Thursday 25 September 2014

Science, the arts and philosophy must be integrated before science can help with the answers


This gloomy picture (Chirico) is titled 'Philosopher and Poet' - why choose that title is not obvious, but to me it could represent the frozen condition of a lack of positive underlying progress in both general science ("philosopher") and culture in general ("poet"). The blankness of the screen confronted by a rigid figure and a weird, detached something beside it, the figure with no arms to challenge the blankness and create something new on the screen ... It could be interpreted as our present global civilization in its reluctance to get moving and examining in any depth the future for our planet and its inhabitants; science having no answers and the humanities mired in repetitiveness, trivia and nostalgia.

Sitting and meditating doesn't change anything. Nor does science per se. Nor our playing around with the remarkable capacities of present-day technology. Do we want change or are we content to concentrate on trying to make life better for our individual selves and those selves that are alike to us?

Most of the inhabitants of our present global civilization live in the present 'dream-world' of unlimited growth with the excitement of ill-regulated competition, the available escapes into fantasy and the comforts of procrastination. All that gives to some - but not all - zest and meaning to life. They would prefer to leave change to chance, to 'Nature' or to 'God'. It is easier to bury misgivings about the future in the minutiae of living and to let the demon of environmental degradation do its worst.

Of course the Syai vision that this blog is basically about is not the only vision of a future life-sustainable world under the governance of (supposedly) intelligent beings. Even with our biosphere burdened with such a large human population as we now have, such a world is still possible. It would require spreading that population out over a changed landscape, integrating human needs and talents with the requirements of the natural environment to flourish and to heal itself from the cancerous imbalances already inflicted upon it by such as weeds, pests and depletions of our supportive flora and fauna.

The Syai vision of home-villages is a plausible possibility. At least some of our scientific theorists are also on to such a possibility: two of them are mentioned in 'New Scientist' (July, 1914), namely Porrit and Sanderson. Unlimited growth and urban congestion would become gradual, measured growth, taking humanity in a new direction with probably slower, more prudential technological advances (one would hope not longer associated with weaponry development).

Most of us ardently desire something like this rather that continuing on a path to extinction or at least to the total destruction of anything resembling a civilization worth living in for most of us. What, then,is the key to real progress and sustainability?  In a sense, it is meditation and appropriate concentration on what matters, because it is from the mind that individual and collective decisions originate.

The scientist deals directly with what I would call base-reality - the world as revealed to us in unemotional observation, discovery and prediction. So long as base-reality has its rightful place in our thinking, a path of change is opened to a level of well-being that is sustainable. Science cannot give us reasons on philosophical, ethical grounds why we should take this path, It is up to all the faculties of our consciousness to fashion a human future grounded in a species-survival ethic. Science can only give us valuable clues as to how to achieve this. And it does so mainly due to its predictive power. The "Why do it" has to come from other reaches of the mind, namely, culture, values-prioritization (morals), the creative imagination (the arts) and religion (spirituality). But with respect to religion, we cannot any longer afford the indulgence of not aligning these broader reaches of the mind with base-reality. Fantasy and escape into dream-world can enrich our lives, but it must be "put in its place"!  We cannot go on ordering our lives according false-to-fact constructions of 'reality', at odds with base-reality. Much of tradition and much of religion has to be re-interpreted or abandoned. A great deal of simplification will be required in the spirit of 'Occam's Razor'. As in the Syai world, religion would harmlessly "simplify" into culture, wisdom-myths and seasonal festivity.

Wednesday 24 September 2014

How the mind-realm of creative imagination best-serves the child

This is a western child in an eastern posture. He probably has his head full of stories and not the thought-chatter emptiness that his meditation teacher hopes for him. Stories legends and myths are a proxy source of experiential wisdom, providing simple ethical lessons that give due recognition to individual freedoms and self-assertion as tempered by reason and consideration for others.

Why, then, do we so cling to the need for religious interpretation of some of them?

All the value of the above-outlined is lost as soon as a religious or quasi-religious body - a collective in competition with other collectives - elevates one story only, tending to disparage others, thus giving that story the imprimatur of what I might refer to as "base-reality" (rightly more the province of science).

If the humanities, the poetry of life, symbol, myth, legend and story can be focused more on the future, which is the child's near-present - a focus that seems to be a crying need in this present age - then it's all doing proper service to the child. If it continues to be wrapped up in the past and tradition too much, it will only serve an established body-politic to subject the child to its service.

If the beneficial re-adjustment of the humanities is to be achieved, we can respect the grandeur of the religious achievements of the past (for example architecturally) without being held by them in thrall. At the same time we can re-adjust our minds to insist that the humanities and sciences complement each other in "non-religious" but soulful harmony, no more treading disdainfully on each other's ground.

Because imaginative stories are only "fun", Syai mythology enters harmlessly into the culture and year-round of festivals without the dangerous solemnity of religion.

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Was religion ever anything much better than a dragon feeding on its own tail?


In answering "probably not" to the title question, I don't want to downplay the genius that has gone into architecture, music and other arts that have had such cultural influence throughout the ages. Religion, of course, has been historically where much of the opportunity, time and money was on offer for the creative person. Like the (fictional) Syai, we, in the present day world with its pressing socio-political and material problems, need to grow out of religion per se, while we retain and continue with the arts, symbols and stories. These include works that can delight and teach us something, despite that it was normal in the past for their creators and communicators to make serious reference to superstition-promoting, supernatural pronouncements, images and myths masquerading as "Truths".

No devised system can self-asses its aptness for what is is designed to do in action and/ or persuasion. 

(Natural systems, such as the ecological, are naturally excluded, here) That is the Archilles heel of religion, but not only religion. It is also why we cannot dismiss the reality of the mind or mindfulness ( See, previous blog). The "axiom" of reality above explodes all religious claims to truth-absolutism, but also the scientific claim that reality is best understood by materialistic behaviourist determinism. Our mind - our capacity to observe and think rationally - is either "talking" to the real world or it is "talking" to itself in a manner lacking a faith-to-fact basis in the real world.

My blogs have already dealt with the ideology fanatic. Despite that, my feeling here is that the comparative sanity of a pragmatic person's "matter-of-fact"-ness   and acceptance of things as they are (as if they could never have come-to-be or needed-to-be otherwise) is not good enough. Awakening to reality requires imagination; and one of the underlying purposes of this blog-site is to try to support the imaginative envisioning of possible positive progress for our species on this planet.

Sunday 14 September 2014

Probing the brain? A "Syai" perspective on the old mind/ body controversy.

Before birth there are only the rudiments of connections between the brain-cells with each other and the rest of the body. At the time of a viable birth, when the organism begins to breath the outside air,  an explosion occurs that could be likened to "the Big Bang". It could also be regarded as the beginning of the entrance of the mind into brain, body, that locality of the living environment - even properly into the Universe itself.

Our present bio-science would (I think) have to go along with the above, despite the difficulty of defining in scientific terms what is meant by the mind.  For reasons that are easily understood - mostly to do with emotions - the prospective parent often finds it hard to understand what kind of an organism the "unborn child" is. Bio-science has to be more objective about this. Scientist's job is also to look into a wider context of social health and humanity's future, and not be swayed by falling foul of popular sentiment and the views of religious propagandists.

Nevertheless, philosophers and theologians need to correct the tendency in science to down-play or even dismiss the concept of the mind. The mind is not just a spiritual concept. It is necessary to make sense of knowledge.  Like (but unlike) the brain, the mind has a structure; a structure which psychologists like Freud have from long ago been trying to probe into and map. What is the special difficulty of this? It is that the mind is, as it were, a meta-structured unstable non-material thing, produced from the physically examinable structure of the brain and body and the whole hard-to-fathom, life-enabling environment. As such, it produces the abstract, but dynamic structures of our ways of thinking and shifting emotions.

A philosophically apparent absurdity is the attempt to by-pass the mind. That dead-end was pursued by some in the behaviourist school. Our brain certainly has a vital part to play in our human curiosity to examine and understand the brain, the body, and all that surrounds it.  However, without the mind's abstractive development of pattern, picture and explanation, the activity of the brain (and body) in probing the secrets of the brain would be as vacuous as one mirror confronting another.The mind is not centred in the physical brain despite the fact that the brain is its "starting engine", playing a primary role. The secondary role is played by the rest of the body. But there is still a tertiary role that is of the utmost importance. It is the whole surrounding biosphere of our life-home, the Earth.

Home-sickness? To get the feeling of just how real  the h(r)uman mind-and-soul is, you might try a stint of living in a physically life-sustaining bubble on Mars.

Sunday 7 September 2014

(3) How fanatics (and persons of not-well-self-examined faith) break the triangle and lose touch with reality


The evangelical who sings something like "Will the circle not be broken?" has already broken the triangle.  Nevertheless, most evangelicals tend to be less than consistent in maintaining that break, unlike the fanatic.

With the fanatic, direct interactive lines of contact  between the intellectual centre and the world-embracing centre are broken, leaving the triangle of the healthy psyche partially destroyed.  There is in the healthy psyche's triangle what might be called the halo (the seat of the supreme goddess) of conscious-generation and mediation around the unconscious centre.  That part is meant to have the job of filtering and modifying the unconsciously generated turmoil of feelings and images. In the broken triangle it no longer works as it should.

It might be said that the goddess (a personifying of the active ring, as shown in yellow, around the unconscious, linking it to the whole) no longer  operates effectively. However, the flow of interactive information between the intellectual centre and the world-embracing centre is still maintained. The trouble is, it has to take the round-about rout, passing through the emotional centre, which - as it allows it through - inappropriately tries to modify and filter it but instead largely distorts it. Thus the individual has only an indirect relationship of intellect with reality. This damaging compromise, doing away with the direct connection of  the two outer centres, intellect and world-embracing, has nothing to do with the power of intellect, the passion of emotion or the apparent material successes the individual enjoys in life. That person is no longer a whole person, and, usually, sooner or later, that fact is almost bound to be realized, either by himself, by others or both, even if the general realisation comes only later through re-examination in historical context. Even a compassionate genius can be - essentially - crazy, his life's work leaving the world and humanity worse off.

