coincidia oppositorum, vortex essence of space

1. Vision [visual sensing] blinds us to physical reality.

2. Purpose oriented behaviour is aberrant behaviour.

Understanding what Bohm refers to as widespread ‘incoherence’ in modern society; i.e. in the globally dominant Enlightenment European society, benefits from inquiry into how far we can trust  our ‘visual sensing’ and our impression of ‘purposeful behaviour’.

The Enlightenment European ‘archetype’ for man is a ‘reason-driven automaton’; i.e. an ‘independently-existing thing-in-itself with its own internal process driven and [reason-and-purpose-] directed behaviour.   The archetype of the ‘reason-driven automaton’ has been institutionalized in government, corporate enterprise, and in the biological cell, the plant and in organisms in general.  All of this is in striking contrast to our understanding of physical reality that comes from our experience and from modern physics where inhabitants and habitat are in conjugate relation per ‘Mach’s principle’ [‘The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants.’], … and where, in place of a notional absolute space and absolute time reference framing [the source of the ‘independence’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’] there is an activity continuum, a dynamic unum; i.e. the continually transforming relational spatial plenum.

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” — David Bohm

To better understand what is holding back the European mind conditioned by noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar from assimilating physical reality as is understood by relativity and quantum physics [the indigenous aboriginals of North America (Turtle Island) do not seem to have a problem, as F. David Peat’s ‘Blackfoot Physics’ points out], one requires an understanding of the two above-mentioned and highly counter-intuitive principles;

1. Vision [visual sensing] blinds us to physical reality.

2. Purpose oriented behaviour is aberrant behaviour.

Both of the these principles are easily understood if one can suspend one’s Enlightenment European cultural conditioning momentarily, and both principles have been argued by modern philosophers. McLuhan argued that vision tends to obscure our understanding and Nietzsche insisted that ‘purpose’ or ‘intention’ was the artefact of language and grammar; i.e. ‘purpose’ is analytical backfill that is NOT to be used to direct behaviour.

In order to mentally master these two perpetrators of our current societal dysfunction/incoherence, and to open the way to the intuiting of a more natural ‘way’ that corresponds with ‘indigenous anarchism’, one has to ‘make an honest attempt’ at accepting the proposition that ‘space is a relational plenum’ rather than the standard ‘infinite emptiness populated by independently-existing things-in-themselves’.

To facilitate bringing this back, at will, into one’s rapid access memory cache, it will be useful to first read the 463 word excerpt from Meinard Kuhlmann’s essay in the August 2013 Scientific American ‘What is Real’.

Ok, … you are now set up to suspend your thought-dependence on Western civilization’s, centuries long standing belief that space is an infinite emptiness populated by independently-existing things-in-themselves and are prepared to at least ‘try to consider’ that space could be an energy-charged relational spatial plenum undergoing transformation in the continuing present, which is the modern physics view that Kuhlmann presents in the excerpt [and which is the view of Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, Barbour, Rovelli and a growing minority of others].

Let the attempting being.

1. Visual sensing is blinding us to physical reality.

Physical phenomena are orchestrated/shaped by the influence of ‘field/s’ such as the gravity field, thermal energy-flow-field, electromagnetic field etc which are ‘relational-spatial’ influences that are, in themselves, non-local, non-visible and non-material; i.e. they are purely ‘relational’.

Meanwhile, visual sensing orients to that which is local, visible, and material.

Noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar converts visual observations coming from that which is local, visible, material to ‘what things do’ narrative. For example we can see iron filings move around on a piece of paper when we wave a magnet beneath the paper. We can formulate a description of what is going on in terms of ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’ based on visual sense observations but that will not include the outside-inward orchestrating ‘field’ influence on the individual and collective behaviour of the iron filings. Our vision goes no farther than informing us that ‘these things are moving’, evidently ‘on their own’, and that their movement is clearly coordinated; i.e. because the outside-inward orchestrating field influence is non-visible, one might be tempted, relying on vision alone, to think that the coordinated movement is somehow coming from the filings.

We can say, using the terminology of ancients, that the movement of the filings is ‘yin/yang’ and that while yin and yang are, in nature, inseparable, our noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar ALLOWS US to drop out the ‘yin’ aspect which is non-local, non-visible, and non-material and which we could only intuit as it is not directly visible, and go solely with the ‘yang’ aspect which is in terms of ‘what independently-existing things-in-themselves do’ as if they were ‘doing their own thing’ in an absolute space, a ‘universe’ that is fixed empty and infinite and populated by a vast collection of ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves’ that move about and interact.

Field dynamics are always circular or toroidal as in a convection cell or ‘vortex’ where there is an outside-inward many-to-one converging [female, ‘yin’] ‘sink’ in conjugate relation with an inside-outward one-to-many diverging [male, ‘yang’] ‘source’. There is just one circulating dynamic here with conjugate aspects. This yin/yang cyclical character of physical nature has been an important [sacred] symbol since ancient times as captured in the tai-chi symbol of Taoism and in the Ouroborus, a dragon whose opening mouth corresponds to the ‘yin/female’ ‘sink’ and whose intruding tail corresponds to the ‘yang/male’ ‘source’, which features in Egyptian sacred writings from the 14th century BCE and has permeated Gnostic, Hermetic and other religious writings [Albigensian watermarks, Tarot cards and so on]. The lead-in figure for this essay shows the ouroborus and the tai-chi together [there are also the ancient symbols; – swastika, caduceus, star-of-david and more that symbolize the circulatory vortex which flows into itself, the ‘union of opposites’]

In other words, the awareness of a fundamental ‘cyclic’ character to nature has been long-standing and widespread.

But back to the ‘yang’ world of visual sensing.

We can snapshot [visually sense and freeze-frame] a configuration of ‘local, visible, materially-existing things-in-themselves’ in this absolute fixed space and capture their three dimension x,y,z coordinates [by anchoring a three dimensional Euclidian reference frame to a fixed reference point] and monitor changes in the configuration by successively snap-shotting the configuration.   And, just as we can calibrate the x,y,z coordinate axes with some arbitrary length, like the length of the king’s foot, we can calibrate the intervals between the snapshots with some arbitrary cyclicity such as the diurnal period of the earth or some fraction thereof, so that we can conveniently describe the dynamically changing configuration using a four dimensional coordinate system, the fourth dimension being ‘time’; i.e. the frequency with which we look out and observe things.

As quantum physicist Julian Barbour [‘The End of Time’ (2001)] points out, ‘time’ is not a property of the universe but a subjectively imposed property of the observer.

There is nothing in our natural experience that is contradicted if we understand ourselves as having shifted out of the Newtonian absolute space and absolute time framing into the ‘continually transforming-in-then-now relational spatial plenum’.  Of course our thinking requires a fairly significant readjustment but it is not ‘that great’ since we have no problems conversing with indigenous aboriginal traditionalists who think this way, and in fact, they all did think this way at the onset of colonization.  They simply thought the white man was crazy, … a hypothesis that was pretty much on target.

