Thursday, March 1, 2012

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Parts 22 and 23

By Brian George

22

To the radioactivity of an object out of mind each detail of one’s memory is a screen. Quite suddenly, as though no time had passed, the whole of history weighs no more than a feather. It is once more possible to review one's death on video. Again, the music of the spheres is audible, or even overwhelmingly loud. There are no hypnotic fields to block access to the macrocosm. If a tribe of watchers appears to be sitting on one's head, you can rest assured that this is purely a coincidence.

23

Gaps open. There are conflicts among the forces that govern the microcosm and the macrocosm. Scientists now compete to develop a Unified Field Theory—or a Theory of Everything, as it is sometimes called—that will unify the principles of relativity with those of quantum mechanics. No one knows what the new universe will look like, or who will discover the theory, or what strange games it will play with our consciousness, but many do believe that such a theory will exist in the nest 20 or so years.

It is tempting to think that the Human Consciousness Project could be brought to some similar resolution. The ancestral war between the subject and the object would end not with a bang but with a wedding. The neocortex would be transubstantiated. Dance would spread like a virus through the Luddite version of the World Wide Web. With their planetary chanting, cyborgs would awaken every megalith at Stonehenge. Intellect would lift all symbols from the sewers of the Sargasso Sea.

The New World Order would not depend on oil, but, instead, on breath. Clones from a Calvinist think tank would give away their hearts, their car keys and their houses, as they ran to hug random derelicts on the street. Prosthetic limbs would attach themselves to torsos. Nanotechnocrats would free the great apes that were hung on the tree of recombinant knowledge.

These microcosmic adjustments would be good. It is more likely, however, that philosophy does not progress. Nagel is smart, but not necessarily more evolved than Plato. Parallel universes agree to disagree. An 11-dimensional superstring coordinates the agon. If consciousness grows from the discovery of a preexistent object—the knowledge guarded by the self, to which the other had systematically denied access to the ego—then the resolution would occur not in the future but in the past. A mysterious conjunction has already taken place.


(Illustration: Pierre Roy)

5 comments:

  1. "A mysterious conjunction has already taken place."

    This series has been quite thought-provoking, or maybe more accurately, wonder-provoking. I can't help wondering why there is such a pervasive feeling that subjectivity is somehow secondary to some ideal we hold as objectivity. Is it because subjectivity comes so naturally to us, while we hold objectivity as some ideal, some half-remembered pre-archetypal impression that endures from where we might have come? We feel what we cannot readily grasp must be something to which we must aspire? Do objects appear so concrete and primary precisely because our subjectivity is so powerful in coalescing them?

    "We are small, and for some strange reason see our smallness as unnatural... If, in fact, we were as stupid as we think, then we would have no urge to interrogate each law, or to test the world against our memory of its archetype."

    What if the human modality were like one of the universe's "senses", just as the sense of smell is one of our senses. Our sense of smell is very good at one mode of perception and can't possibly imagine there could anything like sight or touch. Even if we explained sight or touch to the sense of smell, it would have no capacity to fully comprehend them. So the universe's "sense of human" is a limited instrument of perception that has no capacity to fully comprehend or experience other modalities. While the block of stinky cheese that is consciousness is right there for us to see and taste, we can only experience its smell.

    Is the universe's sense of human is its sense of humor? :)

    "Perhaps the very lack of a fixed meaning is what allows us to create an individual relationship to meaning."

    Meaning is subjective, cultural, intellectual. If true, then I wonder if there is a range of meanings that are available to us. Can we creating new meaning out of whole cloth? Or are we anchored to our archetypes? If we jump out of the track and create an utterly new meaning, does a new archetype echo out to the ages yet to come?

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  2. "If consciousness grows from the discovery of a preexistent object—the knowledge guarded by the self, to which the other had systematically denied access to the ego—then the resolution would occur not in the future but in the past."

    Whoah! Call up all the scientists -- The truth can't set us free, because if it could, it would have done so already!

    Resurrect Plato; He's about to be surprised.

