Individual / Collective



Individual                            -                            Collective
Libertarian                          -                            Authoritarian
Part                                      -                            Whole
Member                               -                            Category
Concrete                              -                            Abstract
Process                                 -                            State
Becoming                            -                            Being
Chaos                                   -                            Order



 

In Balinese society, on the other hand, we find an entirely different state of affairs. Neither the individual nor the village is concerned to maximize any simple variable. Rather, they would seem to be concerned to maximize something which we may call stability [...]

When they speak as members of the village council, the players by hypothesis are interested in maintaining the steady state of the system - that is, in preventing the maximization of any simple variable the excessive increase of which would produce irreversible change. In their daily life, however, they are still engaged in simple competitive strategies.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Bali: The Value System of a Steady State'), p.124-5




We are villagers.

As members of a village we always have the balance of the village in mind, even if only unconsciously. The steady state of the village - the system of which we are a part - is our ultimate concern, running beneath all individual concerns. We know it must be this way because the village is our ecosystem, and we understand that our continued well-being goes hand in hand with that of our environment. The individual good is always, in the last, housed within the greater good.

Our village is a balanced system, acting as an effective container for all of the various needs of each of its individual members. In a steady system, the maximization of any single variable will lead to an imbalance in the system. In terms of our village, this means that if the needs of a single villager were to be prioritized over the rest, then the harmony of our village would be upset. Thus, the maximization of any single variable (any individual interest) is prevented. Individual concerns are always secondary to communal concerns. The individual is always checked in favour of the village.

So whilst we remain an individual, we must also be a villager; these two roles work to balance each other. Individual concerns must always be balanced by communal concerns.

In our society, which primarily takes its direction from the imperatives of commerce, we have lost our villages, in every sense. With no village to contain us, we have been freed from the shackles of our role as villager. The individual need no longer be restricted, and his concerns and desires can run rampant, unchecked. Viewed from the perspective of village life, our current state of affairs is imbalanced. Yet, if the village is now redundant, then presumably so are the values of the village.

However, we must question how sustainable rampant individualism is. It may be that the role of villager provided us with an important balance, something that all of us who have evolved beyond village life now miss. The communal aspect points us towards something larger than ourselves; invests us in something beyond our own constricting borders. If we decide that this is important, then perhaps it is time to think about how we can rebuild our villages, and regain our balance.




If the social [...] is considered more comprehensive and important than the individual [...], one can justify sacrificing the well-being of the individual for the sake of the well-being of the whole.

In modern political terms, this approach is known as fascism (though state socialism has often behaved in the same way).

Because some radical ecologists suggest that ecosystem are more important than individuals (human or otherwise), modernist critics often label radical environmentalists and spiritually-oriented deep ecologists as ecofascists.

[Michael E. Zimmerman]
'Ken Wilber's Critique of Ecological Spirituality'




Innovations become irreversibly adopted into the on-going system without being tested for long-time viability; and necessary changes are resisted by the core of conservative individuals without any assurance that these particular changes are the ones to resist.

Individual comfort and discomfort become the only criteria for choice of social change and the basic contrast of logical typing between member and the category is forgotten until new discomforts are (inevitably) created by the new state of affairs.

Fear of individual death and grief propose that it would be 'good' to eliminate epidemic disease and only after 100 years of preventive medicine do we discover that the population is overgrown. And so on.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 238





The “kinship of the creative hero with deity” constitutes a phenomenon of tremendous import, as of yet radically uncomprehended: consciousness plays a world-constructing role, in a manner that is neither epiphenomenal nor trivial.

It is for this fundamentally non-metaphysical reason that the individual cannot be sacrificed to the exigencies of social and political convenience, as those who live in western democracies have painfully come to realize:

the “world-constructing capacity” of the individual must be respected and honored as something sovereign, lest the forces of chaos or complexity re-attain the upper hand, or the state rigidify and doom itself.

Religious stories, occupying the necessarily metaphorical space at the base of our cultures of belief, provide the foundation for the dogmatic concepts and action patterns that structure our social interactions, and stabilize the territories that we all share.

More importantly, however, functional religious systems ensure that our shared beliefs are predicated on a concept of the individual that makes respect for the capacity of courageous, creative individual action in the face of complexity the most fundamental and ineradicable of values.

