Linear - Circular
Limitless - Limited
Infinite - Finite
Perfection - Completion
Heaven - Earth
Unknown - Known
Avant - Retro
Future - Past
Perfection - Completion
Heaven - Earth
Unknown - Known
Avant - Retro
Future - Past
Innovate - Endure
Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Line + Circle = Spiral
Cultural historian [Jean] Gebser […] theorised that five structures of consciousness developed throughout human history, calling them archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral (emerging). Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber also claimed that time consciousness changed with the evolving consciousness of humans throughout history.
The shift from magic to mythical consciousness paralleled the shift from nomadic life to settled agricultural villages and the world’s first cities […]
Gebser calls the time consciousness of this mythical period ‘rhythmic/cyclical.’ [Eleanora] Masini agrees, referring to the cyclical time perspectives found in the mythological narratives of Buddhist and Hindu cultures.
Gebser and others place the origins of mental-rational consciousness in the ancient Greek period of the great philosophers [and] refer to the beginnings of the concept of linear time in this period, and by association, the beginnings of the default idea of the future that we have today.
Masini’s linear time concept also originated in the Graeco-Roman era and is symbolised by an arrow.
It later came to represent progress in the modern period of scientific and technological development. She also points to the erosion of the idea that linear time is always associated with progress, in the wake of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report in the 1970s.
The fifth type of consciousness, which Gebser called integral, began to appear with the Renaissance and is gradually strengthening in individuals and culture through advances in sciences, philosophy, human rights. It parallels the development of higher models of reasoning, identified by developmental psychologists. Gebser’s integral consciousness, being the most highly evolved, is associated with the most highly evolved time consciousness. Gebser calls this ‘time freedom’ or ‘concretion of time’ in which we are capable of experiencing all the different cultural time senses, rather than being restricted to only one.
Masini’s most evolved time consciousness is symbolised by the spiral, which is an integration of the circle and the arrow, and draws on the work of systems scientist and consciousness researcher Ervin László.
[Jennifer Gidley]
The Future: A Very Short Introduction, p. 21-2
Although the conception of time and the future exist universally, they are understood in different ways in different societies. Eleonora Masini (1996, p. 76) argues that there are three main representations of time. The first representation is:
"A variation of cyclical motion, as in the enclosed circle of life and death in living organisms, or of night and day in cosmic time. This representation is well reflected in the Hindu and Buddhist 'cosmic eras' (kalpa) which are delimited by mythological events in time periods through which all beings continue ad infinitum. The cycle is represented by a snake.
In this conception we see the future as part of an unending continuum. The future is part of life and death. Naturally this influences one's perspective of the future: there is little reason to despair or to strive to achieve."
The second representation is based on the Graeco – Roman and the Judaeo – Christian conception of time:
"Founded on the idea that all people are the same in relation to God. Time is perceived to be a trajectory towards something more, towards accomplishment. In this representation time is symbolized by an arrow; the future is better than the present and the past and may be in contradiction to the historical present, as in utopia. The possibility of the future being worse than the past or present is out of the question.
This is the conceptual base of progress . . . the time of scientific and technological development, where every success has to be bigger and better than anything in the past or present . . . (but) this concept of time and the future is being challenged by environmental barriers and barriers emerging from its own frame of reference."
The third representation has been developed by ―Vico and others and was more recently extended by Ervin Laszlo. According to this representation:
"Time is a spiral, an evolutionary process of world civilization giving a structure to spatial and temporal events ranging from the natural to the social, that develops over time."
These three basic metaphors for time — circle, arrow and spiral — influence the type of futures thinking and the very understanding of the future across cultures.
[Ivana Milojević]
'A selective history of futures thinking'
Remember, everything in this universe is elliptical or circular in motion; that applies both to the abstract and the concrete, the mental, physical and spiritual.
[W.D. Gann]
The Tunnel Thru The Air, p. 76
The law of octaves explains why there are no straight lines in nature.
At the moment of the retardation of vibration a deviation from the original direction takes place.
Let us assume that a movement begins at "do". It will continue in a straight line through "mi". But a deviation occurs between "mi" and "fa" which causes a change from the original direction. From "fa" through "si", the movement continues in the new direction. Between "si" and "do" the second interval occurs which causes a new change in direction.
