Infinite Cafe – Mind Jam, Open Dialogue, Q&A

Conversation

1. It was a real pleasure to participate last night even if more belatedly than I had originally intended and certainly with less coherence than I would have liked. It’s so hard for me to avoid dissociated rambling while thinking on my feet, but practice does make perfect. The airing of half-baked thoughts has a wonderful way of leading towards clarity. Eventually…

   So, some thoughts left in the oven a little longer:

   1. My personal journey through civilization analysis with the likes of the controversial Samuel P Huntington (of ‘clash of civilizations’ fame – or infamy), Toynbee, Philip Bagby, Rushton Coulborn, Matthew Melko, and others has been both insightful and frustrating. The most salient point is how the elusive nature of the concept of “civilization” forces thinkers to attempt to deal with equally elusive terms such as “society”, “state”, and “culture”. Collectively the works say more about how the meaning of history has been interpreted than about definitions.
      All of this should sound familiar to any who wrestle with the similarly multi-pronged idea of “consciousness”…
   2. I wouldn’t recommend Quigley for a group-read, to be honest. Many of his ideas are dated, or rather his generally reductionist (modernist) approach to history leaves little room for imagining future states of culture. In this he is being true to his profession; as I stated, prediction is the last thing you ask from a historian. (In that sense, Spengler the philosopher is more ‘relevant’ to our time.) Quigley came up for me largely because Young had seven stages too.
   3. That said, the book I would recommend (for next year at the earliest of course!) is Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Near the beginning, he devotes a dozen pages or so to summarizing the literature I just mentioned and rejecting it for what he considers to be a too rigid overall approach to the human past, an attempt to define cultural process in terms of structures and essentially ethnocentric checklists. He then presents a fascinating series of vignettes of human interactions with place and time from all over the world and throughout strives to avoid determinism of any kind. The book is another tome at over 400 pages, but it is well-written, informative, and quite close to what I imagine post-perspectival (if not yet “integral”) history will be.
   4. My purpose and “desired outcomes” are really still kind of fuzzy: “I didn’t think I’d get this far…” (LOL) Very few, even in history discussion forums, are willing to devote much time to philosophy of history and in particular the effects our notions of the past have on where we may be headed. This is partly understandable, as I said above, because students of history rightly prefer sources to speculation. But questions of meaning/purpose have assumed greater importance for me over the years; I do know that our volatile (transitional?) times demand both the widest possible appreciation for our global past(s) and the willingness to use that knowledge to imagine the truly unprecedented. I’m exploring what that kind of synthesis (or “systasis”) would look like in the hope of contributing something to the conversation.

   I, too, sorely miss the seminars of my yesteryears, so thank you Marco for keeping the mind-jam studio doors open!

2. And when your desired outcome is still kind of fuzzy, TJ, what would you like to have happen?

   Articulating desired outcomes aren’t easy for most of us as we are usually told what we are supposed to want from a very young age. Articulating a desired outcome is a good exercise and can bring up conflict around having what we want, there is usually some internal voices that protest.

   I have noticed that the antidote to the lack of agency that seems epidemic among many who went through the post modern is stating desired outcomes. It gets easier. As we are in such complex situations we can get stuck easily in problem spaces and attempted solutions that often create more problems. A desire outcome can activate the visionary capacities that are dormant in most people.

   As I mentioned in our talk last night, when we can articulate desired outcomes we can then specify the necessary conditions, implement action plans and it often occurs that meshworks start to emerge, sometimes serendipitous events take us by surprise, we meet allies, etc. I have noted that many times we don’t specify what we want but then are upset when we get what we don’t want or something we are ambivalent about.

   I like your book suggestion. I also think it would be great if you could lead us into the discussion. Also this is a naïve question, but I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on what the difference is between historian and/or civilization analyst?

3. Hey, John.

   I’ll start from the bottom with a simplistic answer to your not at all naïve question. The historian tends to be concerned with primary sources (letters, diaries, diplomatic correspondence, parish records of births, deaths, and/or property, etc.) with which s/he constructs an investigative report of a city or region or political entity or socio-economic trend. The civilization analyst tends to deal with secondary literature (such as those historians’ reports) along with art, artifacts, literature, sacred texts and the like to paint a broad picture of large groups related, say, by a shared basic religious understanding or real or perceived ethnolinguistic affinity. Generally, the historian accounts for trees while the civilizationist relates impressions about forests, but of course a hard-and-fast line does not exist. Spengler was a cultural philosopher who thought he was a historian; Toynbee was a historian whose claim to fame was his theory; Gebser was a historian of consciousness who turned out to be one hell of a civilization analyst; Will and Ariel Durant were philosophers and historians at the same time…

   Ultimately, history and civilization analysis (as well as studies of culture and consciousness) share important elements of world-view and narrative, shaping assumptions and expectations like any unifying myth and always having the potential, as we discussed last night, to influence us in constructive and destructive ways. Too often, and I am myself guilty of this when not careful, notions that what did not work then simply will never work end the dialogue, as if the follow-up question cannot even be asked: What would it take for it to work for just a little while given what we have learned since then?

