Showing posts with label order. Show all posts
Showing posts with label order. Show all posts

Sunday, May 17, 2015

In All Chaos There is a Cosmos – Carl Jung



“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the “personal unconscious.” But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious”. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion… In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves… We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

Motherlove… is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.

Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret. Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?

The grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science… but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practible.

For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness.”

~Carl Jung~


https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/in-all-chaos-there-is-a-cosmos-carl-jung/

Monday, March 23, 2015

Wholeness: A Coherent Approach to Reality – David Bohm

“I think the difficulty is this fragmentation.. All thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. That comes about because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be effecting anything but just telling you the way things are. Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it… Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.”



 “We are internally related to everything, not [just] externally related. Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole, we take in the whole, and we act toward the whole. Whatever we have taken in determines basically what we are.

I think the difficulty is this fragmentation, first of all. Everybody, all thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. It’s extremely hard to break into that.

But that comes about primarily because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be effecting anything but just telling you “the way things are.” Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it.

Let’s take a problem like pollution, or the ecology. See, the ecology in itself is not a problem. It works perfectly well by itself. Its due to us, right? It’s a problem because we are thinking in certain ways by breaking it up and each person is doing his own thing.

Therefore the ecological problem is due to thought, right? But thought thinks it’s a problem out there and I must solve it. That doesn’t make sense because simultaneously thought is doing all the things which make the problem and then tries to do another set of activities to try and overcome it. See, it doesn’t stop doing the things which are making the ecological problem, or the national problem, or whatever the problem is.

The earth is one household really, but we are not treating it that way, so that’s the first step in economics is to say the earth is one household and all that depends on, its all one you see…

Now, the implicate order would help us to see that, to see everything enfolds, everybody, not merely depends on everybody, but actually everybody is everybody in a deeper sense. See, we are the earth because all our substance comes from the earth and goes back. I mean, its wrong to say its an environment, just surrounding us. That would be like the brain regarding the stomache as part of its environment.

The word com-passion is to feel together, and if people have the same feeling together, they are responsible for each other, then you have compassion.

I don’t think that there is such a thing as original sin. I think it has developed more and more with the growth of our society. There is no evidence that people in a hunter/gatherer society were all that competitive. But the more you made society big and you had organization, and you had to get to the top, and people on the bottom would suffer. There was a drive to compete, naturally. It’s not a weakness, it’s a mistake.

So the first thing we have to do, in the long run, is to look at our way of thinking, which has developed over so many thousands of years. I don’t think it was the original way of thinking of the human race at all, but for many complex reasons it came about.

Now, that means that people have to participate, to make a cooperative effort, to have a dialogue, a real dialogue, in which we will not merely exchange opinions, but actually listen deeply to the views of other people, without resistance.

And we cannot do this if we hold to our own opinion and resist the other. It doesn’t mean we should accept the other, but we have to be able to look at all the opinions and suspend it, as it were, in front of us, without carrying them out, without supressing them.

Wholeness is an attitude or an approach, but can be given a scientific realization, because of relativity and quantum theory, we can if we wish look on the world as a whole.

Consciousness is really our most immediate experience of this implicate order. You may think of nets of consciousness that are finer and finer, or we may think of capturing finite aspects of the implicate order. I think there is an intelligence [in the Universe] that is implicit there, a kind of intelligence unfolds. The source of intelligence is not necessarily the brain, you see, but much more unfolding of the whole. Now, the question of whether or not you want to call it God, well, that depends on what you mean by the word. Taking it as a personal God might restrict it, in a way.

I think science has begun to replace religion as the major source of the world view, and therefore, if science takes a fragmentary world view it will have a profound effect on consciousness.

Science is whatever people make of it, science has changed over the ages and it is different now from a few hundred years ago, and it could be different again. There is no intrinsic reason why science must necessarily be about measurement. That is another historical development that has come about over the last few centuries. It is entirely contingent and not absolutely necessary.

Einstein eventually moved toward a view of field theory where everything was one field, all fields merging, so it was a step toward wholeness. It was a limited step, but still it was the beginning.

Wholeness is not a place you can get to, wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. It’s a way. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.

But Nature has been tremendously affected by our way of thinking on the earth. Nature is now being destroyed. There is very little left on the earth which wasn’t affected by how we were thinking.

[If we have coherence] we will produce the results we intend rather than the results we don’t intend. That’s the first big change. Then we will be more orderly, harmonious, we will be happier. I think we can put all that in there. But the major source of unhappiness [on our planet] is that we are incoherent and therefore are producing results that we don’t really want, and then trying to overcome them while we keep on producing them.”

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

An Interview with David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm FRS (December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American theoretical physicist who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, philosophy of mind, and neuropsychology. He is considered to be one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century.

Bohm advanced the view that the old Cartesian model of reality (that there were two interacting kinds of substance - mental and physical) was limited, in the light of developments in quantum physics. He developed in detail a mathematical and physical theory of implicate and explicate order to complement it. He also believed that the working of the brain, at the cellular level, obeyed the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought was distributed and non-localised in the way that quantum entities do not readily fit into our conventional model of space and time.

Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this his epistemology mirrored his ontological viewpoint.[5] Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was targeted during the McCarthy era, leading him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian, then a British, citizen.

His main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...


Sunday, February 15, 2015

The Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (or, more commonly, the Golden Dawn) was a magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced theurgy and spiritual development. It has been one of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism.

Concepts of magic and ritual at the center of contemporary traditions, such as Wicca and Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn.

The three founders, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers were Freemasons and members of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.). Westcott appears to have been the initial driving force behind the establishment of the Golden Dawn.

The Golden Dawn system was based on hierarchy and initiation like the Masonic Lodges; however women were admitted on an equal basis with men. The "Golden Dawn" was the first of three Orders, although all three are often collectively referred to as the "Golden Dawn". The First Order taught esoteric philosophy based on the Hermetic Qabalah and personal development through study and awareness of the four Classical Elements as well as the basics of astrology, tarot divination, and geomancy. The Second or "Inner" Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold), taught proper magic, including scrying, astral travel, and alchemy. The Third Order was that of the "Secret Chiefs", who were said to be highly skilled; they supposedly directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Chiefs of the Second Order.

Hermetic Qabalah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Qabalah

Four Classical Elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Elements

Tarot Divination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_divination

Scrying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying

Astral Travel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection

Alchemy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

Geomancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomancy




The foundational documents of the original Order of the Golden Dawn, known as the Cipher Manuscripts, are written in English using Trithemius cipher. The manuscripts give the specific outlines of the Grade Rituals of the Order and prescribe a curriculum of graduated teachings that encompass the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology, occult tarot, geomancy, and alchemy.

Cypher Manuscripts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Manuscripts

Trithemius Cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trithemius_cipher

According to the records of the Order, the manuscripts passed from Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, a Masonic scholar, to the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford, whom British occult writer Francis King describes as the fourth founder (although Woodford died shortly after the Order was founded). The documents did not excite Woodford, and in February 1886 he passed them on to Freemason William Wynn Westcott, who managed to decode them in 1887. Westcott, pleased with his discovery, called on fellow Freemason Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers for a second opinion. Westcott asked for Mathers' help to turn the manuscripts into a coherent system for lodge work. Mathers in turn asked fellow Freemason William Robert Woodman to assist the two, and he accepted. Mathers and Westcott have been credited with developing the ritual outlines in the Cipher Manuscripts into a workable format. Mathers, however, is generally credited with the design of the curriculum and rituals of the Second Order, which he called the Rosae Rubae et Aureae Crucis ("Ruby Rose and Golden Cross" or the RR et AC).

more can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn