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Vajradhara (Sanskrit: वज्रधार Vajradhāra, Tibetan: རྡོ་རྗེ་འཆང་། rdo rje 'chang (Dorje Chang); Chinese: 多杰羌佛; Javanese: Kabajradharan; Japanese: 執金剛神; English: Diamond-holder) is the ultimate primordial Buddha, or Adi Buddha, according to the Gelug and Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
Vajradhara displaced Samantabhadra who remains the 'Primordial Buddha' in the Nyingma, or 'Ancient School' and the Sakya school. However the two are metaphysically equivalent. Achieving the 'state of vajradhara' is synonymous with complete realisation.
As such Vajradhara is thought to be the supreme essence of all (male) Buddhas (his name means the bearer of the thunderbolt). It is the Tantric form of Sakyamuni which is called Vajradhara. Tantras are texts specific to Tantrism and are believed to have been originally taught by the Tantric form of Sakyamuni called Vajradhara. He is an expression of Buddhahood itself in both single and yabyum form.[2]. Vajradhara is considered to be the prime Buddha of the Father tantras [3] (tib. pha-rgyud) such as Guhyasamaja, Yamantaka, and so on [4].
From the primordial Vajradhara/Samantabhadra were manifested the Five Wisdom Buddhas (Dhyani Buddhas):
From Wikipedia
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Thema Vajradhara
Symbolik – Verinigung der Gegensätze:
Realisation und Vereinigung der Gegensätze - Vajradhara
Für mich ermöglicht die mystische Perspektive einen Blick auf die psychologische. Die psychologische Perspektive untersucht alle Sichtweisen, die natürliche, die wissenschaftliche und die mystische. Alle Sichtweisen werden analysiert in Bezug auf das Ego, doch kann die eigene Perspektive (die psychologische) noch nicht voll erkannt werden.
Aus meiner heutigen Sicht sehe ich den ersten Abschnitt des psychischen Entwicklungsprozesses, den C. G. Jung als Individuationsprozess bezeichnet, als eine Konsolidierung des rational fundierten Egobewusstseins.
Für mich ist es vergleichbar mit dem voll ausgebildeten Vajra oder Dorje (Donnerkeil), dem klaren Geist, oder dem klaren männlichen, intellektuellen Prinzip.
Der Bereich des erfahrenen Seins, das weibliche und emotionale Prinzip ist aber noch nicht voll entwickelt, solange der mystische Bereich (transzendente Erfahrung) nicht voll exploriert wurde.
Transzendente Erfahrungen werden in tiefer Meditation oder Trance-Zuständen gemacht. Der Geist wird entgrenzt von den Beschränkungen des Ego-Bewusstseins. Während dieser Erfahrung entsteht der Blick auf das Leben und Denken in der Verfassung des Bewusstseins, die mir als Alltag bekannt ist.
Ich habe im Alltag gelebt und an einem Leben teilgenommen, das man als gutbürgerlich bezeichnen kann. Als Unternehmer haben meine Eltern diese Umgebung geschaffen. Kaufleute, Politiker, Reiter und Bauern. Das ist meine Umgebung. In dieser handfest auf die Welt bezogenen Aufmerksamkeit bin ich aufgewachsen. Das Bewusstsein ist auf das Materielle bezogen und die Aufmerksamkeit wird durch die Motivationskraft A1 fixiert. In die Ausweitung von Macht und Besitz wird viel Energie investiert und Sorgen und Gedanken über Aufträge, Wirtschaft, Politik und Handel bestimmen den Alltag.
Wenn ich von Alltagsbewusstsein spreche, beziehe ich mich auf meinen Hintergrund in diesem Umfeld. Dieses Umfeld war mir wie das Wasser für den Fisch, ich erkannte viele andere Dinge, sah, in welchen Nischen sich andere versteckten, welche Beute sie machten, oder wie sie sich Respekt verschafften, das eigene Schwimmbecken erfasste ich nicht.
In der Firma meines Vaters wuchs ich mit Arbeitern und ihrer Weltsicht heran. Mit den Herrenreitern sprach ich über ihren neuen Porsche oder das siegreiche Springturnier.
Sieger wollen und müssen immer weiter gewinnen und dieser Drang zieht sie überall dorthin, wo es um Sieg und Niederlage geht. Auch ihr Geist ist fixiert. Bis ich erkannte, worauf mein Geist sich ausgerichtet hatte, nämlich Selbsterkenntnis, dauerte eine Weile. Während ich mich intensiv mit C. G. Jung auseinandersetzte, wurde mir das aber klar.
Diese analytische Klarheit bezeichne ich als Vajra, als intellektuelles Wissen. Es baut sich auf mit der intellektuellen Durchdringung von religiösen, weltanschaulichen oder philosophischen Konzepten.
Zu diesen Konzepten gehört für mich auch der philosophische Buddhismus. Innerhalb dieses sehr nützlichen und die Bewusstheit erweiternden Konzeptes werden Texte zur Anschauung gebracht, in denen es um die Vereinigung der Gegensätze geht. Die bekanntesten gehören zum tibetischen Tantra, das auch als das tantrische Fahrzeug, Tantrayana, bekannt ist.
Im Tantra steht die Vereinigung von voll ausgebildeter intellektueller Klarheit (Vajra) mit einer voll entwickelten Gefühlsseite (Gantha – Glocke) an. Die tantrischen Schriften werden auf Vajradhara zurückgeführt, einer Erscheinungsform des Ur-Buddha.
Für mich ist der Begriff „Buddha“ synonym für ein geistiges Feld oder eine transzendente Motivationskraft, die alle Menschen motiviert, den Weg nach Hause zu suchen und auch zu finden. Die Fragen - Wer bin ich? Woher komme ich? Wohin gehe ich? - entspringen dieser Kraft. Und auch die Antworten auf die Frage - Wie komme ich nach Hause? – werden von ihr gegeben. Eine dieser Antworten trägt Vajradhara in seiner figürlichen Abbildung und wird daher ein Träger der Weisheit. Die Weisheit drückt sich aus durch die vor der Brust auf Herzhöhe überkreuzten Hände mit Vajra und Gantha.
Übersetzt bedeutet das: Vereinige die widerstrebenden Gegensätze deiner männlichen und weiblichen Aspekte (Energien) in deinem Herzen.
Ist dieser Vorgang vollzogen, bedeutet das die volle Verwirklichung, auch Buddhaschaft genannt.
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Digital Art – own resources
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The intense Mediterranean light and it’s metaphysical reflections.....................................................................................Το έντονο φώς της Μεσογείου και οι μεταφυσικές αντανακλάσεις του..
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaterialism
Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is the monistic metaphysical doctrine that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist.
It is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that only material things, and no mental things, exist.
Subjective idealism: This form of idealism is "subjective" not because it denies that there is an objective reality, but because it asserts that this reality is completely dependent upon the minds of the subjects that perceive it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant
Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause and effect. One important consequence of this view is that one never hasdirect experience of things, the so-called noumenalworld, and that what we do experience is thephenomenal world as conveyed by our senses.
Kant aimed to resolve disputes between empirical andrationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was argued that since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
Kant, however, contests this: he claims that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge, but knowledge that is not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions — which he calls a priori forms — and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. In so doing, his main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and in addition, that Space and Time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge.[39] The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. It is our mind, though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and the perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without the concepts, intuitions are nondescript; without the intuitions, concepts are meaningless — thus the famous statement, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments.
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant's solution is the schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us — implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in and of themselves.
Xenophanes of Colophon in 530 BC anticipated Kant's epistemology in his reflections on certainty. "And as for certain truth, no man has seen it, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about all the things I mention.
Briefly, Schopenhauer described transcendental idealism as a "distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to us because "we do not know either ourselves or things as they are in themselves, but merely as they appear."[4] Some of Schopenhauer's comments on the definition of the word "transcendental" are as follows:
Transcendental is the philosophy that makes us aware of the fact that the first and essential laws of this world that are presented to us are rooted in our brain and are therefore known a priori. It is called transcendental because it goes beyond the whole given phantasmagoria to the origin thereof. Therefore, as I have said, only the Critique of Pure Reason and generally the critical (that is to say, Kantian) philosophy are transcendental.
Realism can also be promoted in an unqualified sense, in which case it asserts the mind-independent existence of a visible world, as opposed to skepticism and solipsism. Philosophers who profess realism state that truth consists in the mind's correspondence to reality.[1]
Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality and that every new observation brings us closer to understanding reality.[2] In its Kantian sense, realism is contrasted with idealism. In a contemporary sense, realism is contrasted with anti-realism, primarily in the philosophy of science.
