I see a lot of being and very little becoming. I’m not saying that Ingold is like Sloterdijk in this regard, but I’d like to have a better feel for what he’s really trying to accomplish (he’s got a bit of postmodern feel to him that makes me skeptical, for most postmodernist are notoriously goalless … which leads more often than not – and here I’m thinking of late Barthes and Derrida – to senseless, as in the meaning “nonsense”).
(And, since we do live in a world of clocks and schedules whether we envision ourselves a time-free being-becomers, I want to let everyone know that I’m in the process of preparing for a two-week jaunt to CA. My wife wanted to visit again after 20 years, so we’re going to do it, but from 8-23 September I will be as good as incommunicado, partly due to circumstances, but mostly due to desire as I’m not taking any of my digital communication devices with. Who knows whether I’ll ever be able to catch up with all that I will have missed once I return. The pace of this mere thread is heady and I check in regularly. It’s going to get interesting before it gets boring, I have the feel.)
If I were ever to finally compile my collection of “best misquotes”, this one would be there, along with one of my other favorites, “money is the root of all evil”.
One of my daughters once had listed under “Religion” on her FB profile: “Lord, save me from your followers.”
Mrs. Cahill, FYI, was misquoting (if not outrightly misstating) 2 Thessolonians 3:10, which most literally says, “… if anyone desires not to work, let him not eat …”, and the context of the letter in which the verse appears further mitigates the sentiment involved, and there is a strong suspicion that the “work” involved had more to do with proselytizing than making the world a better place to live.
My other bug-a-boo, comes from 1 Timothy 6:10, which is more properly, “The root of all evils is the love of money …”. I would be willing to bet good money that his is the least quoted of all passages in the Bible (well, New Testament) by all televangelists, Calvinists, Puritans, as well as those misguided and downright deluded Mrs. Wallaces and Cahills who were lovingly and disastrously making impressions on young minds in their day. Their sisters-in-spirit were impressing minds in Western Pennsylvania even a few years before you got to experience them, John.
But as we both know, and as our buddy Bill once wrote, “The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose:” (Merchant of Venice)
I have a not so young mind anymore but I still have imprints from that childhood period and have learned how to soothe myself when a panic attack gets triggered. I have learned, over the years, that there is a class of symptoms, lumped together as PTSD, and that this condition appears often as a free floating anxiety, that comes and goes, much like bad weather. It is very hard to get to the root of this as talk therapy actually makes the symptoms worse!
I speculate wildly that the men and women who raised me, had grandparents who had lived through the Civil War, who had relatives who fought in the First World War and who had direct recall of the Second World War and Hiroshima, and that they were traumatizing us as they themselves were traumatized. Spare the rod and spoil the child… Many of these persons were manifesting PTSD symptoms in classrooms and in pulpits. This is a transgenerational learning passed on by osmosis.
I remember vividly this transmission, palpably. It felt, as if, when I saw them melt down in the classroom, the pulpit, at the supper table, that my own bodymind was split down the middle with an axe. I would now attribute this to a physicalization of the Cartesian split, which has become the basis of McGilcrist’s book , The Master and the Emissary.
I recall when Margaret Mead was told by her youthful students that she was one of them she denied that vehemently. She was she said born before the Bomb was dropped and therefore had a very different experience from her students born after the Bomb. This was an enormous breach with Nature.
So what was done to the Bible by various interpreters is indeed fascinating as you have cogently pointed out. I quote a limited amount of scripture ( the King James version) because I love the way it sounds and it calms me considerably when I am at a cross roads or between dimensions.
I hate those who did what they did to me and to other children and I recognize that though they were adults they were psychologically regressed and passed on their terror without knowing what they were doing. I have recently come to the sad conclusion that my father, whom I have always judged to be the cruelest human being I had ever met was also the most frightened. We are a bundle of symptoms and habits that didn’t start with us and is never completed.
Have a great vacation! We will miss your sober insights.
I finally got my copy in the mail of The Reflexive Universe, as well as Globes and a couple other goodies, so we will see what quality reading time life is willing to grant me over the next few weeks. I am trying to catalyze a few conversations and build pathways for more, and it’s a formidable (but welcome) challenge to balance family, work, reading, writing, meditation, exercise, sleep, etc., with an awareness of intensifying crises, existential mortality, and the general weirdness afoot.
We have some weeks, as well as in-between weeks with Globes (I’ll propose a reading schedule soon), to discuss any or all of these authors, such as Ingold, and their works. I have also been reading one of Ervin Laszlo’s books on the Akashic Field, while waiting for my order to arrive. He seems to be someone who might have something to contribute to our inquiry here.
I hope you enjoy your trip, @achronon—be not too horrified by what this nation has become or is becoming, or is. I would be curious to hear your impressions; it’s been 20 years, you say?
Here is what one sensitive observer from abroad recently found:
Thanks for the bon-voyage wishes. I think we’ll be able to use them. The whole thing is already shaping up to be something of an adventure.
The last time we were in the States was in August 2012, but that was in WPa, where I grew up and things were about as dismal then as they were when I was coming of age. It had hardly changed, and the attitudes of my former fellow citizens were pretty much as Obama had described them (much to the chagrin and faux-outrage of his detractors): G-d and guns.
This is our first trip back to Silicon Valley in 20 years. That was always a different world from the one I grew up in, and I can well imagine that it is now a different world from what it was when I was there. Back then, Apple was second fiddle, Google was doing no evil, and Facebook didn’t exist. And I know for a fact that NONE of the companies for whom I worked during my sojourn there are extant anymore.
And there it is. Consciousness wouldn’t be worth too much without both acknowledgment of the problems and some kind of willingness to craft solutions! Young describes his seventh stage with many question marks; Gebser gives no guarantees of collective access to the truly aperspectival; Ingold fights an uphill battle for the emergence of ‘open’-meshed conceptions of life; Haraway wonders aloud if her chthonic Cthulhu will outlast the raging, dark-side corrupted zombie of Adam Smith afoot…
It may be beyond our capacity to fix totally, but we can keep playing.
Manic depression has captured my soul I know what I want but I just don’t know How to go about getting it
Feeling, sweet feeling Drops from my fingers, fingers…
(–Jimi Hendrix)
PS: A safe journey and enjoyable adventure to you, Ed!
The latest science (New Scientist, Nov 25, 2917) reveals the universe has five-fold symmetry :
“Proposed in 1974 by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow, SU(5) says at the high energies of grand unification, all particles are represented by mathematical structures that can be thought of as pentagons and decagons. Each side of a pentagon represents a fundamental particle such as a quark or a lepton. Mathematically, the pentagon’s sides are identical, so there is no way to tell apart these particles. It is only when the universe cools that this symmetry breaks, shattering the metaphorical pentagon into pieces, each of which is either a quark or a lepton.” Just thought I’d share ;]
https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.bgyvhdxFOFr_anKrIfj8XwEsCC&w=300&h=130&c=7&qlt=90&o=4&dpr=1.25&pid=1.7
In any event, thanks for the link 
). But the implications - the consequences, if you will - of an approach in which Being is the most important world principle will differ from one in which Becoming is, right? I mean, we can emphasize the “dynasty” or “nation” in history and downplay the interims or we can see seeds of change in everything. The former risks Toynbee’s “idolization of the ephemeral” and the latter in our current ultrarationalist ‘phase’ risks the nihilism of extreme postmodern deconstruction. Yet I would lean toward the Becoming personally; I think we (collective) may even be able to handle the ‘life-as-flux’ model in a healthy way if we pay attention to our attention, as John repeatedly, rightly, points out.