   You are quite right, so I will venture an articulation of desired outcome, visionary and bold to the point of laughable hubris: I am not qualified to add to the emerging “prolegomena to the story of the sustainable global village” – yet. First action step? Time to really start organizing these notebooks…

   …And hosting a Fernandez-Armesto book discussion would make organizing imperative…

4. I need to start re-organizing my notebooks too! Could this be a Symbiopoetic moment? If only everyone would organize their notebooks and host a seminar the world would be a much better place!

5. She is likely right. Note the ironic downside of extreme (sub)cultural identification: unwittingly reinforcing segregations rather than nudging the hitherto dominant narrative over a bit to make room for additional perspectives in a common society. Albert Murray warned against this unnecessary yielding to the status quo, for which divide and rule is standard practice. But people feel empowered by culture almost in inverse proportion to the amount of influence they feel they have in the social hierarchy, so it’s a phenomenal modern double-bind.
   Michael Mann (The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1, 1986) has the most interesting deconstruction of the concept of society that I have yet encountered: there is no “society”; there are shifting networks of interaction among varied organizations exercising power and influence over trade, war, law, ideas, etc., and the people subject to such organizations. This certainly stems from postmodern thinking, but with a “sympoietic” twist of which Haraway and Ingold might approve, I think. When we (again, collective) truly get a handle on how malleable our socio-cultural ‘formation(s)’ are and have always had to be, we might lay to rest the what I have long suspected to be false dichotomies of nature/nurture, or freedom/authority, or (dare I say) Left/Right…

   I’m pretty sure such an approach epitomizes boundary-less ‘collective-making’.

   Indeed.

   This was an interesting find:
   

6. Wow! I am glad you shared this, TJ. I have to do more homework. Symbiopoesis and Autopoeisis are ideas that have been around for awhile and I’m looking forward to creating the conditions for a third wave of cybernetics, whatever that means. I’m studying lots of different stuff as we all are, finding lots of strange loops.

   And how do we model the behaviors of complex, boundary-less, observing systems like ourselves? I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone has any good maps and yet being at the edge of our maps can be a good place to be as long as we can remember where we were the next morning…

   " There is no such thing as a pure observer, an exo-observer who does not engage in participation. Neither is there a pure participant, as this state world not allow for an observer participant. Individuals who approach a state of pure participation would find themselves suffering from oceanic boundary loss or dreadful self-dissolution." -Suzie Vrobel.

   This tension is, I believe, what Gebser referred to as an intensification ( rather than expansion) of consciousness. It seems we oscillate quite a bit.

   https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.E7PUX-VHQ4Dy_xYrzEeBbwDTEs&w=184&h=261&c=7&qlt=90&o=4&dpr=1.15&pid=1.

7. I have acquired a habit, as I withdraw from FB, of paying even more attention to the attention of our evolving meta-attention. I point this out as I have made this habit into a conceptual blend of discourse analysis and grounded theory. In other words, I want to catch a falling star and put it in my pocket.

   It is like the work of a dramaturg, the one who does the deep research, for a theater company. The dramaturg reported to the director and other members of the ensemble, what was most socially /culturally relevant in the projects that were unfolding.

   Erving Goffman, the famous sociologist, who pointed out the frames people use in groups, drew upon that dramaturgical tradition in some of his own research. The world is a stage and all the men and women merely players…

   Lakoff and Johnson study the use of metaphors by leading Western Philosophers. Their influential books are written clearly and I believe it could be very useful to explore them in a future seminar. I could also present a kind of archeological investigation of how this kind of study could make for more purposeful behaviors, as we are I believe trying to overcome the undertow of the postmodern drift syndrome. My dream seminar would include some of this research.

   https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506001417&sr=8-1&keywords=philosophy+in+the+fle

   , Marco, your apt use of the sports metaphor, draws my attention. I don’t think it needs an apology. Sports metaphors are very common in our culture and probably for very good reasons. It takes something we don’t know and compares it to something we do know. Catch my drift?.

8. A Case Study in Vision Logic.

   Big question. How to revise the epistemology of Vision Logic?

   Outline for a Strategy
   Truth is not relative ( unless you are a post modern)
   Some accounts of Truth are better than others.
   How to figure out the best practice?
   Develop the best models that align with the best epistemological theory.
   What do I know from here?