Naïve realism[edit]
Naïve realism, also known as direct realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in a common sense theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses. The realist view is that objects are composed of matter, occupy space and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived correctly. We perceive them as they really are. Objects obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone to observe them
Stuckists claim that conceptual art is justified by the work of Marcel Duchamp, but that Duchamp's work is "anti-art by intent and effect". The Stuckists feel that "Duchamp's work was a protest against the stale, unthinking artistic establishment of his day", while "the great (but wholly unintentional) irony of postmodernism is that it is a direct equivalent of the conformist, unoriginal establishment that Duchamp attacked in the first place"
Obscurantism (French: obscurantisme, from the Latin obscurans, "darkening") is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two common historical and intellectual denotations to Obscurantism: (1) deliberately restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the public; and, (2) deliberate obscurity—an abstruse style (as in literature and art) characterized by deliberate vagueness.
How deep the tenderness that yearns
Within the silent wood that turns
From green to gold, and slowly burns
As by some inward fire!
How dear the sense that all things wild
Have been at last by love beguiled
To join one chorus, reconciled....
Words by Helena Coleman, Canadian Poet
for Flickriver - Sophie Shapiro
I would like to thank everyone who takes an interest in my work. I am truly grateful and appreciate your ongoing support. Please take good care of yourselves in these uncertain times. Keep well, safe & inspired.
Kind regards,
Sophie
eating with just a fork - Picasso, art gallery, new york
Music: Right Click and select "Open link in new tab"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYAkR2hrOnk
The American Metaphysical Circus · The United States of America
For we only aim to please
It's our customers who gain
As their appetites increase
They must come to us for pleasure and for pain
And the price is right
The cost of one admission is your mind
“There was something disquieting about the way an intimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions. Any old thing forgotten in a corner, if the eye dwelt on it, acquired an eloquence of its own, communicating its lyricism and magic to the kindred soul. If a neglected object of this kind were forcibly isolated, that is, divested of its warmth and of the protective coat of its environment, or even ironically combined with completely unrelated things, it would reassert its dignity in the new context and stand there, incomprehensible, weird, mysterious.”
—Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1982)
A fractal distortion field involving painful symbolic tesselated fractal hands...
Maurice Cornelius Escher, draftsman extradinaire, raised the essential question of how does one really represent higher dimensions, three and four specifically, on a two dimensional plane. He made use of tessellation, the filling or tiling of a plane with various shaped patterns, as a visual tool to change the perceived dimensionality of space itself.
On the other hand - pun intended - Benoit Mandelbrot computer scientist discovered objects with non-integer, fractional dimensionality! And, we suddenly see tessellation playing a key role in visual representation of certain Mandelbrot sets. -
We may ask, what is the real question? "Hands On" symbolizes the uncertainty of how we view dimensionality. Is it reasonable to work in a Physics of only finite integer dimensionality? One wonders, One may ponder - Is there a way to apply these concepts to Cosmology as well? How about Elementary Particle Physics?
And, another layer of uncertainty suddenly or spontaneously appears!!... Definitely a question for brilliant French Metaphysical Philosophers of Science to address... Most likely, they already have...;))
Self similarity crops up in many current analyses of physical objects such as coastlines and of biological forms... The length of a coastline is a function of the amount or level of detail you permit in the measurement process. Similarly, the branching of a tree follows fractal rules and is self similar no matter which scale you use to view it....
Effects staged and choreogaphed by Picnik for iPhone Camera.
I hope everyone will find this as interesting as I do...
IMG_0169_2
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Un champ de distorsion fractal impliquant douloureuse symboliques tesselées mains fractale ...
Maurice Cornelis Escher, extradinaire dessinateur, a soulevé la question essentielle de savoir comment peut-on vraiment représenter les dimensions supérieures, trois et quatre précisément, sur un plan bidimensionnel. Il fait usage de la tessellation, le remplissage ou le carrelage d'un avion avec divers motifs en forme, comme un outil visuel pour changer la dimensionnalité de l'espace perçu lui-même.
D'autre part - jeu de mots - chercheur Benoit Mandelbrot a découvert l'ordinateur des objets avec des non-entier, dimensionnalité fractionnaire! Et, soudain nous voir jouer tessellation un rôle clé dans la représentation visuelle de certains ensembles de Mandelbrot. -
Nous pouvons nous demander, quelle est la vraie question? «Hands On» symbolise l'incertitude de notre façon de voir la dimensionnalité. Est-il raisonnable de travailler dans une physique de la dimensionnalité entiers seulement finie? On se demande, on peut s'interroger - Yat-il un moyen d'appliquer ces concepts à la cosmologie ainsi? Que diriez-Physique des particules élémentaires?
Et, une autre couche d'incertitude soudainement ou spontanément, apparaît !!... Certainement une question pour brillants philosophes français métaphysiques de la science à l'adresse ... Très probablement, ils ont déjà ...;))
Similitude des cultures auto dans de nombreuses analyses actuelles des objets physiques tels que les côtes et des formes biologiques ... La longueur d'un littoral est une fonction de la quantité ou le niveau de détail vous autorisez dans le processus de mesure. De même, le branchement d'un arbre suit des règles fractales et est auto-similaires, peu importe où vous utilisez l'échelle pour la voir ....
Effets mis en scène et choreogaphed par Picnik pour la caméra de l'iPhone.
J'espère que tout le monde va trouver ce aussi intéressant que je ne ...
IMG_0169_2
Reflecting in those puddle after the rain we should examined in the light of the Ageless Wisdom teachings, we are reminded of the great occult maxim "As Above So Below" The mural shows the right eye, the left eye and the middle eye. This tower is the symbol for not only all three schools, but also the meaning and purpose of life itself. Vertical rods/constructs are considered archetypal symbols of the phallus. As the dual serpents address the concept of gender, the staff serves as an emissary of transference between body and mind, physically and spiritually. The rod could also be viewed as a conduit between the mundane and ethereal.. The puddle is male, the tower is female and the horizontal line is the child, the source of both the other building, for we all begin life as a child. The upper side, the feminine pathway, explores the human nature of emotions and feeling, both positive and negative, sexual energy and birthing, death, certain psychic energy, and everything that is not logical.As guided from within, outwards. “As above, so below” and vice versa, Solar Systems are born, die and come to birth anew in cycles of activity and rest, as does wo-man. There is a constant flaming out and dying down of activity in every department of nature, corresponding to the alternations of ebb and flow, day and night, summer and winter, life and death. In the beginning of a Day of Manifestation it is taught that a certain Great Being (designated in the Western World by the name of God, but by other names in other parts of the earth) limits Himself to a certain portion of space, in which He elects to create a Solar System for the evolution of added self-consciousness. He includes in His own Being hosts of glorious Hierarchies of, to us, immeasurable spiritual power and splendor. They are the fruitage of past manifestations of this same Being and also other Intelligences, in descending degrees of development down to such as have not reached a stage of consciousness as high as our present humanity, and therefore these latter will not be able to finish their evolution in this System. In God — this great collective Being — there are contained lesser beings of every grade of intelligence and stage of consciousness, from omniscience to an unconsciousness deeper than that of the deepest trance condition. During the period of manifestation with which we are concerned, these various grades of beings are working to acquire more experience than they possessed at the beginning of this period of existence. Those who, in previous manifestations, have attained to the highest degree of development, work on those who have not yet evolved any consciousness. They induce in them a stage of self-consciousness from which they can take up further work themselves. Those who had started their evolution in a former Day of Manifestation, but had not progressed far at the close, now take up their task again, just as we take up our daily work in the morning where we left off the previous night. All the different Beings, however, do not take up their evolution at the early stages of a new manifestation. Some must wait until those who precede them have made the conditions which are necessary for their further development. There are no instantaneous processes in nature. All is an exceedingly slow unfolding, a development which, though so exceedingly slow, is yet absolutely certain to attain ultimate perfection. Just as there are progressive stages in the human life — childhood, youth, manhood or womanhood, and old age — so in the macrocosm there are different stages corresponding to these various periods of the microcosmic life. A child cannot take up the duties of fatherhood or motherhood. Its undeveloped mental and physical condition render it incapable of doing such work. The same is true of the less evolved beings in the beginning of manifestation. They must wait until the higher evolved have made the proper conditions for them. The lower the grade of the intelligence of the evolving being, the more it is dependent upon outside help. At the Beginning, then, the highest Beings — those who are the farthest evolved — work upon those who have the greatest degree of unconsciousness. Later, they turn them over to some of the less evolved entities, who are then able to carry the work a little further. At last self-consciousness is awakened. The evolving life has become Woman-Man. The right eye is controlled by the left brain; it’s male knowledge. Although the right eye “sees” directly to the right brain, this is not what the Egyptians were communicating. It is not the “seeing” but rather the interrupting of the “seeing” information that was important here. It is the left brain that makes this interruption of what is seen; it controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In the same manner, the Left Eye of Horus, controlled by the right brain, is female knowledge.What happens on one level of reality also happens on every other level; the microcosm and macrocosm behave alike. A revolution occurred during the 20th century in our understanding of the nature of the physical universe. This change is extremely important to religion, for it eliminates a basic conflict between science and religious belief. Prior to this change, our scientific beliefs were based on an approach that was initiated in the 17th century: "We live in a mechanical universe, and we are simply complex machines." This scientific notion that man was purely a mechanical system contradicts what is probably the core of religious belief, namely the idea that mind-like or spirit-like factors can make a difference in human behavior. The religious outlook assumes that a human being, acting on basis of conscious choices, is NOT equivalent to a mechanical system, whose every action is completely determined by direct interaction between tiny neighboring bits of matter. 20th century science, however, has shown that the earlier mechanical concept of reality to be incompatible with empirical facts. To cope with this failure of earlier ideas, physicist made a breakthrough change. Physical theory was converted from a theory about the physical world itself into a theory of WHAT ONE COULD KNOW about the physical world. Human experience was introduced into the theory and made fundamental. This was to be later known as the Copenhagen interpretation. It had drawbacks.For example, while it brought human knowledge into physical theory, it also renounced the possibility of understanding the underlying physical reality. It set our limits of understanding. It was the eminent mathematician John von Neumann and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner to reincorporate physical reality. They did this by casting the new physics into a theory of the interaction between our conscious thoughts and our physical brains. This was known as von Neumann-Wigner formation of quantum theory, and rationally incorporated conscious thoughts into the basic dynamics. Physics was not yet ready to tackle the problem of interaction between our thoughts and our brain. It was some time before this was scientifically feasible for this kind of proof. Now however, there is a huge and rapidly growing field of experimental data on this question of the connection between minds and brains.
This shift in science is important significance to religion. It removes the basic contradiction between the older scientific claim that human beings are essentially mechanical robots, while religion maintains than man is not ruled by matter alone. The new physics now dynamically entangles our conscious thoughts with the quantum representation of the physical world. There is a plethora of competing theories arising from many disciplines to account for the psychophysical expressions of consciousness in function and structure. The only comprehensive theory must be one that is based in nondualism, and accounts for such self-organizing mindbody manifestations as spontaneous healing or self-recovery, or even the placebo effect. The mind-matter connection is intimately linked to any speculations we can make about alleged mind-over-matter phenomena. In fact all psi phenomena, including such nonlocality demonstrations as the “simple connections” of telepathy, ESP, or synchronicity in general are related to this problem of an underlying or connecting field through which information exchange is instantaneous and unimpeded.The leading contender for such a field, vacuum fluctuation or quantum foam, was proposed by David Bohm. Turbulent motion in this highly excited, subquantal field leads to the emergence from virtuality into actuality of quantum entities which just as quickly dissolve back into the subquantal sea. This same ocean of virtual or metaphysical “stuff” has the property of containing, storing, and transmitting information about the nature of matter and even thought. The observables of nonlocality and psi cry out for some form of interconnection between phenomenon separated in space and/or time. The concept most generally used in physics to account for spatial and temporal interconnection is that of a field. Fields themselves cannot be observed, and so can be considered meta- or beyond physical. Yet the influences propagating through them are observable, eventually. Mind, memory, and consciousness may be such phenomena. Is there one massive holographic field that actually exists in nature in the sense of Bohm’s holomovement? And if so, how does this relate to our consciousness and our relationship to the cosmos. And what is the mechanism by which this universal force interfaces within our organism? When we recognize that we really are that, that nature lies within our deepest structure and function, we come to understand that we are not separate from the whole of creation. We recognize that “I AM THAT I AM.” Everything including ourselves, is deeply connected in one holy movement. The quantum vacuum, the energy-field that characterizes the ground state of the universe, possibly furnishes the indicated ‘fifth field,’ the hidden variables of chaotic yet deterministic micromotion that bootstraps all energy/matter into existence. This plenum could transmit as-yet-unknown effects. This quantum foam, which Wheeler called superspace, consists of a pure massless charge-flux.
