I'd be especially interested to know what Andy thinks about this post. I'd
urge anyone familiar with Jung, Campbell and Wilber to chime in as well.
First, a little joke I heard today...
Did you hear that George W. Bush's mother-in-law lost $8,000 on her Enron
stock? That explain the gash on his face. : )
Please let me begin by asking every reader, especially the old-timers, to be
ready to re-think some things and maybe even to let go of some long-held
views. Its not easy. I'll present just two main ideas about the third level.
One is about individuals and giants. The other is about the age and depth of
the third level. Hope they interest you.
The social level is about society, right? Its about the "giant", the
collective, right? And this is contrasted with the intellectual level, which
is about the individual, right?
No. Its not right. This is one of the main misconceptions about the 3rd
level. Collectivity and individuality both exist in both levels. The
scientific method, for example, absolutely requires many sets of eyeballs
and peer review. Science is clearly a intellectual activity. Sure,
philosophers and scientists are individuals but they both need groups and
institutions to function properly. And social evolution requires the efforts
of individuals, such as the case of the brujo.
In fact, as Ken Wilber points out, everything in the universe is both an
individual entity AND part of a larger collective system. Its a basic
feature of reality. I would challenge anyone to think of something that
defies this notion. So please, take the idea that the battle between social
and intellectual values is essentially a battle between collective and
individual values, write it down on a piece of paper, crumple it up into a
ball and flush it down the toilet. Its poop. Get rid of it. Ahhhh. What a
relief.
Social level values are in every individual human being. They go far beyond
social institutions, conventions and traditions, far beyond issues of power,
status, money, survival, and those cops and soldiers with their guns. These
are just some of the most conspicuous features of the social level. It goes
way deeper than that. When we talk about social level values, we're talking
about everything that's been produced by the last 100,000 years of cultural
evolution. The agents of cutting egde evolution in this period were not
philosophers and scientists, they were shamans, the artists and
storytellers. This period produced stuff like language, stories, myths,
religions, political hierarchies, social traditions, and all kinds of
invisible motivations that inform (form from within) us as individual to
this very day. You know,... French culture exists, therefore Descartes
thinks, therefore he is.
My mind's got a mind of it own.
Takes me out a walking when I'd rather be at home.
Takes me out to parties when I'd rather be alone.
Oh, my mind's got a mind of its own. (Jimmy Dale Gilmore - Zen country
musician)
There is a good reason why the 3rd level seems so enigmatic. The existence
of SOM's old mind/body problem helps to point out how invisible the 3rd
level can be. Subjects are minds. Objects are bodies and never the twian
shall meet. Or so it seemed until very recently. Thanks to guys like Jung
and Pirsig we can begin to see that there is more than just minds and
bodies. There's a third thing in between. I mean, it seems pretty clear to
me that the unconcious mind, which is effectively the source and well spring
of all myths, religions and all sorts of non-intellectual and unconcious
motivations, is one of the most powerful and mysterious features of the
social level. Its one of the things that have evolved in the last 100,000
years. Its not intellect and its not biology. The unconscious mind is
somewhere in between and connects the two. Mind/body problem solved. Or
rather, dis-solved.
And we all still live with it everyday, weather we know it or not. We
inherit it in the same way that we inherit our biological structures. I know
Jungian and post-Jungian psychology has it detractors, but don't be fooled.
The discovery of the unconscious, the collective unconscious and of
archetypes is just as profound as Darwin's theory of evolution or
Copernicus' discovery of heliocentric solar system. Its the kind of thing
that causes us to re-think things in radical ways. The meaning of Jung's
ideas is still unfolding right now in our lifetime. Mythologists like Joseph
Campbell and Robert Graves did quite a bit in more recent years to expand on
the things Jung was saying. Quite simply, myths express social values in
non-intellectual symbolic language.
More another day, hopefully in response to other posts on this topic. Thanks
for your time.
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:48 BST