I suggest reading the earliest posts first

What is the relationship of the experience of synchronicities?

What is the relationship of the experience of synchronicities to the 'rational'? That question has been answered:

"Accompanying the more profound occurrences of synchronicity (is) a dawning intuition, sometimes described as having the character of a spiritual awakening, that the individual herself or himself not only is embedded in a larger ground of meaning and purpose, but also in some sense (is) a focus of it."
Richard Tarnas Cosmos and Psyche

The above quotation is embedded in 492 pages + 50 pages of endnotes, etc, little bitty print, not many pictures in the book.

"There is another world, but it is 'in' this one." Paul Eluard, Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World"

"Here again the dialectic that runs through the whole development of the mythical-religious consciousness stands out with particular sharpness....It is a fundmantal trait in mythical thinking that where ever it posits a definite relation between two members it transforms this relation into an identity. An attempted synthesis leads here necessarily to a coincidence, an immediate concrescence of the elements that were to be linked. " Ernst Cassirer, page 250, The Philosophy of symbolic Forms, Vol 2.

Concrescence is a term coined by Alfred North Whitehead
to show the process of jointly forming an actual entity that was without form, but about to manifest itself ...


"I saw not with the eye of the body, but the eye of the soul." Goethe; Theodore Reik's Fragment of a Great Confession

In discovering the other world, the hidden world, a very strange kind of conversation can be experienced but it's not the typical 'voice' that speaks in that other world. It's created artificially! It uses whatever is available to the individual, the specific individual.

This quotation is from War In Heaven by Charles Williams.

"When Mr. Batesby had spoken that morning it had seemed as if two streams of things: actual events and his own meditations had flowed gently together; as if not he but Life were solving the problem in the natural process of the world. He reminded himself now that such a simplicity was unlikely; explanations did not lucidly arise from mere accidents and present themselves as all but an ordered whole."
Read only the words in Bold-red. and that's the best example I can give of the process of 'abstraction' from embeddedness. This is an excellent description of synchronization as a life process. One's own meditations and actual events flow together and a new 'voice' speaks through this natural process.

Its an individualizing experience in every day life that has been named various names throughout history. C. G. Jung named it individuation, Emanuel Swedenborg had accurately identifed it as regeneration, a process that includes a life review.
An individuation process is not commonly recognized because its such a unique personalized life experience of one's own body and mind. You may be as surprised as I was to have to learn that the 'irrational' is what can't be scientifically validated because it's unique, ultra personal experiences that happen over a life span and science requires repeatability.
So the irrational is what ever isn't rational because science excludes personal analysis, the process requires repeatability. In fact the irrational is a wholeness of experience in that it includes the rational when the individuation process operates in a life or in lives. An individuation process is not commonly understood yet but I became aware of the process and the pattern without knowing about it myself!
How it creates a 'voice' and a conversation is the most personalizing life experience that can be experienced if it's recognized, because the form of its 'speech' is difficult to be discerned. Order emerges from chaos, literally over a span of time that may be decades in a life. It's speech is created artificially, the 'voice' aspect is created by a process of abstractions from every day life content. The bibliography at the end of a technical non-fictional book is in my opinion the result of that process of abstractions, its basically invisible to the author.
When quantum physics was 'discovered' that was a message that 'said': "The physical world is derived from another world" and: " there are no causes in the physical world, only effects." (Emanuel Swedenborg had already written that fact and other important details about the process of life, regeneration was his name for it, that he believed prepared a person for life after death.) One attribute of its speech is symbolic but literalness is also part of how the' voice' is created by a process literally of 'abstractions' , highlighted by the mind from every day life content, by a special function of mind that creates a 'second under lying context' automatically, with an extra 'sense'. The term 'second underlying context' was my own definition but a local Jungian psycyhiatrist told me it was an excellent term. Swedenborg's term, 'double thought' is appropriate too.

Only last year I saw an old movie (Blade Runner) and the process of 'abstraction' caused me to hear a remark made in it about 'tears lost in rain' with that 'extra meaningful sense' that I've noticed myself in my mind. It has helped me describe the undescribable invisibility of such events that occur, embedded in every day life until the 'extra sense' abstracts and highlights them. The 'jokes' that cause you to laugh most heartily are the simplest example I can give now. Television situation comedies in our time are popular from this mechanism's operations but that's just one of 'its' attributes.

There is a kind of rational logic inherent to the process, not Aristolean, or linear, because 'it' uses personal memories and experiences as the content of the process. But that's a fact that had to be recognized over a span of time when 'it' created in my life a consistent synchronization between inner content that was new to me, certain memories from my past and everything, every thing, outside my body.
The process itself was almost overwhelming for a few years until it was a new kind of 'normal', but not yet invisible. What's new eventually becomes normal but whatever is normal gets to be invisible eventually, its ever presence has made it invisible.

The process as I had to figure out myself, operates 'in' every day events. I believe it is a special sense that unites (synchronizes is the best word to use) the body and brain with what's outside the body, history and Time itself with the flow of what I believe is the 'ongoing endeavor of Time'. It may be a function of the unconsciousness itself to create the process of individuation, from the depths of mind but I'm not sure about that. But let me emphasize that I had to discover all, every 'bit of information' myself and notice how it was created from mechanisms of mind that alter 'thought' and the direction of attention. The most difficult to discover was that there is a kind of 'prompter within'. It created a new relationship with every day life events gradually.'

" The medium is the message." The extension in Time of an idea can be 'like' a signal, in my opinion.

The process of individuation is virtually unknown but I have experienced that the 'transcendental function' is in charge, it's building a future event: The Future. Sometimes long strings of events have to happen, widely spaced in time so that the personal 'meaning and context' can in some situations only be given decades later. I've had several events, separated by even decades happen, then a 'closing event ' completes the string and then an inner display retrieves them and assembles them in a flash of a second as 'insight'. Only then suddenly, it's obvious that part of me in the past somehow 'knew' the future.

I wouldn't abandon 'string theory' which F. David Peat wrote is an 'interactive force'. He did not write about or mention a process of individuation. I will have to describe in detail why I believe Sigmund Freud's 'discovery' of psychoanalysis was his experience of this individuation process and Carl G. Jung's much deeper experience was the result of recognizing the effects of the same pattern.

What ever "it" is that energizes my body in that 'kind' of event, which often happens as an ordinary situation, it's not always 'numinous' (feelable at the moment) or even unusual. It's 'feelable' when a creative 'function' of the unconscious mind that is not unconscious its self., 'highlights' the event or the memory of an event. I know it never sleeps, I've had more than acceptable evidence of that fact. That's where its possible to see evidence of foresight, when I see what happened when I was 'moved' by that function in certain specific events and finally realized I'd been alone when many of them happened.

The depths of mind is where an unsleeping part of me (and probably everyone else) is at work. Nothing materially changes but 'associations and understanding'. Its nearly impossible to detect that there's a vast space between upper regions of mind and the most remote regions of mind that produces content that is thankfully strangely visible. It uses symbols that the individual 'knows' or can recognize.

My main symbol is the moebius band in all it's forms. An impulse caused me to make my first one in 1941 when I was 9 years old. The same impulse caused me to discover its 'secret', it's hidden forms that day after I'd made the band with a 180 degree turn. "Cut around it lengthwise." was a thought and I cut it once lengthwise, surprised at the result. The thought words repeated : "Cut around it lengthwise." so I obeyed again. The result was two bands separated but joined in a knot that didn't look like it could be undone. The two bands were joined but separated. The impulse has caused me to look over my shoulder at just the right moment, in the right location and what it brings to my attention is ALWAYS a surprise, sometimes its a real shock, perfectly timed.

It's connected to a part of 'me' that knows where I am, what's in front of me, where I've been and 'it' knows my most private thought. That part evidently knows the future, it has foresight and 'it' or whatever it's connected to uses a different language than our words. But it's within me, looking through my eyes, and I'm not unusual.

The four world balloon was created from an impulse to do something irrational.

About the image of 4 balloons?

I had an impulse to create my own image to represent (re-present) of the four worlds that William Blake's Tree of Life allegory had brought to my mind. I described what I wanted to a young man in a craft store and he thought it was impossible to do what I had in mind. Yet he did it without too much trouble then he made one for himself.


Search This Blog

Friday, September 17, 2010

The 'organ' of self observation..updated

Aristotle voiced the cultural tendancy of his Time when he said: "The feminine principle is the mother of the body but the mother of the spirit is male." Aeschylus play Eumenides, line 659 through line 666 repeats the belief:

The mother to the child that men call hers,
Is no true Life Begetter but a nurse
Of Live Seed. Tis the sower of the Seed
Alone begetteth. woman comes at need,
A stranger, to hold safe in trust and love
That bud of new life--save when God above
Wills that it die...there have been fathers, where no mother is.

