(Reading this late and out of order...) Glad to see your clarity on the brain-deadness of "left-right" analysis. It's something my wife's had to put up with me grumbling about every time it comes up in news reporting. The US is experiencing an autogolpe. Having a better framework than "left-right" to understand it may be critical to its reversal. The plotters have convinced their core followers that the entire humanist and scientific corpus is noting but a "communist" "woke mind virus." Their framing much depends on a "left-right" map that denies a truer comprehension of alignments with the world(s).
Your writing is hard to follow. Lol! But this may be because I don't have any expertise in philosophy. (What even is ontology????) Ultimately, though, I think I get the feel, the gist, of what you are trying to say and maybe that is the most important part. Thanks.
Ah, I can see your three-world model more clearly now. And I see that it sits apart from what psychotopology offers, at least at this point in the two domains’ development.
What I am working with is explicitly a morpho-topology of the soul, with the topology governing the universal patterns and the morphology being how those universals are manifested uniquely in each person. It has taken me a lifetime to uncover, and now one of my tasks is to discover how this underlying morpho-topology emerges from our more objective systems and shapes our collective societies.
It’s too much for me to do alone, and I would love to find a collaborator in this. This collaborator would be someone willing to dig into their own interior with depth and rigor, using psychotopology fieldwork, in order to directly experience their own inner structure well enough to understand what is there. They would also need to carry a strong comprehension of existing philosophical frameworks, with a capacity to bend those frameworks to design something new that aligns better with the structure of life within us.
I offer this as an invitation to you, Jonathan, but I know how busy you must be, and so I offer this as much or more to anyone reading.
Meanwhile, I look forward to digging into and absorbing the next essay in this series!
Soul is the idea that mind, a metaphor for the patterns in the brain, can exist outside its material substrate and there is no mechanism by which that is possible. It is not and cannot be a meaningful idea.
Consider the idea of spirit - the innermost, most necessary attributes of a thing which distinguish it from all other things
As a lover of words I feel more the music and mystic quality of philosophical terms than the formal meanings and so I appreciate the brief asides in keeping me on track with the argument. I doubt I shall ever have the time to read, assimilate and synthesise all the literature so I rely on others like yourself and Iain McGilchrist's expression of intuition being my best flawed tool to judge the truth.
My intuition here is that the idea of reality being a malleable thing is true if not blindingly obvious when you free yourself from the concrete notions we grew up with. It is tempting to suggest several reasons why we might - at least in the Western traditions - have clung so tightly to the idea that there is a fixed reality but that is the past and there are an increasing number of people achieving power recently that have cottoned on to the truth that we can create our own reality - for good or ill and are busy getting on with it.
But does the "reality" thus imagined or "created" take into account that this is primarily a water world. Our bodies are structured water and comprised of 70/80 percent water.
That having been said please check out this very sobering essay on the importance of water.
With you all the way on water. The reality issue is more complex.
First, the view which feels most coherent to me at present is a non -binary one: that there is no clear distinction between what is real as we commonly understand that term and what is ethereal. Both exist but there is a wide area in between where it becomes less easy to be definite.
Second, that according to the relatively recent advances in quantum field theory everything is expressible as a wave in a cosmos of consciousness out of which can emerge temporary forms that, from another perspective, can have particle-like properties which are the things we appreciate as real and tangible.
Water embodies this idea in many ways through the distortion of reflections on its surface, the impossibility of finding a discreet volume of it within a larger volume, its ability to take on many shapes and transform into vapour or solids - you get the picture.
I’m no physicist so I am relying on my intuition to evaluate this idea and remain open to alternatives. For me it’s a journey towards the truth - a destination I hope I shall never arrive at (in this life at least) as I am enjoying the ride!
I REALLY like this, Jonathan. Partly because I have been so moved by Cynthia Bourgeault, and partly because you call on so many others that I have met on my journey through life. However, while I, like you, am keen to distinguish what is ‘real’ and what isn’t, I’m reminded of what Douglas Hofstadter writes in “I am a Strange Loop”, “We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers. ... In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
Thankyou Jonathan . I only half understand some if this but what I do understand I found very interesting and thought provoking and was reassured by references to Cynthia bourgeault and Ken Wilber whose books I have read . I must go back and read your first post now . Such important writing.
Actuality is the universe as it is beyond the perception of a mind
Reality is the aspects of the universe accessible to a mind which comes in two flavours, the unique filtered perspective we each are, and the consensus version.
In a recently posted video, Otto Scharmer adds something that could supplement this discussion of threeness. He calls it “Fourth-Person Knowing.” Here is the link:
The Velveteen Rabbit is the beautifully simple truth of what is real, the capacity of love to conquer aging and even death. I like the threesome of the key, the lock and the experienced burglar. As far as what is happening in the US, yes, things can quickly get worse and I pray that there are some experienced burglars who have the wisdom and courage to find the keys and break the locks before they are irredeemably broken by the wealthy liars who don’t care about goodness, beauty or truth.
