Replying to LO29497 --
Dear LO,
10.29.98 11.52.22. Chandogya Unpanishads, 6. 12.1-3
Bring hither a fig from there
Here it is, sir.
Divide it.
It is divided, sir.
What do you see there?
These rather fine seeds, sir.
Of these, please, divide one.
It is divided, sir.
What do you see there?
Nothing at all, sir.
Then he said to him,
Verily, my dear, that finest essence which you do not perceive - verily, my
dear, from that essence this great fig tree arises. Believe me my dearest, he
said, that which is the finest essence - this wholoe world has that as its
soul. That is reality. That is Atman. That art thou.
Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most
important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of
seeing old theories or fact.- A change of vision can, at its best, achieve
something loftier than a theory. It can usher in a whole new climate of
thinking, in which many exciting and testable theories are born, and
unimagined laid bare. - What we are talking about is not a flip, from this
to that, to an equivalent view but, in extreme cases, a transfiguration.
Dawkins, Oxford.
Transform -- Change shape or form, or character, condition, function or
nature ;-)
Transformation -- Metamorphosis, Pupa to butterfly. Change of form without
loss of value.
Transfiguration -- glorify change so as to idealize and elevate.
Beauty arises in elevating the simple.
"Ficino's work is sometimes called poetic theology -- as originally suggested
by his pupil Pico della Mirandola (author of one of the earliest
articulations of human rights: On the Dignity of Man). Moore suggests that it
is effectively poetic psychology or a psychopoetics -- his insights being
expressed imagistically rather than discursively, precisely because the
purpose was to nourish and educate the imagination to enhance the qualitative
experience of the moment.
Moore focuses strongly on Ficino's concern with "soul" -- as the essential
quality of existence -- an approach that is the focus of Moore's own
writings. This descriptor appeals to many but is also alienating to many
others -- due to its many associations with perspectives that have, for
whatever reason, often proven less than helpful to enhancing self-experience
in daily life. Young people have alternative terms that point to the
experience of its more profound meanings in language without some of these
associations.
Soul is also depth, a metaphor we use to point to a certain intensity of
experience. Having soul we feel a reverberation and resonance carrying
through beneath the surface of everyday experience. With soul, events are not
merely two-dimensional; they carry an invisible but clearly felt dimension of
depth....Soul, then, involves a dying to the natural world, and indeed
imagination is not unlike digestive transformation. To live with soul
requires a willingness to descend into the depths of events, to let their
literalness and our own literal reactions die in favour of another
perspective, to see the world as if from below.
snip -- "What we usually call 'external reality' is seen to have depth and
transparency. Nothing is only what it appears to be. The human imagination is
always at work, though often below the threshold of awareness, making
metaphors of everything...At the very moment that we make use of any object
or talk to any person, they are being transformed into metaphors." Therefore
grasping things solely through the senses overlooks other dimensions from
which powerful syntheses may derive. "We overlook the wealth of images around
us by seeing only physical containers of those images"
Objective experience is transformed through imagination into subjective
experience -- effectively cultivating the world to nourish experience in the
moment. The external world provides a reservoir of images for this process.
"All our actions, in fact, involve us in deep mysterious themes and plots."
For Ficino, the essential point is to make connections between everyday
experience and the deeper life of the soul. We can nourish the soul -- our
quality of life in the moment -- by cultivating the reflection of our
psychological life in the heavens, with its polycentric elements. "By keeping
in mind the characters of the various planets, knowing especially the spheres
of life they 'rule', and the images associated with them, we may organize
life imaginatively...an astrological art of memory." This approach is used to
make a cosmos of patterned variety and multiplicity in one's psychological
environment -- to make a starry sky of one's consciousness in its changing
circumstances . A well-tuned soul is one in which archetypal possibilities
represented by the planetary deities are carefully distinguished and all
represented. It is a soul having distinct, multiple parts, just like the
tones of a tempered musical scale.
Imagination must also be applied to oneself -- to provide an imaginative
awareness of oneself, one's strengths and one's vulnerabilities, especially
restrictive tendencies to a particular mode of awareness limiting expression
of other modes.
Ficino's approach calls for a cultivation of the external environment as a
source of imagery for an ecology of the soul (a point made by Ernst
Cassirer). Moore notes Ficino's emphasis on the psychological values inherent
in the material world (reminiscent of the points recently made with respect
to indigenous cultures by Darrell Posey (Cultural and Spiritual Values of
Biodiversity, 1999). Moore offers examples with respect to the "efficient"
design of cities and university campuses which may effectively be inefficient
in a larger sense because of their soullessness as inadequate abodes for
psychological living. The culture we build is also a house of images. The
challenge is therefore how to elicit and maintain psychological life. One
traditional response is to give design emphasis to the use of the "golden
mean" -- which then ensures a more consonant resonance between the image and
the person.