We argue, along with Laszlo that, “The conclusion to be derived from the considerations presented here is that the four-demnsional manifold Einstein described as spacetime is likely to be more than a geometrical abstraction. As the energetically superdense quantum vacuum, it may be a physically real field, limiting the velocity of light and other matter-particles and transmittingg a variety of effects, including, but not limited to, gravitation and electromangetism. We may well ask, then, whether the field would also transmit the kind of effects associated with psi.”
Waves of this purely informational (scalar) force could create a potential gradient where quantal motion triggers scalar waves in the vacuum, and these propagate by alternately compressing and rarefying its virtual-particle gas. Scalars are neither ‘light’ nor ‘matter’, but longitudinally propoagating fluctuations below the energy-threshold of particle pair-creation.This produces a self-generating cosmological feedback cycle which translates into interference patterns created by the motion of charged particles modifying the local topology of the vacuum. The modified vacuum field modifies in turn the motion of the particles, (Laszlo, 1993, 1994).Fourier show that any three-dimensional pattern can be analyzed into a set of regular, periodic oscillations that differ only in frequency, amplitude, and phase. Specific waveforms can be exact representations of spatiotemporal objects--thus we have a “Holographic Universe.” Analysis shows that the signals transmitted through the vacuum field are precisely of the psi variety, because information in that field is holographic, and because the propagation of the holographic interference patterns is quasi-instantaneous. Therefore, this virttual field might provide a metaphysical foundation for a broad range of psi phenomena and psychophysical interaction, including self-organization and healing. The quantum vaccum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe, and thus of any form of consciousness which may emerge through its autopoeitic process. The human brain, with its pronounced and constant state of chaos, could receive and amplify such signals, expressed both consciously and unconsciously in our biophsyical self and our ephemeral thoughts and intuitions.The von-Neumann-Wigner formulation provides the basic logical principles that govern the interaction between thoughts and the brain. It provides prima facie evidence that human thoughts are linked to nature by nonlocal connections. What a person chooses to do in one region seems immediately to effect what is true elsewhere in the universe. This nonlocal aspect can be understood by conceiving the universe to be not a collection of tiny bits of matter, but rather a growing compendium of "bits of information." This profound shift about the nature of reality has not yet sunk in culturally. It will happen by the promotion of understanding of the radical shifts wrought by quantum theory. Most quantum physicists are interested more in applications of quantum theory than in its deep implications. Most now agree that a conception of physical reality is informational in character, not material. Our conscious thoughts ought eventually to be understood within science and that when properly understood, our thoughts will be seen to DO something; they will be efficacious. From what most quantum physicists now understand, certain ontological claims can now be made. 1. The "physical world," as understood in quantum theory, is a store of information, and this information is NOT imbedded in hordes of tiny particles (as they were in classical theory). The information is stored in a mathematically described structure that specifies propensities for certain events to occur. This events (paradigms) include the acquision of information by human agents.2. Conscious events should eventually be understood in science, and these events should be efficacious. They should have a real effect on our actions. The von Neumann-Wigner formulation of quantum theory achieves these ends. It has never been seriously broached in science, not because it was considered unimportant, but because it was deemed too difficult. Pertinent data seemed insufficient and restrictive. This has changed because science has changed.The six sided star in the structural support of the tower incorporates the Duality, Male and Female (Unity), the Blade (upward pointing triangle) and Chalice. The blade represents the Physical, and the Chalice represents the Spiritual realm. It is sometimes referenced as the fire and water triangle as well. Moloch, Chiun and Remphan are all names for the star god, Saturn, whose symbol is a six pointed star formed by two triangles. Saturn was the supreme god of the Chaldeans. The hexagram is referred to the talisman of Saturn. The hexagram was brought to the Jewish people by Solomon when he turned to witchcraft and idolatry after his marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter. It became known as the Seal of Solomon in Egyptian magic and witchcraft. The six pointed star was adopted as the family crest or shield by the Rothschild family during the 19th century,he helped to finance Eiffel. Heavily associated with alchemy, Leo, the Lion, the Double Lion, Routi, refers directly to the Sun as being a source of knowledge. Leo, is one of the constellations of the Zodiac. The Zodiac, is a direct reference to the Sun. The Sun’s position at midday during the time of the Egyptians coincided with the midsummer solstice. Leo was a constellation of the summer.