It's important not to let this idea slip through without thinking  about what it means: There have been fathers where no mother is. 

In The Republic Plato mentioned in a most offhand way that man possesses an organ more worthy of development than all the five senses. (I counted six: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, intuition which means inwardsly taught, that's a definition I'd learned in Latin, it's instinctive to me to believe the definition means exactly what it says).

The 'inwardsly taught' sense seems to me to be  'art' in all it's forms but that took a long time to become aware of;  I didn't understand what 'art' is until I was in my 70's. Overall it's a pattern-making function:  it creates symbols, defines them, recognizes them in different manifestations (generalizing) and creates seemingly new patterns appropriate to the Time in the individuation process and probably in the collective. The 'ancient' symbol is often hidden from the new ones but there is a connection as I found out myself when I recognized a form of the ancient uroborous (the snake devouring its own tail) in a logo Boeing used to promote 'continuous improvement' in the mid 1990's. The image was only a circle,shaded from a very dark color to lighter color but I recognized the ancient form, which I'd only noticed myself recently! It's supposed to be the symbol of 'wholeness' but that's a very strange definition in my thinking which was at that point  not attached to ancient meanings or their 'icons'.

Such a function of mind created several new patterns that I lived unknowingly myself. but  they were unconnected to the past, at least some of them, because technology not psychology or philosophy was involved.

They were my private frustrations for years until it was obvious many females were walking the same path in their homes. My significant other was constantly switching the channel during commercials; not asking for directions when it was obvious we were lost; had a toddler-like cunning at times; an aversion to rules imposed by authority; disliked very much unsolicited suggestions. And any situation that produced feelings of lack of authority was met with an immediate retreat from the situation.That became a pattern that pointed towards a lot of psychological insight on some level of mind as well as foresight into the actual situation!

My life 'change' began with reading symptoms of male menopause one day, and recognizing that pattern was operating in our life. Then I  tried to talk about it! I didn't know that 'menopause' was  a change to the male!  It  was a female experience until quite by chance, or the operations of destiny itself, I read about it in a book.  I recognized it explained the sudden conflict between us, at least some of it. It was information about my life at the moment, a kind of coincidence that I read the book, but it was useless information in the early 1980's .Even having seen the movie Ash Wednesday with  Elisabeth  Tayhor, which had depicted a woman's mid life crisis when her husband told her he wanted a divorce, so he could enjoy life after a struggle to establish himself. He wanted to start over while he still had a chance, he found a younger   woman.  She tried to entice him back by plastic surgery, I didn't recognized the male pattern in menopause until a few years later, when several well established marriages ended in divorce. However when it intiated a 'change of life' in my location on the planet, in 1981 and I heard basically the same words that I read in  a book.

That has changed in a quarter of a century, it's a collectively lived pattern now, isn't it?  We seem to all be  living through 'male menopause' patterns, vicariously sharing that pattern of change  and all it embodied to the females like me, especially me:  empty nest pattern; displaced housewife; but also just about every negative stereotype about the female that's been put into words by someone other than a female. The positive stereotypes happen to some females, but not all of us.

There are levels in life where negative is necessary, essential, that side of life has to be lived too. Cosmic level 'good' supercedes all other levels. What was negative for a long time, when everything that happened  seemed against what I wanted and hoped for  happened, I've learned to get meaning from life itself. That has caused me to feel I understand real reality much better. I understand how it can seem that 'life is but a dream'.

I don't dream but the faculty that creates dreams seems to be under the authority of that 'organ' that Plato mentioned.  It was a path to reality, but part of it was daily discovery of  new information as I went about my life. Embedded in every day life events, some 'other' life began to emerge, bit of informaton by bit of information.  Discovering that history is really his story and that there's an ongoing mystery in Time seems likely to be a basic pattern itself, one  that creates 'self observation', a re-view of that life that takes place as a mental, but observable process, the process of becoming twice born.

(The quotation from Aristotle is in Re-creating of the Individual by Beatrice M. Hinkle; 1923 Harcourt, Brace and Co, available now in paperback. Incredible book, it explains the psychological re-birth very well, in my opinion. But I just read it a few weeks ago so it was validation that such a pattern does exist and that it re-creates the individual, at least some of them. Individual science, a science of the individual on that path  doesn't exist yet. )

 Back to Plato, who knew about that path and gave a few clues that it exists in an allegory he wrote about people chained in a cave who didn't suspect they lived in a very small world.  Plato was either a secret keeper  who understood that the best way to keep an idea alive so that it manifests in some form continually  in Time is to make the idea dangerous. Make it  a secret not to be revealed on pain of great punishment  But alternatively perhaps he wrote about an 'organ more worthy of development than the five senses' automatically and had no conscious relationship to what he wrote. That idea would not occur to anyone that hasn't experienced the 'automatism' in one's own body and mind,  which I have witnessed in my self, much to my amazement.