Creative exploratory action in the face of anomaly and chaos generates, sustains and renews the world.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
‘Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict’, in Cortex, December 2002, p. 453



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Beggars and Choosers

In a climate of mass unemployment, the "job" takes on inflated proportions. Its scarcity turns it into a precious metal, its possession promising salvation from the miseries of being out of work. Those in employment may feel lucky to have a job, and those who don't have one want one (or are at least told that they should want one). But is to have a job always a "good" thing?

If we are unemployed - and particularly if we are receiving state sponsored benefits - then it can seem as if we have no discretion when it comes to the type of job we do. We must take anything that comes our way, provided we are "capable" of doing it (presumably meaning that we are physically and mentally up to the task, not whether we are morally/ethically capable, or capable in any other sense).

If we follow this line of logic further then we arrive at the conclusion that every job is a worthy job; that every job deserves to exist if for no other reason than that it provides employment for the individual, and means that they no longer have to rely on state benefits. The job allows the individual to become an "functioning" member of the community - to contribute, in a way in which, presumably, the individual on benefits does not contribute.

If we adhere to this view then we must accept its implications. When every job is a worthy one, we accept the incursions that certain roles make into our lives. We are no longer, for example, allowed to become angry when we are bothered by telesales operatives ringing our house. We see that they are only doing their job, and that their job allows them to become an honorable and functioning member of the community. In a sense, we have demanded that they ring our house; just as we have demanded all other possibilities for employment, regardless of how they may impact on our quality of life.

In accepting this viewpoint we have thrown discretion out of the window, both for those who seek employment and for those who may be affected by it. In an environment in which "a job's a job" there is no room for discretion; it becomes a luxury that we cannot afford. Yet, to lose sight of discretion is to lose sight of the larger picture. If we care about our community, our society, and the direction in which it is headed, then discretion must always have a place, and not simply as a luxury of those who can "afford" it. It is illogical to, on the one hand complain about the dysfunction that is caused by certain roles within a society, whilst on the other insisting that "a job's a job" and "beggar's can't be choosers". Perhaps a mark of the responsible society is that everyone can - and should - be a chooser.

If we consider a role to be contributing towards a dysfunction that we see within our local or wider community, then we must not feel compelled to assume this role in order to regain our footing within the community. Whilst, on the surface, our employment may appear to be doing the community a service, it may actually, in the long run, be doing it damage. If it is our duty to the collectivity to keep its interests, as well as our own, in mind, then perhaps we should bear in mind that beggars - as with all others - must always be choosers.

Originally published 25/3/10

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A moment’s silence, if you please, to mark the passing of the Big Society.

It had been in poor health for some time, but has finally been put out of its misery by the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, during a TV interview on Sunday

A graduate was better employed stacking shelves, unpaid, in a supermarket, Duncan Smith argued, than doing voluntary work for a local museum. 

Duncan Smith was infuriated that an Appeal Court had upheld the case of Cait Reilly, a geology graduate who, in order to get her back-to-work payments, was forced to give up her voluntary work at a museum and stack shelves instead.

The truth is, Reilly had been behaving in precisely the way which Cameron used to recommend. The idea behind the Big Society was that it would wean people off dependency on the State, encourage neighbourliness and bring communities together. Volunteering for things – running a local museum, for example – would show that, beyond the nanny state and the harsh jobs market, there was another world of work where satisfaction mattered more than pay.

For many conservatives, these must have been dangerously liberal thoughts. If people like Cait Reilly began to discover that there was more to life than being an economic unit, then the whole market-based system of values would start to crumble.

Conservatives do love a shelf-stacker. It is a job which represents enterprise in a strangely pure and beautiful way. Successful industrialists like to recall that they started their brilliant careers stacking shelves; perhaps, during his gap year, Duncan Smith did some stacking himself.

“Smart people”, he said this weekend, should ask themselves when they were next unable to find something in a supermarket, whose job is more important – a geologist or a shelf-stacker.

An out-of-work person is better employed doing unpaid grunt-work so that a multinational business makes bigger profits, the thinking goes, than working in her community.

If the Big Society had meant anything, then the back-to-work scheme would have put real emphasis on the voluntary sector. It is there that job-seekers are most likely to learn useful values – a sense of engagement and responsibility.

