John,
I doubt that you will be surprised if I somewhat disagree. I feel your
"immediate experience" is in danger of becoming an idol, also the
concept of the "lure" of DQ. You mitigate this somewhat in referring to
Wilber, and his warning of the pre/trans fallacy, but in fact, I suspect
that that is what you are implying: to gradually remove the accretions
of the intellect to return to an infantile paradise (I know,
oversimplifying, but I don't see what else you are offering).
Hence my recommendation of an exploration of differential mysticism, to
counter the tendency of the above toward idolatry. Also why I emphasize
the importance of SOT as being *on the way* to Enlightenment. When its
presuppositions (SOM) are displaced through never-ceasing
deconstruction, one's attachments to those presuppositions and their
unpleasant consequences is lessened. One is still "doing SOT" but with
ever-lessening egoic attachment to one's thinking. In this way thinking
becomes less of a tool and more its own reward. It is creativity like
any other, and that is freedom.
Again, it is not that one becomes Enlightened by thinking about it, but
that in purifying one's thinking one becomes less egoic. I suspect that
John Wren-Lewis was, before his near-death experience, a very fluid
thinker, which allowed him to be open to what happened to him, and not
run for shelter.
I am, you should note, fully agreeing with Wilber's quote about
Whitehead. And the highest level of our current state is the intellect,
so that is where we should direct our efforts, to see it working in all
the lower levels (well, I am ignoring art, but I would like to see
philosophy turn itself into an art form). This is Logos-philosophy,
which sees our intellect as a pale reflection of the Logos. Hence we
should not try to unravel it, but to purify it.
- Scott
John Beasley wrote:
> Hullo all,
>
> I have been playing with a few thoughts which are beginning to coalesce.
> Whether there is any quality in them remains to be seen. (I twice tried to
> post these to the forum and both times they disappeared, so some dynamic
> force obviously didn't like the first draft...)
>
> WARNING: High density of content. Adults only.
>
> We appear to live in two worlds, one time-constrained, the other timeless.
> Both are valid, though most of us experience only the world of time, and
> tend to view it as the 'real' world. The mystic, though, whose primary value
> is immediacy, experiences both the world of the timeless and our ordinary
> time-constrained world. Our ignorance of the immediate world of the mystic
> is obnubilation, which Wei Wu Wei defines as "an inability to perceive the
> obvious owing to a conditioned reflex, which causes us persistently to look
> in the wrong direction".
>
> Dynamic quality is encountered in the immediacy of experience. As children
> we experienced the dynamic almost constantly. But we learned to deny the
> obvious and to plan and hope and manipulate, which are future directed
> activities. This conditioning is self reinforcing, so that it becomes more
> and more difficult to simply be in the present, to be in touch with what is.
> Ultimately it may take a near death experience to bring us back to our
> senses, or perhaps not even that can shake our perceptual prison.
> Nonetheless, immediate experience still is, and while we may ignore or
> trivialize it, it can still reach us from time to time. Probably this
> happens many times a day, but typically we choose not to focus on these
> moments, or shrug them off.
>
> Static quality rules our time-bound existence. Memory and judgment create
> static values, which then dominate even our sensory input, so that
> increasingly we are aware only of what conforms to these time patterned
> values. These static values are not bogus or useless - they are what allow
> us to function in the world. But they do create problems for us, despite
> facilitating our everyday life. For a start, they are driven by powerful
> emotions, particularly fear, which were experienced as overwhelming in our
> early childhood when these patterns were established. Our neediness and fear
> cause us to constantly project upon the world fantasies of having our needs
> met, or having our fears realised. So both the egoic self that emerges from
> childhood, and the world it constructs, are mediated by these fantasies. The
> society we inhabit also reinforces these fantasies in particular ways, and
> so further influences our perceptions of what is.