The beginning of three is simple, so simple that there is an obstinance of meaning.
We can not unlearn the square, nor the singularity, no the required competition to leave the family behind and work in the smoke of patriarchy.
The mind is a set belief.
If I say ‘balance’, the colonial has a Bipolarity in mind on a flat earth sheet of paper, **a** or **b** and a ^ fulcrum.
Reality is different, there is **yaw* or yawn, the both are the same. We are balancing a disc, not a stick, the disc is the shadow of the sphere.
Ok, how do you balance a sphere, either it spins on an axis in space without a floor, or it requires three points of our *gravity*.
You know what, even Ai is giving me the words of assistances in three, so the self is never alone.
1+1 are two external objects in objective rationality as taught.
1+1 are three when the self is included in *natural* observable phenomena, we are not separate of the world, we are of it.
The act of verbing is to see the objective solid of a living thing, that is a tree, yet to learn what of tree ing, is possible to discover the living unknown of ‘how to tree’ better, (in family) don’t cut down the tree house, objectively, yet learn of what it is treeing with a lifetime of our observation, required.
So, the world of speed has no time, and the rocket class human knows nothing about life or how to sustains it.
Thousands upon thousands of people died for the new world, all their books and manufacture, failed of the new land because they could not bare to ask of directions, nor learn of humility of an abundance so alien, it was impossible to survive the indifference.
The three body problem, remains the three mind problem of duopolistic rationality, teachers know everything, experience lets them down.
There is no science nor art in school that can criticize the planned obsolescence.
I know a remarkable Buddhist Spiritual Master who once asked - have you ever tasted and licked the moon or felt it resting on the small of your back.
He further suggested that when you have fell/comtemplated the moon resting in the small of your back for a considerable amount of time, then, and only then are you qualified to make pronouncements about the paradoxical nature of Reality
(Reading this late and out of order...) Glad to see your clarity on the brain-deadness of "left-right" analysis. It's something my wife's had to put up with me grumbling about every time it comes up in news reporting. The US is experiencing an autogolpe. Having a better framework than "left-right" to understand it may be critical to its reversal. The plotters have convinced their core followers that the entire humanist and scientific corpus is noting but a "communist" "woke mind virus." Their framing much depends on a "left-right" map that denies a truer comprehension of alignments with the world(s).
Your writing is hard to follow. Lol! But this may be because I don't have any expertise in philosophy. (What even is ontology????) Ultimately, though, I think I get the feel, the gist, of what you are trying to say and maybe that is the most important part. Thanks.
Ah, I can see your three-world model more clearly now. And I see that it sits apart from what psychotopology offers, at least at this point in the two domains’ development.
What I am working with is explicitly a morpho-topology of the soul, with the topology governing the universal patterns and the morphology being how those universals are manifested uniquely in each person. It has taken me a lifetime to uncover, and now one of my tasks is to discover how this underlying morpho-topology emerges from our more objective systems and shapes our collective societies.
It’s too much for me to do alone, and I would love to find a collaborator in this. This collaborator would be someone willing to dig into their own interior with depth and rigor, using psychotopology fieldwork, in order to directly experience their own inner structure well enough to understand what is there. They would also need to carry a strong comprehension of existing philosophical frameworks, with a capacity to bend those frameworks to design something new that aligns better with the structure of life within us.
I offer this as an invitation to you, Jonathan, but I know how busy you must be, and so I offer this as much or more to anyone reading.
Meanwhile, I look forward to digging into and absorbing the next essay in this series!
Soul is the idea that mind, a metaphor for the patterns in the brain, can exist outside its material substrate and there is no mechanism by which that is possible. It is not and cannot be a meaningful idea.
Consider the idea of spirit - the innermost, most necessary attributes of a thing which distinguish it from all other things
Mm, it seems you and I mean different things by the word soul. Your idea of spirit seems essential, though, thanks for offering that.
It is literally essential - the essence of a person or thing - a literal minimum.
As a lover of words I feel more the music and mystic quality of philosophical terms than the formal meanings and so I appreciate the brief asides in keeping me on track with the argument. I doubt I shall ever have the time to read, assimilate and synthesise all the literature so I rely on others like yourself and Iain McGilchrist's expression of intuition being my best flawed tool to judge the truth.
My intuition here is that the idea of reality being a malleable thing is true if not blindingly obvious when you free yourself from the concrete notions we grew up with. It is tempting to suggest several reasons why we might - at least in the Western traditions - have clung so tightly to the idea that there is a fixed reality but that is the past and there are an increasing number of people achieving power recently that have cottoned on to the truth that we can create our own reality - for good or ill and are busy getting on with it.