As “smart people”, they might also conclude that being told to stack shelves for the benefit of Poundland in return for a government benefit is little more than an exercise in cynicism and exploitation.

[Terence Blacker]
From Independent 'i' newspaper, see here


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Rules of Engagement

[...] In order to convince another of a truth that conflicts with an error he holds firmly, the first rule to be observed is an easy and natural one, namely:

Let the premisses come first, and the conclusion follow.

This rule, however, is seldom observed, and people go to work the reverse way, since zeal, hastiness, and dogmatic positiveness urge us to shout out the conclusion loudly and noisily at the person who adheres to the opposite error.

This easily makes him shy and reserved, and he then sets his will against all arguments and premisses, knowing already to what conclusion they lead.

Therefore we should rather keep the conclusion wholly concealed and give only the premisses distinctly, completely, and from every point of view.

If possible, we should not even express the conclusion at all. It will appear of its own accord necessarily and legitimately in the reason of the hearers, and the conviction thus born within them will be all the more sincere; in addition, it will be accompanied by self-esteem instead of by a feeling of shame.

[...] In defending a thing, many people make the mistake of confidently advancing everything imaginable that can be said in its favour, and of mixing up what is true, half true, and merely plausible.

But the false is soon recognized, or at any rate felt, and then casts suspicion even on the cogent and true that is advanced along with it.

Therefore let us give the cogent and true pure and alone, and guard against defending a truth with grounds and arguments that are inadequate, and are thus sophistical, in so far as they are set up as adequate.

For the opponent upsets these, and thus gains the appearance of having upset also the truth itself that is supported by them; in other words he brings forward argumenta ad hominem as argumenta ad rem.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.119

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The Eternal Ideas





Eternal                         -                       Fleeting
Type                             -                       Instance
Uni                               -                       Multi
Top down                     -                       Bottom up
Planned                        -                       Emergent
Rational                        -                       Intuitive




For Jung, all behaviour is patterned by archetypal images and energies which human beings used to call gods. We can learn something of the nature of these patterns in the “old stories” or myths of ancient cultures.

[Bernie Neville]
'Out of Our Depth and Treading Water: Reflections on Consciousness, Culture and New Learning Technologies'




Now Plato says: "The things of this world, perceived by our senses, have no true being at all;

they are always becoming, but they never are.

They have only a relative being; they are together only in and through their relation to one another; hence their whole existence can just as well be called a non-being.

Consequently, they are likewise not objects of a real knowledge, for there can be such a knowledge only of what exists in and for itself, and always in the same way. On the contrary, they are only the object of an opinion or way of thinking, brought about by sensation.

As long as we are confined to their perception, we are like persons sitting in a dark cave, and bound so fast that they cannot even turn their heads. They see nothing but the shadowy outlines of actual things that are led between them and a fire which burns behind them; and by the light of this fire these shadows appear on the wall in front of them. Even of themselves and of one another they see only the shadows on this wall. Their wisdom would consist in predicting the sequence of those shadows learned from experience.

On the other hand, only the real archetype of those shadowy outlines, the eternal Ideas, the original forms of all things, can be described as truly existing, since they always are but never become and never pass away

No plurality belongs to them; for each by its nature is only one, since it is the archetype itself, of which all the particular, transitory things of the same kind and name are copies and shadows.

Also no coming into existence and no passing away belong to them, for they are truly being or existing, but are never becoming or vanishing like their fleeting copies.

Thus only of them can there be a knowledge in the proper sense, for the object of such a knowledge can be only that which always and in every respect (and hence in-itself) is, not that which is and then again is not, according as we look at it." This is Plato's teaching.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.171




When clouds move, the figures they form are not essential, but indifferent to them.

But that as elastic vapour they are pressed together, driven off, spread out, and torn apart by the force of the wind, this is their nature, this is the essence of the forces that are objectified in them, this is the Idea.

The figures in each case are only for the individual observer.

To the brook which rolls downwards over the stones, the eddies, waves, and foam-forms exhibited by it are indifferent and inessential; but that it follows gravity, and behaves as an inelastic, perfectly mobile, formless, and transparent fluid, this is its essential nature, this, if known through perception, is the Idea. Those foam-forms exist only for us so long as we know as individuals.

[...] only the essential in all these grades of the will's objectification constitutes the Idea; on the other hand, its unfolding or development, because drawn apart in the forms of the principle of sufficient reason into a multiplicity of many-sided phenomena, is inessential to the Idea; it lies merely in the individual's mode of cognition, and has reality only for that individual.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.182




Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reason or grounds and consequences, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal.

For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world's course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time.

It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.185




"Love and Hate" are generally regarded as being things diametrically opposed to each other; entirely different; unreconcilable.

But we apply the Principle of Polarity; we find that there is no such thing as Absolute Love or Absolute hate, as distinguished from each other.

The two are merely terms applied to the two poles of the same thing.

Beginning at any point of the scale we find "more love," or "less hate," as we ascend the scale; and "more hate" or "less love" as we descend — this being true no matter from what point, high or low, we may start.

There are degrees of Love and hate, and there is a middle point where "Like and Dislike" become so faint that it is difficult to distinguish between them. Courage and Fear come under the same rule.

The Kybalion, Chapter X: "Polarity"




A symbol remains a perpetual challenge to our thoughts and feelings. That probably explains why a symbolic work is so stimulating, why it grips us so intensely, but also why it seldom affords us a purely aesthetic enjoyment.

A work that is manifestly not symbolic appeals much more to our aesthetic sensibility because it is complete in itself and fulfils its purpose.

[C.G. Jung]
On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
found in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism
, p.998




Vision researchers have suggested [...] that the pleasing visual motifs used in art and decoration exaggerate these patterns, which tell the brain that the visual system is functioning properly and analyzing the world accurately.

Some of the motifs may belong to a search image for the optimal human habitat, a savanna: open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of water and inhabited by animals and flowering fruiting plants.

By the same logic, tonal and rhythmic patterns in music may tap into mechanisms used by the auditory system to organize the world of sound.

[Steven Pinker]
The Blank Slate ('The Arts'), p.405




A wry demonstration of the universality of basic visual tastes came from a 1993 stunt by two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who used marketing research polls to assess American's taste in art.

They asked respondents about their preferences in colour, subject matter, composition, and style, and found considerable uniformity. People said they liked realistic, smoothly painted landscapes in green and blue containing animals, women, children, and heroic figures.

When the painters replicated the polling in nine other countries [...] they found pretty much the same preferences: an idealized landscape, like the ones on calendars, and only minor substitutions from the American standard.

What is even more interesting is that these McPaintings exemplify the kind of landscape that had been characterized as optimal for our species by researchers in evolutionary aesthetics.

[Steven Pinker]
The Blank Slate ('The Arts'), p.408-9




What makes the struggle for adaptation so laborious is the fact that we have constantly to be dealing with individual and atypical situations.

So it is not surprising that when an archetypal situation occurs we suddenly feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though transported, or caught up by an overwhelming power.

At such moments we are no longer individuals, but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us.

The ideal of the "mother country," for instance, is an obvious allegory of the mother, as is the "fatherland" of the father. Its power to stir us does not derive from the allegory, but from the symbolical value of our native land. The archetype here is the participation mystique of primitive man with the soil on which he dwells, and which contains the spirits of his ancestors.

The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own.

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.

[C.G. Jung]
'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry'
Found in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, p. 1001





In Amish life, silence is an active force, not a sign of introspection [...]  

The person who is possessed of silence lives above verbal contradictions.

The Amish are spared many of the arguments about words of Scripture or theology over which others haggle. For them absolutes do not exist in words, whether in creeds or in position papers, for all such arguments are silenced by the character and example of Christ himself.

[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 389




We like it when a thing is only one thing. But society is always two things; it’s the thing that alienates you, and its the benevolent father; always.

It tilts sometimes; it tilts harder towards the tyrant, and that’s not so good, but that’s an archetypical reality.

What do you have to contend with in life? You have to contend with yourself, and the adversary that’s inside you, that seems to oppose your every movement; [with] the fact that you just can’t move forward smoothly through life without being in conflict with yourself. So there’s the hero and the adversary on the individual level, and then on the social level there’s the wise king and the tyrant.

Those things are always there, that’s our true environment: it’s not these things we see around us; they’re lasting no time. These other things last forever. And that’s what we’re adapted to: we’re adapted to the things that last forever.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Joe Rogan Experience #958 - Jordan Peterson'




For many physicists the underlying laws of symmetry and transformation are more fundamental than the particles themselves.

