Tenure nollag 2011

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The real university will follow the students

Madness in the method, rather than the other way around: There was nothing mindless about what DCU management have been trying to do since 1995, with a quickening after 2000. Vicious to the point of evil and ultimately failed, yes; but there was method there The following initiatives are documented either on this blog, on national Irish media, or on both;

- Tenure was to be abolished; more precisely, it was to be attenuated to the right of 3 months' wages accompanying a summary dismissal, without cause. Since I did not know what any of this meant until 2008, and indeed I assume that the reader does not (nor should he/she have to know as not all of us should need to be lawyers) here is an explanation; even senior academics could be fired for no reason, and were to be entitled only to 3 months' wages as compensation. As now chief justice Susan Denham said from the Supreme court bench on June 29, 2009, that would be the end of academic freedom.

And, of course, the 1997 Universities act declares that academic freedom is the law. Small wonder that the Supreme Court, after a decent interval to preserve face for DCU, ordered Cahill fully reinstated with costs. Nor did DCU follow up on their threat, uttered through junior barrister Mallon at the Supreme court hearing to sack Paul Cahill again - and immediately - in that eventuality. Finally, UCC, UCD, and TCD have all bitten the bullet and interpreted tenure as a job until 65, leaving only DCU.

- Students and staff alike were to be deprived of even the most basic rights of citizens as “autonomy” was granted to the Irish universities. That includes the right not to be bribed , or intimidated; we know this from repeated parliamentary questions

- Students were to lose their right to choose a career; such choice was to be made by the state, centrally

- Students were to begin to pay fees. In UC Berkeley, to take one example, such fees have risen quickly to $14k per annum, with the funds used for building projects.

- University rankings were to be inflated by the addition of expensive “adjunct” staff, normally based in another university, whose publications could be used to pump up the volume. Since 2008, as these staff have become too expensive for the Irish state, rankings have decreased.

- High-achieving students were to be offered exclusive accommodation on campus as an incentive to attend DCU

- Industrial relations (IR)were to be abandoned as a waste of time. If you can fly in a head of dept from Switzerland to work part-time – as indeed DCU has done for nearly a decade - why bother cultivating decent relationships with staff? Indeed, legal judgements could be disregarded – as in fact they effectively were after the Cahill high court case – as no Irish judge would lightly imprison a university president to “purge his contempt of court' as that wonderful mediaeval phrase goes.

The destruction of IR at DCU is VP's single lasting legacy. DCU has been allowed - indeed, encouraged - to act outside rthe law for over a decade and has succeeded only in destroying the delicate network of trust that all too briefly made it a place of outstanding promise. The withdrawal of resources from teaching is a disaster.

It is worthwhile looking at a larger context as well. The Irish were to become an ethnic minority in their own country, with the Chinese becoming the biggest minority ethnic group; the universities were to be moved out of the department of education; and illegal statutes could be replaced by more such illegal statutes.In fact, power was to be decoupled from any kind of legal framework.

So where do we now stand? Well, as I predicted earlier, the first attempt to use the new statute no 5 on a staff member will be met with a High court injunction. The statute will then be declared illegal, and the cycle 2002-2011 will start again. However, it is doubtful that DCU will survive this.

Let us be clear about this; the way DCU was run 1995-2010 is, in the short term, a highly effective way to run an institution. In the medium and long term, it is a disaster to have the college respond to short-term corporate demands in this fashion. Whether that institution should be called a “university” is a moot point; however, the fact is that the international rankings for universities will include it, and its now higher place there will guarantee more foreign students. That is particularly the case as DCU has a good tradition of technical education.

However, it was not accepted practice to throw people under the steamroller of the state until recently. So here is my current response; I do not think that institutions like DCU deserve to survive the 2012 shakeout as MIT, Stanford and other universities attract millions of students. True, they do not yet issue degrees; yet their certificates of completion of course will soon be worth more than degrees from places like DCU. Moreover, these courses are being offered in exactly the technical areas in which places like DCU got their reputation; software eng, algorithms, and so on.


So, to survive, Irish universities will have to revert to being the small, nurturing places that they eschewed in the 2000's. To repeat; I do not think that DCU will survive the debacle of statute no 5. What is interesting now is what to replace DCU with, how to protect the 50k or so graduates (less than the number on a single Stanford course in a month;s time), and how to use the land grant universities in Ireland for the betterment of the Irish people. In a recent post, I even suggested a reversion even to the notion of knowledge as edification; it seems to be the case that the market will provide a better mechanism.

A little about myself. My paternal grandfather returned to Kilkee from the USA almost exactly a century ago and proceeded to become the dominant business force in the area; his counterpart in Kilrush was my maternal grandfather. We were wealthy - even in international terms - before the Irish state was founded, and the advent of a German “aristocrat” in our life was not a particularly smart move by the state that attempted to get our allegiance by invoking republican principles, where titles are an embarrassment. Like many Irish people, I can trace my heritage back to a local “king” (and indeed a Norman baron from Lille) and repudiate all this in the name of participation in Irish society, as all of us do.

This blog started in 2008 as an attempt to protect what we considered was a vital locus of free speech. However, the campaign started in mid-May 2002 when I refused to answer a summons to a meeting that I - in apparent paradox discussed elsewhere - was also to "arrange" (thus vitiating my rights). I revealed elsewhere that this was also the example that inspired Paul Cahill - and I initially advised him in 2006, getting him the barrister for the injunction. After that, Paul's was a better case than mine for the Supreme court as I had not had the benefit of a decade in the USA to pursue research. Our colleagues responded magnificently in 2002-2003, and this would all have been over by March, 2003, but for SIPTU's corruption. The country hyas lost at least tens of millions, and oceans of goodwill as a result.

Since then, we have had Bradley Manning, wikileaks, the Occupy movement and the rise of the Megaversity. Students have a wide variety of choice outside the “universities”and can now get top technical education, and certification, without engaging in scams like U Phoenix, or DCU.


The real university will follow the students, not the other way around

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
Stanford University 28u Nollag 2011

PS Anseo, fis gur fiu e a fheiceail;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL4X5fTw9DI&feature=related

PPS A few minor points as this is now all over but the shouting. First of all, it was VITALLY important that DCU never scored a victory at any stage - Labour court, rights comm, High and Supreme Courts, EAT. Had they scored one, it is as certain as one can be about these things that hundreds of staff would have been dismissed within month.

Secondly, at no point was I going to accept a settlement - which would have been tantamount to accepting that statute no 3 was fair, and would have resulted in dismissals as above. I may not come across on this blog as particularly likeable at times, but I ask the reader to remember what the stakes were, and how much I sacrificed.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

DCU's mysterous new disciplinary statute

Yesterday, DCU sent a team to the circuit court to attempt to overturn the ruling that I was unfairly dismissed under statute no. 3. That illegal statute is still on the web on the DCU server and can be accessed by anyone;

http://www.dcu.ie/info/statutes/statute3.shtml

The new statute, on the other hand, cannot be accessed by any member of the public who pays for DCU, a public university, to assess its conformity with Irish law, as he will see if he tries to access it;

http://www.dcu.ie/info/policies/suspension_and_dismissal_employees.pdf

(26 Dec 2011 - we are told that statute no3 was "superseded" in 2010

Luckily the internet archive keeps track of such things and can confirm that this is not the case;

http://web.archive.org/web/20110611202122/http://www.dcu.ie/info/statutes/index.shtml


So, by June 11 2011 there still is NO mention of statute no 5 - nor is there one on Dec 14 2010;

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20101015000000*/http://www.dcu.ie/info/statutes/index.shtml

So DCU did NOT supersede the statute in 2010 - unless it takes a year for Niall O'Leary, their web guy, to do very basic stuff.

Incidentally, the "new statute" is probably this illegal one;

http://academictenure.blogspot.com/2011/03/dcus-illegal-disciplinary-statute-still.html

I can confirm that Ruairi Quinn has been lobbied on this issue from inside the Labour party and that may have caused the change. For me, this is mission accomplished; and I can also confirm that it was I who initially advised Paul Cahill in 2006, and who got him the barrister for his successful injunction case which started everything)

DCU has refused to settle my case in any way that does justice to the dignity of scholarship. It has spent several millions of taxpayers' money in attempting to destroy my life, and that of my two daughters and long-time partner, the esteemed broadcaster and brilliant jazz artist Melanie O'Reilly. Not only that; through their legal firm, Arthur Cox, they had refused to reschedule the case, and were insisting that I risk my work visa here in the USA to return in Jan 2012.

Readers will remember that my case went into limbo in 2004 - 2009 because of a wholly specious and legally incorrect argument made by Cox that a High Court summons, drawn up by Justice Minister Alan Shatter's firm, pre-empted the case. We shall bring Ms O'Mahony of the EAT back to explain this in due course. Moreover, my case had already been delayed because IBEC refused to represent DCU from 2003, when the IBEC rep Graham Fagan got disgusted at DCU's refusal to put witnesses on the stand.

Yesterday - 21 December 2011 - the circuit court judge laughed DCU out of court, seeing their behaviour for the bullying and victimization that it is. This is of course not the first time that Cox and Mallon for DCU have been laughed out of court, and our learned friends must be wondering whether they are some kind of perverse and highly taxpayer-toxic standup act

Of course, the world is moving on as the Irish state focuses on its specialty; diverting public money from workers (and their descendents) to large law firms and grossly incompetent bureaucrats. For, gentle readers, the Fall 2011 Stanford AI course with its 120,00o students was a success; the sister course in machine learning had a sign-up of 80,000, and Stanford will have 16 courses, with perhaps a million registered, by next spring as the bottom of the ML page promises;

http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

MIT have responded in panic with a vaporware announcement that indicates they too realize that this is the future;

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219.html

Ironically, of course, I have been at Stanford for a decade, have had courses accredited there, and these courses could attract massive revenue for Ireland. It may be better, however, if the state continues its current suicidal trajectory until it collapses sufficiently that we can rebuild using the innate genius of Irish civil society.



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
Stanford University 22u Nollag 2011


PS I posted what I think is the "new" statute at http://academictenure.blogspot.com/2011/01/dcus-new-illegal-statute.html and this is the last page;

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Truth, the academy, blogs and journals

 (Bealtaine 2012 - the paper below just got published at

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/15)

The academy as we know it today derives much of its status from its claim to a pursuit of truth. The process whereby the state usurped the academy from the Church is not one that I will go into here; historically, it may eventually be judged that the accompanying superimposition on the community of scholars that constitute the academy (including the university) of an administration which usurps most of the power is a very serious error.

There are several counter-moves that we as scholars can make. Several of them have been cited over and again on this blog; the use of open-source resources like MIT;s open courseware for pedagogy and the open science movement. It is clear to regular readers that I consider taxpayer funding of science wasteful in the extreme, particularly in a country like Ireland that cannot afford it and in which it is simply used as yet another mechanism for an elephantine state apparatus to usurp another thread in civil society. Instead of science,both pure and applied, emerging from the ground up in the proper hands, it becomes established by central diktat. The lack of breakthrough Irish science and technology since the state quickened its level of interference around 2000 is conspicuous; and, no, generation of a few more hundred papers in the febrile field of immunology does not compensate for the lack of new native tech firms and the marginalization of free thought in public universities.

At UC Berkeley, faced with fee increases and a dimunition of the intellectual commons, the students protest, and the cops riot, every year. Chancellor Birgenau recently received a 90% vote of no confidence by the faculty. Absent a legislative overhaul that attenuates the role of the regents – in particular their power to set the content of syllabi – the situation there is hopeless. In Ireland, the destruction of intellectual life must be seen in the context of our colonial history, in which the years 1921-1998 now look like a brief interlude.

So what can be done? A few things; first of all, the PI/public funding model has broken down as a way of divining truth. There is a strong case for limited taxpayer funding in areas that would otherwise wither on the vine, or in which there is a strong national tradition. As I have written before, Ireland is in a strong position to set up a Bell/ Schroedinger center for the study of quantum coherence in biological systems, one of the cutting edges of current science. The rigour demanded by the academy arises naturally where there is competition and respect for scholarship, as does excellence in pedagogy as soon as students are given clear options.

“Cosmos and history” was founded by Arran Gare, scion of a distinguished Australian family, Unlike the much-vaunted PLOS, it does not demand thousands in money upfront to initiate the review process. It strikes this writer as precisely the way forward for truth-seeking in a schooled context; yet it functions - as far as I can see – with a volunteer crew. Nor does it require copyright assignment, which i am no longer preapred to do.

I occasionally use the “tenure” blog to do pre-prints, and the following paper is an example. There is much going on in it, but a central theme is what happens if we move learning back to a spiritual context, one in which the search for truth is a moral imperative. As before, I have made no attempt to format it here; it will appear, duly formatted, in “Cosmos and history” in 2012

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
Stanford University 14u Nollag 2011

_____________________________________________________________________________________


God's unlikely comeback; evolution, emanation, and ecology.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Room 28, Ventura Hall, CSLI Stanford University, CA 94305

Abstract

This paper has three contrasting sections. The first starts with a description of the academic context that has led researchers like Stuart Kauffman to introduce "God" into respectable discourse. It then goes on to juxtapose his schema with similar others that his work does not reference. It is proposed that, since humanity is the cutting edge-for good and evil-of emanation/revolution, it is human development that we must focus on. This, in turn cannot properly be discussed without reference to first person descriptions and their contrast with third person descriptions. Likewise the role of those contrasting accounts within and outside the academy, which is currently under threat, must be referred to.

Accordingly, the second section begins with the delineation of subjectivity suggested by current neuroscience. It is argued that the cluster sampling of EEG will yield significantly more meaningful results than other competing methods.
This paper makes the admittedly radical contention that it may be intellectually responsible to engage in forms of thought and practice that engage the whole of life in a manner heretofore addressed by “religions”. Such forms of life cannot responsibly emerge from an insight into the nature of physical reality, which is the province of the academy. Rather, these forms emerge from consideration of the human psychophysical unity as it engages with a succession of different contexts and attempts to reflect on and refine its responses to them.
The nature of the academy early in the 21st century is a confounding factor. The corporate pressure to attenuate academic freedom is real, as is the fact that academic freedom in liberal democracies would immediately migrate to other, initially unfunded structures in civil society with the internet offering myriad opportunities for dissemination and immediate critique of ideas. Orthogonal to this is the attempt to specify and refine one's psychological life, the bane of academic psychology from 19th century German research onwards. It is argued that academic psychology has an asymptote at this point; better to distinguish between the “academy” and the “real world” in a way that best does justice to both, and allows the layperson to participate in a genuine attempt to seek knowledge by providing him with a veridical cosmology and psychology, than risk a new absurdity rivaling ontological behaviourism. Many salient facts about human psychology can be discovered by oneself in the “real world”, if only because the imperatives there will always be more compelling.

Finally, a synthetic narrative is proposed, one in which the evolutionary ethos of the first section is interrelated with the signs of the second section. This final section may yet be read independently of its predecessors. Kauffman’s imperative “reinventing the sacred” indicates something is awry in our conceptual and political systems; it is argued that historically authentic religious movements have preserved something they considered divine, and done so on the margins of society. In fact, this marginalization may be the essence of the religious impulse.

Keywords; Evolution, emanation, emergence, anthropic principle, neuroscience, consciousness, subjectivity

0. Prefatory comments
The first point relates to the context of this contribution. Were it fully committed to the academic process, certain things are lost and gained. What is lost is its obligation to base itself in forces in the larger society, as these are set aside in the academic context to afford intellectuals a sharper focus. Intellectuals in academia have no obligation to be comprehensible to the masses, and are asked in return to address current topical issues with increased precision; the state has been happy to provide them with the gain of financial and indeed physical security for this – at least up to recently. If the state continues to withdraw from this role in providing a venue for free inquiry, it is likely that other entities (including an initially “hedge school” coalition of scholars) will fill the vacuum – and historically resources have followed

This paper addresses many current issues, some directly, and others more obliquely. In the first section, starting from Kauffman's recent expedition in the area, we consider how the immanence of order has caused even “hard” science – indeed, particularly “hard” science – to consider schemes so outlandish for explanation of the anthropic thrust of the constants of nature that the old saw “God does it on Tuesdays” now seems like a relatively reasonable explanation. This paper is paradoxically being written at a time when believers in “evolution” (limited to an outdated NeoDarwinian ethos) are at odds, politically as well as epistemologically, with “Creationists”. It is argued that the first group need to familiarize themselves with the emanationism that Darwin only dimly grasped; for the latter, it is argued that a suitably modified emanationism/evolution is actually their best hope for retrieving the ethos of positive psychological transformation in the context of an over-arching sense of the cosmos in which that transformation is meaningful. This process has led to many of humanity's finest moments. We find a recent effort in this direction in the work of Gurdjieff.

But wait! Surely we are not going to countenance a worldview incompatible with modern science in order to generate an emotional frenzy that we then called sacred, the intensity of which will increase as it is contradicted by the facts? Of course not; but neither are we going to commit to a worldview that – in the past century – has variously and absurdly outlawed talk of mental process, trivialized biological inheritance, and announced that some stars are older than the universe. Thus, the paper ends with a tentative cosmogony in which the next step in evolution is seen in a larger context. Moreover, it is proposed that if it is granted that the unfolding of the cosmos, as Paul Davies concluded in his book on the subject, can be seen to point toward humans interacting with it and each other in a meaningful way, we do not need the gear supplied by the Abrahamic religions to transcend ourselves in the manner that the religious have done. In fact, we can work toward preservation of that which we see as sacred. In our case, it is argued that enacting legislation preserving the environment and human well-being in general, fighting corruption, preserving freedom of inquiry and speech, as well as action preserving true methods of inquiry into the real in science and art are examples of such work.

Sankara, Ramanuja, Milarepa in the East as well as Marcus Aurelius, Eckhart, John of the Cross and others in the West and scores of others have indicated a state of being in which the transcendent somehow exemplifies itself in a suitably transformed human psyche. This state of Being was available also to those in the active life; as the founder of the Vincentian order put it, pray that its recipients do not experience giving as mere charity. Religious formation, unlike academic formation, is mainly about the transformation of the subject; selflessness is induced, by greater (Mahayana) or lesser (Hinayana) vehicles. Yet this is done in the context of a cosmology and cosmogony; the fact that religions in general currently teach absurd cosmologies and cosmogonies as “truth” needs to be rectified, and that is one of the goals of this paper. We hope to preserve the self-transcendence of religion without eschewing the truth-seeking of academia.

The paper thus attempts to specify a role in society for what we currently call “the academy” and what we call “religion”. Academic ideas, like all others, are eventually processed by the brain, and this is the beginning of my analysis which is outlined in the following section. It sees a progression from mere attention, the capacity to evaluate salience of signals in a multi-sensory environment, to that stream of narration to oneself that we commonly identify as “consciousness”. In particular, it argues that this “consciousness” indeed may be related to phase synchrony of gamma oscillations in the brain. These gamma oscillations, in turn, decrease the metabolic demand of the brain on the rest of the organism. Meditators have learned how voluntarily to improve their health by increasing the amplitude and synchrony of their gamma oscillations.

In evolutionary terms, gamma oscillations provide extra metabolic energy and may explain why homo sapiens with its massive, metabolically expensive brain managed to survive. It is not excessively academically controversial to suggest that our experience of “consciousness” is fundamentally the result of imposing a largely self-serving narrative on a sketchily sampled series of instances of gamma onset with the brain put in a “null state” wherein it is maximally sensitive to incoming stimuli. Nor does it defy best academic practice to hypothesize that our experience of “selfhood” originates from an information-compression imperative; selfhood fundamentally springs from a cognitive immune requirement, the necessity to filter out irrelevant data often by labeling them as “ego alien” or in fact simply ignoring a huge amount of material that we should be aware of.

This means that our “consciousness” , self and will are largely fictitious. Again, this is not outré in current academic discourse and this author – among others - has published peer-reviewed material supporting this hypothesis. That said, it is surely natural to want a more veridical (true to the facts) “consciousness” , self and will. One would have to become aware of the formative influences in one's developmental environment and indeed current culture, and much else in order to do so.

Yet that is not my principal point here; that stems from the brute realization that, outside a well-appointed tenured office at a well-endowed university, the more urgent imperatives that impinge on one, moment to moment, come from the forces in the larger society identified by sociologists like Durkheim, not from nuances of academic discourse. In particular, the ancient cultural reservoir variously termed “common sense” and “folk psychology” provides algorithmic compressions of complex social interactions that are indispensable in the “real world”. To reject these tools would be folly on a personal level; on a state level, it would require a misguided totalitarianism compared to which Stalinism would seem a libertarian utopia.

And yet, as we talk about “common sense”, we refer to items processed by the brain. Otherwise put, reality is relative to consciousness in one sense, but transcends it in a more important sense. Alternatively, the most phenomenologically pressing facts will always be about being-in-the-world (Dasein), not being-in-the-academy.

So far, the above might read as yet another lifelong academic desperately trying to reassure himself that his work has some consequence. However, I believe that I may be making a more important point; the hypothesizing of a realm of knowledge that relates to our lives, moment to moment, and yet is consistent with our best current academic guess about our nature. To refuse to countenance this hypothesis is to yield acres of critical ground to the “new age” and to charlatans of all stripes. The two extremes of “eliminative materialism” (accepting only the science, however incomplete and uninformative in the millenniar hope of enlightenment in the future ) and irrationalism are both unacceptable.

What I propose, then, is that we should continue to insist that the academy continues to pursue objective knowledge with rigor and honesty; we are, after all, paying for it with our taxes. Every single modern attempt to ask the modern academy to do more, by delineating the nature of subjectivity in a fine-grained and yet comprehensive way, has failed or been diverted from psychology to philosophy, a classical way of kicking the troublesome upstairs where one cannot hear it complain. It seems appropriate to suggest that, outside the finer achievements of the the humanities which need to lose their postx obsessions, it is not appropriate to ask the academy to go this extra kilometer. In particular, no academic psychology, whether neurally based or not, will get us very far, though it is appropriate to mention the existence of more advanced subjective states than “consciousness”.

Where then? Let us return to our notion that “consciousness” reflects gamma synchrony. Surely we wish to hone our “consciousness”, moment to moment, life situation to life situation? It seems to be that the first step is to observe oneself in these different life situations. Is one lying? Being inappropriately deferential, contemptuous, afraid, confident, angry, and so on? What is left of oneself from this wrenching analysis?

Because many true religious thinkers would argue that this is really the beginning of the religious quest; those on the perennialist school would argue that traditionally religions are a codified set of practices to allow one to acquire being for the remnant of selfhood left over from this excruciating self-examination. The fact that religions today are in general merely debauched versions of what was created by their founders is irrelevant; in fact, each religion was set up as a response to a similarly debauched situation.

Why indeed call this path a religion? I would prefer another name; however, I can think of no other that suggests that the task of integrating oneself across many contexts is sacred and immensely difficult, as self-serving narrative begins immediately even in those few of us who have performed feats of great courage and charity. For the remainder of this section, I will outline the metaphysical background consistent with some current scientific best guesses. It will be re-iterated in the course of this paper.

As of 2011, it is known that coherent quantum states can exist in biological systems (Ball, 2011); while their spatial extent is literally minuscule, it does seem to be the case that they would persist better under a regime of gamma phase coherence than its opposite. Consider then this hypothesis; the flight that Plotinus and others describe from the alone back to the alone is the reinstatement of a non-classical probability regime in the cortex. This can be sustained by practices that we call meditation, having been initially attained by the practices of action, thought and love described in the religious literature. The unspeakably faster and more complex urban lives that the majority of humanity now live require that self-integration requires some discipline.

This too may help the physical environment; instead of a “vertical” attempt to realize ourselves through exploitation of the biosphere in new products, the notion that our subjectivity is more veridically experienced through a reflective path should be institutionalized through whatever means are appropriate in politics and/or civil society. The new millennium generation is as compelled by imperatives about the physical environment (recycling etc) as they are by texting and Facebook.


Section 1

1.0 Introduction

It is not unfair to say that "religious" and "theological" are epithets in our contemporary rational discourse, a good-natured step above "racist" and "bigoted", but a warning shot below "woolly” and "hand waving". Stuart Kauffman (2008) has boldly entered this cockpit and attempts a remarkable rehabilitation of God considered as the creative ethos of the cosmos. Not a personal, omnipotent, omniscient God, mind you; yet Kauffman is not insensitive to the charms of the Semitic God's presence. In fact, Kauffman has arguably opened a veritable Pandora's Box, and this first section will look at the consequences.

For Kauffman's eminence has meant that many reviewers have come out as long-term closet theists; otherwise put - and Kauffman comes close-we advocates of evolution should no more cede exclusive use of the word "God" to fundamentalists than liberals should cede "freedom" to the Tea Party. That said, it is the view of this writer that Kauffman would have benefited from a non-British philosophical formation, one that found correlates in what he was attempting in Hegel or in Plotinus. This first section is largely an attempt to create such an infrastructure, and proposes consideration of subjectivity in the context that Kauffman's brandishing of quantum coherence prohibited.

Kauffman sees his work as an essay at the "reinvention of the sacred". Of course, as Durkheim pointed out long go, the sacred is reinvented continually, and the numinous objects change from consecrated hosts to taboo crop circles – and indeed Monty Python’s famous “holy hand grenade”. What is needed, in these terms, is a specification of the sacred that does not offend our reason, and is socially salutary. Given the complex power relations in our contemporary society, self transcendence is often achieved by repealing laws that are man-made, as by - to take one example of emotional education -the distinction Needleman (2011) makes between being "humbled" and "humiliated", with only the former leading to God. Of course, Needleman has been attempting to do the same as Kauffman for some time, but in a religious context. Needleman argues that his mentor Gurdjieff, like Kauffman, introduced to the world a new concept of God.

Similarly, as Facebook regularly reminds us all, Kauffman has more friends than he knows. The mystical traditions in the discrete religious histories that Baha'ullah perceptibly called the Semitic and the Aryan converge on the concept of ultimate reality (Stace, 1960) that represents the formless quantum vacuum that quantum physicists and their new colleagues in cosmology deal with daily. Thus, to take one example of many, the late mediaeval Rhenish mystic Meister Eckhart has been written about, without qualification, both as Hindu and Buddhist (ibid). Problems arose when God became Yahweh, a projection of the social order, as Joseph Campbell correctly hypothesised; the reaction from the contemporary esoteric Judaism was apparently to ask whether this new manifestation was equivalent to the old manifestation labelled "nothing" (Ayin - Exodus 17:7), a higher manifestation that believers in our quantum vacuum at the root of the nature of things would find congenial.

The first port of call for a historically minded Kauffman might have been Plotinus as we shall see below. As it happens Kauffman instead at least implicitly proposes the following schema :

I the physical II the biological III the mental IV the social

He is at pains to argue against any type of reductionism from one level to another. In fact he argues that his schema is not an inventory, but an ontology, as well as an epistemological schema. So each category is ontologically as well as epistemologically distinct from the category below it and has new laws which apply to it as well as inheriting restrictions from the categories below. To those of us with training in computer science, this is not "ontology" as we meant it, which would simply be inventories with hierarchy in Kauffman's conceptual framework.

Kauffman refers rather to different qualities of being, the emanation of a transcendent yet immanent evolutionary "creative spirit" which he calls "God". And so we have a reinstatement of the ancient concept of a great chain of being but with no process of emanation. In fact Kauffman - insofar he addresses the issue - is an emergentist who thinks also that the laws of chaoplexity cut across all levels of his ontology. Yet he is explicitly anti-reductionist. The self-confessed failure of the great Stanford polymath Patrick Suppes (2002) to produce a single reduction to set theory of the diverse scientific phenomena treated in his vast book would not surprise.Kauffman.

With Plotinus (Stace, 1960) we get the following emanationist schema, one that proposes a descending from the absolute. Plotinus was undoubtedly inspired by Indian thought and his schema also shows parallels with the Tao Te Ching;

I absolute II Nous III world soul IV matter

In fact, in a move that we will see again soon, Plotinus claims that we as matter can again ascend to the absolute, the alone to the alone. Hegel may be interpreted as an emanationist with a focus on political organisation, and Marx as one with a focus on economic relations.

In this context, the poverty of emanation in Charles Darwin is noticeable;

I Biosphere ------ natural selection------> II conscious organisms

However much we dress Darwin up, we really cannot take him out. As I analyzed in my (2004) treatment, Dennett claims that Darwin's theory is an emphasis on the algorithmic, and immanent order can be explained by world-trying until a world in which order arises emerges. This is a rather generous reading of the Victorian's work. Margulis et al (2002) point to the huge role in evolution of endosymbiosis – the capture of one organism by another, with our mitochondria the classic example, enslaved to become an energy provider for the cell. Other mechanisms include Hox genes, alternative splicing and so on, well beyond the reach of Darwin’s ethos of small, incremental changes as I previously (2008) pointed out.


Likewise, Margulis et al. (ibid) claim that our current earth shows signs of far-from-equilibrium dynamics conducive to macroscopic life that they follow William Golding in terming “Gaia”; the biosphere without Gaia is capable of harbouring little more than bacteria.

There is a more substantial point to be made. Kauffman is proposing an ontology and evolution without any emanation of spirit. I believe his insistence on ontology, as distinct from epistemology, to basically be well motivated, and in this he follows that other neo-Gurdjieffian Fritz Schumacher (1977). What Kauffman does not make explicit is that the actual emergence of something new (like life) with new laws should be made distinct from situations where the human mind must change its construals (like quantum mechanics). This in turn should be distinguished from situations that I call "anthropisms" where, for example, the resonant reactions involving beryllium that give rise to carbon were predicted. This prediction was made by Fred Hoyle, - ironically a proponent of the "steady-state" universe and a debunker of his own neologism "big bang" - on the basis of anthropocentric data; the very fact that we are here means that carbon must somehow have been produced. Let us label these E, C, and A. If an advance recapitulates a previous advance, we call it "R". To anticipate much of the argument of this paper, what we humans can hope for now is a set of R's and C's on our own psyches and societies as the next, intrinsically sacred, step in evolution. We are not in a position to know whether something truly new thus emerges.

Kauffman correctly points out that many of the elements for life are available in the physical world, before life’s attested emergence; organic molecules (including alcohol) in interstellar clouds, membranes, self-replication before DNA, and so on. What Kauffman fails to acknowledge is the possibility that subjectivity should be part of the worldview, which is now a Weltanschauung as I argued in 2004, because it is no longer simply a third person description.

The difficulties we are about to encounter are in this writer’s experience best exemplified by sources such as the distinguished scholar, Huston Smith (1992). Smith inveighs against the fact that for science there is only “one realm of being”, the third person “objective “ description, then proceeds to give precisely such a description of how he sees things REALLY are; it is a classic third person account. It seems to this writer that we must honour science’s descriptions, but that this indeed allows space for delineation of subjective experience, and indeed the role of that experience in Nature, that does violence neither to science nor to the millennia of cultural formation that each interaction we have with another human being exemplifies.

Similarly Kauffman’s view of the social is indeed chaotic, with English common law his ideal and order emerging naturally from it. This notoriously did not work very well in Iraq where the New World Order attempted to supplant a civil law system with English common law. Hammurabi may still be revolving in his grave.


Moreover, people are capable of establishing astounding moral heights, even absent an explicit legal framework, perhaps indicating that something in reality resonates with them. The single positive consequence that emerged from the slaughter of seven Trappist monks at Tibhirine monastery, depicted in the movie "Of gods and men" and in Kiser's (2002) book, was the coming into public awareness of the work of the physician monk, brother Luc, who at 80 years old and severely asthmatic was still seeing over 100 patients a day free of charge. Moreover he had given up wealth as well as a very promising career in hospital medicine, and is depicted - presumably accurately – as an exemplar of what Christians call a "sign of contradiction", one that will resonate through the ages to young people seeking a direction in life.

The effects of appointing a too young conservative to the Papacy in the late 1970's will not be undone in our lifetime; yet the fact remains that the life led by Luc and the search conducted by Thomas Merton within Cistercian spirituality (Mott, 1993) forever will resonate. While the prior of Tibhirine, Christian de Cherge, might indeed be appropriately described as the kind of general that only the idly curious would follow into battle (Kiser, ibid.), the goal of the monks in staying in war-torn Algeria was not to seek conversions, but to atone for France’s colonial past in a show of love for the neighbors that their presence was protecting. That two groups of followers of the same, Abrahamic God should be at daggers drawn is indeed an indication of how vicious religious sectarianism and colonialism both are. It is worth saying that only religious practices that lead to silence, rather than more words and song, are worth even considering, let alone practicing.

The scheme which most comprehensively addresses all these issues is due to a Greek-Armenian, born around 1870, who became known "Gurdjieff". Moore (1990) writes beautifully about Gurdjieff's ecological concerns (20-21, 343-344). What he does not mention is that in the Gurdjieff system both environmental destruction and human lack of development are inevitable without massive effort. The premise of "the work" - as it is known - is that we are already functioning as nature intended. Unconscious automata, we are warming the Earth sufficiently for it to become like the sun. It would be anachronistic to point out that Gurdjieff would perhaps use the planet Venus as his endpoint for the current trajectory of earth, as many environmental scientists are proposing, had he lived later.

Recoiling in shock at revolutionary excesses, post-enlightenment French thinkers sought cosmologies and forms of life that closely resemble what is about to be proposed in this paper. For example, the apparently scientistic Comte produced an evolutionary schema that did indeed propose a “positivistic' age; and then suggested that we recapitulate to an age of cult, of emotional fervor in worship. The Saint-Simonian movement attempted to reform society along lines being proposed here, before withdrawing to become an apparently risible monastic community. The evolutionary schema and withdrawal from the world was echoed by Gurdjieff, and it is his exemplification of these ideas that we shall consider here.


Gurdjieff mixed with this some sub-Joycean neologisms, bizarre behaviour, and occasional manic humour. Yet the central idea is very powerful; emanation proceeds from the nexus of possible worlds to earth in the manner of the sending of that of major scale. Where a semitone interval is required, a shock - which we call E or A in our schema - is needed to allow its traversal. Remarkably, Gurdjieff proposed - at least in his interpreters - that ours was one of many universes that could exist, a multiverse theory before its time. This is a rough outline of Gurdjieff's schema;


Do Si La Sol Fa Mi Re

I God (All worlds) ....shock ...> II Universe ..> III Milky way >IVSun.> V Planets .shock> VI Earth . organic life >Moon


Gurdjieff, as interpreted by Moore (1990) puts it simply; "In order to fill the interval...a special apparatus is created...organic life on earth". Otherwise put, we are on earth to serve the purposes of the moon, a kind of “The matrix” situation as I pointed out previously (2004)!

In this schema, we are unconscious automata who only fantasise that we have consciousness, will, and selfhood. Gurdjieff provides techniques to develop these three processes within ourselves. He argues that in doing so we are actually contradicting the requirements of nature. In the next section, we are going to see evidence that Gurdjieff's grim analysis of our inner life -such as it is – seems quite close to the mark. The hypothesis that humanity is doomed to destroy the biosphere simply by following dictates of nature also seems to be reinforced by the fact that even before China and India come to Western levels of industrialization and environmental destruction, we are already in deep trouble.