As Howard Zinn pointed out in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, historical accounts [time-based accounts] are inherently subjective.  The colonizers’ historical accounts speak of the construction of a wonderful new world/civilization in North America.  The colonized indigenous aboriginals’ historical accounts speak of the destruction of a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.  They are speaking of the same activity, but one sees it as constructive and the other sees it as destructive.  Wolf, raven and eagle all had their subjective views of history as well, but the temporal view is not the most comprehensive view.  The more comprehensive view or a-perspectival view is in terms of a continually transforming relational spatial plenum.  When we construct a house, we at the same time destroy some forest and meadow.  There is only relational transformation, ‘things’ and ‘what things do’ is a REDUCED, secondary way of understanding what is going on.  It comes from the combination of the limited visual sense [which cannot capture the outside-inward ‘yin’ orchestrating influence] coupled with the noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar.

The term ‘blinding vision’ thus refers to this whole cosmology or pseudo-reality based on ‘what things-in-themselves do’ which deals solely with the ‘local, visible, material’ aspect of physical phenomena. This is also the common way for Enlightenment Europeans to see ‘social dynamics’; i.e. in terms of ‘independently-existing people’ and ‘what they do’, as if people are ‘reason-driven automatons’.

This is the ‘yang’ view with the ‘yin’ dropped out. For example, as a voyeur visual-sensing observer, we can observe a man navigating passage through a crowd and map his x,y,z,t [space and time] trajectory, and taking this in combination with our Enlightenment European scientific model of the man as a reason-driven automaton, we can present this evidence, his ‘observed trajectory’ to him, and ask him to confirm that this is, in fact his trajectory and that he was ‘in charge’ at the time of his authoring of it, and he will confirm this.

However, if we were to ask him to confirm that he was FULLY AND SOLELY responsible for his trajectory, consistent with modeling him as a reason-driven automaton, he would say, ‘no’, for a couple of reasons;

(a) while the trajectory in x,y,z,t coordinates, like a GPS position based trajectory is based on a fixed reference grid, he is not using a fixed reference grid; i.e. his behaviour is relative to the web of transforming spatial relations he is included in, which he experiences as passageways that are continually opening and closing.

(b) just as with the experience of an ant in a swarming of ants on the featureless space on the surface of a sphere [a description of non-euclidian spherical space; i.e. relational space], his inside-outward asserting behaviour is orchestrated by the outside-inward beckoning influence of the spatial-relational passageways that are continually opening and closing [relational-spatial transforming].

in other words, his x,y,z,t trajectory is a trajectory that shows his movement relative to a fixed reference grid.  This provides an ‘all-yang-no-yin’ depiction of his movement. This all-yang-no-yin RE-presentation in terms of him as a ‘thing-in-himself’ and ‘what he does’ as the full and sole author of his own behaviour [as an Enlightenment European reason-driven automaton] is only a ‘true’ RE-presentation if one ‘believes’ in the existence of absolute space and absolute time reference frames.

Recall that sovereign states and corporations are all based on the ‘reason-driven automaton’ archetype of the Enlightenment European mind conditioned by noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar, as are the majority of international and national institutions of justice.

This all-yang-no-yin RE-presentation is grounded in visual sensing which ‘does not see’ the outside-inward orchestrating influence that shapes the man’s behaviour as he navigates passage in the crowded street or in the flow of the busy freeway. An external voyeur observer while reference the crowd-navigating man’s behaviour to a fixed reference grid which RE-presents his actions in all-yang-no-yin terms while the man himself is referencing his behaviour to the continually transforming web of spatial relations he is included in which is yin/yang in nature.

The problem is that visual sensing, taken on its own, IS BLINDING US TO the relational nature of dynamics so that the fixed grid is substituted for the non-local, non-visible, non-material [purely relational] relational spatial plenum which the thing-as-relational feature is relative to. A quick review of the following two video-clips illustrate both representations and by comparing them, shows how visual sensing can drop out critical information.

(i) The first video of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season presents ‘things’ [the hurricanes] in the ‘standard manner’, as ‘local systems-things-in-themselves’ which move about and do their thing relative to a fixed reference frame.

animated view of hurricanes as systems-in-themselves by way of symbolic RE-presentation (yang view)

(ii) The second video, also of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, acknowledges the systems sciences’ proposition that ‘every system is included in a relational suprasystem’ [analytical inquiry of the anatomy of a system must be grounded in synthetical inquiry which investigates the system as an emergent relational feature serving a need within the ‘system-engendering’ suprasystem].  Again, the university-system can be understood as a ‘thing-in-itself’ and explained analytically, as if its behaviours were internal process driven and directed,… or we could look at the relational suprasystem of community which was there before the university emerged within it and now the university would be a relational pattern of activity within the continually transforming relational space of the community rather than a ‘thing-in-itself’.   That is, the relational spatial dynamics of the community outside-inwardly orchestrate and shape the inside-outward asserting behaviour of the university.  

time-lapse of physical conditions that show relational forms in relational spatial transformation (yin/yang view).

In the second video, the sensing of vapour infers the presence of a transforming relational-spatial flow-plenum [fluid-dynamic] which is engendering resonance structures, … ‘relational forms’, … which, in the first video have been ‘symbolized’ as ‘local, independent-system-things-in-themselves’, as we do with such visible forms using our noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar; e.g. ‘Bertha is moving to the northwest’ corresponds to the animated depiction, in which the understanding of space as a transforming relational spatial plenum is lost. That is, the understanding that the ‘systems’ are relational features within the transforming relational spatial plenum/[suprasystem] is lost.

Without the vapour trail markings (which can be compared to the implied lines of field-force in the shifting iron filings analogy) our visual observations, in combination with our noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar, will RE-present dynamics in terms of ‘independently-existing things’ with their own locally jumpstarting [self-authored] behaviours.

When we base ‘reality’ strictly on what we can see [our visual sense observations], we get a reduced ‘all-yang-no-yin’ view which blinds us to the physical reality which is inherently ‘relational-spatial’ or ‘yin/yang’.

We thus suffer from ‘blinding vision’.

* * *

2. Purpose oriented behaviour is aberrant behaviour.

Nietzsche pretty much ‘nailed’ this one where he points out that we synthetically split apart the activity continuum by imputing ‘subjecthood’ [‘being’] to an activity that attracts our attention, and attribute a cause-effect result to the artificially created ‘subject’, thus implying intention or purpose on the subject’s part. With respect to the above ‘systems’ example, by giving subjecthood to the ‘system’ which is saying that the behaviour of the system must jumpstart from WITHIN the system, ‘intention’ is implied on the ‘system’s part. Enlightenment European science does this with all manner of ‘system’ including ‘cells’, ‘plants’, ‘funghi’, ‘sovereign states’, ‘corporations’, ‘justice systems’ etc. That is, we portray them all as jumpstart-animated, ‘purpose-driven doers of deeds’ or in other words, as all-yang-no-yin ‘reason-driven automatons’.