   Tonglen is Tibetan for ‘giving and taking’ (or sending and receiving), and refers to a meditation practice found in Tibetan Buddhism. In the practice, one visualizes taking onto oneself the suffering of others on the in-breath, and on the out-breath giving happiness and success to all sentient beings. As such it is a training in altruism.

   9/21 The Experiment
   I have felt ill the last few days, an ache in the body, a queasy stomach and a malaise brought on by personal distress and observing from afar the devastation visited upon Puerto Rico and Mexico. As a low level synesthete, I frequently feel no boundary. I somatize the suffering of others, like a cosmic sponge.

   I awake in the middle of the night and feel that all the symptoms are gone. Resting on my back, feet propped up on pillows, slightly higher than my head I practice Yoga Nidra and when deeply relaxed I do Tonglen with all of my sorrows, I do Tonglen with all of humanity’s sorrows, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, the Gulf Coast, I feel the energy is balanced as I take in the suffering on the in breath and breathe out the equanimity on the out breath. I stop practice and feel a floating sensation, very pleasant I float off gently into another region, the higher astral, or the dreamtime, an extra-physical dimension, the subtle realm. I re-center into the secret body.

   I end up in a bright city street, on a bus, like the ones they have in the UK, open on top floor, and I recall what I have been studying in paraconsistent logic and I look out the window and view a collection of squares and circles and rhomboids and dodecahedrons.

   I say.” I want to explore the Existential Graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce.”

   What follows is impossible to describe really as I become a series of connectives, and, or, if p then q, if and only if and I am acting out each of them and there are more connectives, many more than those in classic or modern logic and I become a process of experiencing kinesthetically the consortium of affective intelligences that connect language, mathematics and logic, as I become a liquid diamond like flow that enters into grids, graphs and containers within containers, hypercubes and much much more than my human mind can take.

   I have amnesia, a profound not knowing, and then I find myself walking down a country road, autumn leaves, and it is a gorgeous view and on the road there are others but not necessarily in a human form, and I start to sing,” I’m alive!” And I raise my dreaming body off the ground and seek to soar upwards into the blue sky but I pause in mid air and I feel the pull of the sorrows of the earth and I sing,” I am also dead!” And I flow into the depths of the dreaming earth, and in the darkness of death I sing.” I am alive and dead and I can remember sky,” And I fly upwards. And the song is acapella with a simple melody, on an off beat, and I sing with a bright tone, as I float in a bluish light, among intricate lattice shapes, and I sing in a devotional mood, ” How do I let them know how much I love them?”

   I am a borderlander, holding the grief of earth/death/sky/ecstasy in a simultaneity and there is a sense of the Others in danger and in ignorance of their own nature and as I return to the familiar confines of earth mind, the boy who grew up in Texas and the older man, who currently lives in Manhattan, are awake in the same physical form, in the field of all possibilities. I stay in bed for a long time, basking in the after glow of my memory of my impossible dreamtime, teasing out the implications, accepting the contradictions, the mixed messages from different levels. How to sort all of this out?

   Conclusion. I am looking for better words for different kinds of experiences. But I cant always find a new words so I recombine words and ACCEPT MY CONTRADICTIONS. I conclude the experiment is inconclusive.

   And what kind of 'I" is that ‘I’ that makes that inconclusive conclusion?

   It is an ‘I’ with access to a vast memory system.

   “People who build castles in the air do not, for the most part accomplish much, it is true, but every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air…”-Charles S. Peirce

   

9. I’m not sure what to make of them either, Marco, and I would not recommend my experience to anyone. Being neurologically atypical has been a great source of pain and suffering. I had OBEs at a very early age, related to trauma. I was one of those people who could float to the top of the ceiling during violent episodes. I also consider these traumas rehearsals for more creative episodes that I have reported here, albeit with great reluctance. What has been most difficult for me is to reconcile my onw first person experience with the consensual reality which declares my experience unreal. The ability to stay true to what you know to be true is a challenge when you live in a society seduced by pseudo-science.

   Since there is a big taboo around these kinds of alternate realities, and so much nonsense , these so called para-normal experiences are too often labeled and dismissed. For me, they are quite normal. I have always been a deviant and as I get older the symptoms are getting worse.

   However, because it is important for many of us to jump start a more poly-phasic, visionary culture, I do share a few of the more uplifting ones. I do think God is queering humanity at the moment. This may appear to be porn to you, but to me it is often agony. I tend not to report the horrific but for every expansion there is often a big contraction.

   I think the biggest taboo is the warning Jesus gives," DO NOT THROW YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE." One should not, as Oscar Wilde said, interfere with natural ignorance.