Had Gurdjieff lived in the late 20th century, it is likely indeed that he would use the concept of Gaia, an attested mechanism within the biosphere which keeps atmospheric gases at far from equilibrium level while also keeping the seas at an alkaline level. This mechanism has failed before during the "Snowball Earth" period 600 million years ago and there is every likelihood that it will fail again. Likewise, the coincidences explained (away) by the anthropic principle that facilitate our existence have yet been insufficient to prevent millennia of human suffering, due both to moral evil and design flaws in human biology; there will always be work to do, and any religion that proclaims a God that is omnipotent and omni-benevolent will spend a a lot of its time repeating this absurdity - my 2004 book discusses various approaches in theodicy, of which outright antinomialism makes as much sense as any other. So therefore the efforts at full human development as a protection of the environment are moral imperatives, and need an institution for their continued fostering. Somehow, constructive and positive moral action seems to put us in touch with the Good, true and beautiful, and the idea that we are somehow completing creation has a certain resonance.


McBay et al (2011) give an indication of just how high the stakes are here. Their book is a “how to” and indeed “why to” manual for destruction of the entity they see at the core of our current environmental Holocaust. That they call this entity "civilisation" and that it is equated with the historical consequents of its Tigris Euphrates forebear must give pause.

I do not wish to give this book any more respect than deserves; it comes close to glorifying violence, has an almost fascist obsession with death, and supplies no techniques even for the basis of contemporary activism; monitoring changes to one's IP address, detecting spyware, and encryption/decryption. Secondly, as someone who was rather closer to the IRA than they ever were, I must comment that their upholding of Sinn Fein/IRA as an exemplar (180-182) is both laughably naive and deeply troubling. Alternatively put, Terrence MacSwiney's hunger strike to death compromised British rule in Ireland more than any military action against British rule; the practical recission of the instruments of British common law(so beloved of Kauffman, and such an invitation to make things up as they go along, absent a written constitution) was completed by public rejection of the colonial court system and the creation of autochthonous courts; the use of force by Michael Collins was pointed at ensuring that "normalcy" could not return, as there was no chance of victory in pitched battle. Far from destroying civilisation, we need to emphasise civilised values and human development in a way that is environmentally sustainable.

1.1 A flawed emanationist/evolutionary dynamic

There are certain things Gurdjieff got absolutely right;

1.A realistic, if apparently radical, appraisal of the relative importance of “worldly”
and “spiritual” issues for those who have reached a certain stage of questioning. In
brief, the worldly is treated as a set of random events with human automata as their
agents. Until this state of questioning has been reached, this prescription is dangerous.
2. An evolutionary dynamic - which yet stresses that human development past a certain point
is rare.
3.The provision of the prospect of a spiritual home; cosmopolitan, yet gendered,
welcoming and alluring, for seekers.
4.A cosmology, inconsistent with modern science though it is, as we shall see.
5.A “greater psychology”, starting from an already intuited sense of what one's abiding
identity actually is
6.An insistence on scientific verification, if honoured quite as often in the breach as
in the observance.
7.A hierarchy of value, though phrased in chemical terminology inconsistent with modern science.
8.A sense of the sacred, though his occasionally shocking public behaviour and his use of
the “way of blame” and desire to put off dilettantes belied this.
9.The notion that states of the body, including health, could be felt and altered through
a properly attuned consciousness.
10.Similarly, the old heysechast idea that the cosmos could reveal itself to sensation.

A salutary reconstruction of Gurdjieff would make clear the limits of scientific investigation,
and in particular its inability, even in principle, to educate subjectivity. Subjectivity, it would argue as before, is elucidated in interaction with the world in all its forms; business, the arts, ordinary social experience. It would use Goedel and latter day quantum mechanics to explicate the limits of cognition. It would dispense with the nonsense about the inferiority of “Western” art, and elevate the likes of Beethoven and Brunelleschi appropriately.
Gurdjieff's system rightly emphasises;
- an evolutionary cosmology, which needs to be restated in the context of current knowledge.

- a hierarchy of art, in which pride of place is given to “conscious” art that is technically accomplished, self-aware, and capable of emotional range. He erred in excluding “Western” art.
- authenticity in one's dealings with oneself and thus with others. His psychological system is good if one assumes that there are indeed higher states of subjectivity possible.
- the possibility of conscious access to healing processes in oneself and others, which is current cutting-edge science and a useful complement to the biomedical model.
Let us begin with the cosmology. Gurdjieff borrows liberally from Kepler, as well as Plotinus and other forebears, with the sun's being identified with “God the father” in the latter and the organic theory of planet-creation in the former bordering on the delusional. Classic Greek culture, by contrast, already had a relatively veridical model of the solar system, and stunningly accurate estimates using elementary geometry of the circumference of our Earth, as well as the Earth's distance from the sun and moon. It is quite remarkable that otherwise sophisticated intellectuals (Frank Lloyd Wright, Jacob Needleman, Peter Brook, A.R. Orage, P.D. Ouspensky, and EF Schumacher, inter alia) from the early 20th century from now have publicly identified themselves with the Gurdjieff system, which is mercilessly and hilariously dissected by Peter Washington (1993). Alternatively put, the public intellectual self-immolation of these great figures speaks volumes about the urgency of the issues that Gurdjieff's system, if clumsily and bizarrely at times, deals with.
The emphasis on art that is accomplished, self-aware, and capable of emotional range gives a hint about the appeal of his teaching. The corruption and degradation of culture that have accompanied the advent of mechanically reproducible art is, at this point in history, the stuff of legend. Yet Gurdjieff's “Asian” (read Orientalist in the Saidian sense) aesthetic is as wrong as his 19th century biochemistry is muddled, to put it kindly. Yet his emphases on the fragmentation of self, and the fact that he anticipated the links between the nervous and immune system that are now accepted as received wisdom, again indicate why his ideas received quite a welcome from major figures, while undergoing the mockery of Washington (1993). What is unassailable in Gurdjieff, like Merton, Brother Luc and Charles de Foucauld, is the ripples set in motion by the intensity of his search.
Washington (ibid) is similarly scathing about Madame Blavatsky and the entire theosophical movement, with the single exception of J. Krishnamurti. The religious, intellectual, and emotional ascesis of J. Krishnamurti's work is redolent of Gautama. It might be argued that J. Krishnamurti goes several stages further even than the Buddha. Yet many of the moves he makes have not been made explicit. While Gautama eschewed the authority of community, church and state – and in doing so renounced the hold that religions like Catholicism claim on all of these – there still remains the notion of a single, unified self with which he, Gautama, can enter into dialogue and eventually bring to enlightenment. (However, later Buddhist philosophy renounces this “self”)
J. Krishnamurti brackets even this self; in fact, the enemy within is what he calls “thought”. Where this writer lives in Berkeley, California, there is a humorous bumper-sticker that reads “do not believe everything you think”; J. Krishnamurti's (1979, P. 1) message is, essentially, “do not believe anything you think”:
“A meditative mind is silent.....it is the silence when thought – with all its images, its words and perceptions – has entirely ceased. The meditative mind is the religious mind – the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants”.
The connection with Advaita Vedanta is admitted by J. Krishnamurti himself; indeed, it could responsibly be stated that this is the root of the current teachings of Deepak Chopra, inter alia. Yet to denigrate thought will never do; what J. Krishnamurti surely meant was the “empirical” self, the self that comes and goes. However, what worked in the mainly pastoral societies when the Vedas were being written is unlikely to work in our current chaos. And with that we can return to the science.

SECTION 2 Meditation, consciousness, and the next step in human evolution

2.0 Introduction
This section builds on previous published work in theoretical biology and experimental neuroscience by its author. Specifically, it is taken as established that the impact of evolutionary dynamics in phenomenology is experienced primarily through the computational artifacts that we call our “selves”, and that such selves are multiple in each individual. These selves reflect above all the cognitive immune reaction, a reaction that breaks down in such syndromes as autism and schizophrenia, and attribution of often fictional agency to oneself with which nature has endowed us for engineering purposes. Yet in meditation, as in moments of undivided consciousness, this self-system break down to be replaced by a single coherent observer.
This section starts with a short comment on the current state of neuroscience, with remarks on the often exaggerated claims made by practitioners of various techniques. It goes on briefly to examine what phenomenology would seem to require of the data, and whether these requirements can actually be met.
It is cautiously proposed that techniques which reveal discontinuities occurring in the order of tenths of seconds may be most fruitful, and recent ECOG work by the author is, again briefly, summarised. While selves might be said to be manifest in the “dark energy” that comprises the great majority of the brain's 20% metabolic demand on the organism's total energy, the meditative state's benefits are perhaps partly due to the often sustained reduction of this demand. The paper continues by speculating on what evolution might want to achieve by this phenomenologically “selfless” and metabolically “zero power” state, and what social structures and experiential disciplines are appropriate to engender this state.
To do so is to infringe on the area traditionally occupied by religion. It is argued that the human religious impulse will survive the most robust attack by scientism, including eliminative materialism, and it is better if we can find ways of channeling this impulse into streams that are non-contradictive of fact, non-dogmatic, and inclusive of the many domains of human existence that we ourselves negotiate on a daily basis.



2.1 Neuroscience, logical atomism, and the new phrenology.
Vul et al. (2010) recently published a paper arguing that many fmri “findings” are premised on inappropriate statistical models and/or analysis. In that they are in tune with a new trend of skepticism about data-driven science
Fmri's new phrenologists are also logical atomists, over a half-century after Wittgenstein refuted this earlier position of his once and - one suspects – for all (O Nualláin et al., 2007). The frontal lobes are increasingly being mapped out for voluntary action under various regimes, and indeed feelings of awe; the idea that the locations chosen might be at best hubs (a la Dallas Airport) seems to have escaped the functionalists in their rush to publication. More troublingly, the project itself seems absurd beyond words; to catalogue a variety of experienced dispositions and look for cortical locations for them without first coming clean that this is what's happening is to risk scientific malpractice of the worst sort. Moreover, the really causal mental phenomena that constitute the innards of our mental machinery may be using not just time-tolerances in the thousandths of seconds, but tensor and category theory operations as described by Hoffman and Kime in (O Nualláin, et al., eds., 1997). They could not be further from the verbal projections of unschooled phenomenology that constitutes much current fmri interpretation.

Other current fads exploit, for example, the recent discovery that there do exist, after all, neural stem cells. So the prescription is to go exercise and generate new cells. There is no question that exercise can alleviate depression, and the notion that depression is primarily a resource-conservation strategy by the brain, one in which new neurons are not being formed, seems to this writer plausible. As we shall see, the kind of techniques used resemble those of Gurdjieff (Ouspensky, 1977); exercise, dance, and so on. Yet the time scales involved are in the order of weeks and months for any noticeable change.
It is uncontroversial in the extreme to suggest we need time sensitivity that is one or two orders of magnitude greater; it does seem to be the case that consciousness can be causal in the tenths of seconds, and that many critical neural events require only hundredths or thousandths of seconds. Specifically, work on microgestures (O Nualláin, 2010) indicates that a facial expression sustained for only 0.04 of a second, well below the sampling rate of consciousness, can affect our evaluation of a person. In turn, the sampling rate of consciousness can be assessed by examining what experimental subjects can actually report; to eschew pseudo-precision, and to anticipate some of the discussion below, it seems to be about a tenth of a second.
Let us now follow the later Husserl and examine some salient phenomena of experienced mental life. It is established from consciousness studies as certainly as any other fact within that disciple that a great deal of our mental life is the result of “change blindness” and other forms of projection and filling in the blanks. We are constituted of legions of “selves” that are experts in particular micro-contexts; remarkably, each one claims sovereignty over the entire organism while it is active (O Nualláin, 2010 ) . Alternatively put, the feeling of selfhood itself is an artifact of immunological cognition; when we are engaged in any cognition, we consciously sample a wave packet as it transitions through the basins of attraction that constitute its states.
So what does the transmission of a wave packet, a progression of the reaction incited by an incoming stimulus in our work (Freeman et al, 2008) involve subjectively? For a start, work on microgestures indicates that we process data that do not enter focal consciousness. I hypothesize that the transmission of a wave packet involves tacit experiences of self as particular contexts are
visited. The attractor landscape requires several preset trajectories, which we label modus ponens, story structure, and so on. Other, more gravitational influences on our cognition involve us predicating agency and moral rectitude of ourselves, often wholly inaccurately.

We master many cognitive domains and, barring disasters like Alzheimer's, manage to keep a lot of this knowledge intact. Whatever brain processes preserve this knowledge, they are remarkably robust. Following Piaget, Polanyi et al., many of us have outlined a model for the development of consciousness which see us exploring a domain by initially being overwhelmed by data. Think of the classical example of arriving at a new airport, where it takes some time to orient ourselves. Contrariwise, the child may assimilate all this data to an inauthentic notion of self and will begin to differentiate subject from object only under pressure. As we all know to our cost, many people (pace, Piaget) fail to differentiate subject and object in many contexts, and become bores, or worse.

In any case, both the child and the traveler need to develop a more veridical notion of the subject-object relation. The eureka moment achieved, it is preserved by a marking of self versus non-self for that particular context. Our cognition is structured by tens of thousands of these markings, and we have archaeological layers of them in our psyches. Their working has recently been attested by the fact that we can process microgestures (Pease, 1988); indeed, a technology of identification of suspects is now developing based on these tacit cognitions – whether for good or ill only time can tell.

Essentially, then, the content of our consciousness is a runaway train. What many authentic mystical traditions do is alert us to this, and in particular ask us to witness the process of selves coming and going in our psyches (Ouspensky, 1977; Krishnamurti, 1979). The eventual aim is to be able to identify ourselves as pure observation at a level higher than these empirical selves. Yet the cost of this is one that few feel like paying; total renunciation of those needful identifications to family, profession, and belief that we need to function in the world.

What I have argued for (2006) is the possibility of the development of a spiritual path that uses this most immediate and paradoxical fact about ourselves as a starting-point. It would see the role of the path as alerting the subjects to their intrinsic subjectivity through logical paradoxes exemplified by Goedel, where the careful observer can see himself believe two mutually incompatible facts in quick succession, and certain types of movement which free the subject from blocking behaviour by the organism. Dogmatic beliefs aside, it is likely that higher human function would result from identifying as pure awareness for some time each day. It can be argued that in his highly verbal way, this is what J. Krishnamurti (1979)was trying to achieve; and, of course, the here is also the starting-point for the Gurdjieffian Work, which is far more broadly based, and, perhaps inevitably, far more incorrect in its details (Ouspensky, 1977).

The discipline of meditation involves identification with a level of observation at which this fragmentation becomes salient; the religious infrastructure of church and sangha allows a space, both ontological and physical, within society's hubbub wherein this state can be realized. This state is devoid of worldly ambition and concerns. Yet the question remains; what role can it have in evolution? If, as suggested in O Nualláin (2007), selves are themselves a form of “code”, why dissolve them in this way? And what is the role of the kind of Weltanschauungen that religions exemplify?

O Nualláin et al (2011) hypothesize that consciousness, as we experience it, may be a “spandrel”, an accidental consequence of the necessity to attenuate the brain’s metabolic demand on the organism. For this attenuation, the brain began to operate with a “shutter” a few times a second (Freeman et al, 2008) wherein the cortex went into a “zero power” (O Nualláin, 2009) phase of miniscule metabolic demand, if for a very brief period.
Gregory Bateson (1972, 318) famously commented on what he considered the absurd notion that there is a delimited thing called the “self” that cuts down a tree. Indeed, that narrative self IS an artifact of a tenaciously-maintained narrative that puts oneself at the center of the universe and attributes agency and consistency to oneself, often wholly inappropriately. Nevertheless, the tree is just as felled afterward as it would be, had the self sprung from the ground like mushrooms. In fact, the engineering ability bequeathed by this narrative self is exactly what can destroy the biosphere’s ability to support macroscopic life (Gaia) – or alternatively, preserve it.

One of the themes of this paper, therefore, is that our evolution, as the preservation of Gaia, is now in our own hands. There will be no stone tablets, or twitter feeds, on how to save the conditions for intelligent and sustainable life on this planet. We ourselves must create the resources - moral, intellectual, and technological – to do so. That is what Gurdjieff began to attempt to say a century ago in his cryptic and marginalized way.
2.2 A brief comment on evolution and religion

Evolutionism and creationism are slugging it out in the US; the latter has taken the alias of “intelligent design”. Indeed, one of the critical document discoveries in the recent Dover trial was one wherein it was found that the “intelligent design” moniker was indeed used consciously by the creationists as a cover. It can, this writer believes, consistently be argued that the heat of the debate is due to the necessity of maintaining a “moral” basis for the expropriation of the northern part of the American continent from its autochtones, which keeps the impulse behind fundamentalist Christianity alive. The impulse gains further traction from the genetics illiteracy of Darwin himself, and the unassailable fact that his supporters fail to appreciate the many explanatory gaps in their arguments.

O Nualláin (2008) suggests some new foundations for biology, and evolutionary theory in particular, inter alia the following;
1. Darwin must be sacrificed for the sake of the stupendous theory of evolution which is emerging, which draws its evidence from the subatomic as from Hox genes.