The next octave gives an even more marked deviation so that the line of octaves may eventually complete a circle.
[P.D. Ouspensky]
In Search of the Miraculous, p. 127
[...] we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the further it takes us from our roots.
[...] it is the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present [...]
[...] reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before [...]
[...] all haste is of the devil [...]
[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.263, 264
There are many planes of Being — many sub-planes of Life — many degrees of existence in the Universe. And all depend upon the advancement of beings in the scale, of which scale the lowest point is the grossest matter, the highest being separated only by the thinnest division from the spirit of the All.
And, upward and onward along this Scale of Life, everything is moving. All are on the Path, whose end is The All.
All progress is a Returning Home.
All is Upward and Onward, in spite of all seemingly contradictory appearances.
[...] This Involuntary stage of Creation is sometimes called the "Outpouring" of the Divine Energy, just as the Evolutionary state is called the "Indrawing." The extreme pole of the Creative process is considered to be the furthest removed from the All, while the beginning of the Evolutionary stage is regarded as the beginning of the return swing of the pendulum of Rhythm — a "coming home" idea being held in all of the Hermetic Teachings.
[...] The Hermetic Teachings regarding the process of Evolution are that, the All, having meditated upon the beginning of the Creation — having thus established the material foundations of the Universe — having thought it into existence — then gradually awakens or rouses from its Meditation and in so doing starts into manifestation the process of Evolution, on the material, mental and spiritual planes, successively and in order.
Thus the upward movement begins — and all begins to move Spiritward. Matter becomes less gross; the Units spring into being; the combinations begin to form; Life appears and manifests in higher and higher forms; and Mind becomes more and more in evidence — the vibrations constantly becoming higher. In short, the entire process of Evolution, in all of its phases, begins, and proceeds according to the established Laws of the "Indrawing" process.
The Kybalion, Chapter VII: ""The All" in All"
Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed.
"If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness.
Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said:
"There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend.
Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The diety is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
[Herman Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game
It's true that biology and theoretical physics have brought us some fascinating knowledge about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But does knowing such things help us elucidate the basic mechanisms of happiness and suffering?
It's important not to lose sight of the goals that we set ourselves. To know the exact shape and dimensions of the Earth is undeniably progress. But whether it's round or flat doesn't make a great deal of difference to the meaning of existence. Whatever progress is made in medicine, we can only temporarily treat sufferings that never stop coming back, and culminate in death.
We can end a conflict, or a war, but there will always be more, unless people's minds change.
[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.17
Modern man likes the word progress. I think contemporary people are still dragging that idea around. It is easy to accept that logic which proposes a diagram of "progress," progress with stages rising in a line.
On this point, Jungian ideas are pretty flexible, while Buddhism is utterly open. There is no first and last, no beginning or end. Buddhism shows us the world of everything as it is, as a whole.
No real change is going on.
[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.61
The oft-repeated doctrine of a progressive development of mankind to an ever higher perfection, or generally of any kind of becoming by means of the world-process, is opposed to the a priori view that, up to any given point of time, an infinite time has already elapsed, and consequently that all that is supposed to come with time is bound to have existed already.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.172-7, 184
Debt is only required of systems built around the demand for growth, and that is where our current capitalist system has failed. Constant growth without end, and without any thought to the preservation of resources, is simply and wholly unsustainable.
Our current economy is built around the stock markets, and those markets demand never-ending growth at all costs. If your company cannot promise growth from one quarter to the next, and the next, and the next, then you go bankrupt when all of your investors flee to someone that can give them what they want - free money with no expenditure of work and no productivity. The only thing that keeps a system like ours running is more and more debt, and a system like that will always eventually fail.
What we are seeing now is the last gasps of an empire desperately trying to keep the illusion of prosperity going. Going into debt is not prosperity because it is a form of slavery.
["motleyhoo"]
David Icke Forum
The ordinary Balinese term for the period before the coming of the white man is "when the world was steady" (doegas goemine enteg)
[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Bali: The Value System of a Steady State'), p.121
[...] I came to live here where I am now between Wounded Knee Creek and Grass Creek. Others came too, and we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that this is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.
[...] The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.194-6
He who covets a mythical abstraction must always be insatiable!