The quantum world is in a constant process of change and transformation. On the face of it, all possible processes and transformations could take place, but nature's symmetry principles place limits on arbitrary transformation. Only those processes that do not violate certain very fundamental symmetry principles are allowed in the natural world.

Just as the ancient Greeks believed that fundamental forms and archetypes lay deeper than supposed atoms, so too contemporary physicists contrast elementary particles with more basic symmetry principles.

[F. David Peat]
From Certainty to Uncertainty, p. 59




What Socrates is seeking relentlessly are definitions of the essential nature of the thing concerned rather than descriptions of the properties by means of which we can recognise them.

And this priority of definitional knowledge led to Plato’s thesis that you cannot know anything unless you know the Forms, which are what definitions specify. If we cannot define piety from working with particulars, then let us start with the universals from which these particulars should flow. In other words, if you cannot get a map from a territory, build a territory out of the map.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 254




The Platonic ideas are also essences; Plato gives expression chiefly to the transcendent aspect and Aristotle to the immanent aspect, but this does not imply incompatibility; independently of any conclusions to which the ‘systematic’ spirit may lead, it is only a matter of a difference of level; in any case, they are always considering ‘archetypes’ or the essential principles of things, such principles representing what may be called the qualitative side of manifestation. 

[René Guénon]
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times,  p. 14



Related posts:-

All is Change



Life                           -                      Death
Solid                         -                      Liquid
Certain                      -                      Uncertain
Stasis                         -                      Motion
Abstract                     -                      Concrete
Order                         -                      Chaos
Coherent                   -                       Random
Explicate                   -                       Implicate




No matter where I went, or what I did: there it was, always, beneath everything: that constant 'drip, drip, drip' ...




No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.

[Hermann Hesse]
'Lament', The Glass Bead Game, p. 429




In the process of constructing this blog, I’ve often found it difficult to work out where one post ends and another begins. 

Whilst they may appear to be separate islands, it is often the case that they merge into one another. I imagine, although I’ve yet to test it, that you could hop from one to another using the ‘Related posts” feature, and touch upon every post on the site.

Sometimes creating individual posts - about this thing or that thing - is like sitting on a beach and making sandcastles. One here, and one there. From the unity of ‘sand’, to the multiplicity of 'sandcastles'.

But once the tide comes in my creations will soon return to their original unity, reminding me that their separateness was only a momentary daydream.

(Hopefully this site has a while before the tide comes in). 




Man considering the Universe, of which he is a unit, sees nothing but change in matter, forces, and mental states. He sees that nothing really is, but that everything is becoming and changing.

Nothing stands still - everything is being born, growing, dying - the very instant a thing reaches its height, it begins to decline - the law of rhythm is in constant operation - there is no reality, enduring quality, fixity, or substantiality in anything - nothing is permanent but Change.

He sees all things evolving from other things, and resolving into other things - a constant action and reaction; inflow and outflow; building up and tearing down; creation and destruction; birth, growth and death.

Nothing endures but Change.

The Kybalion, Chapter IV: "The All"






Under any hypothesis the Universe in its outer aspect is changing, ever-flowing, and transitory — and therefore devoid of substantiality and reality.

But (note the other pole of the truth) under any of the same hypotheses, we are compelled to act and live as if the fleeting things were real and substantial.

The Kybalion, Chapter VI: "The Divine Paradox"




Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will.

Finally the same thing is also seen in human endeavors and desires that buoy us up with the vain hope that their fulfilment is always the final goal of willing. But as soon as they are attained, they no longer look the same, and so are soon forgotten, become antiquated, and are really, although not admittedly, always laid aside as vanished illusions.

It is fortunate enough when something to desire and to strive for still remains, so that the game may be kept up of the constant transition from desire to satisfaction, and from that to a fresh desire, the rapid course of which is called happiness, the slow course sorrow, and so that this game may not come to a standstill, showing itself as a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a lifeless longing without a definite object, a deadening languor.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.164




[...] the steady state and continued existence of complex interactive systems depend upon preventing the maximization of any variable, and [...] any continued increase in any variable will inevitably result in, and be limited by, irreversible changes in the system.