>
> We can assume, if we take an evolutionary stance for a moment, that there
> has been some survival value in the development of our time sense, so that
> on balance the fear and need driven fantasies did work to protect us from
> some threats, and obtain for us some of the necessities of life. The
> question the mystic raises is whether there is any more to be gained through
> further development within time, or whether it is just this development that
> now constitutes our greatest difficulty?
>
> In the West we are living in a period when the presuppositions of our static
> value systems have been explored and formalised as never before. We see this
> most clearly in the sciences, but they permeate all our pursuits and
> scholarship. Language and mathematics and intellect are the tools, but also
> the straightjacket of this exploration. So the world of common sense is far
> more constrained than we care to imagine, and subject to fashions, including
> intellectual fashions, to which we are largely oblivious.
>
> During the last century our most eminent scientists have become aware of the
> limitations of science, and many have taken a mystic stance, acknowledging
> that science operates only in a narrow field, mathematically defined, that
> is incapable of resolving our issues and concerns at other levels. In
> particular, science is singularly unsuccessful in resolving disputes about
> value, since it attempts to take a value neutral stance in an attempt to
> more accurately explore the world. Since many values are indeed conditioned
> by individual fears and needs, and by learned social patterns, this attempt
> to eliminate values was helpful in freeing scince from social and religious
> bondage, but the limitations of this course are only now becoming apparent.
>
> Gregory Bateson in his "Last Lecture", made one of the most helpful comments
> in information theory, when he said that "information is difference that
> makes a difference". He elaborates that of the infinite number of
> differences immanent in any situation, very few become information. To do
> that, they have to "enter into an information processing system. This is
> basic to our notion of what is life, our notion of what is death. It is
> basic for religion."
>
> I want to stress that the first "difference" in his statement is 'different'
> to the second. The first is a matter of analysis, the second of value.
> 'Life' and 'religion' are value bound terms. In effect he is pointing to
> Whitehead's view, as I interpret it, that value operates in the opposite
> direction to evolution. That is, from the scientific perspective, value
> emerges in some way from the evolutionary algorithm, whereas for Whitehead,
> (whose general argument I have appended, in the form developed by Ken
> Wilber), we can only understand evolution by starting with the highest
> values accessible to us, and seeing how far down the levels they extend.
> 'Analytic' difference only becomes significant in the presence of 'value'
> difference, and the value realm is primary. Or put another way, there can be
> no information without an information processing system, and such a system
> is fundamentally a value system. [This seems to fit well with Pirsig's
> general argument.]
>
> "Process theology" is the name given to a theology that grew directly from
> the thought of Whitehead, and which stressed the centrality of processes
> over things. Value meant that the ultimate aim of all occasions (to
> Whitehead, all reality is composed of 'actual occasions' having a mental and
> a physical pole) is 'beauty', a certain harmony of proportions and
> relations, while evil is the thwarting of this aim - the mutually
> obstructive character of things. "Salvation means a progressive response to
> the lure of God toward the realization of beauty, and the peace which is the
> preservation of beauty." (James M Lapsley, Salvation and Health, p57)
>
> The use of the word 'lure' implies an attractor, and while I have problems
> with traditional God talk, this is the next step in fleshing out a way of
> understanding in which value has priority. Pirsig mentions a 'level of art',
> and more or less abandons it, but Whitehead and the process theologians had
> already developed a way of talking (albeit theological) which develops this
> further. 'Beauty' is an attractor, which establishes a pull in a certain
> direction.
>
> Wilber uses similar language when he asserts that "deeper and wider contexts
> exert a pull, a telos, on present limited contexts." (SES p78) While today's
> scientific orthodoxy is to see everything pushed by the aftermath of the big
> bang, such a view is completely unable to talk meaningfully about the value
> issues that 'matter' to us. At best they are regarded as epiphenomena, not
> really real, as in Ryle's 'Concept of Mind'. Which is why Chalmers'
> suggestion that to understand consciousness may actually require us to add a
> new fundamental to science has created such controversy.
