Bookmanas

Reductionism at Work

2010-12-30T12:48:00.001-08:00

"Where did the idea of infinite come from? Does it bring with it some subtle survival value that favored those with the inclination to develop it? Evolutionary psychologists would look for some way of thinking or acting which aided survival on African savannah landscapes a million years ago and had as a by-product the liking for generalization without end. Nothing specific is immediately obvious. Primitive life was brief and immediate. Action was needed. Contemplation was not rewarded. The inclination to think about infinity is something that happens much later in the human story and it emerges from one of many responses to the Universe around us. What are the trails that might lead to forever?"

John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. Pantheon Books, New York, 2005.

An infinitely absurd comment, not worth commenting on, except it's a good example of the reductionistic genre.

But I saw one good quote in this disappointing book, from Jorge Luis Borges:

"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not

to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."

After Virtue

2010-11-25T08:20:00.001-08:00

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.
University of Notre Dame, 1981.

Chapter I. A Disquieting Suggestion
p. 2 "The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess... are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived." Says that philosophy will not be able to help us. We must understand the history - but it is not academic history to which he refers (i.e. in its value-neutral standpoint moral disorder "must remain largely invisible" -- "... the real world and its fate has remained unrecognized by the academic curriculum"). The language of morality is in a state so disastrous that we cannot even afford the cultural luxury of pessimism.
Chapter 2. The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism
Interminable character of modern moral disagreements. "There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture." (p.6) There seems to be no way of deciding between rival claims and premises. p. 11: "We simultaneously and inconsistently treat moral arguments as an exercise of our rational powers and as mere expressive assertion..."
emotivism- all moral judgments are nothing but expression of preferences. It makes the claim that every attempt, past or present, to provide rational justification for objective morality has failed. "What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true." (p. 19) Contends that emotivism has become embodied in our culture and that what was once morality has in large degree disappeared, and this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss.
Chapter 3. Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context
"A moral philosophy - and emotivism is no exception - characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions, and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world." (p.23)
~key to emotivism: obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Kant's distinction between treating people as means or ends has no meaning in this type of philosophy.
~self presented in emotivism may pass judgment on anything and everything, there are no limits set to it. "It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs... To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency is to be located." (p. 31-2)
Chapter 4. The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality
Scottish Enlightenment. Kierkegaard - "The choice between the ethical and the esthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil." (40) And: "Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he takes to be the compelling nature of the considerations which exclude both reason and the passions.
"Thus the vindication of each position was made to rest in crucial part upon the failure of the other two, and the sum total of the effective criticism of each position by the others turned out to be the failure of all. The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public shared rationale or justification... the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject." (49-50)
Chapter 5. Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail
~the rejection of any teleological view of human nature -that is, of any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end: this is the key to the failure. "Since the whole point of ethics - both as theoretical and a practical discipline - is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notions of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear." (55) Rift exposed the fact vs. value dichotomy: on one hand a content for morality, a set of injunctions deprived of teleological context. On the other, a view of untutored human nature-as-it-is - and no bridge from the one to the other. "It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept." (59)
Chapter 6. Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project
~utilitarianism; the Kantian project of showing that any rational agent is logically committed to the rules of morality in virtue of his or her rationality (66) The price paid for liberation from what appeared to be traditional authority was the loss of any authoritative content. "Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone listen..." (68)
Chapter 7: 'Fact,' Explanation and Expertise
p. 81: "The Enlightenment is... the period par excellence in which most intellectuals lack self-knowledge."
~Aristotelian understanding of nature repudiated in 17-18th cents. along with Ais. acct of action. "'Man' ceases, except within theology - and not always there - to be what I called earlier a functional concept. The explanation of action is increasingly held to be a matter of laying bare the physiological and physical mechanisms which underlie action; and, when Kant recognizes that there is deep incompatibility between any account of action which recognizes the role of moral imperatives in governing action and any such mechanical type of explanation, he is compelled to the conclusion that actions obeying and embodying moral imperatives must be from the standpoint of science inexplicable and unintelligible. After Kant the question of the relationship between such notions as those of intention, purpose, reason for action... and the concepts which specify the notion of mechanical explanation... becomes part of the permanent repertoire of philosophy. The former notions are... treated as detached from notions of good or virtue..." (82)
p. 86: "Twentieth century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of 18th century philosophy." Managerial expertise: claims of value neutrality and manipulative power.
Chapter 8. The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power
Chapter 9. Nietzsche or Aristotle?
p. 110: "It was indeed Nietzsche's perception of this vulgarized facility of modern moral utterance which partly informed his disgust with it."
and: "a key part of my thesis has been that modern moral utterance and practice can only be understood as a series of fragmented survivals from an older past and that the insoluble problems which they have generated for modern moral theorists will remain insoluble until this is well understood. If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions." (110-111)
~Nietzsche's achievement was to understand that "what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will" (113)
Rules rather than virtues: key concept. We need to attend to virtues in order to understand the function and authority of rules. (119)
Chapter 10. The Virtues in Heroic Societies
~morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society. Evaluative questions are questions of social fact. We learn from this that "morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit ..." (126-7)
~Nietzsche's mythologized this distant past: "What [he] portrays as aristocratic self-assertion: what Homer and the sagas show are forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one. Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own 19th-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical inquiry was actually an inventive literary construction." (129)
Chapter 11. The Virtues at Athens
~ belief in the virtues... and belief in human life exhibiting a certain narrative order are internally connected (144). Important to recall that what is at stake in the "Sophoclean dramatic encounter" is not simply the fate of the individual... "in some important sense the community too is a dramatic character which enacts the narrative of its history." (145)
Chapter 12. Aristotle's Account of the Virtues
~ every activity, every inquiry, every practice aims at some good
~human beings have a specific nature; they have certain aims and goals; and they move by nature toward a specific telos
~what is the good for man? Not money, honor, pleasure. He calls it eudaimonia: blessedness, happiness, prosperity. The state of doing/being well through possession and practice of the virtues. "To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues." (149)
~friendship embodies shared recognition and pursuit of a good, a sharing which forms the essential primary element of any form of community
~both Plato and Aristotle "treat conflict as an evil" (157); the good life is unitary; civil war is the worst of evils. "It follows that conflict is simply the result either of flaws of character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements. This has consequences not only for Aristotle's politics, but also for his poetics and even his theory of knowledge. In all three the agon has been displaced from its Homeric centrality..."(157)
~certain tension between Aristotle's view of man as essentially political and his view of man As essentially metaphysical (158)
~virtues unavailable to slaves or barbarians: "Freedom is the presupposition of the exercise of the virtues and the achievement of the good." (159)
~virtues cannot be defined as merely the pleasant or useful. "The standard of utility or pleasure is set by man qua animal, man prior to and without any particular culture. But man without culture is a myth. Our biological nature certain places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing. It is only man with practical intelligence - and that, as we have seen, is intelligence informed by virtues - whom we actively meet in history."(161)
~practical reasoning according to A. has 4 essential elements: (1) wants and goals of the agent, presupposed by but not expressed in his reasoning; (2) major premise, assertion that to do or seek for something is good; (3) minor premise, wherein agent asserts that said incident is an instance or occasion of requisite nature; (4) conclusion = action. A.MacI says A's account of practical reasoning is "notably elliptical and in need of paraphrase and interpretation," (162) but enough is said to warrant saying that in Aristotelian terms, reason cannot be the servant of the passions. "For the education of the passions into conformity with pursuit of what theoretical reasoning identifies as the telos and practical reasoning as the right action to do in each particular time and place is what ethics is about." (162)
Chapter 13. Medieval Aspects and Occasions
~medieval vision is historical in a way that Aristotle's could never be... the virtues are those which enable men to survive evils on their historical journey. (176) A.MacI. does not say, but it occurs to me to ask, whether what was the zoon politicon, the polis, for Aristotle, was transmuted in the medieval period as the supernatural - that is, only a supernatural tension could maintain so many diverse, even opposing, virtues. cf. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: "[The] heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion."
Chapter 14. The Nature of the Virtues
~ Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen
~virtue defined: "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods." (191) This seems a bit labored, but could you find a better? But good, later (194) - "It... turns out ... that every practice has its own history and a history which is more and other than that of the improvement of the relevant technical skills. This historical dimension is crucial in relation to the virtues."
~ p. 200: are there evil practices?
Chapter 15. The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition
~"liquidation of the self into a set of demarcated areas of role-playing allows no scope for the exercise [of]... virtues in any sense remotely Aristotelian" (205)
~"The concepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identity... [but] all attempts to elucidate the notion of personal identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative, intelligibility and accountability are bound to fail." (218)
~"The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide." (221)
~"A living tradition is... an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition." (222)
Chapter 16. From the Virtues to Virtue and after Virtue
~a "pluralism which threatens to submerge us all" (226)
~ traditional account of the virtues presupposed the concept of narrative unity and the concept of a practice
~segregation of narrative from life (postmodernism?)
p. 227: "The contrast, indeed the opposition, between art and life, which is often in fact the premise rather than the conclusion of such theorists, provides a way of exempting art - including narrative - from its moral tasks. And the relegation of art by modernity to the status of an essentially minority activity and interest further helps to protect us from any narrative understanding of ourselves." And: "... to think of a human life as a narrative unity is to think in a way alien to the dominant individualist and bureaucratic modes of modern culture."
~egotism and altruism ( 229) Altruism both "socially necessary" and "inexplicable." And: "On the traditional Aristotelian view such problems do not arise. For what education in the virtues teaches me is that my good as a man is one and the same as the good of others with whom I am bound up in human community. There is no way of my pursuing my good which is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly - goods are not private property. Hence Aristotle's definition of friendship, the fundamental form of human relationship... The egotist is thus, in the ancient and medieval world, always someone who has made a fundamental mistake about where his own good lies and [who]... has to that extent excluded himself from human relationships."
~review of Kant, Hume, Stoicism; French Revolution, and Jane Austen - "the last great effective imagination voice" of thought about the virtues (240)
Chapter 17. Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions
Rawls and Nozick. Modern moral incoherence.
Chapter 18. After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle; Trotsky and St. Benedict
p. 259: "It is therefore after all the case that the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or another and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other." His conclusion is that despite three centuries of moral philosophy, "...[we] lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualistic point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments."
Postscript to the Second Edition.
p. 268: "The philosophy of physical science is dependent on the history of physical science. But the case is no different with morality."

Sex in History

2010-10-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

Gordon Rattray Taylor, Sex in History. Thames & Hudson, London, 1953, 1959, 1968. 392.6 T214s

p. 3: "...no type of attitude is more fundamental and more indicative of the trend of the personality than are attitudes to sexual matters... Hence the study of the changes in sexual attitudes is the very first step, the sine qua non, of all coherent historical research." Two identifications: 'authoritarian' (identify with the father) he calls patrist and 'permissive' (identify with the mother) he calls matrist.

moral --- mores, customs: "The moral is what is customary."

p. 95: concept of honor arising out of chaste love - says was "the essential character of the paederastic relationship in classical Greece... Every man was expected to take to himself a boy, to whom he should act for a time as a mentor, helping him to find his place in life. The man was called the Inspirer; the boy, the Listener. It seems quite clear that, while a relationship of love existed between them, the performance of sexual acts was strictly forbidden..." Mueller, C.O. History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, Murray, 1830.
Plato's "love that was made for beauty" --philosophia meta paiderastias --
p. 135 Says the Church carried on a war against matrism - Renaissance as "matrist-individualist trend." Think this is too simplistic.
p. 156: arrival in Europe of syphilis, brought back from Haiti to Portugal by Columbus' sailors in 1494.
1560: Fallopius, invention of the condom
p. 159: a very "matrist" book--speaking of the heavy patrist orientation of Calvinism, he says--"As always in patriarchal systems, Calvinism was fanatically against intellectual freedom." he has yet to mention the chief virtue of patriarchy, the legitimization of children. I do think there is often an intellectual narrowness in Christianity, but I would ascribe this to reasons other than patrism.
p. 201: "The search for the mother and the search for wisdom is the romantic quest, as the search for the father and for the stability of the traditional order is the quest of the realist." Good.
p. 230: Greeks used the term theos, god, for the moment of excitement, when one recognizes a long-lost friend, and applied it to the excitement of a new discovery.
p. 233: "... this idea of periodical self-abandonment to Eros and Thanatos, which had at the same time the character of a religious act, was primarily associated with the worship of a mother-figure. In this pure form, it also betrayed another feature worthy of note: a tendency to direct violence against the self... mother-religions exhibit self-flagellation in various forms..."
Description of a ritual of castration (Lucian, in The Syrian Goddess, Constable, 1913, by Strong and Garstang.)
p. 235: psychology of mother-religions: tell of "how the mother-figure was loved by an effeminate youth, who was both son and lover. Thus, just as the Oedipus myth reflects exactly the child's position in the paternal family, so the mother-myth reflects with extraordinary precision the position of exclusive mother-fixation as it would be found in any family where there was no father." Interesting admission.
p. 251: Mithraism: chief priest known as Pater Patrum. Roman soldiers brought the religion from Persia c. 60 B.C. Its central figure is a god, not a goddess. Intercession with heavenly Father. Votaries redeemed by the blood of the bull. Radiate crown worn by Emperors of Supreme Deity, Ahuramazda. In 304 A.D. Mithra was officially made protector of Rome. Yet within 50 years it collapsed "... at the hands of a rival creed whose mythology and ritual were substantially similar, except in one crucial respect. This was Christianity."
Cumont, F. The Mysteries of Mithra, Chicago, 1911.
Mithraism and Christianity concern relationship of son with a father. In Mithraism, the son slays the father, symbolized by the bull (a traditional symbol of father deities) - whereas in Xity the son submits to the father and is himself slain. "Mithraism is a religion of conquest, Christianity a religion of submission...Mithraism became the religion of soldiers, administrators and extraverts, but offered no place for women. In contrast, Christianity...not only attracted introverts but attracted many women and gave them important roles, and also attracted slaves, whom it constantly urged to obey their masters."
Ernest Jones says these two myths gave a solution to the Oedipal situation: the son either conquers the father and replaces him, or he avoids conflict by submitting to him. But at the price of denying his own sexual desires... [of course a psychoanalyst would say this!] "The myth depicts an attempt to avert Oedipal guilt by tabooing sexual activity altogether."
p. 254: "...and while Mithra survives, Christ dies." Says this was a victory "for death-instincts as against life-instincts." What about the Resurrection? Psychoanalytic interpretation is all horizontal, on one plane only. Gordon R. Taylor thinks that Xity is a "guilt-ridden religion."
Keating, J.F. The Agape and the Eucharist in the Early Christian Church. Methuen, 1901.
p. 262: Eucharist est. in 363 A.D. when the Council of Laodicea ruled that Agape should not be held in churches, which had the effect of separating it from the Eucharist. Love-feasts finally disappeared altogether, only to remain as features of funerals and weddings.
------the deliberate substitution of a symbolic for a real meal.............
@ Condemnation of the Artotyritae who put cheese on their communion bread....

p. 263: "The significant feature of this transformation is that it was a change from a group experience, in which all participants were equal, to a religion in which each individual was individually in relation to God..."
---"When the charitic and theoleptic character of Christianity had finally been destroyed, the early Church was able to assert that those who had formerly met in theoleptic groups had been heretics, and to treat them as part of the considerable tradition of theoleptic religious experience, under the general heading of gnosticism..." -- the living experience of religion was squeezed out.... growth of a body of doctrine...The doctrine that Christ was divine made it necessary to establish the Nativity as a major feast: Dec 25, date of principal Mithraic feast (354 A.D.)

p. 265: "The earliest Christians had sought to substitute the transcendence of sexual instincts for the technique of dealing with them by catharsis. The Church abandoned the device of sublimation for the principle of repression." But the issue was to flare up again and again.

Johannine Christians esp. associated with "theoleptic Christianity" - dancing, shakers...
p. 276: "... against this ecstatic tradition can be placed the continuous opposition of the puritan groups, medieval, reformation, and modern, to dancing."

p. 283: three ways of dealing with sex instinct: repression/catharsis/sublimation. "It would seem that the Church felt that to treat sex as unimportant was just as serious as to treat it as divine."
Modern Morality
p. 296: Says that present period inclines to matrism. "The claim that sex might be holy, not sinful, is still the thing that arouses the deepest anxieties of the patrist." Says our system of sexual morality is "muddled and arbitrary." In fact, it is not in any consistent ethical sense a morality at all. It is essentially a hodge-podge of attitudes derived from the past, upon which is erected a shaky and inconsistent system of laws and social prohibitions... The great majority of the prohibitions are, or were, taboos --- that is, prohibitions introduced to relieve unconscious, irrational anxieties." State of the modern West is the "rule of the dead."
At least he acknowledges the task is "to transmute Eros to a constructive form."
p. 305: "The problem of sexual control is the problem of what we do with our creative powers."

Matrism and Patrism
Matrism: Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861) Argued that matriarchy was the original primitive stage of culture everywhere preceding patriarchy; postulated a state of sexual promiscuity with no stable family life prior to the matriarchy; hence the evolutionary development is from promiscuity---- matriarchy----patriarchy.
Patrism: Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (1861) Argued that patriarchy was the original and universal system of social organization; postulated that the earliest social unit was the family; groups of families known as clans or tribes pre-existed nations; hence the evolutionary cycle is from a collection of isolated patriarchal families into a patriarchal tribe or nation, with matriarchy as a degenerate form.
Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (1951): disagrees that all societies pass through stages, no "social evolution" as such
G.R. Taylor, Sex in History (1953): patrism/matrism alternate; they concern attitudes rather than institutions.

See also Katherine K. Young and Paul Nathanson, Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man, McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.
p. 162: "We suggest that intellectual life is now under siege not by the masses, as in the past, but by academics. Special-interest groups consider themselves immune to any standards of judgment. They ignore facts that contradict their own views..."
p. 167: "The therapeutic focus on self is clearly at the heart of this movement, not worship of a deity."

Ernst Mach

2010-06-15T15:17:00.000-07:00

From: Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (5th ed., 1904)
"Even in the simplest case, in which apparently we deal with the mutual action between only two particles, it is impossible to disregard the rest of the universe. Nature does not begin with elements, as we are forced to do. Certainly it is fortunate for us that we can sometimes turn away from the overwhelming all, and allow ourselves to study isolated facts. But we must not forget ultimately to amend and complete our views by taking into account what had been omitted."

Sir Edmund Whittaker F.R.S. (II)

2010-06-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity.
Sir Edmund Whittaker. Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1910, 1950.
Volume II - The Modern Theories

Chapter 1. The Age of Rutherford
ions: particles that carry electric charges
Rutherford-Soddy - general theory on radioactivity pub 1902-3. They asserted that in the radioactive substances radium, thorium, and uranium, there is a continuous production of new kinds of matter, themselves radioactive; when several changes occur together they are not simultaneous but successive; radioactivity consists in this: that a certain proportion of the atoms undergo spontaneous transformation into atoms of a different nature; and these changes are utterly different from anything in chemistry; the number of atoms that disintegrate in unit time is a definite proportion of those present. The proportion is characteristic of the radioactive body and is constant for that body.
Re: chemical ether
1864: John A. R. Newlands and the 'Law of Octaves' - when the chemical elements Are arranged according to the numerical vAlues of their atomic weights, the 8th element starting from any given one is, in regard to its properties, closely akin to the first 'like the 8th note in an octave of music.' Newland's idea was Adopted and developed by D.I. Mendeleev, who arranged the elements in a periodic table. Elements which are chemically inseparable but have different atomic weights were called by Soddy, isotopes.
Rutherford: Structure of the atom, 1911
Like the solar system, a small + charge nucleus in center containing most of the mass of the atom and surrounded by - electrons (electrons with negative charge) orbiting like planets at distances the order of 10 -8 cm.
Chapt II. Relativity Theory of Poincare and Lorentz
p. 28 et seq: One of the most perplexing unsolved problems of late 19th c. science was determining the relative motion of the earth and the aether. The laws of Newtonian dynamics presuppose the knowledge of a certain set of systems of reference [inertial system of reference] Doctrine of the aether, justified by the undulatory theory of light, was generally regarded as involving concepts of rest and motion relative to the aether and thus a means of specifying absolute position. The failure of many promising attempts to measure the velocity of the earth with respect to the aether led to Poincare's saying in 1899 that absolute motion is indetectible in principle whether by dynamical optical or electrical means. "Our aether," he said, "does it really exist?" Also Lorentz in 1904 asserted the same general principle. On 24 Sept 1904 Poincare gave to a generalized form of this principle, the name The Principle of Relativity. "According to the Principle of Relativity, the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a 'fixed' observer as for an observer who has a uniform motion of translation relative to him: so that we have not, and cannot possibly have any means of discerning whether we are, or are not, carried along in such a motion." And: "From all these results there must arise an entirely new kind of dynamics, which will be characterized above all by the rule, that no velocity can exceed the speed of light." [italics his]
p. 35: The notion of absolute fixity in space, which... was thought to be required by the theory of aether and electrons was shown in 1900-04 by the Poincare-Lorentz theory of relativity to be without foundation.
p. 42: theory of relativity had its origin in the theory of the aether and electrons.
p. 51: now he traces the connection of mass with energy--expressed by Planck in 1908 in the form of a unified definition of momentum, the equivalence of mass and energy
p. 64: "The phenomena studied in natural philosophy take place at a definite location at a definite moment, the whole constituting a four-dimensional world of space and time. The theory of relativity had now made it clear that the separation of this four-dimensional world into a three-dimensional world of space and an independent one-dimensional world of time may be effected in an infinite number of ways, each of which is distinguished from the others only by characteristics that are merely arbitrary and accidental. In order to represent natural phenomena without introducing this contingent element, it is necessary to abandon the customary three-dimensional system of co-ordinates and to operate in four dimensions."
Chap. III. Beginnings of Quantum Theory
(too technical)
Chap. IV. Spectroscopy in the Older Quantum Theory
atomic spectra- essentially a quantum phenomena.
Pauli exclusion principle (1924) - two electrons in a central field can never be in states of binding which have the same four quantum numbers
Chap. V. Gravitation
p. 151: From 1904 onwards the Newtonian law of gravitation was examined in the light of relativity theory of Poincare and Lorentz. 1907: Planck experiments indicated that the gravitational properties of a body are essentially of the same nature as its inertial properties. Now, said Planck, all energy has inertial properties, and therefore all energy must gravitate. Six months later Einstein published a memoir in which he introduced what he later called the Principle of Equivalence... i.e. a uniform gravitational field os physically equivalent to a field which is due to a change in the co-ordinate systems.
Followed up in 1911 w/important memoir in which he argued that since light is a form of electromagnetic energy, therefore light must gravitate, that is, a ray of light passing near a powerfully gravitating body such as the sun, must be curved; and the velocity of light must depend on the gravitational field.
p. 157: FitzGerald, Works, p. 313: "Gravity is probably due to a change of structure of the aether, produced by the presence of matter." (1894) F.'s aether was called by Einstein simply space or space-time and F.'s somewhat vague term 'structure' became with Einstein the more precise 'curvature.' Thus we obtain the central proposition of the Einsteinian theory 'Gravity is due to a change in the curvature of space-time, produced by the presence of matter.'
p. 158: "What differentiates the Einsteinian theory from all previous conceptions is that the older physicists had regarded gravity as merely one among many types of natural force - electric, magnetic, etc. - each of which influenced in its own way the motion of material particles. Space, whose properties were set forth in Euclidean geometry, was, so to speak, the stage on which the forces played their parts. But in the new theory gravity was no longer one of the players but part of the structure of the stage. A gravitational field consisted essentially in a replacement of the Euclidean properties by a much more complicated kind of geometry: space was no longer homogeneous or isotropic..." General Relativity was "essentially a geometrization of physics" (p. 192)
p. 174: In 1920 A.N. Whitehead published a criticism of General Relativity -- "I do not understand how the fixed conditions for measurement are to be obtained." Set forth an alternate theory in his The Principle of Relativity, 1922. Whitehead's doctrine is loosely described as fitting Einsteinian laws into flat space-time. The idea of mapping curved space of General Relativity on a flat space wAs later revived by N. Rosen (1940) who claimed it enabled a more direct explanation for the conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum, and also to account for "certain unexplained residuals" in the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Chap. VI. Radiation and Atoms in the Older Quantum Theory
(too technical, but p. 222 on diff kinds of statistics might be worth copying)
Chap. VII. Magnetism and Electromagnetism, 1900-26
(too technical)
Chap. VIII The Discovery of Matrix Mechanics
p. 253: Replacement of Rutherford planetary model of the atom with that of the "virtual orchestra" which emitted radiations of frequencies actually observed. Heisenberg saw that this idea of replacing the classical dynamics of the Rutherford atom by formulae based on the virtual orchestra could be applied in a far wider connection. He took as his primary aim to lay the foundations of a quantum-theoretic mechanics which should be based exclusively on relations between quantities that are actually observable. Previous investigators had found integrals of the classical equations of motion of the atomic system, and so had obtained formulae for the coordinates and velocities of the electrons as functions of the time. These formulae Heisenberg now abandoned, on the ground that they do not represent anything that is accessible to direct observation... and in their place he proposed to make the virtual orchestra the central feature of the theory."
Problems could thus be translated from the beginning into quantum mechanics.
Chap. IX. Discovery of Wave Mechanics.
(too technical)

Justice in Nuremberg

2010-06-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

Victor's Justice. Montgomery Belgion, Henry Regnery Co., 1949.
"Crimes against peace"
Germany invaded Poland Sept 1, 1939
Russia invaded Poland Sept 17, 1939 and occupied half of it. But only Germany was punished.
This was "an affront to the conscience of all those to whom justice is not a mere formal observation of rules of procedure," (M.J. Bonn)
Nuremberg in 1946: "Two parties had committed an act alleged to be a crime, and on the charge of having therefore been criminal one of the two parties was being tried by the other."
The tribunal was styled 'international' but in fact represented the four victorious powers - that is, it was the judiciary of prejudiced parties. "For victors in war can never be accepted as impartial judges." (p. 31) The judgment was worthless because, exactly like 'aggression,' the existence of a need to defend 'special and vital interests' by resort to war is not a matter of fact; it is a matter of opinion. In short the "crimes against peace" charge could not possibly be substantiated; it was illusory.
The Dark Side of the Moon - book about Russian atrocities in Poland (1946)
As early as Feb. 1946 it was estimated that 17 million persons had been evicted from their homes, deported -- but long after this date the deportations continued -- these were the postwar crimes of the Allies - for which the Germans had been judged and found guilty.
International law is based on custom and a sense of decency, and relies on mutual consent.
p. 133: "For one state, or a coalition of states, to seek to enforce observance of some rule... of international law on another state is to discard law and rely on force. And force is foreign to international law so far considered."
Two essential features of international law are the absence of force and the presence of consent.
p. 139: "The net effect of the post-war punishment at the hands of the victor of individuals among the vanquished for war crimes must be to make it seem as if war crimes were legitimate so long as it was the victor who committed them."
Perversion of justice and the principles of British justice -- the heresy hunt replaced the principle that it is better for the guilty to go free than for the innocent to be convicted.
p. 180: "For St. George slew the dragon only to find that it was the dragon's features which confronted him when he beheld his natural face in the glass."
Fatal confusion of force and right
p. 182: "The victors had received the unconditional surrender of the vanquished, and having denied to the vanquished a government of their own, they were themselves, as regards the vanquished, in a relation of government to the governed. But that relation could obviously only hold concerning the current discharge of the national government and administration, whereas the Charter (Aug 8, 1945) and the Trial were concerned with the international conduct of the vanquished. In that domain the legal and moral status [of the victors] was no more than that of a gang of lynchers dealing with a victim..."
p. 184: "Only a super-government or World State could have promulgated the charter and held the Trial-- but such a superstate to exist would have to abolish nationality -- "Unless nationalities were abolished, nothing could make a world government effective... If a world government did have the power to rule the whole world, there could be no limit to its power... This is why all talk of a world state... is pernicious and immoral."
Further: international law cannot suddenly become an international criminal code, and "to a world state empowered to enforce the code, the code would be superfluous." Furthermore, such a state could not be moral - "It is the restriction of power that leads the exercise of power to be moral."
p. 187: "Nuremberg: an undertaking fraught with grave menace for the future of civil manners. It was an attempt to degrade the Law of Nations from a set of moral rules (anchored in customs based on mutual consent) to a criminal code, an attempt, which if it could ever succeed, would abolish the law of nations altogether." [italics mine]
Turning points in the history of Western man: one of them was the setting up of the Inquisition. At the French Revolution the inquisitorial methods were discarded from judicial procedures on the Continent.
p.39: "Those Western victors instituted the Nuremberg Trial in order... to confer on themselves a title to mete out retribution and to levy reparations."
All possibility of committing 'war crimes' ceased for Germany with surrender in May, 1945. But for the victors, on the contrary, that was mainly when the possibility began (except for Russia - when it began earlier). Six of the kinds of war crime named at Nuremberg:
1. Murder, ill treatment or depaortation to slave labor camps of civilians of occupied territories
2. use of concentration camps to destroy opposition
3. murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war
4. killing of hostages
5. plunder
6. destruction of cities, towns, etc., not justified by military necessity
Belgio's book is mainly devoted to showing how the Allies were guilty of all of these crimes, before, but mainly after the cessation of hostilities.
p. 125: "The treatment called 'denazification' to which so many Germans were subjected after the unconditional surrender is the equivalent of the 'persecution of the Jews' by the German National socialists in the twelve years before." It was the wholesale arrest, internment and frequently sentence of former members of the National Socialist Party - carried out by the four occupying powers.
p. 126: "The international military tribunal at Nuremberg did not pronounce, in its Judgment, any of the accused guilty of being responsible for the deaths of German Jews. The Jews who were stated to have been killed were from occupied territories. From Germany under Hitler, most if not all Jews who could afford it were up to the outbreak of war allowed to emigrate."
p. 129: The three men set free by the Tribunal - Dr. Schacht, Baron von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche - were afterwards re-arrested by by the German police under the denazification and had to serve 8 years in a labor camp.
p. 152: "Apologists for the Trial, and for the punishment of so-called 'war criminals' in general, had contended, and were to go on contending, that the holding of the Trial would lead to an extension of the dominion of law. But how could the dominion of law be extended by means of the flouting of a fundamental principle of justice?"
Disregard of the adage -- nullum crimen sine lege -
As regards crimes, the Charter purported to make law for the past. Likewise, when the Tribunal pronounced certain associations to be 'criminal,' it was making law for the past. Dr. Stahmer, leading counsel for the defense, reminded the Tribunal that a person was not to be sentenced to punishment unless he had infringed a law in force at the time of his alleged offense (p. 150)

Saturn

2010-06-14T11:50:00.001-07:00

From The Morning of the Magicians. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Souvenir Press, 1960.

p. 78: "All our knowledge of the atom and its nucleus are based on the 'Saturnian' model (Rutherford/Nagasoka): nucleus and its belt, or ring, of electrons. Old alchemical texts affirm that the keys to the secrets of matter are to be found in Saturn."