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  3. Hi Lion,

    For the Ancients, the ontological point of convergence was projected backwards into the past—onto a period of higher civilization, now present as an echo within stories, onto the age of the gods, in which the three worlds were in greater communication, or onto some plane of existence now entirely lost to view. We Moderns, on the other hand, project this point into the future, whether specifically, in terms of 2012, the Marxist Workers Paradise, Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere,” or an imminent digital “singularity,” We believe that we are evolving towards this point, rather than devolving from some already perfect sphere. In part, these alternate perspectives may correspond to different periods in the precession of the equinox.

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  4. Hi Zympht,

    Much thanks for your wonderful comment. So raise so many important points that I hardly know where to begin. Since I am in the middle of a very difficult revision at the moment, I will have to limit myself to responding to a few of your points in this post, with further discussion to follow a bit later.

    You wrote, “I can't help wondering why there is such a pervasive feeling that subjectivity is somehow secondary to some ideal we hold as objectivity. Is it because subjectivity comes so naturally to us, while we hold objectivity as some ideal, some half-remembered pre-archetypal impression that endures from where we might have come?”

    When I was attempting to decipher Gurdjieff about 15 years ago, I was surprised to come across his assertion that there was, in fact, an “objective” plane of consciousness. By this, he seemed to refer to something different than the general sense of unity that is described by many teachers. He seemed to be saying that one could see the world from a circular viewpoint that contains both the “subjective” and “objective” modes—that one could see the world, so to speak, as from both sides of the mirror. Few philosophers would give any credibility to such an assertion. Nonetheless, it resonated for me, and, while perhaps not being technically true, it pointed me in a pregnant direction.

    “What can we actually know about the world, and how can we know it with any certainty, and how can we know that we know?” Since Aristotle, these questions have been at the heart of philosophical debate. All of these are questions that are very much worth asking, but, after 2400 years of being preoccupied with them—in manner that makes Reason that prime vehicle of exploration, while discounting any and all raw interdimensional data—I can’t help but feel that much mainstream philosophy is approaching a dead end. It clings to the few puzzle parts that can be proven to be in hands, while discounting the 10,000 that make up the whole picture.

    Granted, no human being—while still alive at least—can see all of the 10,000 parts at once, but perhaps, on some level, there is a faint trace of the overall picture in our memory. The key thing may be asking a slightly different set of questions, and, in conjunction with this, being able to intuit where to look.

    You wrote, “Do objects appear so concrete and primary precisely because our subjectivity is so powerful in coalescing them?”

    We do, as subjects, seem to have an odd kind of vested interested in believing in the solidity of objects, and we go out of our way to give a great deal of our power to them, as well as to such objectified sources of authority as the Bible. On one level, perhaps this is because we know—and have deliberately forgotten—that the Earth is actually more disjunctive and unstable than it seems, and had experienced many cataclysms in the past. In science, the idea of geological “gradualism” has had a kind of magnetic appeal for this reason, while “catastrophism,” which it now seems more accurately describes the actual punctuation of Earth’s history, has been derided as fringe quackery. If only the Earth would stay put!

    One of my favorite painters is Giorgio de Chirico, the founder of “Metaphysical Painting,” and conceptual catalyst for Surrealism, who is famous for his paintings of manikins, mysterious objects, and haunted Italian squares. In his work, the idea of “the object” is always associated with a sense of strangeness and nostalgia. We know that we are seeing the petrified remnants of something far more complex, and more real, which was once, perhaps, fully alive.

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  5. "For the Ancients, the ontological point of convergence was projected backwards into the past- ..."

    I see it: The idea of Eden, the idea of Atlantis. I also see it in traditions that speak of "returning home," like Country Roads to West Virginia.

    I also see that we moderns look to the future, with exactly the examples you gave.

    What I don't understand is what you mean when you say that these two perspectives "correspond to different periods in the precession of the equinox."

    And what about -- "If consciousness grows from the discovery of a preexistent object—the knowledge guarded by the self, to which the other had systematically denied access to the ego—then the resolution would occur not in the future but in the past." ..?

    Oh, you are talking about the locus of --.. You are not doubting that the preexistent object can be publicly known -- you are saying that the nature of the discovery is the discovery of an immanent / preexisting reality.

    Am I understanding you rightly?

    If that is what you are saying, then I believe I understand. Scientists could never discover reality if there were not a preexisting reality to discover.

    The Eden story emphasizes the originality and naturalness of our wholeness. We are love.

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