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects…] … our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

Once a person starts to believe he is a ‘reason-driven automaton’ [an ‘independently-existing system-thing-in-himself with his own internal process driven and (intellect and purpose) directed behaviour], then he is going to have to reflect on how he is going to jumpstart his own behaviour in this all-yang-no-yin model of self. That is, if he were tuned into the yin/yang model of self of an indigenous anarchist, he would see himself as an ‘agent of transformation’ in the manner of a ‘storm-cell’ in a continually transforming-in-the-now relational spatial plenum.

These two mutually including views of self are described by Emerson who points out that our view of self as an ‘agent of transformation’, we have a mischievous tendency of ‘reducing’ to a view of self as ‘doer-of-deeds’.

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

Emerson’s statement can be compared to the two videos discussed above where the ‘system’ is shown as (i) a thing-in-itself with its own internal process jumpstarted behaviour, and (ii) a relational feature who’s inside-outward asserting form manifests development and behaviour that is outside-inwardly orchestrated/shaped by some need or accommodating passageway that opens up within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum.

Don Quixote is the story of a man who loads himself up with ‘purpose’ and ‘good intention’ that he wants to shape his jumpstart self-authoring of behaviour with. He opts for the chivalrous knight model [the doer-of-good-deeds model], and sets out looking for situational data that he can fit to his theory-of-who-he-is, … and like a man whose only tool is a hammer, every situation he finds himself in, looks like a nail; i.e. he re-interprets the situational relationships in such a fashion as to identify a villain-predator and the villain’s innocent prey and sets about to vanquish the villain-predator and rescue the innocent prey [he goes ‘tilting at windmills’].

Of course, if he didn’t start from a view of himself as a ‘reason-driven automaton’ or ‘doer-of-deeds’ [his reason and purpose incorporating only the finest morals and ethics of the old era of chivalry, to be sure], he might instead go with Emerson’s agent of transformation view of self, in which case he would attune to the continually transforming-in-the-now relational spatial plenum, and put himself in the service of cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in his conjugate habitat-inhabitant [suprasystem-system] relating.

Clearly, the human self has two options here once again; (a) if he sees himself as an ‘independently-existing thing-in-himself ‘doer-of-deeds’, he must ‘load his yang torpedo tubes with purpose, goals, destinations, desired futures’ by listening to priests and politicians and reading books about historical figures and revolutionary heroes and studying marxist leninist and other theory, and then use this combination of rational intellect and purpose to direct and shape his behaviour, … and (b) if he sees himself as a relational form in a continually transforming-in-the-now relational spatial plenum; i.e. as an agent of transformation, then he must attune to relational situations that are continually forming around and including him and let them orchestrate and shape his asserting actions and developments as with the non-intellectualizing creatures of nature. In this mode, the relational spatial plenum is ‘everything in the universe’, land, climate, human society, the whole of nature. The richness of this outside-inward informing of his inside-outward asserting behaviour is something other than the moral and ethical principles that would direct his behaviour in the (a) view of self. The liberating feeling of this (b) mode understanding of self is captured in Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wildgeese’;

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Self-charged, local internally jumpstarted ‘reason and purpose’, on the other hand, pre-empt one’s behaviour and development being informed by the richness of nature that one is situationally included in, in the continuing now. ‘Reason and Purpose’ can easily make slaves of those who load up on them. The self as in the above poem does not have to sublimate the self/inhabitant into the habitat, like a block of dry ice left out in the hot midday sun, it can play the  role that ocean and atmospheric turbulence play in the behaviour of the (b) mode sailboater; i.e. it provides the primary influence on behaviour [cultivating and sustaining balance and harmony in the habitat-inhabitant relation] while the destination orientation is secondary. This is in contrast to the (a) mode powerboater behaviour where destination orientation is primary; i.e. when one jumpstarts one’s behaviour from reason and purpose, ‘getting something accomplished’ is the first order of the day. The pre-charging of the self with reason and purpose pre-empts assimilation of the ‘yin’ influence, the ‘call of nature’ in ‘Wildgeese’ and reduces behaviour to all-yang-no-yin assertive action; i.e. it demotes the ‘agent of transformation’ to ‘doer-of-deeds’.

Purpose oriented behaviour, where ‘purpose’ is put into an unnatural primacy over the outside-inward behaviour orchestrating influence of the continually transforming relational space we are situationally included in, is aberrant behaviour in the sense that it cuts us off from our natural agent-of-transformation participation the continuously unfolding world dynamic, and reduces us to simple ‘doers of deeds’.

* * *

Prognosis re the continuance or subsumation of Blinding Vision and Aberrant Purpose

Blinding Vision and Aberrant Purpose have been thoroughly institutionalized into our Enlightenment European colonizer culture. Our organizational structures of governance, commerce and justice emulate the ‘reason-driven automaton’ archetype of Enlightment European man.

This ‘lock-in’ is perpetuated by our elevating of visual sensing into an unnatural precedence over acoustic experience, as McLuhan has suggested, and it is held in place by our noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar, as Nietzsche, Whorf, Bohm and others have pointed out;

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The Enlightenment European science of biology which infuses the all-yang-no-yin archetype of the ‘reason-driven automaton’ into its models of the cell, the organ and the organism and into plants as well as animals, in spite of the alternative more natural and sensible yin/yang models of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Rolph and others, … continues to support the lock-in. Since biology is the home of the model of the human self, it has a pivotal role to play in sustaining the lock-in.

How likely is it that this ‘reason-driven automaton’ archetype will be soon subsumed by a more ‘realistic’ yin/yang understanding?

It seems to be underway in ‘spotty’ revolts where individuals like Bruce Lipton or small groups of researchers working ‘epigenesis’ etc. are revolting against the orthodoxy of Dawkins et al, however, one can get a measure of how ridiculously far biologists are willing to go to perpetuate the archetype by their statements concerting ‘the intelligence of plants and funghi’. One would think that the highly coordinated organization in ‘plant behaviour’ [termed ‘smarty plants’ etc.] would suggest a ‘yin/yang’ or ‘habitat-inhabitant’ mode of organization where plant or fungal behaviour is outside-inward orchestrated, rather than constrained to the all-yang-no-yin mode of the reason-driven automaton’, but the psychological entrenchment of that archetype is so deep that biologists come only with that archetype in mind as they gather data that MUST fit it.

Example: ‘Slime Mold Smarts’

“The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell without a brain, yet it can make surprisingly complicated decisions. In this animated video short, watch as a slime mold navigates through a maze and solves a civil engineering problem.” — Nova, ‘Slime Mold Smarts’

Why hold on to this notion that any/all bio-systems are ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own internal process driven and [reason and purpose-] directed behaviours to the point that one has to make such absurd statements in order to stick with an inadequate archetype?

“a single cell without a brain can make surprisingly complicated decisions”

Why not ‘try on’ Lamarck with his yin/yang model of biology wherein the outside-inward orchestrating influence of ‘les fluides incontenables’ (energy-fields) activates inside-outward asserting ‘fluides contenables’ (fluids saturated with dissolved salts, minerals).