2. Some kind of anthropic principle will always be invokable to explain the origin of life, of multicellularity and all the other major transitions as it is for apparent coincidences like the value of the fine structure constant
In the beginning, as envisaged in that paper (ibid.) are the laws constraining nature (particularly thermodynamics, and probably network theory), the laws allowing it unexpected creativity (handled by chaoplexity including catastrophe theory), the biosemiotic laws of syntax, consciousness without subject/object differentiation, unlimited energy, the possibility of time/space,

Evolution, in this scenario, occurs first in the physical world, where phase transitions allow the creation of planets, laws including stochastic resonance help in describing their mutual gravitation, and eventually chemistry describes the metabolic cycles created. At some point, the metabolic cycles become transcended by the entrance of codemakers, and the possibility of DNA-RNA replication enters nature. Once codes acquire metabolic power, a new possibility enters nature – that of deception, of lying when recreated at the human level. Now life and biochemistry emerge. Several billion years later, humans emerge, and the relevant code for their social interaction is a “socius”, a social self. The human task is to realise after sustained interaction with the world, which will beget a multitude of pseudo-”selves” in one, that one's real nature is observation. That realisation is the essence of soul. In the meantime, a life that increases recursive ability, conscious control of metabolism, and emotional stability will also facilitate success in the world.
There is a vast space left open to new religious movements by a combination of an immoral society, the linked issues of ethical, aesthetic and moral relativism, and the refusal of science both to engage reality with the whole psyche and, much more mundanely, exclude from its ambit much data and styles of thought. Thus, aspiring gurus can point to the fragmentation of the self, and use this as a lever to undermine the whole psyche for their own benefit; conversely, religious traditionalists can point to the moral chaos in our society and, with some moral force, argue for old time religion. As a group, a religious entity can convene to help to turn the ordering principles in nature toward good, insofar as they can with their limited resources.
On a positive note, questions like;
“Where and how did the cosmos originate?”
“Where and how did life originate?”
“Where and how did humans originate?”
“How does the biosphere self-regulate to support life?”
produce wonder in most people. Indeed, it takes a process akin to metaphysical censorship to stop this access of wonder, a refined emotion that historically has been just as much central to religion as social control.
The psychic reality of our fragmentation is dealt with in opposite ways by the two Krishnamurtis (Jiddah and UG). Gurdjieff steers a path between the two ; his genius is the certainty with which he posits the universality of his system, as in his range of data. We quite definitely need a cosmology, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology and he provides all, if in at times utterly nonsensical form, as in his science. His aesthetics incorrectly ignores and indeed denigrates the monumental achievements of European civilization.
The finer aspects of the arts, sciences, and social relationships need to be defended with moral force. We need to defend Beethoven and Mingus against our contemporary trash, just as the tendency of science to jump on the next big thing like the human genome project and effectively disenfranchise biochemistry needs to be resisted. Thus, there is a role for an organisation, international in scope and originating in civil society, which preserves salutary impulses within the arts, sciences, and indeed politics in the name of authentic human development. The early 21st century attack on US democracy from within in the name of an enemy without needs further to be resisted. As the success of popular science has shown, the central arguments of science are comprehensible to intelligent laypeople.
With respect to subjectivity, it is increasingly clear that there is immense power in concepts from folk psychology, and they seem more like useful compressions of data than societal fiats. In any case, folk psychological description of inner states will always win in the marketplace of ideas. A salutary example is the notion of freedom of conscience, which effectively sets ultimate parameters for one's political being in a free society, and logically precedes any neural data. In the same vein, by prohibiting the imposition of a state religion, the first amendment rightly destroys the possibility of theocracy.
That said, there will always be a market for new religions. Coupled with the imperatives mentioned above toward a substantive ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic engagement with life, there is also a need for something that is environmentally sustainable. The aesthetic impulse should include vectors toward a life that is much more emotionally free and full than what we have. That established, a morally stable society will seem much more natural.

Coming from a strong engineering background ( there is no reason to disbelieve his claims about working on railway engines) Gurdjieff found it useful to talk about humans as machines in a classical Victorian sense. Stimulus-response psychology comes from the same impulse. It talks, it thinks, it cannot do. We can at best catch ourselves in the act.

Several paradoxes are inescapable. In evaluating scientific views of how we function, we compare them with what we know of the real world and our relation to it. It will remain effectively a political, not a scientific decision, to abandon the wisdom of our folk psychology. Concepts like “maturity” and “decency” may perhaps never enter the scientific lexicon, but remain the finest achievements our knowledge of ourselves. Contrariwise, Gurdjieff's system with its cosmology, psychology and detailed analysis of the psyche and organism can perhaps usefully be rephrased using some of the concepts of today's knowledge.
2.3 Neuroscience redux and conclusion
In a set of papers (O Nualláin, 2008, 2009, 2010 and forthcoming and O Nualláin et al 2011) this writer outlines some empirical neurodynamic work, and interprets it with respect to consciousness, selfhood, and meditation. To step back for a moment, what he is doing is mapping some empirical work onto phenomenological facts that have been known for several millennia. To wit; there is no unchanging self, outside some restricted social contexts that can sustain it; this, above all, is the lesson of the wilderness that religious neophytes were sent into. Much of what we experience as self is the result of subliminal processing; specifically, the processing of microgestures can be explained with dynamical systems approaches to the brain, which allow for the fact that an entire cortex can be destabilized by a few photons, a few molecules of scent, or other stimuli lasting only a few milliseconds. To continue; we narrate to ourselves continually, giving us the illusion of a self continuous in time, which is agentive and consistent.
Moreover, we will not ever trust a fully reductionist account of our mental states, which is likely to involve mapping to a Grisha Perelman-like mathematical nexus of topological theory, except more complicated. Folk psychology is here to stay, if only because society, rightly, will not trust neuroscientists to make all decisions for it. The fact that people will remain making sense of their lives, taking a little science, a little family experience, and much personal judgement will forever leave the door open to sense-giving activities like religion. Conversely, the pointlessness of religion's ignoring science is exemplified in a an age-old theatre of autos-da-fe and show trials. In this writer's opinion, it can consistently be argued that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were on the right track after all; it is their science that needs updating. The ethos of search, and assertion of finer states of being reflected in appropriate art, allows the insights and sense of the divine that they exploited from esoteric Christianity, Vedanta, Sufism, and Tibetan Buddhism to be reconstructed in modern, urban society

In (O Nualláin, 2006), I outlined the notion of an experiential discipline, and how education of subjectivity can be facilitated with such disciplines as Feldenkrais, and indeed application of current modal jazz, the modern mandalas that cubist paintings exemplify, and so on. Yet all this cannot proceed in a vacuum; we need societal constructs as refined as academic tenure, together with the thousands of years of hard-won experience about individual freedoms, state and civil society, representational structures for due process, peace-making and - as has become clear since 2008 – regulation of the market, and possibly a root-and-branch definancialization of aspects of our economy for human progress to continue.


Section 3 A new religious sense
3.1 The third millennium Mind
To assert, veridically, “I am” while remaining non-contradictive of cutting edge science and the other finest achievements of one's culture requires Himalayan efforts. Let us now outline what Ouspensky (1977) might have included in the 21st century edition of his book. First of all, the prospectus for the school might have read as follows;
“Truth

Few “seekers of the truth” are really looking for truth. The end of our exploration is even more banal than arriving back at our starting-point and knowing it for the first time; it is the realization that our fundamental nature rests most securely as the act of observation itself, and cannot ultimately be achieved through anything in the world.

First of all, there are often psychological motivations for their ill-founded “search” - a desire to escape challenges of life that are going to recur anyway, no matter what cult they follow, pure laziness, egomania masquerading as a search for reality but actually a deeply-entrenched desire to subjugate others, using religion as an excuse.

Secondly, there are few real sources of truth in our contemporary world. Alternatively and perhaps better put, the diversity of narratives out there means that certainty will be bought only at the cost of debauching openness and indeed reason itself. Correspondingly, cults like Scientology maintain their hold by the practice of physical and mental violence.

Thirdly, truth is currently dominated by “science”, a word meaning knowledge; again more specifically, its etymology connotes a (presumably correct) cutting of the world into categories. The mathematics associated with the most exciting discoveries in fields like physics are beyond 99% of us; yet they are indispensable tools in the search for physical truth.

Finally, to repeat; few “seekers of the truth” are really looking for truth. What they are looking for instead is a meaningful life in which their aptitudes and self-discipline are recruited toward a self-transcendent goal. Genuine seekers will not willingly give up their skill-set, nor the better part of their natures; they will, on the other hand, renounce money, career, sex, social status and much else if the goal seems worthy.

In the early 21st century, the energy put into fruitive work no longer ends in “fruitive” products; remarkably, people pay billions to create and maintain simulated farms on the internet. An economic collapse in the West led to money being redirected back to the very miscreants who caused the collapse. It is doubtful that popular culture has ever been at a lower ebb. Universities are being colonized by corporations, and research monies are being poured into ever sillier and more fraudulent projects.

The old solutions have lost their lustre. Nationalism has been - rightly or wrongly – publicly discredited to the point that the expression of autochtones in cultural nationalist projects is now viewed as suspicious. Traditional religion has not recovered in the west from the Galileo incident, nor frankly should it be allowed to do so.

Yet there is much hope. The destruction of the biosphere has been slowed by courageous activism. Similar campaigns have ensured that most - perhaps all – scientific knowledge is available free on the web, with for-profit journals hiding only contentious and often evanescent findings True heroism ensured that freedom of speech and the democratic process have withstood a century of serious external threats.

It is possible to live a meaningful life without surrendering to a cult. Trashy popular culture can be avoided. One can forever top up one's knowledge, free of charge, from publicly available sources, as science indeed advances

One first of all needs sufficient resources to leave traditional society. This path has existed as long as monasteries themselves have done so. These resources include money, but also a conscious rejection of the wiles of the world. These wiles must of course first be experienced. They do not include the desire for normal social intercourse with others as a responsible member of society – if one who does not subscribe to current political and indeed epistemological trends.

The day can be spent enjoying the products of tens of thousands of years of high human culture, maintaining one's property (cultiver notre jardin), creating edifying products, and attempting to live an ever more refined and renounced life. One's skill set will be used in full. To call this path “religious” is to say no more than it accepts the necessity of living – if for a brief period – at the margins of society in order to find one's true place in it.

The final goal, of course, is to inspire others to live such an environmentally sustainable and decorous existence – one worthy of the destiny of human beings.




3.2 A new guide for the perplexed

People search, and they naturally call what they're looking for “knowledge”. Yet an effective monopoly on knowledge is claimed, with much justification, by the universities. Moreover, this knowledge is often couched in terms that are very intimidating – mathematical formulae, big words, and so on. This I have discussed immediately above

What we now will focus on is the paradox that reality (as experienced) is relative to consciousness, and yet transcends it. So knowledge is ultimately third person, a set of objective statements – of course! - and yet the external world keeps breaking into all hermetically sealed conceptual systems. In fact, this systems can exist only in the hothouse of the academy; outside the academy, they lose all force. Humans are drawn to belief systems – even spectacularly obviously wrong belief systems like fundamentalist religion – that can somehow inform their every moment.

We are in deep waters. Let's try and clarify one thing; third-person knowledge should be left to the academy, and nothing that we state should contradict the finer, stable achievements of the academy. Fundamentalist religion is epistemologically wrong, pure and simple. Conversely, the academy should be allowed to continue its explorations in total intellectual freedom, and without corporate or state interference. If the “official” academy is interfered with in these ways, there is plenty of space in western civil society for alternative academies, if necessary on the Internet.

Another path in our argument is opened up by the history of formal linguistics. It seemed at one point that a total description of language could be given by a grammar, and that this grammar could be programmed into a computer, which would then understand language. However, it quickly became clear that grammar only gave syntax; and attempts to capture “meaning” with semantic formalisms only led to another complex set of predicates, which also had to be interpreted. In fact, a new level, pragmatics, required the understander actually to have a critical property of consciousness as the literal “meaning” of statements was often incorrect

So far, then, syntax, semantics, pragmatics; but any great literary artist will play on the reader's experience of the world in ways meant to be edifying. The artists will try to recruit the reader's moral sense, and to invoke ever finer types of feeling. We have now left the academy, as it is currently understood; we are in the area of first person knowledge. As instructors, we are trying to transform the being of our students to make them capable of truly selfless acts in order to understand a text.

It is better that way. All third-person knowledge can be acquired most rapidly and effectively by people without a highly developed moral sense. Scientists like Dirac and Newton, who seem to have had Asperger's, got there first precisely because they really did not have a developed sense of their being in society and this freed up processing space. That sense should be inculcated if necessary for everyone's benefit.

One cannot understand the forces in our society without having been subject to then in a very raw form at some point. These forces incarnate themselves in figures who want to own everything, to control through force, or whatever. Conversely, they can authentically be responded to by moral decisions, second to second, a smile at a harried service worker, a donation to a cause, a sit-down in front of a tank, a year with a voluntary organization.

This kind of moral formation involves repressing the “empirical self”, that part of oneself that narrates non-stop in a self-serving way. Its narrations get in the way of veridically apprehending reality. Moral formation has positive epistemological consequences. That is apart from the sense of moral stature we get from figures like Nelson Mandela, who seem genuinely to have forgiven their enemies and in doing so to have caused self-integration through taking of responsibility in some of them.

There are two further problems involved in the search for truth;

1.Consciousness is a relatively slow process, and the great majority (according to Lashley, all) of causal processes have already occurred before an item enters Consciousness. Yet, once it has entered, we can now make a moral decision; as the aphorism has it, we may not have a conscious will, but we have a conscious “won't”.
2.Influences from the academy – which, let us remember, claim to be absolute truth - are competing with primal biological urges, with the demands set by the financial and political systems, and much else for preeminence in our psyche. Ironically, to grant the academy such preeminence would be a political decision, and probably a very bad one.

Again; the world (as experienced) is relative to consciousness, and yet transcends it. Much “education' and indeed formation of all kinds is about molding the billions of years of winding evolution that we represent into something that can perform a specific set of tasks well. That involves forming the preconscious. None of this is controversial.

The preconscious can be formed by stating an ontology, one that distinguishes grades of being from lower to higher, and recruiting the moral sense in impelling the students to the higher. Recent history shows that this can be very powerful, and very evil ; it is possible that many in the SS sincerely believed that they were righteously wiping subhumans from the earth. It is important to note that this is an ontology, not an inventory; that what is taking place is not psychological, but “objective”; external moral and noetic entities are being created that one is encouraged properly to apprehend through an act of self-transcending will. (We could indeed invoke the old concept of hylomorphism, the degree of spiritualization of substance, for the higher realms here, to complement “ontology”)

Of course, nationalism notoriously has provided the ontology, and moral impulse. The fact that “nationalism “is now a bad word doesn't mean that it will not be reused, over and over, in the future as in the present – as anyone looking at emerging countries can see - nor that all great human initiative is always going to emerge from those who see themselves as conforming to the dictates of a higher calling from outside themselves, rather than seeking psychological balance.
To continue with the main theme, then, seekers are looking for knowledge and understanding. The universities and other official academic institutions claim, with much justification, to be the providers and arbiters of knowledge. Yet academia is so full of trendiness and vicious competition that it often leaves alone the big, interesting questions, the ones that impelled Einstein to say that a human being who has lost the ability to wonder is already half-dead. Let us look at a few of these questions from some of the sciences:
PHYSICS
Do the Copenhagen and ontological interpretations of wave-function breakdown reflect different psychological dispositions, or are they in principle formally distinguishable?
Why is there so little progress to a grand unified theory that string theory is starting to be derided?
Is there really an external ordering process in the cosmos, one labeled “God” by proponents of intelligent design?
What have the chaoplexity sciences actually wrought?
BIOLOGY
Why was Darwinian evolutionary theory accepted even before there was a plausible theory of genetics, and is this premature acceptance underlying the intelligent design debate?
Does the very limited success of the human genome project imply that we need a new theory of symbol systems in nature, encompassing gene expression all the way to natural language?
What is the relationship between diet, metabolism, thermodynamics, and biochemical pathway?
THE INFORMATIONAL SCIENCES
Why cannot we parse any complete natural language after a half-century of trying?
Will quantum computing change our notion of computability?
How far can the notion of information be extended as an explanatory tool, or, as in the case of Murray Gell-Mann, a moral imperative?


PSYCHOLOGY
Is consciousness best regarded as a property of the cosmos, or an epiphenomenon of mental processing?
Does this also go for emotion?
Is there any physiological basis for meditation?
Are there formal limits to any attempted scientific formalization of mind and/or if such formalization was achieved, would anyone even understand it? Many math theorems are now too complicated to be checked by a person.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Is there a real progression evident from feudalism to democratic republics?
Is a caliphate-type theocracy desirable, given its undoubted capacity to give stability?
What is the relationship between science, society, and religion that best does justice to all?
Are there objective rules in art, or is it all personal preference?
3.3 CURRICULUM
It is our, hopefully uncontroversial, contention that most of education involves students and teacher reading, discussing, and trying to improve their powers of concentration. If there is indeed some direct connection with the soul of the cosmos that can be achieved by arational initiation – and we have not found any such - the facts remain untouched by it. What we offer, au contraire, is a set of lectures and discussions that penetrate right to the heart of cutting-edge science and arts in a variety of fields.
PHYSICS
Cosmology; the “big bang” and its conceptual origins.
The origins of order; the anthropic principle and our privileged place in the unfolding of the cosmos
From Galilean mechanics through QM and relativity to the search for a grand unified theory
Chaoplexity; what is chaos? What are non-linear effects? Why is this field so important?