   I take these experiences very seriously and I don’t play around with these forces as a parlor game or to get high. Once you confront your own shadow, you then are compelled to confront your culture’s shadow and eventually the species shadow. I had to master these experiences or be swept away by them, an ever present danger, as Gebser reminds us. It has been a life and death struggle. I hope future generations, who don’t live under the shadows we do, may have a different relationship to nature. I dedicate myself to that remote possibility.

   I imagine that if a enough people survive this ordeal, a new logic would arise, a VisionLogic could become the new norm. An inconceivable advance in our human development could occur as we shed our fear of death, balance the triune brain, explore deep time, adjust to the increase in energy.

   Here is a good discussion on the differences between lucid dreams and OBEs, by two practitioners I respect.

   Also Jeff Kripal’s new book is coming out soon. The descriptions he offers and the complications such experience create is quite compelling. He opens up a very deep space. He predicts, and I imagine he is right, that a new religious age is emerging.
   

10. A View From Nowhere.

    At the risk of appearing incredibly delusional I offer up this report as an update to the previous inquiry. I am keenly aware of the risk of trying to operationalize the magic powers that are being manifested in this humble servant. After this report I hope I can let go of the pressure to explain these para-normal events for they have made me feel quite inadequate.

    I theorize that ‘we’, the royal ‘we’, are creating the conditions but are not in any way in control of these experiences. This is a beneficial experience and I imagine that such experience is available to everyone, and it is my belief that it would be a great delight for everyone to develop their own Vison Logics and find an appropriate time and place to make this happen and in the most ecological way, to gather the harvests.

    9/30
    I performed skull breathing, a Vajrayana practice, in a sitting posture for twenty minutes. Lying on my right side, relaxed, I felt something Other take over. The breathing pattern changed, there was a shallow, rapid, panting breath, for a minute followed by a deep and long inhalation and exhalation, and this pattern continued for a long time, and then a new development occurred.

    On the exhalation at the very end of it, when there was no air in the lungs, the most unusual sounds emerged, high pitches repeated for a long time, and they had the sound quality of Mandarin, strange, foreign diphthongs, operatic , the sounds emanate from the head area, high soprano, doing something almost like coloratura, light and ethereal and this I could not do consciously, for I am a baritone and this is outside my vocal ability to pull off. And the sounds continued even as I stopped breathing. There was no inhale or exhale but the sounds continued to be made, hovering around my head, with vibrating over tones.

    I was in a conscious physical state with these sounds coming through and feeling exalted. I felt this was a totally autonomous Other than my own intelligence, which was using my anatomy and physiology in ways that ‘I’ cannot do, for an essentially aesthetic purpose. I felt a sense of awe and wonder and surrender but not at all like submission. I could have stopped the unfolding of this event but would not do so. I felt I was held within a great benevolent energetic field, a current of vitality, and quite subtle and infinitely gentle. My metaphor here is of being caressed by an ancient, invisible, musical/ linguistic intelligence and that my body was being explored, and that sounds were being produced that were one of a kind.

    I kept thinking thank you, thank you, thank you…which I repeated in English and internally not wanting to interfere with the vocalization which was quite physical. I was grateful to this co-intelligence and I felt I was being upgraded into a more perfect union.

    Then there was strong third eye activation, a field of gold and red pixels and charts and diagrams and formulas, flowing, morphing in many varied colors of remarkable richness and clarity. There was a long stretch of these fantastic displays and then I went ‘out of the body’, floated above the bed and saw that it was empty.

    The room was in a bluish gray light and I felt that it was a simulation and that I was in a phase space between physical and extra-physical and I sent energy to where I knew, my physical body ought to be. I was able to be a healer of my own body-mind and it was as if there was a double operating, and on a continuum which was made up of subtle affective and relational qualities and ‘I’ was, although it was not in a visible condition to me from the space ‘I’ was viewing from, able to receive the intention. This is a sense of being and becoming simultaneously in different kinds of space. I am giver and receiver at the same time and with a sense of coherent agency. A view from nowhere.

    The pleasures of this experience lasted awhile and I was in such a complete sense of fulfillment that I felt able to relax and enjoy the sense of grace, for I felt that I have been given a marvelous experience and that though I wanted to share this I knew this was not up to me. I could only wish for others that they too would be a vehicle for such grace, and I felt an overwhelming sense that all would be well as I was released from the constraints of physical form. My intention is to serve.

    I feel that a new cycle is starting, a finer quality of attention, and a capacity to take no view or many views all at the same time. I will continue to chop wood and carry water.

    As I have finished this report, I register the norms of the ordinary human condition, the coffee is good, there is a cool breeze and I have a slightly stiff neck. Quite ordinary state of body mind. I feel I have done my duty and externalized this process and can now return to hermit mode. Thanks, whoever may be tuning in, for your kind attention.

16 more replies