 And he had no curiosity about what he wrote. That's also  happened to me so I know it can happen that a person experiences very little of what their own body does. That's the foundational idea for psychiatry itself, as I discovered, although I don't believe it should apply to individuals until a certain point in life 'opens the life' of that individual, then self observation is possible. It's like a detachment from one's own body, and I don't mean 'out of body' in the literal sense. It's a movement in inner space that puts distance between my body and an organ within that uses what's in front of me to create a 'story' with only one person in the audience, me, somewhat aware of being controlled and manipulated, but by what?

That includes writing something that hasn't been thought about, saying things that haven't been thought about, doing things that seem meaningless; spontaneous and at times compellingly necessary; impulse driven activities that have no established purpose or goal.  Discovering quite by impulse that such silliness has meaning and what I was 'acting out' was important,  that a kind of language has to be learned, as life does the interpreting, well consciousness of that kind of meaning happens or may not happen; noticing small details and differences from 'normal' is necessary.

The pattern may be where the idea of fate, destiny, fortune originated. It's the means to keep the 'thread of an idea moving forwards in biological time'. It's my opinion now that  it functions 'like' a signal, carrying a message and as McCluhan said in a different context than mine:  "The medium is the message." There's no way that  verbal language can describe what a leap it was for me to begin to  believe events had to be interpreted, and a bigger leap that the interpretation occurred automatically in mental space. Meaning came automatically, in bits and fragments that accumulated and then created a new understanding, parallel to 'normal', or what had been normal for me  Two streams of understanding..."Which is  real?" I wondered after about 5 years.

It functions 'like' a perpendicular, in my opinion and it creates it's own information, I'm the observer and my past is the basis from which it's formed.

What is embedded in every day life has to be abstracted out in some way. A few events were inserted early in life, memories  of those events re-occured  for no reason but they made me curious about why they re-occurred. They were stored in advance for later used. When there's no conscious memory of such  activities when they are initiated, when theres no eye or ear in the  body that remembers such content, (well, that's the basis of psychoanalysis) that points towards different levels in the mind.  But there are several mentions in the bible to the same kind of content. "ye have eyes but see not", "Let him that hath an ear"; 'ye understand not  the signs of your own time', etc.

The form of speaking in 'comparisons' and 'illustrations' was  old when Plato suggested an organ more worthy of development than the five senses.  To make the idea into a heresy, a topic forbidden to disagree with,  a secret to be kept on pain of great punishment is to guarantee it's survival through generations in Time, such that a conspiracy seems to keep it alive.

The body was certainly information encoded in some form even in the Greek era as it is today when  an amazing synchronization becomes obvious between inner content and events outside the body. Many individuals experience that synchronization but getting the message requires learning to be a kind of artist, as well as a critic of one's own body.  When other inner content that's not dreams but somehow visible content that has to be 'discovered'  and understood, although it  had  a kind of visibility when it occurs, but which was as distant from the 'now' when it occured as some galaxies are from Earth, it's like observing events with a new eye, hearing with a new ear.

 Such an organ is an idea that would seem to merit a chapter and a lot of detailed elaboration but as yet I I've not come across it except in  off hand remarks that infer or ought to infer much. A poem often says the same thing, coded:
                                                                            STAY
The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled
as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV,   chilling
in their calm and unequivicable malevolence.

In the garden the roses are opening
chanting in unison, My name is Mary and
you really don't want to come near me
not if I were the last little swastika nympho
on Earth., and WHAT was THAT supposed to mean!

Then there were the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exceptions
of two friends. He could tell they were friends'
by the marked improvement in their moods
when his was at its most truely desolate.
Franz Wright,

It works somewhat like the author writes, the effect of one persons' unconsciousness on that of another can create some uncomfortable situations. Theodore Reik's written Listening With The Third Ear and other important books about how in his life his mind seemed to create situations that led him to insight in his patients problems. Not everyone tries or expects to have to learn for themselves, how their own mind  operates.

I read Plato's remark only a few years ago at a point when I had felt the mechanisms of that organ and they were already familiar to me to some degree. There are points of change, radical change in one's thought and the direction of attention.   I'd recognized them as mechanisms but the effect created a more personalized interface with every thing and everything than some interactions I've had with real people.