BIOLOGY
Health; diet, ageing, exercise, and the limits of the biomedical model.
What is cancer?
The contrast between metabolism and codes; genetic, histone, and other codes
Syntax as an essential part of nature; viruses and other text-editors
Epigenetics; factors that structure the unfolding of the genome in time and space, and the consequences for the nature/nurture debate
SOCIAL SCIENCES
The origins of the normative i.e. rule-based, in human experience
The role of religion in pre-industrial society and the necessity for outsourcing its concerns to other societal structures.
What then is left for religion? - Krishnamurti/Maharshi, Gurdjieff, MLK/Gandhi.
The dangers of fundamentalism
Liberal republican democracy; the individual as microcosm in a self-similar structure
Open source; the Luddites being creative, rather than destructive, this time
PSYCHOLOGY
The classical domain of psychology; methodology and conclusions
A greater psychology; consciousness and the self
Aesthetics; formal complexity, expression and suppression of desire, and self-awareness
Music; Indian rags and other modal musics; the classical period of western music; what next, after jazz?
Art; why did painting lag behind architecture? After post-impressionism and cubism, what next?
Transcending postmodernism “
It is in the context hopefully established by the above discussion that I propose a new evolutionary schema; as stated in the abstract, this is consonant with the schemas produced in 19th century reaction to revolutionary excesses. Let us start with the grades of being. From the bottom, there is an entangled nexus giving rise to matter including advanced properties thereof like, self-preservation even far from thermodynamic equilibrium, dynamics captured in recent discoveries like fractals and chaos, and so on. At some point, the capacity to distinguish self and non-self merges with dynamics to create life. In turn, life becomes social, evolving into multicellular organisms, and allowing sex which will turn out to be critical for regulating chromosome number. The mere detection of stimuli to assay the exterior evolves into consciousness, with the latter allowing tests of salience of signals from many modalities. consciousness combined with symbols and self/nonself distinction creates much of modern man.

We are now up to perhaps 300 million years ago; what is even less certain is when the capacity to embed plans for dealing with the external world within themselves; this is the essence of the human genius arises. It is possible that recursion, the capacity to embed symbols, arises initially in birdsong. Combine recursion with intentionality in symbols, a nascent capacity for them to point to the external world, and the full human technical competence is close to being established. It is this competence that academies should – in total intellectual freedom – study and enhance.

Yet that is only the beginning of our path, as individual and as a species. Moreover, academies function in particular contexts that bias what they teach. The very act of sitting and listening to a lecture – however interactive technology can make this - induces a set of restrictions, and betokens a context of civilization. There are truths concerning race, class, and gender in which context the academy functions; while it can talk about them, they shape its functioning. Likewise, academies work in a context of political freedom, and in an environment in which all can travel practically anywhere in the world, and find out anything from the endless mine of human knowledge.

It is the unconscious presuppositions that religions explore. The goal is less an intellectual grasp – however refined – of various items of knowledge than a state of being that permeates every context of life. That granted, it is fair to suggest that no new religion should ignore science's central findings, nor its methods of exploring reality. This is particularly the case in the early 21st century, as it begins to look like the exponential advance over the previous 3 centuries was low-hanging fruit. The mind has not proved susceptible to this analysis; the “life' sciences as well as economics use baroque mathematical formalisms – much more complex than anything in physics - to find out very little.

The truth of the ontology then, common to the academy and outside, rests on two pillars;

1. The distinction between first and third person knowledge, with the academy concerned only with the latter, but rigorously so;
2.The nature of matter, life, consciousness and self-awareness, with patterns like chaos arising in social systems as in raw matter
3.The permeating through society of race, class, and gender, with certain parts of life been set aside for certain activities, and social structures that should incorporate civil values. Much of this is unconsciously encoded, and religion will sometimes try to bring it into awareness to facilitate the development of mastery of oneself

What can such a new path offer? Ironically, given the debauching in current society both of the arts and sciences, inexpensive efforts in these areas are likely to be more refined and technically better than that produced in the mainstream. Secondly, “he who rests shall reign” locating oneself as the locus of awareness seems physically healthy. Thirdly, increase in empathy in fact broadens one's knowledge and experience of life, through vicarious experience. Fourthly, it is possible to live a life much less environmentally damaging if not subject to the stream of accident. This includes the fact that the insane economic cycle of modern society allows a period in which good physical property is cheap, and will then uphold one's claim on it.

3.4 MASAB; A less evanescent perennial philosophy

(meditation, Arts, sciences, activism, biosphere )

Struck by the absence of interiority in modern life, many writers – and indeed some thinkers – have called for a return to a “perennial philosophy”, however conceived. Energies that might have gone into saving the pacific salmon have instead been diverted into strongly-worded assertions about how many levels of psychic reality there are, and how the geocentric model is really true if we are properly initiated into the true secret knowledge that constitutes its meaning.

The “true secret knowledge “of the cosmos is best considered by Einstein's use of math tensors, a race for truth he won against David Hilbert. It requires initiation; a course in mathematical physics, or at worst a good popular science account. Similarly, the various cosmic and colored psychic models (Holman, 2008) seem destined to suck up energy that should go into the arts.

This is particularly the case as mass popular culture threatens good art, in the same way as corporate encroachment on the university is indeed destroying true knowledge. Assertion of the Arts and sciences in today's society is a positive political act. Likewise, of course, is any act that preserves the biosphere, and human dignity.

The central problem with respect to the thrust of ideas is that their verbal expression, once presented to the individual, is processed by relatively slow and powerless conscious processes. In the meantime, imperatives due to food, shelter, and so on, often mediated by societal structures, gain much greater purchase even at the moments that one may persuade oneself that one is thinking edifying thoughts. These imperatives only become available to consciousness as a result of very severe internal struggle, or much more salutary political struggle

The goal is authentic states of meditation in the middle of a life in the world which is open to the world's diversity and beauty in a realistic way. It is clear that is necessary to have a sense of an external world and of a moral excellence that is possible with requisite effort, usually directed in the context of conforming to the higher achievements of that world. Here indeed we will have an external world, including a cosmology and cosmogony, but the moral effort is going to consist in honing the person's ability to cognize that world, most importantly by getting rid of unwanted ego in proper humility (which is what it is to be in the moment)

3.4.1 A creation reality

In the beginning, an undifferentiated nexus; called “uroboros” by the ancients and currently terms like “quantum vacuum” are used to describe the same concept. Yet it contains within itself the potential for everything, including us

The first differentiation traditionally saw God differentiate from his creation; we now use terms like symmetry-breaking and operators in Hilbert-space. This tendency to differentiate subject and object, which yet have the potential to be linked in a way that allows recreation of unity at a higher level, in turn allows sensation, perception, and intentionality in cognitive systems. A human being in full possession of his faculties and with a stable relationship with the physical world can re-experience uroboros in a controlled way.

Now there is matter, with classical probabilities, and its own laws; yet according to some modern thought baby universes are incessantly being born. The energy in our quantum vacuum is 10**120 times less than the predicted value, and this facilitates our existence. Thousands of such unlikely circumstances beget our existence as intelligent carbon-based life forms, stardust able again to experience the primordial forces of the universe.

There are two sets of objective facts; the physical and the social. The former can be expressed as an ontology buttressed by the authority of science. The latter refers to forces that contextualize every utterance, including every utterance that claims to discuss them objectively. To gain clarity about them requires resources like critical theory – but even that is an artifact of the 20th century academy. Power relations in the society often can best be apprehended by a struggle against them, not through talking about them.

It is simply not good enough after several centuries of modern science to talk about “hidden knowledge”. Any such “hidden knowledge” - where useful in the manipulation of the real world, both physical and social - has long ago been made explicit. Conversely, the modern academy is a dangerous place, with commercial forces assailing even academic freedom, which was the keystone of the set of compromises between scholarship and power that is incarnated in the academy. So what this section is about is an attempt at an ontology that works within and without the academy .

The old chain of being - matter, life, consciousness, self-awareness must be complemented by these notions;
1.“Simple' matter itself arises from some primordial stuff, and one mechanism is through an act of observation.
2.Matter has extraordinarily complex dynamics, which we are currently attempting to comprehend using appropriately skeptical terms like “chaos”.
3.These dynamics rare recreated at each higher level, including human social systems;
4.There are other intrinsic dynamics; for example that which separates subject and object, leading in turn to things (through wave-function-breakdown), membranes, and Brentano's intentionality.
5. Symbols begin with life, and meld with recursion and intentionality to allow humans to talk about the world as if it were objective; on occasion, it in fact is best regarded as objective and we get engineering ability. Of course, symbols - even pre-symbolic signs – allow deception.
6.There is an external ordering force in nature, addressed in science (or explained away; as you prefer) by concepts like the “anthropic principle”. The odds against the existence of intelligent organic beings are literally astronomically high.
7.This principle manifests itself in ordered societies doing complex tasks like waging war, calling on our engineering ability, and these things are often literally insane.
8.To distance oneself from this insanity and to exult in one's being as a free human is a very remote and infinitely joyous achievement.

The restrictions of the human psyche include the following;

1.There is a distinction between sensorimotor and symbolic cognition.
2.Cognitive development involves interiorization of processes previously intermediate between person and world.
3.Cognitive development also involves the related ability to reflect on one's diverse perceptions, and realizing a higher synthesis between them – subject/object differentiation. Pace Piaget, this process of development continues through adulthood.
4.The appropriate behaviours for every stage in life are often encoded in the culture; for childhood, play and obedience; for adolescents, finding the limits of one's competence and power; for young adults, ambition and house holding; for older adults, reflection on the ebb and flow of emotions and sage counsel.
5.There are regnant biases as a result of emotional “cathexes” - positive and negative- and, of course, early experience of family is critical.
6. The schema can best help those who are in the midst of the appropriate stage in their lives for their age, intuit something huge is missing, and are acting on it in some principled way. For example, they may notice that people give utterly inconsistent accounts of their actions and motivations and have sought explanations at cost to themselves s their friends flail about in their explanations of their inconsistency; they may notice the trash music in our culture and have set up a functioning, stable music business with a good Youtube channel at some cost; they may notice that their contemporary socio-economic system essentially facilitates a power-grab by Wall Street using ever more arcane math models and seek to rectify their lives to insulate what is fine in them from this; they may notice that simultaneously the biosphere is being destroyed and work for its conservation. The critical commonality is a moment of observation that transforms everything in one's life. At that point, one can move to the next level.
7.Any accompanying institutions should provide a place of respite and development for those with the foregoing realizations and responses to BE. This should be in a peaceful, preferably rural setting; have Feldenkrais and Yoga sessions; along with depictions of the Buddha should be those of contemporary heroes like MacSwiney and Brouwer; there should be a library full of artistic, spiritual and scientific classics from Beethoven's late Quartets Einstein's/Dirac's popularizations to the Gita. Preferably, there should be a working farm for self-sufficiency. There most above all be courtesy and civility, both in the group and with the neighbours.

3.5 The making of another counter-culture

There is of course ultimately no need for a path; we are already enlightened, have Buddha nature, are non-dual awareness etc. The problem is that, put in these terms, we lose this realization in the hurly-burly of everyday life. In fact, if we don't take care, we can end up so overburdened with stress due to real problems that we have no time to realize anything outside that stress.

Likewise, science indeed gives answers to a wide range of questions. Unfortunately, its areas of success do not include phenomenology – and how could they, given that science works for the objective/quantitative so well! The folk psychology description will always take personal precedence

These facts together allow the creation of a space in society for that consensual experience of the sacred, particularly as manifest in man, that we call religion, It needs a modus vivendi, at all times aware of the needs of others in a range from benign indifference to utmost heroism, a commitment to the search, and emotional maturity

A new counter-culture should address sufficient aspects of one's life in society to become an alternative to living in that society.. It does strike me that, right now, with a new realm of symbolic product opened up in a discredited economic ruling system with an ongoing environmental holocaust, such a counter-culture is imminent. Moreover, this available symbolic product can be used to create narratives more veridical than those in academic “science'


3.6 Weltanschauung

The problem today is NOT that we lack a first person science. It is rather that science has become cognitively impenetrable at its cutting-edge, reliant on baroque (and often false) statistical analysis on the one hand, massive technical apparatus on the other, and an ultimately absurdist narrative based on the math. So take all this away and we indeed end up with a first person narrative a la popular science books, which depend for their impetus of the reader's phenomenology.

Humans can get the best from themselves only in the context of an ontology – not just an inventory – of the external world, one in which their finer actions make sense. Schools like that of Gurdjieff tackle this by conjuring an ontology from thin air in a way inconsistent with attested science and this is both unacceptable and unnecessary. We can produce a Great Chain of Being based on an evolutionary dynamic that is as acceptable within the academy as the church.

The Church deals with the “Sacred” which is in often arbitrary opposition to the “profane”. There are many churches, each with their divisions of Sacred and profane. Where the church's activity ends in silence in contemplation of mystery, the Church is a useful resource, a stepping-stone. Otherwise it is likely to be toxic.

To “invent” a new “sacred” is, in our scientistic culture, an expression of failure. It is a scientific failure in that we have failed to motivate the value by rational means; it is a political failure in that we have failed to muster the material means to make its protection inevitable. We can point to informational complexity in the arts to buttress the more ineffable attributes of self-awareness and emotional expression; we can point to legislative achievement in moral action to buttress the selflessness clear in people like Mandela. So what we mean by separating a space for the sacred and divine is precisely announcing that we are currently on the margins of society; a “religion”?


3.7 DETAILS

In the beginning is a quantum state, beyond state and time. The fully human mystical state can re-achieve this both intellectually and using sensorimotor consciousness.. To attempt to do so without proper preparation is an attempt at integration without conscious de-differentiation and is pathological. Examples are doctrinaire pacifism (Gandhi's childish letter to Hitler) and modern “western” non-dualism that fails to take into account the difference in ours and the Upanishads' relation to nature. Alternatively put, premature re-integration by an organism into the biosphere is death; premature re-integration of Gaia into the biosphere is death of all macroscopic life.

Systems free of their environment will explore the space of all possible configurations of interaction with that environment until it finds its best stable functions. This we call “equilibration”. Thereafter, environment and system co-operate, allowing for example “genetic assimilation” if the environment is stable. True differentiation unites, at a higher level.

The theist believes that our intuitions of a physical source of things and that dynamic leading to the type of self-abnegation and self-integration we call moral excellence converge on “God” who then becomes the fount of all that's good. To understand how little influence this fount has on human history, just take a look at the succession of tyrants who have taken power. To which the theist will respond, presumably, with action that lessens their power, He could continue and argue that the order immanent in the cosmos -and indeed in human affairs - usually explained away by concepts like the anthropic principle, when experienced psychologically, is what he means by “God”. He could continue to argue that the god hypothesis is in no worse shape than string or multiverse theory.
Conventional religions, then, are based on a set of paradoxes; they worship a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent and universal yet create sectarian institutions wherein they pray to that god to rectify matters. Despite the apparent metaphysical austerity of its founder, Buddhism is little different. Moreover, moral heroes are revered in each religion, though surely they were just obeying orders? The anthropic principle attests that there is something magnificently and mysteriously ordered about creation; our daily existence attests that there is also something cankered within it that leads to downright evil. As we consider ourselves delimited selves, we go bout our daily lives in the context of a creator, even if we call that Nature; as we achieve moral excellence, we become something able to immerse ourselves in the unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed, and the alone returns to the alone.