[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p.239
I must say that progress is the invention of someone who suffered immaturity and who craved to be initiated. This could be the reason that nothing is definite, final, and everything is fast moving.
[Malidoma Patrice Somé]
Ritual, p. 65-6
Having achieved a certain plateau of living, the Amish do not want to be forced to live on a higher standard than what they feel comfortable with.
In a recent election year when presidential candidates were promising a higher standard of living, an Amish patriarch remarked:
"Striving for such a high standard of living is nothing more than the worship of the golden calf."
[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 131
In his introduction to the 1979 edition of his novel Pig Earth – the first in a trilogy chronicling the decline of peasant life in Europe in the 20th century – John Berger makes a distinction between what he calls a ‘culture of progress’ and a ‘culture of survival.’
The culture of survival [...] is the culture of the peasantry, of indigenous people; of pre-modernity. It is the culture of the great majority of human history, and of many people still, and it is exemplified for Berger by the French peasantry he still lives among. A culture of survival does not have an end goal; it just is. Its purpose is to live from day to day and year to year. It is a repeating pattern.
The end goal of the culture of progress, meanwhile, is at its grandest the abolition of death itself.
For this goal, the destruction of traditional ways of being and seeing, and much of the world’s wild beauty, is a sacrifice worth making.
[Paul Kingsnorth]
'Brexit and the Culture of Progress'
From the days of the early Greeks we have been seeking the certainty that lies in what could be called closure.
Closure implies that final world that brings discussion to its conclusion; it is a wrapping up, a resolution of the great questions of the universe, an ending of time. But this is also the sort of ending beloved of Victorian novelists in which all conflicts are finally resolved, warring parties united, loving couples married and the wrong-doers punished. Although life may go on after the novel's ending it is a life without conflict or tension.
While post-modern stories can no longer afford this luxury some scientists still believe that the story told by science can reach an ultimate conclusion through its laws, a conclusion in which time is finally blotted out.
Truth, however, may be of a very different order from timeless stasis for it may require a search for what is straight rather than what is static.
[F. David Peat]
'I've Got a Map in My Head'
[Quinlan] Terry's universe is one in which, at a certain point (in some long-gone Golden Age) "they got it right" and we can only keep repeating that cosmic "rightness" forever.
Unfortunately, many rock musicians are stuck in the same belief -- nothing can ever top "Pet Sounds" or whatever. It's a tragic belief for the medium involved, because it deprives practitioners, instantly, of any motivation to be inventive or innovative.
[Momus]
Terry's classicism is more than just modernism in reverse. It's a completely alternate point of view, and one just as defensible as modernism, I think.
Classicists feel a responsibility to the Past, while modernists feel a responsibility to the Future, both forgetting that neither the past nor the future really exists, only the present.
[Anonymous]
'The paradoxes of Quinlan Terry'
No straight lines are to be found in the natural world.
Everything that really exists follows a series of curved shapes to which the logical products of the human mind can only ever approach tangentially – flow, once again, reduced to a series of points. Leonard Shlain has pointed out that the only apparently straight line in the natural world is that of the horizon; but of course that too turns out to be a section of a curve. Even space, it turns out, is curved.
Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field.
Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.
By contrast the shape that is suggested by the processing of the right hemisphere is that of the circle, and its movement is characteristically ‘in the round’, the phrase we use to describe something that is seen as a whole, and in depth.
Circular motion accommodates, as rectilinearity does not, the coming together of opposites.
Cognition in the right hemisphere is not a process of something coming into being through adding piece to piece in a sequence, but of something that is out of focus coming into focus, as a whole. Everything is understood within its penumbra of significances, in its context – all that encircles it.
There are strong affinities between the idea of wholeness and roundedness. The movement of the right hemisphere is not the unidirectional, instrumental gesture of grasp, but the musical, whole-bodied, socially generative, movement of dance, which is never in a straight line towards something, but always ultimately returns to its origins.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 447
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form.
Everyone (including even those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the evolution-idea — and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that – whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint.
There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle's timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture […]
To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant "Progress."
The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season.
To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 315
Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :
Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world.
‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.