Of course, ‘yin’ is ‘negative cause’ and Enlightenment European science abhors ‘negative cause’.

Negative cause is what is implied in Louis Pasteur’s deathbed admission that Antoine Béchamp had been correct, that ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the [inside-outward asserting] action of the microbe is nothing, the [outside-inward accommodating] condition of the terrain is everything). In the relational space of modern physics, this is literally true.

A condition of ‘deficiency’ can be ‘accommodating’ to a bacterium as with Vitamin C deficiency.

A ‘Case Study’: Death by ‘Blinding Vision’ on the Part of Medical Science

When there is a certain ‘hole’ knocked in the natural assemblage of 500 or so ‘probiotic’ bacteria in the gut by the administering of a standard anti-biotic, perhaps as a precautionary for minor surgery, the bacterium clostridium difficile can ‘squat’ in that ‘vacant niche’ and be impossible to remove. It is called a ‘highly lethal’ anti-biotic resistant super-bug but it doesn’t bother doctors, nurses, hospital visitors, hospital staff, it only kills people who have had a hole knocked in their natural digestive tract flora assemblage, and it kills thousands of people every year. There is a 90-100% sure remedy for the severe/often-lethal colonitis that associates with c. difficile, and it is ‘flora rebalancing’ by an infusing of normal, balanced flora [‘fecal transplant’]. The reason why hundreds of thousands, literally, have had to die of c. difficile colonitis when a ninety-percent sure remedy was available is because the remedy ‘doesn’t fit theory’ and implies a situation brought on by ‘negative cause’. The proliferation of c. difficile was not due to the yang-actions of the c.difficile, it arose from the flushing out of a ‘niche’ in the floral assemblage and letting in c. difficile ‘squatters’. If you research this, you find that Enlightenment European Medical sciences have rejected the administering of this 90 – 100% certain floral rebalancing technique since it was discovered in 1958, and failed to conduct the clinical trials needed to give the green light to it.

http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/hai/ (March, 2012). People getting medical care can catch serious infections called health care-associated infections (HAIs). While most types of HAIs are declining, one – caused by the germ C. difficile* – remains at historically C. difficile causes diarrhea linked to 14,000 American deaths each year high levels.. Those most at risk are people, especially older adults, who take antibiotics and also get medical care. When a person takes antibiotics, good germs that protect against infection are destroyed for several months.”
.
“Dr. Andrew Webb, vice president of medicine at Fraser Health, says the evidence isn’t strong enough to support fecal transplants as a rescue therapy. What literature exists comes from nonrandomized case studies, he says. “With these studies, you tend to report the positive and not the negatives. … There’s a rather long list of nasty infections that can be transmitted from bodily fluids.”
.
“A review of 100 Scandinavian cases found that fecal bacteriotherapy cured 89% of patients (Anaerobe. 2009;15: 285–90). Dr. Johan Bakken, the review author and a gastroenterologist in Duluth, Minnesota, says the risk of transmitting a contagious agent through fecal bacteriotherapy is merely “theoretical.” Bakken says there hasn’t been a single reported case of a transmitted infection agent. He also estimates that more than 500 unpublished fecal transplants have occurred, most of those without donor screening because of its high cost. In most sites where fecal transplants are undertaken, donors are a “bed or table contact” of the infected individual, to minimize the risk of disease transmission, Bakken adds.”

The point is that ‘negative cause’ is ‘yin’ influence. Mainstream science is ‘all-yang-no-yin’ so that in the case of c. difficile and its ‘flora rebalancing remedy’, doctors who knew it worked had to do it ‘outside of the hospitals’ in the homes of patients. There are many statements by the Medical establishment/orthodoxy rejecting the claimed remedy and refusing to run experimental studies because ‘it did not fit theory’. The medical science focus continues to be drugs to combat the bacteria while 30,000 deaths per year in the U.S. continues on. See ‘Combating a Brand-New Superbug’

Negative cause [‘yin’] is not just ‘counter-intuitive’ to the all-yang-no-yin structure of Enlightenment European science, it is an alien concept;

“The evidence from disease would have led sooner to a conception of these food constituents and their functions but for a not unnatural bias in thought. It is difficult to implant the idea of disease as due to deficiency. Disease is so generally associated with positive agents — the parasite, the toxin, the materies morbi— that the thought of the pathologist turns naturally to such positive associations and seems to believe with difficulty in causation prefixed by a minus sign.” — Medical Research Committee, Report on the present state of knowledge concerning accessory food factors (vitamines), Special Report No. 38, London, H.M.S.O, 1919. Cited in ‘The Germ Theory, Beriberi, and the Deficiency Theory of Disease’ by K. Codell Carter [ negative cause ]

In the above cited case of ‘slime mold smarts’, the following statement;

“a single cell without a brain can make surprisingly complicated decisions”,

is the same type of all-yang, ‘yin’-influence-denying statement as;

Over the last decade, C-diff has morphed into a superbug. A new epidemic strain emerged in 2004 that is now making C-diff ever more virulent, drug-resistant, prevalent and lethal. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that C-diff kills nearly 30,000 people in America every year. Some experts call this a low estimate.

There is no recognition of ‘negative cause’ or ‘deficiency-induced’ or ‘yin-orchestrated’ shaping of local, visible, material dynamics, … not in the biological/medical science orthodoxy and not in the Enlightenment European colonizer-culture news media. ‘Terrorists’ are defined by ‘their behaviour’ as if they are ‘reason-driven automatons’ whose behaviour derives fully and solely from their internal intellection and purpose, which means that the source of terrorist violence is seen as jumpstarting from the interior of their ‘evil, twisted minds’. There is no acknowledgement of the obvious, that U.S. and colonizing power yang dynamics are conditioning the dynamics of the relational space we live in which are at the same time yin-orchestrating the dynamics of so-called ‘terrorists’ [Mach’s principle]. Every yang system is included in a relational suprasystem and arises to serve some need [yin-deficiency] within the relational suprasystem.  It can’t be any other way in a continually transforming relational spatial plenum. There are no such all-yang-no-yin things as ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own internally jumpstarted, reason and purpose directed behaviour’. This archetype is a total fiction.

When a landslide occurs, what could be more ‘all-yang-no-yin’ than a massive pile of rocks rolling and sliding down a hill? As it happens, landslides are facilitated by ‘yin’ and go farther and faster than straight yang science predicts.  What happens in the sliding is that large rocks open up large spatial relational holes which medium size rocks tumble into and medium size rocks open up medium spatial relational holes that small size rocks tumble into and so on and so forth down to fines, providing a fluid cushion that efficiently transports the larger rocks on the top of the fines and smalls [this is termed ‘acoustic fluidization’] so that the slide goes much farther than it would according to normal yang movement based predictions, and in mountain valleys, slopping up the opposite slope and slopping back, like a liquid. Engineers acknowledge this ‘yin/yang’ behaviour as a ‘special case’, a ‘nonlinear dynamic’ that sits outside of ‘normal’ engineering calculations.