It took about 20 years  (1980-2000)  to be certain  there are mechanisms of mind that operate without my intentions or will and that my own mind has always had busyness of it's own and it's operated independently through out my life on a project I had to discover. Other people seemed to know it before I did, that's where the idea of 'participatory consciousness' between humans at the unconscious level began to dawn on me, when it seemed other people could read my mind.  And gradually we can each recognize that the project is an ongoing endeavor in Time itself, a hint about which  is in the bible where four dimensions are mentioned: height, width, breadth, depth. (Reading that was a puzzler to me, 4 dimensions?)

((Flatland by Abbot; Sphereland by Burgher; The Persian King by Charles Hinton help to convey the new way to think about perpendiculars, in my opinion anyway. Brief synopsis: The King had to learn how to motivate inert creatures that felt equal pleasure and pain, so that they would 'do' something. He figured out that by absorbing a degree of their pain  the creatures felt more pleasure than pain, for a time so they lived and became active. But he had to keep them 'alive' by absorbing more and more of their pain,  then when he could bear no more pain he left them inert and went with an Other that mysteriously appeared, on his way." Beautiful story. ))

The occasions when my mind operated with it's own project in mind were events that were embedded in every day life, some when I was less than 9 years old. I suspect such events happen for a reason, Jung experienced them, many authors of great books begin with an incident that happened when they were very young. Mine were very specific and they  caught (or were brought to) my attention in the most subtle ways,  creating a new  way to relate to every aspect in my life while I struggled with certain life problems and felt literally isolated from everyone in that isolation. In that kind of isolation it's not impossible to notice there is an attempt to help, and it's all 'within'.

A hidden world emerged, but it was certainly one that caused Plato to write the Allegory of the Cave and inspired the Matrix series as well as much of our modern fantastic movies.   Plato could have been more direct than using allegory perhaps except that secret keeping was essentially a device he knew would create a determination to find out what the secret is, in future generations.  It (that there is a secret, really) was eventually obvious when the intensity I felt seemed to be shared by others working on the same 'project' that when I  (and two small groups of other individuals in my location on this planet shared it for several years (1975-1993).

We were leaving the mainstream level literrally, learning advanced and challenge level square dancing. The mainstream dancers were not violent but we felt their outrage because gender differences were erased at that level. That made a 'fun dance' much more difficult to do, as we found out, not everyone likes to work at having fun. It's basic form is the same as the I Ching, chess, ideas of quantum physic, and certain psychological concepts, it's physically re-presentable in the moebius band, where the interaction of opposites and the interactions of similars as well as the interactions of complementary other(s) live and teach each other.

 Petr D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organun, page 150-151 describes love:
"Perhaps love is a world of strange spirits who at times take up their abode in men, subduing them to themselves, making them tools for the accomplishment of their inscrutable purposes. Perhaps it is some particular region of the inner world wherein the souls of men sometimes enter, and where they live acceding to the laws of that world while their bodies remain on earth, bound by the laws of earth.  It is an alchemical work of some Great Master, wherein the souls and bodies of men play the role of elements out of which is compounded a philosophers' stone, an elixir of life..." 

 "The philosopher is usually interested in a central idea that evolves over a long period of time, which may never be successfully completed and formulated into words , one that may appear to be mysterious and beyond scientific validation." Jean Piaget.  I understand what that feels like.

I repeat this as I do other ideas that seem to need to be emphasized: From Oedipus authored by Patrick Mullahy Footnote, page 507

"Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"

It's my opinion that the 'something which should be differentiated' is an effect of the 'organ of self observation', as Swedenborg wrote in his life about a process of regeneration that occurred to him, as preparation for life after death.  I don't know about that but it, (individuation/regeneration) happens in this real world, and it's not easy to get validation through science, yet. That kind of specificity in content cannot be verified easily.  I've had a very rational experience, not many  hallucinations were inserted, and they were always brought to my attention, eventually. That kind of inner prompting made me curious, eventually. I  have never had out of body experiences such as he and Robert Monroe live, that was their life experience. But their stories made the mind and it's abilities to create it's own content and insert it into actual reality,  some thing to think about. That kind of 'insertion' has happened a few times, and I've not noticed them until much later, an inner prompting brings an event to mind, and some aspect that I didn't notice is brought to my attention. 

"What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future." Norman O. Brown.

No comments: