Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Something weird happened with my last post about V-8 enemas. It repeated the post 7 times, 2 of them at the top of the page and gave me control on deleting the thread! Please fix this Balder. I can't handle that kind of power!

Moderator's Note:  Edward, I cannot fix this.  My only option on your two posts is “delete thread,” for some odd reason, and I don't want to take the chance of deleting everything.  I've reported this to Gaia.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Ditto on above, this is another of the V-8 enema comments that got elevated and that I edited.

Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Toward synergist spirituality:

 
Beginning with a synergist cosmology/ ontology

1) Synergism is the natural interaction of two or more agents or forces whereby their combined effects produce wholes greater than the sum of their parts.

2) Wholes follow the principle of “quasi-transcendence,” never yielding one transcendental whole.

3) Parts never dissolve in favor of the whole.

4) Interaction of the parts never balance in equal proportions in specific instances; one or the other may dominate but in the general system of interaction each plays an equally essential role.

5) Of the parts, neither can be entirely reduced to the other and neither can exist without the other, thereby comprising the synergistic “whole.”

6) Yet no part is whole in itself; each part is inherently ruptured and exposed to permeation by the other.

7) To complete the cosmology, neither being nor time nor space are wholes unto themselves. Each is fundamentally ruptured, being into beings or traces (split by differance or temporality), time into times (split by motion), space into spaces (warped by gravity), particle into wave (split by context), wave into particle (split by context). Nothing is unaffected by relation to the other of itself.

Communication, ethics, politics of synergist spirituality:

In the role of language the incursion of context and the other cannot be strictly limited and controlled. Consequently, the “outside” of a larger context may always encroach on the inside of a more narrow segment of communication. Any sign can mean anything at any time depending on the range and the quality of the contexts within which language-users use and interpret it. Communication, if it is to be possible, must admit of the possibility of its impossibility. The hope of communication must open the door to the circumstance that “we” do not, and perhaps never do, communicate.

Since communication remains in doubt, the attitude appropriate to such doubt would be to assume, in all cases of interaction with others, that communication has not occurred. This attitude is preferable to its opposite for pragmatic reasons. Assuming that communication has occurred serves as motivation for discontinuing the process through which its possibility arises. Of course, there may be practical limitations on the amount of time available for attempts at communication. Such constraints, however, need not require deciding ipso facto that communication has occurred. Practical affairs, for good or bad, will proceed without the guarantee of communication.

Language suggests that the concept of communication describes the form (appearance) corresponding to its use but not necessarily to its function. In this respect, the effort to communicate may be serendipitous. Setting out to share in understanding may present additionally, or instead, the opportunity to further understanding for oneself. As a tool, language may be as much a stimulus to thought and action (for both sides) as a means of communication.

With communication in doubt, the evaluation of interpretation no longer conforms to the criterion of acceptance by members of a person’s culture. No can be certain of what has been or what is accepted. “Collective agreement” functions as a personal blank check, because it consists only of particular interpretations of what that agreement might be. Talk of what “we believe” may mislead as much as lead, since the degree of sharing in any interpretation remains, by way of the play of difference, uncertain. Consequently, another attitude toward language emerges: always assume that consensus may be appearance.

This attitude shifts the center of interpretative evaluation from the dominance of a potentially illusive collective consensus to what each person interprets another’s words and actions to mean. The issue becomes not so much how an interpretation participates in, contributes to, or derives from a collective understanding but how interpretations may come to life and take value in the understandings of particular persons. In this sense, the “subjective” remains a relevant component of “what is meant” in expression and “communication.”

Summary (guidelines for ethical communication):

Since every use of language may be viewed as interpretive and thereby also strategic, language-using may be regarded as synonymous with rhetoric.

Rhetoric assumes the form of hierarchy in the making of distinctions, but these distinctions should never be assumed to be necessary, natural, or fixed.

 
Rhetoric assumes the guise of communication, but communication should never be assumed to have taken place.

 
Communication assumes the form of the agent (in intentionality), but subjects should never be strictly identified as agents (which is not to say that in all cases they should escape being socially treated as agents).

 
Community, as the rhetorical situation, assumes the form of various types of consensus, but these should never to take as self-evident.

The cosmological platform leads to certain attitudes about communication which in turn implicitly contains assumptions about the “other.” Attitudes toward communication shape the contours of an ethical relationship with others which thereby informs social, communal, and political interactions and what may count as ethical orientations in these spheres.

 Feedback Welcome, All the best,

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Overall, my impression was that you fall a bit short of clearly stating your thesis and main ideas, altho, at the same time, I felt that you might be onto communicating some important and powerful ideas.

I was most interested in your writing on rhetoric and communication.

The original statements on “a synergetic cosmology” were interesting, and seemed accurate enough, however, I wasn't sure what you wanted me to do with that conceptual model, once you had communicated it to me.

I thought the summary comments on rhetoric were valuable reminders in and of themselves.

I thought the middle comments on communications were also good, but, I felt you didn't make it clear what role those ideas on communication were to play, and how they should be applied.

I suspected you didn't out of political caution - hoping to avoid being seen as criticizing, even tho the statements themselves have inherently critical applications.

I'd be interested in reading more.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Bill,

Thanks for your comments. You say: Overall, my impression was that you fall a bit short of clearly stating your thesis and main ideas,

Yes, the parts didn't quite come into a whole! I've been wanting to put together a “cluster of terms,” as Kenneth Burke (American literary critic and language theorist) might have put, along with a cluster of ideas, that mutually imply each other and circle around a notion of spiritualily similar to integral while including modifications suggested by some of the criticisms and objections brought up in various discussion threads here and elsewhere. My sense is that in order to get the dance off on the right foot we need to begin at the metaphysical/ontological level. Basically this means adopting a position on the structural relation between oppositions. In other words, some relatively clear orientation on the dialectical is necessary even if it should turn out to be better characterized as featuring a nondialectical strategy. From this orientation all else proceeds (much like start conditions for the big bang).

So what I'm calling the “synergist” approach follows a deconstructive line of thinking about oppositional structure and suggests two elements caught up in an interdependent twist such that they are different yet not separate (as described in the points below). As time goes on I'll try to build on the importance of this line in relation to conceiving of a philosophy that avoids most of the problems of basic dualism, realism, monism. Integral philosophy was also a response to the modernist metaphysics of these postions but still tends, in my view, too much toward realism and monism.

Bill:The original statements on “a synergetic cosmology” were interesting, and seemed accurate enough, however, I wasn't sure what you wanted me to do with that conceptual model, once you had communicated it to me.

The idea is to try to flesh it out a bit more over time so that it makes a clearer statement about the synergistic metaphysical position as it may differ in various ways from what has been described as the intergral approach. Granted the integral approach is still in formation and there is difference of opinion about what it means but for purposes here we might key primarily off Wilber's work as a way of beginning to point out important differences.

Bill: I thought the middle comments on communications were also good, but, I felt you didn't make it clear what role those ideas on communication were to play, and how they should be applied.

I thinks as soon as metaphysical grounding has begun to form along what may be called a philosophical position and how it orients to oppositional structure, a theory of relationship emerges at the same time. For example, the question “What is the nature of being?” quickly leads, via the linguistic resources of the negative, to the question “What is the relation between being and nonbeing?” The way a philosophical system answers any question of relation as fundamental as this prefigures the way in which it will commit to answering every question of relationship–which in human community is a question of communication. Here language and the understanding of language and how it works looms large immediately. The question of relationship and the structure of relationship is implicit in the larger question of relationship between opposites and oppostional structure. And since ethical issues are bound up in the scope and quality of relationship issues, ethics is prefigured in the choice of how to understand dialectic and the structure of oppositions.

The comments about communication are an attempt to lay out certain practical implications of the metaphysical position circumscribed by the synergist orientation. These also lay out the beginnings of an ethical orientation to communication. How to regard langauge? How to regard the other in communication? How to respond? etc.

Your questions have helped (perhaps) launch us on the way to further clarification. Feel free to bring up integral issues that might be points where it would be interesting to see if there is a significant synergistic alternative or contrast.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

On another thread back on March 19th Balder posted the following which I somehow missed until now. This citation is great and raises many issues with respect to Derrida, Buddhism, postmodernism, and the nondual that I sense are very relevant to the issues that should be discussed in converging toward some coherent expression of a contemporary spirituality (that those who post here might be happy with).One of the major questions this citation raises for me is the extent to which Madhyamika Buddhism discussed may represent a beneficial step or two beyond what Derrida may be offering us. Or is it perhaps very similar? I need to ponder this for a while before taking a try at an answer so for now I'll just replay Balder's post for others to consider as well.

Also, in many ways, this citation touches on issues that Edward and I have circled around in posts elsewhere and may provide a good summary of some of the key issues.

The following is an excerpt from Meeting the Great Bliss Queen:

“Emptiness is said by Buddhists to describe how things are.  In Middle Way (Madhyamika) Buddhist philosophy, emptiness is considered entirely compatible with dependent arising; indeed, emptiness is said to be what makes dependent arising possible.  To what extent can this emptiness be characterized as an 'essence,' especially since emptiness itself is a dependent arising?  How completely can either conditioned or unconditioned phenomena be 'known'?  These questions bring us to important tensions between Buddhist and postmodern understandings of the mind's ability to know its objects, and to a consideration of the role of language in this process…

Buddhists emphasize that although one fashions a table, no one fashion's the table's emptiness.  So long as the table exists, its emptiness cannot, like the table itself, deteriorate or be altered in any way.  This is true of the self's or any other emptiness.  However, even though all emptinesses are the same, mere absences of inherent existence, emptiness is not a Platonic ideal.  There is no 'ideal' or 'generic' emptiness apart from its specific instances - the specific emptiness of the table, for example.  Moreover, a table's emptiness depends on the emptiness of its parts - the emptiness of its legs, color, and weight.  Similarly, the unfindability of a person depends on the unfindability of the arms and legs of the person.  This means that emptiness too is a dependent arising.  However, unlike persons, or anything impermanent, emptiness does not depend on causes and conditions.  It is unconditioned precisely because it does not deteriorate or change in any way.  Therefore, although a person is conditioned, the emptiness associated with a person is unconditioned.  Insofar as it is unconditioned, emptiness is an 'essential' quality.  Insofar as it is a dependent arising, it participates in change and constructedness.  Thus, the category of emptiness is connected with both the essentialist and postmodern sides of the feminist debate.  That Buddhist philosophy finds it possible for something to be both a dependent arising and unconditioned is a crucial move I want to now contrast with feminist postmodern reflection.

More than any other feature of Buddhist philosophy, it is the characterization of phenomena as dependent arisings that seems to call forth comparisons with contemporary theory.  Let us look closely at the apparent similarities.  In Buddhist thought, the self exists only in dependence on causes, conditions, and its own constituent parts.  Its functionality, far from contradicting emptiness, is made possible because inherent existence is absent.  Similarly, all dependent arisings are qualified by the absence or emptiness of inherent existence.  Dependent arising is in fact the reciprocal meaning of emptiness; ordinary persons as well as Buddhas are dependent arisings, as are all nonsentient phenomena.

For the Middle Way school known as Prasangika, no person, no table, no VCR or computer, exists apart from the causal or constitutive elements through which it arises.  From this perspective, Buddhists would agree with feminist and other postmodernists who describe the endless play of differences in relation to the self.  Teresa de Laurentis speaks for many postmodern feminists when she says that subjectivity arises from a complex of habits resulting from the semiotic interaction of 'outer world' and 'inner world,' the continuous engagement of a self or subject in social reality… The principle of dependent arising describes a self  that is both contextually constructed and viable as an agent, a force to contend with, but not the center of the world.  In denying persons, as well as things, independence, Buddhist presentations share with Judith Butler, for example, an unwillingness to underestimate the power of the acted upon to be independent of the action that partially constitutes it.  After all, Butler argues, to understand identity as an effect of multiple conditions does not mean that it is either 'fatally determined' or 'fully artificial and arbitrary.'  In fact, she points out, it is the constructed status of the self that opens up the possibility of agency.  To the extent that constructedness is the co-meaning of emptiness, Buddhist traditions would agree.  As we have noted, emptiness itself is also a dependent arising.  It does not map neatly onto the contemporary feminist debate, however, because although the idea of dependent arising is a valid category for most postmodern theorists, 'unconditioned' most definitely is not.  Yet the possibility of experiencing the unconditioned is central to Buddhist theory and practice, and the unconditioned realm of emptiness means that there is an objective dimension that corresponds to the internal subjective dimension of mindfulness and concentration.

Middle Way Buddhist philosophy emphasizes what I call ontological nondualism, meaning that emptinesses and dependent arisings are indivisible.  In other words, the play of differences, the process of conditioning, is an insufficient description of how things are.  Moreover, the conditioned and unconditioned can be experienced simultaneously because conditioned things and unconditioned emptiness are intrinsically compatible (ontological nondualism) and because the mind is sufficiently concentrated to be free from patterning by objects or thoughts (making possible cognitive nondualism).  In other words, it is possible both because of how things are and how they are known.  Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, postmodern emphases on the constructed and endlessly diffuse nature of things, combined with its unwillingness to admit any category outside of the process of diffusion, is like talking about dependent arising without emptiness.

The importance of emptiness to the Buddhist tradition is not just that emptiness is considered true, but that understanding it changes the subject in desirable ways, that is, in ways that complement concentration and compassion…  Knowing emptiness can reorient subjective experience in ways that other types of knowledge cannot.

In developmental strategies such as … meditation on emptiness, the shift in the subject is explained largely in terms of the interplay between conceptual and nonconceptual states.  The stabilizing force of concentration balances the sense of destabilization that comes from undoing one's previous experience of the world.  Buddhists would agree with postmodernists that the mind and its activities are linguistic in general, but not that mental functioning is irreducibly linguistic.  Unlike the textual idolatry of some of contemporary theory, the words that are the starting point for reflection on emptiness and compassion do not continue to govern the subject in the same way throughout the developmental process.  The mind is not thought alone; nor is it separate from bodily energies.  It is also clarity and knowing.  And Buddhists emphasize that this clarity and knowing can experientially be fused with the unconditioned emptiness.

Mental clarity and mindfulness are crucial to the process of accessing the unconditioned.  In order to experience emptiness, the mind must be steady and focused.  When one fully knows the absence that is emptiness, one knows it with one's full, speechless attention.  This complete and fully affective experience of emptiness cannot come about only through language, although language does play an important role.  In contrast to much of postmodern feminist theory, Buddhists would contend that language does not have equal influence on all subjective states.  Mindfulness and its furtherance as concentration are crucial cases in point.  Buddhist wisdom is often praised as 'inexpressible.'  However, the force of this description shifts considerably in a system that valorizes both conceptual and nonconceptual experience.  The inexpressible unconditioned emptiness is not nonexistent.  Knowing emptiness requires at least some measure of clarity, stability, and intensity.  These are subjective dimensions, as we have observed, little attended to in contemporary Western theory.

By the second of the five classic stages of the developmental path to enlightenment, one is able to rest the mind effortlessly, and for as long as one chooses, on an image of emptiness.  That mental image serves to eliminate the 'self,' or inherent existence, that one previously identified.  Then the sense of mind and emptiness as separate subsides as one focuses on the increasingly subtle image of that absence, and finally the image fades away completely.  This fading away leads to the direct experience of emptiness, classically described in Indian and Tibetan Mahayana texts as utterly nonconceptual, because there is no mental image to separate the mind from the emptiness now encompassed by its understanding.  When emptiness is known fully and directly (these terms are synonymous in the Buddhist context), the relationship of mind to emptiness is said in Geluk texts to be like 'fresh water mixed with fresh water.'  Although they are not actually one in that emptiness is not a consciousness and a consciousness is not a mere absence, there is no experienced difference between them.  They seem utterly fused.  This is the classic moment of cognitive nondualism.

…Although the wisdom of emptiness is famous throughout the Buddhist world for being inexpressible, concentration bears even less association with verbal activity than does wisdom, primarily because concentration experientially removes one from the influence of one's most immediate thoughts and mental images.  Since these thoughts and images are arguably the prime means by which cultural conditioning shapes or affects the individual, concentration is an important part of Buddhist arguments for the possibility of an 'unconditioned' state.  These arguments, as we have seen, probably represent Buddhism's most serious disjunction with feminist and other contemporary theory.”  (Anne C. Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, pp. 134-139).

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

In a blog post of March 29th Balder responded to some interesting questions raised by Julian relevant to circumscribing a spirituality that falls within the parameters of the nondual understood as “not one, not two.” Toward the end of this post Balder summarizes certain key points that I think contribute to a description of what I am tentatively calling “synergist spirituality” (in order to separate such a description, for the time being, from direct link to Derrida, Wilber, Buddhism, or any other primary source).

In a separate post (see above), I will repeat Bruce's list and add comments.

Here is Bruce's blog post:

For several weeks now, ever since Julian posted his Simply Put series and I responded with a Simply Put entry of my own, Julian and I have been debating whether or not Wilber's writings on Integral Postmetaphysics and the myth of the given in Integral Spirituality open the door in the Integral community to relativism, magical thinking, pre/trans fallacies, and so on.  In a recent blog entry, Julian challenged me to write “a piece that puts IPM ideas in their proper context with regard to truth, falsity, pathology, stages of development, and left/right distinctions.” 

This entry is my response to that challenge.  I am going to approach this somewhat informally, not presuming to speak on behalf of Wilber or the Integral community at large, but just talking about how I relate to these ideas in my own thought and practice.  For now, I will talk about how IPM handles the issues of truth, falsity, pathology, and left/right distinctions.  I will return to stages of development (which I believe are implicit in what I'm writing below) in a later entry, or in the comments section of this blog, if necessary.

Prelude

In my Simply Put entry, I wrote, “In Integral post-metaphysics, discussion of 'the real' can be understood as making a claim about how a given conperception will behave across a wide range of circumstances - we can count on it to operate in certain ways and be subject to certain kinds of confirmation.”  To explain what I mean by this, I want to take a step back and say something about how I view AQAL and Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP).  To do this, I will appeal to a paper which is not part of the Integral literature, but which I believe is consonant with the aims of Integral Postmetaphysics:  A Cure for Metaphysical Illusions: Kant, Quantum Mechanics, and the Madhyamaka, by Michael Bitbol.  In it, Bitbol argues for a functional-operational integration of the three perspectives named in the subtitle of the essay. 

While AQAL is often discussed and, unfortunately, treated as a static map, I believe Integral Methodological Pluralism invites us to see it in more dynamic, enactive terms, as a sort of integrative operator.  In this conception, the constitutive paradigms of AQAL/IMP - science, philosophy, linguistics, religion, and so on - are themselves understood as operators rather than representational maps.  For instance, following Michael Bitbol's description, “scientific theories [are] operators of structuring our actions within the world and of anticipating their outcomes.”  Science here is understood dynamically and enactively, not as a revealer of static, underlying, universal, pre-given truths, but as the product of the disciplined co-interaction of human subjects and the (indeterminate) wholeness of reality.  Similar enactive or operational readings can be given of other paradigms as well.  If we adopt this view, then AQAL, via Integral Methodological Pluralism, becomes, not simply a map of what is “already there,” independent of all perspectives, but a higher order, creative enactment itself.  With regards to this notion, Bitbol makes a point which I think suggests a very helpful way to hold the whole project of Integral Methodological Pluralism: 

Insofar as [transcendental philosophy, quantum mechanics, and the Middle Way] are nothing but tools (operators), the three terms to be related must be taken as plastic and evolutive; each term has to be seen in the context of its history, of its potential developments, and of the dynamics of its possible coadaptation to the other terms rather than treated as a closed doctrinal system.

With this move, he outlines a fruitful integrative approach that avoids the problems of naïve representationalism and is quite consonant with the enactive perspectivism of Integral Postmetaphysics.

Truth and Falsity

If, as is suggested by the Integral Postmetaphysical approach, we abandon the idea of a single, pre-given world order for one and all and accept that everything in the phenomenal world that we can point to is, first and foremost, a perspective (or perspective-occasion, as Wilber sometimes puts it), what happens to the notions of truth and falsity?  Must notions of “truth” and “reality” be thrown out?  Clearly not – not in a system such as AQAL which attempts to honor and integrate as many (relative) truths as possible.  But we will need to let go of any residual attachment we may have to the naive metaphysical realism that under girds popular understanding. 

From the perspective of scientific theories as operators, we can say that something is “objective” if certain relationships among phenomena can be observed universally, or across a stable range of circumstances, by active human subjects.  As Kant showed us, this invariant relational patterning of phenomena says nothing about “intrinsic properties” of things-in-themselves.  Because we cannot extract ourselves from the overall situation to adopt a view from nowhere, we can at best study the form given to phenomena by our cognitive apparatus.  But as developmental psychology and relativistic/quantum science have shown us, our cognitive apparatus is neither static in its organization nor endowed (as Kant had originally argued) with a priori forms which are valid at all levels of phenomenal reality.  The phenomenal world enacted by human beings is, in some important respects, enacted differently by human beings at different times and in different developmental or even cultural contexts, with no apparent perspective available that we can hope to appeal to as final or decisive.

Does this leave us stranded in a flatland, radical relativist swamp?

Not from the point of view of Integral Postmetaphysics.  But while, according to AQAL, all holons or perspective-occasions are understood to have an objective component (and therefore are not merely products of our psychology or our cultural conditioning), the way forward does not lie in finding a way to separate out the “factual part” from the “conventional / constructed part.”  To imagine we can do so is to commit a fallacy of division.

Rather, as I suggested above, the postmetaphysical approach is an operational one: when we argue that something is real or true, we are making a claim about how a given conperception (a construct-perception) will behave across a wide range of circumstances.  We are saying that we can count on it to behave in certain ways and be subject to certain kinds of confirmation within a given set of operational parameters.  If a claim cannot be confirmed in these ways, we are justified in rejecting it as false.

Thus, as Wilber and Bitbol both suggest, if we take on board …

*  The Madhyamaka critique of ontology (which demonstrates that, try as we might, we will not be able to find any self-existent things-in-themselves)

*  An operational or enactive approach to cognition and epistemology, such as Varela's autopoeisis or the Neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy of science (which proceeds by identifying invariants [objectivation] and distinguishing them from the noninvariant remainders of any perspective-occasion [subjectivation], without ever having to appeal to correspondence to an absolute, independent, pregiven reality)

*  The implications of postmodern science / quantum theory (which challenge us to reconsider our attachment to object ontology)

*  And the constructivism, contextualism, and integral aperspectivism of postmodern philosophy

… we will still be able to pursue rigorous scientific inquiry, make objective determinations, and differentiate true claims from false ones based on integrative operational procedures (which IPM situates in AQAL space).

Pathology

The above discussion was concerned mainly with truth, which in Integral Theory would be considered an Upper Right (singular objective) type of validity claim.  But Integral Postmetaphysics is equally concerned with other types of validity claims, from truthfulness (Upper Left) to rightness (Lower Left) to functional fit (Lower Right).  Pathology in an individual can be understood from any of these perspectives (UR neurophysiological disorders; LL intersubjective issues, such as family conflicts or problems; UL psychological disorders; and so on).  In my discussions with Julian, it appears he has mostly been concerned with left-hand manifestations of pathology … and whether IPM undermines our ability to make sound determinations in this area.

Honestly, I am not clear why he expects this difficulty to arise.  It can't be the subjective or even intersubjective bias that I believe he fears may infect IPM, since psychological assessment of pathology is already an inter/subjective exercise.  Is it the nondual element?  If so, that need not pose a problem either: non-dual does not mean “all one, without distinctions”; it points to the radical interrelationship and co-determination of all phenomenal appearances.  This perspective can be seen as consonant, in some respects, with Object Relations theory, which has a sophisticated model for understanding the intersubjective generation of the object-relational self (e.g., a self which lacks inherent self-existence).  But although Object Relations theory is a constructivist approach, which like Buddhism understands self and object as interdependent and co-emergent, it still has no compunctions powerfully modeling the etiology of different forms of pathology, or suggesting constructivist (“structure building”) interventions to alleviate suffering and dysfunction. 

If students of Integral for some reason come to the strange conclusion that a perspective grounded in nondualism, or which admits postmodern intersubjectivity, is incompatible with the notion of the existence of pathology, they need look no further tha Object Relations theory - if not Buddhism, which freely diagnoses Samsaric illnesses and prescribes spiritual and psychological cures.  They might also read Wilber's thoughts on the nature of UL pathology as set forth in Excerpt C of the Kosmos Trilogy:

Many psychological symptoms–interior feelings of anxiety, depression, phobia, obsession, compulsion–are the disguised forms of feelings and impulses that, for whatever reason, are too dangerous to the I-space to allow them to arise in their raw and naked forms, and thus they have to be “clothed” in more acceptable fashions. Put bluntly, the psyche lies to itself, becomes false to itself, is no longer being truthful about its own interiors–the price of which is psychological pain and suffering.

(Truthfulness, recall, is the selection pressure, or validity claim, of the UL quadrant. The types of psychopathology we are investigating here involve violations of this integrity or truthfulness, the price of which is psychological anguish, suffering, angst. When the self is untruthful, it damages its internality codes and boundaries, or the ways to tell with integrity what is true self and what is false self. A history of interior deception, untruthfulness, lying to oneself, deceiving oneself, is the beginning of the creation of a false-self system, the beginning of a kosmic habit as a negative karmic stream of dis-integrity that lives on lies. It is this false self we are briefly examining, which is not to say that other things aren't also happening with psychological dys-eases, including, e.g., UR neurotransmitter imbalances, LL family problems, LR economic factors, and so on. We are here simply focusing on the UL manifestation of the knot in the Kosmos identified as a “psychological symptom.”)

In this example, an original feeling of “anger,” which is not allowed by the self's agency, regime, or code (because it is a nice person), is mis-translated as “depression” and thus allowed to arise in the I-space as long as it is wearing that disguise, a disguise that is accompanied by suffering as the price of untruthfulness.

Wilber's perspective here does not depend for its validity on a commitment to metaphysical realism or foundationalism.  The diagnosis of pathology, in any of its guises, is something that can be handled operationally within the context of Integral Postmetaphysics, without being compromised - as Julian unnecessarily fears - by the fact that all such determinations are necessarily relative.

Left/Right Distinctions

By left/right distinctions, I believe Julian means a clear differentiation between the actuality of the physical world and the inter/subjective influences of personal history and culture.

Integral Postmetaphysics is neither solipsistic nor a form of subjective idealism.  It does not deny the existence of a world outside of or beyond the individual observer, nor does it suggest that the individual observer is solely “responsible for” or the generative source of that world.  The world is not merely a concept or belief.  However, following the Madhyamaka analysis and the insights of postmodern philosophy and science, IPM legitimately challenges the notion that this “external reality” consists of absolute, pre-given, abiding, self-existing objects.

Conventionally, we can still speak of “the world.”  But from an Integral Postmetaphysical perspective, it is more appropriate to speak of world orders or worldspaces, since the four quadrants of AQAL, while distinguishable, are inseprable and always co-implicated, meaning that the world we interact with and describe is always “the-world-as-it-appears-to-this-subject-at-this-AQAL-address.”  As perceptual relativists point out, individual objects do not exist independently of our conceptual models.  Objects represent particular patterning “cuts” that we impose on the whole of reality (implying that there are other ways the whole could be conceptually sliced and divided).  A cognitive scientist such as Francisco Varela might point out that there nevertheless appear to be objective constraints on how human beings carve up the world; that it is not wholly arbitrary, and that certain divisions appear to be nearly universal for human subjects, suggesting the impingement of culture-independent objective patternings.  Thus, even though we may not be able to separate the “factual” from the perspective-dependent or “conventional” aspects of any observed phenomenon, neither can we attribute the existence or “order” of the world soley to Lower Left, intersubjectivist patterns or influences.  The Right Hand quadrants cannot be reduced out of the picture, or subordinated to the whims and influences of the individual observer.

From the point of view of the Madhyamaka, and of IPM as well, neither the objects on the right hand or the subjective patterns on the left are inherently self-existing – they are co-dependently originated, tetra-enacting, and thus, in the ultimate Buddhist analysis, “empty.”  But emptiness is not a denial of existence; without this radical interdependence, no world order at all would ever appear or get off the ground.  Therefore emptiness does not constitute grounds for ignoring or dismissing the importance of either the subjective and objective dimensions of experience in human life.  To privilege one side over the other is to move in the direction of reification, metaphysical illusion, and potential pathology or disorder.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Here are some points taken from Balder's blog post (cited below) in which I have inserted some comments (in bold):

Thus, as Wilber and Bitbol both suggest, if we take on board …

*  The Madhyamaka critique of ontology (which demonstrates that, try as we might, we will not be able to find any self-existent things-in-themselves)

In other words, this is not a view that at bottom is consistent with basic realism (an absolute reality completely independent of contextual constraints–and here “context” does not refer simply to cognitive orientations because a clean separation of cognitive or mental constructs and a physical reality cannot be reliably achieved by any means presently known)

*  An operational or enactive approach to cognition and epistemology, such as Varela's autopoeisis or the Neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy of science (which proceeds by identifying invariants [objectivation] and distinguishing them from the noninvariant remainders of any perspective-occasion [subjectivation], without ever having to appeal to correspondence to an absolute, independent, pregiven reality)

*  The implications of postmodern science / quantum theory (which challenge us to reconsider our attachment to object ontology)

For an academically rigorous and detailed presentation of the case for this position see my essay “Physics and Language–Science and Rhetoric: Reviewing the Parallel Evolution of Theory on Motion and Meaning in the Aftermath of the Sokal Hoax” available on my website at www.gregorydesilet.com under the “Essays” link.

*  And the constructivism, contextualism, and integral aperspectivism of postmodern philosophy

… we will still be able to pursue rigorous scientific inquiry, make objective determinations, and differentiate true claims from false ones based on integrative operational procedures (which IPM situates in AQAL space).

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi Greg,

1) Synergism is the natural interaction of two or more agents or forces whereby their combined effects produce wholes greater than the sum of their parts.

Liquidity is often proposed as a translucent example of an emergent phenomenon, and the facts seem straightforward. Liquidity is not a characteristic of individual H2O molecules. Nor is it a characteristic of the ultimates of which H2O molecules are composed. Yet when you put many H2O molecules together they constitute a liquid (at certain temperatures, at least), they constitute something liquid. So liquidity is a truly emergent property of certain groups of H2O molecules. It is not there at the bottom of things, and then it is there.

When heat is applied evenly to the bottom of a tray filled with a thin sheet of viscous oil, it transforms the smooth surface of the oil into an array of hexagonal cells of moving fluid called Bénard convection cells.23 This is another popular example of an emergent phenomenon. There are many chemical and physical systems in which patterns of this sort arise simply from the routine workings of basic physical laws, and such patterns are called ‘emergent’.

This is all delightful and true. But can we hope to understand the alleged emergence of experiential phenomena from non-experiential phenomena by reference to such models? I don’t think so. The emergent character of liquidity relative to its non-liquid constituents does indeed seem shiningly easy to grasp. We can easily make intuitive sense of the idea that certain sorts of molecules are so constituted that they don’t bind together in a tight lattice but slide past or off each other (in accordance with van de Waals molecular interaction laws) in a way that gives rise to — is — the phenomenon of liquidity. So too, with Bénard convection cells we can easily make sense of the idea that physical laws relating to surface tension, viscosity, and other forces governing the motion of molecules give rise to hexagonal patterns on the surface of a fluid like oil when it is heated. In both these cases we move in a small set of conceptually homogeneous shape-size-masscharge-number-position-motion-involving physics notions with no sense of puzzlement. Using the notion of reduction in a familiar loose way, we can say that the phenomena of liquidity reduce without remainder to shape-size-mass-charge-etc. phenomena — I’ll call these ‘P’ phenomena for short, and assume for now that they are, in themselves, utterly non-experiential phenomena. We can see that the phenomenon of liquidity arises naturally out of, is wholly dependent on, of types of emergence, see van Gulick (2001); see also Broad (1925) and McLaughlin (1992).

 I wouldn’t put it this way now. The notions of explicability and intelligibility are in origin epistemological, and are potentially misleading because the present claim is not epistemological. It is not, for example, touched by the reply that there is a sense in which all causal dependence relations, at least, are ultimately unintelligible to us, even those that seem most intuitively understandable. For although there is a sense in which this is true, in as much as all our explanations of concrete phenomena come to an end in things that are simply given, contingent, not further explicable, it has no bearing here. ‘Intelligible to God’ isn’t really an epistemological notion at all, it’s just a way of expressing the idea that there must be something about the nature of the emerged-from (and nothing else) in virtue of which the emerger emerges as it does and is what it is.

 You can get liquidity from non-liquid molecules as easily as you can get a cricket team from eleven things that are not cricket teams. In God’s physics, it would have to be just as plain how you get experiential phenomena from wholly non-experiential phenomena. But this is what boggles the human mind. We have, once again, no difficulty with the idea that liquid phenomena (which are wholly P phenomena) are emergent properties of wholly non-liquid phenomena (which are wholly P phenomena). But when we return to the case of experience, and look for an analogy of the right size or momentousness, as it were, it seems that we can’t make do with things like liquidity, where we move wholly within a completely conceptually homogeneous (nonheterogeneous) set of notions. We need an analogy on a wholly different scale if we are to get any imaginative grip on the supposed move from the non-experiential to the experiential.

 What might be an analogy of the right size? Suppose someone — I will call him pseudo-Boscovich, at the risk of offending historians of science — proposes that all ultimates, all real, concrete ultimates, are, in truth, wholly unextended entities: that this is the truth about their being; that there is no sense in which they themselves are extended; that they are real concrete entities, but are none the less true-mathematicalpoint entities. And suppose pseudo-Boscovich goes on to say that when collections of these entities stand in certain (real, concrete, natural) relations, they give rise to or constitute truly, genuinely extended concrete entities; real, concrete extension being in this sense an emergent property of phenomena that are, although by hypothesis real and concrete, wholly unextended.

 Well, I think this suggestion should be rejected as absurd. But the suggestion that when non-experiential phenomena stand in certain (real, natural, concrete non-experiential) relations they ipso facto instantiate or constitute experiential phenomena, experience being an emergent property of wholly and utterly non-experiential phenomena, seems exactly on a par. That’s why I offer unextended-to-extended emergence as an analogy, a destructive analogy that proposes something impossible and thereby challenges the possibility of the thing it is offered as an analogy for. You can (to use the letter favoured by the German idealists when either stating or rejecting the law of noncontradiction) get A from non-A for some substitutions for A, such as liquidity, but not all.

 —My poor friend. The idea that collections of concrete entities that are truly, genuinely unextended can give rise to or constitute concrete entities that are truly, genuinely extended is actually scientific orthodoxy, on one widely received view ofwhat ultimates are. It’s an excellent candidate for being an analogy of the right size.

 But this won’t do. It won’t do when one is being metaphysically straight, not metaphysically instrumentalist, or positivist, or operationalist, or phenomenalist, or radical-empiricist, or verificationist, or neoverificationist or otherwise anti-realist or Protagorean (alas for the twentieth century, in which all these epistemological notions somehow got metaphysicalized). If one is being metaphysically straight, the intuition that nothing (concrete, spatio-temporal) can exist at a mathematical point, because there just isn’t any room, is rock solid. Itmay be added that anything that has, or is well understood as, a field, or that has any sort of attractive or repulsive being or energy, or any area of influence or influencability, ipso facto has extension—extension is part of its being — and that although there are plenty of ultimates that have no charge in what physicists call ‘the standardmodel’, there are I believe none that are not associated with a field. So if the idea of unextended-to-extended emergence is offered as an analogy for non-experiential-to-experiential emergence, I don’t think it can help.

 I’ll take this a little further. Suppose someone proposes that there are real, concrete, intrinsically, irreducibly and wholly non-spatial phenomena (‘wholly non-S phenomena’), and that when they stand in certain wholly non-spatial relations they give rise to or constitute real, concrete, intrinsically and irreducibly spatial phenomena (‘S phenomena’), these being emergent features of wholly non-S phenomena. Those who claim to find no difficulty in the idea that genuinely unextended concrete entities can give rise to or constitute genuinely extended concrete entities may like to consider this case separately, because they presumably take it that their putativemathematical-point entities are at least spatial entities, at least in the sense of being spatially located. My hope is that even if they think they can make sense of the emergence of the extended from the unextended, they won’t think this about the more radical case of the emergence of the spatial from the non-spatial.

 But what do I know about this? Almost nothing. With this kind of speculation ‘we are got into fairy land’, as Hume says, or rather I am, and any impossibility claim on my part, or indeed anyone else’s, may seem rash. And some may now propose that the ‘Big Bang’ is precisely a case in which S phenomena are indeed emergent features of wholly non-S phenomena.

 Don’t believe it, I say, falling back on the argumentum a visceris. S phenomena, i.e. real, concrete, intrinsically and irreducibly spatial phenomena (bear in mind that we are seeking an analogy for experiential phenomena that we know to be real, concrete, intrinsically and irreducibly experiential) can’t be emergent properties of wholly non-S phenomena. This is a case where you can’t get A from non-A. The spatial/non-spatial case may look like an analogy of the right size for the experiential/non-experiential case, but all it turns up, I suggest, is impossibility. If there is any sense in which S phenomena can be said to emerge from wholly non-S phenomena, then they must fall back into the category of mere appearance, and they are then (by definition, see above) not S phenomena at all. Experiential phenomena, however, cannot do this. They cannot be mere appearance, if only because all appearance depends on their existence. If it were to turn out that real S phenomena can after all emerge from wholly non-S phenomena, all that would follow would be that the spatial case did not after all constitute an analogy of the right size. The experiential/non-experiential divide, assuming that it exists at all, is the most fundamental divide in nature (the onlyway it can fail to exist is for there to be nothing non-experiential in nature).

 THE CLAIM, AT LEAST, IS PLAIN, AND I’LLREPEAT IT. IF IT REALLY IS TRUE THAT Y IS EMERGENT FROM X THEN IT MUST BE THE CASE THAT Y IS IN SOME SENSE WHOLLY DEPENDENT ON X AND X ALONE, SO THAT ALL FEATURES Of Y trace intelligibly back to x (where ‘intelligible’ is a metaphysical rather than an epistemic notion). Emergence can’t be brute. It is built into the heart of the notion of emergence that emergence cannot be brute in the sense of there being absolutely no reason in the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is (so that it is unintelligible even to God). For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.

 I’m prepared to allow for argument that an ultimate’s possession of its fundamental properties could be brute in the sense of there being no reason for it in the nature of things, so long as it is agreed that emergence cannot be brute. One problem is that brute emergence is by definition a miracle every time it occurs, for it is true by hypothesis that in brute emergence there is absolutely nothing about X, the emergedfrom, in virtue of which Y, the emerger, emerges from it. This means that it is also a contradiction in terms, given the standard assumption that the emergence of Y from X entails the ‘supervenience’ of Y on X, because it then turns out to be a strictly lawlike miracle. But a miracle is by definition a violation of a law of nature! If someone says he chooses to use the word ‘emergence’ in such a way that the notion of brute emergence is not incoherent, I will know that he is a member of the Humpty Dumpty army and be very careful with him.

So if new synergies are producing wholes greater than the sum of the parts, where are these new wholes comming from?

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas–thanks for this excellent question. I think Strawson's argument is good but may be countered by another argument that leads us back to “not one, not two” with a firmer grip on why it may be the best way to describe “reality” and the origin and nature of “what is.”

Strawson summarizes his claim this way:

THE CLAIM, AT LEAST, IS PLAIN, AND I’LLREPEAT IT. IF IT REALLY IS TRUE THAT Y IS EMERGENT FROM X THEN IT MUST BE THE CASE THAT Y IS IN SOME SENSE WHOLLY DEPENDENT ON X AND X ALONE, SO THAT ALL FEATURES Of Y trace intelligibly back to x

Derrida would agree with him insofar that if X emerges out of Y then there must be a significant trace of Y already in X. This accords with Derrida's claim that there is no “absolute other” because if there were such a thing it would have no contact whatever with what is not other and therefore could never become intelligibly aware to or connected with what is not other. For all practical purposes it would not exist.

So Derrida argues, to use Strawson's letters, that X does not emerge out of Y nor does Y emerge out of X. Both X and Y are co-originary and co-emergent, yet both are already contaminated one by the other (yet one cannot be reduced to the other). And together they produce a non-monistic “whole” (of interconnectedness and dependency that is greater than what could be generated by either alone). This reasoning may seem paradoxical but we are forced to it for the following reason:

If everything is really of one essence, what “cause,” “motivation,” or “impetus” results in the “one” differentiating itself (i.e., for the one to become many). Why would there be anything like change, motion, transformation, etc.? Why wouldn't the “one” simply exist in and of itself, without change, without time? In order to account for anything like these Strawson must assert that “change” or “emerging” is an essential property of the “one.” But by doing so he attributes to the “one” a property that he has no justification for adding (other than the need to account for change). He appears to attribute this property to the “one” for the sake of the convenience of his monistic theory.

To summarize: strict monism does not account for change and strict dualism does not account for any way by which the “two” could ever meet and interact. Thus, we are left with the paradox of “not one, not two” which may, perhaps no less paradoxically also be understood as “both one and two.”

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi Des,

I don't agree with Strawson, but I don't follow your logic either.  Perhaps I just don't know Derrida well enough, but it sounds to me that he isn't really saying anything, that his conclusion is arbitrary.  It seems to me that he is saying, “that's just the way it is.”  So no matter what phenomena arises, the same will necessarily be true – it's all co-emergent, how could it be otherwise?

I'm sure his reasoning is more sophisticated than that, but I'm just not getting it.  Here's the problem as I see it:

If Y is truly an emergent property of X, then even if we knew all the facts and laws about X, then nothing about X could tell us that Y would emerge.  (The argument that X does predict Y, but we just don't know how, is reductionism.)  But if Y has not evolved yet, there's no sense that Y can be said to be co-dependant on X, unless one insists that Y already exists somewhere, or somehow, as a yet unmanifest potential.  This could entail a sort of involutionary logic, where all emergent properties are a sort of recovery.  Morphic resonance could then be invoked to explain the law-like nature of the emergence, e.g. X can in theory lead to multiple forms of Y– Y1, Y2, Y3, etc–but when one of these randomly gets selected for enough times (Y2, let's say) and then we start to always see Y2 emerge, so assume it's a fixed law.

For the record, although my mind is not made up yet, I do lean towards emergence.  Perhaps I'm just looking at this from ore of a nuts and bolts angle.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Back at you, again it's unquestionably a difficult topic but here's how I would respond to what you say here:

Infimitas: I don't agree with Strawson, but I don't follow your logic either.  Perhaps I just don't know Derrida well enough, but it sounds to me that he isn't really saying anything, that his conclusion is arbitrary.  It seems to me that he is saying, “that's just the way it is.”  So no matter what phenomena arises, the same will necessarily be true – it's all co-emergent, how could it be otherwise?

But Derrida has a least given reasons for why the co-emergent theme is the best choice among possible ontological options. Again, strict monism shuts off the possibility for change (introducing notions like “morphic resonance” to account for change is like introducing magic; even fractal geometries and Mandelbrot sets are generated by the introduction of a variable that then generates a spinning interdependence. Z=Z(Z)+C where C is a constant and Z squares itself. This produces an “iterability”–with each iteration we create a new Z that is equal to the old Z squared plus the constant C (indicated by a different symbol than the = sign but I can't find it right now). So the value of Z keeps changing. This formula creates iterations that are similar but not identical–spinning into infinite complexity. But we don't get to this infinite diversity and complexity (which resembles organic forms) without the addition of the variable Z which is not simply a function of or extension of C. C and Z are different and their co-emergence in the “whole” that becomes the fractal design is a function of that irreducible difference–which continues to manifest its trace (otherness) everywhere in the fractal.


Infimitas: But if Y has not evolved yet, there's no sense that Y can be said to be co-dependant on X, unless one insists that Y already exists somewhere, or somehow, as a yet unmanifest potential. 

Yes, “unless one insists that Y already exists somewhere, or somehow”–Y does already exist and has always already existed (where here we are thinking of X and Y as analogous to, say, yin and yang. And, yes, also as “unmanifest potential”–which Derrida characterizes as the “yet to come” aspect of the “other”–but which is also an aspect of both yin and yang as one is the “other” to the other.

Infimitas: For the record, although my mind is not made up yet…

Good. Don't ever make up you mind about anything. (And that, by the way, does not preclude action–it only makes it a little more hairy!)

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi, Greg,

I appreciate your highlighting both my blog entry as well as the excerpt by Anne Klein that I had posted last week.  I am in essential agreement with all of the points you have made in response to my blog: that the position being described is not compatible with metaphysical realism; that it necessitates our holding conventional truth claims provisionally; and that there may at times be an experiential foregrounding of subject over object, or vice versa, but ultimately one cannot be reduced to the other.

A potential difference from what you are proposing (I believe it is a real difference from postmodernism) is that Buddhism allows for the category of “ultimate truth” – this truth being unconditioned emptiness.  This is related to Klein's argument in the excerpt above, so perhaps we can discuss this in that context at some point.

Your analysis of Strawson's argument was quite consonant with a Middle Way approach.  If something is inherently self-existent (existing without dependence on anything else, wholly self-sufficient and self-contained), then what reason is there for it to change?  If cause and effect are “one,” what sense is there in talking about cause and effect?  If cause and effect are wholly different, then cause and effect also breaks down, because if one thing can give rise to something completely different from itself, then anything could give rise to anything.

This line of reasoning leads ultimately to the Buddhist notion of co-dependent origination and non-foundationalism, e.g., emptiness.  But in some Buddhist schools, while the notion of a single unifying substance is rejected, they will nevertheless describe things as being of “one taste” – that of the emptiness of inherent self-existence.  Here, what is meant is not just the conceptual realization of emptiness, but the union of ontological and cognitive nondualism  that Klein describes.

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S.  I expect you already realize this, but just to be clear:  I am not trying to argue here that your synergist spirituality model needs to incorporate these Buddhist perspectives; I am just recommending them for consideration, given the consonance between other aspects of these visions.

P.P.S.  As I mentioned elsewhere, I believe, one Tibetan school (a stream in the Tibetan Bon Dzogchen lineage) holds to a similar vision, but does not employ the absolute vs. relative truth distinctions you find in other Buddhist schools.  Rather it speaks in terms of an unbounded wholeness which is indeterminate, taking multiplicity not as a contradiction to wholeness but as “evidence” for it (where the not-one-not-two-ness of phenomena suggest inseparability without positing an underlying substantial basis).

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

I’m still trying to understand the particular Buddhist school(s) Balder discusses, how their notion of an ontological “ultimate truth” is accessed directly through nonconceptual awareness. So perhaps framing it within this thread’s premises might help? I’ll have to do this piecemeal, as time is limited this morning.

1) Synergism is the natural interaction of two or more agents or forces whereby their combined effects produce wholes greater than the sum of their parts.

2) Wholes follow the principle of “quasi-transcendence,” never yielding one transcendental whole.

I’ll use Balder’s latest post of 8:44 am on 4/4/08:

“A potential difference from what you are proposing (I believe it is a real difference from postmodernism) is that Buddhism allows for the category of “ultimate truth” – this truth being unconditioned emptiness.

“This line of reasoning leads ultimately to the Buddhist notion of co-dependent origination and non-foundationalism, e.g., emptiness. But in some Buddhist schools, while the notion of a single unifying substance is rejected, they will nevertheless describe things as being of “one taste” – that of the emptiness of inherent self-existence. Here, what is meant is not just the conceptual realization of emptiness, but the union of ontological and cognitive nondualism that Klein describes.”

So could we say that conceptual understanding of (epistemological) and nonconceptual direct perception of (ontological) the nondual is a sort of interaction of binary parts whose whole (unbounded wholeness) is greater than the sum of its parts? And that whole is not a “single unifying substance” but more of a “quasi-transcendence?”

Somehow I don’t think Gregory and Balder, while having some shared, similar premises, are completely on the same page. For Balder continues to see the difference as one of a Buddhist “ultimate truth” in the form of “unconditioned emptiness.” So it would seem that this emptiness is not part of the binary relation of conceptual and nonconceptual nonduality but is a “whole” beyond that relation? I continue to ask because I continue to fail to understand this.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

I also found some similarities to what Gregory is saying here from my post of 3/10/08, 9:52 pm in the Derrida thread, quoting Bortoft. I'll re-post some highlights here:

We cannot know the whole in the way in which we know things because we cannot recognize the whole as a thing.

Awareness is occupied with things. The whole is absent to awareness because it is not a thing among things.

We cannot separate part and whole into disjointed positions, for they are not two as in common arithmetic. The arithmetic of the whole is not numerical. We do not have part and whole, though the number category of ordinary language will always make it seem so. If we do not separate part and whole into two, we appear to have an alternative of moving in a single direction, either from part to whole or from whole to part. If we start from this position, we must at least insist on moving in both directions at once, so that we have neither the resultant whole as a sum nor the transcendental whole as a dominant authority, but the emergent whole that comes forth into its parts. The character of this emergence is the “unfolding of enfolding,” so that the parts are the place of the whole where it bodies forth into presence. The whole imparts itself; it is accomplished through the parts it fulfills.

This process tells us something significant about the whole in a way that shows us the significance of the parts. If the whole presences within its parts, then a part is a place for the presencing of the whole. If a part is to be an arena in which the whole can be present, it cannot be “any old thing.” Rather, a part is special and not accidental, since it must be such as to let the whole come into presence. This speacialty of the part is particularly important because it shows us the way to the whole. It clearly indicates that the way to the whole is into and through the parts. It is not to be encountered by stepping back to take an overview, for it is not over and above the parts, as if it were some superior, all-encompassing entity. The whole is to be encountered by stepping right into the parts. This is how we enter into the nesting of the whole, and thus move into the whole as we pass through the parts….

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hey Greg,

… strict monism shuts off the possibility for change (introducing notions like “morphic resonance” to account for change is like introducing magic …

… even fractal geometries and Mandelbrot sets are generated by the introduction of a variable that then generates a spinning interdependence. Z=Z(Z)+C where C is a constant and Z squares itself. This produces an “iterability”–with each iteration we create a new Z that is equal to the old Z squared plus the constant C (indicated by a different symbol than the = sign but I can't find it right now). So the value of Z keeps changing. This formula creates iterations that are similar but not identical–spinning into infinite complexity. But we don't get to this infinite diversity and complexity (which resembles organic forms) without the addition of the variable Z which is not simply a function of or extension of C. C and Z are different and their co-emergence in the “whole” that becomes the fractal design is a function of that irreducible difference–which continues to manifest its trace (otherness) everywhere in the fractal.

Yes, “unless one insists that Y already exists somewhere, or somehow”–Y does already exist and has always already existed (where here we are thinking of X and Y as analogous to, say, yin and yang. And, yes, also as “unmanifest potential”–which Derrida characterizes as the “yet to come” aspect of the “other”–but which is also an aspect of both yin and yang as one is the “other” to the other

Good. Don't ever make up you mind about anything….

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas—a few quick things,

Regarding morphic resonance I was responding perhaps too quickly to your comment:

Morphic resonance could then be invoked to explain the law-like nature of the emergence, e.g. X can in theory lead to multiple forms of Y– Y1, Y2, Y3, etc–but when one of these randomly gets selected for enough times (Y2, let's say) and then we start to always see Y2 emerge, so assume it's a fixed law.

I don't think morphic resonance can be used to explain emergence; it can be used to explain repetition of the same but not repetition of the same with a difference (which is what we manifestly have in nature). But this is just my rather unstudied opinion and we should not allow the subject of the details of morphic resonance to side track us from the larger topic (unless it turns out to be a particularly exemplary instance of part of what you are explaining).

I feel similarly about my introducing fractal geometry. I thought it might be a way of illustrating my point but I think it only succeeds, at the moment, in muddying the waters. I do believe the subject is worth exploring in this context but my expertise in it is not great enough for me to argue or explain competently enough to proceed with it as a paradigm point of illustration.

But you move on to the following interesting comment:

I didn't mean a horizontal (co)dichotomy like yin and yang, but something like Ken Wilber's evolutionary holarchy or Michael Murphy's evolutionary panentheism – a heirarchy of emerence, like neoplatonism only evolutionary in nature.  Say, a chain of something like matter to body to mind to spirit exists, but only as unmanifest potential.

Deconstruction specifically targets the mistaken (in its view) transformation of horizontal dichotomies into vertical dichotomies. Derrida believed that the entire tradition of metaphysics was a history of the incorrect privileging of one side of certain ontological oppositional tensions over another (e.g., mind over body, male over female, presence over absence, essence over accident, etc.). It's not that in given cases there isn't a weighting or dominance of one over the other but that in the general system of “life” or “emergence” each side is as essential as the other in the play that generates “what is.”

The essential ontological role of these elements should not be confused, however, with “levels” or degrees of sophistication (complexity) of awareness. It might be possible to say, for example, that all emergence in the cosmos is the result of the play of yin and yang. What we think of as “evolution” of life is really just endless transformation and adaptability to changing environmnents. We appear to be superior to many species but dinosaurs were around a lot longer than humans have been. As far as adaptability goes viruses have it all over humans. We are a highly specialized life form but we are only “superior” given certain judging criteria. How convenient that we are the ones to select those criteria when making such judgments! All judgments of vertical emergence are not ontologically relevant but only axiologically relevant given human values and assumptions about what is “life enhancing.” But levels of awareness need not imply that spirit is superior, say, to body. Even Wilber avoids this claim while insisting that the two are in some sense inseparable on the path to higher levels of awareness.

But even the “evolution” of awareness is a tricky business. Wilber's “transcend and include,” as David has pointed out to me, must be understood (as Derrida would have it too) as “transcend and include/exclude.” Every “transcending” move leaves behind something of value which means that every mode of awareness has benefits and drawbacks and is susceptible to different hierarchical placement depending on the frame of human values through which it is evaluated. Long story short: vertical dichotomies of any “fixed” nature are problematic and open to critique from many angles. So too, then, is the notion of “emergence” when understood from a hierarchical evolutionary perspective.

Given the above line of thinking, the placement of the notion of “emptiness” becomes interesting. But my time is out and I have to save that for later.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Edward: So could we say that conceptual understanding of (epistemological) and
nonconceptual direct perception of (ontological) the nondual is a sort
of interaction of binary parts whose whole (unbounded wholeness) is
greater than the sum of its parts? And that whole is not a “single
unifying substance” but more of a “quasi-transcendence?”

Actually, I think this may be a good way of putting it. A certain achieved harmony of conceptual understanding (through rational inquiry) and nonconceptual experience (through meditation, trance work, or physical exertion or whatever) might lead to a sense of breakthrough overcoming or “quasi-transcendence” (not pure transcendence because it is not a full merging or unity of the conceptual and nonconceptual nor the part and “the whole” –but rather, the part and a whole, a transcendence).

Edward: Somehow I don’t think Gregory and Balder, while having some shared, similar premises, are completely on the same page. For Balder continues to see the difference as one of a Buddhist “ultimate truth” in the form of “unconditioned emptiness.” So it would seem that this emptiness is not part of the binary relation of conceptual and nonconceptual nonduality but is a “whole” beyond that relation? I continue to ask because I continue to fail to understand this.

In sorting this out I wonder if it works to suggest a parallelism between conditioned/unconditioned, manifest/unmanifest, and deconstructable/undeconstructable. Here the undeconstructable is the alterity of the other and the “silence” of the “yet to come.” The “yet to come” is a kind of unconditioned emptiness, but not an absolute emptiness in that its “emptiness” or “silence” is merely the gap between its having not yet come and its coming, its having not yet spoken and its speaking. The undeconstructable is what splits and divides the present, but without the present into which to pour itself the undeconstructable would not be “emptiness” but “nothing.” The binary present/future is necessary and yet it forms a seamless blend capable of irruptive disturbance and unpredictability. Again I see the applicability of “not one, not two.”

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Some of the topics here are being discussed in a side tangent on ”the end of enlightenment” thread in the open forum. See particularly yesterday's and today's posts on “On Madhyamika method” and “on nonconceptual modes.” As a tangent they are buried about midway through the thread, not at the end of it. The nonconceptual emptiness that Balder is advocating via Buddhism is not the same as the undeconstructable in Derrida.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi Greg,

Deconstruction specifically targets the mistaken (in its view) transformation of horizontal dichotomies into vertical dichotomies. Derrida believed that the entire tradition of metaphysics was a history of the incorrect privileging of one side of certain ontological oppositional tensions over another (e.g., mind over body, male over female, presence over absence, essence over accident, etc.). It's not that in given cases there isn't a weighting or dominance of one over the other but that in the general system of “life” or “emergence” each side is as essential as the other in the play that generates “what is.”

Wilber's “transcend and include,” as David has pointed out to me, must be understood (as Derrida would have it too) as “transcend and include/exclude.”

Every “transcending” move leaves behind something of value which means that every mode of awareness has benefits and drawbacks and is susceptible to different hierarchical placement depending on the frame of human values through which it is evaluated. Long story short: vertical dichotomies of any “fixed” nature are problematic and open to critique from many angles. So too, then, is the notion of “emergence” when understood from a hierarchical evolutionary perspective.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas: The job of philosophy is to analyse all those and other metaphysical
positions and see which ones, if any, are the most realistic, and which
ones have fatal flaws.  (A good metaphysics must be informed by the
best empirical sciences–soft and hard–but empiricism alone does not
reveal the “correct” metaphysics – for that we have no choice but to
invoke philosophy.)

Yes, we agree here.

Infimitas: So we all have a metaphysics, though arguably some may be better or
more complete than others.  In my view, it's a terrible mistake to
assume that our perspective is true or just normal or neutral, and not
recogniise that it is, in fact, a metaphysics.  Derrida isn't making
this mistake, is he?  I assume he isn't, but I don't know his work well
enough to say.

No. Derrida believes and has stated in several places in his work that there is no escape from metaphysics. You pay your money and you take your choice, but you don't escape. That's why for him the use of a phrase such as “post-metaphysics” is misleading at best. Derrida didn't even like “postmodern” since he felt there was too much continuity with modernism to warrant that term.

Infimitas: Of course, you could argue that this is merely a structural heirarchy, not a value heirarchy.  True enough, but–and this is my second point–Derrida's argument seems to require the view that those structural stages ought to be valued equally, so that transcend and include (and negate and preserve) must neccessarily be both equally good and bad.  E.g. atoms and molecules are equal, so that what is gained by emergence of the molecule in the atoms transcendance is balanced by the atoms' negated qulities.  What possible justification does Derrida have for that belief, that all level are equal in value?  It seems to result in absurdities, like killing a giraffe is no worse than killing an ameba, because there's no legitimate way to use heirarchies of value.  Is there any way in Derrida's metaphysics to allow for, say, mammals to have more intrinsic value than single-celled organisms?  How does Derrida determine value?

Here yes, Derrida does not seem to believe in any version of a “naturally occuring” value hierarchy in evolutionary development. From the point of view of “nature,” one species is no more valuable than another. If nature gave a damn, so to speak, why would dinasaurs have gone extinct? Even when we approach this topic from the direction of increasing structural complexity, the theory of ecology has shown how dependent even the largest species are on the smallest micro species. Remove one species in the ecological linkage and the entire ecosystem may collapse or radically shift resulting in the deaths of certain species.

“Value” is strictly a human construct and has no relevance apart from human designs, desires, and projects. Nothing in nature has inherent value (as mother nature herself has indicated in the coming and going of species); or, put more positively, everything, every being, in nature has equal value in the ecosystem (especially as that system affects human well-being). In modifying our ecosystem we have (as yet) no comprehensive understanding of what we are doing or what long term damage we may be causing.

Since value is a human construct, modes of valuation will turn on the ways in which humans contextualize “life.” Even Wilber has admitted in his critique of the Great Chain of Being that matter and spirit are equal. The evolution of one parallels the evolution of the other. As matter becomes more complex, spirit becomes more complex. But I disagree with him here when he claims that the hierarchy of consciousness is in any sense ultimate or universal.

The development of consciousness is a specialization that gives up certain qualities as it takes on others. And there could be many ways of organizing its development hierarchically. Remember the rock group “devo”? They argued, half seriously, that human consciousness was devolving rather the evolving toward something higher. Some have made similar arguments with regard to the effects of media on the human mind–that we are in retrograde rather than moving higher. I don't agree with these views but they show how it is possible to recontextualize the Great Chain of Consciousness in differing ways. Think here also of Julian Janes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind. He's not so sure that the evolution of consciousness has taken the best turn. Everything is debatable here.

Conclusion: Vertical hierarchies or dichotomies are human constructions depending on relative modes of contextualization for their ranking choices. In nature, all such dichotomies are horizontal. Amebas are not inherently more valuable than giraffes–if we take nature as our guide.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Edward: that is the point of contention between Derrida and Buddhism, that one can have a final or direct, nonconceptual perception/experience/realization of anything, including emptiness. So of course Derrida doesn't go there. He does, however, posit an undeconstructable but it's not the same as a nonconceptual awareness of emptiness. 

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi, Gregory and Edward,

I believe this inquiry, as long and winding and scattered over a number of threads as it is, will nevertheless prove to be worthwhile, whatever tentative conclusions we may come to.  For me, at least, I have appreciated the opportunity to continue to explore these questions.

The question I'd like to raise right now – not just in relation to Derrida, but in relation to the Synergistic Spirituality his thought has inspired for you – is whether differance has, to use the Buddhist term, inherent self-existence.  Is it an absolute?  It seems as if it is being used as an absolute of some sort in these recent discussions.

As we discussed a few weeks back, if everything is divided by differance, if there are no self-existing essences to be found anywhere – if each pole on either side of a division is itself subject to division, and so on, without remainder – then this undercuts differance as well, for what then is it dividing?  If the elements on either side of a division are “empty,” so is the division itself.

I think this is what Klein is pointing at when she says that postmodern theory seems to allow for dependent origination without also allowing for emptiness.  The Buddhist analysis goes a little farther, as far as I'm aware, than the Taoist one does – the Taoist view still remains, in some sense, on the side of realism and essentialism, stopping short of the implications radical co-determination and interpenetration.

What do you think?

There is more I want to discuss, but I'll stop here for now.

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S.  The play of differance seems to imply infinite dispersion, the infinite play of differing/deferring, “all the way up, all the way down.”  Is this the case?  If so, then would it be fair, in your view, to also peak in more positive terms of infinite allowing, infinite accommodation?

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder,

You wrote:The Buddhist analysis goes a little farther, as far as I'm aware, than the Taoist one does – the Taoist view still remains, in some sense, on the side of realism and essentialism, stopping short of the implications radical co-determination and interpenetration.

so next time you will be aware—

“The one creates the two, the two create the 10,000 things,” or something to that effect.

You are right there is no “radical” co-determination or interpenetration in Taoism. But there is balanced co-determination and interpenetration. Nothing can be manifest except through the balanced co-existence and balanced co-operation of yin and yang; yin within yang, yang within yin. And since the two interpenetrate and infuse all, whether conceptual or material or of unknown nature, then all origination is dependent.Good god, that one comes right off the top and one did not have to check in to the stupa to learn it. All one had to do was clear the mind and look out the window for five minutes. I suspect what disturbed your otherwise often insightful awareness here was that Taoism, during the eras I have studied, was worldly and during that same time Buddhism was monastic. It is thus through the comprehension of the procession of yin and yang that the Taoist masters were able to manifest within the various empires of the time; alchemy/chemistry, metallurgy, diplomacy, military strategy, and the longest existing, effective, medical modality in the world. According to the Saying of Ancestor Lu (Lu Dung Bin) the Buddhists of his time were stuck in the imbalance of excess yin (while most of the emperors were stuck in the imbalance of excess yang) and this “dwelling in emptiness” became a nihilistic obstacle  to realization.

Someone mentioned the other day on these boards that the Taoist definition of emptiness had to do with the simplicity of life, etc. That may or may not be the case. But the Taoist word that matched then what Klein now writes of emptiness was “openness.”  It is the same thing with the difference that the Taoists were much more process oriented in perspective than in how they compared themselves to the Buddhists. This meant that while they considered themselves “realists” they did not consider the 10,000 Things to be “real.” How can things be “real” when everything is in constant flux? There are no essentials. There is one’s “life,” (otherwise one wouldn’t be wherever one was) but it was unconditioned by any “real” essence—all conditioning was false. And there was the “essence” of the moment, the transitory meaning of that produced by the constant interplay of yin and yang. If one dwelled in perfect unconditioned openness—being one with the tao—then one could stand aloof of yin and yang and comprehend the “essence” of what the two produced at that given moment and deal effectively with it. From what I understand of the small piece of Taoist lore that I have studied the question of whether or how much one’s consciousness co-determined “reality” was irrelevant and to make it relevant would be an excessively yin obstruction. The Taoists at that time were trained and trained themselves to comprehend the flow of energies that culminated in the conscious moment, realize how those flows interpenetrate themselves and exercise enough of their own “reality” to be free and act in an appropriate manner. Buddhists sometimes thought Taoists tended to be amoral and no doubt some of them were.

It has been at least 10 years since I paid any attention to Taoism so I might have forgotten much and I know I left a lot out. But the basic point is that in the small area of which you wrote the Buddhists and the Taoists were on a par with one another.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Thank you for that, Steven.  I was aware that Taoism was thoroughly process oriented, but I wasn't aware of the use of the word “openness” in Taoist thought.  I was actually going to be writing about that next, since that word is used in Dzogchen thought (also very process oriented); that's what I was getting at in my last post with my questions about allowingness and accommodation. 

However, the sentence that starts with the “one” at the beginning still seems to be supporting a sort of substantialism that Buddhism undercuts.  But it's been many years since I read any Taoist books, so I'm a bit rusty in the partikyoolers.

I don't have any problem with worldliness, and I don't fault Taoism for it.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

It is also interesting that Taoism was a significant influence on Chan and Zen Buddhism, particulary meditation practice. For example see ”History of Ch'an Buddhism previous to the time of Hui-neng” and ”Chuang-Tzu and the Chinese ancestry of Ch'an Buddhism.”

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder,

I too have problems reconciling this “one” business with what else I understand about Taoism. But there are so many technical problems standing between us and resolution, such as:

1. Taoism incorporates a vast array of spiritual practices that range from Religious Taosim (the ritualistic, go to temple on Sunday and honor the ancestors and the denizens of the 9^th Heaven, kind of thing) to physical alchemy (healing, Tai Chi, tantra) to spiritual alchemy (the subtle meditative development of immortality).

2. Join this with the fact that the Tao te Ching, from which that “one” paraphrase was lifted, could easily have been a scatter-gun compendium of folk wisdom with origins in oral traditions that was finally anthologized by one or several or many into a somewhat coherent volume that has been modified, mis-translated, edited, etc. The “one” passage could have been originally directed only at the unsophisticated practitioners of the religious schools as a teaching expedient because it would have been ignored as being too literalist by the spiritual alchemists.(Playing this line of thought out to its reasonable conclusion: there is a possibility that the most adept practitioners of Spiritual Alchemy might consider the entire Taoist Canon to be a falsely literalist teaching expedient even with its notorious codes.)

3. In light of the coding process the “one” which was obviously a synonym for the Tao, might have been a code word for that perpetually changing and elusive, infinitely faceted, category of  “That which I do not know.” (The interpenetrated co-determinator of “That which I know”….Derrida’s “other” ??)  Could this perspective nudge “one” down toward what Klein writes of emptiness? I am looking at this possibility because Liu I-Ming, who was both a Buddhist and Taoist master, wrote a very sophisticated and maddeningly coded commentary of the I Ching that described the “Darkness” of the #4 hexigram as the unknowable, undefinable darkness (that wasn’t dark, of course) that was the source (but not the source) of all wisdom if it was cultivated by innocence (a state that could only be achieved by not being innocent—anything to destroy the illusion of essence) which was the code word for unconditioned openness or a different perspective on the absolutely recondit aspect of the Mind of Tao…take your pick, it is all a dance.

And it all gets down to the place where one could refine away all possibilities in regard to “one” and still maintain it was substantialist in as much as it had a word and a calligraphic character associated with it. Which leads me to the conversation M and I had over our coffee this morning in which we pooled her knowledge of Buddhism and my understanding of Taoism and concluded that someone like Lu Dung Bin or Liu I-Ming could dismiss Klein's “emptiness” as essentialist and substantialist (not open) if only because she could write it’s name and a simple sentence on its purported nature.  But at this point one remembers that according to history the two teachings were rivals occasionally for political and cultural power and that, for me, makes it all suspect. Maybe I am being too reductionist but I will only grant that someone claiming to represent these teachings sprinkled signs across a page or a screen that somehow conditions, to some unknown extent, my awareness and sensibilities. I will give them (and all other sign sowers) no more value then that and suggest you could do the same with the signs I just scattered and I would take no offense. (Smiley)

Only when everything is all stripped away can one be truely effective. Consider the differences too, in light of the word “effective,”  that Taoism had its roots in very prgmatic shamanism while Buddhism had its roots in…what?…redemptive mysticism? (I don't know, I always found it a little off-putting and never strayed there very far or long.)

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Re: 3. Darkness. There are different types of darkness. Was the master referring too, the darkness of a sun without planets in orbit? That is, there would be no objects to reflect the light (awareness) back to it?

Which leads me to the conversation M and I had over our coffee this morning in which we pooled her knowledge of Buddhism and my understanding of Taoism and concluded that someone like Lu Dung Bin or Liu I-Ming could dismiss Klein's “emptiness” as essentialist and substantialist (not open) if only because she could write it's name and a simple sentence on its purported nature. 

:) Properly sunyata is a signifier with no referent.

Only when everything is all stripped away can one be truely effective.

Yeah, that's emptiness. BTW, “everything is all stripped away” is the import of renunciation in Buddhism.

Consider the differences too, in light of the word “effective,”  that Taoism had its roots in very prgmatic shamanism while Buddhism had its roots in…what?…redemptive mysticism? (I don't know, I always found it a little off-putting and never strayed there very far or long.)

I'm reminded of a Taoist priest's reply when asked the difference between Buddhism and Taoism, “the color of the robes”. Buddha shamanesquely was born, awakened, taught, lived and died outdoors.


love

e

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi, Greg,

This post is a continuation from my previous one.  I wanted to ask you something about your understanding of hierarchical development (based in part on a recent response of yours to Infimitas).  I appreciate the point you make, a la Derrida, that developmental hierarchies necessarily involve some exclusion, some loss, as well as some gain, and that there may be a number of possible developmental trajectories – that we cannot say with certainty that “development” lies only in a particular direction.  Although I wasn't framing things in exactly these terms, this is what I was getting at last year when I questioned, on the I-I forum, the idea that the Spiral Dynamics path is inevitable.  My observation at the time was that certain v-Memes, especially as they are often described in Integral literature, appear to be entangled with various arbitrary historical and cultural trends, and therefore we shouldn't consider them to represent an “inevitable” trajectory – especially the more recent ones.

But acknowledging that – acknowledging that there is a degree of openness in how any particular hierarchical trajectory will unfold – I still think it is legitimate to make qualitative distinctions between levels of any given trajectory…distinctions which are subjective and context-dependent, of course, but not without objective, quasi-universal elements as well.  I am thinking here of Robert Kegan's Neo-Piagetian model of cognitive and moral development, for instance, which is understood in terms of unfolding subject-object negotiations and an increasing capacity to take multiple perspectives.  The distinctions between levels here can't be understood merely horizontally, because the levels (of meaning- and perspective-space) build on each other.  Certain perspectives and forms of reasoning simply aren't possible without prior subject-object negotiations having been made, without certain capacities having been developed.

In my view, while it makes sense still to hold these models provisionally – understanding there may be other ways the mind may “unfold” meaning spaces, and leaving room open for other contextual arisings – I think it is legitimate also to speak of these developmental trajectories in objective (or quasi-objective) terms, if these trajectories are, in fact, what we observe emerging cross-culturally, for whatever reasons.  And, it appears we can identify developmental patterns of structural complexification that appear to show up fairly regularly in many different, unrelated human communities.  A Synergistic Spirituality, at the level at which you are communicating it, won't make a lot of sense to folks in any of these communities until they have developed a certain degree of cognitive perspective-taking capacity.

Would you agree with this?  Or do you have a different take on it?  I do believe you have offered this approach as an improvement on prior monistic and universalist models – on moral, cognitive, and communicative grounds.

Best wishes,

Balder

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: The question I'd like to raise right now – not just in relation to Derrida, but in relation to the Synergistic Spirituality his thought has inspired for you – is whether differance has, to use the Buddhist term, inherent self-existence.  Is it an absolute?  It seems as if it is being used as an absolute of some sort in these recent discussions.

No–I don't believe differance should be regarded as an absolute in any sense consistent with “inherent self-existence.” Differance is like the wedge that times drives within the same to make the same nonidentical with itself. I know saying it this way makes it appear as if, cosmologically speaking, there was once “one” that, with time, differentiated itself into the many determined forms. But we still have to ask where did “time” come from? Time and space are the result of movement and movement occurs only through the tension brought about by “two.” Time is like the fold, say, between yin and yang. It emerges with the co-emerging of the two, which are nevertheless “one” in their mutual dependence. (Here I use “yin” and “yang” only as general marks for an originary oppositional pair; more on Taoism to come!). Differance is the rupture of continuity/discontinuity and as such does not function, I believe, as a philosophical or ontological absolute.

Balder: As we discussed a few weeks back, if everything is divided by differance, if there are no self-existing essences to be found anywhere – if each pole on either side of a division is itself subject to division, and so on, without remainder – then this undercuts differance as well, for what then is it dividing?  If the elements on either side of a division are “empty,” so is the division itself.

This is like Zeno's famous paradox where we can't get from point A to point B because the distance between them is infinitely divisible (by half, by half, by half, etc.). It also comes up with Nietzsche when he says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” If there are only interpretations, what are the interpretations interpretations of? There must be something there to interpret, no? It's also like the perfect vacuum where gravity still exists and through which light passes. As Einstein discovered, space is matter–in the sense of a “field” even in a vacuum. What appears to be nothing is really something, of a sort. I think the answer lies in something like the idea that in a world of motion there is and can be no essence. Everything is penetrated, divided by everything else.

Balder: I think this is what Klein is pointing at when she says that postmodern theory seems to allow for dependent origination without also allowing for emptiness.  The Buddhist analysis goes a little farther, as far as I'm aware, than the Taoist one does – the Taoist view still remains, in some sense, on the side of realism and essentialism, stopping short of the implications radical co-determination and interpenetration.

Here I agree with Nickeson. You may be selling Taoism a little short. I'm not very strong on Taoism so I'm glad Steven can provide more here (thanks for your posts on this!). What I have is only book learning, mainly from the text by N. J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism. According to him, early Taoism had something like the feel of the “not one, not two” nondualism we have been discussing in the context of Buddhism. But I have a sense that it may have been understood more along the lines of the kind of cosmology I am attributing to Derrida. Part of my basis for this comes from Girardot (although he does not mention Derrida) and from explanations such as this for the meaning of the yin/yang symbol:

A symbol that reflects the inescapably intertwined duality of all things in nature, a common theme in Taoism. No quality is independent of its opposite, nor so pure that it does not contain its opposite in a diminished form: these concepts are depicted by the vague division between black and white, the flowing boundary between the two, and the smaller circles within the larger regions.

This explanation gets across the main ideas of co-dependence (locked within “one” system), mutual irreducibility, and mutual contamination. The “one” system might be what is meant by the Tao. As Steven explains, these might have been “code” words for the mutually implicated tangle. At any rate, this sense of the yin/yang symbol is worth further pondering.

Balder: The play of differance seems to imply infinite dispersion, the infinite play of differing/deferring, “all the way up, all the way down.”  Is this the case?  If so, then would it be fair, in your view, to also peak in more positive terms of infinite allowing, infinite accommodation?

I need more here. Not sure what you are getting at with “infinite allowing.”

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Greg:  I need more here. Not sure what you are getting at with “infinite allowing.”

In the Synergistic cosmology, is it legitimate to speak in terms of the infinite dispersion or “play” of differance? 

If so, if reality can be legitimately described in these terms, then the “yin” side of the infinite penetration of differance, is the infinite allowing or accommodation of dispersion:  an openness that “allows” for infinite play.

This is a move that TSK would make – though it would caution against thinking in terms of that space as a static container of some sort. 

Best wishes,

Balder

P.S.  In moving to a second level understanding of space – a move that grows out of a move away from object-orientation towards a more process view – TSK talks about existence in terms of space projecting space into space.  While recognizing we should be careful with analogies between very different systems, I am wondering if differance can be understood in these terms – as space-into-space.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: In my view, while it makes sense still to hold these models provisionally – understanding there may be other ways the mind may “unfold” meaning spaces, and leaving room open for other contextual arisings – I think it is legitimate also to speak of these developmental trajectories in objective (or quasi-objective) terms, if these trajectories are, in fact, what we observe emerging cross-culturally, for whatever reasons.  And, it appears we can identify developmental patterns of structural complexification that appear to show up fairly regularly in many different, unrelated human communities.  A Synergistic Spirituality, at the level at which you are communicating it, won't make a lot of sense to folks in any of these communities until they have developed a certain degree of cognitive perspective-taking capacity.

Yes, I agree with this way of putting it. My only objection comes when we begin thinking too much in the direction of fixed or natural vertical hierarchies or dichotomies. We need to understand orders of complexity and we need various rankings but these should be tools for understanding and inquiry and held as relevant to particular ways of contextualizing “life” and what is “life enhancing.” For example, if we are contextualizing what is “life enhancing for humans” in the long term this can be very different than when thinking in the short term! (both with regard to individuals and communities).

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi Greg,

… Derrida believes and has stated in several places in his work that there is no escape from metaphysics. You pay your money and you take your choice, but you don't escape. That's why for him the use of a phrase such as “post-metaphysics” is misleading at best.

Conclusion: Vertical hierarchies or dichotomies are human constructions depending on relative modes of contextualization for their ranking choices. In nature, all such dichotomies are horizontal. Amebas are not inherently more valuable than giraffes–if we take nature as our guide.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: In the Synergistic cosmology, is it legitimate to speak in terms of the infinite dispersion or “play” of differance?  If so, if reality can be legitimately described in these terms, then the “yin” side of the infinite penetration of differance, is the infinite allowing or accommodation of dispersion:  an openness that “allows” for infinite play.

Yes, I think I see what you are saying now. I think the following passage from Derrida speaks to that in a way I couldn't improve on:

I am tempted to regard justice as the best word, today, for what refuses to yield to deconstruction, that is to say for what sets deconstruction in motion, what justifies it. It is an affirmative experience of the coming of the other as other: better this should happen than the opposite… The openness of the future is worth more than this: that is the axiom of deconstruction–the basis on which it has always set itself in motion, and which links it, like the future itself, to otherness, to the priceless dignity of otherness, that is to say justice… It is the experience of the other as other, the fact that I permit the other to be other, which presupposes a gift without exchange, without reappropriation, without jurisdiction. (pp. 36-37 from “The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Radical Philosophy, Vol 68, 1994).

This affirmation and openness that is a “gift without exchange” seems very much in line with the “infinite allowing” and “accommodation of dispersion” you are suggesting.

Balder: In moving to a second level understanding of space – a move that grows out of a move away from object-orientation towards a more process view – TSK talks about existence in terms of space projecting space into space.  While recognizing we should be careful with analogies between very different systems, I am wondering if differance can be understood in these terms – as space-into-space.

Here, I'm skeptical of this way of speaking. “Space projecting space into space” seems too much in line with an infinite differentiating (projecting) of the same. I agree with Derrida on this issue and so will cite him again:

Could not this (active) movement of (production of) differance without origin be called simply, and without neographism, differentiation? Such a word, among other confusions, would have left open the possibility of an organic, original, and homogeneous unity that eventually would come to be divided, to receive difference as an event (p. 13, Margins of Philosophy).

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: In moving to a second level understanding of space - a move that grows out of a move away from object-orientation towards a more process view - TSK talks about existence in terms of space projecting space into space.  While recognizing we should be careful with analogies between very different systems, I am wondering if differance can be understood in these terms - as space-into-space.

Desilet:  Here, I'm skeptical of this way of speaking. “Space projecting space into space” seems too much in line with an infinite differentiating (projecting) of the same. I agree with Derrida on this issue and so will cite him again:

“Could not this (active) movement of (production of) differance without origin be called simply, and without neographism, differentiation? Such a word, among other confusions, would have left open the possibility of an organic, original, and homogeneous unity that eventually would come to be divided, to receive difference as an event” (p. 13, Margins of Philosophy).

I understand.  I think the TSK treatment of space is fairly subtle, and what is meant by it changes on different levels of analysis.  The use of Space on second and third levels (TSK often uses 3 levels) is not intended to refer either to a pre-existing “empty container” or to a “homogeneous unity that is later divided.”  One reason I asked about this TSK way of phrasing things is because differance is, in part, a “space activity”:  the infinite differing of differance, as in understand it, is an infinite opening of spaces.  Is that a fair way to put it?  And because there are no primordial, essential units or essences “untouched” by differance – because everything can be found to be already ruptured by it – you could say that everything we can point to arises or appears “between” this differing, with each momentary or apparent defining “boundary” itself another play of difference.  If you trace this cascading play of ungraspable differance – differing-into-differing, deferral-unto-defferal – a space-like quality arises, a sense of openness, bottomlessness.  Boundlessness within boundarying.

B.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas: I suspect that by “metaphysics”  Wilber has in mind the Great Chain theories prior to evolutionary science and “postmodern” philosophy.

Yes, you may be right about this in which case his use of “post-metaphysics” seems to make more sense. However, due to the fact that he addresses postmodern philosophers, including Derrida, he should then address the issue raised by Derrida that there is no escape from metaphysics and either re-define how he is using the term or show why he thinks it possible to escape to what he calls “post-metaphysics.” Without doing that he leaves many questions on the table and makes his position confusing.

Infimitas: The neo-Piagetian research that Balder refers to is in my oppinion true… at least in spirit, if not necessarily in all the details.  And I think a genuine post-whatever-we-call-it metaphysics has to make sense of this sort of unfolding.

Yes, I agree. I think this can be done by keeping “truth” provisional and by understanding that the hierarchies and rankings are within certain contexts that are at least provisionally circumscribed.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Gi Greg et al.

It [the paradox] also comes up with Nietzsche when he says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” If there are only interpretations, what are the interpretations interpretations of? There must be something there to interpret, no?

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas: Again, I think the only solution to this–if one is committed to nondualism–is to take Neitzshe literally at his word, perhaps even more literally than he intended.  That is to say that reality is only interpretation, but that there is only one interpreter, interpretting “himself” – interpretations that we erroneously attribute to individual minds or bodies, creating the ilusion of seperation, and insides and outsides, and seer and seen.  This does require that one accepts mystical experience though – the realisation that everything ultimtely arises out of an unqualifiable spirit or Godhead.  I'm beginning to think it is the only kind of ontology that works.  Is it compatible with Derrida though?

No, with this line of thinking you are slipping back into the very thing Nietzsche is critiquing–which is, like Derrida, the traditional dualisms as well as the notion of undivided Godhead. For clarity, Nietzsche's “will to power” is only an apparent monism in that “will to power” is a term that only characterizes the telos of the system, the mutually dependent play of active and reactive forces toward the dominance of one or the other (but never achieving fixed dominance or stasis).

Nietzsche says, “The 'true world' and the 'apparent world'–that means: the mendaciously invented world and reality.” This leads to the pointlessness of the antithesis between the true and apparent worlds. He says, “No shadow of a right remains here to speak even of appearance” (Will to Power, #461). The true world as pure presence and the apparent world as pure absence (or nothing) both explode in Nietzsche's deconstruction. But this leaves us with what Derrida lands on–which is the structure of the “trace.” Dualism does not collapse into oneness but instead collapses into the co-dependent, co-originary, interpenetration of presence and absence in the trace. The play of yin and yang, or for Nietzsche the play of active and reactive forces. This leads to the understanding of the “nondual” as in the expression “not one, not two”–not the nondual in the sense of homogeneous unity or monism.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: If you trace this cascading play of ungraspable differance – differing-into-differing, deferral-unto-defferal – a space-like quality arises, a sense of openness, bottomlessness.  Boundlessness within boundarying.

Yes, I think differance can be understood this way. In his essay “Differance” Derrida I believe even says as much. “Differing” and “defering” are meant to evoke space and time and somewhere Derrida describes the process as the “spatialization of time and the temporizing of space.” And of course, space and time imply motion and vice versa.

From what I've read many of the points in TSK seem consistent with a “synergist” orientation, although the use of the word “knowledge” seems a bit problematic in the sense of being used in many different ways. It's hard to tell what it may mean and it carries some baggage that might not be necessary. For example:

TSK relies on no higher authority, apart from knowl­edge itself. Within knowledge, there are no divi­sions, discriminations, or exclusions. The followers of any school or teaching can study TSK, drawing from it whatever benefit they can.

But how do we know what counts as “knowledge itself”? There are no “exclusions” to what counts as knowledge? No “descriminations”? This line of thinking opens the door to radical relativism and, I believe, differs from deconstruction in that sense. In deconstruction we are always making discriminations but are regarding these as unfixed and always open to review. And in this deconstructive frame “knowledge” must be understood in a very provisional sense–almost in the sense of the Socratic “true opinion” where “true” counts as “what currently operates as true.”

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

I have a dumb question.  What makes this synergist theory “spiritual?” If we're accepting that it doesn't side with the spirtual side of spiritual/mundane interaction, then how are we defining spirituality in this context? As a nondual metaphysics? Is that necessarily “spiritual?”

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Yes, “knowledge” is a bit wide open and could mean a lot of things.  Here, he is NOT saying that, in terms of meaning-making, no distinctions exist or that all propositional claims are equally valid.   He is using knowledge in a specialized sense – one that “arrives” after following through on the deconstruction of ordinary conceptions of knower and known, subject and object, etc, in relation to time and space.  You may still find it objectionable, but not for the reasons that you outlined above – because the sort of relativization or evisceration of conventional distinction-making is not what is intended.  I will return to this subject in another post, if you'd like to go into it … either in this thread or elsewhere if it is off track from where you'd like to head.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi Greg,

The play of yin and yang, or for Nietzsche the play of active and reactive forces. This leads to the understanding of the “nondual” as in the expression “not one, not two”–not the nondual in the sense of homogeneous unity or monism.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Edward: What makes this synergist theory “spiritual?” If we're accepting that it doesn't side with the spirtual side of spiritual/mundane interaction, then how are we defining spirituality in this context? As a nondual metaphysics? Is that necessarily “spiritual?”

In coming up with “synergist spirituality” I was simply substituting this phrase for “integral spirituality” or “integral post-metaphysical spirituality” or “post-metaphysical spirituality” or “postmodern spirituality”, etc. It just means looking at spiritual issues through a particular philosophical or cosmological lens.

For me the word “spiritual” evokes the kinds of deep life issues surrounding the structuring of ethics, morality, community (politics and issues of justice), meaning (as in clues about how to value one's own life and others), psychological health, family, education, and probably other things I'm currently forgetting. It's a word I would use instead of “philosophy” to indicate a belief orientation deep and fulfilling enough to replace what is usually called religious belief. I don't like the word “religion” because it denotes (for me) too much along the lines of worship and ritual practices associated with the worship of a diety or some other anthropomorphized entity. This points out a problem I have with popular forms of Buddhism in that so many dieties have been created to worship. I don't believe a mature spirituality needs any dieties. I think we would be better off if the concept of “worship” were replaced by reverent “affirmation” and “love of life.”

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: I will return to this subject in another post, if you'd like to go into
it … either in this thread or elsewhere if it is off track from where
you'd like to head.

Perhaps we can pursue this more later because TSK does seem interesting. But at the moment I'm feeling like we are gaining some ground on the question of the “nondual” and I'd like to try to get clearer on it. In that regard I'll turn to Infimitas' last post:

The Daodejing makes it clear that both can be known, though it's very brief, so perhaps I shold retract that and say one possibe interpretation of the text is that it says both can be known.  In any case, it also seems to suggest that both unmanifest and manifest are real, so that it doesn't collapsethe Tao into a crude form of adualistic monism where there is no actual duality.  This is why I think nondual might be better phrased “transdual.”  The illusion of seperateness should not be taken to mean that the manifest world does not exist, only that it is not what it appears to be (to some people).

The choice of “transdual” is interesting. I wonder what others think of it as a choice perhaps better than nondual, since “nondual,” as Edward and I have experienced in another forum and as we have seen here, corresponds with uses that, to me, seem sometimes contradictory and confusing with regard to separating it clearly from varieties of monism.

I know the waters may get muddied here since Infimitas raised the word “transdual” in the context of Taoism and I don't think we have broad agreement on whether Taoism qualifies as what we might here want to call a “synergist” or even “deconstructionist” orientation on the nondual understood as “not one, not two.” And since Taoist traditions and history are very complex we probably don't want to try to decide that issue right now. So by way of proceeding let me break it down this way and let's just look at the “logic” of this expression of the nondual.

it also seems to suggest that both unmanifest and manifest are real

Yes.

so that it doesn't collapse the Tao into a crude form of adualistic monism where there is no actual duality.

Yes.

This is why I think nondual might be better phrased “transdual.”

Perhaps. Let's think about this more.

The illusion of seperateness should not be taken to mean that the manifest world does not exist,

Yes, but to satisfy my “criteria” for the synergist nondual I would have to add that “separateness” can be no more an illusion (or as much of an illusion) as “unity.”

only that it [the manifest] is not what it appears to be

Yes, but I would add also that the manifest is both (in differing ways) what it appears to be but also not what it appears to be (in that it always “exceeds” itself or becomes more or other than itself through the pervasive operation of differance). This is the nature of “being” understood as the “trace.” (and also the nature of the “signifier” and the “signified”)

So, we begin here to trace out a “definition” of what I think we could call a synergist nondual (considering here also the term “transdual” as a possible substitute for “synergist nondual”). I'll try to summarize and clarify these and other “criteria” in another post.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Infimitas: I used to be an adualistic monist once, but several nondual experiences led me to rethink my view of reality.  Now I feel the need to believe in both the manifest world as well as the unmanifest– they both need to be both included, lest things collapse into a hidden dualism by leaning to one side or the other.  Fitche seems to over-emphasise the unmanifest; Nietszche (unless I misunderstand him, which is actually very likely – I'm only going on your brief description) sems to resist the unmanifest for (understandable) fear that it denies that manifest.  That's my answer to Theurji, too; that is to say, a nondual “post-metaphysics” needs both of these worlds, and it needs to reconcle them in a way that includes evolutionary theory, modern science and the insights of postmodern philosophy.

Regarding the manifest/unmanifest dichotomy, I think this can be understood via a synergist orientation by thinking of the “unmanifest” as the “yet to come” (to use Derrida's phrase) or the “yet to become” (in Nietzsche's terms) or simply “the future.” All of these ways of putting it evoke temporality. We don't have the “unmanifest” without time. But if the “unmanifest” slides over into meaning the “atemporal” or the “beyond time” or “the timeless” then it shades in a direction that I think must give rise to a transcendentalism whereby the dichotomy between the manifest and the unmanifest becomes more clearly dualist rather than an interpenetration in keeping with a nondual synergist orientation. It becomes more like the transcendentalism of the time/timeless or ephemeral/eternal dichotomies where the “timeless” and “eternal” become sharply transcendental and separate in relation to time and the ephemeral.

Greg

P.S. This is one thing I think I like about TSK in that it seems, like the above, to theorize in the realm of space-time and no further. This might be a refreshing thing to do for a change (I can't think of many philosophies that accomplish this). It would certainly take us away from rigid dualisms.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Greg,

I like this: But if the “unmanifest” slides over into meaning the “atemporal” or the “beyond time” or “the timeless” then it shades in a direction that I think must give rise to a transcendentalism whereby the dichotomy between the manifest and the unmanifest becomes more clearly dualist rather than an interpenetration in keeping with a nondual synergist orientation. 

The word interpenetration brings the perspective closer to The Tao of Those Who Prefer to Play in Openness as an alternative to The Tao of Those Who Seek Closure, the effects of which might have slipped into this thread a few posts above. (I have no problem with this school and for authority appeal to the Iron Law of Sociology that states,”Some people do, some people don’t.”

But the Daodejing (PC…right?) also makes it clear: 1) the Tao that can be called the Dao is not the Dao, and; 2) whatever the unknowable Dao is (if it really is) interpenetrates both the manifest and unmanifest which means that neither can be ultimately understood. Whether or not they are “real” is another matter because in Taoism there are some grave problems with the use of that word that may be conceptual, multi-conceptual, or just a matter of translatability.

“…to theorize in the realm of space-time and no further. This might be a refreshing thing to do for a change (I can't think of many philosophies that accomplish this). It would certainly take us away from rigid dualisms.”

I could get behind this though I don’t see why we need to get away from “dualisms.” Sometimes it serves me to see things dual, sometimes whole. Sometimes I like to see the rabbit, sometimes the duck, sometimes the crone, sometimes the maid. And sometimes I like to see black patterns on a white sheet of paper that are just begging for my projections. I find it interesting that when I see dual, or rabbit, or maid, it makes not one single iota of difference to any other part of my life than when seeing the other projection. I still put my pants on one leg at a time, nothing changes; my diet, occupation, sexual orientation, or primary language. Getting rid of duality would eliminate a little entertainment and the same goes for unity. The two make a great game from time to time and when it grows tiresome there is always the fall-back—free cell.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Greg:  The choice of “transdual” is interesting. I wonder what others think of it as a choice perhaps better than nondual, since “nondual,” as Edward and I have experienced in another forum and as we have seen here, corresponds with uses that, to me, seem sometimes contradictory and confusing with regard to separating it clearly from varieties of monism.

I still prefer nondual.  I reflected a bit on “transdual,” but to me it suggests a real duality which one then goes beyond, whereas with nondualism the perceived duality is neither real nor unreal, neither existent nor non-existent.  I do agree that the term, nondual, has been sloppily and inaccurately used.  People have picked it up and used it as a synonym for “oneness” or monism, without recognizing the philosophical context in which the word originally arose, or the subtle distinctions it involves (as a correction to just such tendencies towards a reified oneness).  I prefer to see the word rehabilitated and restored (I learned it the way I described it, as not-one-not-two), rather than abandoned.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Nickeson: 2) whatever the unknowable Dao is (if it really is) interpenetrates both the manifest and unmanifest which means that neither can be ultimately understood.

Good. (Taking notes here for upcoming “summary”). “Knowing,” “understanding”– provisional, at best.

Nickeson: Whether or not they are “real” is another matter because in Taoism there are some grave problems with the use of that word that may be conceptual, multi-conceptual, or just a matter of translatability.

Good. Let's dispense with the word “real.” With the manifest and the unmanifest it also makes no sense to say one is more “real” than the other (as in the “now” is more real than the “future”)–only that whatever they are they are of a piece, one always sliding into the other but never collapsing one into the other.

Nickeson: Getting rid of duality would eliminate a little entertainment and the same goes for unity.

Couldn't agree more. My only problem with dualism is the way in which it has been traditionally structured and understood. Thus, part of the task here; how to say it better (and in fewer words?).

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: I still prefer nondual.  I reflected a bit on “transdual,” but to me it suggests a real duality which one then goes beyond, whereas with nondualism the perceived duality is neither real nor unreal, neither existent nor non-existent.  I do agree that the term, nondual, has been sloppily and inaccurately used.  People have picked it up and used it as a synonym for “oneness” or monism, without recognizing the philosophical context in which the word originally arose, or the subtle distinctions it involves (as a correction to just such tendencies towards a reified oneness).  I prefer to see the word rehabilitated and restored (I learned it the way I described it, as not-one-not-two), rather than abandoned.

Let's ponder this. I understand where you're coming from, I think, but I'm not sure you can accomplish what you want–with regard to “rehabilitation.” To point to one example: folks have been trying to “rehabilitate” what is meant by “Christianity” for centuries to the point where the term is so loaded with baggage that I believe it will now always give off a charge that will neutralize any genuine attempt at a rehabilitation that might actually tap into what Christ was talking about. Nietzsche put it well: “There has been only one Christian. And he died on a cross.”

I feel the same way about “Buddhism.” It has too many interpretations and varieties–such that the term suggests so many things that no one knows what you may mean when you use it. And although “nondual” is a little different from these, I think it comes with many of the same problems. Plus, the very term, on its face, suggests something that sounds like the negation of the dual (as in “not dual”). Which is enough to get many newcomers off on the wrong foot right from the git-go.

What I respect about Wilber is the attempt to fashion a spiritually relevant vocabulary that does not attempt to fit itself into any of the old and compromised vocabularies. I just don't think Wilber's views always coincide with the way I would want to think about and talk about the “spiritual” quality of life. On this thread I'm proposing constructing a new vocabulary that will take a stab at expressing what is possibly (though we probably can't say for sure) a very old understanding. But whether it's old or new I think we are better off to fashion a new vocabulary (or at least a few “new” terms) that may help to keep us (and perhaps  others) out of unproductive interpretations and ruts. “Synergy,” although not a neologism is a bit new when applied in these contexts. However, I'm not married to it and would like to consider alternatives. But, for me, “nondual” will not cut it.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

e,

Thanks for getting back to Nickeson's post (of many postings previous). It deserved more response and exploration that we have been thus far able to give it. On re-reading it I think it expresses well the problematics of getting at old texts and debating what they mean.

For me, one of the main guides in interpreting the Tao te Ching is the yin/yang symbol (which I have seen argued by some was influenced by Buddhism!–don't know if that's true). But the words of the translations I have of the Tao te Ching do not always conform to what I would regard as an interpretation consistent with the implications of that yin/yang symbol. When in doubt, I follow the meaning of the symbol (though it too can be interpreted in different ways) because it works more powerfully to point me in the direction I think is best regarding orientation to “what is” as the “not one, not two.” (see also the description/explanation of the symbol provided in a post below). And I'll eat my hat if this isn't what the best Taoists had in mind when they took up the symbol. (Yes, but just in case, cowboy hats are not so bad with a little salt).

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Hi, Greg,

Yes, I agree, the rehabilitation of words long misused is difficult.  I guess the extent to which you will see “nondual” abused depends on the circles you move in.  I've seen it misused, of course, but as I mentioned, I have also used it in communities where its meaning is understood.

I like synergy, but don't think it can serve, in itself, for the not-one-not-two of nondualism.  At least, my concern is that the conventional connotations of the word don't push through all the way to what is meant by nondualism, e.g., emptiness and radical co-determination.  Perhaps you can use a phrase like synergist nondualism, or nondual synergy, as you've done in other posts. 

I am not at all against the creation of new, more serviceable vocabularies.  I appreciate what Raimon Panikkar is doing, for instance, where he talks about nonduality in terms of radical relativity and uses the Christian metaphor of Trinitarian perichoresis to illustrate it:  the co-determining dancing-around of the persons of the Trinity illustrate, in his view, the radical relativity and co-determination of all subjects and objects and communications (three-but-one, or not-one/not-three).

I think this is a worthy exercise, so while I'm resisting synergy by itself (as you're resisting nondualism by itself), I hope we can all go deeper with this and enact something new.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Balder: I think this is a worthy exercise, so while I'm resisting synergy by itself (as you're resisting nondualism by itself), I hope we can all go deeper with this and enact something new.

Yes, works fine for me.

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Greg, to be clear, I'm not opposed to your use of synergy as a guiding principle for the alternative-to-integral vision you're trying to articulate.  My point is that, given the way it is typically defined – “interaction of discrete agencies (as industrial firms), agents (as drugs), or conditions such that the total effect is greater than the sum of the individual effects” –, I don't believe it can be used as a synonym for nondual.  Perhaps a better word than nondual, without so much “baggage” attached, can be found.  I'm not opposed to that.  I'm just saying that the current connotations of synergy don't make it a good candidate for replacing nondualism – at least not the Buddhist/Madhyamaka understanding of it.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Thanks Bruce. This is good feedback for me on the term “synergy.” I'm looking for whether or not it does the right things (encourages the right associative moves, so to speak) regarding the “not one, not two” theme. You make some good points, so I think we need to keep searching. We seem to have gotten down to four words that seem to evoke the right associations (or push us in a good direction), but maybe there is yet one word that will work (or maybe one word that is also two words, or two words that are also one word–a not one, not two word–just playing around here!! But is there a word that means both one and two? Hummmm. Where's my dictionary?

Greg

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Speaking of words, I think it may also be helpful to clarify what is meant by dualism, duality and monism.

Dualism is one of those words that has many meanings, but in this case I take it to mean that there are two (or more) different kinds of things that make up reality, e.g. the two deities of Zoroastrianism, the mind and body of Descartes and Leibniz, the interior and exterior of Wilber, etc.

Duality means for me just the fact that we live in a world of differance e.g. hot, cold and so on.  This does not neccessarily imply dualism.

Monism means, contrary to dualism, that there is only one kind of thing in the universe.

Putting these together, we have several ontological categories:

1) Dualism – e.g. Descartes
2) Type monism – e.g. physicalism, which accepts duality of the yin-yang variety but insists that they are of the same kind, i.e. physical stuff
3) Absolute monism – an adualistic oneness where all distinction is a fiction

(I'm not suggessting those as new terms, just using them now for purposes of discussion.)  I think nondualism has to paradoxically accept both 2 (form) and 3 (emptiness).  That is to say, duality is both real and nonreal.  There's a passage from the Daodejing that says something to the effect of that if we focus on our desires (i.e. this rather than that) we see duality (#2, of form), but if we are desireless we see the “mystery” (translations vary considerably) – #3, or emptiness.  It doesn't say that one is truer than the other, however.

Re: Synergist Spirituality Manifesto (Beginning draft)

Greg said:
Thanks for getting back to Nickeson's post (of many postings previous). It deserved more response and exploration that we have been thus far able to give it. On re-reading it I think it expresses well the problematics of getting at old texts and debating what they mean.

Yeah, it can be difficult. I was lucky to find a place where there were senior monks from the east and west with 100+ years of experience with the dharma with varying emphasis on scholarship and practice. Some knew and taught the sutras very well, others meditation and others seemed to display the teachings with their benign influence alone. With their friendship and guidance and along with a bunch of other motivated students, the old texts came alive.

For me, one of the main guides in interpreting the Tao te Ching is the yin/yang symbol (which I have seen argued by some was influenced by Buddhism!-don't know if that's true).


See for yourself. Here is how Buddha postulated and used “dualism”.

“When this is, that is.
From the arising of this comes the arising of that.
When this isn't, that isn't.
From the stopping of this comes the stopping of that.”

Some interpret this as conditionality instead of causality. Some see it as the underlying mechanism for Dependent Origination. BTW I see Derrida's trace as analogous to the line manifesting the yin/yang. We could even say the trace is analogous to the path of the middle way. Here is another sutra using duality in this way. Nagarjuna references it in his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way.

“'Everything exists': That is one extreme. 'Everything doesn't exist': That is a second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma via the middle: [eg Dependent Origination arising and ceasing]”

But the words of the translations I have of the Tao te Ching do not always conform to what I would regard as an interpretation consistent with the implications of that yin/yang symbol. When in doubt, I follow the meaning of the symbol (though it too can be interpreted in different ways) because it works more powerfully to point me in the direction I think is best regarding orientation to “what is” as the “not one, not two.” (see also the description/explanation of the symbol provided in a post below). And I'll eat my hat if this isn't what the best Taoists had in mind when they took up the symbol. (Yes, but just in case, cowboy hats are not so bad with a little salt).

A friend who is an anthropologist on the Integral Institute pod turned me onto Rappaport. Here is an relevant excerpt:

From the chapter, On Cognized Models, P119
“Fourth, cosmological axioms serve as the logical basis from which both the specific rules of conduct and the properties of social life can be derived. Ultimate sacred postulates are more remote from social life. They do not themselves provide a logical foundation for it, nor even for cosmological structure (which, I have asserted, is axiomatic). But they are not otiose. They sanctify, which is to certify, the entire system of understandings in accordance with which people conduct their lives. Without sanctification the axioms of cosmology would remain arbitrary, constituting nothing more than speculative conceptual structures, amounting to nothing more than attempts at explanation. When a cosmology is sanctified it is no longer merely conceptual nor simply explanatory nor even speculative. It becomes something like an assertion, statement, description, or report of the way the world in fact is. To invert the hierarchical metaphor, whereas ultimate sacred postulates do not themselves provide logical ground upon which the usages and rules of social life are established, they provide the ground, deeper than logic and beyond logic's reach, upon which cosmological structure can be founded. It follows that cosmological structures can change - expand, contract, or even be radically altered structurally - in response to changes in the environment or historical conditions without changes in, or even challenge to, ultimate sacred postulates. Being devoid of material terms, ultimate sacred postulates are not fully of this mortal world and can be regarded as eternal verities. Being devoid of explicit social content they can sanctify everything, including change, while remaining irrevocably committed to nothing.”

So, the ultimate sacred postulate in Buddhism can be emptiness. In Taoism it is the Tao that cannot be spoken. For Theism it is God. What is the ultimate sacred postulate for the Synergist Spirituality Manifesto? Once you have that in view, I think the axioms will flow easier from there instead of trying to swim upstream. Is “not one, not two” the ultimate sacred postulate?