[...] in such systems it is very important to permit certain variables to alter. The steady state of an engine with a governor is unlikely to be maintained if the position of the balls of the governor is clamped. Similarly a tightrope walker with a balancing pole will not be able to maintain his balance except by varying the forces which he exerts upon the pole.

[...] In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance.

This last point gives us, I believe, a partial answer to the question of why the society not only continues to function but functions rapidly and busily, continually undertaking ceremonial and artistic tasks which are not economically or competitively determined.

This steady state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Bali: The Value System of a Steady State'), p.124-5




The universe is like a swimming pool full of lego bricks.

When an idea is thought of, it is created: built from bricks. In time it is demolished and become bricks again.

But the bricks always remain.

If you had the right view, then you would see that the bricks themselves are also breaking down into smaller bricks. Breaking down and reforming.

The bricks are like a soil, from which everything grows.

The pool is infinite.





 Alas - but also be glad of it - pattern and/or information is all too easily eaten up by the random. The messages and guidelines for order exist, as it were, in sand or are written on the surface of waters.

Almost any disturbance, even mere Brownian movement, will destroy them. Information can be forgotten or blurred. The code books can be lost.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 56






Every condition [...] is only a particular step in the attainment of inward and outward perfection, and therefore has no significance of itself.

Blessedness consists in progress towards perfection; to stand still in any condition whatever mean the cessation of this blessedness.

[Leo Tolstoy]
The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 46



Nothing in the visible universe of motion can ever become still. The very fact that you can see it means that it is in motion. Otherwise you could not see it.

[Walter Russell]
The Message of the Divine Iliad, vol. II, p. 79




The Taoists believe that the world is always an interplay between chaos and order and that if you live your life properly you stand with one foot in order and one foot in chaos. 

Because if you’re only in order, nothing that’s interesting ever happens to you. Nothing is anything but a repeat of all the things that you already know. That’s the state that Fascists desire because Fascists desire things to be exactly the way they are forever.

And if you’re in a state that’s only characterized by chaos you’re at sea or overwhelmed or things have fallen apart on you and there’s too much of everything for you to deal with.

[Jordan Peterson]
'Reality and the Sacred'




The idea wants changelessness and eternity.

Whoever lives under the supremacy of the idea strives for permanence; hence everything that pushes toward change must be opposed to the idea.

"[Sensation] can only say: this is true for this subject and at this moment; another moment another subject may come and revoke the statement of the present sensation."

[C. J. Jung, and Friedrich Schiller (in quotes)]
Psychological Types, p.97




Piaget noted that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change and, as such, is defined in reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems. Specifically, he argued that reality involves transformations and states.

Transformations refer to all manners of changes that a thing or person can undergo. States refer to the conditions or the appearances in which things or persons can be found between transformations.

Thus, Piaget argued, if human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and the static aspects of reality. He proposed that operative intelligence is responsible for the representation and manipulation of the dynamic or transformational aspects of reality, and that figurative intelligence is responsible for the representation of the static aspects of reality.

Operative intelligence is the active aspect of intelligence. It involves all actions, overt or covert, undertaken in order to follow, recover, or anticipate the transformations of the objects or persons of interest.  

Figurative intelligence is the more or less static aspect of intelligence, involving all means of representation used to retain in mind the states (i.e., successive forms, shapes, or locations) that intervene between transformations. That is, it involves perception, imitation, mental imagery, drawing, and language.

Therefore, the figurative aspects of intelligence derive their meaning from the operative aspects of intelligence, because states cannot exist independently of the transformations that interconnect them.

Piaget stated that the figurative or the representational aspects of intelligence are subservient to its operative and dynamic aspects, and therefore, that understanding essentially derives from the operative aspect of intelligence.

'Piaget's theory of cognitive development'




Hypokeimenon, later often material substratum, is a term in metaphysics which literally means the "underlying thing".

To search for the hypokeimenon is to search for that substance which persists in a thing going through change—its basic essence.

Locke theorised that when all sensible properties were abstracted away from an object, such as its colour, weight, density or taste, there would still be something left to which the properties had adhered—something which allowed the object to exist independently of the sensible properties that it manifested in the beholder.