The theme of Illumination, Knowledge, or Secrets being kept “under the Lion’s Paw” is a recurring motif.There are lions on the first floor belly. The spiral effect the descending forces of the tower, that indicates an expansion of knowledge, and the undulating dance of cosmic forces. Such dualities include:
Asleep/Awake Illness/Health Separation/Unity Male/Female
Left/Right Binding/Loosing Wax/Wane Water/Fire Sun/Moon
Yin/Yang Light/Dark Good/Evil Upper/Lower. If you take it a step further, you notice the dual intertwined snakes form a double helix DNA strand; Serpent DNA specifically. If the serpent is a biological anthropomorphism of DNA, then we can attribute the Ouroboros to cycles of DNA change.Let us examine this slide which I feel holds many secrets. First you have the sun and moon in opposite positions which proves the world has been put on a purposeful pole shift done at the hands of man.
In the East where the sun is supposed to rise you now have the moon or crescent where there is a Brother with a sword with an eagle or falcon upon it where he is shielding his eyes from the light because it is either too bright or he cannot see because he is blinded by the darkness.
In the West where the sun is supposed to set, you now have the sun with a brother who can see clearly what is going on as he holds the staff and serpent.
In the middle is the LORD OR LORDS and KING OF KINGS who represent the union of both and has risen above the Abyss on the wings of destiny. The Phoenix or Rex Mundi who represents not only the union of East and West, but also AS ABOVE SO BELOW.
So what does it mean?
The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm, and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one you can understand the other. The primary idea behind this is that the “above” refers to what is visible in the sky. The below, refers to Earth. This creates an equality as it explains how the Earth is a microcosm of the configuration of the planets in the solar system. It draws the connection that the Earth is affected by planetary orbits. This concept also affects various levels of reality: physical, emotional, and mental What happens on any level happens on every other.
The concept has not only been a practice, but an attempt to replicate and do a better job then YHWH himself. This is why alchemy and astrology play such an important role in the Illuminati.
In Alchemy, there is a process which Mercury and Lead can supposedly turned to Gold. The Gold isn’t the main goal. It’s to understand the process of how mercury or lead changes into gold. Man wants to replicate and modify what is on the Earth into their standards.
The same goes for Astrology. The elite not only observe all of the astrological signs, but use them to construct the architecture of this tower.
There will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the Godhead with heartfelt piety and service; and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual. The Elohim will return from earth to heaven; Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities.
They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of YHWH, this glorious structure which HE has built, this sum of good made up of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of YHWH operates in that which he has made, ungrudgingly favoring man’s welfare.
Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good.
As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you; all this they will mock, and even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven, will be heard or believed.
And so the Elohiym will depart from mankind – a grievous thing and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.
Then will the earth tremble, and the sea bear no ships; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, all voices of the Elohiym will be forced into silence; the fruits of the Earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation; all things will be disordered and awry, all good will disappear.
But when all this has befallen, then YHWH the Creator of all things will look on that which has come to pass, and will stop the disorder by the counterforce of his will, which is the good. HE will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; he will cleanse the world of evil, washing it away with floods, burning it out with the fiercest fire, and expelling it with war and pestilence.The double tetrahedron visible in the structural's forms of the tower can be referred to as the interdimensional vehicle for travel, the Merkaba. It also incorporates the Duality, Male and Female, the Blade (upward pointing triangle) and Chalice. The blade represents the Physical, and the Chalice represents the Spiritual realm. The Star of Solomon can also represent Jerusalem.The Square and Compass is the Blade and Chalice, God and Goddess in the act of Creation, and within the Star we find the Heavenly Luminaries or the Eyes or Spirits of God (the Planets). The symbols on the star represent the astrological portion of the symbol, Jupiter, Venus, the Moon, Mercury, Mars and Saturn, with the Sun being at the center. Zoroaster’ teachings mentioned earlier in the thread as Thoth or Hermes, would be responsible for the seven petal flower depicted at the center.
The concept of an otherworld in historical Indo-European religion is reconstructed in comparative mythology. Its name is a calque of orbis alius (Latin for "other Earth/world"), a term used by Lucan in his description of the Celtic Otherworld.
Comparable religious, mythological or metaphysical concepts, such as a realm of supernatural beings and a realm of the dead, are found in cultures throughout the world. Spirits are thought to travel between worlds, or layers of existence in such traditions, usually along an axis such as a giant tree, a tent pole, a river, a rope or mountains.