James Clerk Maxwell

2010-06-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell. In two volumes bound as one. Edited by W.D. Niven, Dover Publications, 1965. 508 M45

On the stability of motion of Saturn's rings (1856)
p. 291: "...in the Saturnian realms, there can be motion regulated by laws which we are unable to explain."
p. 294: "...in the present state of mechanical science, we do not know whether an irregular solid ring, or a fluid or disconnected ring, can revolve permanently about a central body; and the Saturnian system still remains an unregarded witness in heaven to some necessary, but as yet unknown, development of the law of the universe."
p. 295: destructive tendency- "nebular theory" - ring collapses into one or more satellites -- but by revolution of the ring "it is converted into the condition of dynamical stability"
p. 526: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. 1864
Royal Society Transactions, Vol CLV
"We have...reason to believe, from the phenomenon of light and heat, that there is an ethereal medium filling space and permeating bodies, capable of being set in motion and of transmitting that motion from one part to another, and of communicating that motion to gross matter so as to heat it and affect it in various ways."
Amount of energy in the whole medium is equally divided between motion and elastic resilience.
~20 equations of the electromagnetic field...
~intrinsic energy of the field depends partly on its magnetic and partly on its electric polarization at every point
LIV. On Action At a Distance. Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, VII
Oersted: "found that an electric current acts on a magnetic pole, but that it neither attracts it nor repels it, but causes it to move round the current. He expressed this by saying that 'the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner.'" [and yes, the word used here is "conflict"]
LXII. Molecules. Nature, Vol VIII. 1873.
A lecture delivered before the British Assn. Soddy reminds us that Maxwell uses the term "molecule" where we would say "atom."
~molecules of air in this hall flying about in all directions at a rate of about 17 miles per minute. If they were all flying in the same direction, they would have the force of a wind ejected from a cannon. "... if this molecular bombardment were to cease, even for an instant, our veins would swell, our breath would leave us and we should, literally, expire."
~ammonia molecules = velocity of 600 meters per second.
The "atoms": "They continue as they were created - perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created, not only the heavens and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist." (my italics) (v. 2, p. 377)
XCVII. Ether. From the Encyclopedia Britannica.
"Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the ether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge."

Sir Edmund Whittaker F.R.S. (I)

2010-06-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1910, 1951. Sir Edmund Whittaker.

Vol. I The Classical Theories
Preface: Due to failure of attempts to observe the earth's motion, the term 'aether' fell out of use in late 19th-early 20th c. Interplanetary space was referred to as 'vacuous' with no property except that of propagating electromagnetic waves. With the development of quantum electrodynamics, the vacuum has come to be seen as seat of 'zero-point oscillations' of the electromagnetic [EM] field, and of 'polarization' correlative [corresponding?] to dielectric current... hence use of 'ether' seems unwarranted.
p. 7: Huygens critique of Descartes: he 'put forth his conjectures as verities... and claimed to have revealed the precise truth.' EW says he was continuing the ancient Greek tradition instead of following Tycho, Kepler and Galileo - "he never really grasped the principle that true knowledge can only be acquired piecemeal, by the patient interrogation of nature." A further weakness: force cannot be communicated except by actual pressure or impact.
Newtonian view: space permeated by an elastic medium or aether, capable of propagating vibrations as air propagates sound, but with greater velocity. It pervades pores of all material bodies, and is the cause of their cohesion. Light & ether mutually interact; aether is in fact the intermediary between light and ponderable matter.
p. 40: "Perhaps nothing in the history of natural philosophy is more amazing than the vicissitudes of the theory of heat..."
Chap. IV. The luminiferous medium from Bradley to Fresnel
Theory of John Bernoulli [1710-90] --All space is permeated by a fluid ether containing an immense number of tiny whirlpools. Elasticity of the ether is due to these whirlpools, "fine-grained turbulent motion" is interspersed with solid corpuscles; vibrations are propagated from luminous point longitudinally -- Bernoulli's ether closely resembles that which Maxwell invented in 1861-62 for the express purpose of securing transversality of vibration -- "one feels that perhaps no man ever so narrowly missed a great discovery" [EW on Bernoulli]
Leonhard Euler [1707-83]-- Nova theoria lucis et colorum
Resemblance of light & sound; the whole of space through which the heavenly bodies move is filled with subtle matter, the aether, and light consists of vibrations of this aether -- "light is in the aether the same thing as sound in the air." (98) He anticipated Maxwell in asserting that the source of all electrical phenomena is the same aether that propagates light; electricity is nothing but a derangement of the equilibrium of the ether, "A body must become electrical whenever the aether contained in its pores becomes more or less elastic than that which is lodged in adjacent bodies... the efforts which it [ the aether] makes to recover its equilibrium, produce... electricity."
Also gravitational phenomena: pressure of aether increases with the distance from the center of the earth, say as constant -1/r, so that the force pressing a body towards the earth is stronger than that directed away from it, the balance of these forces being the weight of the body. On this hypothesis, the force of each atom would be proportional to the volume of the atom, therefore the weight of the atom must be proportional to its volume. [Letter, 4 July 1761]
p. 106: wave-theorists: "still misled by the analogy of light with sound" - unable to explain the phenomenon of polarization
Augustin Fresnel [1788-1827]
Complete overthrow of corpuscular theory - he published an investigation of the influence of earth's motion on light. "I am disposed to believe that the luminiferous aether pervades the substance of all material bodies with little or no resistance, as freely perhaps as the wind passes through a grove of trees." Showed that the apparent positions of terrestrial objects are not displaced by the earth's motion. Rigidity of solid bodies, i.e. power of resisting distortion, means that it will be capable of transverse vibration.
Chap. V. The Aether as an Elastic Solid
Young & Fresnel - the vibrations of light are performed at right angles to the direction of propagation.
A new hypothesis of the luminiferous medium - namely, that it possesses the power of resisting attempts to distort its shape. This is what distinguishes solids from fluids - thus the ideas of Young and Fresnel may be expressed by the statement that the aether behaves like an elastic solid.
p. 129: transversality of light. Investigating properties of elastic bodies.
p. 154: "In spite of the advances which were made in the great memoirs of the year 1839, the fundamental question as to whether the aether particles vibrate parallel or at right angles to the plane of polarization was still unanswered."
___________________________________________________
polarization of waves [definition from a science encyclopedia] -- "The directional dependence of certain wave phenomena, at right angles to the propagation direction of the wave. In particular, ordinary light may be regarded as composed of two such assymmetrical components, referred to as its two states of linear polarization." And more on polarized light: "Light which has its electric vector oriented in a predictable fashion with respect to the propagation direction. In unpolarized light, the vector is oriented in a random, unpredictable fashion... Most light sources seem to be partially polarized... It is actually more difficult to produce a completely unpolarized beam of light than one which is completely polarized... the human sense organs are essentially unable to detect the presence of polarization... Light from a rainbow is completely linearly polarized; the electric vector lies on a plane... the electric vector rather than the magnetic vector of a light wave [is] responsible for all the effects of polarization and other observed phenomena... of light. Therefore, the electric vector of a light wave for all practical purposes can be identified as the light vector... [the] different types of polarized light can all be broken down into two linear components at right angles to each other."
__________________________________________________
Chap. VI Faraday
Said he began to learn chemistry by reading Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry.
induction: i.e., of causing an opposite electrical state on bodies in its neighborhood.
p. 193: Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations (1846) -- the atom of ponderable matter may be nothing else than a field of force -- electric, magnetic and gravitational -- surrounding a point-center -- completely penetrable -- all space being permeated by lines of force. Light & heat might be transverse vibrations propagated along these lines of force. He proposed to replace the concept of aether by "lines of force" between centers, the centers together with their lines of force constituting the particles of material substances. If the existence of a luminiferous Aether is to be admitted, "it is not at all unlikely that if there be an aether [he wrote in 1851] it should have other uses than simply the conveyance of radiations." Says EW on Faraday: "This sentence may be regarded as the origin of the electromagnetic theory of light."
Chap VII. The mathematical electricians of the middle of the 19th c.
Chap. VIII. Maxwell
p. 242: Result of Thomson's memoir suggested a picture of the propagation of electric or magnetic force [1847] : might it not take place in somewhat the same way as changes in the elastic displacement are transmitted through an elastic solid? The question helped to inspire Maxwell, who communicated the first of his endeavors to form a mechanical conception of the electromagnetic field [1864] Characteristic of Maxwell was the union of the imaginative and the analytical faculties to produce results partaking of both natures. (italics mine) (243) The first memoir may be regarded as an attempt to connect the ideas of Faraday with the mathematical analogies devised by Thomson.
Principles of Maxwell's theory as described in his letter to W. Thomson [Kelvin] 10 Dec 1861:
p. 250: "I suppose that the 'magnetic medium' is divided into small portions or cells, the divisions or cell walls being composed of a single stratum of spherical particles, those particles being 'electricity.' The substance of the cells I suppose to be highly elastic, both with respect to compression and distortion; and I suppose the connection between the cells and the particles in the cell walls to be such that there is perfect rolling without slipping between them and that they act on each other tangentially..." [more]
p. 254: "... we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena."
p. 255: another characteristic feature of Maxwell;s theory is that magnetic energy is the kinetic energy of a medium occupying the whole of space; and that electric energy is the energy of strain of the same medium. "By this conception electromagnetic theory was brought into such close parallelism with the elastic-solid theories of the aether, that it was bound to issue in an electro-magnetic theory of light." A Dynamical theory of the Electromagnetic Field, 1864.
p. 258: "After tracing the action of the surrounding medium both the magnetic and the electric attractions and repulsions, and showing that they are proportional to the inverse square of the distance, Maxwell inquired whether the attraction of gravitation, which follows the sAme law of the distance, may not also be traceable to the action of a surrounding medium.
"Gravitation differs from magnetism and electricity in this: that the bodies concerned are all of the same kind, instead of being opposite signs, like magnetic poles or electrified bodies, and that the force between these bodies is an attraction and not a repulsion, as is the case between like electric and magnetic bodies. If, then, gravitational potential energy is regarded as located in the medium, the energy per c.c. at any place must be a[alpha] - B [beta] R where a and b are positive constants and R is the gravitational force per gram at the place. If we assume (as everybody in Maxwell's day assumed) that energy is essentially positive, then the constant a must have a value greater than bR, where R is the greatest value of the gravitational force at any place in the universe; and hence at any place where the gravitational force vanishes, the intrinsic energy in the medium must have an enormously great value. 'As I am unable to understand in what way a medium can possess such properties,' said Maxwell, ' I cannot go further in this direction in searching for the cause of gravitation.' "
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 1873.
Chap. IX Models of the Aether
p. 279: "There seemed to be a possibility of accounting for electric, magnetic and gravitational forces by the action of an intervening aether." - thanks to the work of W. Thomson and Maxwell in representing the electric medium by mechanical models. These models were in two major groupings:
Model 1: linear/electric force/ electric current
rotatory character - magnetism
Thomson, 1847
Maxwell, 1862

Model 2: linear - magnetic force
rotatory - electric current
Maxwell, 1855
Helmholtz
p. 303: Aether as a "vortex sponge" - influence of Larmor, end of 19th c. -"the aether came to be recognized as an immaterial medium sui generis, not composed of identifiable elements having definite locations in absolute space."
Chap. X. The followers of Maxwell.
--the researches of Hertz yielded more evidence of the similarity of electric waves to light. Larmor: "the discoveries of Hertz left no further room for doubt that the physical scheme of Maxwell...constituted a real formulation of the underlying unity in physical dynamics." (328)
(my italics)
Chap. XI. Faraday to the discovery of the electron
Conduction, gases (skipped)
discovery of electron (JJ Thomson)
Chap XII. Classical radiation theory (skipped)
Chap. XII. Classical theory in the age of Lorentz
Reviews the evidence for and against the motion of the aether in and adjacent to moving ponderable bodies at the end of the 19th c.
Aberration: Young, assumption that the aether around bodies is unaffected by their motion
Stokes (1845) offered another explanation -- If it is supposed that the aether near the earth is relatively at rest with respect to the earth's surface, the star will appear to be displaced toward direction of earth's movement.
Lorentz objected, assumed that Aether near eath is moving irrotationally (as in Stokes) but that at the surface of the earth the aethereal velocity is not necessarily the same as that of ponderable matter and that (pace Fresnel) a material body imparts the fraction of its own motion to the aether within it. Aberration is not the only astronomical phenomenon depending on velocity of propagation of light. Maxwell pointed to the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites - "By taking observations when Jupiter is in different signs of the zodiac, it should... be possible to determine the sun's velocity relative to the aether, or at least that component of it which lies in the ecliptic." (388)
p. 392: apparent contradictions furnished by experiments with moving bodies, so that theoretical physicists "so extended the domain of electrical science that it became necessary to enlarge the conception of space and time to contain it." (my italics)
Lorentz [1853-1928] memoir of 1892. A theory of electrons, i.e. all electrodynamic phenomena were ascribed to the agency of moving electric charges, which were supposed in a magnetic field to experience forces proportional to their velocities, and to communicate these forces to the ponderable matter with which they might be associated. Differed chiefly from older writings in which electrons were assumed to be capable of acting on each other at a distance, depending on their charges, mutual distances, and velocities; the present memoir by contrast, says that electrons did not interact with each other but with the medium in which they were embedded. "To this medium were ascribed the properties characteristic of the aether in Maxwell's theory." (393)
p. 404: "The reconciliation of the electromagnetic theory with Fresnel's law of the propagation of light in moving bodies was a distinct advance. But the theory of the motionless aether was hampered by one difficulty: it was, in its original form, incompetent to explain the negative result of the experiment of Michelson and Morley. The adjustment of theory to observation in this particular was achieved by means of a remarkable hypothesis which must now be introduced."
---FitzGerald's hypothesis of contraction: that the dimensions of material bodies are slightly altered when they are in motion relative to the aether.

The Secret History of Dreaming

2010-06-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

Robert Moss: The Secret History of Dreaming, New World Library, Novato, California, 2009.
14 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94949
BF 1078. M66 2009
154.6'309 - dc 22MOS
[member: Green Press Initiative]

Pioneer of "active dreaming" -- www.mossdreams.com
Jacques LeGoff: "the imaginal life is central to the human story..." The Medieval Imagination. In dreams, we wake up. Egyptian "dream" = rswt, meaning "awakening"
xiv. Among indigenous peoples, dreamers are speakers for the earth and travel between the worlds. They help us "not to let our minds fall" from the deeper world...
Moss, Dreamways of the Iroquois, Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 2005.
Differences in modern sleep patterns -- older ways were "first" and "second" sleep punctuated by period of relaxed wakefulness. French: dorveille, intermediate state
Disruption of natural cycles may have "disannulled [us] of our first sleep, and cheated [us] of our dreams and fantasies."
Thomas Middleton, The Black Book (1964) AMS Press, N.Y.
xxi. Ibn Khaldun (circa 1377 A.D.)-- dreaming as one of the six essential conditions for human society. Moss Argues that dreams need to be restored to their rightful place in the study of history.
p. 5: Chiquitano (eastern Bolivia) say human has 3 souls: breath soul, blood soul, shadow soul. During dreams the breath soul stays with the body but blood soul (otor) can wander. The shadow soul can make longer journeys, leaving body and blood soul far behind.
p. 8: Freud: "...the dream has nothing to communicate to anyone else." (!!) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 231.
p. 10: Aboriginals express different levels of dreaming - the Kukatja - ancestral Dreaming is Tjukurpa and [the word] Kakukurri for personal dream experience. They call the dreamtime the "all-at-once."
p. 12: Egyptian priests of later times called the "Learned Ones of the Magic Library" cf. Apuleius and Joan Grant.
p. 29: Aristotle: "dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement." From On prophesying by dreams. Artemidorus -- "the gods love to speak in riddles."
--------Section on "Divine Dreaming" - O.T. & N.T. There is more to Xity than dreams - but some interestin g facts, e.g., the Chi-Rho sign was known in Constantine's day as an abbreviation of the word chreston, "good," a mark that indicated something espectially good in a text.
p. 66: Synesius of Cyrene, On Dreams, circa 405 A.D.
What you grow in the seedbed of your imagination will be stamped on your world & soul - on the energy body in which you will travel to another life after death. "The Soul holds the forms of things that come into being." His essay, On Providence, depicts a world dominated by dark forces who aim to drag humans down and destroy them if they reach for the light. Behind the surface events of history is the struggle between the higher aspirations of humanity and the darkness within and around it. The power of light runs down at the end of the great cycles and has to be renewed periodically.
See: Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene - Bishop and Philosopher, University of California, 1982.
He taught that the realm of imagination is "the hollow gulf of the universe" where the soul is at home. Imagination is the mediating principle between spirit and matter.
Counterpole/opposite to the fanatical Cyril of Alexandria (412 A.D.) whose diatribes against Hypatia led to her death and dismemberment by a mob.
The Cult of the Saints is a way to "rein in" the power of dream.
p. 78: dreams in Islam--"Whatever the deceased tells you in sleep is true, for he stays in the world of truth." Sirin (d. 728 A.D.) In Muslim dream books, it is stressed that the dead are aware of the living, eager to receive news of them.
The universe begins when God imagines it (or dreams it). Realm of Images - alam al-mithal - the "place of apparition" of spiritual beings - the place where "divine history" is accomplished.
Suhrawardi (ca. 1153-1191) visionary journeys, meets the Imam of wisdom, helper of souls.
p. 80: Ibn 'Arabi- (1165-1240) Imagination is the isthmus between body and spirit and being and nothingness. Requires discipline and discernment. Imagination works through "embodiment." But Imagination in sleep is given to all; it is universal. The world requires interpretation just as a dream does. The curtain that prevents us from perceiving truly has been placed by ourselves - "You are the curtains over yourself."
From the Dream Library
Graham Greene: "[in dreams] there was something in the warring crooked uncertin world he could trust beside himself." The Confidential Agent
Aleksei Remizov [1877-1957] in Martyn Zadeka-- "...in Russia many things happened and happen that don't and won't happen on earth." Remizov was a prolific modernist; seized by folklore and legends. Despised the surrealist practice of automatic writing -- "one has to take from the stream of words according to one's will, and not what comes automatically." He long preceded the Surrealists in use of dreams as literary texts. His approach has nothing in common with psychoanalysis which forever looks for "latent" meanings and discards the "manifest." For Remizov, dreams are not about baring hidden meaning by revealing what is right in front of you. "To give the dream a voice is great art." he pictures life after death as a continuous dream whose content corresponds to ideas the dreamer had when he lived. See: "Aleksei Remizov's Dreams," Russian Review 58 (Oct 1999) 599-614.
Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, describes what happens when the imagination is outlawed or driven underground... life begins to fall apart.
p. 226: Pauli "waged a long campaign" to get Jung to use some other word than synchronicity - he suggested connection through meaning rather than simultaneity. But Jung could not hear. In their final review pauli expressed satisfaction that they agreed "on the necessity of a further principle of interpretation of nature other than the causal principle." In our perception we encounter events connected by causation and events connected by meaning- a wave/particle resemblance (?) Pauli added to the quantum uncertainty principle this: in order to know 'which aspect of nature we want to make visible... we simultaneously make a sacrifice. In selecting one event, we sacrifice another." Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, New York, Harper, 1974.
See: Herbert can Erkelens, "Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with the Spirit of Matter," in
Psychological Perspectives 24 (1991): 38.

Chesterton

2010-06-13T07:27:00.000-07:00

"It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous."

From: The Everlasting Man, p. 75.

Chemical or Sound Ether

2010-06-13T07:16:00.000-07:00

See previous post on Guenther Wachsmuth, who says that the characteristic form of chemical or sound ether is the "half-moon." Indeed, rather like the form of the ear, when you think of it.

The following is a surprising confirmation from astronaut Buzz Aldrin:

On the quality of moon dust: "It exhibited a most unusual quality. I must have kicked about half-a-dozen sprays or more, and each time the dust flew out in front slightly, landing in a perfect semicircle, every grain spraying out uniformly and equidistantly without any rippling effect. I related my observations to Houston, and thought, This is surreal, how each grain of moondust falls into place in these little fans, almost like rose petals."

From his book, Magnificent Desolation: the Long Journey Home from the Moon, New York, 2009.

Emil Bock

2010-06-12T08:03:00.001-07:00

Saint Paul: Life, Epistles, Teaching. Floris, 1993. Emil Bock.
Damascus: halfway point between initiation and conversion.
p. 33: The consciousness of modern man is turning unchristian, if not anti-christian, and therefore Xity must begin to influence the continuous development of consciousness itself.
Background of Stoicism: Athenodorus introduced the concept of conscience into ethics--- this term did not occur in the Old Testament.
p. 68: aversion to hierarchies in Old Testament extends all the way into intellectual protestantism
p, 76: 'spiritual optical illusion' of the Pharisee eschatology - telescoping the Second Coming with the Last Judgement
p. 77: "Time is nothing formal; it is humankind's grace-filled gift of reprieve preceding the ultimate decisions... the merciless spell of the O.T. concept of God and... and the Pharisees' idea of the Messiah had come about because... the continuous fear of the eschatological short circuit was effective and time was not really taken into account."
p. 81: Paul heard the light
p. 88: Revelation on Sinai was an Arabism within Israel's spiritual history--
p. 91: Damascus not only refuted eschatology of Messianic Final Judge but also the fundamental thesis of post-Mosaic Judaism that Nature no longer revealed divinity and that all pagan elements were impure and evil.
p. 107: Paul vitally incorporated the conscience--synesis, syneidesis
p. 173: ekstasis replaced by incorporation: "With this new beginning, the seed existed for a form of consciousness that does not arrive at its insights outwardly, but comes to them from within. The intellectual brain-bound thinking, which was still to have a dramatically rich history reaching from Neoplatonic and Alexandrian philosophy all the way to the mode of thinking of modern natural science, was and is a cognition leading from without to within. Today it is an appendage to sense perception directed solely to the external world. It came into being as the shrunken product of ancient half-clairvoyant perception..."
p. 241: Paulinism: a Christian anthropology concerning "the change in structure that [occurs] in the human being through the relationship with Christ."

p. 269: recht/richtig/realness/ no semblance---
--------"The redeeming effect of Christ is to rectify... [it is the] 'correction' of earth-creation which has fallen victim to semblance."

p. 274: active receptivity: basis of any genuine inner activity
See: Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, "Theology based on the idea of life," Theologia ex idea vitae.

Guenther Wachsmuth

2010-06-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man.
- A path of investigation into the world of the living.
Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth.
Anthroposophical Publishing Company, Vol I., 1932. London.
Anthroposophic Press, New York.

German edition: Die Atherischen Bildekrafte in Kosmos, Erde und Mensch. Trans. from 2nd German ed.
"The powers of knowledge for the mechanical are awake in themselves; those for the higher forms of reality must be awakened." Rudolf Steiner, Autobiography.
P. Lenard, the distinguished investigator of the ether, says in "Uber Ather und Materie," Heidelberg, 1911--- "In his conflict with the theory of Einstein, which would deprive the ether of every mechanical property..." p. 13
Chap. 1. Fundamentals of a new theory of motion.
lenard rejects the theory of "ether continuous through spce and moved as a continuum" and would substitute "ether moved not as a continuum in space," yet immobility is just the one mechanical characteristic which H.A. Lorentz would still attribute to ether; whereas to Einstein, "the whole change in the conception of ether the theory of relativity brought about, consisted in taking away its last mechanical quality, namely, its immobility."
From: Sidelights on Ether and Relativity, London, 1922; p. 11.
p. 36: etheric formative forces are not merely to be understood mechanically, as with lenard, or in the negation of all mechanical characteristics, as with Einstein -- but as active supersensible principles that come to living expression in the phenomenal world and call forth phenomena of motion which may be partially and only up to a certain point understood mechanically. Linked with spiritual/qualitative characteristics.
Chap. II. The etheric formative forces.
p. 39: "...there are altogether seven etheric primal forces, formative forces, active in the cosmos; of these, however, only four reveal themselves in the space-and-time processes of our present phenomenal world."
Warmth ether
Light ether
Chemical ether (sound ether)
Life ether
-distinguished from each other in the wave lengths they call forth in the world of substance. But this is only an elementary and quantitative observation. In actuality they proceed out of each other in dynamic metamorphosis."
[Note: the interesting contrast with chain-reaction. See entry on Radium.]
Warmth ether------------light ether----------chemical ether------life ether.
p. 39: "The mutual relation between the etheric forces is such that the later ether, more highly evolved, always contains in itself the attributes of the earlier, yet always develops as a new entity, an activity clearly distinguishable from that of the other."
EXPANSIVE: warmth/light/light
CONTRACTIVE: chemical/life
This polarity is an ultimate elemental principle lying at the basis of all natural phenomena. "Heat" processes are a transition stage from the purely etheric to the "substantial."
WARMTH ETHER TENDS TOWARD THE SPHERICAL FORM.
LIGHT ETHER TENDS TO THE TRIANGULAR FORM. Light = a transverse wave motion.
Lenard: "... in a beam of light and perpendicular to its direction - never merely backward and forward displacements in the same direction with the beam, as is the case with sound waves --- there are present periodically shifting states."
Wachsmuth: "We may say, then, than an oscillation, a form which is caused by light ether in a substance-medium, takes the shape of a triangle."
Chemical ether/sound ether:
p. 42: "... its forces transmit to us the tones perceptible to the senses... For it is tone which causes the uniting together, the orders and forms, of substance and bodies of substance."
CHEMICAL ETHER has a "tone-and-sound nature of which sensible sound, or tone heard by the physical ear, is only an outward expression: that is, an expression which has passed through air as medium." Its characteristic form: the half-moon.
LIFE ETHER: phylogenetically the most highly evolved, rayed out to us from the sun and modified in its action by the earth's atmosphere. Characteristic form: square.
Four States of Aggregation:
heat..........warmth ether
gaseous...............light ether
fluid..............chemical ether
solid................life ether
p. 78: The nature of gravitation and terrestrial magnetism
gravitation: "nothing other than the effect of the suctional activity of life ether centralized in the sold earth"
magnetism and gravitation are forms of expression of life-ether
p. 97: etheric structure of Saturn is the reverse of the earth
p. 98: "The etheric structure of the earth is a complete reversal, a turning upside down, of the etheric structure of Saturn. That which is 'without' for the heavenly body oldest in its nature is for the earth 'within,' and that which is 'within' for Saturn is 'without' for the Earth."
And: "But the inversion which puts the inside out and the outside in is a fundamental law of all evolution, which we can discover again and again at decisive evolutionary turning points..."
Plassmann, Himmelskunde: "The ring is distinctly brighter than the planet. It shines with a golden yellow color while Saturn is leaden gray." And: "diminution of the brightness of the ring is from without inward."
p. 99: "The formative force which was first in phylogenetic evolution, the warmth ether, forms the body of Saturn, while the genetically more highly evolved formative forces, light ether, chemical ether, and life ether, are radiated down upon the planet from its environment, the ring."
Ibid: "In the case of the earth, the formative force which is genetically most highly evolved, life ether, forms in absolute contrast to this, the inner part of the planet; while the least evolved, the warmth ether, forms the outer part, and enters the inner part of the earth in form modified by the life ether. The sun, between Saturn and the earth, is filled exclusively by the formative force genetically the most highly evolved, life ether."
p. 130: shining without burning - discovery of phosphorus by von Brandt (1669) - a cool light
Radioactivity
p. 149: the most intensely dissolving substances are similar in nature to lead - products of the radioactive dissolution series are isotopes of lead
Oldest state of the cosmic system -- the "Saturn state"
"Modern research has now established quite indisputably and quantitatively this relation between lead and the most complicated element of substance, most subject to dissolution."