'Hypokeimenon'




In order to convey some of the flavor of Bohm's ideas I have called upon images and metaphors that are somewhat static. But Bohm's notions are all about process, or the holomovement; that is, the movement of the whole.

For Bohm, the ground (if we wish to call it that) or "all that is" takes the form of ceaseless movement. Within this movement can be discovered an endless process of unfolding and enfolding as the implicate order temporarily exposes aspects of itself to the explicate.

The fact that our world appears stable is not so much that objects remain static in our world, but that the same patterns are constantly being born again only to die away as fast as thought. Our minds and bodies encounter the surface of things, and of the apparent stability of the explicate, without being truly aware of the constant movement below.

[...] An elementary particle is not so much an object but a process. It is a constant process of becoming and dying away, a process in which the "particle" unfolds from the whole of space into a tiny region and then enfolds back again over all space.

[F. David Peat]
From Certainty to Uncertainty, p. 64-5




The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. 

Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody-and ultimately even the phrase "unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. 

But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. 

[Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Gay Science, 109




Peirce laughed at the “sheep & goat separators” who split the world into true and false. Rather, he held that all that exists is continuous, and such continuums govern knowledge. 

For instance, size is a continuum, as [the Sorites paradox] shows. Time is a continuum, so though an acorn eventually becomes an oak tree, no one can say exactly when. Speed and weight form spectrums, as do effort, distance, and intensities of all sorts. Politeness, anger, joy, and other feelings and behaviours come in continuums. Consciousness itself is a continuum, varying not only in a single person, from high alertness through coma, but also across species, from humans to protozoans. 

Hence Peirce asserted that vagueness is a ubiquitous presence and not a mark of faulty thinking. Words do not suddenly cease pertaining at points on the spectrum, but rather shade away. This kind of uncertainty will always afflict us. “Vagueness,” he noted, “is no more to be done away with in the world of logic than friction in mechanics.”

[Daniel McNeill & Paul Freiberger]
Fuzzy Logic, p.28



The Principle of Polarity

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There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites [...] Nothing can exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end.

[C. G. Jung]
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9), par. 178


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"Everything is Dual, everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."

This Principle embodies the truth that "everything is dual"; "everything has two poles"; "everything has its pair of opposites," all of which were old Hermetic axioms.

It explains the old paradoxes, that have perplexed so many, which have been stated as follows: "Thesis and anti-thesis are identical in nature, but different in degree"; "opposites are the same, differing only in degree"; "the pairs of opposites may be reconciled"; "extremes meet"; "everything is and isn't, at the same time"; "all truths are but half-truths"; "every truth is half-false"; "there are two sides to everything," etc., etc., etc.

It explains that in everything there are two poles, or opposite aspects, and that "opposites" are really only the two extremes of the same thing, with many varying degrees between them.

To illustrate: Heat and Cold, although "opposites," are really the same thing, the differences consisting merely of degrees of the same thing. Look at your thermometer and see if you can discover where "heat" terminates and "cold" begins! There is no such thing as "absolute heat" or "absolute cold" — the two terms "heat" and "cold" simply indicate varying degrees of the same thing, and that "same thing" which manifests as "heat" and "cold" is merely a form, variety, and rate of Vibration.

The Kybalion, Chapter 2: "The Seven Hermetic Principles"

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They drew special attention to the fact that polarity, that is to say, the sundering of a force into two qualitatively different and opposite activities striving for reunion, a sundering which also frequently reveals itself spatially by a dispersion in opposite directions, is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal up to man.

Yet in China this knowledge has been current since the earliest times in the doctrine of Yin and Yang.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, p.143-4


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All movement is defined in terms of an oscillation between two opposite polarities.

Implicit in the idea of oscillation, however, is the related concept of differences.

Differences convey information to an observer and therefore provide the basis for a response.

Without differences between structures, and between states of being, there would be nothing to perceive, nothing to respond to, and therefore no movement or evolution.

[Tony Plummer]
The Law of Vibration, p. 17

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A signal is digital if there is discontinuity between it and alternative signals from which it must be distinguished. Yes and no are examples of digital signals.

In contrast, when a magnitude or quantity in the signal is used to represent a continuously variable quantity in the referrent, the signal is said to be analogic.

Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement.

This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three, there is a jump.

In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.

