Replying to LO24588 --
Dear Organlearners,
John Zavacki <jzavacki@greenapple.com> writes:
>I've read a few of AT's dissertations in the past few weeks
>and looked at the contexts of his use of the terms being and
>becoming (alternately be and become) and I've compared
>them to my (30 year old) notes on Heidigger's sein, seinde,
>mitsein, etc. It all comes down to how the individual
>understands being (regardless of its relationship to time).
Greetings John,
Thank you for reflecting on becoming-being in terms of the quality of
energy.
When we think of be/being, we primarily think of existence. The sand of
the Kalahari desert exists. It has an incredible amount of "total energy"
in it. But none of this "total energy" is available "free energy", i.e.
energy with which it can become something else. In other words, the
Kalahari sand exists without any potential for becoming.
When Dan Chay introduced this topic, he became aware that oil is important
to us because of the potential to be used as fuel, releasing energy while
becoming carbon dioxide plus water. In other words, in our OXYGEN RICH
ENVIRONMENT oil exists with the potential for becoming. I thought that Dan
was interested in the limited availability of oil, but he stressed that he
was interested in what gives oil its quality as fuel.
>To be is to change. I won't try to give the cells names, nor
>will I try to show some little formula. They change. Daily,
>and more frequently. The ones in the brain and the ones in
>the gonads.
John, as I see it, beings can change only when they have the "free energy"
for that change. In other words, change is not "self-starting". But
neither does "free energy" have this property of "self-starting". It
requires back-ground "entropy" to open up its potential. The "entropy" is
a measure of the being's organisation which involves both chaos and order.
It is the chaos in this entropy which "pushes" the "free energy" lower so
that change can happen.
It is for me clear that we have to think in terms of connections which
make up a whole if we want to understand when change will happen AND what
will become of that change all along the web.
But what is chaos? Many people think dialectically that it is disorder,
i.e, the opposite of order. But we can also think of it dualistically,
i.e. chaos is the complementary dual of order. How is it possible to do
this? By thinking of order as "diversity of being". Then chaos will be
"diversity of becoming".
In conclusion, change (i.e the becoming of beings) depends on the
diversity of changes which will trigger the lowering of the "free energy"
with its "production of entropy". This is a new way of formulating what
Ross Ashby once has called the Law of Requisite Variety. Biologists have
now their own way of thinking about it -- they call it biodiversity.
>The dance of change is a sacred duty and a sacred gift.
>It uses both the conscious and the unconcious soul to create
>a new and different world from every dream and every wakening.
>What AT calls 'liveness' is present in even the most tired and
>down-trodden soul. The difference is in the quality of the
>experience, the depth of consciousness, the richness of the
>unconciousness.
Yes, the richer (deeper and wider) the organisation (experience,
consciousness, imagination, etc.) within a person, the more the potential
for that person to "dance changes". Or in terms of entropy-energy, the
more the spiritual entropy (measure of organisation) of the spiritual
energy of a person, the more the spiritual free energy that person will be
able to muster by way of creative collapses.
This is why authentic learning is so important to all of us. I add the
authentic because it has to be stressed that this learning has to begin
with experiences and end with wisdom upon which higher order activities
will occur.
>AT once asked me what I think of intimidation. I took my time
>in answering, but here it is. There are physical, emotional, and
>intellectual bullies. They all add up to the same thing: unbecomers,
>a good word to throw into the unlearning stew, perhaps as a spice.
Its a pretty fine answer John. Their are other ways of intimidation too
which we ned not go into now.
But how do we overcome the intimidation by bullies? Well, bullies
intimidate others into "unbecoming" because they have experienced the
same. However, since they have not overcome it self, they fear that any
developing personality may eventually become complex enough to intimidate
them too. In other words, bullies lack that which would have sustained
them against the intimidation of anything complex. What do they lack? The
kind of learning which would have resulted in a complex personality. Only
new complexity can match up and even surpass known complexity.
How do bullies intimidate others into "unbecoming"? They meddle with the
mentality of a person so as to reduce the mental "free energy" for change
of that person. How do they meddle with the mentality? Well, they have
seven different ways (or any combination of them) to do so. See if you can
pick out at least one such a way.
John, allow me some direct comment to a fellow learner.
Dan, I almost feel as if I am writing on "spiritual oil". Millenia ago it
was actually a custom to anoint a person physically with oil as a kind of
wish that the anointed will accomplish a profound change. In other words,
it signalled "may the person have spiritual oil of outstanding quality".
Ashes, on the other hand, was used to indicate that the spiritual "free
energy" was very low so that little change was possible.
I usually end "with care and best wishes", but now I want to end by
anointing you all with the sweetest smelling and most combustable oil
available -- best "free energy"!!
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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