James Clerk Maxwell

2010-06-12T05:58:00.001-07:00

The Life of James Clerk Maxwell. by Lewis Campbell.
London, Macmillan, 1882.
b. June 13, 1831 - died [November?] 1879 - before he completed his 49th year.
p. 163: "He had an innate reverence for sacred things, which I do not think was ever much disturbed by the skepticism fashionable among shallow scientific men... All his experiments led him to greater reverence for the Great First Cause, heartily agreeing with Young's Night Thoughts, 'An undevout astronomer is mad...' "
p. 244: "Under the guise of an ironical paradox, that all biography is (1) impossible, (2) inevitable, Maxwell recommends the simple record of facts, and deprecates the method of introspection. Of many shrewd remarks occurring in the course of this essay, the following are the most noticeable:
"... When a man once begins to make a theory of himself, he generally succeeds in making himself into a theory."
--the family trick: "calling things out of their names"
p. 259: "The ideas with which his mind was teeming were perpetually intersecting, and their interferences, like those of thew waves of light, made 'dark bands' in the place of color, to the unassisted eye..."
p. 297: Letter to Mr. Garnett, 9 July 1877:
"I think it a pity that the old historical word Dynamics should, for mere considerations of time, be split up into Kinematics, Kinetics, and Statics. With respect to the divisions of the subject, I think they fall thus:--
1. Early attempts at founding the science, ancient Kinematics (mechanical description of curves, etc.) generally correct.
Ancient Statics - Archimedes
Modern Dynamics - Galileo, first founder. Descartes, good up to Kinematics and Statics, failed in Kinetics.
Promoters-- Wren, Wallis, Huyghens, Hooke
Laws of collision establised, and motion in a circle.
Newton--Three laws of motion. Form suggested by the laws of Descartes. Meaning established by newton's own copious and complete example of using them.
Second statement of Newton's third law.
My notions on the three laws are in "Matter and Motion"....etc. [more; not transcribed]
Letter to same, 24 July 1877:
"The result of motion without reference to time I call Displacement. Kinematics must involve the idea of time if it treats of continuous displacements, velocities, and accelerations, though it does not contain within itself materials for comparing different intervals of time. For this we must go to the science which deals with matter; call it kinetics, dynamics, or mechanics....statics also deserves a place on the same level as kinematics, as it deals with the equivalence of different systems of forces...
Picture of an integrated personality--- "the unity of his nature and life" --- "absolutely single-hearted" ---- mental as well as emotional ----
Some phrases he used: "no watertight compartments" -- "no tabooed ground" --"marvellous interpenetration of scientific industry, philosophic insight, poetic feeling and imagination, and overflowing humor, was closely related to the profound sincerity which, after all is said, is the truest sign alike of his genius and of his inmost nature, and is most apt to make his life instructive beyond the limits of the scientific world." (p. 433)
To his fiancee, Miss Dewar, 6 May 1858:
Note: Whittaker in History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity has a footnote where someone talks about Maxwell's "terrible wife," who would come to the lecture hall in the afternoon and drag him away to dinner. It was said she wanted him to live the life of the country gentleman on his estate in Scotland, not be a physics professor. None of this comes through in Campbell's account.
p. 309
"Isaiah li & Gal. V
I suppose the leaven in v.9 is the little bit of Judaism that they were going to adopt on the plea that it is 'safer' to do and believe too much than too little, and yet these little things altered the character of the whole of their religion by making it a thing of labor and wages, instead of inward growth of faith working by love, which purifies the heart now, and encourages us to wait for the hope of righteousness... Our flesh is God's making, who made us part of His world; but then He has given us the power of coming nearer to Himself, and so we ought to use the world and our bodies as a means toward the knowledge of Him, and stretch always as far as our state will permit towards Him. If we do not, but wilfully seek back again to the elements as the Israelites in Egypt, then we are not like infants or even brutes, but far worse, as recoiling from God and his blessedness. Here are manifest the works of the flesh, which are not only not those of righteousness, but opposed to them; but the fruit of the spirit comes when, like good trees, we stretch our best affections upwards till we see the sun... and receive free gifts, instead of sending our branches after our roots, down among things that once had life but are now decaying, and seekig there for nourishment that can only be had from above."

The Interpretation of Radium

2010-06-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

The Interpretation of Radium.
Being the substance of six free popular experimental lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow by Frederick Soddy M.A., F.R.S. With illustrations. New York, Putnam's, 1912.

I. The New Science
Science has to do with correlation of phenomena, e.g. chemistry: combustion/oxidation as burning of a candle, rusting of metals, respiration, explosion of gunpowder. The common fact is oxygen entering into new chemical combinations. e.g. physics: revolution of the earth, comets, tides, fall of the apple- law of gravitation.
But radioactivity presents something fundamentally new and has no analogy to familiar phenomena.
p. 3: "Radioactivity is a new primary science owing allegiance neither to physics nor chemistry, as those sciences were understood before its advent, because it is concerned with a knowledge of the elementary atoms themselves of a character so fundamental and intimate that the old laws of physics and chemistry, concerned almost wholly with external relationships, do not suffice."
However, he adds: "The extension of the old theories which has been rendered necessary has not been revolutionary in any destructive sense." (p. 6)
p. 8: "... radioactivity has introduced a new conception into the fundamental problem of existence. By its conclusion that there is imprisoned in orderinary common matter vast stores of energy... [it raises the question of whether the 'struggle for existence' is to be the permanent condition of man]
History:
x-rays : Roentgen, 1895
radiation able to traverse objects opaque to light
radioactivity : Becquerel, 1896
1. radioactive substances affect a photographic plate in the same manner as light and other agencies; 2. they excite phosphorescence or fluorescence in certain substances; 3. radioactive bodies cause the air and other gases to lose their normal insulating power and become partial conductors of electricity; 4. radioactive bodies generate heat.
Radioactive substances emit "rays": alpha, beta, gamma
But the main interest is the spontaneous and continuous emission of energy of which the rays are but one manifestation. Heat & light given off by radium year in and year out - without apparent intermission and without the substance being altered or consumed... "something from nothing" (!!)
Radium is more than a million times as radioactive as uranium.
Chapter Two. Mme Curie's first step.
Uranium is distinguished by having relatively the heaviest of all known atoms. An atom is the minimum unit quantity of an element. Relative atomic weight of an element is one of its most important characteristics.
p. 18: "Radioactivity is the one process going on in matter we cannot influence or stop, while transmutation is the one process in matter we have so far signally failed to effect. The juxtraposition of radioactivity and transmutation is not a fanciful one, because it will appear, as we proceed, that the two processes are most intimately connected.
uranium
thorium
pitchblende -- "... lead is always present in important quantity."
Other elements in pitchblende: bismuth, barium
The radioactivity in these was due to the presence of two new elements of minute amount mixed in with them - the one associated with bismuth Curie named polonium, the other, associated with barium, is Radium.
Even the richest pitchblendes between 100-200 tons would be needed to produce an ounce of pure radium. A tone of pitchblende only contains 2 grains of radium.
p. 27: high cost of this research -- "The investigations of Mme Curie naturally have cost many thousands of pounds, provided in part by the Austrian government and the Rothschilds."
He reviews the laws of energy & thermodynamics which gained such momentum - and remarks that "Nothing goes by itself in nature, except apparently radium and the radioactive substances." (p. 29)
Energy in principle is measurable: "Practically the whole of the energy [of radium] is transformed into heat when the radium is kept in a leaden vessel..." (p. 31)
He possessed about a grain, or 65 milligrams, half of which quantity was contained in a small ebonite capsule.
1 gram = 15.4 grains of radium, gives out ~133 calories per hour
p. 31: "The amount of heat evolved by any quantity of radium in 3/4ths of an hour is as much as is required to raise a quantity of water equal in weight to the radium from the freezing point to the boiling point."

coal [250 calories] = radium [800 times the energy of coal] Total amount of energy evolved by radium is ~360,000 times the same energy as evolved from a like quantity of coal.
p. 36: nothing of the vast scale and dimensions of the universe about this tiny scrap of radium, "yet it is giving out energy at a rate, relative to its mass, which no sun or star is doing... [radium] draws its supplies of energy from an hitherto unknown source and obeys yet undiscovered laws. There is something sublime about its aloofness from and indifference to its external environment... This tiny speck of matter we can hold in our hands exhibits in perfect miniature many ancient mysteries..."
Chapter Three. The radiations.
gamma ray-- most penetrating type of radiation known. The smallest quantity of radium that could be detected by the aid of the gold-leaf electroscope, i.e., by the emission of alpha rays. It is: one-three-thousandth-millionth of a grain. Beta-rays are similar in nature to the "Radiant Matter" of Sir William Crookes, obtained when an electric discharge or current is passed through a vessel exhausted to a high degree of vacuum.
p. 78: electron, mass, etc.
Chapter Four. Where does the energy in radium come from?
If the doctrine of the conservation of energy is true, there are two possibilities: either the energy is derived from within the radium; or it must be supplied from outside. With the 2nd alternative, if radium is a transformer of energy from outside, it has been impossible to modify or quench radioactivity--"...even in its natural state in the mine, hundreds of feet deep... pitchblende exhibits its normal radioactivity." (p. 96)
p. 97: the first alternative: but if the energy is stored up in the radium it must be within the arom, and therefore, if the radium changes, it must be a change of the atom and of the element itself. This change would be a transmutation, which is more fundamental than chemical, and "until the discovery of radioactivity such changes have never been observed. If the energy of radium comes from within, radium must be suffering a spontaneous kind of transmutation into other elements."
p. 102: radioactive substance changes in a cascade, i.e., chain reaction.
p. 104: "Were radium tochange in one single step into, say, lead, which we believe may be the ultimate product in the main line of descent.... [italics mine] ... no chemist has yet detected lead as the funal product of radium, and our evidence on this point is at present only indirect, and not even very conclusive. But radium does not change all at once in one step. At least eight intermediate bodies intervene, each one of which is formed from the one preceding it with an outburst of energy [italics his] and changes into the next with another outburst of energy [italics his]."
"... the energy possessed by the changing intermediate substances and evolved from them is the sole but sufficient evidence of their existence." [these substances are absolutely infinitesimal]
If the radium is dissolved in water, it diffuses something into the air which is intensely radioactive. It is a gas, and Rutherford called it an emanation.
The heat given off by a gram of radium is 133 cals/per/hr. After solution in water, that is, after the emanation is extracted, the radium gives off heat to the extent of only 33 cals/per/hr, while the emanation produces 100/cals/per/hr. the emanation of radium gives 3X as much energy as the radium from which it is derived, tho' the actual amount of matter is practiccally imperceptible. (p. 118)
However, radioactive decay is rapid - in descending geometrical progression. Law of the Conservation of Radioactivity: whatever you do to any radioactive substance you cannot artificially alter the total radioactivity though you may divide it into parts.
Chapter Five.
helium - discovered in 1868 via spectroscope in sun's chromosphere, bright yellow line in spectrum - D3
1895: discovered in certain minerals in earth's crust
Gas: 2nd lightest known, 2x dense as hydrogen, and for a long time it successfully resisted all efforts to liquefy it by extreme cold & pressure. Finally done in 1908. Helim, without combining power, exists free as single atoms without being known to form compounds. Atomic weight = 4. All minerals in which helium is found contained either uranium or thorium (Sir William Ramsay). Rutherford/Soddy regard helium as one of the ultimate products of the disintegration of the radiocactive elements, radium, uranium, and thorium [1903; p. 136] Rate: ~ 2 milligrams of helium from 1,000 tons of uranium per yr.
First disintegration suffered by radium: Radium/226 = Emanation/222 + helium/ 4
Atomic disintegration and the periodic law. Radioactivity gives us for the first time the opportunity of learning, first, that some elements do change, and second, how they change. Radium changes, by the loss of an atom of helium, into the emanation, which is chemically & materially very different from radium. Radium is a member of the alkaline/earths; emanation is a member of the argon family.
The Periodic Table shows the most sudden and surprising differences appear between succeeding elements. Chlorine, potassium, argon - three succeeding and no resemblances between them.
In the 9 successive transformations radium undergoes, the atom suffers, in most but not all, a disintegration in which a helium atom is expelled. The heavy remaining residue after the successive losses constitutes intermediate bodies - emanation, Radium A, Radium B, Radium C, etc - successively produced. The succeeding transition - substances differ entirely from one another.
p. 149: vital difference between element and compound in the chemical sense: the energy change which attends the resolution of an element into its constituent parts is ~ million times greater than in the case of a chemical compound. Complexity of elements (~ 80 of them, or so) entirely of a different order from compounds. The atom of radium is the smallest particle of radium that exists.
p. 155: "The chance at any instance whether any atom disintegrates or not in any particular second is fixed... The events of the past in radioactive change have, so far as we can tell, no influence whatever on the progress of events in the future... in radioactive change the rate of change is invariably simp;ly proportional to the quantity of changing substance... since the quantity of changing substance itself changes as time goes on, owing to the progress of the change, the rate of change being proportional to the quantity also continuously changes, and at no time has a constant value... the 'expectation of life' of a radioactive atom is independent of its age..."
Chapter VIII. Disintegration series of uranium.
Uranium I/238: 8,000,000,000 years ........... alpha
Uranium II/ 234: 2,000,000 yrs..................alpha
Uranium X/ 230: 35.5 days...........................beta
Ionium/230: 200,000 yrs...........................alpha
Radium/226: 2,500 yrs...............................alpha
Emanation/222: 5-6 days.........................alpha
Chapter IX. Subsequent changes of radium.
p. 191: radium possess the power of endowing with some of its own radioactivity neighboring objects. Thorium also possesses a similar power.
p. 205: polonium: chemically resembles bismuth, and was separated first from pitchblende in association with the bismuth contained in the mineral. Its radioactivity is intense; period of average life = 202 days. The whole output of the Joachimshal mine per annum, ~ 15 tons, contains about 1/100th of a grain of polonium.
Atomic weights:
Lead: 207.1
Bismuth: 208.0
Thallium: 204
Mercury: 200
Helium: ~ 4
Radium: 226.5
p. 208: "Lead is found in all the common minerals containing uranium in considerable quantity, and there is some evidence that the older the geological formation from which the mineral is obtained, the greater the percentage of lead present."
p. 220: From a lecture by James Clerk Maxwell to the British Association, 1873: in re the uniformity of atoms of each kind no matter where found: "... no theory of evolution can be formed to account for their similarity, for evolution necessarily im;lies continuous change, and the [atom] is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. None of the processes of nature... have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any [atom]. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the [atoms] or the identity of their properties to any of the causes which we call natural... in tracing back the history of matter, science is arrested when she assures herself... that the [atom] has been made ... [and] or [yet] it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural... Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter out of nothing..."
And: "Natural causes... are at work which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred... the [atoms] out of which these systems are built - the foundation - stones of the material universe - remain unbroken and unworn."
Chief argument: that all atoms of any one element are exactly alike; the evidence for the truth of this is more abundant today than in 1873. A grand piano has ~100-odd sound vibrations. An iron atom emits many thousands of definite light vibrations. There are ~ about 100 different kinds of atoms known.
Chapter XI. Why is radium unique?
--because it is changing comparatively rapidly with respect to other elements.
p. 231: "The truer view is that this one element has clothed with its own dignity the whole empire of common matter... The ultra-material potentialities of radium are the common possession of all that world to which in our ignorance we used to refer as mere inanimate matter..."

Uranium ~ millions of years ---------Radium, 2,500 yrs-------------Emanation, ~a few weeks
But what about other heavy elements? -- lead, bismuth, mercury, gold, platinum, etc. -- are any of these disintegrating at all? Is this enormous store of energy confined to radioactive elements?
p. 285: In all probability, No. the radioactive elements may be regarded as peculiar only in evolving this internal store of energy at a perceptible rate.
p. 287: Transmutation of the elements carries with it the power to unlock the internal energy of matter... If it were possible artificially to disintegrate an element with a heavier atom than gold and produce gold from it, so great an amount of energy would probably be evolved that the gold in comparison would be of little account. The energy would be far more valuable than gold.
Philosopher's stone, elixier of life............
p. 253: "The same matter, the same chemical elements, serve the purposes of life over and over again, but the supply of fresh energy [needs to be] continuous............."

Douglas Reed [1895-1976]

2010-06-01T04:34:00.000-07:00

____________________________________________________________________________________

A Prophet at Home. Jonathan Cape. 1941
Post-war changes: the film-dictatorship of Hollywood. Cultural deterioration. “Later in the war, when Hitler stood on the gates of Paris and the real world seemed to collapse about our ear, when moral calamity seemed to loom imminently over England, I came through Leicester Square and saw such a queue of thousands of people, waiting patiently for hours on end to see ‘Gone with the Wind.’ With baffled incomprehension I contemplated the faces of the people who formed it, faces that told of lives of bleak drabness. Why, I thought, did they not seek to live themselves, instead of plunging into these darkened caverns in search of adventure and emotion second-hand?” (p. 46) ~’alienization’ of British life
~’longitude and platitude’ (chapter title)~old men in charge of British policy (61) “If youth, the generation of 1914, had ever had its chance in England this war would not have happened.”~theme: lack of accountability in politics. Reads like a primer in American politics today. Apathy re Parliament, that it always did the opposite of what it promised, the lack of difference between the two parties.
Chapter 5. He had noticed the very great influence which the Jews in all countries exercised in the interest of their co-religionists.
p. 102: “The anti-Jewish teaching of National Socialism was but the direct inversion of the anti-Gentile teaching of the Hebrew religion, and this statement of the case cannot be refuted; it is never refuted, but always ignored.”
p. 118: What are the Jews? – “It is much more difficult to define them. Dispersed throughout the world, they may themselves best be compared to a sphere of which the steel core is the body of fiercely intolerant, anti-Gentile Jews, while those qualities diminish as you work outwards toward the softer peel.” The Jew “wants to have his Jewish cake and eat Gentile cake.”
p.119: the most complex people in the world and “to claim to know their inmost souls and uttermost motives… is fatuous.”
p. 120: “The loyalties of the Jews are far more difficult to determine than their advocates… would admit.”
p. 129: “the greatest single factor in Hitler’s rise to power was the embitterment and desperation of the German war generation – I mean the 1914-1918 war. Those men, when they came back, found every road to advancement and useful employment closed to them, and they found many trades and professions locked-up by foreign Jews who had come to their country from Poland and elsewhere while they were away.”
War: September 3, 1939
p. 181: “The people had learned nothing; but, also, they had forgotten nothing, because they never remembered anything…” ……..eternally going from victory in war to defeat in peace: “death would not be worth dying at that rate”
Memorable: p. 183: “A politician may have been wrong a hundred times, but when the cumulative sum of those errors adds up to the monosyllable WAR, he always advances fearlessly to The Bar of History.”
Generational theme: p. 183: “I think the worst thing about this way is this cackling chorus of aged voices, this venerable Greek choir in the background, while in the foreground young men tramp, tramp, tramp across the stage and disappear into the shadows…”
p. 198: “I had remained English; England had become alien.”
~decay of manners
~the “fantastic silences” of the English—“they are grotesque and subhuman. What state has human society reached when men and women wince almost from physical pain if they are required to answer any question, make any remark?” (p. 198) Says he never saw anything like it anywhere else. “I do not believe it existed in England before the calamitous discovery of coal, prosperity and the public schools…” ……..”To me, manners, which seem daily more important than men, reach their lowest point when four human beings share a table, never exchange a word, and desperately avoid each other’s eyes…”
Chapter 4 – Dullmouth
England everywhere “had this feeling of past participle” (p. 201) --- the “unplanned, uncontrolled and untended growth of towns, townships and colonies…” England was submerged under “derelict farms; villadom; bungalowdom; and stately homes…”
The period 1918-1939 he calls “senile” – “there was unrestricted license to deface and vulgarize England, there was no freedom to improve it” (p. 202)
p. 217: “far-retching consequences” – i.e. “they make you sick”
p. 262: the principle of non-accountability has become so firmly established
Waiting for Hitler to invade England…. Sept., 1940
p. 312: “A man’s mind, his wit, is like a knife; it needs a grindstone, another mind, another wit, to keep it sharp, and this was a thing I missed more than anything else in England, my native country, where everybody seemed to be just about to say something or to be trying to look as if he could-say-a-lot-if-he-wished.”
He was pleased that England showed itself willing to fight – and speaks highly of Churchill’s leadership.

Lest We Regret. 1943.
Winning the peace – part of what he calls his “foresight series” beginning in 1938 with Insanity Fair.
Enclosure movement- the ruin of England.
A Whodunit—behind the scenes actors. The principle of non-accountability enshrined into politics.
p.225: “…the influences which prompt a people either to commit race suicide, or to breed, are spiritual.”
Feb. 1939, Prague: the words of the Jewish doctor, Doktor Farisy, lifted a fog in his mind—he said: “One of our Rabbis here is preaching in the synagogue that Hitler is the Jewish Messiah, because he will cause all those countries of the world to be opened to the Jews, which are now closed to them.” Reed comments: “As a knife needs a grindstone, so a mind needs the touch of another mind…I turned to Doktor Farisy with a whetted interest…”
p. 239: “…we British approach the climax of the Second World War and the middle of the tortured 20th century and strive to retrieve our future from all this misery. In soberly considering the Jews and Jewish ambitions, and the relation of these to our British interests, one great fact stands out like a mountain peak, in the confusion: that a Jewish triumph is all that remains of our victory in the First World War.”
p. 242: concerning the Jewish triumph, and the massive Jewish immigration to Palestine – and Britain: “We witness the largest ambitions ever expressed and pursued in the history of the world.” Gentiles fail to understand the strength of Jewish cohesion.
p. 240: In November 1942 a great campaign began about the ‘extermination’ of the Jews. Victory approached. If it came and found Jews still living in Europe, there they would remain. If they were to leave Europe they would need to do so before the victory. “Also, the British government had suspended immigration to Palestine. The ‘extermination’ campaign began… All sound of the suffering of the non-Jews who are Germany’s captives was drowned.” This ‘campaign’ and all the hullabaloo was “the most stupendous press and political campaign in his experience,”
leading to mass immigration of Jews to England. The UN Declaration read out on December 17, 1942, for retribution ‘against those responsible for these crimes’ (i.e., against Jews) in which England lent its name to the threat of Jewish vengeance.

Bolshevism: in 1917-1919 was predominantly composed of imported Jews. Early Bolshevist massacres bore all the signs, not of mob violence, but of vengeance.
In 1919, the Rev. George A Simons [ Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Petrograd, 1907-1918] said that of the 388 members of the Bolshevist government, 371 were Jews, 265 of which were from New York’s Lower East Side!
The Times (March 1919) – three-fourths of the Bolshevik movement were Jews
In 1920: 447 of the 545 members of the Bolshevik Administration were Jews
1933: The Jewish Chronicle reported that over one-third of all Russian Jews had become officials
There were three prior versions of a “Jewish State” before Palestine:
1. Communist/bolshevist Russia
2. Hungary
3. Bavaria, November 1918- May 1919
Hitler was in Bavaria during this period under the orders of its Jewish Red government,
p. 261: (his italics) “This period in his life has never been explained and is ignored in the literature about him.” Says that one of Hitler’s first acts as Chancellor was to imprison Count Arco-Valley, who shot the Bolshevist Jew Kurt Eisner in 1919. Was this done to remove a possible witness to Hitler’s conduct in Munich? After Nov. 1918. Jews came to Bavaria from abroad – and Hitler “did not escape from Munich and join the other assembling anti-Bolshevist forces, like other patriots.” (p. 261)
p. 266: “What are the Jews, and their ambitions?”
Says the Jews of the world are divided into three main groups: (1) more or less assimilated; (2) Zionists, with foreign policy and territorial ambitions; (3) international Jews, “with boundless aims”
“Anything which promotes the belief that great Powers, like this Empire or the U.S., are promoting the ambitions of the second and third group, immediately diminishes the population of the first group, which its adherents mainly see as a bond of religion. The second group is a race, or sees itself as such. History provides no precedent for their territorial ambition in Palestine -- comments that it has less justification than if the Arabs were to claim Spain – which they ruled for longer than the ancient Hebrews did Palestine. The third group remains invisible until the moment of chaos and pursues a great ambition – an exclusively Jewish rule in white countries on the basis of laws outlawing ‘anti-Semitism’ and on the basis of the weapon of terror. This unseen group suddenly appeared in Russia, Hungary and Bavaria in 1918-19. He says, “We need not dislike any of these groups; we need only know them.” (268) But time and again the news is not reported, under-reported, distorted, or otherwise rendered unserviceable.
p. 279: “Our foremost public spokesmen seem the victims of a Dervish-like obsession or infatuation in this question which blinds them to our own national and patriotic interests.”

Chapter XIII. “The Children of Israel. Begins – and ends – with scene with the Jewish Doktor Farisy, with whom Reed is walking through the streets of Prague. This is how it ends:
“…’Say that again,’ I said to Doktor Farisy as we walked through the streets of Prague, ‘I didn’t quite understand.’
He repeated: ‘One of our Rabbis here is preaching in the synagogue that Hitler is the Jewish Messiah, because he will cause all those countries of the world to be opened to the Jews, which are now closed to them.’
‘Do you know, Herr Doktor,’ I said, ‘I’ve known that for a long time without realizing it. Thank you for putting it into words. But my country will have to look after its own interests.’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘You know very well that you haven’t a single non-Jew on the staff of your newspaper,’ I said, ‘and you’ll do the very same thing in England, or Kenya, or wherever you go.’
He looked at me warily, with veiled eyes, opened his mouth, then shut it, without comment.
We walked on together.” (p. 280)

Next chapter: Parliament and Press only champion the cause of alien immigration; there was a hindrance to intermigration in the Empire. “We have seen that our Parliament will not help us… from some madness, or ulterior prompting, it seeks to cleave the bloodstream between this mother island and the offspring Dominions, and to fill every artery with Ersatz fluid…” (286)
Agitating for “Social Security” while the foundations of life are smashed: family life, truth, loyalty, faith and hope.

This book with its knowledge and experience represent the accumulated understanding of 30 years – 1914-1943. What is the summing-up of his five books? That the causes of the war have been concealed; the practice of non-accountability and power-wielded-in-anonymity; need to end the exploitation of unemployment; labor has to do with employment; industries of national importance should not be allowed to close because of “private enterprise” (i.e. “free market). Ten years ago, in 1933, he began to write his books. But the “dark order” did not change (323_ - that which is wielded in non-accountability which brought about the war and the inexplicable inaction preceding it. Then during the war there descended what one journalist called “obscurantism” that led to the sense of defeatism – “one other writer at least has seen what lies behind the sham-holy and mock-humanitarian clamor of our Parliament and our newspapers, our prelates and our professors; the desire, conscious or unconscious, to destroy us, to weaken everything that is good in us, to strengthen our enemies, fail our friends, surrender our future, perpetuate our wrongs and deprive us of our rights.” (p. 325)
That could have been written today.
The sound instinct needs a fixed and clearly conceived purpose… the ordinary people, who showed such staunchness, --“they have every virtue except the courage to admonish their leaders.” (326)

From Smoke to Smother (1938-1948) A sequel to Insanity Fair. Jonathan Cape, 1948.
Reading Douglas Reed – I am in the presence of a highly civilized mind. His “journalism books” are a special breed of writing, combining the virtues of good literature and a kind of whodunit, as he gains an ever deeper knowledge of the forces behind the scenes of history in the 20th century.
Smoke of the 30’s, ordeal by fire of the 40’s, the dark smother that awaits us in the 50’s. Military victory gave way to acts of politicians “much more than even in the first war and the years that followed it,” – who were “misguided by hidden groups hostile to liberty and nationhood everywhere.”
What seems most important to him now is the annihilation of spiritual values – he means “religion, patriotism, liberty, human dignity and honor.”
The mechanisms of 20th century war has been brought under remote control……..
p. 17: “An all-falsifying dishonesty is the mark of our century…Treachery as a calling can now be seen as the disease of the 20th century. Earlier ones of the body, like leprosy, were in time overcome. The traitor’s uncleanness has polluted public principle and civic security everywhere.” [these remarks followed his account of meeting Seyss-Inquart, whom he saw as a traitor to invite the Nazis into Austria]p. 19: tyranny – a disease of power that infects each successive group that comes to power just as the waves break on the shore – the disease is not to be identified with any distinct group, calling, or class.
Chapter 4 – The Wrecker
p.29 “I thought Hitler meant to ruin Germany. It was the only plausible explanation of the things he did. The new crime of ‘genocide’ (destroying nations) was charged against his henchmen at the great trial in the 40’s…but I think the nation he aimed to destroy was the German. This key to the riddle of our times was discovered by a few of the men near to him, who recoiled in horror when they opened Bluebeard’s forbidden room with it…” The first was Herman Rauschning, in Germany’s Revolution and Hitler Speaks (1939). The second was Albert Speer, who attempted to kill Hitler by gassing the arch-wreckers in their dugout. Says he believed Mussolini to be an unwitting agent of destruction and Hitler and Lenin to be fully enlightened destroyers and depopulators.
The “design” – that of destroying liberty and justice and the parent stock from which it came – Christianity – in all nations. After Hitler went the “design’ spread to all of Europe, England, USA. Question: was Hitler witting or unwitting? He thinks he was witting because of a mystery of his early life.
Formative years – Vienna before 1914. All archival records of that period have disappeared – been ransacked – disappeared. In those years the great Eurasian migration West was beginning—In 1919 Hitler was a German soldier serving under the Bolshevist gov’t of Munich. He did not fight it, yet after it was over, he suddenly became the leader of an anti-Bolshevist “National Socialist Party”! cf Tito, Lenin, Trotsky – they all appeared like that, seemingly out of nowhere – as result of secret Communist training. Reed’s theory is that this missing Viennese dossier would hold the key to 1908-1914: he thinks that Hitler received his political training in the Russian schools of anarchism and nihilism, and that these have now bred ostensibly opposed factions of ‘Communism’ and ‘Fascism’ in order better to work… for the aim of continental destruction. (p. 38) “I think he sprang from those secret, nationless conspiratorial ranks nd with his chosen initiates, may have been spirited away by them…” [Hitler’s body was never found]
Chapter 5. Between Two Thieves
Reichstag fire—“the hoax was the atomic bomb that blew our continent to pieces” [quoting a writer to the Times]
“iron curtain” – Reed originated the phrase
Bisection of Europe – compares to a broken spine
Chapter 7. WWI began something new in our planet’s history.
Chapter 8. Passing of the cross – to swastika – hammer and sickle – both images of a broken or distorted cross. The new tyrannies have almost undone the work of 19 centuries, they acknowledge no authority higher than their own—“theirs is the vainglory of the baboon” (p. 55)
p. 63: civilization is only wafer-thin – “Mankind was still a toad with the humane jewel dulling in its forehead; the toad had not become the lovely prince.”
p. 66: 1930’s –the most evil and fateful decade in 20 centuries – “huge backward strides were made.”

The Fire 1940-1945
“Emergency Powers” – “through this system of pipes stealthily laid down under the cover of war and behind the back of fighting men, the poison of power began to circulate through the body of England.” (p. 76) It was obviously being set up for a permanent political purpose – to transfer the power-over-people to new hands.

p. 112: observation on the French – “They have never been happy since their revolution.”

Chapter 11 The War Behind the War
At the cease-fire the purpose of destroying Europe & Christendom had greatly advanced with British and American support -- The war behind the war, the political one, had run counter to the visible one. Change of direction occurred after the entry of Communist Russia and the USA, through German and Japanese attacks, in 1941. “From then on…my own feelings about the future were…those which led me to write Insanity Fair… we were being taken back to where we came in and the victory of September, 1940 was being stood on its head…”

Between 1938-43 he wrote a book a year. After 1943 he did not write another book. “It would have been useless, perhaps impossible, to challenge the huge machine of wartime propaganda. The bludgeoning and intimidatory effect of mass-propaganda on the mass-mind is staggering; the power of thought sometimes seems extinct in the run of men.” (p. 123)

Erection of ‘Iron curtain’ – 1942-43 – the entire region behind this line would merely pass from Nazi German into Communist Russian hands. Hitler, Tito, et al—“training was in Moscow, but enthronement by London and Washington” (p. 125) Imperial conferences: Moscow, Tehran, Yalta.
Money from Britain and the U.S. financed German rearmament; Hitler was encouraged by gifts of territory to start the war; when he attacked Russia all this succor was simply carried over to the new aggressor. (p. 129)

George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War
Baron von Hessel, The Other Germany (1946)
A.W. Dulles, Germany’s Underground (1947)
Hitler-Stalin pact, 1939: “From then on, for 6 yrs, or 4 in the case of Russia, the propaganda machine told the masses that the evil man responsible for the war, whose downfall would end it, was Hitler. Yet every approach made by those who alone could kill him, Germans, was rejected and kept secret.” (131)

Chapter 12. Fissionary Society
The copyright to the nuclear weapon was transferred from Britain to the U.S. – “a transaction matchless in history” – the construction of the atomic arsenals was “deliberately allotted to the other partner in the Anglo-American alliance” (Times, 24 Sept 1947) [Reed emphasizes “deliberately”]
p. 138: “the dropping of the bombs was not a military act, but a political one, for future reference.” The bombs are used to force mankind into unconditional surrender to a World Government, “or be destroyed.”
1942-43: the cry began for the “abolition of national sovereignty”
At U.N. meeting Bernard Baruch, one of FDR’s advisers, proposed the “Atomic Development Authority” which claimed a world monopoly and worldwide powers to prevent their development by others, as well as the authority to use them on any nation that violated this “agreement.” The goal to impose world rule through atomic terror. Had all 5 members of the Security Council said yes, mankind would have surrendered all national sovereignty – but it was checked for the moment by the Soviets. The real design in all this was “to weaken men by the fear of war until they yield to dictatorship.” P. 143: “Men are quick to tremble before imaginary dangers and slow to see real ones.”

W.H. Chamberlin, Iron Age in Russia – describing state-managed famines
Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (1947)
David Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia (1947)
Russian pop. In 1914 was 170,000,000 – approx the same in 1939—the man-made famines and concentration camps account for the deficit of some 95,000,000 Russians

@@@@@@
p. 145: “After twenty centuries the plan is to convert mankind, not through the Christian mission, but through nuclear fission, or the threat of it; and it is of the devil.”
@@@@@@@

Chapter 13. A Thief or Two…
p. 146: “In our century leading politicians (I think the word ‘statesmen’ has no current application) appear repeatedly to surrender principles to what presumably appears to them a necessity of the moment. By this process, bad constantly breeds worse. Those who, nominally at least, took responsibility for the Nuremberg Trial set up a precedent of evil omen for the future. It appears to me to have outlawed international law and to have legalized the savage victor’s rule of putting his captive foe to death.”

Of the 4 main charges, “War Crimes” and “Crimes against Humanity” were the last. The first two were new to any code of int’l law—“The Common Plan of Conspiracy” and “Crimes against Peace.” These included “the planning and waging of wars of aggression.” P. 147: “Of two thieves, one was exalted to judgment on the other.” Whose, indeed, was the Vengeance at Nuremberg? Cf the Dec 17, 1942 “Declaration “ in the House of Commons by Anthony Eden – mentioning “retribution” against those who had committed crimes against the Jews. P. 148: The dates of sentence and execution at Nuremberg were Jewish festivals.” Very few newspapers in the West said anything about it, with the exception of space given to a letter in the Manchester Guardian – from a reader – who wrote: “The four nations… have now openly renounced Christianity through their leaders… There was a direct choice to be made between ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ …. On the one side, and ‘Vengeance is Mine,’ on the other. Britain, America, France and Russia have made that choice in favor of savage pre-Christian rites.” (p. 149)

Comments Reed: “That appears to me the precise truth. The choice of those dates can hardly have been accidental and thus the executions were given the nature of a tribal vengeance under Old Testament law… if these hangings were not performed in the name of all the victims, but only of one group, the other victims are by plain inference put outside the law that was dispensed, and it was neither justice nor Christian.” (p. 150) And: “The lengthening shadow of Nuremberg and of the powers behind it reaches far into our future. People who are strong enough to arrange such great affairs in the way that suits them clearly will not confine their ambition to Germany.”

Chapter 14 In Unknown England.
P. 153: “What was built in Europe in 1900 years, and has been almost destroyed since 1914, cannot be transplanted…If England were now to fail, I think a great horror and darkness would come on the Christian world for many centuries.”

The Smother 1945-1950
“I never saw a land where a free man had a more hopeful future than the England saved by a few fighting men of 1940. In 1945 its elected government began to destroy freedom and the hope of a future.”[A good reply to John Lukacs, who once said that ‘Churchill gave us fifty years.’] A socialist victory before wartime “Emergency Powers” were repealed opened the way to dictatorship.
---Traces the effects from the “still unbroken curse” from the Reichstag fire, Feb. 27, 1933; to the July 21 1945 election in England – and need we mention 9/11/2001 in USA – and all the things in between?
Calls the disease of the 20th c. ‘the greed for power over persons and property” (p. 188) All parties – Conservative, --------Liberal and Socialist- joined hands in 1940 to suspend the citizen’s liberties in the name of war emergency; and when the war ended they never mentioned their common promise to restore them “and by this silence consented to their destruction.”
p. 191: “The aims of Communism were generally familiar in the Thirties. In the forties the British and American people became confused about them because when the two European thieves fell out, the huge war-time machine of mass-propaganda was switched to disguising the nature of communism.”
----“…Treason made into an art and espionage into a science by the modern totalitarians.
Plain Talk, New York, 1947
The science and methods of permeation, penetration and capture—published in Blueprint for World Conquest, by W.H. Chamberlin, Human Events, Washington, 1946.
---Footnote, p. 198: “among our worst losses in the war was the tradition of chivalry to a beaten enemy.”
p. 212: The 393 victorious socialists of 1945 included more Jewish members than Westminster had ever known before. Thus with the Socialists these British Jews joined in the attack against British liberty. “When the fighting-war ceased the entire wealth and strength of Political Zionism immediately turned against Britain.”
p. 252 “Exceptional laws on the Leninism and Hitlerist model, nominally directed against some dim group but in fact aimed at the entire population, are the essential basis of dictatorship.”
p. 254 “since the Reichstag fire, however, no government can be forgiven that outlaws its people in the name of such easily stage-managed affairs.” (!!)
The dividing line between democracy and totalitarianism: where labor is directed or free.
Final phase of the Battle in Britain began November 3, 1947. Compares the 1940’s to the 1640’s – Cromwell - On October 22, 1947 (!) the Attlee government announced its intention to ‘reform’ the House of Lords --- Cromwell had abolished the House of Lords and the King; he ended by abolishing Parliament and setting himself up as king. Cromwell in the 1640’s betrayed the achievements of Runnymede 400 years before. Their restoration in 1600’s made them safe for another 300 years – until 1940’s. “The Parliament of 1647 found itself confronted with a new master of its own creation – Cromwell’s Army. The Socialist parliament in 1947 found itself confronted with a new master of its own creation—a Communist dominated Trade Union Congress.” (p. 273) The only major difference: Cromwell did not enslave England for the benefit of a third party.
Re: processes of natural decline
“The condition of England is quite clearly not the result of such processes of natural decline, but of a deliberate and well-planned assault by political forces, alien in their roots and hostile in their spirit.” (p. 275)
This is why he thinks the years 1945-47 are so important – England was made into an invalid by her own government, which did everything possible to prevent recovery.

Part Four. The Fulminant Fifties: 1950-

p. 283: “It is no more possible for Europe to remain cut in half than for a serpent to live with a half-engorged rabbit in its mouth; it must either wholly devour or wholly disgorge.”
---The two forces that grew stronger behind all the tumult: Communism and Zionism. Both became powerful at the same moment, Oct-Nov 1917, when the Communist seized power in Russia, and the Zionist claim was underwritten by the British government.
--p. 286: “Both worked hand in hand and promoted each other’s aims during the next 30 years (whether in the third act they will separate and strike at each other, or appear to do so, is a revelation reserved [for later]”
---ibid. “A backward glance reveals that the existence of “National Socialism” was indispensable to their common advance. This is the point where the mystery of Hitler’s origins, real motives, sudden entry and exit, become significant.”
---1880’s-1890’s: Anarchism/Nihilism/Bolshevism/Communism – born (or reborn) in Russia, tracing back to Secret societies behind the French Revolution Large numbers of Jews emigrated to England and USA after unsuccessful revolutions of 1890 and 1905 – many of them returned and predominated in Bolshevist government.
p. 291: “… heavy migration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the American zone of Germany was ‘part of a carefully organized plan financed by special groups in the U.S.’ [Was this the real reason for the American occupation?] –they were sent from the Communist Empire (where No One could leave!!) and their passage facilitated by British and American money. Lieut-Gen Sir Frederick Morgan spoke of “a secret organization” that existed to further a mass movement of Jews from Europe to Palestine – he was accused of “anti-Semitism.” Notice how the “anti-Semitism” charge flourished in pre-Revolutionary Russia, then shifted to Germany, then to England………
p. 300: “The war situation in the Middle East: British and American troops fighting for Israel could only mean “that men of Christian civilization would return to the birthplace of their faith and civilization in order to blot out the entire story of 1947 years. This is the immense symbolism of the thing…”
---The original promise, given in breach of other promises to the Arabs—the results of which were years of enforced Zionist immigration; growing Arab protests; Arab uprisings in: 1920, 1921, 1929, 1933, and the first Zionist War of 1936-39 (waged by British troops against the Arabs).
p. 302: “This long and costly war was not successful, and only ended when the British government agreed to reduce Zionist immigration to a maximum of 12,000 a year…At that point Arab resistance had brought the Zionist plan to a standstill. Without the simultaneous rise of Hitler and ‘anti-Semitism’ in Germany, and the second world war, a wrongful invasion of a peaceable land would have been checked and the ‘design’ of the 20th century would have been spoiled.”

p. 302: “coincidence in our century is clearly a malignant demon; Hitler appeared and the second war began… What happened then? A U.N. organization was set up to make ‘aggression’ impossible and to ensure the spread of ‘democracy’ everywhere…WITH THE EXCEPTION OF PALESTINE. Then the nuclear monopoly was vested in ADA… the supreme ambition: to get American armies fighting in Arabia. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the United Nations Declaration of 1947 were in effect two declarations of war against the Arab world.
“Protocols…” published in Russia, 1897; translated into English by British newspaper man Victor Marsden, and published in England in 1918. Marsden said when translating them, he could not work on them more than an hour at a time, because they made him physically ill. (p. 331) They manifest an all-embracing knowledge of a rare kind – a mastery of the weaknesses and wickednesses of human nature and the uses to which they may be put. (p. 331 “The reader has the feeling that he is in the presence of something unclean and deadly, as if he were locked in a dark room with a viper.”

It may be that the Protocols are an anti-Jewish document of Machiavellian plotters who saw in the use or misuse of the Jews a good way to spread chaos. The “scriptures of a black religion” traceable to Adam Weishaupt, 1771 – who said, “… princes and nations shall disappear off the face of the earth. Yes, the time will come when men will have no other laws than the book of nature; this revolution will be the work of the secret societies, and that is one of our great mysteries.” p. 321
--------“Illuminism was German, not Jewish.” P. 323—but it came under Jewish leadership after the failed Revolutions of 1848 – the promoters of which went underground to Russia to emerge in later revolutions of 1880 [1890?] , 1905, 1917. The Communist Manifesto was merely a consommé of the teachings of earlier secret societies. The Canadian Report of 1946: “the conclusive document of the series.” [I missed getting the particulars of this.]

The Shape of the 50’s
1. The Black Religion and its organization exist. The literature is available and its teachings may be compared with the pattern of events.
2. The greatest success of the conspiracy has been its astonishing concealment.
3. 2 volcanoes were laid: Europe and Palestine – could erupt at any time
4. The visible agents: communism in the East and “World Statesmen” (with their servants the atom bomb and the buried gold) in the West
If England holds and renounces the road to serfdom (p. 341) Difficult to hope for in England. “It still rises like a rock from its surrounding waters, but has been left by the second war creeping with licensed treason and masked treachery, riven with bewilderment, and undermined and honeycombed by those who desire its destruction.” P. 341 He adds: “It has been fantastic to see that the great bulk of its people still think they are merely witnessing, or participating in, a struggle between ‘Labour’ and ‘The Tories.’”

Epilogue “Ten Times April”
“Shall I, in 1958, still be retailing the blindingly obvious to the incorrigible blind?”

Postscript
“In 1938, when Insanity Fair appeared on April 1st, Hitler just three weeks previously had confirmed the book’s argument by invading Austria.”
From Smoke to Smother was written between April-November, 1947.

---“The way to final ruination in this century lies in further submission to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine; the only way out of the chaos is to break that bondage.” P. 352

The costs of supporting Zionism are becoming evident. “The Zionists will seek to knock down the incompliant politicians and set up a new generation of compliant prime ministers and politicians…” p. 356
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Far and Wide. Douglas Reed. 1951.
A journey to America – “Much power… has passed from Europe to America, so that I felt an urgent need of the mind to go there.” The plan for world dominion is chiefly promoted by Soviet Communism and Zionist Nationalism—“the hammer of revolution and the anvil of gold.” The plan was apparent as early as the civil War – “The real aim was to break the political power of the rural South and transfer it to the expanding, industrial North where the revolutionary forces were strongest.” (p. 22)
And: “The clear trail leading from the Civil War to the present was the first of my surprises in America.”
(p. 25) What came with the defeat of the south was the new order of “enslavement of white men by Soviet methods.”
A line goes from the subjugation of the South in 1965 (1965-1977) to the subjection of Germany after the WWII—see Victor’s Justice, Montgomery Belgion – proving “the existence of a permanent revolutionary organization, trained to intervene at such junctures in human affairs and give them a satanic twist.” (p. 27)
Murders: Abraham Lincoln (1865); Alexander II of Russia (1881); Archduke at Sarajevo (1913); Alexander of Yugoslavia (1934); Count Bernadotte (1948). “The men marked for death…stood for reconciliation, unity, orderly judicial reforms…” (p. 48)
“The Civil War was America’s real revolutionary war, not the one Washington fought.” (p. 56)

p. 143: “The geography of America is a morality play in itself, a graphic natural symbolization of the cross-roads to which man seems ever to come afresh, at which the white man now stands. On the eastern seaboard is the civilization so painfully built up, now arrested and imperiled; that was a God-fearing conquest of the wilderness. Then comes the reward for that first venture, the bountiful central valley, eternal abundance. Then again comes the arid West, the picture of what might lie at the end of any false road: emptiness and death. North of Salton Sea lies the terrible place called Death Valley, which the map-makers have marked ‘National Monument.’ Here the traveler feels, not the youth of the Republic, but the age of America…”
p. 151: “Hollywood…contains the most potent machine, of this or any time, for forming or warping the mass-mind… it is the fission-propaganda for dividing Christian or white folk among themselves…” And: “Hollywood was built in a day, as Holyrood (say Scotsman of that ancient abbey) was not…” (p. 149) And: “It is an illusion that ‘box office’ is Hollywood’s only and golden rule; the purpose of political suggestion overrides all else.” (p. 152)
p. 198: Reflection in Wyoming and the passing of the dinosaurs: “America is a place to study the ends of worlds rather than the beginnings of new ones.”
In the closing section, “Three Servitudes,” he feels the “underlying kinship of Christian purpose” in America, but “overlain now by much confusion.” (p. 269) Camp meetings and revivals are a testament to the emotional starvation of Americans, “a product of the excessive concentration on material things, [leaving] a mass of unused spiritual energy drifting about in the Republic like loose ballast in a ship.” (p. 270) The “Manifest Destiny of 1850 has changed to a destiny unmanifest in 1950.” The three servitudes: Political Zionism, Communism, and organized crime. The Balfour Declaration “tethered the British and American peoples to the ambition of a Zionist-controlled world federation…” (p. 291) …an event “which gave the lie to ever moral principle ever stated by Western politicians as the issue of the two wars.” (p. 301) “There is a science of mind control and these men proved masters of it. They achieved dominance over Gentile politicians and split world Jewry as by atomic fission, reviving in it the doctrine of a peculiar people with a Messianic mission overriding other loyalties, overruling native interests, overlording public affairs.” (p. 307) Maurice Samuels: “…We are trying to rebuild the world to our needs and unbuild it for the Gentiles…” (p. 363)
He finds in America a “spiritual leaderlessness”: “The structure of government and all the means of public information have become so infested that the masses of men simply cannot tell where truth or native interests lie.” (p. 368) This hidden organization or the occult controllers converted Western military victories into political defeats… the solution lies in the magic phrase ‘Emergency Powers.’ Fissioning: Europe; Korea; Palestine. It seems to be the signature mark. Amazing, the “apparent absence of protest or resistance among the leaders of those Western nations, which were thus deprived of what they had gained during two thousand years… the process seems to have been one of infatuated self-surrender to the forces of destruction.”
Long section on Whitaker Chambers/Alger Hiss/ Communist subversion.

Precession

2010-05-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization. Graham Hancock, Three Rivers Press, new York, 1995.

"... For some inexplicable reason, and at some unknown date, it seems that certain archaic myths from all over the world were 'co-opted' ... to serve as vehicles for a body of complex technical data concerning the precession of the equinoxes. "

See also: Jane B. Sellars, The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.

12 = number of constellations in the zodiac
30 = number of degrees allocated along the ecliptic to each zodiacal constellation
72 = number of years required for equinoctial sun to complete a precessional shift of 1 degree
360 = total number of degrees in the ecliptic
72 x 30 = 2160 number of years required for sun to complete passage of 30 degrees along the ecliptic
2160 x 12 = 25,920 [also: 360 x 72] The Great Year or one complete precessional cycle
4320 = number of years required for equinoctial sun to complete precessional shift of 60 degrees
72
+36 [precessional shift of 1/2 degree)
= 108
108 x 100 = 10,800
108 divided by 2 = 54
54 x 10 = 540
Norse Myths: Valhalla's fighters = 432,000 - last battle against Fenrir Wolf

See: Hamlet's Mill: An essay investigating the origins of human knowledge and its transmission through myth. (or: An essay on myth and the frame of time) The two subtitles (cover and inner title page) in this David R. Godine edition from 1969, actually differ.
Giorgia de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend.
cosmology: p. 50
participation: p. 53
..............myth is essentially cosmological..............participation in ultimate things.......................

Notes on the Gurdjieff Work

2010-04-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

From: Is There 'Life' on Earth? an Introduction to Gurdjieff. J.G. Bennett. 1973.

The reproach against "Idealism":
~p. 24: "Every meanness, every self-indulgence and every violent impulse that takes root in my inner world will, sooner or later, find expression in outer manifestations. Unfortunately, the converse is not true. I do not find that if I think noble thoughts or entertain fine projects in my mind, they have a corresponding effect on my behavior. I may decide to do admirable things, and yet find that, however much I may think about them, they do not get done..."
And: "... if we want to achieve, it is not sufficient to think."
Idea of choice reinforced in the great religious teachings:
~p. 27: "It is because of this added power that they have been able to change the course of history. We can see from the history of the past two hundred years what happens when the idea of choice is shorn of any compelling motive. As the idea that man must choose degenerates into the belief that he can choose, and choose morever and when he himself wishes, it passes from a positive to a negative thought...
~p. 28: "The distinction between real and illusory choice lies deep at the root of all religious teaching..."
An interesting explanation for overpopulation:
~p. 44: "Gurdjieff taught that man is a being with two destinies, one unavoidable, the other which it is in his power to have, but only if he himself earns it. .. this second destiny... is incomparably more valuable than the first. As things are in the world at the present time, a very small proportion of people are doing anything effective for the attainment of the second destiny. This has certain very bad consequences, because the amount of energy or matter which has to be produced in the life of man is determined not by himself, but by general influences. Suppose that we had a flock of sheep and required so much wool. If the sheep begin to produce less wool, we should have to increase our flock. The population of the world is increased in very much the same way as the number of sheep that have to be kept as the wool deteriorates in quality and quantity and this carries with it very unsatisfactory consequences for mankind."
The second destiny:
~p. 45: If the struggle for the second destiny can be more widely felt, "then future generations will enter into a new world. If not, they will not even keep the old world that we have known."
~p. 45: "If once it is understood that the one true criterion which objectively decides the value of a man is his ability to struggle with himself... the world would seek for teachers, rather than rulers, for those who could set an example rather than those who dominate and impress.
Three uses of energy:
~p. 96: We have to learn to bring the quicksilver, the wayward energy of attention, under control. If we can do this certain changes can take place in the organism. "When I direct and hold my attention, a transformation of energy takes place, which produces material that can be used for various purposes. First of all, energy is used up in my psychic activity and in the life of my body. Secondly, I am constantly radiating energy out into space. This energy is not wasted, but is needed for the general purposes of life. If I make the effort to control my attention, the quality of my radiation shanges and this has an important result about which Gurdjieff has much to say in his writings. Then there is the third use of energy of attention, which is for the formation and growth of my higher bodies."
Laws of life
~p. 108: "The universe is very large and subject to laws of different grades. These laws interpenetrate and pass from one level to another. They become very complicated indeed by the time anything so small as individual man is reached. The complexity of the laws operating in the life of one individual man or woman is so great that often no solution of the practical problems of life can be found in philosophical or theoretical terms. It is only on a very advanced level that the problems of the individual can be seen in a concrete setting. This is quite contrary to our ordinary way of thinking. We imagine that the problems of individuals are within the compass of our understanding. We may even think it more difficult to understand great laws than to understnd one man. It is not so."
Conformable acts
~p. 131: "... the assimilation of the results of oft-repeated acts"
Responsibility
~p. 133: "... the task which confronts those who have realized their responsibility toward coming generations."
Faith is a quality of understanding
~p. 139: "Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment ... [or] from the perception of anything by sight... but from understanding. Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced..."
Transsubstantiation
~p. 141: "The material required for a new creation enters through our outer world and is made one's own, 'transsubstantiated' -... by work and struggle in our inner world.

"Sincere atheism"

2010-03-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

A footnote in Frithjof Schuon's book on Sufism (p. 17): "In our time there is much talk of 'sincere' atheism; however, apart from the fact that sincerity neither prevents error from being error nor adds any value to it whatsoever, there is always in this system of sincerity - or 'sincerist narcissism' - a point which constitutes total sin, and which seals off entry to Truth and Mercy."

Contemporary man described

2010-03-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

From Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, Frithjof Schuon. World Wisdom Books, 1981.

~p. 17: "...Contemporary man, in spite of his being marked by certain experiences due to the senescence of humanity, is spiritually soft and ineffective and intellectually ready to commit every possible betrayal, which will seem to him as summits of intelligence, whereas in reality these betrayals are far more absurd than the excesses of simplicity and emotivity of ancient man. In a general way, the man of the 'last days' is a blunted creature, and the best proof of this
is that the only 'dynamism' of which he is still capable is that which tends downwards, and which is no more than a passivity taking advantage of cosmic gravity; it is the agitation of a man who lets himself be carried away by a torrent and who imagines that he is creativing this torrent himself by his agitation. "

~p. 94: "...one all too often forgets the blinding evidence that it is better to follow truth stupidly than to follow error intelligently, all the more so as truth in any case neutralizes unintelligence at least to a certain extent, whereas on the contrary error can only pervert and corrupt the mind."

~p. 95: "Intelligence is only beautiful when it does not destroy faith, and faith is only beautiful when it is not opposed to intelligence."

relativity theory

2010-03-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Herbert Dingle - "[Maxwell's basic axiom - that there exists an ether with respect to which the velocity of a body had a definite, in principle, measurable value] ... "What Einstein was proposing, therefore, was to retain the finite velocity of light without the existence of any standard with respect to which that velocity had a meaning. Light consisted in waves, with a definite length, frequency, and velocity, in nothing; it was the grin without the Cheshire cat."

Science at the Crossroads, p. 108

From: The Labyrinth of Solitude

2010-03-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

From Octavio Paz's great classic of history and imagination:

p. 172: "Each man's fate is that of man himself." Paz is speaking of universal history- that is to say, of Western history. "Now history has recovered its unity and become what it was in the beginning: a meditation on mankind." Actually this may be less true now than when he wrote it - in 1961. When he wrote it seemed that history was to be replaced by "a single civilization and a single future." Now, with the rapid deterioration of our society, we begin to look to a future where China takes the lead.

Nevertheless - the idea still carries enough conviction that the moral entombment of Western society becomes at least partially explicable. Carrying the burden of history is too much of a burden, especially for a people who have never learned the fine art of self-command (self-restraint). People who have not discovered their essence, and who remain caught in the snares of personality, cannot be trusted to be in the spotlight. They go crazy. cf. Paz--"The feeling of illegitimacy, common to all barbarians and newcomers..." (p. 309)

Perhaps essence is the real secret of power. "Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition." Yes, but so is sociality. Solitude is profound because it is the face turned toward essence. (The distinction between essence and personality comes from Gurdjieff and seems to me one of the most useful things he said.) Personality is turned toward sociality. And yet, an essential being has his face turned toward others. This comes only after dwelling for a long time in solitude.

Paz on the Aztecs: "The case of the Aztecs is unique because their cruelty was the result of a system impeccably and implicably coherent, an irrefutable syllogism-dagger... what stuns and paralyzes the mind is the use of realistic means in the service of a metaphysic both rigorously rational and delirious, the insensate offering up of lives to a petrified concept... [and] what concerns me... is not the problem of historical interpretation but the fact that we cannot contemplate the cadaver face to face: its phantasm inhabits us."(p. 308)

p. 370: "A society is essentially defined by its position as regards time."

Divine Art of the Story

2010-02-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Isak Dinesen…from “The Cardinal’s Last Tale,” in Last Tales

“… ‘ Stories have been told as long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water. You will see the characters of the true story clearly, as if luminous and on a higher plane, and at the same time they may look not quite human, and you may well be a little afraid of them. That is all in the order of things. But I see, Madame,’ he went on, ‘I see, today, a new art of narration, a novel literature and category of belles-lettres, dawning upon the world. It is, indeed, already with us, and it has gained favor amongst the readers of our time. And this new art and literature – for the sake of the individual characters in the story, and in order to keep close to them and not be afraid – will be ready to sacrifice the story itself.’
“ ‘ The individuals of the new books and novels – one by one – they are so close to the reader that he will feel a bodily warmth flowing from them, and that he will take them to his bosom and make them, in all situations of his life, his companions, friends, and advisors. And while this interchange of sympathy goes on, the story itself loses ground and weight, and in the end evaporates, like the bouquet of a noble wine, the bottle of which has been left uncorked.’ “
“ ‘Oh, Your Eminence,’ said the lady, ‘do not speak ill of this new fascinating art of narration, to which I am myself a devotee. Those live and sympathetic persons of the modern novels at times have meant more to me than my acquaintances of flesh and blood. They have indeed seemed to embrace me, and when, reading by candlelight, I have wetted my pillow with the tears of Ellenore, this sister of mine – frail and faultful like myself – seems to have been shedding my own.’
“’Mistake me not,’ said the Cardinal, ‘the literature of which we are speaking – the literature of individuals, if we may call it so – it is a noble art, a great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. At the end we shall be privileged to view, and review, it – and that is what is named the day of judgment. ‘”

Sacrifice of the Future

2010-02-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

"The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose."
William James [1842-1910]

Intellectual Decadence

2010-02-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence. There is no area of our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that…. Or: There is capitalism in so far as… The use of expressions like ‘to the extent that’ is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever… So it is easy to find examples of lethal absurdity wherever one looks. Simone Weil, “The Power of Words,”(1937) from her Selected Essays, Oxford, 1962.

Responsibility for Acts

2010-02-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

"...Of all the changes that have taken place in the human condition over the past hundred years, none is more significant than the increasing difficulty we have in tracing acts to their owners. In earlier times and in more simple societies each act was branded with its owner’s name. In the complex societies of today it might take the combined efforts of a detective and a moral philosopher to trace any given act to any one person…[But] we must not only know to whom acts belong, if the world is to make sense; we must also understand the nature of our own responsibility and have some notion of the obligations natural to us. Otherwise we swing in uneasy alternation between… an irresponsibility that is seldom free from guilt and, on the other hand, an exaggerated notion of our duties and obligations. Both scamp and busybody are products of a land without boundary marks…”

From:
Gai Eaton, The King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World, 1990.

The Higher Truths

2010-02-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote: “[The] higher realities are rather bashful and do not seize us as their victims. On the contrary, they make themselves apparent to us only on one condition: that we desire their existence and that we strive toward them. In a way, then, they depend on our will for their existence. Science, art, justice, manners, religion, are orbits of reality which do not overwhelm our persons in a brutal way as hunger or cold does; they exist only for him who wills them to exist.”

Kenosis

2010-02-27T05:11:00.000-08:00

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; And being found in fashion like a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death on the cross. Phillippians 2: 5-8 (King James)
“Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” (Revised Standard Version)

Profile on George F. R. Ellis, “Thinking Globally, Acting Universally,” Scientific American, October 1995: Astronomer and cosmologist from South Africa whose work has explored alternatives to the so-called “standard model” and especially critical of the concept of the “critical density” universe. He says that, “What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” In addition Dr. Ellis is very active in the ethical field and believes in the existence of a universal moral law. “The foundational line of true ethical behavior, its main guiding principle valid across all times and cultures, is the degree of freedom from self-centeredness of thought and behavior, and willingness freely to give up one’s own self-interest on behalf of others.” He calls this principle kenosis, the Greek word for self-emptying.

Ellis further develops his thinking in his paper, “Kenosis as a Unifying Theme for Life and Cosmology,” (not published; no date) Says that the key idea is “the fundamental aim of loving action shapes the nature of creation and of transcendence in practice…thus we take seriously the concept that the purpose of the universe is precisely to make this kind of sacrificial response possible, and pursue the implications.” But he undermines his own argument when he remarks that “science cannot provide the metaphysical basis” for such a view of the universe. How very much more does man need to understand Owen Barfield’s wise words, that it is impossible to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to imagine that we can. But I think the cosmological basis for sacrifice or renunciation is already shouting at us in the revised and rehabilitated theory of the ether. Cf. also, The Hidden Face of God, by Gerald Schroeder: where he argues that most of matter is “empty space,” a fact which he translates from the Hebrew word tzimtzum, meaning a spiritual pulling-back by the Eternal to yield a space of existence.

Frank Wilczek

2010-02-22T18:17:00.000-08:00

"Besides the fluctuating activity of quantum fields, space is filled with several layers of more permanent, substantial stuff. These are ethers in something closer to ther original spirit of Aristotle and Descartes-- they are materials that fill space. In some cases, we can even identify what they're made of even produce little samples of it. Physicists usually call these material ethers condensates. One could say that they... condense spontaneously out of empty space as th morning dew or an all-enveloping mist might condense out of moist, invisible air."
Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces.
New York, Basic Books, 2008
Perseus, $26.95
Perseus Book Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia 19103
800-819-4145 ext 5000
531.1 W643L

Guenther Wachsmuth

2010-02-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man.
Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth. Anthroposophical Publishing,
Vol I, 1932. London & New York.
"A Path of Investigation into the World of the Living"

Rudolf Steiner says in The Story of My Life, that "The powers of knowledge for the mechanical are awake of themselves; those for the higher forms of reality must be awakened."
Key to GW's book: the theory of the etheric was to be made the master-key to the knowledge of Nature. he who limits himself to the purely quantitative and sensorially-perceptible can never arrive at a true notion of the action of the ether.
Seven etheric primal forces, but only 4 of them reveal themselves in space-time processes:

warmth ether
light ether
chemical (or sound) ether
life ether

warmth & light ethers -- expansive/radiative tendency

chemical & life -- contractive, centric or suctional tendency

warmth ether - tends to spherical form [heat]
light ether - tends to triangular form [gaseous]
chemical ether - tends to half-moon form [fluid]
life ether - tends to square form [solid]
p. 76: migratory birds connected with etheric currents setting in (spring/fall). Changing distribution of etheric formative forces offers a great vista for insights into ethnology, zoology, etc.
Gravitation: suctional activity of life ether centralized in solid earth. Life ether induces solid state of substance.
Etheric structures of Saturn are necessary to understand genesis of our cosmic system. Etheric structure of Earth is the complete reversal of the etheric structure of Saturn. "Without" for Saturn is for earth "within." There is this emphasis: "But the inversion which puts the inside out and the outside in is a fundamental law of all evolution." E.g., life-ether, the outermost zone of Saturn's ring, is the most interior of the Earth. The density of substance (densest of substance?)
is the outermost of the rings.
A very interesting sentence (p. 122): "... human thought seeks to re-unite into a unity that which in the perceptible world is sundered. In the sense intended above we may say that it reverses the action of the etheric formative forces which bring about the phenomenal world; it leads backwards from the phenomenal to real being, from the separate, the spatial, into the real, the non-spatial..."
Steiner- "Time belongs to the phenomenal world. It has nothing to do with being itself." (Hmm) p. 123

warmth & light ethers = expansive and space-affirming
chemical & life ethers = contractive and space-denying
... the evolution of the world takes its course between the affirmation and denial of space--"The genesis of the etheric formative forces is the genesis of space." (p. 124)
"Pure light" = ozone > O3 i.e., absence of heat or warmth ether.
"Heat light" = oxygen > O2 i.e., owes its existence to action of warmth ether. Result of destruction of substance through combustion.

Pure light: >>>> Sun >>>>Life ether >>>HELIUM >>>>>Light ether >>>>OZONE

Ozone absorbs life ether with a greater intensity than any other terrestrial substance. It reduces the action of life ether to an intensity bearable to the eyes - Pure life ether would destroy the human body. "Pure light" also appears in phosphorescence.
p. 131: ether theory in physics sees it as purely automatic mechanisms - not so here.

COLORS
When there is predominantly active:
warmth ether......................red
light ether............................yellow
chemical ether....................blue
life ether...............................violet

Plants: those with a tendency towards shade (darkness) develop round leaves; those with a tendency toward light develop pointed or serrated leaves. "These phenomena can be understood only on the basis of a theory of ether." (p. 164)

p. 212: "The etheric systemization of the blood corpuscles of a human being is a copy of the etheric systemization of the interior of the earth......the fate of the earth and the fate of man are thereby closely bound together. That which arises in the etheric earth will always be reflected in the blood corpuscles of man."

Heat: transition stage from the purely etheric to the 'substantial' and vice versa. RS on motion: "... the reaction of matter capable of motion to the action of heat and light." (p. 23) Says it is "nonsense" to say that heat and light are in motion.
p. 36: something real, the very being of things, comes with the etheric formative forces (EFF) to living expression in the phenomenal world-- these forces are not to be understood merely mechanically (Lenard) nor as simply the negation of mechanical characteristics (Einstein). In the phenomenal world of expression they may be considered mechanically - up to a certain point. They are in essence spiritual and qualitative, they 'announce' an individual being.
>>>Velocity, Mass, Length, V0lume, etc. >>>>...Measurable......>>individually spiritual...
p. 45: the "atom">>>>4 globular spheres surrounding one another when in a static condition, cf. earth with its atmosphere>>>4 globular spheres as loci of activity of the 4 etheric formative forces.
(Circle represented with four concentric interior spheres. The innermost is the Life ether, and proceeding out from there: Chemical, Light, and Warmth ethers.)

Electromagnetic Wave

2010-02-22T17:37:00.000-08:00

From: David Wilcock, "The Science of Oneness," chap 5,
http://divinecosmos.com/index.php/start-here/books-free-online/19-the-science-of-oneness/83-the-science-of-oneness-chapter-05-aether-electromagnetism-and-free-energy
5.4.1 E-FIELD AND B-FIELD
Magnetism and electricity are considered to be two components of the same force, namely electromagnetism. Magnetism is referred to as the "B-field" and electricity as the "E-field," and they are graphed out as a unified wave where the E-field is on the horizontal plane and the B-field is on the vertical plane, 90 degrees of rotation away from its counterpart.
This is based upon careful measurements of the properties of these fields themselves, and is considered to be a contemporary fact. The picture below shows us a "conventionalized diagram of an (electromagnetic) wave form..." that was reprinted by Enterprise Mission with permission from Ultra High Frequency Radio Engineering by WL Emory, The Macmillan Company.
.. it may be surprising to realize that magnetism and electricity, which certainly seem to be used as two separate forces in our technology, are always traveling together in this fixed 90-degree relationship where magnetism is dynamic and electricity is static.

A Weapon of Mass Destruction

2009-12-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

Human "thinking" is a weapon of mass destruction. There are actually steps that need to be taken, procedures, disciplines, remembrances, etc. to detoxify thinking, to fortify its immune system against itself. Only a "thinking" which has been through this process and development of auto-immunification really deserves to poke its head out into the world and begin chirping, adding its voice to the chorus of influences continually piping in the background around us/within us. But how few there are with even a concept of "de-toxification"!

Books - many books, most books - are cognitional poisons, or rather, poisons of the soul. It is necessary for us to expose ourselves to these packaged poisons, and it is equally necessary for us to learn how to clean ourselves after ingesting them. Indeed I wonder if there is not some deep, secret, intimate relationship between poisons and consciousness itself? - look at how closely drugs and vegetable toxins are allied with shamanism, with voyages to the limits of awareness, with the "awakening into life and awareness."

We are reaching the limits of our ability to handle these toxins. For the shamans exposure to toxins meant an expansion of consciousness. For us, on the contrary, exposure has only meant a narrowing and stultification of consciousness, a hardening of the arteries, an inability to change, a deep stagnation. All of modern society has the character of a stagnant pool, full of toxins. All of our ways of doing things are overlaid with habits, mental habits, mental habits upon mental habits - in a way, it is an exquisite work of art without the art, a porcelain inlay that is paradoxically both fragile and hard as steel. Our "fragility" can be seen in the growing movement to impose conformity upon thought - political correctness, the fear of new ideas, the fear of making fun of ideas, people, things. Everything has got a sheen over it of the pseudo-sacred. Our hardness consists in a loss of plasticity. The toxification of our minds has left us into the mud - the dinosaur mud - in which our steps are encased.

The cost of toxification is loss of intimacy with one's own mind. Relationships and acquaintance with people reveal this loss of intimacy, freedom, and confidence, thus ultimately issuing into alienation, self-alienation and loss of community. The ability to think in a relatively unpoisoned way is the conditio sine qua non of viable community, social imagination and growth, of loving and being loved, of friendship, philia, dialogue, conversation. The social, intellectual and spiritual stagnation of the United States today is very much the result of the fact that few people seem to inhabit their inner forum in a real way. Many appear not to be holding a conversation with their own minds.

In the following post I am going to quote from and analyze certain passages and quotes from a "New Age" book as a way of illustrating mental toxification. Not everything in this book is bad, by any means. I will praise it sometimes, appreciate it sometimes, agree with it sometimes. At other times I will attack it, ridicule it. The acting of putting down quotes and responding to them: this is the activity of airing out, of detoxification.

Barbara Hand Clow, The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind. Bear & Co., Rochester, VT. 2007. She's an International Mayan Elder, book publisher, ceremonial record keeper, mother and author. The "mother" part does come in for some sorrow in this book, which is frankly and honestly acknowledged. Two of her sons died, one by accident, the other took his own life. He had been reading a book on the Mayan Calendar. Barbara remarks: "I will always wonder what Tom was thinking about... and I honor his right to end his own life." (5)

This has to be a major difference between the New Age and the religious perspectives - the "right to end one's own life." "Rights-talk"makes clear thinking on this issue impossible. Perhaps not all cases of suicide are wrong - think of an honor situation, or someone old, sick, etc. But a young man in the prime of life? How could this be anything other than a terrible tragedy? What do "rights" have to do with it? Are "rights" ever accompanied by obligations?

But Barbara has trouble grasping moral dimensions of issues. One of her previous books went by the name of Catastrophobia, in which she argues that the earth and human race underwent an enormous catastrophe some 11,000 years ago. She writes: "I believe that Earth was quarantined when humans became a traumatized species during the 9,500 BC cataclysm..." In other words, the cataclysm provides an opportunity for feeling victimized. One may term this the Jewish strategy. Other spiritual teachers (Rudolf Steiner, Nikolai Levashov), not to mention the Bible, have also discussed this ancient "cataclysm." But these teachers emphasize man's part in it. Levashov teaches that the Atlanteans had begun to do unlawful experiments with the earth, and Rudolf Steiner also teaches much the same thing. The Old Testament teaches that man transgressed through pride.

Thus, I agree with Barbara that there may have been a cataclysm. It caused the axis of the earth to tilt 23.5 degrees, may have been the beginning of the precession, may have been "marked" as an important astronomical event by many ancient cultures (Egypt, Stonehenge, etc.) But Barbara carefully avoids any hint that human beings might have been responsible. What is the source of this abhorrence for moral responsibility?

It's an intriguing idea that the "Mesoamerican advances" (p. 12; meaning the Mayan discovery of how time influences history, the calendar as the marker of historical cultural evolution) "are the missing link that explains why the West has lost its soul during the last 400 years." Actually I think there's something profound about that idea and I wish she had elaborated. I don't think there is a correspondence between the ignored advances in Mesoamerica and modern man's loss of soul. And yet there is a relationship between modern man's loss of soul and his tendency to bifurcate the world into material and mental entities. "Historical consciousness," which John Lukacs has done so much to elucidate, is the missing unifier, the missing concept. For obviously this is something neither material nor mental, but deeper and inclusive of both. Evidently the Mayans had historical consciousness; it affected everything they did. In this quote Barbara is struggling to articulate something for which she lacks the ability and the education. Nevertheless, it's an interesting "hit."

Barbara is very generous in acknowledging Carl Johan Calleman's research into the Mayan calendar and the idea of "the nature of evolution by time acceleration." (15) This is a qualitative notion of time, that each subsequent age is 20-times more speeded up than its previous one. Much of Barbara's book is devoted to an exposition of the Calleman research. This new research into ancient wisdom goes by the name of "New Paradigm." It is the movement to overcome materialism in thinking, and takes account of both symbolic and literal dimensions of reality. I think as a movement in historical and ethnographic study, it's long overdue. My problems with it have to do with the materialism and lack of integration in some of its ruling assumptions.

Barbara knowledge of history is limited. She is naive on the subject of the existence of evil, and her view of religion is extremely prejudicial - especially the Catholic religion. She can't say enough about Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code and she repeats many common defamations of the church (.e.g. , that gnosticism was the "true Christianity"). Her charges have just enough truth to seem respectable ( e.g., "Christianity is dead without a periodic new view of Christ - a renewed Christology." Sure. But does this mean accepting the "erotic Christ" married to Mary Magdalene? Where are the limits? What are the standards? How do you make judgments of value?)

According to Barbara, religions "have repeatedly caused people to kill each other for God" (168) and fundamentalism feeds on "fear of change." These are standard litanies against religion made by enlightened New Agers and atheists. Evidently, political considerations play no part. Barbara has no idea who the neocons are, she thinks Israel and Palestine will make peace in 2008 (as if both parties bore equal responsibility! - totally overlooking Israel's original theft of Palestinian land and its ongoing wars of extermination against that unhappy people). She despises the "patriarchy," which is her loaded term for all that is wrong in the world ("... the realization that women have been used as birthing machines by the patriarchy for thousands of years--will be so profound that people will never allow unplanned births to happen again.") (174) Horrible and anti-spirit and life propaganda!

I suppose if you know nothing of history and are naive concerning man's "sinful nature"(a shorthand expression for something that needs to be taken into account, although perhaps a different mode of expression could be used for it) you could come to believe that "a pile of stinking beliefs about right and wrong has been fermenting in the collective mind for 5,000 years" (170) and that "we humans are ready to rescue our divine access from organized religions." And this, in italics: "All current organized religions are 4D dualistic filter systems that manipulate the human mind for the purposes of the Powers and Principalities."

Why give so much attention to a book filled with such patent nonsense? My view is that we do need to supplement the idea of linear, historical time (a gift of the Old Testament Hebrews) with a dynamic, transformational, "inward" time. We do need to cultivate a "galactic consciousness" - a realization of the vastness of the cosmos and of our place in it. We do need something of the gift of the shamans or a "right-brain" consciousness which will somehow manage to preserve some of the gains of the "left-brain." But we need disciplined gifts, we need to know how to distinguish the "gift" from the "poison."

It is an accident of fate or a mystery of meaning - in the recesses of the history of our language, both "gift" and "poison" mean the same thing.

____________________________________________

P.S. In the interests of full disclosure, I sent Barbara Hand Clow an e-mail on Dec. 7th through the Bear and Company Publishers system. Here it is reproduced in part below. As of this writing, she has not seen fit to respond.

Dear Ms. Clow,
I enjoyed your book "The Mayan Code" - at least the first part of it until your vicious anti-Catholicism became impossible to disguise. Why are New Age people so full
of sweetness and light until it comes to the Catholic Church? .....

But all you can say in your book is to quote the disreputable Dan Brown and make other gratuitous remarks against the Church! Disgraceful!

Despite my scolding -- and I am a "Flint" according to the Maya day sign (!) -- there is much that I agree with in your presentations. The Mayan calendar is indeed fascinating, especially the teachings about resonance and accelerated time. I am looking forward to an extended study, especially a reading of the Calleman book.

Sincerely,
Caryl Johnston

Last remark:
It seems to me that the truth of a system, any system, largely depends upon two indices: the affirmation of personal responsibility for acts; and the ability of those within the system to respond to challenge and deal with conflict. On these two counts, Barbara Hand Clow disappoints us.

Study of time

2009-12-22T06:04:00.001-08:00

"Physics is a science about motion and its basic principle is that all is in a state of motion, which is the only real form of existence. In order to turn physics into the science of time this basic principle has to be changed. Motion is not the basis of everything, but it is time that is incorporated into existence, whereas motion is the physical manifestation of duration."

From--"On the justifiability of establishing a science of time," Dragoljob Cucic,
http://www.chronos.msu.ru

Notes-Nikolai Levashov

2009-12-20T15:56:00.000-08:00

Extraordinary Russian healer, born 1961.
Notes are from his books or articles, posted on his website.

Levashov Biography
p. 3: "...I only understood this parasitic system [i.e. Communist ideology] when I began my own study of nature, found my own methods of evolving, and carried out a qualitative transformation of my brain and thus was able to get rid of the influence of parasitic generators on my consciousness..."
p. 5: enslavement in the US: "The most staggering fact is that one and the same individuals have made people slaves in both worlds..."
p. 22: astral parasites influence the brain's pleasure centers directly, stimulating it with a portion of stolen vital force! We should never forget that we spend some of our vital force on every emotion...even if the emotion is positive...
...The world of living creatures is much richer than people commonly imagine...none considers life as a many-sided and many-leveled phenomenon, physical plane is just a foundation or basis at only initial levels of development...the more 'additional' bodies, the more highly developed [the being]...
p.23: types of living matter: (1) organism regularly incarnated in physical body; (2) extinct organisms which cannot be incarnated because there are no living representatives of their genetics; (3) reasoning kind(s) of living creatures. The second group has three options: to become a parasite, to create symbiosis with some living species, or to be eaten by spirits of more aggressive creatures.
p.23: meditation and astral parasites - to promote feelings of "bliss" - these are advanced parasites which make a person open voluntarily - results of meditation are the same regardless of type - i.e. loss of vital force.
p. 35: "primary matters, or as modern scientists call them, dark matter"
p. 42: thoughts are primary - languages are "verbal codes"
p. 42: spatial positioning of atoms in respect to each other plays as important a role as chemical composition
p. 46: his transformation; restraining power
p. 48: knights/ horses; genetic memory
p. 50: abnormality of homosexuality
p. 55: "there is nothing worse than being captured by parasites"-- Light & Dark Hierarchs.
p. 56: "...most Light Hierarchs developed in relatively peaceful conditions; almost all had travelled their evolutional path in highly developed civilizations without permanent contact with parasitic systems; exactly this became their Achilles heel..."
"Light Hierarchs did not have space or planetary parasites in the initial stages of their evolution..."
p. 57-60: "...our planet, Midgard-Earth, was totally seized and controlled by social parasites from Big Space...the names of these creatures are a very complicated interlacing of structures and matters in some kind of volumetric sign which reflects its owner's level of development." A Hierarch's name changes every time he passes to the next level of development. .. "Social parasites, independent of whether they are space or earthly, know perfectly well what they do and how they do it, and it is necessary to fight them without any regret, but not by their methods...All negative emotions are 'doors' for the attack of space parasites and a direct way into transformation into one of them."
p. 61: beginning of a new Brotherhood, the purpose of which was the liberation of the Universe from the occupation of space parasites. Our work in Big Space--- the further we went, the closer we came to Midgard-Earth.
cf. also p. 166: Our Earth appears to be in the very center of events on which the fate of the Big Universe depends.
p. 83: "I have every reason not to believe in God." (!) Does not elaborate.
p. 89: Christianity and Christ. Jesus knew the Torah perfectly and unmasked Judaism and its servants as servants of Dark Forces- Jesus taught for the sake of the "lost sheep of the house of Israel."
His history of Christianity is peculiar, to say the least. Says Jesus was crucified in Constantinople on Feb. 16, 1086 (!) where there was an eclipse/earthquake- says his real name was Radomir, "joy of the world" - Constantinople was seized on July 15, 1099, and the Jerusalem kingdom was created (result of First Crusade). What about St. Paul?
p. 116: "...social parasites did their best to sink the glorious history of the white race into oblivion." He is mainly referring to the early history of Russia/Slavonic Vedas. The modern history of the white race is hardly 'glorious'! cf. V.A. Rybnikov, "The Vedic orthodoxy as a system of the world view and a basis of Slavonic spirituality." p. 165: this system: having at one's disposal all levels of consciousness simultaneously.
p. 121: Self-realization only happens through conscious actions when a person totally understands the responsibility for his every action. Very good. He often repeats this theme.
p. 124-5: Theologian Johan Ital - reincarnation? - says it is "mortally dangerous" for "so-called Christianity."
p. 155: democracy (pseudo-democracy) is ideal for avoiding personal responsibility, as a decision taken collectively implies absence of personal accountability.
p. 163: astral body = "third material body of the spirit"
p. 164: "I created my own system"-- [in 1987]--in finding a fundamentally new method of functioning of human consciousness.
p. 170: high quality scanning-- "complete control over emotions...despite emotional reaction being absolutely morally defensible."

Biography (Part 2?)
p. 54: thought forms are volumetric holograms
p. 62: evolutional development based on the principle of free will. The evolutional potential of mankind is an important strategic raw material. p. 85: creators of parasitic system on earth are not even from here. "Most likely, it was these 'brothers' who imposed upon us terrestrials the idea that we were alone in the boundless universe to facilitate their parasitizing of our civilization."
p. 95: six qualitative barriers of earth. Not all dwellers at upper levels work for the Light.
p. 109: "What a person perceives as real [is] only that level of reality with which he [is] in qualitative resonance..."
Difference between biological and social parasites: the former destroy the weaker members of the species, thus ultimately improve it. Social parasites destroy the best, the highly educated, the cream of the crop.
As man progresses spiritually, his bodies become, in a sense, "simplified." The structures of the brain he created were "sense-organs" for other levels of reality.
p. 191: Everything appropriate is accidental and everything accidental is appropriate.
p. 192: In his method, "no need for the spirit to go out of the body." This is important.
p. 122: In the Light Hierarchy, there is no place for futile offensives and foolish ambitions.
p. 236: "There is no life in a lie, while truth is alive because the real events and processes, which it reflects, are behind it." Wonderful. Think on this! He adds-- "To learn to see this is one of the most complicated problems, because the parasites are skillful experts in creating the so-called camouflage, in other words, the illusion of reality."
p. 239: the understanding of what is going on makes [one] responsible for it.
p. 257: "to get the ability to feel truth"

_______________________________________________________________

The Final Appeal to Mankind. San Francisco, 1997.

p. 52: A brain without a fully developed etheric body cannot develop any further.
Says that Homo sapiens came from outside earth and that extraterrestrial agents evicted the Neanderthals, thus allowing mankind to take over that niche.
p. 65: "Evil, despite its illusion of power, is unable to evolve. The imaginary power of evil lies in its pervasiveness; the majority of people cannot perceive what is happening on other levels of reality." Compare with note 14: "The highest power in the universe reveals itself in its harmonious and benign influence on natural processes and human affairs."
Long passages on embryogenesis.
p. 74: "A spirit which, developmentally, does not possess at least one mental body is easy prey for creatures living on the etheric and lower astral levels."
p. 77: "The consecutive restoration of the etheric, astral and mental bodies to their level of development prior to the spirit's entry into the biomass, and their further development, depend upon the consecutive acquisition of etheric, astral and mental strucures by the neurons of the brain..."
Currents of Will (etheric) -- Heart (astral)-- and Intelligence (mental) = the "Golden Triangle"--their balance is crucial for full development - also to protect against external intrusion and manipulation.
On average we only use 3-5% of the brain; the rest is the "spirit's evolutionary reserve." In order to control someone, - make him a "biorobot"-- it is necessary to disturb the currents, enabling an external entity to influence the unused portions of neurons thereby manipulating the subconscious (78). "It is impossible to implement this robotization on the level of the spirit..."
During development, the physical body sustains the spiritual bodies by transforming available primary matters (through tissue disintegration?)...[which] releases these matters, which are then utilized to create and evolve the etheric, astral and mental bodies of the spirit. The physical body has antennae for absorbing primary matters directly. Humans possess seven of these antennae, or chakras. This corresponds to the number of bodies one must create in order to complete the Earth cycle of evolution and begin the cosmic cycle..."
p. 83: The circulation of primary matters between the physical and the spiritual bodies is what we know as life.
The sense-organs were created as a mechanism of adaptation to the ecological niche, not as a tool of cognition....
Part 2, Chapter 7.
p. 18: qualitative barrier between physical and etheric represents in essence the difference between organic and inorganic
p. 24: Egyptian priests knew the laws that govern how form influences space.
p. 26: use of psi-weapons to control people. Modern totalitarianism. And: In the construction of psi-field fight against evil one must preserve one's emotional purity.
p. 28: Mental stage of evolution requires a transcendent morality, ethics, knowledge and philosophy.
p. 69: Physical brain is just the substrate that makes thinking possible. Neurons of the physical brain do not do any thinking; they merely break up the substance of their level into its constituent primary matters. This, in turn, provides the potential and fuel for the neurons on other levels...

____________________________________________________________

Russian History Viewed Through Distorted Mirrors. Vol. I.

Alien origin of modern man. No explanation for absence of fossil remains of transitional forms.p. 20: parasitism: difference between natural and social parasites. p. 29: Slavonic-Aryan Vedas and the Old Testament reflect one and the same events from the viewpoints of adversarial forces... Says the O.T. reflects events thru prism of "beaten, black magicians" who expounded their version of events allegorically.
p. 31 vera [faith] - Russian, means enlightenment by knowledge.
p. 38: "The fight between Light and Dark Forces is not some conditional concept that depends on the point of view of the person who expounds it... This is the fight between life and death, evolutional movement forward and evolutional dead end..."
The Multi-Gate Transport System - "not electrical, magnetic, or gravitational..." The real forces of Nature have to do with the result of the interaction of anisotropic space with matters existing in this space.
The conflict between the ancient Slavonic-Aryan Empire and Antlan (Atlantis) over 13,000 years ago - the axis of earth changed to 23.5 degrees--says it was a nuclear catastrophe - and Earth was put in quarantine which will last until it either rids itself of the Dark "virus" or is destroyed-- there is no other option (48).
p. 56: spiritual maturity is understanding personal responsibility for actions. He keeps returning to this often - such a simple concept. Somehow, I know that he is good - because he keeps saying this - although many of the things he says sound "weird." This concept, the touchstone, persists.
Four Stages of Extrauterine Development: 1. animal. 2. reasoning animal. 3. man. 4. highly developed man. Newly born child needs to absorb a minimal but critical volume of information during developmental period of 2nd material bodies of neurons (etheric). The process of brain's neuronal chain-forming is mainly completed by age 8-9. The "evolutional door" for stage of reasoning animal is closed by ages 16-18. Potential is limited - spending it on sexual activity does not leave enough for right development.
The "calling card" of parasites is the destruction of the educational system and propaganda of sexual license. This halts the development of young people at the stage of reasoning animal and facilitates control of them. The first two human stages are passive; the last two, active. One who acts can become a creator when he uses knowledge correctly.
p. 79: development of individual impossible without moral principles. Genetic potential gives neither spirituality nor forms moral principles - these have to be earned from one embodiment to another. The qualities that enable overcoming the Dark Forces' strategy are will power and high moral qualities and principles, handed down over the generations.

Studies in Mayan Cosmology

2009-12-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

From: Carl Johan Calleman, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness.
Says there are 9 levels of main Mayan pyramids representing a model of time in which each step or "underworld" is 20 times more accelerated in linear time than the one preceding it.
I. 13 hablatuns (16.4 billion years ago) e.g. "Big Bang" -- early cellular life
II. 13 alautuns or 820 million years ago
Animal life evolution from cellular
III. 13 kinchiltuns or 41 million years ago -- evolution of primates and first rudimentary tool usage
IV. 13 kalabtuns or 2 million years ago -- tribal organization, ancestors
V. 13 piktuns or 102,000 years ago -- emergence of Homo sapiens and development of spoken languages
VI. Great Cycle of 13 baktuns beginning 5,125 years before the approaching birth date when mankind created law, written language -- the "National Underworld"
VII. "Planetary Underworld" -- 13 katuns or 256 years ago beginning in 1755 AD-introduction of industrialization, electricity, technology, modern democracies, gene splicing, atomic bomb
VIII. "Galactic Underworld" -- 13 tuns or 12.8 years, beginning in 1999--development of the internet into a global communication infrastructure
IX. "Universal Underworld" -- 13 uinals or 260 days -- Calleman believes will lead to attainment of "nondual cosmic consciousness" - by the end of the Universal Underworld humanity will have crossed the threshold into becoming conscious co-creators... "understanding the spiral dynamics of evolution expressed through the Mayan calendar is in itself an aspect of the Divine Plan" (241)...the Mayan calendar orients our lives within "a galactic frame of reference" (246)... it is "fundamentally a time-schedule for the evolution of consciousness" (247).

tun=260 days
katun=19.7 years
baktun=394 years

____________________________________________________________

Jose Arguelles, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology (1987; 1996)

Introduction. Surrender the idea of progress. Mayan scienced "based on holonomic resonance rather than atomic physics." The Mayans were "the last of the ancient streams of civilization to flower on this planet."
Chap. 1. "...their purpose was to codify and establish a system of knowledge, and having codified in stone and text, to move along." (36) The Mayan Factor is "the overlooked factor in the consideration of the meaning of human history."
HUNAB KU: "One Giver of Movement and Measure" - according to JA - "the principle of life beyond the Sun." Name of galactic core.
KUXAN SUUM: "The Road to the Sky Leading to the Umbilical Cord of the Universe"--Describes the invisible galactic threads that connect the individual and the Earth through the Sun to the galactic core. These are "resonant pathways" - a series of vibratory or resonant lenses. On one end the lens of Hunab Ku, on the other the lens of the individual human being who, as cosmic resonator, actually contains three lenses: the reptilian brain or autonomic system; the mammalian brain or neo-cortex; and the third is the higher mind. This last extends from the solar plexus. Through alignment of these three lenses, a fourth comes into focus corresponding to the "solar mind."

resonant frequency juncture: the form of a thing or things at any given moment, its purpose or consciousness - "the synchronization of two or more tonal spectrums which join momentary need with universal purpose" (56)

TIME as a function of the principle of harmonic resonance. The days are tones (kin=sun) while any day represents a particular tone or number, it also has its overtones; properly tuned into, the quality of day can lead into other dimensions. Meaning does not necessarily come from sequential relationship but from juxtapositions, permutations and overtones, i.e., radially reciprocal.

Notes: I was glancing through John Major Jenkins "2012"--a sort of summing up - he thinks Arguelles is not reliable, neither Calleman-- who has a weird system. Arguelles capitalizes on his Mexican name and puts forth a system that pretends to be Mayan, but is not. Still, what I found of value in Arguelles is his theory of resonance; in Calleman, the idea of the calendar as measure of the evolution of consciousness.

John Lukacs

2009-11-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

Notes from Last Rites (Yale University Press) 2009
p.56 "There was an American upperclass whose power and ambitions were limited, but whose prestige was extant and attractive. But the convictions of their members were regrettably superficial, and their self-confidence remarkably weak."
~In the 1960's the bourgeois and urban and urbane chapter in the history of the U.S. came to its end. Imperial presidency; nationalism. Note, p. 67: "I despair of this nation and many of its people."
~Puerility worse than decadence: "...decadence is ...full of dissolving maggots of maturity, of remnant memories that puerility does not possess." This statement was made in the context of discussing "...a puerile presidency may be but one symptom of the devolution of this republic into a military superstate." (p. 68)
~false spiritualism (p. 71) Says this is more dangerous than materialism but does not explain it.
~alienation from his profession (p. 76)
~not an inability but an unwillingness to think (note, p. 81)
~Modern Age is over (note, p. 100) of which the establishment of the USA was a part
~Christians "...must steel themselves against temptations of popularity and success, against actors who may become Antichrists, kissing babies, blessing believers, announcing that they are great champions of prosperity and heroic warriors againstg evil...(p. 102)
~p. 128: The past is the only thing we know.
~"the strange self-carved path of my life. Less than an honest pilgrimage. (An escape, rather.)" (note, p. 135) He is speaking about leaving Hungary - rather remarkable.
~Geocentrism, pps. 36-38. Said that Niels Bohr's recognition that the human observer cannot be separated from the things he observes (especially when it comes to the smallest components of matter) reversed the tendency from Copernicus et al to remove the earth from the center. "We and the earth on and in which we live are back at the center of the universe * - a universe which is - unavoidable - an anthropocentric and geocentric one." His note (asterisk) reads as follows:
D[iary] 20 Decemvber 2005: "All right: my knowledge that we on this earth are at the center of the universe, which (of course) is our invention. We have been inventing (and re-inventing) the universe. But God is more than our invention. And to those who think that God is nothing but our invention my question is: Why? What makes human b eings want such an invention? Is it not that a spark of God may exist within us?"
A second note, [Diary 13 January 2006, reads: "In the end my quick but strong vision that we are at the center of the universe, etc., has been - perhaps - an important recognition. Whether it will be later discovered by admirers does not matter. What matters, alas, is that I threw these things, these recognitions, off, without much insisting and developing and propagating them. This happened (and still happens) because of the frivolousness and failures of my character. My 'historical' philosophy, this new monism of our knowledge of ourselves and of the universe, may b e my great mental achievement. But I do not feel particularly proud of this."

See also "Thoughts on Last Rites," From the Catacombs, Nov. 13, 2009.

Radiant Matter

2009-07-23T05:48:00.001-07:00

Georg Blattmann: Radiant Matter - Decay and Consecration. Floris, 1979.
1. The elements and the periodic table.
an imaginative-spiritual grasp of the states of matter, beginning with the first division of the primal unity into the hydrogen-helium polarity, leading through the realm of transformations (combination and separation) in the 'two genders of matter' (metals and non-metals). Then, the third stage or phase of matter is that of the heavy metals ('inner gravitational cohesion') and finally to that of the rare earths -- "so compressed that their enormous density makes it almost impossible to tell them apart." the last five elements in the series "have become so compressed that they are destroyed by their own inner weight." Example of a beached whale.
~p.20: "Certain limits exist in nature with respect to mass, size, and weight, and when they are exceeded, then stability disintegrates from within..." The heavy elements are so enormously compressed and complicated that they spontaneously disintegrate. When this happens, lethal forces are released.
~p. 21: "....the essence of matter 'escapes' from this exaggerated state of compression through the emission of destructive radiation... called radioactive decay...By carrying development to the point of absurdity, matter has naturally limited its own possibilities..." the creation of new artificial elements in the lab confronts this same problem - spontaneous disintegration due to over-complexity,
Stages in the development of matter:
i. polarity
ii. realm of transformations
iii. compression and density - weight
iv. monotonous repetition
v. deadly radiation
In the chronicle of matter, the development of the material realm ends in death. There is the need to infuse the descending curve with an ascending renewal of life. Intervention of Christ.
~p. 27: Christ revealed the mystery of renewal on Maundy Thursday - for the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of the living and life-giving Word... transubstantiation is the profoundest and most important task of the Christian Church-- ~p.28: "Christ is not the path of inner development. Christ shows us how to let the spiritual forces of transformation stream into material existence...."

St. Augustine

2009-07-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

"The man who, knowing the right, fails to do it, loses the power to know what is right; and the man who, having the power to do right, is unwilling, loses the power to do what he wills."
De libero arbitrio, 3.19.53

"God made man upright and consequently with a good will. For if he had not had a good will, he could not have been upright. The good will... is the work of God... But the first evil will, which preceded all of man's evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the work of God to its own works than any positive work. And therefore the acts resulting were evil, not having god, but the will itself for their end..." The City of God (p. 457)
~"good can exist without evil, but evil cannot exist without good, because the nAtures in which evil exists, insofar as they are natures, are good. "
~ vice is of the will amd vice is contrary to nature (cf. entropy)

Gratia supponit et perfecit naturam. Aquinas. Grace presupposes Nature and brings it to perfection.

Foster-- "...beware of everything that could in any point injure the sacred cause" i.e., guard intact the faculty of saying yes to the good.
"On the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion," from Foster's Decision of Character. Paradox: Although to be able to sin is a consequence, or even a sign of freedom, "it does not belong to the essence of the free will to be able to decide for evil." [Aquinas]
"Sin is what one does not freely do" -- Andre Gide
Aquinas says that sin has its ground of possibility in the very creatureliness of man. "The creature is dark, insofar as it stems from nothing," i.e., it is created. Not because the will is free but becAuse the free will comes from notbhing, that is why it is inherent to it not to remAin in the good by nature. De Veritate.

Chesterton calls narrative romance [possible] because of theological free will - "man at the crossroads"

Siegfried Sassoon-- "Armed with our marvelous monkey innovations/ And unregenerate still in head and heart/ Deliver us from ourselves."

Kingsley

2009-07-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

Peter Kingsley. Reality. Essays on Parmenides and Empedocles.
thumos: passion, longing, energy of life - "all we ever do is reason with ourselves about the form our longing will take."
hesychia - stillness. trying to think about thinking is utterly futile. There is only one way to understand the nature of thinking - and that is to arrive at the hesychia, the stillness beyond thought. p. 47 for reasoning to accept this would be for it to accept its own destruction. cf. needleman
p. 117 the mind - a dog's bladder -
p. 118 "The art of knowing how not to impose ourselves on the things we see or hear or read is a hard one to discover. We are not aware that there are secret ways of allowing them to penetrate or change us, rather than us always changing them. For this one, essential art no schools or colleges exist to teach it. learning it takes either a long and lonely training - or just a few intense moments of searing honesty and sheer disgust with oneself."
p. 147 Teachings of the prophets - threads connecting us with reality - kept alive in Islam, in the West became the cult of reason.
elechos-- challenge, argument, testing, proof, refutation, process of demonstrating the truth about a matter, exposing the truth, getting to the real, 'exposing,' cf. aletheia, revealing deception or fraud.
pistis- result of being persuaded, evidence in a court of law
p. 185 By turning each impulse back on itself, we are returning thought and perception consciously to their source....instead of you perceiving reality what in fact is happening is that reality is perceiving itself through you...
toi pant'onom' estai - its name shall be everything
Persephone - Aphrodite - "the queen of death in the world of reality and the queen of life in the world of illusion"

p. 282 drink the deception we live in to the dregs - "to go the whole way through what one knows to be an illusion and not get caught in it is extremely tricky." And "extending the limits of knowledge" is only expanding the illusion that we live in.
p. 396 re Empedocles - "For consciousness, the consciousness of humans, is the blood around the heart."
p. 514 common sense ----- sensus communis ------ koine aisthesis ----
~"that consciousness which is able to hear, see, taste, touch, feel and taste at the same time."
Human mind 'distorts any reality it touches - converts it into something else, esp. 'common sense.' For Empedocles, training how to perceive oneself perceiving was part of the esoteric transmission from teacher to disciple. But Aristotle confidently asserted that this awareness is something we already have. "Just as Parmenides' divine logic was corrupted by being turned into reason, Empedocles' common sense was corrupted from the rarest experience of divine awareness and turned into something familiar..."
p. 550 no anonymous reality

Peter Medawar

2009-07-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Pluto's Republic (1982)
Comments on the attraction of Teilhard de Chardin- "philosophy-fiction...for people who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought."
~ on psychoanalysis: unbridled explanatory facility with conceptual barrenness.
Re the dogma of empiricism: "Everything that reaches consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schematized, interpreted, said Nietzsche, on one of his exhilarating bursts of common sense." We learn to perceive.
From "Ethology and Human Behavior" -- I think we shall have to get used to the idea that moral judgments should intrude into the execution and application of science at every level... Characteristics of human form of evolution: (1) Lamarckian in style, i.e., embodies a learning process; (2) cultural heredity mediated through non-genetic channels; (3) reversible. We could revert to the Stone Age in one generation. ... This characteristically human system of conceptual communication... places a high selective premium upon such capabilities as teachability and imitativeness (a word for which in this context... the term 'aping' seems uncannily apt) because these form the causal nexus of cultural heredity... for Homo docens...
~"On the efficacy of all things possible..."
"The 17th c. doctrine of the necessity of reason was slowly giving way to a belief in the sufficiency of reason - so illustrating the tendency of many powerful human beliefs to develop into an extreme or radical form before they lose their power to persuade us, and in so doing to create anew many of the evils for which at one time they professed to be the remedy." p. 327
..........Genes as messages........

The Hand

2009-07-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

The Story of the Human Hand. Walter Sorell, 1967
one of the more conspicuous signs of specialization in man's hand is the development from the two-line system of man-ape to a three-line system in our hand... This three-line system, conditioned by the different muscalature in the human hand, symbolized the clear separation of man's brain function from his emotional reactions, or, in other words, his growing ability to control his emotions through the process of thinking.
... the further back we look into prehistoric days, the more indications we find of left-handed prominence-- a surprising number of cave painting animals are depicted in their right profile.
Later Stone Age: ambidexterity
Bronze Age: the sickle - made for right hand only. Today about 4% of population is left-handed.

____________________________

Guenther Wachsmuth. The Evolution of Mankind. Philosophic-Anthroposophic Press, 1961.
~Lemurian period begins the process of incarnations. two principal centers for growth: first the continent of Atlantis; second the continent of Hyperborea, a land-complex that included Greenland, iceland, Ireland, England, Scandinavia, Northern Europe as far as the South of France.[ no mention of Russia?!] Re: the Atlantean period (Quaternary) preceded the Ice Ages - "... the most decadent human types completed the skeletonizing process. the more progressive men still held back from this." (71) This period - high point in the condensation of matter.
~p. 72: "In the Sun-Mysteries the initiate was taught to recognize cosmic, earthly and human evolution as a unity, to remain open to revelation from the spiritual worlds, and to communicate what he thus experienced in such a way that it could be grasped by men who had closed themselves to the cosmos." [my italics]
See on Ice Age art: Uehli, E. Atlantis und das Ratsel der Eiszeitkunst.
The types that evolved in the North "preserved their receptivity to the cosmic worlds." End of Lemurian period- evolution moved from southern to northern hemisphere.

Salt

2009-07-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

Salt: a crystalline substance which holds etheric magnetism better than any other substance
Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense

Catholicism and History

2009-07-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

"It has been reported again and again that a curse rests on those who profited by the spoliation of Church lands. This is too well known to require discussion in these pages."
An interesting remark in Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense (72) - wish she had elaborated.

____________________________________________________
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth (1996)
"...when Christianity is taken away, archaic powers of evil that had been banished by Christianity suddenly break loose again."
p. 185 "Even Adorno said that there can be justice only if there is a resurrection of the dead, so that the past wrongs can be settled retroactively, as it were. There must, in other words, somewhere, somehow be a settling of injustices, the victory of justice."
Etienne Gilson: "Since men have refused to serve God, there is no longer an arbiter between them and the State that judges them. But who, then, will judge the State?" (1949)
Evelyn Waugh- "It is no longer possible... to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests." Unfortunately we do it all the time.
From - "Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me," 20 October [1930?]

Environmentalism

2009-07-21T12:08:00.001-07:00

"Man cannot live as a purely earthly creature totally at home in this world without destroying the natural environment, precisely because he is not such a creature." And: "...Even few today want to accept the direct relation between the materialistic view of nature and the destruction of nature on an unprecedented scale that we observe everywhere on the globe today." p. 227
From "Religion and the Environmental Crisis," in The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, World Wisdom, Bloomington, Indiana, 2007.
Comments extensively on German proverb: "There is no culture without asceticism" - says the modern world is just the opposite. The traditional virtues allowed countless generations to live without destroying the environment, as we are doing.
Interesting: "Technically speaking, God is, but He cannot be said to exist... for existence is derived from ex-sistere, implying a pulling or drawing away from."

Reason and Realism

2009-07-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

"...if we are symbolic creatures...then presumably evolution made us so."
Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality. Harvard, 1993
I remark: evolution is for such thinkers the closest they ever come to being concrete - e.g. "Rationality evolved as an adaptation against a background of stable facts that it was selected to work in tandem with. One such fact is the presence of other creatures with a similarly evolving rationality." What utter gobbledegook!! cf. Kevin MacDonald -- "human mind not designed to seek truth but to attain evolutionary goals.."
Contrast with Etienne Gilson: "...humanly and naturally speaking, there is no unifying force above reason... Every time philosophy yields to the temptation of giving up reason as an organizing power, it regularly brings about the triumph of those obscure forces whose self-assertion is the only possible justification...The only thing in the natural order that is unconditionally and unreservedly neither mine nor yours, is reason..."
And: "Every sound rationalism is at the same time a realism. Idealism says that reality is determined by the laws of the mind--and when pursued to its logical conclusion, a rationalism of the idealist type always considers itself justified in prescribing what reality ought to be. By deciding that the human mind is free to prescribe its own law to things, idealism has, under the pretence of liberating the mind from things, enslaved the human mind to itself. ...
And: "... the only real originality for a human mind, is not to describe things as it sees them, but as they are, and that unless you believe that your mind is regulated by things, you will never have anything true to say.
Spirit of Scholastic realism: complete submission to reality. "Either we shall be free from things and slaves to our minds, or free from our minds because submitted to things."
People are individuals by their bodies, but persons by their intellects. According to the medieval understanding, intellectual knowledge is both personal and universal.

Judgment and chance

2009-07-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Otto Weininger -- Aphorisms:
~The present is a form of eternity; judgment concerning the actual has the same form as judgment concerning the eternal. Connection with morality, which wants to transform all present into eternity, to take into the narrowness of consciousness all the breadth of the world.
~There is no such thing as chance. Chance would be a negation of the law of causality, which demands that even the temporal meeting of two separate causal chains still has a cause. Chance would destroy the possibility of life... it would nullify the connectedness of things, the oneness of the universe. If there is chance, then there is no God.

spirals

2009-07-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory
the spiral is the spiritualized circle.
...as are professional physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the whereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, akin to thought, then, surely another dimension follows - a special space, maybe not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.

Embryogenesis

2009-07-15T05:47:00.000-07:00

Embryogenesis in Myth and Science
Thomas J Weihs
Floris 1986

“Modern genetics provides an adequate and lucid explanation of the vast number of distinguishing features in the millions of human beings (with the exception of identical twins), but not of the human form or gestalt… The plan which gives the form, or gestalt, has as yet not been fully grasped…” (p 62) Summary of current views on human embryogenesis:
(1) just under 3 weeks – embryonic membranes from fertilized ovum
(2) 40 days to end of 2nd month: development of human form with head, trunk, limbs and organs, only just over 1 inch in length
(3) Remaining 7 mos: fetal phase, growth, and further differentiation

Phase I: 17-20 days: transition fluid and development continuous. Fertilization, cell division, embryonic disc (3 germ layers) from which develop 3 types of body tissue; 3 spatial axes of embryonic form. Human embryo only begins to develop after the 1st phase of 17-20 days has passed and the 4 membranes – amnion, yolk-sac, allantois, chorion, have developed.

There are 6 stages in the first phase:
dual impact of polarization and division

FEMALE MALE
† †

OVUM ‌ ‌ SPERM

۝ †
Precursor to all subsequent
development;
least specialized
cell type nuclear substance

OVUM: “…holds the potential of differentiating form-creation in its huge cytoplasm like a void, while the directions for individuation are concentrated in the relatively small nucleus.
“…Fertilization occurs thru penetration of ovum by one spermatozoon which sheds its tail, enlarges its head, and fuses with the nucleus in the ovum. Head of sperm. Is also highly light-reflective, the rapidly oscillating stream of sperm rushing towards ovum looks like flash of lightning when seen under a microscope.
Ovum: round, enclosed in highly light-reflective thick membrane, the zona pellucida and surrounded by corona radiata, a halo of follicular cells.

Chaoticizing..restrucuring… Cleavage, division of nucleus and cytoplasm into 2 cells, then 4, then 8, then 16, until morula, cluster of cells, is formed. Whole process from polarization and division to morula takes 4-5 days. Cf. gen. 1:1-hashamayin, heaven, or “that which steps out into the light of appearance” or that which reveals itself.
Gen 1: 6-8 firmament
Morula enters the womb and changes into the blastocyst; fluid inside and outside. The blastocyst is a hollow sphere approx 5th day after conception.

Nidation
7-10 days
Beginning of gathering of amniotic fluid and forming of the first germ cell layers within the mesenchyme.
Blastocyst attaches to uterine wall. Inner cell mass begins to differentiate into 2 layers of dissimilarly-formed cells, the ectoderm and endoderm.
Amnion – “waters under the heavens”
Dry land – inner cell mass
Gen.1: 9-11
Archetypal plant forms can be seen in the “fibrous mesenchymal growth in which cell boundaries appear and disappear” p. 95

Gen. 1: 14-16
11-13 days
Lights, greater and lesser
Implantation: forming of starlike villi around the ‘firmament’ of trophoblast. Beginning of sunlike placenta and of sickle-moon form of body stalk and allantois.

Growing trophoblast becomes studded with tiny villi all over its surface.

14-15 days
Animals in water and air pulsating blood-islands appear on the amnion connecting the stalk and yolk-sac. Only later will these blood-islands flow together and form the first blood vessels. At this early stage pulse of blood in many independent islands appears long before formation of heart.

First appearance of the embryonic disc out of the three germ layers. Beginning of the chorda, neural tube, and heart formations, and intestinal invagination.
15-17 day
3 partial axes
3-fold nature of embryonic [word?]
Trilaminar

Up-down (cranial-caudal ends by chorda)
Dorsal-ventral – amnion, yolk sace
Ectoderm, endoderm

Left-right – mesoderm

Ectoderm: nervous system and outer skin
Endoderm—intestines and most of inner organs
Mesoderm- skeleton, muscles, blood, form movement

Sixth Day
Gen 1:26-27
But nothing emerges by 20th day with anything like the human form s we know it. What does it mean, the ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ of God?
Archetype Man as zodiac “the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created”
Universal principle of form-creation, i.e. humans as totality of animal-plant forms

Compare:
Dove-form
Larynx (oral cavity, Eustachian tube)
Breastbone, collarbones
Uterus, Fallopian tubes

He distinguishes form from hereditary or genetic aspect, p. 130

Resurrection body- “non-material human form without distinguishing genetic features; universally human but with no individualizing characteristics.
The Resurrection body reveals two completely new phenomena: one is that form as such becomes a visible experience to a number of people without, as it were, being filled with genetic matter – form is perceived visually on its own, by itself.
The other is that this form is not genetically individualized, specialized, but is "... the universal archetypal form of man…”

Toward a Phenomenology of the Etheric World

2009-07-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

Essays contributed by J. Bockemuehl, C. Lindenau, G. Maier et al. Anthroposophic Press, 1985.
BP 595.E7713
299'.935
ISBN 0-88010-115-6
p. 164 "The safest initial assertion that can be made concerning the etheric is that it cannot take the place of physical energy, for otherwise it would reside within the physical realm, and thus be quantifiable and subject to the law of conservation of energy, into which balance it does not enter."
p. 208 "...it was especially in connection with pedagogical matters that Rudolf Steiner spoke and wrote to this point. He drew attention to the fact that during childhood a portion of the etheric body releases itself from its activity in the physical body and henceforth is at the disposal of the activity of the soul. This event is essentially completed with the full emergence of the second or permanent set of teeth. The beginning of the second dentition may therefore serve as a bodily indicator of the emerging readiness for school. The child might of course also have formal instruction prior to this point, but this is accomplished only by drawing prematurely on those forces which the child still needs for the forming of a healthy body. A weakening of physical health is therefore the necessary consequence.
From this point on, however, it is essential that the learning processes begin. For it is precisely through this liberated part of the etheric body that man is by nature predisposed to become a cultural being...." Hence.....
p. 219 "The human etheric body differs from that of plants and animals through being organized to serve the purposes of the thinking spirit." Theosophy, Chapter 1, Sect. 4
This is from Herman Poppelbaum's contribution, "The Concept and the Action of the Etheric Body" --
Etheric body has two aspects--"contour-dissolving" and "form-maintaining" (!!) The etheric body becomes visible by virtue of the physical matter it takes up. "through the physical the etheric form becomes visible to us. What we actually see is the etheric form- the physical is only the means by which the etheric form becomes perceptible." Temporal succession of forms is the result of unfolding into the spatial dimension - a true 'ex-plane-ation.' The specific form of the organism, which in plants arises within the etheric body and in animals and man arises in higher members, is transmitted through heredity.... Thus the bearer of heredity is significantly different in each of the three kingdoms; only in the plant is it the etheric body alone.(222) Particularly characteristic of the activity of the etheric is the repetition of structured parts..."Everything that is repetitive in living organisms can be traced back to the etheric principle. On the other hand, everything that brings the repetition to a conclusion, is a manifestation of the astral principle." (223)
~ "The full reality of the etheric body cannot be known until it is perceived as well as conceived, but the concept of the etheric body nevertheless makes the sense-perceptible phenomena of life intelligible." (226)
~ "...morphogenesis and thinking have a common basis in the etheric body." e.g. multiplication and differentiation of bodily structures <> [corresponds] repeatability and variability of thought structures; development of right-lift symmetry <> symmetrical structures of logic; loss and regeneration of an organ <> to the forgetting and reconstructing of a train of thought, etc.
"It is of the greatest importance to know that the ordinary thought-forces of man are the refined forces of growth and differentiation." [R. Steiner, Light Course (?)]
~ The Etheric Body in 'Configured' Counterspace.......[section of chapter]
"In contrast to the more or less inert and homogeneous space with which we are familiar, the etheric formative forces exist in a space that is differentiated and 'configured.' Thus, the nature of the substances which 'come to rest' within this space is dependent upon their location. The common notion that every particle of a substance is alike is overthrown. A substance is what it is, only within the context of the space it occupies at any moment. It is possible, therefore, that different, even contradictory processes occur within the apparently tiny space of a single cell. In 1937 Bertalanffy wrote, 'Let us observe for example a liver cell: it turns glycogen into sugar, and vice versa, produces urea and uric acid from amino acids and ammonia, breaks down hemoglobin, produces bile acids and has the ability to retain or render harmless the toxins which are brought to it. In a cell whose size is about one-hundredth that of the head of a pin, at least ten, and probably man more chemical processes are occurring simultaneously.' That the cell can exist at all in this medley, is due to the fact that it is maintained not from within but from the periphery. Rudolf Steiner expressed this by saying that in a single cell the entire cosmos is active.
"This compressing of many contradictory processes into a tiny space can only be comprehended if one realizes that the contents of the cell exist in a 'counterspace' that is just as infinite as the ordinary space which surrounds the cell.
".... Thereby it is seen that organs may be closely related even though they are not adjacent anatomically; they are, as it were, adjacent within counterspace. Examples of such 'etheric neighbors' are the kidneys and the organs of sight, or the large intestine and the forebrain. In the field of pathology, many instances are known of the same disease taking hold of organs which are situated far apart, while the intervening regions of the body remain unaffected." (p. 231-2)
________________________________________
Rudolf Steiner, Man, Hieroglyph of the Universe
p. 112 When ordinary matter strikes some other object, the object is repelled or pushed away. When ether approaches an object, it attracts it and draws it within itself. The activity of the ether is the exact opposite of matter. Ether acts as an absorbent. Were this otherwise, you would present the same appearance back and front, for even in this diversity of the physical appearance of man we have the result... of the pressure of ponderable matter and... the absorbing action of the ether.
ether -- the "hollow" in physical matter - that which adjusts or connects the two (pressure and suction) is the astral -- mediates - we imprint our astral and ego in the absorbent and pressure-producing elements but manifest as mediator between front and back, upper and lower

King of the Castle

2009-07-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World. Gai Eaton. Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge, 1990. [First published, 1977]

~Author of Islam and the Destiny of Man (1985); member of British Diplomatic Service and later consultant to the Islamic Cultural Center in London.

ISBN: 0-946621-21-7

From the Preface to the 1990 edition: "Many people in their lifetime advance through a landscape of destruction. As they mature and as their opinions change, they reject everything that once had meaning for them. My way has been one of accumulation, not rejection...in climbing our personal ladder, we need not kick away the rungs which supported us in our ascent."

Introduction [paraphrases]: "This book is concerned, above all, with what it means to be a man in terms of the traditional view of human nature. ...in the traditional view, the fulfillment of the human function is to live as a 'symbol' rather than as a transient individuality...for Islam, the distinction between 'believers' and 'unbelievers' is the most fundamental...The moment the idea of a revealed religion presents itself, the moment we speak of God or of the supernatural...this disproportion is implied...Take it away and you remove the fulcrum upon which the whole structure revolves. You are left with a religion that is little more than sentimental idealism, idle day dreaming or wishful thinking; worldly religion....what point in playing Canute and trying to defy the tide (18) The justification for adopting a different policy today lies in the uniqueness of our present situation, in which secular societies are attempting to absorb the whole of man...no more 'opting out'...the question is not whether a social system is benvolent, efficient and well-ordered, but whether it leaves breathing-room for the sacred and tolerates eccentrics who refuse incorporation. Modern societies tend to close all the exits, level the heights and confine human beings to modalities of social usefulness and economics. This tendency cannot be resisted on its own level..."This age in which we live stands condemned in terms of human normality precisely because it encourages men to dream their lives away in forgetfulness of their heritage and of those few things which they really need to know."(22)

I. Unreal Cities. The choice we make is ours and no one else's...in order for this to be understood...men must have a certain freedom of movement. Choice is not enough. There must be the opportunity to exercise it, for good or ill; and without this opportunity the very idea of personal responsibility is drained of meaning..."Of all the changes that have taken place in the human condition over the past hundred years none is more significant than the increasing difficulty we now have in tracing acts to their owners."(24)

II. The Cost of Wealth. "There are no watertight compartments in the human realm, and devaluation on one level provokes a corresponding devaluation on others. Men unify by instinct, however theory may divide...No doubt it was for this reason that coinage possessed a sacred character in earlier times and that gold, with its rich symbolic significance, was the linchpin of major currencies. Remove from any object its sacred or symbolic aspects, tossing it into the flux of any purely quantitative phenomena, and value dissolves like flesh from bones in a vat of acid."(54)

III. Liberty and Obedience. "Human obedience, in common with the obedience of all natural things to natural laws, reflects a Norm in which all have theirroots and from which they derive their significance; but, when there is no true authority to act as a magnet, it seizes upon whatever comes within its range, and man's enormous capacity for obeying God and thereby integrating himself into a universal order is perverted into an instrument of enslavement."(66)

IV. Man in Society. "...if the primal Fall was identified with the knowledge of Good and Evil, the second implies the loss of this discriminative knowledge and the substitution for it of ideas of good and evil." (96) "Axiomatic in traditional thinking is the idea that the animal creation is imprisoned in time; man is not."(111)

V. Man as Viceroy. "Outside the field of mathematics there are sound reasons for speaking, if not in riddles, at least by means of implication and allusion, parable and even hyperbole, rather than in bald statements which, if taken too literally, lead to the petrifaction of meaning. Neither the facilties of human speech nor the contours of human mentality lend themselves readily to the expression of truths which lie beyond the sphere of day-to-day affairs. But there are points at which the direct statement, however liable it may be to misunderstanding, becomes unavoidable. Any discussion of man's real identity leads to such a point...Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments, an animal whose time is up. If he is such an animal, then he has no rights...but if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world... is in some measure to be laid to his count." (122-3)..."What matters is the intention to fulfil - or try to fulfil - our proper function. The incapacity to do so unaided is universal; but our intention is expressed in the effort to act 'as if' we were what in truth and in essence we are. The rest is a matter of grace...The essential distinction is between those who recognize this virtuality in man and those who are blind to it. The possibility expressed in the words 'as if' is indeed the glory which surrounds and plays upon the human form. This is why the prudent man is convinced that 'you never know'...For the very pavements await the coming of the Wanderer..."(124)..."never...do we find the suggestion that man has absolute rights over the animals, to do with them as he pleases...man by virtue of his 'central' viceregal position enjoys certain special privileges but does not enjoy the right to abuse these privileges...By a most curious irony, it is only since men came to see themselves as no more than clever animals...that they have started to treat the animal creation as totally alien and totally without rights."(126)

"The riches of the modern world are unearned riches, for it is only by fufilling some small part of his viceregal function that man earns the right to make use of his environment." (129)

VI. Knowledge and Its Counterfeits. "Religious (or metaphysical) ideas, when they penetrate whole populations within a traditional environment, may adopt simplified and what might be described as 'picturessque' forms without thereby sacrificing either integrity or effectiveness, but secular and scientific notions soon become slipshod and inaccurate when they are popularized..."(144) "An incestuous conjunction of mind with matter engenders some monstrous offspring. Our bodies (and there is a sense in which the whole world, the whole of nature, is our body) are clothing which lasts a little while and then falls apart. We have better things to do than pick obsessively at this clothing, placing its fragments under the microscope, making it our sole and absolute concern. Human dignity forbids such dreary obscentities." (151)

"Reason is one mode of knowledge among others, and rationalism is its 'Pharonic sin' (whereby the partial and fragmentary usurps the place of wholeness.)"

~Human tendency to idolatry- worship of the reflection to the exclusion of that which is reflected.

~"At the root of modern idealism, with its refusal to accept imperfection as something inherent in the human condition, there lies a bitter and perhaps satanic puritanism which, carried to its logical conclusion, would set fire to this world of ours and destroy it utterly." (161)

VII. The Only Heritage We Have. Reality not in objects but what they signify. "Our human past has nothing else to offer us." (174) This is the only heritage we have. "The process whereby the environment gradually congeals or loses its quality of transparency, until things are no more than objects... is the same as the process whereby symbols are drained of meaning And reduced to the level of either poetic allegory or 'primitive science.' "

~"Things break away. First one aspect of living claims autonomy, then another, building themselves their own little ships; but these are ships constructed for sailing downstream, in accordance with the direction of time, not for crossing over."(179) "...terror encompasses a world that goes astray..." (181)

VIII. What We Are and Where We Are. "The further the world moves from its source and is stripped...of supernatural meaning, the greater the necessity to concentrate our attention upon essentials. For creatures who are here so short a time, whose powers decay just as they are learning to use them and who die long before they are ready to go, there cannot be many essentials. In our situation, very little matters, but that little matters enormously." (192) "What the Muslims call the Holy War is in the fact the opposition of the unified and God-centered man to the forces of dissipation and chaos both within and outside himself." (198)

Metaphysics and Quantum Theory

2009-06-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key. Wolfgang Smith. Sophia Perennis, Hillsdale NY. 3rd rev. ed, 2005. ISBN: 1 59731 007 7 1. Quantum theory. 2. Science- Philosophy. I. Title.
LC: QC174.13 S65
Dewey: 530.12

I. Rediscovering the corporeal world. "...Every quantum-reality position thus far enunciated hinges upon one and the same ontological presupposition... (4) [the bifurcationist] ... the thesis, namely, that the perceptual object belongs exclusively to res cogitans, or that what we actually perceive, in other words, is private and subjective ... precarious to say the least... (8)The question arises why Western thought should have been dominated for so long by Cartesian philosophy, a speculative doctrine which contradicts our most basic intuitions and for which there can in principle be no corroborating evidence. And why should the scientist, of all people, espouse this chimerical teaching, which in effect renders the external world unknowable by empirical means? (17) [part of the problem lay in attributing to perception purely sensation, however, this is not the case- "perception is not sensation, pure and simple, but sensation catalyzing an intelligent act" (21)] ...

It is by force of intellect that the perceived object is joined to the percipient in the act of perception - assuming, of course, bona fide or valid perception...sometimes perception miscarries because, as the medievals would put it, the perceptual act is not purely intellective but only 'participates' in the intellect (22)...

Another side of the problem: reduction of intellect to reason. Reason sunders, analyzes; intellect bonds, joins.

II. What is the physical universe? Distinction between the physical and the corporeal: the corporeal is known through direct perception and the physical through a complex modus operandi involving measurement, hypothesis (or theory) and representation. One does not perceive measurable quantities; for this reason one needs an instrument. "For indeed, one cannot know or even conceive of a physical object except by way of a model, a theoretical construct of one sort or another." (31) The object is not just reducible to a representation or a model, for the latter is not measurable - "The passage from representation to object, therefore, constitutes an intentional act [analogous to] sense perception...(32) ...to observe in the sense of the physicist is to pass from the perceptible to the imperceptible - and only theory can span the gap."(42) Physics deals with "existentiated mathematical structures" (45)

III. Microworld and indeterminancy. "There are...two ontological planes, and there is a transition from the physical to the corporeal resulting in the collapse of the state vector. The collapse, one could say, betokens - not an indeterminism on the physical level - but a discontinuity, precisely, between the physical and the corporeal planes. (61) ...Measurement...is the actualization of a certain potency... Below the corporeal level we are dealing with possibilities or potentiae, whereas the actualization of these potentiae is achieved on the corporeal plane. We do not know how this transition comes about. (66)... the frequent claim that the microworld is indeterministic - or somehow vague and fuzzy - reposes ultimately upon a confusion between the physical and the corporeal domains...[indeed] of all the things with which physics has to deal, there is nothing more sharply defined and accurately knowable than the electron. (70) According to heisenberg, there exist two ontological domains...the language of classical physsics.. and the language of quantum mechanics, which applies to the domain of potentialities. In the state vector, interpreted a la Born as a kind of probability wave, Heisenberg perceives thus 'a quantitative version of the old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy.' (73) However the difference between Heisenberg's view and that of the author is that in the philosophy of H. there is "no sharp distinction between the physical universe on a macroscopic scale and the corporeal world, properly so called." (74)

IV. Materia quantitate signata. ["a materia marked by quantity" - Aquinas] Deep reality as 'unbroken wholeness.' (78) Nature, though not spatio-temporal in its own right, presents itself as spatio-temporal under observation. This is to be understood, however, not in a Kantian but in a realist sense. (80) materia - forma; quantities - qualities; yin - yang; - Nature presents this dualism. Qualities abound on the corporeal plane but are nowhere to be found on the sub-existential plane says that qualities betoken essence [esse - 'to be'] - the essence namely of the corporeal entity. That essence is not a mathematical structure. "The corporeal domain is constituted, thus, by 'non-mathematical' essences..."(91) Quantity and mathematical structure refer to materia, or more precisely, to the material aspect of things -- as e.g., the Scholastics -- Numerus stat ex parte materiae. The concrete object is made up of matter and form, and that is why there are both qualities and quantities in the corporeal domain: the one indicative of essence, the other of the material substrate. "In rejecting the qualities or so-called 'secondary' attributes, Galileo and Descartes have cast out what in fact is primary: the very essence of corporeal things." (92) "... the reduction of the corporeal to the physical has the effect of rendering ontologically incomprehensible the physical itself. One can still, of course, calculate and make quantitative predictions, but that is all. One may indeed be able to answer the question 'How much?' with incredible accuracy; but any attempt to respond to the query, 'What?' leads perforce to contradiction or absurdity. This world-view...does not admit of an ontology. And is this not precisely the conclusion to be drawn from the interminable 'quantum reality' debate? Moreover, it is impossible even to give an unfalsified account of the scientific methodology within... the reductionist position, for in the absence of qualities there can be no perception and hence no measurement as well...(94) And from a footnote:"The moment one forgets that this so-called universe constitutes but a sub-existential domain -- a mere potency in relation to the corporeal - one has created a monster. For indeed, the physical domain, thus 'hypostatized,' becomes forthwith the prime usurper of reality, the great illusion from which a host of baneful errors spring. It is neither a small nor a harmless things to 'lose one's grip on reality'!"

V. On whether 'God plays dice.' Need to revive distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans. The significance of the quantum mechanical discontinuity - the significance of state vector collapse - lies in the fact that it betokens an action of natura naturans." (107)

VI. Vertical causality. The natural or 'natured' world presupposes a creative or 'form-bestowing' agency not simply in the sense of a first cause that brought everything into existence,
but as a transcendent principle of causality that is operative here and now. In Scholastic terms - natura naturata presupposes natura naturans. The phenomenon of state vector collapse - "so far from constituting merely a conundrum of quantum theory, [its] significance proves to be in the first place metaphysical." (109) One is forced to conclude that 'the spatio-temporal universe neither exists nor functions on its own.' ... it is misleading to speak of 'chance' in reference to the microworld. State vector collapse is not the result of a temporal process, be it deterministic, random, or stochastic. [stochastic process is one in which randomness and determinism both come into play] (110) A higher order of causality enters the picture. But for modern science, a causality transcending the temporal domain is inconceivable - whether Newtonian or Einsteinian.
________________________________________________________

The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition.
Wolfgang Smith. Foundation for Traditional Studies, Box 370, Oakton, VA 22124
http://www.traditional-studies.org/
ftsdc@ erols.com
ISBN 0-9629984-8
@2003
Introduction. Four characteristics of traditionalist metaphysics: (1) qualitative aspect of reality; (2) hierarchical order; (3) man as microcosm; (4) affirms that higher strata of the integral cosmos can be known through realization of the corresponding states in man himself
I. Sophia Perennis and Modern Science.

II. From Schrodinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology. Argues that quantum facts can be integrated into Thomistic ontology. Superposition states. Roger Penrose: "The rules are that any two states whatever, irrespective of how different from one another they may be, can coexist in any complex linear superposition. Indeed, any physical object, itself made out of individual particles, ought to be able to exist in such superpositions of spatially widely separated states, and so be in 'two places at once.'... Why, then, do we not experience macroscopic bodies... having two completely different locations at once..." (40-1) Smith says the resolution lies in the overlooked Cartesian dilemma. "...Descartes conceived the external or objective world as made up of so-called res extensae, which can be fully described in quantitative or mathematical terms. [He also posits...] res cogitantes or thinking entities, and it is to these that he consigned the sens8ible qualities, along with whatever else in the universe proved recalcitrant to mathematical definition. One generally regards this Cartesian partitition of reality into res extensae and res cogitantes as simply an affirmation of the mind-body dichotomy, forgetting that it is much more than that; for not only has Descartes distinguished sharply between mind and body, but he has at the same time imposed an exceedingly strange and indeed problematic conception of corporeal nature, a conception, namely, that renders the external world unperceived and unperceiavable." The red apple, so to speak, is a mental phantasm. This splitting into two natures ("one if the conjecture, the other is the dream") is what Whitehead refers to as "bifurcation;" he called it a complete muddle in scientific thought. It persists to this day and is exacerbated in quantum theory. "Quantum paradox , it appears, is nature's way of repudiating a spurious philosophy." (42) To deny bifurcation is to affirm the objective reality of the perceived entity: the red apple is clearly to be perceived, and distinguishable from the "molecular apple," a thing investigated through the methods of physics. One can distinguish corporeal objects from physical objects, two ontologically related (but distinct) domains. The bifucationist denies this, for he implicitly reduces corporeal reality to the physical. "Now the amazing thing is this: whereas classical physics seemingly tolerates that error, quantum mechanics does not." (43) The new physics insists on the distinction between corporal object X and associated physical object SX. The system belongs on the physical plane whereas the act of measurement terminates clearly on the corporeal. "...measurement...relies on an ontological transition from the physical to the corporeal domain... state vector collapse is inexplicable on a physical basis because it results from the act of a corporeal entity."... From an Aristotelian or Thomistic point of view, what distinguishes the corporeal object X from SX is precisely its substantial form, which bestows upon X its corporeal nature and specific essence. Substantial form is not a mathematical structure; otherwise X and SX would coincide.

A Note on Predestination

2009-06-23T04:51:00.000-07:00

William Blake: "Ancient of Days"
[God creating the world]

A good illustration for the Pauline term pro-horizo, literally 'to border beforehand.' From Emil Bock's Saint Paul:

"...The actual verb is contained in our word 'horizon.' Where the celestial line runs its course, the world is demarcated. Limitation, formation enters the still unformed and limitless elements. During the first stage, human beings rested in humanity like single drops in the ocean. For them, the eye of consciousness was not yet opened to the nascent earth; they lay in fertile developmental sleep. Higher hierarchies, who protectively bore the human seed, keep vigil over men as does a mother over her sleeping child. On the second level, the individual beings start to delimit themselves. The very first beginnings of an earthly physicality emerge and bring about the fruitful blossoming of a multitude within the great unity: God bestows form on man.
The word for the original limitation, which in Greek shines forth with such atmospheric lightness, becomes praedestinatio in Latin... Thus arose the terrifying and depressing concept that predestination applied to the whole person including the immortal essence of his being, hence, that from the beginning of creation each man was subject to a preconceived divine judgment, one leading to redemption, the other to damnation.
It is obvious, however, that this primal delimitation and structuring only took place in and through the body. All human beings are subject to a 'predestination' inasmuch as they have had to enter earthly bodies. Originally, no burden would have been implied by this, for bestowing a form on the developing human being was in any case a necessary stage on the path to future independence and freedom of the individual. It was only through the Fall that a tragic burden entered evolution; this, however, affected all men in like manner." (p. 265-6)

I will have more notes later on Saint Paul: Life, Epistles, and Teaching. Floris Books, 1981. Emil Bock [1895-1959] was the founder of the Christian Community and a great expositor of the Biblical and Christian understanding made possible by Rudolf Steiner. His other books include: The Three Years, Moses, Caesar and Apostles, Kings and Prophets, Apocalypse.

Imagination

2009-06-22T16:21:00.001-07:00

The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives--if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself.
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (61)
Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania,

Interesting: in “Pictures from the Speaking Stillness” I ended with comparing imagination to gravity -- not to light. I am uneasy with the statement that imagination “adds nothing except itself.”

Kathleen Raine:

From “Blake and Antiquity,” a shortened version of her Blake and Tradition:
Blake would have accepted Yeats’ definition of poetry: “the traditional expression of certain heroic or religious themes, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”

“Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are the roads of Genius.” Blake

Excerpts from the Poems: Collected Poems 1935-1980, Kathleen Raine. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1981.

From The Pythoness, 1948
From : “Isis Wanderer” p. 21

“This too is an experience of the soul,
The dismembered world that once was the whole god,
Whose broken fragments now lie dead.
The passing of reality itself is real…”

From The Year One, 1952

Poem: “Amo Ergo Sum”
A challenge to Descartes.
p. 49
“Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
The earth upon her astral spindle winds
Her ecstasy-producing dance…”

Etc.

From: “Three Poems on Illusion”

“…death is the withdrawal of attention
That has discovered all it needs to know,
Or, if not all, enough for now,
If not enough, something to bear in mind…

“…They never wearied of telling their being; and I
Asked of the rose, only more rose, the violet
More violet; …”

“I see them now across a void
Wider and deeper than time and space.
All that I have come to be
Lies between my heart and the rose,
The flame, the bird, the blade of grass.
…..
Sometimes from far away
They sign to me;
A violet smiles from the dim verge of darkness,
A raindrop hangs beckoning from the eaves…
And if my love could cross the empty desert self
That lies between all that I am and all that is,
They would forgive and bless.”

From: The Hollow Hill, 1960-64

From “The Star:” p. 108

“We looked away, and never looked again
Along the gaze that runs from love to love for ever…”
p. 108

From Eileann Chanaidh (Part 6: “The Shadow”)

“Because I see these mountains they are brought low,
Because I drink these waters they are bitter,
Because I tread these black rocks they are barren,
Because I have found these islands they are lost;
Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world
My shadow has fallen.”
p. 103

From “Envoi” p. 122

“…I found you wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,
And lent you, for a while, the golden kigdom I in you beheld.”

From: The Lost Country, 1971

From “A Painting by Winifred Nicholson,” p. 128
………

“’That is an old picture,’ my friend said;
And I, ‘How like the real world you and I remember.’
---For those same peaceful fields of vanished summer
Were spread alike for ladies of the castle
And for the niece of the village schoolmaster.

“Fields, it is true, in the aftermath are still green,
Beeches turn brown, country flowers in unheeded gardens grow,
It is something else, we said, that will not come again,
That leisure, that ease of heart unsevered from its roots;
The things we thought about, some sweetness in the air, nuance
Of educated English speech, libraries, country lanes;
Few cars; ‘wireless’ a cat’s whisker and a piece of quartz
Boys fiddled with. But there was laughter,
Songs at the piano, the Golden Bough, the Spirit of Man;
Pressed flowers: how fondly we took civilization for granted!
(October 1968)

From On A Deserted Shore, 1973

[Untitled short poems]

“Little of what you were, less of myself I knew,
Loved with my blind heart I knew not who,
Nor from what root love’s recognition grew,
Who in my ignorance worshipped and wounded you.”
p. 181

“Memories, shrivelled leaves
To keep or throw away.
Love cannot piece by piece
Remake the felled tree.”
p. 183

“All seems the same;
But this familiar room
Stands in the years we shared,
Where I, a ghost,
Out of this unreal future, haunt
The long-past present that was home.”
p. 186

“That we die who live
My heart knew by your grave.
Does he live who died?
‘He is not here,’ the angel on the stone replied.”
p. 195

From: The Oval Portrait, 1977

From “Before the Accuser,” p. 213

….
“I try, I try to justify
To find for ill beginning some good end,
Or hidden wisdom, though not mine,
In idiot’s tale, but find instead
A foolish record by a fool scanned.
And in the story there is more pain
Than I can bear to know again,
Yet why it seemed I suffered so
No longer can recall, nor feel
Vanished pain or vanished pleasure…”

From “Short Poems”:

“If I choose remorse
Of a heart inured to pain
It is because forgiveness would revive
Joy and love
To suffer all again.”
p. 220

Herbert Butterfield

2009-06-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800. London, 1950

Change indicates a “transposition in the mind” -- less clumsy a locution than “paradigm”

p. 32 “It is true even today that when conclusions have been reached in science or history, it is normal to incorporate these into a realm of ‘established facts,’ after which they come to be transcribed from one book to another . . .”

p. 36 Harvey exposed the errors of Galen, “but even he regarded arterial blood as being mixed with a sort of spirituous substance called pneuma, a life-principle analogous in some ways to air and in other ways to fire.”

In 1543: Copernicus, De Revolutionibus
Vesalius: De Fabrica
Translations made available the work of Archimedes

p. 104 changes in the last resort referable to “an alteration in men’s feeling for things.”

150ff: the anti-religious bias in modern science stems not from the great scientists themselves (Descartes, Newton, Boyle) but from popularizers like Fontenelle-- “They adopted the policy of making the intellectual work palatable and easy -- unlike the older forms of academic or scholastic controversy.” Cartesian doubt became a thing “easily vulgarized.” Era of Louis XIV, the philosophes, (1660’s-1770’s) “reason” came to mean something like “common sense.”

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962.

Exposure to “out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.” He discovers in the work of Jean Piaget, B.L. Whorf, W.V.O Quine (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”) fruitful material leading to thought about the “integral part played by one or another metaphysic in creative scientific research.” He begins to doubt the cumulative process (that science represents development-by-accumulation).

“…observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.” (Italics mine.)

In describing the work of imagination “in synthesis and reason,” he implies “a change in the rules.” In approaching this realm he realizes it is a mixture -- historical studies, sociology, logic, epistemology -- and asks “Can anything more than profdound confusion be indicated by this admixture of diverse fields and concerns?” It’s an example of how historical knowledge is outgrowing traditional categories -- “How could history of science fail to be a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may legitimately be asked to apply?” (Italics mine.)

Nature of normal science: the efforts to articulate a paradigm is a prerequisite to the discovery of laws. It’s not just taking measurements: “history offers no support for so excessively Baconian a method.” Boyle’s experiments were not conceivable until air was recognized as an elastic fluid…etc.
The paradigm problem: how something so seemingly haphazard as history can produce something so seemingly exact as science. “In the absence of a competent body of rules, what restricts the scientist to a particular normal-scientific tradition?” Preoccupation with “rules” seems to me positivistic. Also skirts the question of the sheer usefulness of abstract or geometric reasoning; reduction of universe to a problem in dynamism. This is not a universe we live in, but it certainly fosters the occupation of seeing “how things work.”

p. 46 the severe difficulty “of discovering the rules that have guided normal-scientific tradition. That difficulty is very nearly the same as the one the philosopher encounters when he tries to say what all games have in common.” This refers to Wittgenstein’s question: what need we know in order to apply terms like ‘chair,’ ‘leaf,’ or ‘game’ unequivocally and without provoking an argument?

Paradigm in some ways seems like an elaborate screen hiding the evolution of consciousness. Is this like Design Theory today?

p. 53 “Assimilating a new sort of fact demands a more than additive adjustment of theory, and until that adjustment is completed -- until the scientist has learned to see nature in a different way -- the new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all.” P. 55 the sentence, “oxygen was discovered…” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing.”

Discovery: a recognition both that something is as well as what it is.

On Figuration, Expectations, Collective Representations:
J.S. Bruner and Leo Postman, “On the perception of incongruity: a paradigm,” Journal of personality XVIII (1949) 206-23. About showing cards to subjects, some of which were anomalous (e.g. a red 6 of spades) Postman later remarked that “even knowing all about the apparatus and displays in advance, he nevertheless found looking at the incongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.”

See also (other topics)
Walter F. Cannon, “The Uniformitarian-Catastrophist Debate,” Isis, LI (1960) 28-55.
C.C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology, Cambridge, 1951.

Butterfield shows more clearly how the Aristotelian theory of motion underlay everything up until the 1600’s -- and in fact the “Scientific Revolution” pretty much consists of the putting-aside or yielding of Aristotelianism to the more abstract and mathematical motion without a mover. This is the true “paradigm change.” Everything else Kuhn talks about is small potatoes. But likewise this is a greater than a paradigm. “paradigm” is either too large or too small to accommodate the evolution of consciousness idea.

The positivist core of Kuhn, discussing the changes and crises in paradigms -- quotes Butterfield about placing data in a “new system of relations by giving them a different framework.” Then he quotes another source who says it is similar to “a change in gestalt.” Kuhn then says: “The parallel can be misleading. Scientists do not see something as something else; instead, they simply see it.” Very revealing.

The problem: supposed “equality of paradigms.” You cannot compare the breakdown of Aristotelian theory of motion with the “immense effort required to detect the neutrino.” P. 94: “Are there intrinsic reasons why the assimilation of either a new sort of phenomenon or a new scientific theory must demand the rejection of an older paradigm?” P. 112: “something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself.”

p. 125: “But is sensory experience fixed and neutral? Are theories simply man-made interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictates an immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developed alternative, I find it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yet it no longer functions effectively and the attempts to make it do so through the introduction of a neutral language of observation now seem to me hopeless.”

Thomas Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, Chicago, 2000.

His new guidelines: reiterates the view that science is a cognitive empirical investigation of nature exhibiting a unique sort of progress, but not one that can be interpreted as “approximating closer and closer to reality.”

Secondly, he compares evolution of science to evolutionary biological development: “in science, speciation is specialization . . .”

Talks again about his revelation in reading Aristotle: “perhaps his words had not always meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.”

Motion in Aristotle: change in general, not just change in position of a physical body. Change of position (Galileo, Newton) is a subcategory of motion for Aristotle,
Others which included growth, alteration of intensity, and a number of qualitative changes.

Centrality of qualities in Aristotelian system: it “inverts the ontological hierarchy of matter and quality that has been standard since the middle of the 17th century.” And: “What had been paradigmatic examples of motion for Aristotle -- accord to oak or sickness to health -- were not motions at all for Newton. In the transition, a natural family ceased to be natural; its members were redistributed among preexisting sets; and only one of them continued to bear the old name.” P. 30. Aristotelian motion: flight of arrow; falling stone; return to health; growth of oak. These are changes of state, whose salient features include end points and elapsed times of transition. Thus: motion cannot be relative, and it is a category distinct from rest, which is a “state.”

All this: A good example of “scouring” or original participation.

“…the distinctive character of revolutionary change in language is that it alters not only the criteria by which terms attach to nature but also, massively, the set of objects or situations to which these terms attach.” In other words, they affect Nature itself -- though he doesn’t quite get to this point. Kuhn calls this process “holistic” -- “language is a coinage with two faces, one looking outward to the world, the other inward to the world’s reflection in the referential structure of the language.” P. 30

Deconstruction is what results when this process is insufficiently understood: that is to say, it is understood as ‘subjective’ only. The ‘objective’ pole, that is, Nature itself, is not brought along. Need to expand this. “The central characteristic of scientific revolutions is that they alter the knowledge of nature that is intrinsic to the language itself and that is thus prior to anything quite describable as description or generalization, scientific or everyday.”

“Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability” -- excellent essay on language-problems of understanding out-of-date science texts.

p. 54: “Is full communication nevertheless possible between an 18th and 20th century chemist… Perhaps yes, but perhaps only if one of the two learns the other’s language, becoming, in that sense, a participant in the other’s practice of chemistry.”

P. 55: “The shaping of cognition by language, a point by no means epistemologically innocuous.”

Important: P. 57: (Italics mine) “If I were rewriting The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I would emphasize language change more and the normal/revolutionary distinction less.” See also p. 97: “This change (i.e. of language) permits a significantly more nuanced description.”

“Possible Worlds in the History of Science”

Motion in Aristotle refers not simply to change of position but to all changes specified by two end-points. Planck (before 1907) “… the energy element hv referred not to a physically indivisible atom (later called “the energy quantum”) but to a mental subdivision of the energy continuum, any point on which could be physically occupied.” P. 60

Quine: assumes that anything can be said in any language.

Newtonian mechanics: before exposure to Newtonian terminology can begin, students must already possess a vocabulary adequate to refer to physical objects and their locations in space and time. All prior to learning Newton’s theory: mathematical vocabulary of trajectories; analysis of velocity; accelerations of bodies; a notion of extensive magnitude.

MOTION ARISTOTELIAN NEWTONIAN

“Forced” Hurled projectile For Newtonian: all of these are
examples of forced motion.

“Force-free” Falling stone
Spinning top
Rotating flywheel

Force-free motion is Newton’s first law: “in the absence of an external force applied to it, a body moves continuously at constant speed in a straight line.” This can only be demonstrated in interplanetary space.

If the real world is lexical-dependent, that poses a problem for realism, i.e., things are not independent of time, language, and culture. This is often called the problem of “meaning variance.” The “causal theory of reference”: Kripke & Putnam: The problem it sets out to solve is which properties are essential and which accidental. Which belong to a kind by definition, and which are only contingent? “The use of theoretical rather than superficial properties offers great advantages, of course. There are few of the former, the relations between them are more systematic and they permit both richer and more precise discriminations. But they come no closer to being essential or necessary properties than the superficial ones they appear to supplant. The problems of meaning and meaning invariance are still in place.” P. 83.

Gold: yellowness, ductility, atomic weight 79.
But enormous transitions can be seen in terms like ‘force,’ ‘species,’ ‘heat,’ ‘element,’ ‘temperature,’ etc. Causal theory says that naming is a sort of “original act,” to which speakers in later history are related, that is, for referents for natural-kind terms like ‘gold,’ ‘tiger,’ ‘gene,’ etc. The common problem of meaning is the failure to distinguish the lexicon as shared property constitutive of community and lexicon as something carried by each individual. What is called “lexicon” might better be called a “conceptual scheme,” he says, where the very notion of a conceptual scheme is “not that of a set of beliefs but of a particular operating mode of a mental module prerequisite to having beliefs, a mode that at once supplies and bounds the set of beliefs it is possible to conceive.”

He says that this “mental module” may be supposed to have developed from “a still more fundamental mechanism which enabled individual living organisms to reidentify other substances by tracing their spatio-temporal trajectories.” P. 94. This is a kind of Kantianism.

p. 95 perspective of historical study: there is no Archimedean “Platform” available for the pursuit of science other than the historically situated one already in place… Though both rationality and relativism are implicated, what is fundamentally at stake is rather the correspondence theory of truth, the notion that the goal, when evaluating scientific laws or theories, is to determine whether or not they correspond to an external mind-independent world. It is that notion, whether in an absolute or probabilistic form, that I’m persuaded must vanish together with foundationalism. What replaces it will still require a strong conception of truth, but not, except in the most trivial sense, correspondence truth.” P. 95

“The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science”

He was motivated by the recognized difficulties in the then philosophies of science, esp. positivism, logical empiricism, etc. “What is the process . . . by which the outcome of experiments is uniquely specified as fact and by which authoritative new beliefs … come to be based on the outcome?” p. 109 he talks about a “sociology of science” that has emerged from his work, whose net effect has only been to deepen confusion, not clarify it. The concept of “negotiation” -- factual and interpretative -- process is circular. If so much depends on contingencies how much is true or probable? The “strong program” in deconstruction -- the 60’s preoccupation with power/authority -- claims it has all “gone mad.” Even newer and more qualified claims hardly address the issue “of how nature enters the negotiations that produce beliefs about it.” The historical study of science only gradually led from view of science as static body of knowledge to a dynamic one. An excellent essay that describes the process of scouring original participation (without calling it that) -- finds itself in a nonparticipated cosmos and asks the question, How do we know what is true? What does the phrase mean, that “successive scientific law and theories grow closer and closer to the truth?”
p. 115: “Only a fixed, rigid Archimediean platform could supply a base from which to measure the distance from current belief and true belief.”

The problem consists in understanding small incremental changes in belief: (p. 112) “From the philosophical point of view, the difference between the two formulations -- the rationality of belief vs. the rationality of incremental changes of belief -- is vast.”

He summarizes:
(1) The Archimedean platform outside of history, time, space, etc. is gone beyond recall. In other words, what is needed is a vehicle of participation.

(2) In its absence, comparative evaluation is all there is. (I doubt this.) “Scientific development, like Darwinian evolution, a process driven from behind rather than pulled toward some fixed goal…”

(3) truth cannot be anything quite like correspondence to reality. P. 115

He is looking for principles of developmental processes.

p. 118: “The trouble with the historical philosophy of science has been . . . that by basing itself upon observations of the historical record it has undermined the pillars on which the authority of scientific knowledge was formerly thought to rest without supplying anything to replace them.” These most central pillars are:
(1) facts are prior and independent of beliefs for which they are supposed to supply evidence; and
(2) what emerges in science are truths or probable truths about a mind-independent world.

Two things have happened since:
(1) the effort to shore up the pillars; or
(2) the denial that science has any special claims to truth

on FIGURATION:

“Reflections on My Critics,” p. 173
“deep differences” are “not simply about names or language but equally and inseparably about nature. We cannot say with any assurance that the two men even see the same thing, possess the same data, but identify or interpret it differently, What they are responding to differently is stimuli, and stimuli receive much neural processing before anything is seen or any data is given to the sense. Since we now know (as Descartes did not) that the stimulus-sensation correlation is neither one-to-one nor independent of education, we may reasonably suspect that it varies from community to community.” (Italics mine.)

“Metaphor in Science” (1977)

“Does it obviously make better sense to speak of accommodating language to the world than of accommodating the world to language?”
“Or is the way of talking which creates that distinction itself illusory?”
“Is what we refer to as ‘the world’ perhaps a product of mutual accommodation between experience and language?”

Reprinted in: Metaphor and Thought, Ortony ed., 1977 (Cambridge University Press)

Says he is groping towards a type of Kantian perspective, but one in which the categories of the mind change with time, according to the accommodations of language and experience.

New work in “kind” terms: i.e. evolution of neural mechanisms for reidentifying what Artistotle called ‘substances’ -- things that, between their origin and their demise, trace a lifeline through space over time. What emerges as a mental module that permits us to learn to recognize not only kinds of physical objects (e.g. elements, fields, and forces) but also kinds of furniture, or government, of personality. P 229.
All knowledge possesses an historical dimension.

Consilience

2009-06-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

Steve Jones, reviewing Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works
New York Review of Books
Nov. 6, 1997

The motto of the Royal Society of London is Nullius in verba: trust not in words. Observation and experiment are what count, not opinion and introspection. The study of the mind has been invaded by both. Few working scientists have much sympathy for those who try to interpret nature in metaphysical terms. For most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it is cheaper, easier, and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it. Outside psychology it plays almost no part in the functions of the research machine.

Pinker treats the mind as other biologists treat the kidney. His thesis is clear: "The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our ancestors in their foraging way of life."

From Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience
Atlantic
March, 1998

Western science took the lead in the world largely because it cultivated reductionism and physical law to expand the understanding of space and time beyond that attainable by the unaided senses. The advance, however, carried humanity's self-image ever further from its perception of the remainder of the universe, and as a consequence the full reality of the universe seemed to grow progressively more alien. The ruling talismans of twentieth-century science, relativity and quantum mechanics, have become the ultimate in strangeness to the human mind. They were conceived by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and other pioneers of theoretical physics during a search for quantifiable truths that would be known to extraterrestrials as well as to our species, and hence certifiably independent of the human mind. The physicists succeeded magnificently, but in so doing they revealed the limitations of intuition unaided by mathematics; an understanding of nature, they discovered, comes very hard. Theoretical physics and molecular biology are acquired tastes. The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

Note: Interesting he doesn’t mention the participatory principle, but rather “that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind.”

NATURAL scientists, chastened by such robust objections to the Enlightenment agenda, mostly abandoned the examination of human mental life, yielding to philosophers and poets another century of free play. In fact, the concession proved to be a healthy decision for the profession of science, because it steered researchers away from the pitfalls of metaphysics. Throughout the nineteenth century knowledge in the physical and biological sciences grew at an exponential rate. At the same time, newly risen like…

Gives a very superficial account of challenges to the reign of Enlightenment naturalism. His Romantic tradition mentions only Rousseau and German Naturphilosophie -- Goethe as scientist is given short shrift. The deeper sensibility is lacking.

Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

And yet it he did a good job deconstructing deconstruction, and I am sympathetic with his concern about the fragmentation of knowledge.
His essay on the history of science seemed to me a little weak.

To those concerned about the growing dissolution and irrelevance of the intelligentsia, which is indeed alarming, I suggest that there have always been two kinds of original thinkers -- those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. It lifts us upward on a zigzagging trajectory of progress. And in the Darwinian contest of ideas order always wins, because -- simply -- that is the way the real world works.

Quite a mishmash here.

The confidence of natural scientists, I grant, often seems overweening. Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age: the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow become clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.

Sentimental garbage.

In his 1941 classic Man on His Nature, the British neurobiologist Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as an "enchanted loom," perpetually weaving a picture of the external world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe. The communal mind of literate societies -- world culture -- is an immensely larger loom. Through science it has gained the power to map external reality far beyond the reach of a single mind, and in the arts it finds the means to construct narratives, images, and rhythms immeasurably more diverse than the products of any solitary genius. The loom is the same for both enterprises, for science and for the arts, and there is a general explanation of its origin and nature and thence of the human condition.

Is it the same?

…true reform will aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and the humanities in scholarship and teaching. Every college student should be able to answer this question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?

This is ambitious, given the current state of learning. It’s taken me about 50 years just to get to the suburbs of this question.

Most of the issues that vex humanity daily -- ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environmental destruction, and endemic poverty, to cite several of the most persistent -- can be solved only by integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that from the social sciences and the humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as it appears through the lens of ideology and religious dogma, or as a myopic response solely to immediate need. Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are trained primarily or exclusively in the social sciences and the humanities, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences.

The problem is not in the contents of knowledge. The problem lies in the will to pay attention, which can only arise when one has a perception of needing to pay attention. One can master the substance of what one needs to know (i.e. for debate or legislative purposes) if one has the will to pay attention and therefore be receptive to the flow of information from numerous, and often mutually conflicting, sources.

The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided.

True to the point of understatement.

A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces; the consilience among them must be pursued. Such unification will be difficult to achieve. But I think it is inevitable. Intellectually it rings true, and it gratifies impulses that arise from the admirable side of human nature. To the extent that the gaps between the great branches of learning can be narrowed, diversity and depth of knowledge will increase. They will do so because of, not despite, the underlying cohesion achieved. The enterprise is important for yet another reason: It gives purpose to intellect. It promises that order, not chaos, lies beyond the horizon. Inevitably, I think, we will accept the adventure, go there, and find what we need to know.

I hope the rest of the book is better than this and he tells us how this wonderful consilience is to be achieved.

From a review of “Consilience” by Steve Jones
The New York Review of books:

Consilience makes an eloquent case that, as understanding increases, what seemed mysterious can more and more be construed in biological terms. If that is true (and it is), need there be a limit to what biology can explain?

Well, maybe. Certainly, religious ecstasy has a neurobiological cause; but so does the impotent rage that emerges when you pour scalding coffee onto your lap. It all goes back to what science is able to say. Bishop Berkeley was right; people are attracted to what is close at hand—but that has nothing to do with gravity. A city is like an antheap—but that is not much help in town planning. We may indeed have evolved to live in a savannah, but in spite of his eloquence about our "biophilia," E.O. Wilson prefers Lexington, Massachusetts, and I choose to live in Islington.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a regular attendee at the lectures on chemistry given by the Royal Institution in London. Asked why he put himself through such torment, he replied: "To improve my stock of metaphors." That is the danger for those who try to read into nature the affairs of men; to be so seduced by the outward parallels between the two as to mistake analogy for shared descent. Although it contains much of value, Consilience falls too readily into that trap.
________________________________________

Still—retournons à nos moutons—what of Dolly? She gave the public (and the Congress) a reminder that, pace the followers of E.O. Wilson, the ancient questions of sex, age, and death remain unanswered, and that, thanks to Rifkin and his clan, the law may be forced to interfere with the advance of science. Gina Kolata comes up with a good quote from Dostoevsky: "Man gets used to everything—the beast." That is what will happen to genetics. It will become just another science, and as such of no interest to most of those who gain from it. That day is closer than most of us realize.

Each of these books has its strengths, but each is a martyr to its own hyperbole. Does Rifkin really believe that mothers will soon be fined for not engineering the genes of their children, Kolata that in Dolly "all of science fiction is true," or Wilson that people have nightmares about snakes because they used to kill our ancestors? (Who, after all, dreams of stinking meat?) All three write clearly, know their subject, and understand how biology works. Is it really necessary to present the biological prospect in such terms of apocalyptic simplicity? Lord Salisbury once said that: "You should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense." Science writers, please note.

Jerry Fodor: The London Review of Books
Reviewing Consilience

Wilson thinks consilience is in disrepute because philosophers don't take science seriously. On the contrary, it's in disrepute because they do. It's attending to how the scientific edifice is actually organised that makes the eventual reduction of the rest of science to physics seem so unlikely. Here, for once, 'don't think, look' sounds like good advice; one could wish that Wilson had taken it. For what one sees when one looks doesn't at all suggest a structure that is collapsing into its basement. If the unity of the sciences is true, then there ought to be fewer sciences every day, as basic physics absorbs them one by one. But what's going on seems to be quite the reverse: an accelerating proliferation of new disciplines; the damned things multiply faster than college deans can keep up with them.
I think one should be moved by this apparent failure of consilience. I think it poses a deep, deep question about the way our physicalistic ontology comports with the pluralism of scientific discourse to which any college prospectus bears testimony. I think we ought to pay attention to what the structure of the scientific institution seems to be trying to tell us. Not so Professor Wilson. Wilson is in a pique with the structure of the scientific institution. 'The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.' That is a claim to conjure with, and one would like to see some arguments. Wilson says - and this is really all he says that's pertinent - that its 'best support . . . is no more than an extrapolation of the consistent success of the natural sciences'. But what the natural sciences have been successful at is not to Wilson's purpose. They have been remarkably, impressively, gloriously, good at explaining things. But they generally do so in their proprietary dialects, not in the language of basic physics. The success of the sciences is one thing: the unity of science is quite another.

DNA and Other Designs, by Stephen Meyer
First Things, April 2000

“Explaining the origin of the specific sequencing of proteins (and DNA) lies at the heart of the current crisis of materialistic evolutionary thinking….
“During the last forty years, every naturalistic model proposed has failed to explain the origin of information -- the great stumbling-block for materialist scenarios. . .

Charles Sanders Pierce called the grounding of science in forensics *i.e. anti-Aristotle and anti-Church) “a barbaric reaction to the Middle Ages”--
He called for repudiation of Cartesianism and restoration of the Scholastics ---scholasticism explained things in terms of their intelligibility or the intelligible that they revealed. Descartes resorted to a “God made it so” argument. E.Oakes: science discovers, it does not invent (and technology invents, it does not discover!!) -- confused legacy of Cartesianism -- leaves the subject isolated and never sure of the “real world.” Are its concepts cooked up and imposed on the world?

CSPierce: “…. The very point of Occam’s attack, for his whole notion of a reality was that of a thing which is in itself whatever it really is. This he was able to see must be devoid of all quality and all relations. All qualities and all relations according to him, are terms, subjects and predicates of written, spoken, or thought propositions; and the qualities and relations of things can consist in nothing except the mind naturally applies them such and such terms.

Figuration

2009-06-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

The neurophysiologist Joseph Bogen argues that consciousness is subjectivity, and he comments that you can't see subjectivity; it's like looking for the wind, you can only see its effects.

Alan Hobson has also developed a model of the ways in which consciousness changes over time. First he defines consciousness as
"a graded integration of multiple cognitive functions yielding a unified representation of the world, our bodies and ourselves".
This integrated system and its unified representation also goes through a continuum of states as we go through our days and, in longer term, our years. So this model that Hobson has developed shows that:
the level of consciousness changes as a function of activation;
the focus of consciousness changes as a function of input/output gating; and
the form (or perhaps the state) of consciousness changes as a function of modulatory neurotransmitter ratios.
He concludes that
"Consciousness is the forebrain's representation of the world, our bodies and ourselves. It is always a construction whose level, focus and form depends upon the brain stem."

One can also see a commitment to the neuron doctrine in the joint work of the Churchlands. In a discussion of how the relation of psychology to neuroscience is likely to compare to significant historical cases of intertheoretic reduction - the reduction of Kepler's planetary laws to Newton's laws of motion, the reduction of temperature to mean molecular kinetic energy, and of light to electromagnetic waves - the Churchlands (1994) say that in the neuroscience-psychology case,
the presumption in favor of an eventual reduction (or elimination) is far stronger than it was in the historical cases just examined. For unlike the earlier cases of light or heat or heavenly motions, in general terms we already know how psychological phenomena arise: they arise from the evolutionary and ontogenetic articulation of matter, more specifically, from the articulation of biological organization. We therefore expect to understand the former in terms of the latter. The former is produced by the relevant articulation of the latter. (p. 48)

A similar suggestion is made by Hubel (1974):
As we learn more about the brain, the effects of that knowledge on other fields of inquiry will be profound. The branches of philosophy concerned with such subjects as the nature of the mind and of perception will, in a sense, be superseded, as will the parts of psychology that seek to obtain the answers by indirect means. (p. 259)
Here the suggestion that the psychological sciences are way stations is explicit. If a theory of a mental phenomenon is not a neural theory or, at any rate, is not reducible to the neural, it will be discarded in the long run by neuroscience as "direct" explanations become available.[12]

A clear statement of the neuron doctrine can be found at the beginning of Patricia Churchland and Terrence Sejnowski's (1992) book The Computational Brain:
The working hypothesis underlying this book is that emergent properties are high-level effects that depend on lower-level phenomena in some systematic way. Turning the hypothesis around to its negative version, it is highly improbable that emergent properties cannot be explained by low-level properties... (p. 2)
In
A statement of the neuron doctrine can also be found at the beginning of Paul Churchland's (1995) recent book The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul:
[R]ecent research into neural networks, both in animals and in artificial models, has produced the beginnings of a real understanding of how the biological brain works - a real understanding, that is, of how you work, and everyone else like you...[W]e are now in a position to explain how our vivid sensory experience arises in the sensory cortex of our brains: how the smell of baking bread, the sound of an oboe, the taste of a peach, and the color of a sunrise are all embodied in a vast chorus of neural activity. We now have the resources to explain how the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord conduct an orchestra of muscles to perform the cheetah's dash, the falcon's strike, or the ballerina's dying swan. More centrally, we can now understand how the infant brain slowly develops a framework of concepts with which to comprehend the world. And we can see how the matured brain deploys that framework almost instantaneously: to recognize similarities, to grasp analogies, and to anticipate both the immediate and the distant future. (pp. 4-5)
Although our primary focus is the Churchlands, commitment to the neuron doctrine is by no means limited to them. In A Vision of the Brain, for example, Semir Zeki says:
It is...fortunate that neurobiologists are not philosophers, for they might otherwise find themselves immersed, like the philosophers, in an endless and ultimately fruitless discussion of the meaning of words such as 'unconscious,' or 'inference' or 'knowledge' and 'information' instead of trying to unravel important facts about the brain. They would, in brief, end up contributing as meagrely to an understanding of the brain and of the mind as philosophers have. This last point is not a trivial one for ultimately the problems that cortical neurobiologists will be concerned with are the very ones that have preoccupied the philosophers throughout the ages - problems of knowledge, experience, consciousness and the mind - all of them a consequence of the activities of the brain and ultimately only understandable when the brain itself is properly understood. The path toward the millennial future lies more with neurobiologists and some philosophers acknowledge this...It is only through a knowledge of neurobiology that philosophers of the future can hope to make any substantial contribution to understanding the mind. (p. 7; emphasis added.)

In our view, the answer to this question is "no." If reductionism is a constraint in science at all, then it is a general or global constraint. That is to say, if reductionism is true, then anything that is in principle reducible, reduces to the most basic science there is, namely, physics.[31] But this means that considerations of reduction do not privilege neurobiology over the other sciences but only physics, and reductionism implies that a successful theory of the mind will be solely physical and not solely neurobiological. The relation between neurobiology and psychology is left entirely open by reductionism and must be regarded as an empirical question about the local relations among the sciences. In short, then, the appeal to reductionism does too much for the proponent of the neuron doctrine. If one is going to be a reductionist, one has to take the train of reduction to the terminus of physics. In the absence of a further argument privileging neurobiology as well as physics, neurobiology represents for psychology nothing more than - in Jerry Fodor's (1981) phrase - a local stop. If there is an argument privileging neurobiology in this way, it is not an argument that derives from reductionism itself, and this is enough to defeat the argument from unification on the interpretation we are considering

The reason for the qualification concerns the enormous difficulty involved in explaining the conscious aspects of perception: "In 1972 , I suggested that '...active high-level neurons directly and simply cause the elements of our perception,' and I still think this simple idea has some merit, even though I now believe that interactions with other individuals and society have to be taken into account when considering the conscious aspects of perception" (Barlow 1995, p. 428).

Gold, Ian & Stoljar, Daniel. (1999). A neuron doctrine in the philosophy of neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): XXX-XXX.