In other words, number is of the world of pattern, gestalt, and digital computation; quantity is of the world of analogic and probabalistic computation.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 59, 241

Number = can be exact = separate = heaven
Quantity = can't be exact = connected = earth


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[...] Gestalt theory recognizes that all choices exist on a continuum between one extreme and another (authoritarian or collegial, open-minded or closed-minded) and represent a decision, however unconscious, to position oneself nearer to one pole than to the other. This is what is meant by polar differentiation: seeing options on the continuum between poles.

[...] all meaning manifests through the creation and dissolution of polarities.

"In order for a phenomenon to be perceptible and appreciable, it must stand for the opposite of something else; it must be different from some other thing. This distinction constitutes, in the most elementary way, the figures of the world, the forms of phenomena. The elementary principle of creation that structures this distinction of phenomena is that of polarities, the original opposite."

The individual is himself or herself "a never-ending sequence of polarities. Whenever an individual recognises one aspect of him [or her] self, the presence of the antithesis, or polar quality, is implicit."

Because the pairs of opposites (polarities) are actually extremes on the same continuum of possibilities, the nearer one gets to the mid-point of the continuum, the more difficult it is to differentiate one pole from another.

Friedlaender calls this midpoint the point of "indifference." It is at this point – the point at which the full continuum of possibilities is fully known -- that creativity becomes possible and where the polarity dissolves or, if you prefer, transforms into a higher order of understanding.

[Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'


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Polarity creates moving body forms in pairs of opposites, and places the opposite of each pair on opposite sides of a mutual equator. It likewise makes each mate so dependent on the other that neither could survive without constant interchange.

No living body could survive without receiving its inward breath from its spatial counterpart, nor could the spatial mate survive without the outbreathing of its opposite body to recharge it.

[Walter Russell]
A New Concept of the Universe, p. 80


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[...] each value complex's need for both 'challenge and support,' as illuminated by the insights of polarity theory, is best fulfilled by a form of opposition that recognizes its own inherent interdependency with the political counterpart it seeks to moderate.

In other words, the ability to influence and potentially persuade a given political constituency is almost always tied to an acknowledged degree of sympathy for that constituency's positions.

Stated yet another way, the partisans of any given position are far more likely to listen to and respect the opinion of opponents who are willing to affirm at least some of the strengths of their position.

[Steve McIntosh]
'Overcoming Polarization by Evolving Both Right and Left'


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What all these point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience.

When one puts that together with the fact that the brain is divided into two relatively independent chunks which just happen broadly to mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to – alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on – it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth.

But if it turns out to be ‘just’ a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and His Emissary, p. 462


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It has long been argued that the wisest crowds are the most diverse [...] in a theoretical model of group decision-making, a diverse group of problem-solvers made a better collective guess than that produced by the group of best-performing solvers. In other words, diverse minds do better, when their decisions are averaged, than expert minds.

Could there also be ways to make an existing crowd wiser?

Previous work might imply that you should add random individuals whose decisions are unrelated to those of existing group members. That would be good, but it’s better still to add individuals who aren’t simply independent thinkers but whose views are ‘negatively correlated’ – as different as possible – from the existing members. In other words, diversity trumps independence.

If you want accuracy, then, add those who might disagree strongly with your group. 

[Philip Ball]
'‘Wisdom of the crowd’: The myths and realities'


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The polarity Big-Small is the first in the inventory of existential oppositions such as Male and Female, Ruler and Ruled, Owner and Owned, Light Skin and Dark, over all of which emancipatory struggles are now raging both politically and psychologically.

The aim of these struggles is the recognition of the divided function of partners who are equal not because they are essentially alike, but because in their very uniqueness they are both essential to a common function.

Exploitation exists where a divided function is misused by one of the partners involved in such a way that for the sake of his pseudo-aggrandizement he deprives the other partner of whatever sense of identity he had achieved, of whatever integrity he had approached.

The loss of mutuality which characterizes such exploitation eventually destroys the common function and the exploiter himself.

[Erik H. Erikson]
Childhood and Society, p. 376-7


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Joining the dots
Everything is connected
Exclusion
Boxed off
A Difference that makes a Difference
This, Not That 
Assuming a position
All is Change
The Colour Wheel
The Eternal Ideas 
Giving and Receiving 
The Middle Path 
Balance 
Life and Death (and everything in between)