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The Search For Cohesion In The Age Of Fragmentation
Get PDFAt the beginning of Chapter 17 in our book Spiral Dynamics we noted: “George Bush’s hundred hour war in the Persian Gulf and Caesar-like triumphal parading through Washington, D. C. in l991 became his twilight’s last gleaming. He never recovered from the victory. In his speech announcing Operation Desert Storm he had claimed: ‘We have before us the opportunity to forge, for ourselves and for future generations, a New World Order.’”
The term “New World Order” itself not only became a fearful symbol of global domination by an elite few, but it also stoked paranoid fears of a new march of jack boots to the cadence of a single ideology. President Bush later softened the sentiment before the United Nations General Assembly with the words: “In short, we seek a pax universalis built upon shared understanding.” The time has now come to renew the search for the global operating principle and process. This quest for the Next Global Mesh is based on such a pax universalis, an initiative that seeks after a “shared understanding” of how we, as a people, emerge through levels of complexity. While “order” conveys the idea of closed systems and regimentation, the term “mesh” suggests a new form of social integration based on the weaving together of the rich textures of human differences and bindings of constant change. The concept of “mesh” carries with it the capacity to absorb the awesome complexities that now confront global people as we enter the next decade, century, and millennium
Intercorporeality: An Invitation to Being in the Human-Body-Nature Relationship
Get PDFHuman-mediated climate change and environmental degradation are real. Likewise, human health issues associated with modernity are becoming increasingly concerning. This paper presupposes the inter-relationship between these two bourgeoning phenomena, and draws upon recent scholarship in the field of Religion and Ecology, and particularly the work of Thomas Berry (2006, 1999), as a means to critically analyze Judeo-Christian theosophy, an encoded meaning animus by which Westerners (largely), and Americans primarily, enact denial of the fullest expression of life – among one another and within the context of the natural world. I offer two broadly generalized and contrasting religious narratives, which together illumine widely variable cultural cosmologies. The first narrative is derived from indigenous peoples of the Amazon, as described by Wade Davis (2009). The second narrative emerges from the Judeo- Christian Biblical creation stories in Genesis Chapters One and Two, as described by Leon Kass (2003). Together, these narratives form a basis for developing understanding of encoded human behavior toward the human body, human Being, and the nature-body. My thesis is that Western Judeo-Christian theosophy as it has been interpreted and expressed societally, serves, even in a largely secularlized context, as the encoded meaning animus, which drives human behavior toward denial of the fullest expression of life. It is this theosophy that is herein scrutinized, which provides the context to consider other ways of Being. When juxtaposed with animist cosmogony, the Judeo-Christian cosmological denial of life becomes immediately apparent. Is there, however, a pre-immanent cosmology, one that is proto-logical, indeed, proto-symbolical? Importantly, the paper invites a response to these human and environmental issues by considering an enactive framework of embodied intersubjectivity – intercorporeality – as it relates to the embodied Being-in-the-world as well as Beingness embodied, embedded, extended and enacted (Rowlands, 2010) intercorporeally. Drawing largely on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl by way of David Michael Levin (1985) and J. W. Hayward, I propose here, a response that is less methodological than it is an examination of and invitation to experiential phenomenology and intersubjectivity – intercorporeality – to address human-nature well-being
A.I., Cyborgs, Shamans and Transcendence Configuring the ISO and the Mythopoeic Sacred in Tron: Legacy
Get PDFThis essay explores the role of cyberspace in the 2010 film Tron: Legacy as an expression of the enduring relevance of religious symbolism and humanity\u27s innate search for transcendence in modern technologies. Cyberspace is investigated as a sacred space of infinite possibilities in which humanity is redefined at the intersection of the digital, fantasy and consciousness. In the examination of the film’s religious symbolism as a modern-day creation myth and its roots in shamanic cosmology, artificial intelligences in the movie depicted as highly complex humanoid information systems are proposed as a blueprint for an advanced mode of consciousness which integrates the worlds of science, spirituality and the fantastic. The “imaginative consciousness” will be proposed as the key means by which this may occur – the archetype of the ‘woman-child’ in the cybernetic figure of the ‘ISO’ in the movie is argued to represent a blueprint for the cellular and cognitive advancement of the human species, to a unique state of spiritual purity
Uncovering the Lost Knowledge of the Imagination in Films
Get PDFFilms have forever changed the way in which humans perceive reality and have provided significant opportunities to spread knowledge in ways that are both entertaining and deceptive. Uncovering the lost knowledge of the imagination shifts an individual’s perceptions of a shared experience and exposes film’s persuasive power to penetrate the psyche. This paper explores the constitutions of reality and how humans are able to tap into other realms of consciousness through mediums of creative expression. Topics such as the origins of life, the hidden knowledge of secret societies, and the burgeoning full disclosure movement for truth are discussed as a means of information dissemination that are often witnessed through the cinematic experience. Subjects involving Transpersonal Psychology, psi phenomena, science, spirituality, and the philosophies of social consciousness are used as a means of ascertaining a deeper understanding of the complexities of human existence. Concepts of magic, beauty, and dreams are offered as tools in the excavation of this lost knowledge, while the power of the imagination provides a pivotal role in the comprehension and creation of individual and collective reality
Subjectivity Is No Object: Can Subject-Object Dualism Be Reconciled Through Phenomenology?