>
> Bateson, in developing what he called a 'biological epistemology', used the
> understanding of Fechner and Weber that mental life is dependant upon the
> ability to receive news from the outside (this is very SOM jargon, but bear
> with me) and this supposes that we can discriminate differences that are in
> fact ratios. "This means that our entire mental life is one degree more
> abstract than the physical world around us", says Bateson; "we deal in ...
> derivatives, and not in quantities - in ratios between quantities but not in
> quantities. This, you see, is a bridge between mind and body, or between
> mind and matter, but, at the same time, it differentiates mind from matter."
> He goes on to show how everyday language is not very helpful in establishing
> relationships, and more importantly, if you were to begin looking at the
> world "with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with
> concepts which the biologists don't look at at all. You will meet with
> beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world
> that you as a living creature live in. It's not a new idea that living
> things have imminent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a
> scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and
> crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live." (A
> Sacred Unity, p311) Bateson seems to be saying that if we could 'cleanse the
> doors of perception' (in Blake's apt phrase), we would encounter a reality
> that is value based.
>
> To pull all this together, it seems that the value patterns that obtain in a
> time-constrained world are valid enough in their own sphere, but become a
> prison as they dominate and overwhelm the dynamic values that are
> encountered in immediate experience. This occlusion of the dynamic is
> assisted by the strong emotional substrate of the static values, and the
> warping effect of this on perception.
>
> Pirsig views static and dynamic as a conceptual division, and the values are
> viewed as different but equally necessary. I am arguing that the static has
> a tendency to overwhelm the dynamic, and that recovery of access to dynamic
> quality is not simple. Many people have found meditation to be valuable, not
> least in reducing the eternal chatter of our 'monkey minds', accessing our
> alpha and theta rhythms and the calm they create, and so on, but the mystics
> suggest there are much more difficult issues in regaining access to the
> dynamic. Both the egoic self and the constructed world must be unravelled if
> we are to regain the immediacy of access to the dynamic, which we enjoyed as
> children. While this can occur (rarely) through a spontaneous event such as
> a near death experience, as John Wren-Lewis testifies, mostly it is a slow
> and often painful process of inquiring into the patterns that dominate our
> moment by moment existence, and which prevent us from being present. The
> pain is twofold, a working through of the childhood terrors that helped
> create these patterns, and the loss of all time constrained benefits, which
> equates with death. One of the losses is our fiercely defended set of social
> and intellectual values, which for most of us are so closely identified with
> our selves that they may have more value for us than life itself. They too
> must go, if immediacy is to be regained.
>
> Such a painful process is not immediately attractive. Traditionally it was
> expected that candidates for mystic enlightenment would be mature people who
> had lost their faith in social or intellectual values to offer meaning or
> any real reward. In this regard, it was thought that those who had
> experienced success in worldly endeavours made the best candidates, since
> they were less likely to believe that just a bit more success would resolve
> their issues. It is worth asking then, how it is that anyone would take this
> path? Here the lure of the deeper and wider contexts must be seen as the
> key. While the painful reality of time-constrained values can goad us into
> seeking something better, only the lure of the "dim apprehensions of things
> too obscure for ... existing language" (Whitehead, quoted by Pirsig in Lila,
> Ch 9) can guide us through such a dificult and extended process. Pirsig says
> these dim apprehensions are dynamic quality itself.
>
> This may be an over simplification. Wilber argues against any simple
> transition from "the divisive and analytic and rational and nasty ego,
> straight to the expansive and liberated and and cosmic God consciousness"
> (BHE p 151), as a variant of what he calls the pre/trans fallacy, which is
> to assume that anything that is not ego is post egoic enlightenment, when in
> reality it may be regression to an ugly pre-egoic state. Wilber argues that
> "there are stages in all growth, including human. These basic stages - I
> have listed nine of them, but that's just a summary - are based on massive
> amounts of empirical, phenomenological, interpretive, contemplative, and
> cross-cultural evidence." (Ibid) If he is correct then dynamic quality
> itself is layered and structured in ways that can be teased out. The lure is
> to a dynamic unfolding as the individual progresses holarchically through a
> patterned sequence that is roughly similar for each of us, and which cannot
> be bypassed. It may even be that the near death transition that John
> Wren-Lewis reports could only occur to one who had already reached a high
> level of moral and spiritual development. More evidence is needed on this
> point.