The evidence is, instead, that yin/yang behaviour is the general case, and that ‘all-yang-no-yin’ model of dynamics is a ‘special case’. In terms of our modern global social dynamic, it is the case of Blinding Vision and Aberrant Purpose.

 * * *

Footnote:   “Emile vs Jung’s view of ‘the symmetries’ in Alchemical archetypes”>

Emile’s view of the world, like Mach’s, Nietzsche’s and Schroedinger’s, is that it is a continually transforming relational spatial plenum whose essence is consciousness.  Transformation is by way of relational forms that serve as ‘agents of transformation’ which are continually gathering and regathering within the transforming relational spatial plenum.  Such ‘agents of transformation’ include man, animals, plants, rocks, water, air etc.  The relational forms in the transforming relational spatial plenum can be thought of by analogy to the convection cell [e.g. hurricane or vortex] in the flow of the atmosphere/ocean.

The symmetry associated with a vortex, as is the basic relational feature or ‘agent of transformation’ is that of the ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ of outside-inward, many-to-one, ‘yin’/female orchestrating influence [the ‘sink’] and inside-outward, one-to-many [divergent], ‘yang’/male assertive action [the ‘source’]. 

This symmetry is affirmed by modern physics.  It is the basic structure of matter as visualized by a toroidal [circular] flow.  Thus a ‘unit of matter’ could be understood, not as an independently-existing thing-in-itself, but as a basic unit of transformation, its apparent ‘persistence’ or apparent ‘being’ deriving from the ‘eternal return’ that characterizes energy resonance structures. 

coincidentia oppositorum

When relational forms such as ourselves, ‘agents of transformation’, gather within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, we are ‘fully conscious’ meaning that we are full integrated into the one world consciousness.   Note that this is not Jung’s definition of ‘consciousness’ but Schroedinger’s.   What humans then experience is ‘the fall’.   ‘The fall’ is a continuing reduction of consciousness by way of knowledge.  The more we understand the world by way of knowledge, the less conscious we are in the sense of being tapped into the natural world dynamic we are a relational feature in and thus less conscious of ourselves as ‘agent of transformation’, instead ‘thinking’ of ourselves as doers-of-deeds [causal agents].  Thus farmer John ‘fancies himself’ a ‘producer of wheat’ when all he really does is rearranges plants and puts them in rows.  Like a surfer, he catches the wave of the seasons as they bring sunshine and rain and lets them orchestrate his and his brother’s behaviours, rearranging seeds and plants and manure etc. so that the growth of fields of wheat is something he has been included in, as an agent of transformation, but he can hardly say that ‘he has produced the wheat’.   In fact, the farmer’s in Oklahoma had not lost any skills when the dustbowl conditions came but they were no longer able to produce wheat because they never did ‘produce wheat’, they had been rearranging things so as to tap into the seasonal surges of fertility and sponge some of it up.

Enlightenment European science, meanwhile, has man portraying himself as a reason/knowledge-driven automaton, an independently-existing doer-of-deeds so that farmer John’s actions are seen as causally resulting in a wheat crop.  This fictional impression, … the world seen in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves with internal process driven and [reason-and-purpose-] directed behaviours, ‘do’, … is ‘the fall’.   It is the reduction-to-the-yang-pole of yin/yang reality.  It is the banishment of ‘yin’, the female aspect of the vortex or ‘coincidentia oppositorum’.

The ‘fall’ as a progressive loss of consciousness, by the individual and by the culture, has been presented in these terms in ancient accounts.  For example;

Gnosis’, as was debated in early Christianity is the sort of complete ‘knowledge’ or ‘consciousness’ which is like an awareness of Schroedinger’s suggestion that we are BOTH the individual relational form AND the transforming relational space in which it gathers [i.e. we are, at the same time, Atman, the personal self and Brahman, the eternal self (the plenum)]   The Atman is ‘local, visible, material’ while Brahman is ‘non-local, non-visible, non-material’.

The ‘fall from grace’ is described in the following way;

In Genesis 2:9 we are told of two trees in Paradise, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These fit well into the themes of Thomas; good and evil are two opposites, and life is a single thing, a unity. By eating of the tree of two things, Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are eventually cast out of Paradise.”

There are allusions in the gospels of both Thomas and Luke which point to the same thing; i.e. the fall from the yin/yang or ‘holistic’ world view [gnosis, consciousness] to the all-yang-no-yin, binary logical world view. that is, we are capable of both, but the ‘fall’ is where we put the ‘reduced-to-the-yang-pole’ binary logical view into an unnatural primacy over the yin/yang relational spatial integrated view.  The symmetries here correspond to the vortex and the ‘convection-cell-in-the-flow’, the ‘cell’ being the ‘agent of transformation’ in the service of the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, as in ‘physical reality’ according to modern physics;

“Here, as in Luke 17:20, the Kingdom of God is said to be an interior state; “It’s within you,” Luke says. And here it says, “It’s inside you but it’s also outside of you.” It’s like a state of consciousness. It’s hard to describe. But the Kingdom of God here is something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means knowledge. But it doesn’t mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like “I know that person, or do you know so and so.” So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you could call it insight. It’s a question of knowing who you really are, not at the ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But knowing your self at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.”

The allusion here has the same symmetries as the vortex, as in the physical reality of a hurricane in the atmosphere.  The symbols that capture this include; … the ouroborus, yin/yang [tai-chi], caduceus, swastika, star-of-David etc.

Gnosis is a form of reasoning that uses BOTH/AND logic of the included third [termed ‘quantum logic’ by Lupasco, Nicolescu et al] as is needed to capture a ‘vortex’ or ‘coincidentia oppositorum’, and it was indeed found in early Christian myth, a fact which it seems appropriate to state as a prelude to examining quotes from the ‘Gospel of Thomas’.

While Christians didn’t invent logic, … they definitely ‘ran into a doctrinal issue that embroiled them in discussions on which type of logic to use’, … and opted for binary logic rather than ‘gnostic’ logic [both/and logic of the included third or ‘quantum logic’].

This issue of ‘which type of logic to use’ [EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third or BOTH/AND logic of the included third] arose in regard to the relationship between ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’. the gnostic version [quantum logic version] is that God is ‘the All’ and thus ‘the eternal’ [the ‘all’ doesn’t come and go but everything in it does].  So, in the gnostic view, Jesus is ‘the son of the All’ in the sense that a hurricane is the son of the All of the atmosphere.  That is, the gnostic logic understood the ‘God’s kingdom’ as nothing other than the ‘all of nature’, the continually transforming relational spatial plenum, as physicists like Bohm and Schroedinger describe it. Therefore, the relationship between Jesus and God was like Atman and Brahman in Vedanta, as Schroedinger portrays it in ‘What is Life?’. The implications of quantum physics is that this Atman = Brahman relationship is the same for all of us, but not all of us are as fully ‘in touch’ or as ‘one with the All’ as Jesus was. This was a hotly debated issue at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and evidently, the ‘BOTH/AND’ logical view or ‘yin/yang’ view is still regarded as ‘heresy’ in our Enlightenment European culture, even when we use it today in portraying the nature of our relationship with/in the spacetime continuum we are included in.  The record from the Council of Nicea debates includes;

“For about two months, the two sides argued and debated, with each appealing to Scripture to justify their respective positions. According to many accounts, debate became so heated that at one point, Arius was struck in the face by Nicholas of Myra, who would later be canonized.”