Get PDFTranspersonal psychology has at times critiqued the broader psychology field for perpetrating a somewhat arbitrary Cartesian subject-object divide. Some phenomenologists claim that reframing this purported divide as an experienced phenomenon can defuse its philosophical impact. If subjective experiences are viewed as continuous with the lifeworld out of which objective phenomena are abstracted, the divide between these is revealed as a somewhat arbitrary, if useful, construction. This, in turn, challenges psychology to engage with subjective phenomena in a more substantive way. In this paper based on excerpts from a protracted email conversation held on the American Psychological Association’s Humanistic Psychology (Division 32) listserv, two academic psychologists with transpersonal interests explore this extraordinary claim of phenomenology, one being a proponent and the other being a skeptic of the claim. Two other academic psychologists with transpersonal interests who participated in this dialogue comment on its relevance for transpersonal psychology. The conversation focuses on the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger, and emphasizes how phenomenology might reconcile the subject-object divide through exploring intentionality, the meaning of noetic/noema, and thinking itself, while the discussion serves as an example of an adversarial collaboration in which disagreeing parties seek deeper understanding through dialogue
Transition to Transcendence: Franklin Merrell-Wolff\u27s Mathematical Yoga
Get PDFMathematicians--those who develop new mathematics--spend much of their time proposing the existence of mathematical constructions whose existence they then proceed to try to prove from the mathematics that has already been developed. Following that, they often try to prove that those mathematical constructions are unique, that there are no other constructions with the same characteristics. In practice, it is often easier to prove the uniqueness of a mathematical construction than its existence, so a mathematician may proceed by first proving uniqueness, as though the mathematical construction existed, and then using clues from the uniqueness proof to prove existence. I want to follow a similar strategy in this paper, in that I want to talk about transitions to transcendent states of consciousness as though they existed and as though we knew what they were, thereby perhaps uncovering ways in which their existence and characteristics may become apparent.
How are we going to talk about transcendent states of consciousness if we do not even know if they exist? Here, we may be in the situation of the eighteenth century explorers seeking the source of the Nile with only mythology on which to base their expeditions (Bruce, 1790/1972). In that case there were natives who lived at the source of the Nile for whom the river\u27s source was part of their everyday experience. Perhaps similarly, there are those who have realized transcendent states of consciousness that for the rest of us exist only as myths. We shall consider here the account of Franklin Merrell-Wolff who lived from 1887 to 1985 and devoted most of his life to the attainment and exposition of transcendent states.
The information about Merrell-Wolff\u27s ideas has been taken largely from his books (Merrell-Wolff, 1994; 1995b) and from a series of lectures that he gave in 1966 titled Mathematics, Philosophy and Yoga (1995a). Additional information has been acquired from his other publications, unpublished papers and audio recordings; from conversations with his granddaughter, Doroethy Leonard, and conversations with Ron Leonard, who lived with Merrell-Wolff for a year and wrote his doctoral dissertation in philosophy about him (Leonard, 1999). I have also written previously about Merrell-Wolff\u27s philosophy (Baruss, 1996). In the following, I have used Merrell-Wolff\u27s language largely to convey his meaning, and have only used quotation marks for identification of specific terms and for directly quoted longer passages