But does the "reality" thus imagined or "created" take into account that this is primarily a water world. Our bodies are structured water and comprised of 70/80 percent water.
That having been said please check out this very sobering essay on the importance of water.
http://cribb.substack.com
With you all the way on water. The reality issue is more complex.
First, the view which feels most coherent to me at present is a non -binary one: that there is no clear distinction between what is real as we commonly understand that term and what is ethereal. Both exist but there is a wide area in between where it becomes less easy to be definite.
Second, that according to the relatively recent advances in quantum field theory everything is expressible as a wave in a cosmos of consciousness out of which can emerge temporary forms that, from another perspective, can have particle-like properties which are the things we appreciate as real and tangible.
Water embodies this idea in many ways through the distortion of reflections on its surface, the impossibility of finding a discreet volume of it within a larger volume, its ability to take on many shapes and transform into vapour or solids - you get the picture.
I’m no physicist so I am relying on my intuition to evaluate this idea and remain open to alternatives. For me it’s a journey towards the truth - a destination I hope I shall never arrive at (in this life at least) as I am enjoying the ride!
I REALLY like this, Jonathan. Partly because I have been so moved by Cynthia Bourgeault, and partly because you call on so many others that I have met on my journey through life. However, while I, like you, am keen to distinguish what is ‘real’ and what isn’t, I’m reminded of what Douglas Hofstadter writes in “I am a Strange Loop”, “We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers. ... In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
Thankyou Jonathan . I only half understand some if this but what I do understand I found very interesting and thought provoking and was reassured by references to Cynthia bourgeault and Ken Wilber whose books I have read . I must go back and read your first post now . Such important writing.
Just a quick high five, glad you continued, looking forward to part 3...
TLDR:
Actuality is the universe as it is beyond the perception of a mind
Reality is the aspects of the universe accessible to a mind which comes in two flavours, the unique filtered perspective we each are, and the consensus version.
In a recently posted video, Otto Scharmer adds something that could supplement this discussion of threeness. He calls it “Fourth-Person Knowing.” Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qxW2jm7CU
The Velveteen Rabbit is the beautifully simple truth of what is real, the capacity of love to conquer aging and even death. I like the threesome of the key, the lock and the experienced burglar. As far as what is happening in the US, yes, things can quickly get worse and I pray that there are some experienced burglars who have the wisdom and courage to find the keys and break the locks before they are irredeemably broken by the wealthy liars who don’t care about goodness, beauty or truth.
The beginning of three is simple, so simple that there is an obstinance of meaning.
We can not unlearn the square, nor the singularity, no the required competition to leave the family behind and work in the smoke of patriarchy.
The mind is a set belief.
If I say ‘balance’, the colonial has a Bipolarity in mind on a flat earth sheet of paper, **a** or **b** and a ^ fulcrum.
Reality is different, there is **yaw* or yawn, the both are the same. We are balancing a disc, not a stick, the disc is the shadow of the sphere.
Ok, how do you balance a sphere, either it spins on an axis in space without a floor, or it requires three points of our *gravity*.
You know what, even Ai is giving me the words of assistances in three, so the self is never alone.
1+1 are two external objects in objective rationality as taught.
1+1 are three when the self is included in *natural* observable phenomena, we are not separate of the world, we are of it.
The act of verbing is to see the objective solid of a living thing, that is a tree, yet to learn what of tree ing, is possible to discover the living unknown of ‘how to tree’ better, (in family) don’t cut down the tree house, objectively, yet learn of what it is treeing with a lifetime of our observation, required.
So, the world of speed has no time, and the rocket class human knows nothing about life or how to sustains it.
Thousands upon thousands of people died for the new world, all their books and manufacture, failed of the new land because they could not bare to ask of directions, nor learn of humility of an abundance so alien, it was impossible to survive the indifference.
The three body problem, remains the three mind problem of duopolistic rationality, teachers know everything, experience lets them down.
There is no science nor art in school that can criticize the planned obsolescence.
A comment on 1 + 1 is three.
Everyone is always involved in and dramatizing a three part process.
Identification Differentiation & Desire
Identification as a seeming separate someone.
Differentiation from all other seeming separate others and things.
Desire to either positively re-connect or to protect one's self from the seeming other
Yes, not include the self is an out of body projection. Every demand and every should can not be met, only pointed to.
The moon is cheese until further notice.
I know a remarkable Buddhist Spiritual Master who once asked - have you ever tasted and licked the moon or felt it resting on the small of your back.
He further suggested that when you have fell/comtemplated the moon resting in the small of your back for a considerable amount of time, then, and only then are you qualified to make pronouncements about the paradoxical nature of Reality