[Paul Kingsnorth]
'What Progress Wants'
That nothing is certain except the imminent obsolescence of all our certainties - our scientific theories, our technology, our artistic styles and schools, our philosophies, our political ideals, our fashions - naturally gives rise to the sense of impermanence that has been celebrated or deplored as the very essence of the modern outlook, the sense that all that is solid melts into air," in the often quoted remark by Marx and Engels.
What is less often remarked is that impermanence appears to assure a certain continuity in its own right when conceived as an extension of the self-correcting procedures of scientific discovery, which allow the scientific enterprise as a whole to flourish in spite of the constant revision of particular findings.
A social order founded on science, with its unnerving but exhilarating expansion of our intellectual horizons, seems to have achieved a kind of immortality undreamed of by earlier civilizations.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.48
Masters of the Universe
The Earth's the Limit
Information and Knowledge
The Tyranny of Novelty
Familiar Territory
The Preoccupied Mind
The Colour Spiral
Maintaining the Balance
The Sacred Circle
Live Forever?
Concentrate
The Middle Path
Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Line + Circle = Spiral
Cultural historian [Jean] Gebser […] theorised that five structures of consciousness developed throughout human history, calling them archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral (emerging). Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber also claimed that time consciousness changed with the evolving consciousness of humans throughout history.
The shift from magic to mythical consciousness paralleled the shift from nomadic life to settled agricultural villages and the world’s first cities […]
Gebser calls the time consciousness of this mythical period ‘rhythmic/cyclical.’ [Eleanora] Masini agrees, referring to the cyclical time perspectives found in the mythological narratives of Buddhist and Hindu cultures.
Gebser and others place the origins of mental-rational consciousness in the ancient Greek period of the great philosophers [and] refer to the beginnings of the concept of linear time in this period, and by association, the beginnings of the default idea of the future that we have today.
Masini’s linear time concept also originated in the Graeco-Roman era and is symbolised by an arrow.
It later came to represent progress in the modern period of scientific and technological development. She also points to the erosion of the idea that linear time is always associated with progress, in the wake of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report in the 1970s.
The fifth type of consciousness, which Gebser called integral, began to appear with the Renaissance and is gradually strengthening in individuals and culture through advances in sciences, philosophy, human rights. It parallels the development of higher models of reasoning, identified by developmental psychologists. Gebser’s integral consciousness, being the most highly evolved, is associated with the most highly evolved time consciousness. Gebser calls this ‘time freedom’ or ‘concretion of time’ in which we are capable of experiencing all the different cultural time senses, rather than being restricted to only one.
Masini’s most evolved time consciousness is symbolised by the spiral, which is an integration of the circle and the arrow, and draws on the work of systems scientist and consciousness researcher Ervin László.
[Jennifer Gidley]
The Future: A Very Short Introduction, p. 21-2
Although the conception of time and the future exist universally, they are understood in different ways in different societies. Eleonora Masini (1996, p. 76) argues that there are three main representations of time. The first representation is:
"A variation of cyclical motion, as in the enclosed circle of life and death in living organisms, or of night and day in cosmic time. This representation is well reflected in the Hindu and Buddhist 'cosmic eras' (kalpa) which are delimited by mythological events in time periods through which all beings continue ad infinitum. The cycle is represented by a snake.
In this conception we see the future as part of an unending continuum. The future is part of life and death. Naturally this influences one's perspective of the future: there is little reason to despair or to strive to achieve."
The second representation is based on the Graeco – Roman and the Judaeo – Christian conception of time:
"Founded on the idea that all people are the same in relation to God. Time is perceived to be a trajectory towards something more, towards accomplishment. In this representation time is symbolized by an arrow; the future is better than the present and the past and may be in contradiction to the historical present, as in utopia. The possibility of the future being worse than the past or present is out of the question.
This is the conceptual base of progress . . . the time of scientific and technological development, where every success has to be bigger and better than anything in the past or present . . . (but) this concept of time and the future is being challenged by environmental barriers and barriers emerging from its own frame of reference."
The third representation has been developed by ―Vico and others and was more recently extended by Ervin Laszlo. According to this representation:
"Time is a spiral, an evolutionary process of world civilization giving a structure to spatial and temporal events ranging from the natural to the social, that develops over time."
These three basic metaphors for time — circle, arrow and spiral — influence the type of futures thinking and the very understanding of the future across cultures.