So we have a notion that the Infinite can be approached with a set of formulaic prayers; moreover, that infinite can give blessings as He (always He) chooses. Obviously, the reason things are not going well is that the guys down the road have different prayers and are displeasing Him. The life of Jesus can be taken as a cautionary tale of what happens when you really try and get him to change the system; the system uses you for its own end for 2k years (and counting). An alternative is necessary, one that makes clear that moral excellence is as difficult as its is rare, and to be praised precisely because it is not really in tune with Nature/God/whatever. Insofar as we understand the most efficient ways to run societies, they seem to be dictatorships; as democrats, we invoke individual freedom as a moral alternative.
It could be argued that what modern theocracy consists of is above all a category error. They attempt to destroy centuries of societal development by invoking the wrath of a personal God. The infinite of course cannot be a person; it can however be noetic and transpersonal as we are in our finest moments. Moreover, its nature is to be on the cutting-edge of subject and object, the cutting-edge of evolution. When we get an unjust law revoked, or get an endangered species legally protected, we participate in this

Evolution is indeed a vitally important concept. Unfortunately is has gotten trapped in a local minimum related to a Victorian gentleman's childlike impressions of an imperial expedition Religions, by contrast, are an attempt to take the forces of immanent order and channel them toward the good is a created community; the channeling is called “intercessionary prayer” -and is directed to God. Yet it could be argued that, in eschewing a personal God who is the foundation of morality, Buddhism is more advanced; this is particularly the case as its founder apparently lived a life of heroic self-sacrifice

3.7.1 SCHEMA

On the left, the substance at a particular stage. At the right, the new dynamics introduced with that stage with an identification of whether it is an anthropism, emergence, construal, or recapitulation(a.e.c.r)

REALITY
Quantum uroboros Quantum fluctuations, subject/object differentiation (a,e)

MATTER

subatomic particles collisions (e)

Atoms (pre Carbon) Fusion, chaotic dynamics(e)


Atoms (post Carbon) self-catalytic organic chemistry (a, e)

Molecules Full chemistry, emergence of new properties (e)

LIFE

Life Membranes(subject/object differentiation) (e,r)
Organismal complexity endosymbiosis, natural selection, Hox genes, co-operation (a,e,c)

Lifeworld Dynamics leading to Gaia (a,e)

Self-replication in DNA/RNA Cells, organisms, symbols ->deceit, recursion (a,e,c)

multicellularity differentiation and integration of function (e,c,r)

ANIMALS

sensorimotor function imitation, egocentrism (e)

consciousnessI detection of salience in multimodality (e)

Use of recursive sets of signs Birdsong (e,c,r)

Social interaction Tribal dynamics (e)


HUMAN

Symbolic development sensorimotor use of logical systems (e, c)

Use of symbols to refer intentionality (subject/object differentiation) (e,c,r)

consciousness2 Symbolic and recursive elements (e,c,r)

Quickened social interaction Societal dynamics, mass war (e)

Refinement of symbols The arts and sciences (e,c)

A socius in network of selves an egocentric narrative (r)

A “self” constant over operations Engineering; environmental change, damage (e,c)


TRANSITIONAL STAGE

Self-modelling Incompleteness intuitions, humour (e)

consciousness3 Subjectivity (integration) (e,c,r)


NEW EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS

Self-awareness over several domains control over intentionality (e,c,r)


Biosphere as Gaia Ethical action to protect environment (e,c,)


Refinement of impulses protection of higher arts and sciences (e,c,)


All these final category emergent items also are construals; we are on our own, as the cutting-edge always is on its own. We are attempting to integrate our differentiated selves into one central person, much as differentiated cells came into the ambit of a single organism in endosymbiosis
3.7.2 A slightly embarrassed political sociology
In terms of societal organization, we can detect progress from tribal dynamics (with a ruling principle of loyalty to a tribe) to feudalism (itself a protean concept) with an imposed hierarchy. On a parallel track, the invention of writing led to the possibility of bureaucratic organization. On yet another, since size indeed does matter in realpolitik, the tribal ethos was trumped by the reality of empire, administered by a bureaucracy and with a “dead hand” ethos that we can call an “ecumenism”
In the 19th century, as wonderfully described by Benedict Anderson, inter alia, came the apotheosis of the “nation state” with a tribal identity but a bureaucratic administration that made it almost an ecumenism. The “New world” countries attempt to ape the notion of a nation state in some ways but are by definition multi-ethnic. Clearly, environmental protection will require ecumenical dynamics over several sectors of life; these should offer no dangers to ethnic identity.
Raymond Aron pithily defined political sociology in terms of relationships between part and whole. In that, of course, it echoes processes in biology; moreover, rather famously, Plato discerned a tight analogy between the structure of the ideal psyche and that of the ideal polis. To say that the modern state is still a work in progress is an understatement; nevertheless, we can discern an empowerment of the individual within the state to the point that a citizen in a western democracy has at her disposal –given average financial success – cultural and energetic possibilities beyond the reach of potentates of even three hundred years ago.
Even that is a step down from the heyday of the “mixed economy”; otherwise put, Richard Nixon would look like too liberal a Democrat to be even remotely electable, It is also fair to say that “popular culture”, dimly glimpsed as an approaching threat by early critics like MacDonald, now threatens to steamroll higher forms of human expression.
We can perhaps best detect the differentiations and integration within society that reflect ineluctable processes toward increased autonomy by being what permanent gains people have been willing to struggle and die for; as their heir, we should similarly be ready to struggle. They include an attenuation of the absolute power of the monarch, exemplified by Magna Carta; freedoms of person, thought and property, gained by the Enlightenment revolutions; and universal franchise, gained mainly by suffragettes.
Many other freedoms are being rolled back, often through the ingenious device of granting personhood to corporations. The worker had a much greater share than now in gross profit until the 1980’s, mainly as a result of union activism; that via media between dictatorship of the proletariat and plutocracy may be reinstated, and violently. Until 9/11, privacy was sacrosanct in American and many other Western societies; the current level of state monitoring of private interaction is close to a blasphemy to the intentions of the “founding fathers” US.
We have no Moses to point to stone tablets on which rights to self-expression, economic opportunity, and so on are written; we do however have the evidence of centuries of class struggle, and a palpable sense of the victories gained, still available to us at least in vestigial form, and worth fighting for again if needs be, We can best honour them by adding to our struggle the integrity of Gaia.
3.8 Conclusion
This paper began with Kauffman’s program of “reinventing the sacred”. Kauffman, above all, wishes to rehabilitate God considered as the “creative spirit’ in evolution. We pointed out projects parallel to his from Plotinus to Buddha before focusing on Gurdjieff as a 20th century synthesizer. In Gurdjieff’s system, neither environmental preservation nor human development is by any means guaranteed by evolution/emanation; on the contrary, both these desiderata are in some way against “nature”. Yet in our consciousness, as mystics have argued from Plotinus onward, is a capacity to re-unite ourselves with the absolute, a step that Kauffman might indeed have proposed - particularly given his resolutely ant-algorithmic quantum view of mind. For Kauffman, like Plotinus, the alone could return to the alone considered as a coherent quantum state.
Remarkably, Gurdjieff’s radical insistence that we possess neither consciousness, will, nor a constant self can be maintained in the face of recent neuroscientific evidence. In fact, human consciousness seems like a spandrel, an accident of evolution that has in its wake begotten selfhood and the capacity to perform engineering feats that can both destroy and heal the environment. The “work” focuses on the development and refinement of consciousness among an elite. That is insufficient for sustainability; the good news is that modern “ecumenical” power together with bureaucracy has shown a capacity to legislate appropriately to preserve ecosystems.
Activism to enshrine such legislation into the machinery of the state can be seen as an act of re-enchantment of nature; indeed it can be seen as a re-assertion of the anthropic coincidences which have caused us to be, in the midst of our complex socio-political systems. It can also be seen as a mundane, if morally excellent legal achievement; it will be the job of those with a genuine religious impulse to produce structures and rituals in which political activism can be seen as a participation in the sacred. The references to “the path” are a semi-serious attempt to suggest a prayer and life weekly cycle .
For the moment, writers like Needleman alert us to emotions in which self-transcendence is achieved, as Kauffman. It is clear that modern delineation of the sacred must include the processes that we call Gaia; it is argued here that it should also include the refined parts of the arts and sciences, characterized by informational complexity, self-awareness, and (for the arts) control of emotion. Moreover, we should see ourselves as creating new levels in an ontology, a new form of human being. We should, doubts and all, strive for moral excellence even if we worry that no good deed goes unpunished.
In this schema, the Abrahamic God who legislates directly is an absurdity – or, as the American-Jewish comedian Lewis Black rather brilliantly put it, he was invented to distract the desert wanderers from the realization that there was no air-conditioning. Yet, faced with a clear moral injustice upheld by material force, it is appropriate indeed to act as if God is on our side. A good example is the recent success by the “sea Shepherd” in arresting the annual Japanese whaling season. McBay et al (2011) are right about one thing; globalized corporatism is malignant, as destructive of Gaia as it is of the higher possibilities of humanity. It is a mystery that, absent any “objective” cues, moral heroism – even if failed, from Jesus through to the victims of the GW Bush “Green Scare” – does seem to put us in touch with a Reality that transcends us.
Nature supplies us with a few clues, beyond the clear destruction of the biosphere. As we attempt to become more integrated self-systems, we recapitulate a path that multicellular organisms took when their differentiation into multi-sensory systems required integration as “consciousness1”. Genuine moral achievements supply the kind of existential security that led many whom we consider “great” to ever more austere moral heights. The greater informational complexity and consistency of the more refined arts and sciences is a similar goad to the heights. Finally, the emergence of the internet allows the dissemination and production of fine art and science, and it is by no means impossible that a whole new definition of “livelihood” and “work” is imminent.



References

Ball P (2011) “Physics of life: The dawn of quantum biology” Nature 474, 272-274 |doi:10.1038/474272a Published online 15 June 2011 News Feature
Bateson (1972) Steps to an ecology of Mind NY: Ballantine
Freeman, W., S. O'Nuallain and J Rodriguez(2008) "Simulating cortical background electrocortigram at rest with filtered noise" Journal of integrated neuroscience,7 (3 )Page: 337 - 344 Sept 2008

Holman, J (2008) The return of the perennial philosophy London, England: Watkins
Gazzaniga, M. (1995) “Consciousness and the cerebral hemispheres. “In Gazzaniga, M. (ed.) (1995) The cognitive neurosciences Pp 1391-1400 Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press

Kauffman, S (2008) Reinventing the Sacred New York: Basic Books

Kiser, J. (2002) The monks of Tibhirine New York: St Martin’s

Krishnamurti, J. (1979) Meditations Boston: Shambala

McBay, Arik, L Keith and D. Jensen (2011) Deep Green Resistance New York: seven stories

Margulis, L. and D. Sagan (2002) Acquiring Genomes NY: Basic books

Moore, J (1991) Gurdjieff Rockport, MA: Element

Mott, M (1993) The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton New York; Houghton

Needleman, Jacob (2011) What is God? NY: Penguin

O Nualláin, Seán (2003) The Search for Mind ( Third edition); Bristol, England: Intellect

O Nualláin, Seán (2006) “Inner and outer empiricism in consciousness research” New ideas in Psychology
Volume 24, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 30-40

O Nualláin, Seán (2004) Being Human: the Search for Order (Bristol, England Intellect, 2004) second edition

O Nualláin, Seán (2000) (ed)Spatial Cognition (ed.) (Philadelphia, USA: Benjamins);

O Nualláin, Seán (1997) (ed) Two Sciences of Mind (Philadelphia, USA Benjamins,);

O Nualláin, Seán (2008)“Subjects and Objects” Biosemiotics journal, Volume 2, Pp. 239-251
O Nualláin, Seán and T. Doris (2009) “What is neural resonance for?” Chaos and complexity letters 4(2)

O Nualláin, Seán (2006) “Inner and outer empiricism in consciousness research” in New ideas in psychology
O Nualláin, Seán ““Code and context” in Marcello Barbieri (ed.) The codes of life (Springer) Pp 347-356 (2007)

O Nualláin, Seán and R. Strohman ““Genome and natural language” in Witzany (ed.) Proceedings of Biosemiotics 2006. Helsinki; Umweb (2007) Pp. 249-260

O Nualláin, Seán (2008)““Remarks on the foundations of Biology” at “Cosmos and History: special issue on 'What is life?'” Vol 4 Nos 1-2
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O Nualláin, Seán (2009) “Zero power and selflessness” Cognitive sciences 4(2)

O Nualláin, Seán and Tom Doris((2011 ) “Consciousness is cheap” Biosemiotics journal, web edition DOI: 10.1007/s12-y

O Nualláin, Seán (forthcoming ) “Neural correlates of consciousness of what?” New ideas in psychology

Ouspensky, P. (1977) In search of the Miraculous. Orlando, Fa: Harcourt

Pease, Alan (1988) Microgestures London: Sheldon Press

Schumacher, E.F. (1977) A guide for the perplexed New York: Harper and Row

Sellnerr, E (1994) “A common dwelling” Cistercian Studies Quarterly, Vol 29 1-22

Smith, H (1992) Forgotten Truth NY: Harper Collins

Stace, W. (1960) The teachings of the Mystics NY: Mentor

Suppes (2002) Structure and Representation in scientific structures Palo Alto: CSLI publications

Walker, K (1969) A Study of Gurdjieff’s teaching NY: Award/Jonathan Cape

Vul E, Harris C,Winkielman P, Pashler H (2009) “Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality,and social cognition”. Perspect Psychol Sci 4:274–90

Washington, Peter (1993) Madame Blavatsky's baboon London; Secker and Warburg

PS 5u eanair 2012

Knowledge and the path

We are entering an age in which conceptual progress in science is slowing noticeably. In fact, it may be possible that this is a new age of “system-builders”. Coincidentally, a new space in civil society has opened up for spirituality as it is clear that subjectivity is inviolate – politically and scientifically. . While there is no going back to a grand narrative that is irrational and sectarian - a la the catholicism of the inquisition and indeed any kind of dogma - the scientistic control of truth has failed to issue any decent prescriptions about who we are as people. That opens a vast new realm of attested experience, a path, particularly in view of the moral/fideistic and environmental crises that accompany the epistemological one. In short, we can begin again to talk of ontology, and the possibility of perfection of being in ourselves through a path.

There is knowing that; knowing how; but also the coming into consciousness of one's role in a system of which one is part, a type of knowledge that will often involve an affective and sensual component, be that system Gaia or a socio political system. This may be because, creatures of clay, we experience deep springs of our unity with the earth that become presented to consciousness before verbal expression. This happens in other sensual activities like dance. For knowledge covered by the academy, within “knowing that” are objective and consensual knowledge, acquaintance and description and so on. The path should not conflict with the higher achievements of the academy; we do not want another Galileo trial.

The path can simply be stated as knowing oneself then knowing god as creator, including God in the creatures (Gaia), then knowing oneself as the infinite. Yet that cannot be done without an absolutely self-transformative excursion through all of the aspects of society one encounters in one's life. Otherwise, one's experience is a set of narratives, inculcated through biological urge and social convention. All these narratives are buttressed by the notion that “I” am in charge. The Path first attempts to help the neophyte archive identification with a center of awareness in himself that allows these narratives to be seen as automatic. This may require many years, and excursions to deal with problems in the real world in order precisely to delineate subjectivity and to identify the self as awareness. .

God can be conceived of as the human effort to wrestle the ordering principle that exists in our part of the cosmos into something positive. It is clear, after 2oth century totalitarianism, that efficient societies can easily be constructed in an age of technological advance by coercive means, using the capacity there exists here for order. It is our duty to fight this. As we do so, we seek strength from outside, often pretending that the force for “good” is omnipotent – thus, “God”. And, as universal mystical experience shows, beyond God there is a ground of Being, beyond subject/object distinction, access to which will be thought of as available to suitably-prepared humans whether or not science allows it. Right now, the notion of a quantum vacuum indeed supports it.

The path I recommend is non-attachment; emphasis on the refined, even if very complex; cordial and normal human relations; spiritual intensity; humour; all 3 centers (mind, body, psyche) nurtured as is easy given the freely available information resources present now; massive struggle for the achievements of our culture when necessary, including freedom and voting franchise (if called upon, as a way of transformations of self). The religious search begins either with very intensive search for oneself, or a demand that one has more being; that one be more integrated (as in classic conversion experiences like those AA catalogs). Then the world is seen as an ontology, with grades of Being, including one;s own possibilities, including a supreme being. The epistemology f the academy is now supplemented by an ontology, and practices for the expansion of being are searched for in religion.

PPS 22/1/12

Here is a apropos for an appropriately non-sectarian office schedule, with an outline at the start being implemented at least to some extent. It unapologetically includes some canonical Irish texts;


Three Offices daily

________________________________

Lauds Monday to Sunday: Theme the glory of creation

Monday Singing from the Upanishads qualities of Brahman

Tuesday from the Pali Canyon "There is an unborn uncreated unoriginated unformed.."

Wednesday from the Psalms " you set the stars in their firmament...

Thursday from the Tao te Ching about the generation of the universe

Friday from the book of Genesis " in the beginning...

Saturday Celtic joy in nature

and Sunday again from the Upanishads

readings can include Einstein on wonder, Kauffman on God and the divine in evolution,Gurdjieff on the generation of the universe, Goodwin on biology and constraints, James Joyce on "mortal beauty"._

____________________________________________________________

None
Monday to Sunday: work and struggle.

The Fire sermon/Battle of Allen in Irish mythology/nonaction from the Tao te Ching /various revolutionaries on necessity for action/Chardin on evolution as way of the cross

Singing; Gita on work,


_______________________________________________________________________________

Vespers

This should emphasise the deep mystery of God and creation as apprehended through non-dual experience
for example Meister Eckhart on godhead, Upanishads on Brahman, Plotinus on the alone meeting the alone

Invocation

“We are stardust, we are consciousness, we are life, we are people. Every breath we breathe, very thought we experience testifies to the miracle of our existence. We came from the stars through the primeval dark to a state of being with enormous potential. Let us not forget that we are perhaps the unique thinking beings that exist on a unique and fragile planet. Let us remember too that we have a duty to perfect our own better angels and ensure that this beautiful and fragile earth endures.”








LAUDS

Monday
SAY  I  AM  YOU   I am dust particles in sunlight. I am the round sun.     To the bits of dust I say, Stay. To the sun, Keep moving.   I am morning mist,   and the breathing of evening.   I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.     Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel, I am also the coral reef they founder on.   I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches. Silence, thought, and voice.     The musical air coming through a flute, a spark of a stone, a flickering   in metal. Both candle,   and the moth crazy around it.   Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.   I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy, the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,   and the falling away. What is, and what isn’t. You who know   Jelaluddin, You the one in all, say who   I am. Say I am You.

Tuesday

The Song of Amergin
I am a stag of seven tines,
I am a wide flood on a plain,
I am a wind on the deep waters,
I am a shining tear of the sun,
I am a hawk on a cliff,
I am fair among flowers,
I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke.
I am a battle waging spear,
I am a salmon in the pool,
I am a hill of poetry,
I am a ruthless boar,
I am a threatening noise of the sea,
I am a wave of the sea,
Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen ?













Wednesday
“Thou art the fire, Thou art the sun, Thou art the air, Thou art the moon, Thou art the starry firmament, Thou art Brahman Supreme: Thou art the waters–thou, the creator of all.
“Thou art woman, thou art man, Thou art the youth, thou art the maiden, Thou art the old man tottering with his staff; Thou facest everywhere.
“Thou art the dark butterfly, Thou art the green parrot with red eyes, Thou art the thunder cloud, the seasons, the seas. Without beginning art thou, beyond time, beyond space. Thou art he from whom sprang the three worlds.” (Shvetashvatara Upanishad 4:2-4)
Thurday

Psalm 19(18) Caeli enarrant

.2 The heavens proclaim the glory of God,
and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.
.3 Day unto day takes up the story
and night unto night makes known the message.

.4 No speech, no word, no voice is heard
.5 yet their span extends through all the earth,
their words to the utmost bounds of the world.

There he has placed a tent for the sun;
.6 it comes forth like a bridegroom coming from his tent,
rejoices like a champion to run its course.

.7 At the end of the sky is the rising of the sun;
to the furthest end of the sky is its course.
There is nothing concealed from its burning heat.


Friday

Psalm 8(8) Domine, Dominus noster

.2 How great is your name, O Lord our God,
through all the earth!

Your majesty is praised above the heavens;
.3 on the lips of children and of babes
you have found praise to foil your enemy,
to silence the foe and the rebel.

.4 When I see the heavens, the work of your hands,
the moon and the stars which you arranged,
.5 what is man that you should keep him in mind,
mortal man that you care for him?

.6 Yet you have made him little less than a god;
with glory and honor you crowned him,
.7 gave him power over the works of your hands,
put all things under his feet.

.8 All of them, sheep and cattle,
yes, even the savage beasts,
.9 birds of the air, and fish
that make their way through the waters.

.10 How great is your name, O Lord our God
through all the earth!

Saturday

The Invocation in Gaelic:
Toghairm na hÉireann
Áiliu íath nÉireann
éarmach muir
mothach sliabh screatach
screatach coill citheach
citheach ab eascach
eascach loch linnmhar
linnmhar tor tiopra
tiopra túath óenach
óemach ríg Teamhrach
Teamhair tor túathach
túathach mac Mhíleadh
Míleadh long libearn
libearn ar nÉirinn
Éireann ard díglas
dícheatal ro gáeth
ro gáeth bán Bhreise
Breise bán buaigne
Bé adhbhul Ériu
Érimon ar dtús
Ir, Éber, áileas
áiliu íath nÉireann
 
Sunday
The Invocation in English:
Amergin's Invocation of Ireland
I request the land of Ireland (to come forth)
coursed is the wild sea
wild the crying mountains
crying the generous woods
generous in showers (rain/waterfalls)
showers lakes and vast pools
vast pools hosts of well-springs
well-springs of tribes in assembly
assembly of kings of Tara
Tara host of tribes
tribes of the sons of Mil
Mil of boats and ships
ships come to Ireland
Ireland high terribly blue
an incantation on the (same) wind
(which was the) wind empty of Bres
Bres of an empty cup
Ireland be mighty
Ermon at the beginning
Ir, Eber, requested
(now it is) I (who) request the land of Ireland!


NONE

Monday/Wed/Fri/Sun

Psalm 130(129) De profundis

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,
2 Lord, hear my voice!
O let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my pleading.

3 If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt,
Lord, who would survive?
4 But with you is found forgiveness:
for this we revere you.

5 My soul is waiting for the Lord.
I count on his word.
6 My soul is longing for the Lord
more than watchman for daybreak.
(Let the watchman count on daybreak
7 and Israel on the Lord.)

Because with the Lord there is mercy
and fullness of redemption,
8 Israel indeed he will redeem
from all its iniquity.

Tuesday/Thurs/Sat

Psalm 132(131) Memento, Domine

1 O Lord, remember David
and all the many hardships he endured,
2 the oath he swore to the Lord,
his vow to the Strong One of Jacob.

3 "I will not enter the house where I live
nor go the bed where I rest.
4 I will give no sleep to my eyes,
to my eyelids I will give no slumber
5 till I find a place for the Lord,
a dwelling for the Strong One of Jacob."

6 At Ephrata we heard of the ark;
we found it in the plains of Yearim.
7 "Let us go to the place of his dwelling;
let us go to kneel at his footstool."



Compline/Vespers
Monday/Wed/Fri/Sun
Christ Be Beside Me

Christ be beside me, Christ be before me,
Christ be behind me, King of my heart.
Christ be within me, Christ be below me,
Christ be above me, never to part.

Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand,
Christ all around me, shield in the strife.
Christ in my sleeping, Christ in my sitting,
Christ in my rising, light of my heart.

Christ be in all hearts thinking about me,
Christ be on all tongues telling of me.
Christ be the vision in eyes that see me,
In ears that hear me Christ ever be.

Tuesday/Thurs/Sat

“The Infinite is the source of joy. There is no joy in the finite. Only in the Infinite is there joy. Ask to know of the Infinite.”
“The Infinite is below, above, behind, before, to the right, to the left. I am all this. This Infinite is the Self. The Self is below, above, behind, before, to the right, to the left. I am all this. One who knows, meditates upon, and realizes the truth of the Self–such an one delights in the Self, revels in the Self, rejoices in the Self. He becomes master of himself, and master of all the worlds. Slaves are they who know not this truth.
“He who knows, meditates upon, and realizes this truth of the Self, finds that everything–primal energy, ether, fire, water, and all other elements–mind, will, speech, sacred hymns and scriptures–indeed the whole universe–issues forth from it.




READINGS

Monday
Lauds

The authorities teach that next to the first emanation, which is the Son coming out of the Father, the angels are most like God. And it may well be true, for the soul at its highest is formed like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. For this reason the angel was sent to the soul, so that the soul might be re-formed by it, to be the divine idea by which it was first conceived. Knowledge comes through likeness. And so because the soul may know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original idea, in which all things are one. And there it comes to rest in God.
Sermon 9, as translated in The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (1999) by Hughes Oliphant Old, Ch. 9 : The German Mystics, p. 449
Tuesday

Pali Canon

"There exists, monks, that which is unborn, that which is unbecome, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned.
"For if there were not, monks, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned, there would not be made known here the escape from that which is born, from that which is become, from that which is created, from that which is conditioned.
"Yet since there exists, monks, that which is unborn, that which is unbecome, that which is uncreated, that which is unconditioned, there is therefore made known the escape from that which is born, from that which is become, from that which is created, from that which is conditioned."

AVADHUTA GITA

(Translated by Hari Prasad Shastri)

Chapter I


1. By the grace of God the Brahmins above all men are inspired with the disposition to non-duality (unity of the Self with God), which relieves them of the great fear.

2. How can I salute the Self, which is indestructible, which is all Bliss, which in Itself and by Itself pervades everything, and which is inseparable from Itself?

3. I alone am, ever free from all taint. The world exists like a mirage within me. To whom shall I bow?

4. Verily the one Self is all, free from differentiation and non-differentiation. Neither can it be said, "It is" nor "It is not." What a great mystery.

5. This is the whole substance of Vedanta; this is the essence of all knowledge, theoretical and intuitional. I am the Atman, by nature impersonal and all-pervasive.

6. That God who is the Self in all, impersonal and changeless, like unto space, by nature purity itself, verily, verily, that I am.

7. I am pure knowledge, imperishable, infinite. I know neither joy nor pain; whom can they touch?

8. The actions of the mind, good and evil, the actions of the body, good and evil, the actions of the voice, good and evil, exist not in me (Atman). I am the nectar which is knowledge absolute; beyond the range of the senses I am.

9. The mind is as space, embracing all. I am beyond mind. In Reality the mind has no independent existence.
 Wednesday
10. How can it be said that the Self is manifest? How can it be said that the self is limited? I alone am existence; all this objective world am I. More subtle than space itself am I.

11. Know the Self to be infinite consciousness, self-evident, beyond destruction, enlightening all bodies equally, ever shining. In It is neither day nor night.

12. Know Atman to be one, ever the same, changeless. How canst though say: "I am the meditator, and this is the object of meditation?" How can perfection be divided?

13. Thou, O Atman, wast never born, nor didst thou ever die. The body was never thine. The Shruti (revealed Scriptures) has often said: "This is all Brahman."

14. Thou art all Brahman, free from all change, the same within and without, absolute bliss. Run not to and from like a ghost.

15. Neither unity nor separation exist in thee nor in me. All is Atman alone. "I" and "thou" and the world have no real being.

16. The subtle faculties of touch, taste, smell, form and sound which constitute the world without are not thyself, nor are they within thee. Thou art the great all-transcending Reality.

17. Birth and death exist not in the mind, not in thee, as do also bondage and liberation. Good and evil are in the mind, and not in thee. O Beloved, why dost thou cry? Name and form are neither in thee nor in me.

18. Oh my mind, why dost thou range in delusion like a ghost? Know Atman to be above duality and be happy.
 Thursday
19. Thou art the essence of knowledge, indomitable, eternal, ever free from modifications. Neither is there in thee attachment nor indifference. Let not thyself suffer from desires.

20. All the Shrutis speak of Atman as without attributes, ever pure, imperishable, without a body, the eternal Truth. That know to be thyself.

21. Know all forms, physical and subtle, as illusion. The Reality underlying them is eternal. By living this Truth one passes beyond birth and death.

22. The sages call Atman the "ever-same." By giving up attachment the mind sees neither duality nor unity.

23. Concentration is not possible either on perishable objects, on account of their mutability, nor on Atman. "Is" and "is not" do not apply to Atman either. In Atman, freedom absolute, how is Samadhi possible?

24. Birthless, pure, bodiless, equable, imperishable Atman thou knowest thyself to be. How then canst thou say: "I know Atman," or "I know not Atman."
 Friday
25. Thus has the Shruti spoken of Atman; "That Thou art." Of the illusory world, born of the five physical elements, the Shruti says: "Neti, neti" (not this, not this).

26. All this is ever pervaded by thee as Atman. In thee is neither the meditator nor the object of meditation. Why, O mind, dost thou shamelessly meditate"

27. I know not Shiva, How can I speak of Him? Who Shiva is I know not, How can I worship Him?

28. I am Shiva, the only reality, Like unto space absolute is my nature. In me is neither unity nor variety, The cause of imagination also is absent in me.
29. Free from subject and object am I, How can I be self-realizable? Endless is my nature, naught else exists. Truth absolute is my nature, naught else exists.

30. Atman by nature, the supreme Reality am I, Neither am I slayer nor the slain.  

31. On the destruction of a jar, the space therein unites with all space. In myself and Shiva I see no difference when the mind is purified.

32. Brahman alone is, as pure consciousness. In truth there is no jar, and no jar-space, no embodied soul, nor its nature.

Saturday

LXI

A large state should be the estuary of a river,
Where all the streams of the world come together.
In the coming together of the world
The female overcomes the male by weakness.
Being weak she takes the lower position.
So a large state taking the lower position
Allies itself with a small state.
A small state taking the lower position
Is allied with a large state.
One by taking the lower position allies itself,
The other by taking the lower position is allied.
All the large state wishes
Is to join with and nourish the other.
All the small state wishes
Is for its services to be accepted by the other.
In order to achieve what they wish
The great adopt the lower position.
LXII

The Way is the myriad creatures’ refuge.
It is that which the good extend,
And that which defends the bad.
Eloquent words can win promotion.
Eloquent actions can elevate.
Even if a person is bad, should one reject them?
When the ruler is installed
And the three great ministers appointed,
Though jade disks
And four-horse teams are offered,
It’s better to grant the gift of the Way
Without stirring from one’s place.
Why was the Way valued of old?
Was it not said it brought achievement,
And mitigated the punishment of the guilty.
So it was prized by the realm.
Sunday

THE HERMIT'S SONG
(See EHu, vol. x, p. 39, where the Irish text will be found. It dates from the ninth century)
I Long, O Son of the living God,
Ancient, eternal King,
For a hidden hut on the wilds untrod,
Where Thy praises I might sing;
A little, lithe lark of plumage grey
To be singing still beside it,
Pure waters to wash my sin away,
When Thy Spirit has sanctified it.
Hard by it a beautiful, whispering wood
Should stretch, upon either hand,
To nurse the many-voiced fluttering brood
In its shelter green and bland.
Southward, for warmth, should my hermitage face,
With a runnel across its floor,
In a choice land gifted with every grace,
And good for all manner of store.
A few true comrades I next would seek
To mingle with me in prayer,
Men of wisdom, submissive, meek;
Their number I now declare,
Four times three and three times four,
For every want expedient,
Sixes two within God's Church door,
To north and south obedient;
Twelve to mingle their voices with mine
At prayer, whate'er the weather,
To Him Who bids His dear sun shine
On the good and ill together.
Pleasant the Church with fair Mass cloth,
No dwelling for Christ's declining
To its crystal candles, of bees-wax both,
On the pure, white Scriptures shining.
Beside it a hostel for all to frequent,
Warm with a welcome for each,
Where mouths, free of boasting and ribaldry, vent
But modest and innocent speech.
These aids to support us my husbandry seeks,
I name them now without hiding—
Salmon and trout and hens and leeks,
And the honey-bees' sweet providing. Raiment and food enow will be mine
From the King of all gifts and all graces; And I to be kneeling, in rain or shine,
Praying to God in all places.

None
Monday

echhart

The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.
As translated in A Dazzling Darknesss: An Anthology of Western Mysticism (1985) by Patrick Grant

eriugena on reason

Cum ergo audimus, Deum omnia facere, nil aliud debemus intelligere, quam Deum in omnibus esse, hoc est, essentiam omnium subsistere.
When we are told that God is the maker of all things, we are simply to understand that God is in all things – that He is the substantial essence of all things.
De Divisione Naturae, Bk. 1, ch. 72; translation from Hugh Fraser Stewart Boethius: An Essay (London: William Blackwood, 1891) p. 255.
Auctoritas siquidem ex vera ratione processit, ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate. Omnis enim auctoritas, quae vera ratione non approbatur, infirma videtur esse. Vera autem ratio, quum virtutibus suis rata atque immutabilis munitur, nullius auctoritatis adstipulatione roborari indigent.
For authority proceeds from true reason, but reason certainly does not proceed from authority. For every authority which is not upheld by true reason is seen to be weak, whereas true reason is kept firm and immutable by her own powers and does not require to be confirmed by the assent of any authority.
De Divisione Naturae, Bk. 1, ch. 69; translation by I. P. Sheldon-Williams, cited from Peter Dronke (ed.) A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1988) p. 2.
Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare, nisi verae religionis, qua summa et principalis omnium rerum causa, Deus, et humiliter colitur, et rationabiliter investigatur, regulas exponere? Conficitur inde, veram esse philosophiam veram religionem, conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam.
What, then, is it to treat of philosophy, unless to lay down the rules of the true religion by which we seek rationally and adore humbly God, who is the first and sovereign cause of all things? Hence it follows that the true philosophy is the true religion, and reciprocally that the true religion is the true philosophy.
De Divina Praedestinatione, ch. 1; translation from Kenelm Henry Digby Mores Catholici, vol. 8 (London: Booker & Dolman, 1837) p. 198.
Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam.
No one enters heaven except through philosophy.
Annotationes in Marciam, no. 64; translation from John Joseph O’Meara Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 30.
Tuesday
Einstein;

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.

Einstein on reason, religion etc

Our time is distinguished by wonderful achievements in the fields of scientific understanding and the technical application of those insights. Who would not be cheered by this? But let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.
Written statement (September 1937)


All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.
The essential unity of ecclesiastical and secular institutions was lost during the 19th century, to the point of senseless hostility. Yet there was never any doubt as to the striving for culture. No one doubted the sacredness of the goal. It was the approach that was disputed.
"Moral Decay" (1937);
Wednesday
I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. ... The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity.
"The Need for Ethical Culture" celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Ethical Culture Society, founded by Felix Adler (5 January 1951).
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
Letter to California student E. Holzapfel (March 1951) Einstein Archive 59-1013, quoted in Albert Einstein, the Human Side (1979) by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and in The New Quotable Einstein (2005) by Alice Calaprice
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Letter to Hans Muehsam (9 July 1951), Einstein Archives 38-408, quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) by Alice Calaprice, p. 404
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
Letter to Carl Seelig (11 March 1952)

Thursday

Macswiney

We fight for
freedom--not for the vanity of the world, not to have a fine conceit of
ourselves, not to be as bad--or if we prefer to put it so, as big as our
neighbours. The inspiration is drawn from a deeper element of our being.
We stifle for self-development individually and as a nation. If we don't
go forward we must go down. It is a matter of life and death; it is out
soul's salvation. If the whole nation stand for it, we are happy; we
shall be grandly victorious. If only a few are faithful found they must
be the more steadfast for being but a few. They stand for an individual
right that is inalienable. A majority has no right to annul it, and no
power to destroy it. Tyrannies may persecute, slay, or banish those who
defend it; the thing is indestructible. It does not need legions to
protect it nor genius to proclaim it, though the poets have always
glorified it, and the legions will ultimately acknowledge it. One man
alone may vindicate it, and because that one man has never failed it has
never died. Not, indeed, that Ireland has ever been reduced to a single
loyal son. She never will be. We have not survived the centuries to be
conquered now. But the profound significance of the struggle, of its
deep spiritual appeal, of the imperative need for a motive force as
lofty and beautiful, of the consciousness that worthy winning of freedom
is a labour for human brotherhood; the significance of it all is seen in
the obligation it imposes on everyone to be true, the majority
notwithstanding. He is called to a grave charge who is called to resist
the majority. But he will resist, knowing his victory will lead them to
a dearer dream than they had ever known. He will fight for that ideal in
obscurity, little heeded--in the open, misunderstood; in humble places,
still undaunted; in high places, seizing every vantage point, never
crushed, never silent, never despairing, cheering a few comrades with
hope for the morrow. And should these few sink in the struggle the
greatness of the ideal is proven in the last hour; as they fall their
country awakens to their dream, and he who inspired and sustained them
is justified; justified against the whole race, he who once stood alone
against them. In the hour he falls he is the saviour of his race.

Needleamn on MA and action:

“Throughout the meditations, while Marcus is communicating his struggle not to attach himself to his emotional judgements and thought associations, he speaks of the fundamental wish to open himself to the Mind of the Whole....He is speaking of a palpable force that has material effects on his thinking, his feeling and his action in the world....the capacity to obey and transmit the Mind of the Whole into the bones and muscles of his own human body. Does he succeed..?.Perhaps , perhaps not, in this or that case”
Friday
ON THE FLIGHTINESS OF THOUGHT

Shame to my thoughts, how they stray from me !
I fear great danger from it on the day of eternal Doom.

During the psalms they wander on a path that is not right :
They fash, they fret, they misbehave before the eyes of great God.


Through eager crowds, through companies of wanton women.
Through woods, through cities — swifter they are than the wind.

Now through paths of love anon of riotous shame !
Without a ferry or ever missing a step they go across every sea :
Swiftly they leap in one bound from earth to heaven.

They run a race of folly anear and afar :
After a course of giddiness they return to their home.

Though one should try to bind them or put shackles on their feet,
They are neither constant nor mindful to take a spell of rest.

Neither sword-edge nor crack of whip will keep them down strongly :
As slippery as an eel's tail they glide out of my grasp.


Neither lock nor firm-Vaulted dungeon nor any fetter on earth,
Stronghold nor sea nor bleak fastness restrains them from their course.

Saturday
Non-action from Tao te Ching
XLIII

The softest thing in the world
Subdues the hardest thing in the world.
Non-being enters impenetrable space.
That is why I know the power of non-action.
Very few people in the world
Know how to teach without words
And profit from non-action.

XLVIII

In pursuing one’s studies
Something’s added each day.
In practising the Way
Something’s subtracted each day.
It grows less and less
Until one reaches non-action.
When one reaches non-action
Nothing is left undone.
It’s always through not interfering
That one can control the realm.
Whoever loves to interfere
Will never control the people.


Non-action from Matthew

Matthew 6:24-34 (Luke 12:24-27)
24 "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and mammon. 25 "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more  value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? 28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O  men of little  faith? 31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, `What shall we eat?' or `What shall we drink?' or `What shall we wear?' 32 For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. 34 "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.

Sunday
“Being, clinging and craving” from Pali canon

(BEING)
28. Saying, “Good, friend,” the bhikkhus delighted and rejoiced in the venerable Sāriputta’s words. Then they asked him a further question: “But, friend, might there be another way in which a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma?” -- “There might be, friends.
29. “When, friends, a noble disciple understands being, the origin of being, the cessation of being, and the way leading to the cessation of being, in that way he is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.
30. “And what is being, what is the origin of being, what is the cessation of being, what is the way leading to the cessation of being? There are these three kinds of being: sense-sphere being, fine-material being, and immaterial being. With the arising of clinging there is the arising of being. With the cessation of clinging there is the cessation of being. The way leading to the cessation of being is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view…right concentration.
31. “When a noble disciple has thus understood being, the origin of being, the cessation of being, and the way leading to the cessation of being… he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.”
(CLINGING)
32. Saying, “Good, friend,” the bhikkhus delighted and rejoiced in the venerable Sāriputta’s words. Then they asked him a further question: “But, friend, might there be another way in which a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma?” -- “There might be, friends.
33. “When, friends, a noble disciple understands clinging, the origin of clinging, the cessation of clinging, and the way leading to the cessation of clinging, in that way he is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.
34. “And what is clinging, what is the origin of clinging, what is the cessation of clinging, what is the way leading to the cessation of clinging? There are these four kinds of clinging: clinging to sensual pleasures, clinging to views, clinging to rules and observances, and clinging to a doctrine of self. With the arising of craving there is the arising of clinging. With the cessation of craving there is the cessation of clinging. The way leading to the cessation of clinging is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view…right concentration.
35. “When a noble disciple has thus understood clinging, the origin of clinging, the cessation of clinging, and the way leading to the cessation of clinging… he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.”
(CRAVING)
36. Saying, “Good, friend,” the bhikkhus delighted and rejoiced in the venerable Sāriputta’s words. Then they asked him a further question: “But, friend, might there be another way in which a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma?” -- “There might be, friends.
37. “When, friends, a noble disciple understands craving, the origin of craving, the cessation of craving, and the way leading to the cessation of craving, in that way he is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.
38. “And what is craving, what is the origin of craving, what is the cessation of craving, what is the way leading to the cessation of craving? There are these six classes of craving: craving for forms, craving for sounds, craving for odors, craving for flavors, craving for tangibles, craving for mind-objects. With the arising of feeling there is the arising of craving. With the cessation of feeling there is the cessation of craving. The way leading to the cessation of craving is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view…right concentration.
39.“When a noble disciple has thus understood craving, the origin of craving, the cessation of craving, and the way leading to the cessation of craving… he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view… and has arrived at this true Dhamma.”

Vespers

Monday
Chapter VI - avadhut


1. The whole universe is a projection of the mind; therefore it is a mode of the mind. The true nature of the mind is bliss, and when the mind is stilled, bliss absolute is revealed.

2. Consciousness absolute, being unknowable by the mind, how can speech explain it?

3. The Self is free from day and night, and therefore the conception of its pilgrimage in time and space is no true one.

4. No sun illumines Atman; the fire and the moon cannot shine therein. It is not equanimity or even desirelessness; how then can action exist in it?

5. Neither can it be said that It is to be known by the absence of action. It is neither within or without. It is naught but bliss absolute.

6. How can it be said that It is the first or that It is the last, since It is neither element or compound, nor emptiness nor fullness? Eternal, ever the same, the essence of all is Shiva.

7. The statement that Atman is describable or indescribable cannot stand. Neither is It the knower nor the known. It cannot be imagined or defined. How can we say that It has a mind or any of the senses?

8. Space, time, water, fire, earth, constituting the world, are a mere mirage. In truth the One, imperishable, ever blissful, alone exists. There is neither cloud nor water in It.
9. As there is no possibility of birth and death in It, so no conception of duty nor dereliction of duty can be applied to It. That undifferentiated, eternal, all-pervasive Shiva alone is.

10. The modifications of primordial matter and of individualized consciousness are in the realm of cause and effect. When there is eternal all-pervasive Shiva alone, how can there be matter or spirit therein?

11. There is in It no suffering, and no possibility of suffering, because It is free from all attributes.

12. There is no duality in It. How can there be age, or youth, or childhood in that One eternal principle?

13. Atman is dependent on nothing and is unlimited. The law of cause and effect touches It not. How can the buddhi, which operates only in duality, and which is perishable, discern It?

14. It grasps not, nor is It grasped. It is not born nor does It bring forth. We can only say that in It there is no destruction.

15. In Atman there is neither manhood nor womanhood, because such conceptions cannot exist in eternity.

16. There is no pleasure in It, and no faculty of enjoying pleasure, since It is free from such defects as attachment. Equally free from doubts and suffering, one and eternal is Shiva; thus the conception of "I" and "mine" do not apply to It.

17. Neither is there Brahman in It, nor the absence of Brahman. Since It alone exists and is eternity, it must follow that It is free from pain, and also from freedom from pain.

18. There is no gain and there is no loss. Infatuation and worldly wisdom have no place therein. When the eternal consciousness alone exists, how can discrimination or wisdom, or any such thing be contained in It?

19. In It there is no "thou" and no "I", therefore family and caste exist not therein. It is neither true nor untrue. Neither is It of this world nor of the next. How then can one pray to It?

20. Illusory is the connection of the learner and the teacher. Teaching and contemplation, when thus beheld, are not admissible. "Verily, I am Shiva." This alone is the whole Truth. How then can I pray to It, or worship It?
 Tuesday
21. The body itself is imagined in Atman, as is the whole universe. Atman is free from all differentiations. Then since I am Shiva, there can be no idea of prayer or worship.

22. Consciousness absolute has no body. It cannot be said that It is without a body or attributes. All that can be said is that It is bliss absolute, and that bliss am I. This is the height of worship, and this is the culmination of all prayer.

23. The Avadhut who has realized this mystery of all mysteries, and has risen to the state of unceasing and perfect bliss, moves about in the crowds unconcerned, radiating bliss and higher knowledge.

24. He is clothed in a habit of old and worn. He walks in a path that is free from religious merit or sin. He lives in the temple of absolute emptiness. His soul is naked, and free from all taints and modifications of maya.
25. The Avadhut has no ideal, neither strives he after the attainment of an ideal. Having lost his identity in Atman, free from the limitations of maya, free also from the perfections of Yoga, thus walks the Avadhut. He argues with no one, he is not concerned with any object or person.

26. Free from the snares of expectations and hopes, he has cast off the worn-out garments of purity, righteousness, and all ideals. His path is free from any such consideration. It can only be said about him that he is purity absolute, and is far, far above the clouds of maya and ignorance.

27. He has no such thoughts as "I am not in the body," or "I am not the body." He has no aversion, attachment or infatuation towards any object or person. Pure as space he walks, immersed in the immaculate bliss of his natural state.

28. The Avadhut may be compared to immeasurable space. He is eternity. In him is neither purity nor impurity. There is no variety nor unity in him; no bondage nor absence of bondage.

29. Free from separation and union, free from enjoyment or absence of enjoyment, he moves calm and unhurried through the world. Having given up all activity of the mind, he is in his normal state of indescribable bliss.

30. Atman, with which the Avadhut has found natural unity, is limitless and inconceivable. It is unknowable by the mind. It is neither a part nor is It divided. It cannot be said, "So far is its province and no farther." Verily, it is hard to describe and hard to obtain.
 Wednesday
31. The Avadhut is not concerned with the things of the world, because the natural state of Self-realization renders all else insignificant. Death and birth have no meaning; he meditates not, neither does he worship.

32. All this world is a magic show, like a mirage in the desert. Concentrated bliss, alone and secondless, is Shiva and that is the Avadhut.

33. The wise man strives not for anything, not even for Dharma or liberation. He is free from all actions and movements, and also from desire and renunciation.

34. What do they, the pundits, know of him? Even the Vedas cannot speak of him perfectly. That bliss absolute, ever indestructible, but a source of bliss to all, is the Avadhut.

Berkeley

.. we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things. .. Hence a great number of dark and ambiguous terms presumed to stand for abstract notions, have been introduced into metaphysics and morality, and from these have grown infinite distractions and disputes amongst the learned. (George Berkeley, 1710)
Thursday
Dionysus

Dionysius,
endeavouring to treat of God in Himself, apart
from man and nature, is obliged to use terms of
the purest negation J . Thus he says : ' He is neither
soul nor mind ; He has neither imagination, nor
opinion, nor word, nor thought ; nor is He word
or thought ; He uttereth no word and thinketh no
thought; neither is He number, nor order, nor
greatness, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality,
nor likeness, nor difference ; He standeth not, nor
moveth He, neither doth He take rest ; He hath
not power, nor is He power, nor light ; He liveth
not, neither is He life ; He is not being, nor
eternity, nor time ; neither is He within touch of
reason; He is not skill, nor is He truth, nor
dominion, nor wisdom ; neither one, nor unity, nor
divinity, nor goodness, nor yet spirit, as known
to us ; neither sonship nor fatherhood, nor any-
thing that is known to us or to any other beings ;
neither is He of the things that are, nor of those
that are not ; neither do the things that are know
Him in that He is, nor doth He know the things
that are in that they are ; neither doth any word
pertain to Him, nor name, nor thought ; He is
neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth ;
neither is there for Him any place nor any removal ;
for when we place and when we remove those that
come after Him, we do not so with Him ; for the
perfect and unifying Cause is beyond any place,
and the excellent Simplicity withdrawn from all
things is beyond any taking away, and stands
apart from all things.'
Friday
Erigena - from John Draper
“In a letter to Charles the Bald, Anastasius expresses his astonishment “how such a barbarian man, coming from the very ends of the earth, and remote from human conversation, could comprehend things so clearly, and transfer them into another language so well.” The general intention of his writings was, as we have said, to unite philosophy with religion, but his treatment of these subjects brought him under ecclesiastical censure, and some of his works were adjudged to the flames. His most important book is entitled “De Divisione Nature.”
Erigena’s philosophy rests upon the observed and admitted fact that every living thing comes from something that had previously lived. The visible world, being a world of life, has therefore emanated necessarily from some primordial existence, and that existence is God, who is thus the originator and conservator of all. Whatever we see maintains itself as a visible thing through force derived from him, and, were that force withdrawn, it must necessarily disappear. Erigena thus conceives of the Deity as an unceasing participator in Nature, being its preserver, maintainer, upholder, and in that respect answering to the soul of the world of the Greeks. The particular life of individuals is therefore a part of general existence, that is, of the mundane soul.
If ever there were a withdrawal of the maintaining power, all things must return to the source from which they issued — that is, they must return to God, and be absorbed in him. All visible Nature must thus pass back into “the Intellect” at last. “The death of the flesh is the auspices of the restitution of things, and of a return to their ancient conservation. So sounds revert back to the air in which they were born, and by which they were maintained, and they are heard no more; no man knows what has become of them. In that final absorption which, after a lapse of time, must necessarily come, God will be all in all, and nothing exist but him alone.” “I contemplate him as the beginning and cause of all things; all things that are and those that have been, but now are not, were created from him, and by him, and in him. I also view him as the end and intransgressible term of all things.... There is a fourfold conception of universal Nature — two views of divine Nature, as origin and end; two also of framed Nature, causes and effects. There is nothing eternal but God.”
The return of the soul to the universal Intellect is designated by Erigena as Theosis, or Deification. In that final absorption all remembrance of its past experiences is lost. The soul reverts to the condition in which it was before it animated the body. Necessarily, therefore, Erigena fell under the displeasure of the Church.”

quotes

the divine
mind, on the one hand, is capable of selfmovement
and of movement in the same [way]
(for it is immutable), the human [mind], on the
other hand, is capable of self-movement but not
of movement in the same [way] (for it is
mutable)


Saturday
Berkeley


Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713)
I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceit of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of think, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word, since this revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many thing which before were all mystery and riddle.
Said by Philonous (Berkeley) to Hylas in the opening of dialog 1 with reference to the recent surge philosophic endeavors (Locke, Newton, et al) that seemed to lead to skepticism about the existence of the world
That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see any thing absurd or skeptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this, that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.
Philonous to Hylas
Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?
Philonous to Hylas
Seeing therefore they are both [heat and pain] immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain;and consequently, that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain.
Philonous to Hylas
Since therefore, as well those degrees of heat that are not painful, as those that are, can exist in a thinking substance; may we not conclude that external bodies are absolutely incapable of any degree of heat whatsoever?
Philonous to Hylas. Hylas replies with, "So it seems."




Sunday
Einstein


Religion and Science (1930)
Originally written for the New York Times Magazine (9 November 1930). A version with altered wording appeared in Ideas and Opinions (1954)


Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain.


it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints.
Everything that men do or think concerns the satisfaction of the needs they feel or the escape from pain. This must be kept in mind when we seek to understand spiritual or intellectual movements and the way in which they develop. For feelings and longings are the motive forces of all human striving and productivity—however nobly these latter may display themselves to us.

The longing for guidance, for love and succor, provides the stimulus for the growth of a social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, decides, rewards and punishes. This is the God who, according to man's widening horizon, loves and provides for the life of the race, or of mankind, or who even loves life itself. He is the comforter in unhappiness and in unsatisfied longing, the protector of the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral idea of God.

It is easy to follow in the sacred writings of the Jewish people the development of the religion of fear into the moral religion, which is carried further in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially those of the Orient, are principally moral religions. An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. Only exceptionally gifted individuals or especially noble communities rise essentially above this level; in these there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints. Viewed from this angle, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are near to one another.



It is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.

For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him. A God who rewards and punishes is for him unthinkable, because man acts in accordance with an inner and outer necessity, and would, in the eyes of God, be as little responsible as an inanimate object is for the movements which it makes. Science, in consequence, has been accused of undermining morals—but wrongly. The ethical behavior of man is better based on sympathy, education and social relationships, and requires no support from religion. Man's plight would, indeed, be sad if he had to be kept in order through fear of punishment and hope of rewards after death.

It is, therefore, quite natural that the churches have always fought against science and have persecuted its supporters. But, on the other hand, I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research. No one who does not appreciate the terrific exertions, and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer creations in scientific thought cannot come into being, can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such work, turned away as it is from immediate practical life, can grow. What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work! Any one who only knows scientific research in its practical applications may easily come to a wrong interpretation of the state of mind of the men who, surrounded by skeptical contemporaries, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered over all countries in all centuries. Only those who have dedicated their lives to similar ends can have a living conception of the inspiration which gave these men the power to remain loyal to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is the cosmic religious sense which grants this power. A contemporary has rightly said that the only deeply religious people of our largely materialistic age are the earnest men of research.

sankara

"in the deepest sense of the highest truth is that which vedins call the inexhaustible, beyond Being as beyond non-Being. It is reality alone, nothing else

Eckhart

“I alone take all creatures out of their sense into my mind and make them one in me. When I go back into the ground, into the depths, into the well-spring of the Godhead, no one will ask me from where I came or where I went. No one will miss me, for there God unbecomes.”

“had I a good whom I could understand, I would no longer hold him for god” "

\ “There is more in this unknowing knowledge than in any ordinary understanding, for this unknowing lures you away from all understood things and from yourself. This is what Christ meant when he said: ‘Whoever does not deny himself and leave father and mother and is not estranged from all these, is not worthy of me.’ That is as though to say: whoever does not abandon creaturely externals can neither be conceived or born in this divine birth.” Entering into this unknowing might also be called a kind of gnosis, or inner spiritual knowledge, though as Eckhart has it, “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.”

“In unknowing knowing we know God, in forgetfulness of ourselves and all things up to the naked essence of the Godhead,