>
> To sum up, I want to emphasise the significance of time in the
> static/dynamic split that Pirsig suggests. I argue that a balance between
> static and dynamic values is not readily achievable, due to the tendency of
> static patterns to dominate our experience, excluding awareness of the
> dynamic. I draw on the conclusions of a number of authors to support the
> idea that quality is experienced as a lure away from static patterns, and I
> use the experience of mystics to suggest that even though this lure exists,
> it remains a very difficult path to undo the conditioning of the static,
> time based quality that ultimately imprisons us in an unsatisfying
> existence. I agree with Wilber that a holarchical developmental sequence
> seems best to describe the process that can lead to a reintegration of the
> dynamic in our moment by moment experience, which is effectively outside
> time. I would argue that the lure of quality is the tug towards a time free
> experience of the dynamic, this lure being felt in the time bonded arena of
> the static patterns of value that build an egoic self and its world, and
> that it is only through the laborious and often painful undoing of early
> conditioning that we again are enabled to access immediacy freely. With this
> achieved, it is now possible to return to the 'marketplace' of time
> constrained human activity, and to live in the world but not of it.
>
> The human sequence thus implied begins with an immersion in immediate
> experience in early infancy, with this immediacy gradually lost and replaced
> by an increasingly rigid entrapment in time-constrained egoic behaviour,
> which facilitates survival but drives out the immediacy which permits the
> experience of the dynamic. In some people, disenchantment with this sterile
> reality, together with the lure of the dynamic, will assist them to move
> through a difficult and often painful examination of their behaviour, which
> results in the clearing away of the static constructs and a new and deeper
> experience of immediacy, which if stabilised can allow a new balance of
> static and dynamic values to occur. These static values would be
> instrumental in character, rather than driven by needs and fantasies as in
> the past.
>
> If anyone has followed this rather dense thesis to this point, I would be
> interested in your response.
>
> John B
>
> [My previous posting on Whitehead, as interpreted by Wilber, follows.]
>
> Whitehead "said that if you want to know the general principles of
> existence, you must start at the top and use the highest occasions to
> illumine the lowest, not the other way around, which of course is the common
> reductionist reflex. So he said you could learn more about the world from
> biology than you could from physics; and so he introduced the organismic
> viewpoint which has revolutionized philosophy. And he said you could learn
> more from social psychology than from biology, and then introduced the
> notion of things being a society of occasions - the notion of compound
> individuality. Naturally, he held that the apex of exemplary pattern was
> God, and it was in God, the ultimate compound individual, that you would
> ground any laws or patterns found reflected in reduced versions in the lower
> dimensions of psychology, then biology, then physics. The idea, which was
> brilliant in its statement, was that you first look to the higher levels for
> the general principles of existence, and then, by subtraction, you see how
> far down the hierarchy they extend. You don't start at the bottom and try to
> move up by addition of the lower parts, because some of the higher parts
> simply don't show up very well, or at all, on the lower rungs. Perhaps his
> favourite examples were creativity and love - God, for Whitehead, was
> especially love and creativity. But in the lower dimensions, the creativity
> gets reduced, appearing in humans as a modicum of free will but being almost
> entirely lost by the time you get to atomic particles... So Whitehead, by
> looking to illuminate the lower by the higher, and not vice versa, could
> make creativity the general principle, and then understand determinism as a
> partial restriction or reduction of primary creativity. If, on the other
> hand, you start at the bottom, then you have to figure out a way to get free
> will and creativity out of rocks, and it just won't work."
>
>
>
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