While gnosis with its BOTH/AND logic of the included third is found in early Christian myth, it got the reputation of ‘heresy’ and got kicked out of ‘official Christian beliefs’ via the synods of Antioch and Council of Nicea. so, Christian consciousness went ‘binary-logical’, ‘dualist’ and ‘time’ based.  For example, the Christian belief; i.e. the official belief since the Council of Nicea, … is that ‘God’s kingdom’ is something that is ‘coming’ and is not continually present in the continuing ‘now’ [whether or not we are able to ‘get in touch with it’], as in the gnostic BOTH/AND logic.

This is expressed in the Gospel of Thomas as follows;

 “When his disciples asked when the new world or kingdom would come Jesus is to have said in the Gospel of Thomas: “…Rather the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you will dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”
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In another passage when describing the kingdom Jesus said, “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it…the Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth, but men do not see it.”
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Within the teachings of Gnosticism the Kingdom of God seemed to represent an alternation of consciousness rather than a physical coming future event. “…Say, then, from the heart that you are the perfect day, and dwell in the light that does not fail…For you are the understanding that is drawn forth…”
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Again when Jesus saw infants being nursed by their mothers he said, “These infants being suckled are like those entering the Kingdom.” And the disciples asked, “Shall we, then, as little children, enter the Kingdom?” He answered them, “When you make two one, and when you make the inside the outside and the outside the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same…then you will enter (the Kingdom).”

Schroedinger has drawn from relativity and quantum physics, this same notion that the world is one thing; i.e. it is ‘consciousness’ as matter is entirely secondary [resonant energy as in the coincidentia oppositorum of the vortex, the coniunctio of outside-inward, many-to-one, yin/female orchestrating influence [‘sink’] and inside-outward, one-to-many, yang/male asserting action [‘source’].   This symmetry is an archetype for dynamics in general; convergence and divergence are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational-spatial transformation.  Construction and destruction are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of relational-spatial transformation; i.e. when we construct a house we are at the same time destroying forest and meadow, etc. etc.

‘The fall’ is man’s development of ‘knowledge’, a reduction-to-the-yang-pole that displaces his fullblown intuition of the BOTH/AND ‘unum’ of the ‘self-and-other’ coincidentia oppositorum or Schroedinger’s ‘Atman = Brahman’.

In Genesis 2:9 we are told of two trees in Paradise, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. These fit well into the themes of Thomas; good and evil are two opposites, and life is a single thing, a unity. By eating of the tree of two things, Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are eventually cast out of Paradise.”

 * * *

Comparison to the views of Carl Jung;

The language conventions used in the above discussion differ from those used by Carl Jung; i.e. the original state of the newborn human individual in Jung’s usage is ‘unconscious’ and this ‘unconsciousness’ is where the individual connects with the ‘whole’.  While the connection with the ‘whole’ or ‘all’ is in common, the usage of ‘consciousness’ is reversed.  Where Jung refers to ‘the fall’ as the rise of consciousness, the above discussion refers to ‘the fall’ as the reduction of fullblown yin/yang consciousness-understood-as-physical-awareness-of-oneness-with-the-Plenum, … ‘to the yang-pole’; i.e. the reduction of ‘consciousness’ to ‘knowledge’ in the noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar terms of ‘what things-in-themselves with their own internal process driven and [reason-and-purpose-] directed behaviour ‘do’. 

For example, in ‘Blackfoot Physics’, F. David Peat describes the culture of a human collective, indigenous aboriginals, which has not undergone ‘the fall’, who retain the natural primacy of their yin/yang consciousness, and who, while they have the capability of ‘reduced-to-the-yang-pole knowledge’, do not allow it to ‘displace’ and shut out the naturally primary yin/yang consciousness.  BOTH/AND logic is essential to this mode of understanding.  But when EITHER/OR logic is applied yin/yang versus reduced-to-the-yang-pole knowledge, we can choose EITHER one OR the other, and Enlightenment European mind has chosen ‘reduced-to-the-yang-pole knowledge’.  The same alternatives apply to Atman and Brahman.  The indigenous aboriginal’s ability to employ BOTH/AND logic allows him to understand that he is like the flow of the atmosphere as the same time as he is the hurricane, the agent of transformation within the continually transforming relational spatial plenum.   Enlightenment European man, on the other hand, by employing EITHER/OR logic, has chosen for himself the one mode of self, the doer-of-deeds.  Again, Emerson captures this flip-flop from BOTH/AND to EITHER/OR logic that reduces man’s view of self from BOTH agent of transformation AND doer of deeds, to simply ‘doer-of-deeds’, a reduction that has major consequences in our society;

“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’

‘The fall’ is thus this ‘reduction-to-the-yang-pole’ which amounts to a denial that one is, in physical reality, an ‘agent of transformation’ and not just a ‘doer-of-deeds’.  This amounts to an awareness of Mach’s principle which discloses our habitat-inhabitant interdependence, … something we forget about once we see ourselves exclusively as ‘the doer of deeds’;

“The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” — Mach’s principle

The structure of relational space is such that the storm-cells are conditioning the dynamics of the relational space of the atmosphere/ocean at the same time as the dynamics of the atmosphere/ocean are conditioning the dynamics of the storm-cells; i.e. the temporal Atman storm-cell [relational form]  is, at the same time, the Brahman atmosphere-plenum that is ‘timeless’ [continually transforming relational spatial plenum]

In Jung’s conceptualizing, the ‘vortex’ or yin/yang ‘coincidentia oppositorum’, seems to capture the dynamic more as a ‘progression’ from dividedness to integration and assimilation.   It is important to note that in the above discussion, ‘wholeness’ is the ‘physical reality’, it is the essential nature of the world as understood through relativity, quantum field dynamics and our natural fully-conscious experience [we are fully conscious as newborns],… therefore, this ‘integration and assimilation’ is not ‘something we have to do’, in an active sense.  Instead, the fullblown consciousness of our newborn self is waiting for us if we can only ‘let go’ of our ‘knowing’, let go of the psycho- aspect of psycho-sensory experience and get in touch with our un-psyched sensory experience [here we might think of the ‘psyche’ as a material aspect or ‘secondary aspect’ of our overall relational, energy-in-transformation essence.