The direct lines affected are those (in the unbroken triangle) between intellectual centre and world-embracing centre. In the broken triangle, these lines do not disappear but are shifted subjectively inwards, as it were.  They then link the intellect (the thinking, believing mind) directly to the main centre which is the unconscious centre. This link is made, without the world-embracing centre's involvement. The triangle is thereupon a broken one. This frees up the intellect from coping directly (and in the long run, effectively) with the often harsh (sometimes pleasant) impacts of the material world.. It compromises the individual's capacity to rationally respond to the real world's uncompromising buffeting. The round-about nature of the residual connective lines via the emotional centre, have, in many cases (especially the religious ones), a cushioning benefit to the weakened, deformed psyche in dealing with the real world.




Saturday 6 September 2014

(2) A simple symbolic shape of the normal mature well-functioning psyche


The grey is the background of unknowing: we have no grasp of reality beyond the reach of our senses.  At the centre of the triangle is the animal-body unconscious, but with a radiating influence, supporting not only the outer centres but the three double-lines of interconnections from one to the other. The channels (shown in brown) are the basic developmental force generated from the unconscious centre that allows the other centres and triangle to take form and generate consciousness. Thus the supreme goddess Sunchild, as child of the rude, atavistic titans, takes her place in or around the unconscious center. The heart-symbol here does not represent her, but the overt urges and emotional workings of the individual's nature, thus Redbelly's. The head, of course, is the seat if the intellect, Bluehead's. The Chinese pictogram for 'earth' is the world-embracing center, where the individual has his (/her) impact on the physical and biological environment, and has to use his outer senses, limbs and so forth, to deal with the harsh - if sometimes very pleasant - impacts that the real world has on him - thus, Moonbeast's.

The integrity of the triangle enables the thrust of  forces of the unconscious to be -as it were - steered and modified into a well-balanced consciousness. Aesthetics and imagination well-directed to enhancement of life beyond just that of the individual, play a big part in this. The unconscious centre is a seething cauldron of dream-like memory-generated and imaged ideas that the consciousness draws upon constantly. This inspirational function of the unconscious centre has to pass through the centre's outer filter (personified in by the earth-sun-goddess Sunchild) if it is not to disrupt the balance and unbroken interconnecting lines of the psychic triangle. If  the steering through the holistic filtering does not take place , one might say it means that Sunchild has retreated to the emotional centre and cannot steer the course of the individual appropriately. She is no longer in the driver's seat, which sooner or later is taken over by the blindingly ruthless, more-or-less maniacal titans with their dream-machine. An example of this malfunction (fanaticism) will be presented as a break in the triangle (of sanity) in my next posting.

Friday 5 September 2014

Introducing three posts: the first one dealing with the (Syai) ;psyche in terms of symbol, archetype and myth


How does one describe a sound mind as differing from an unsound? It may not have so much to do with "higher" abilities nor with ethical notions of emotional sensitivity and empathy, as with connectedness.

There are many images of the four deities of the Minor Quaternary in the Syai world. The above cartoon-like representation of the gods, sketched from Teress's memory, show Sunchild, Moonbeast, Redbelly and Bluehead as if before their mythical incorporation into the Syai Psyche. In the background are the ghostly images of the "terrible" titans, the progenitors and opponents of the gods. At the heart-center is Sunchild, represented as benevolent and in revolt against the violent brutal self-interest of the individual (and groups-of)  whose empathy does not extend outside itself. However, she is also - in a deeper sense - the archetype of the unconscious and rooted in raw nature, being the daughter of the titans. Moonbeast, with his extendible rope-snake and sack, represents our body's active interface with the physical world; the outer senses and muscles with which we manipulate the world. Moonbeast was not born but initially created, like a robot, to serve the titans.

The other two deities are the children of Sunchild. Redbelly represents our visceral nature and is sometimes represented (as here) with two stomachs. She is the goddess of our motivational urges and emotions but not so much our more complex inmost feelings. In her excited state she devours creatures and regurgitates them in an altered state, morphed into an appearance closer to their real natures (from the ethical point of view).. Bluehead, the last-born, represents the "higher" brain or intellectual functions of the body: inquiring, calculating and reasoning (Mr Spock type).

The well-balanced mind may be represented (according to Syai psychology) as a centred triangle, Sunchild at the centre and the sub-centres of the other three at the angle-points. As far as the h(r)uman individual is concerned, the inner strength of each center varies, but their workings in interaction with each other determine the degree of well-being and sound functioning, more so than whether that person is intellectually bright or a sensitive tendency to strong passions. In my postings 2 &3, I go from the gods themselves to the way they may help us understand the positive norm of our nature and what happens when that norm becomes abnormal or pathological, as in the case of fanaticism, which the Syai would see as a form of insanity.