[Ivana Milojević]
'A selective history of futures thinking'
Remember, everything in this universe is elliptical or circular in motion; that applies both to the abstract and the concrete, the mental, physical and spiritual.
[W.D. Gann]
The Tunnel Thru The Air, p. 76
The law of octaves explains why there are no straight lines in nature.
At the moment of the retardation of vibration a deviation from the original direction takes place.
Let us assume that a movement begins at "do". It will continue in a straight line through "mi". But a deviation occurs between "mi" and "fa" which causes a change from the original direction. From "fa" through "si", the movement continues in the new direction. Between "si" and "do" the second interval occurs which causes a new change in direction.
The next octave gives an even more marked deviation so that the line of octaves may eventually complete a circle.
[P.D. Ouspensky]
In Search of the Miraculous, p. 127
[...] we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the further it takes us from our roots.[...] it is the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present [...]
[...] reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before [...]
[...] all haste is of the devil [...]
[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.263, 264
There are many planes of Being — many sub-planes of Life — many degrees of existence in the Universe. And all depend upon the advancement of beings in the scale, of which scale the lowest point is the grossest matter, the highest being separated only by the thinnest division from the spirit of the All.
And, upward and onward along this Scale of Life, everything is moving. All are on the Path, whose end is The All.
All progress is a Returning Home.
All is Upward and Onward, in spite of all seemingly contradictory appearances.
[...] This Involuntary stage of Creation is sometimes called the "Outpouring" of the Divine Energy, just as the Evolutionary state is called the "Indrawing." The extreme pole of the Creative process is considered to be the furthest removed from the All, while the beginning of the Evolutionary stage is regarded as the beginning of the return swing of the pendulum of Rhythm — a "coming home" idea being held in all of the Hermetic Teachings.
[...] The Hermetic Teachings regarding the process of Evolution are that, the All, having meditated upon the beginning of the Creation — having thus established the material foundations of the Universe — having thought it into existence — then gradually awakens or rouses from its Meditation and in so doing starts into manifestation the process of Evolution, on the material, mental and spiritual planes, successively and in order.
Thus the upward movement begins — and all begins to move Spiritward. Matter becomes less gross; the Units spring into being; the combinations begin to form; Life appears and manifests in higher and higher forms; and Mind becomes more and more in evidence — the vibrations constantly becoming higher. In short, the entire process of Evolution, in all of its phases, begins, and proceeds according to the established Laws of the "Indrawing" process.
The Kybalion, Chapter VII: ""The All" in All"
Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed.
"If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness.
Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said:
"There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend.
Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The diety is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.
[Herman Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game
It's true that biology and theoretical physics have brought us some fascinating knowledge about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But does knowing such things help us elucidate the basic mechanisms of happiness and suffering?
It's important not to lose sight of the goals that we set ourselves. To know the exact shape and dimensions of the Earth is undeniably progress. But whether it's round or flat doesn't make a great deal of difference to the meaning of existence. Whatever progress is made in medicine, we can only temporarily treat sufferings that never stop coming back, and culminate in death.
We can end a conflict, or a war, but there will always be more, unless people's minds change.
[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.17
Modern man likes the word progress. I think contemporary people are still dragging that idea around. It is easy to accept that logic which proposes a diagram of "progress," progress with stages rising in a line.
On this point, Jungian ideas are pretty flexible, while Buddhism is utterly open. There is no first and last, no beginning or end. Buddhism shows us the world of everything as it is, as a whole.
No real change is going on.
[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.61
The oft-repeated doctrine of a progressive development of mankind to an ever higher perfection, or generally of any kind of becoming by means of the world-process, is opposed to the a priori view that, up to any given point of time, an infinite time has already elapsed, and consequently that all that is supposed to come with time is bound to have existed already.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.172-7, 184
Debt is only required of systems built around the demand for growth, and that is where our current capitalist system has failed. Constant growth without end, and without any thought to the preservation of resources, is simply and wholly unsustainable.
Our current economy is built around the stock markets, and those markets demand never-ending growth at all costs. If your company cannot promise growth from one quarter to the next, and the next, and the next, then you go bankrupt when all of your investors flee to someone that can give them what they want - free money with no expenditure of work and no productivity. The only thing that keeps a system like ours running is more and more debt, and a system like that will always eventually fail.