What is essential to maintaining psychological life for Ficino is having an
appropriate perspective on life itself: "the only person truly alive is the
one who lives most remote from this false life, at least in attitude" -- life
outside life itself (or life within life, depending on metaphorical
preferences). The quintessential "elixir is elusive because it is not a
substance but a perspective. It is a panacea in that this perspective can
transform everything, and it contains the secret of perceiving the immortal
dimension behind all mortal events."
Quantum Theory und The Brain: Some Experimental Ideas...
"Quantum theory is one of the two major revolutions in fundamental physics
that were introduced in the 20th century (the other being Einstein's general
theory of relativity). Yet quantum theory contains a seeming paradox at a
basic level of interpretation, referred to as the measurement paradox.
Roughly speaking, this paradox refers to the fact that at the quantum level
of simple systems of particles and molecules, a thing can be "in two places
at the same time" whereas at the c1assical level of ordinary objects, such
superpositions are never actually observed. There are various conventional
explanations aimed at resolving this paradox, all of which depend, at some
stage, upon the presence of conscious observer. I present a viewpoint that is
diametrically opposed to such "explanations". I argue that the measurement
paradox must find its explanation in an inanimate objective physics where a
subtle change in the very rules of quantum mechanics is required.
Accordingly, the role of the conscious observer, in the paradox of quantum
measurement is removed, and is replaced by an objective physical process
(referred to as "objective reduction" or OR). As a second strand of the
argument, I suggest that the phenomenon of consciousness actually depends
upon this change of the rules of quantum mechanics. A conscious event would th
en come about when there is mass movement in protein molecules acting
coherently in accordance with quantum mechanics that is sufficient for OR to
occur spontaneously, in an orchestrated way, over large regions of the brain
(Hameroff-Penrose model). Ingenious experimental ideas could directly test
the relevance of the non-local aspects of quantum mechanics to conscious
perception.
SIR ROGER PENROSE, Oxford
Polanyi's variegated understanding of reality,
(1) The real is independent of our knowing and may be hidden from us.
(2) Our knowledge of the real is an embodied feat accomplished through tacit
skills.
(3) Intellectual beauty is a guide to discovering the real.
(4) That is real which is expected to reveal itself indeterminately in the
future.
(5) There is something inherently pleasing about the real for human minds; it
has<_>attractive power .
(6) The real is most powerfully and significantly manifest in
comprehensive entities.
(7) Personal knowledge of the real is characterized by universal intent.
(8) Living beings utilize different levels of comprehension of the real for
their adaptive advantage.
(9) Living beings' evolutionary achievement of broader contact with the real
cannot be explained solely by the principle of survival of the fittest but
also requires the capturing of random occurrences in favourable circumstances
under the guidance of higher operational principles serving self set
interests.
(10) A token of a real object is its coherence.
Minds and problems possess a deeper reality than cobblestones, although
cobblestones are admittedly more real in the sense of being tangible. And
since I regard the significance of a thing as more important than its
tangibility, I shall say that minds and problems are more real than
cobblestones. Dead matter, matter that is both lifeless and deathless, takes
on meaning by originating living things... The field of new potential
meanings was so rich that this enterprise, once started, swept on toward an
infinite range of higher meanings, unceasingly pouring them into existence,
for the better part of a billion years. ... Rising stages of evolution
produce more meaningful organisms, capable of even more complex acts of
understanding. What is the relationship of the significance criterion to the
revelatory criterion? Polanyi follows up his statement that minds and
problems are more real than cobblestones with this elaboration: "This is
to class our knowledge of reality with the kind of foreknowledge which guides
scientists to discovery". This foreknowledge includes an inarticulate
ability to sense clues which can be successfully indwelt and integrated into
meaningful comprehensive entities. The same structure of coming to know
underlies our comprehension of people, problems, and cobblestones, but the
former have a rich diversity of aspects not exhausted by our knowledge of one
facet of their existence. Hence they will reveal themselves in unexpected
ways, which are signs of their significance. But our knowledge of reality is
also confirmed after the fact by the criterion we use to assess knowledge.
Polanyi
love, (=fear;-)
Andrew
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