In the same sense, systems sciences pioneer Russell Ackoff’ uses the example of the ‘university’ to point out that the we can use our analytic inquiry to break down the ‘system’ of university into parts and processes and re-integrate it as a ‘thing-in-itself’ and think of it in a ‘doer-of-deeds’ sense, but this is too reductive to capture the fact that it is, at the same time, a relational feature in the relational suprasystem of community so that “our analytical inquiry must be grounded in our synthetical inquiry”; i.e. if we start our inquiry by investigating the community dynamic, the university will show up ‘relationally’ in the manner the storm-cell shows up in the relational flow of the atmosphere; i.e. as being outside-inwardly orchestrated to serve a need in the relational flow.

The words ‘integration and assimilation’ would ‘not be quite right’ here, since nothing need be ‘assimilated’.  The transforming relational spatial plenum or ‘suprasystem’ is the ‘physical reality’ while the ‘system-thing-in-itself’ is abstraction that we have subjectively imposed.  There is no need for integration since it is already a physical reality, and to get in touch with that, what is required is to suspend the psychic energy that has been making reductions-to-the-yang-pole, pulling relational features out of the activity continuum [the timeless, continually transforming relational spatial plenum] and reducing them to notional ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with their own internal process driven and [reason and purpose-] directed behaviours.  The integration and assimiliation does not need to be done in the ‘psyche’, it is already in place in the physical reality of nature’s dynamic, … the ‘psyche’ is where the fragmentation occurs.  The ‘psyche’ is ‘the fall’; i.e. it is where knowledge, thinking and purpose constructs are produced.

Jung’s alchemical analysis seems to work in the reverse direction; i.e. the ‘integration and assimilation’ is regarded as something that ‘needs to be done’, thus implying that the opposites are ‘real’ [in the above understanding, the opposites are not real, thus there is no need for ‘integration and assimilation’, merely a suspension of believing the opposites to be real];

Excerpt from —From Carl Jung’s ‘Collected Works’, Vol. 14

“The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.

The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which […] unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious.”

Evidently, Jung sees the individuation process as process of ‘self-realization’ brought on by the ‘unconscious’; e.g;

Jung felt this process of “self-realization” [individuation] was a “natural transformation,” something that “the unconscious had in mind,” something meant to develop our individual personality.” — Sue Mehrtens, Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences

Here, again, there is the sense that in Jung’s view, the opposites are ‘real’ and ‘need to be integrated and assimilated with/in one and other’, rather than there being an acceptance that there has never been any splitting apart except in the ‘psycho’ aspect of our ‘psychophysical experiencing’. 

Instead of ‘the fall’ being understood as the reduction of the pure νοῦς of the newborn to ‘knowledge’ by way of psychologically reducing the yin/yang dynamics of nature to-the-yang-pole, Jung sees it as ‘the growth of consciousness’, … ‘consciousness’ that is created by man’s opposing himself to ‘instinct’.

Instinct. An involuntary drive toward certain activities. (See also archetype and archetypal image.)

All psychic processes whose energies are not under conscious control are instinctive.

‘Instinct’ is not a word that is necessary in the above discussed view of ‘the fall’ since the newborn is in touch with nature in the manner that a hurricane is in touch with the atmosphere; i.e. the individual is in touch with the outside-inward ‘yin influence orchestrating his inside-outward asserting ‘yang’ action.  That he has the capability of intervening is a matter of fact validated by our experience, and such interventions would appear to derive from ‘knowledge’ of some or other type [e.g. ‘carnal knowledge’].  Here, I am just re-emphasizing the view that ‘the fall’ can be seen in terms of ‘consciousness’ being the newborn’s being in touch with his ‘one-with-all’ physical reality, while his socialization/acculturation comes from ‘knowledge’ which takes him out of the transparent/seamless ‘unum’ by shifting the sourcing of direction of his behaviour from the fully harmonious reciprocal complementarity of outside-inward yin orchestrating of his inside-outward yang asserting, over to the yang-pole,… this knowledge essentially being ‘self-knowledge’ that sources ‘self-direction’ so that the union of yin and yang is no longer seamless.  As knowledge grows, direction of behaviour shifts more and more ‘to-the-yang-pole’ and outside-inward ‘yin’ orchestrating influence becomes less and less.   This is evident in ‘states’ and ‘corporations’ as well as in ‘individuals’ and is highlighted by the Enlightenment European view of the individual organism and/or organization as a ‘reason-driven automaton’.   ‘The fall’ could thus be described as the rise of SELF-consciousness [shift-towards-the-yang-pole] with a reciprocal, complementary reduction of OTHER-consciousness coming through outside-inward yin orchestrating influence.  It is not that the ‘yin’ influence ‘goes away’, it is simply that ‘knowledge’ which is essentially ‘understanding’ that has been ‘reduced-to-the-yang-pole’ that has been ‘traded out’ EITHER/OR style for ‘yin/yang consciousness’, thanks to the influence of noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar.   The indigenous aboriginal is distinguished from the Enlightenment European by the fact that his BOTH/AND logic, a capability preserved rather than excluded in the architecture of his language,  allows him to stay in touch with his yin/yang nature [agent of transformation nature] at the same time as having access to his ‘reduced-to-the-yang-pole’ ‘knowledge’.

Meanwhile, Jung’s model construction employs the inverted sense that ‘the growth of consciousness’ is responsible for ‘problems’ and he gives the sense that if we are submerged in nature, we are unconscious rather than ‘fully conscious’;

“If psychic life consisted only of self-evident matters of fact — which on a primitive level is still the case — we could content ourselves with a sturdy empiricism. The psychic life of civilized man, however, is full of problems; we cannot even think of it except in terms of problems. Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts, experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems…It is just man’s turning away from instinct — his opposing himself to instinct — that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature, whereas consciousness can only seek culture or its denial. Even when we turn back to nature, inspired by a Rousseauesque longing, we ‘cultivate’ nature. As long as we are still submerged in nature we are unconscious, and we live in the security of instinct which knows no problems. Everything in us that still belongs to nature shrinks away from a problem, for its name is doubt, and wherever doubt holds sway there is uncertainty and the possibility of divergent ways. And where several ways seem possible, there we have turned away from the certain guidance of instinct and are handed over to fear. For consciousness is now called upon to do that which nature has always done for her children — namely, to give a certain, unquestionable, and unequivocal decision. And here we are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness — our Promethean conquest — may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature.

 

“Problems thus draw us into an orphaned and isolated state where we are abandoned by nature and are driven to consciousness. There is no other way open to us; we are forced to resort to conscious decisions and solutions where formerly we trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness, but also the necessity of saying goodbye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature. This necessity is a psychic fact of such importance that it constitutes one of the most essential symbolic teachings of the Christian religion. It is the sacrifice of the merely natural man, of the unconscious, ingenuous being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise. The biblical fall of man presents the dawn of consciousness as a curse. And as a matter of fact it is in this light that we first look upon every problem that forces us to greater consciousness and separates us even further from the paradise of unconscious childhood. Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain, and smooth, and for that reason problems are taboo. We want to have certainties and no doubts — results and no experiments — without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need…”

My view is that Jung has ‘got it backwards’ by supposing that ‘consciousness’ is the unique attribute of humans.

This thing that Jung is calling ‘consciousness’ in humans, is more appropriately seen as ‘knowledge’, the ability to split the ‘yang’ out of the ‘yin/yang’ using vision and tactility [which is fundamentally limited and cannot sense that which is non-local, non-visible and non-material of relational influence [field influence] that inductive orchestrates and shapes individual and collective behaviours, like those of the iron filings on the blank sheet of paper.  Instead of this attribute being ‘something extra that humans have’ that ‘turns out to be a curse’, and the reason for ‘man’s fall from grace’, … this attribute is something that ‘everything in nature has’ which SOME humans have found a way of ‘tampering with’ in the same sort of manner as ‘splitting the atom’.  It is a way of looking at the yin/yang conjugate dynamics in nature which ‘gets rid of the yin’ aspect and RE-casts the yin/yang dynamic in a one-sided all-yang-no-yin terms; i.e. in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’, as if in an absolute fixed empty and non-influencing [mutually exclusive/independent] space.

As humans, we do not have a special add-on attribute that the rest of our brothers in nature do not have, that deserves the name ‘consciousness’.  We have ‘broken’ something that we all have so that ‘it works differently, … one-sidedly’.  The something that we have broken is ‘consciousness’ and when we crack it apart we get ‘knowledge’.   The Master’s & Johnson ‘Human Sexual Response’ has been compared to splitting the atom; rather than going with the yin/yang of conjugate relating wherein the outside-inward orchestrating yin influence and the inside-outward asserting yang action arise as one dynamic, ‘knowledge’ [yin/yang dynamics reduced-to-the-yang-pole] can RE-cast the sexual dynamics in one-sided all-yang-no-yin ‘doer-deed’, ‘cause-and-effect’ terms, with the help of noun-and-verb European language and grammar.

The Enlightenment European culture has obsessed on this and has unravelled the natural yin/yang relational-spatial dynamics of community and social organizing of all types, reconstituting them as ‘reason-driven automatons’ [the current popular archetype for government, commercial enterprise, and self-image of the human individual].

The noun-and-verb European language-and-grammar operates on the activity continuum [the continually transforming relational spatial plenum] to synthetically break out notional ‘things-in-themselves’.   Whether we are speaking of skyscrapers, bridges, motor vehicles or Titanic ocean liners, this artefacts of Enlightenment European thinking/behaviour appear ‘different’ because they don’t fit into the evolutionary flow.  Stainless steel and glass structures with perfect lines and right angles in them do appear as if they have been made by ‘Gods’ or ‘aliens’.   These structures absolutely ‘assert themselves’ without having waited to answer some need of nature.  The more un-needed and uncalled for they are, the more they take on this ‘God-like’ or ‘alien’ look of coming fully and solely from out of themselves.  The same applies for people’s behaviour when it comes absolute, one-sidedly from out of the self-asserting agenda of an individual person, state or corporation.  All of this God-like one-sidedness which characterizes Enlightenment European man, and which, to him, signifies the ‘advanced status’ the ‘progress’ of his ‘civilization’, is the product of ‘splitting the atom’; i.e. ‘splitting apart the vortex’, the coincidentia oppositorum’;

“In ancient writings there is a general pattern alluding to the replacing of ‘yin’ with passivity; Adam’s first wife, Lilith, from ‘lil’ [Sumerian for ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’ ca. 3000 BCE], becoming ‘lilitu’ [wind-spirit] in Babylonian, and appearing in Arabic as ‘Alilat’ [a form of Lilith, in this case as the daughter of Allah and Goddess of the night], was the equal of Adam, who was banished for demanding equality in sexual relations. According to the legends, Adam insisted on superiority in sexual relations and Lilith was banished and God made Adam a second, passive/submissive wife, Eve. Lilith was demonized as a spirit of darkness that had sex with the devil and spawned djinns or genies.”

“In the Bible (Gen. 2:7) God breathes the breath of life into the human being formed of dust, and this being “became a living soul”. Words in many languages which double as wind and spirit indicate the creation process, the turning of inanimate matter into animate (anemos is Greek for wind).”

In conclusion, this ‘something extra’ that man has, and that Enlightenment European man obsesses on, is the ability to ‘split apart’ the essential organizing archetype of nature [the yin/yang vortex or ‘coincidentia oppositorum’]  IN HIS MIND.  That is, when humans see themselves as ‘things-in-themselves with their own internal process driven and [reason-and-purpose] directed behaviours, they are only imagining this.  They can never escape Mach’s principle wherein; “the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants”.  There is no way to ‘construct a house’ without, at the same time, ‘destroying some forest and meadow’, and there is no way to ‘construct the history of an independent state’ without, at the same time, ‘destroying established spatial relations’.  As McLuhan observes, it takes a whole community [the transforming of relations] to raise a new factory.  The physical reality IS the transforming relational spatial plenum, and the notion of ‘new construction’ is idealization that depends upon framing the constructive activity against blankness.  Only then can you speak of ‘constructing a house’ instead of ‘transforming the forest and meadow space’.

Wolf and bear have not, it appears, yet learned how to break apart the coincidentia oppositorum, so they are still letting their individual and collective inside-outward asserting behaviours be orchestrated by outside-inward ‘yin’ influence, rather than driving themselves from the yang side.  They would probably have no interest in it, if they could do it.  Crows seem to be able to do ‘some of it’ [fetching a tool to fetch another tool to fetch some difficult to obtain food].  Perhaps it’s not impossible for scenes to eventually develop as in Hitchcock’s movie ‘Birds’.  Nevertheless, those who do develop this ability to split themselves out of the yin/yang dynamics of nature are not REALLY splitting themselves out.  That is, the best they can do is to ignore their inclusion in the continuing yin/yang dynamics of nature; e.g. they can pretend that they are in doer-deed mode constructing a new home in the forest when they are really in agent-of-transformation mode helping to transform the relational space they share inclusion in.  The apparent paradox here, in that it truly seems as if they are ‘doing their own thing’; i.e. it seems as if it ‘is’ possible to split oneself out of the yin/yang dynamics, is that ‘our vision is blinding us’ to a full and comprehensive view of dynamics.

This ‘closes the loop’ in that it brings us back to the body of the ‘Blinding Vision and Aberrant Purpose’ essay above.

It also establishes that what Jung is calling ‘consciousness’, this ‘extra’ capability that humans have, is ‘not real’.  It is an imaginary capability that derives from incompleteness in our psychophysical observing.  We can make a video-tape record of farmer John producing wheat and it will indeed appear that he is producing wheat, but that is because our visual sense, if we interpret it on its own, blinds us to physical reality.  The physical reality is that farmer John’s inside-outward yang asserting behaviour is being outside-inward yin orchestrated by the relational spatial dynamics of the surfing seasons etc.