What we are seeing now is the last gasps of an empire desperately trying to keep the illusion of prosperity going. Going into debt is not prosperity because it is a form of slavery.
["motleyhoo"]
David Icke Forum
The ordinary Balinese term for the period before the coming of the white man is "when the world was steady" (doegas goemine enteg)
[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Bali: The Value System of a Steady State'), p.121
[...] I came to live here where I am now between Wounded Knee Creek and Grass Creek. Others came too, and we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that this is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.
[...] The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.194-6
He who covets a mythical abstraction must always be insatiable!
[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p.239
I must say that progress is the invention of someone who suffered immaturity and who craved to be initiated. This could be the reason that nothing is definite, final, and everything is fast moving.
[Malidoma Patrice Somé]
Ritual, p. 65-6
Having achieved a certain plateau of living, the Amish do not want to be forced to live on a higher standard than what they feel comfortable with.
In a recent election year when presidential candidates were promising a higher standard of living, an Amish patriarch remarked:
"Striving for such a high standard of living is nothing more than the worship of the golden calf."
[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 131
In his introduction to the 1979 edition of his novel Pig Earth – the first in a trilogy chronicling the decline of peasant life in Europe in the 20th century – John Berger makes a distinction between what he calls a ‘culture of progress’ and a ‘culture of survival.’
The culture of survival [...] is the culture of the peasantry, of indigenous people; of pre-modernity. It is the culture of the great majority of human history, and of many people still, and it is exemplified for Berger by the French peasantry he still lives among. A culture of survival does not have an end goal; it just is. Its purpose is to live from day to day and year to year. It is a repeating pattern.
The end goal of the culture of progress, meanwhile, is at its grandest the abolition of death itself.
For this goal, the destruction of traditional ways of being and seeing, and much of the world’s wild beauty, is a sacrifice worth making.
[Paul Kingsnorth]
'Brexit and the Culture of Progress'
From the days of the early Greeks we have been seeking the certainty that lies in what could be called closure.
Closure implies that final world that brings discussion to its conclusion; it is a wrapping up, a resolution of the great questions of the universe, an ending of time. But this is also the sort of ending beloved of Victorian novelists in which all conflicts are finally resolved, warring parties united, loving couples married and the wrong-doers punished. Although life may go on after the novel's ending it is a life without conflict or tension.
While post-modern stories can no longer afford this luxury some scientists still believe that the story told by science can reach an ultimate conclusion through its laws, a conclusion in which time is finally blotted out.
Truth, however, may be of a very different order from timeless stasis for it may require a search for what is straight rather than what is static.
[F. David Peat]
'I've Got a Map in My Head'
[Quinlan] Terry's universe is one in which, at a certain point (in some long-gone Golden Age) "they got it right" and we can only keep repeating that cosmic "rightness" forever.
Unfortunately, many rock musicians are stuck in the same belief -- nothing can ever top "Pet Sounds" or whatever. It's a tragic belief for the medium involved, because it deprives practitioners, instantly, of any motivation to be inventive or innovative.
[Momus]
Terry's classicism is more than just modernism in reverse. It's a completely alternate point of view, and one just as defensible as modernism, I think.
Classicists feel a responsibility to the Past, while modernists feel a responsibility to the Future, both forgetting that neither the past nor the future really exists, only the present.
[Anonymous]
'The paradoxes of Quinlan Terry'
No straight lines are to be found in the natural world.
Everything that really exists follows a series of curved shapes to which the logical products of the human mind can only ever approach tangentially – flow, once again, reduced to a series of points. Leonard Shlain has pointed out that the only apparently straight line in the natural world is that of the horizon; but of course that too turns out to be a section of a curve. Even space, it turns out, is curved.
Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field.
Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.
By contrast the shape that is suggested by the processing of the right hemisphere is that of the circle, and its movement is characteristically ‘in the round’, the phrase we use to describe something that is seen as a whole, and in depth.
Circular motion accommodates, as rectilinearity does not, the coming together of opposites.
Cognition in the right hemisphere is not a process of something coming into being through adding piece to piece in a sequence, but of something that is out of focus coming into focus, as a whole. Everything is understood within its penumbra of significances, in its context – all that encircles it.
There are strong affinities between the idea of wholeness and roundedness. The movement of the right hemisphere is not the unidirectional, instrumental gesture of grasp, but the musical, whole-bodied, socially generative, movement of dance, which is never in a straight line towards something, but always ultimately returns to its origins.
[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and his Emissary, p. 447
[…] perhaps the most pervasive and specifically Judaeo-Christian component tacitly retained in the modern world view was the belief in man's linear historical progress toward ultimate fulfillment.
Modern man's self-understanding was emphatically teleological, with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a darker past characterized by ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression, and toward a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom.
The faith in that movement was based largely on an underlying trust in the salvational effect of expanding human knowledge: Humanity's future fulfillment would be achieved in a world reconstructed by science.
[Richard Tarnas]
The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 321
What were the principal accomplishments of the Enlightenment? And what are its failings?
Its principal accomplishment has been the growth of scientific knowledge with the consequent development of modern technology. Its error was the elevation of reason, as embodied in science, technology and production, into an end in itself.
It converted tools that were meant to serve the fundamental needs of society into demi-gods to be worshipped for their own sake. It produced extraordinary material innovation and economic growth. But it destroyed the diversity of cultures in which human beings have traditionally lived and in which their lives have found meaning.
Progress and growth became surrogates for stability and contentment, which were considered to be encumbrances inhibiting the free development of human creativity.
Do you reject the achievements of the Enlightenment?
I reject its priorities. Not all its products.
[James Goldsmith]
The Trap, p. 182-3
It is the powerful who understand how to honour, that is their art, their realm of invention.
Deep reverence for age and the traditional - all law rests on this twofold reverence - belief in and prejudice in favour of ancestors and against descendants, is typical of the morality of the powerful; and when, conversely, men of 'modern ideas' believe almost instinctively in 'progress' and 'the future’ and show an increasing lack of respect for age, this reveals clearly enough the ignoble origin of these 'ideas'.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
Beyond Good and Evil, 260
At the moment exactly corresponding to that at which (c. 540) the Classical Soul in the person of Pythagoras discovered its own proper Apollinian number, the measurable magnitude, the Western soul in the persons of Descartes and his generation (Pascal, Fermat, Desargues) discovered a notion of number that was the child of a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite.
Number as pure magnitude inherent in the material presentness of things is paralleled by numbers as pure relation, and if we may characterize the Classical "world," the cosmos, as being based on a deep need of visible limits and composed accordingly as a sum of material things, so we may say that our world-picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable.
The Classical mathematician knows only what he sees and grasps. Where definite and defining visibility - the domain of his thought - ceases, his science comes to an end. The Western mathematician, as soon as he has quite shaken off the trammels of Classical prejudice, goes off into a wholly abstract region of infinitely numerous "manifolds" of n (no longer 3) dimensions, in which his so-called geometry always can and generally must do without every commonplace aid.
The symbol of the West is an idea of which no other Culture gives even a hint, the idea of Function. The function is anything rather than an expansion of, it is complete emancipation from, any pre-existent idea of number.
With the function, not only the Euclidean geometry (and with it the common human geometry of children and laymen, based on everyday experience) but also the Archimedean arithmetic, ceased to have any value for the really significant mathematic of Western Europe.
In the Classical world the starting-point of every formative act was the ordering of the become, in so far as this was present, visible, measurable and numerable. The Western, Gothic, form-feeling on the contrary is that of an unrestrained, strong-willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space.
When Classical man turns to artistic expressions of his form-feeling, he tries with marble and bronze to give the dancing or the wrestling human form that pose and attitude in which surfaces and contours have all attainable proportion and meaning.
But the true artist of the West shuts his eyes and loses himself in the realm of bodiless music, in which harmony and polyphony bring him to images of utter “beyondness" that transcend all possibilities of visual definition.
Our universe of infinite space, whose existence, for us, goes without saying, simply does not exist for Classical man. It is not even capable of being presented to him. On the other hand, the Hellenic cosmos, which is (as we might have discovered long ago) entirely foreign to our way of thinking, was for the Hellene something self-evident.
The fact is that the infinite space of our physics is a form of very numerous and extremely complicated elements tacitly assumed, which have come into being only as the the copy and expression of our soul, and are actual, necessary and natural only for our type of waking life.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 75, 81-2
It is not true that technics saves labour.
For it is an essential characteristic of the personal and modifiable technics of Man, in contrast to the genus technics of animals, that every discovery contains the possibility and necessity of new discoveries, every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand more, every triumph over Nature incites to yet others.
The soul of this beast of prey is ever hungry, his will never satisfied - that is the curse that lies upon this kind of life, but also the greatness inherent in its destiny.
It is precisely its best specimens that know the least quiet, happiness, or enjoyment.
[Oswald Spengler]
Man and Technics, p. 58
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form.
Everyone (including even those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the evolution-idea — and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that – whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint.
There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle's timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture […]
To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant "Progress."
Darwin's struggle for existence, which he read into Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare's tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 370
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 370
The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid only for a season.
To the Classical spirit mankind appears as a stationary mass, and correspondingly there is that quite dissimilar morale that we can trace from the Homeric dawn to the time of the Roman Empire.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 315
Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :
Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world.
‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.
[Paul Kingsnorth]
'What Progress Wants'
That nothing is certain except the imminent obsolescence of all our certainties - our scientific theories, our technology, our artistic styles and schools, our philosophies, our political ideals, our fashions - naturally gives rise to the sense of impermanence that has been celebrated or deplored as the very essence of the modern outlook, the sense that all that is solid melts into air," in the often quoted remark by Marx and Engels.
What is less often remarked is that impermanence appears to assure a certain continuity in its own right when conceived as an extension of the self-correcting procedures of scientific discovery, which allow the scientific enterprise as a whole to flourish in spite of the constant revision of particular findings.
A social order founded on science, with its unnerving but exhilarating expansion of our intellectual horizons, seems to have achieved a kind of immortality undreamed of by earlier civilizations.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.48
--
Science, endlessly self-correcting, allows us to defeat the future. By constantly changing and adapting, our social order prolongs itself indefinitely.
It is difficult to imagine an Indigenous scientist having written Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Its hypotheses about the survival of the fittest and progress through competition are essentially the values of Victorian politics, society, economics, industrial progress, checks, and balances projected onto the natural world.
By contrast, an Indigenous scientist would view nature as cooperative and operating through relationship and alliance.
In a universe in which time turns in a circle, and in which the ceremonies of renewal are the continued obligations of The People, the emphasis is always upon balance and harmony as opposed to progress, advancement, and accumulation. Within such a world the whole idea of sickness and health must have a profoundly different meaning.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.118
The word teleonomy replaced teleology for some people. The evolutionary theorist, Ernst Mayr, he suggested that term. But I don’t use the term myself because I think that teleonomy doesn’t allow for the notion that there is inevitable progress towards higher intelligence through the mechanisms I describe.
For me, teleology means two things: One is purposeful movement or goal oriented behavior, and the other is progress. Progress happens on earth towards higher intelligence because evolution is a knowledge creation process. Knowledge is accumulating in genetic, neural and cultural memory.
[Bobby Azarian]
‘EP 159 Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality’, Jim Rutt Show, YouTube
It is difficult to imagine an Indigenous scientist having written Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Its hypotheses about the survival of the fittest and progress through competition are essentially the values of Victorian politics, society, economics, industrial progress, checks, and balances projected onto the natural world.
By contrast, an Indigenous scientist would view nature as cooperative and operating through relationship and alliance.
In a universe in which time turns in a circle, and in which the ceremonies of renewal are the continued obligations of The People, the emphasis is always upon balance and harmony as opposed to progress, advancement, and accumulation. Within such a world the whole idea of sickness and health must have a profoundly different meaning.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.118
The word teleonomy replaced teleology for some people. The evolutionary theorist, Ernst Mayr, he suggested that term. But I don’t use the term myself because I think that teleonomy doesn’t allow for the notion that there is inevitable progress towards higher intelligence through the mechanisms I describe.
For me, teleology means two things: One is purposeful movement or goal oriented behavior, and the other is progress. Progress happens on earth towards higher intelligence because evolution is a knowledge creation process. Knowledge is accumulating in genetic, neural and cultural memory.
[Bobby Azarian]
‘EP 159 Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality’, Jim Rutt Show, YouTube
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