Many Indo-European mythologies show evidence for a belief in some form of "Otherworld" and in many cases such as in Persian, Greek, Germanic,Celtic,Slavic and Indic mythologies a river had to be crossed to allow entrance to it and it is usually an old man that would transport the soul across the waters. In Greek and Indic mythology the waters of this river were thought to wash away sins or memories whereas Celtic and Germanic myths feature wisdom-imparting waters, suggesting that while the memories of the deceased are washed away a drinker of the waters would gain inspiration. The wayfarer will commonly encounter a dog either in the capacity of a guardian of the Otherworld or as the wanderer's guide.[3] Examples of this are the Greek Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, and the Indic सर्वरा "sarvarā, one of the hounds of Yama, whose names may derive from an Indo-European *ḱerberos meaning "spotted".[3] In Indo-European mythologies the Otherworld is depicted in many ways, including peaceful meadows, islands and buildings making it hard to determine how the original Proto-Indo-European Otherworld was viewed. However the ruler of the dead was possibly Yemo, the divine twin of Manu the first man.
The Chinvat Bridge (Avestan Cinvatô Peretûm, "bridge of judgement" or "beam-shaped bridge") or the Bridge of the Requiter in Zoroastrianism is the sifting bridge which separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. All souls must cross the bridge upon death. The bridge is guarded by two four-eyed dogs. A related myth is that of Yama, the Hindu ruler of Hell who watches the gates of Hell with his two four-eyed dogs.
Many Celtic Immrams or "voyage stories" and other medieval texts provide evidence of a Celtic belief in an otherworld. One example which helps the reader understand the Celtic concept of the otherworld is The Voyage of Saint Brendan. Another Classic example of a Celtic "otherworld" is the Voyage of Bran. Because Celtic life largely was based upon nourishment from the sea and around the wet and foggy weather of Northern Europe the otherworld is often portrayed as an island to the west in Celtic oral tradition and even shown on some maps of Ireland during the medieval era. The otherworld in the idea of Celtic people became hard to distinguish and sometimes overlapped with the Christian idea of hell or heaven as this was often an analogy made to the Celtic idea of an otherworld or Scandinavian idea of a world tree. This is likely because of Roman and Scandinavian influences on Celtic cultures. An example of Scandinavian influence is apparent in the Voyage of Saint Brendan from the likeness of Lasconius the serpent to the Scandinavian Midgard Serpent. Red and white are the colors of animals in the Celtic Otherworld, and these colors still animate transcendent religious and political symbols today.
See also: Alfheim, Asgard, Vanaheim, and Norse cosmology
As was the case in the Celtic mythologies, in Germanic myths apples were particularly associated with the Otherworld. In the Scandinavian tradition mythological localities are featured, as in Irish mythology; however, unlike Irish mythology, an attempt was made to map the localities of the Otherworld rather than list locales associated with it.In the Edda many locations are named including the dwellings of the gods such as Odin's hall of Valhalla or Ullr's dwelling of Ydalar ("Yewdale"). The Gylfaginning and the later Norwegian poem the Draumkvaede feature travels into the Otherworld.
The Early Slavs believed in a mythical place where birds flew for the winter and souls went after death; this realm was often identified with paradise and it is called Vyraj. It was also said that spring arrived on Earth from Vyraj.The gates of Vyraj stopped mortals from entering. They were guarded by Veles, who sometimes took the animal form of a raróg, grasping in its claws the keys to the otherworlds. Vyraj was sometimes also connected to the deity known as Rod - it was apparently located far beyond the sea, at the end of the Milky Way.It was usually imagined as a garden, located in the crown of the cosmic tree. Whereas the branches were said to be nested by the birds, who were usually identified as human souls. When the Slavic populations were gradually turning to Christianity (e.g. during the Christianization of Kievan Rus' and the Baptism of Poland), a new version of this belief became widespread in which there were two of these realms - one analogous to the original myth, a heavenly place where birds departed, and the other an underworld for snakes and zmeys, often associated with the Christian idea of hell. This second variant bears many similarities to Nav, another representation of the Slavonic underworld. See also: Mount Olympus, Greek Underworld, Hades, and Fortunate Isles In Greco-Roman mythology the Gods were said to dwell on Mount Olympus whereas the dead usually went to the Underworld or Fortunate Isles after death
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherworld
The world to come, age to come, or heaven on Earth are eschatological phrases reflecting the belief that the current world or current age is flawed or cursed[citation needed] and will be replaced in the future by a better world, age, or paradise. The concept is related to but differs from the concepts of heaven, the afterlife, and the Kingdom of God in that heaven is another place or state generally seen as above the world, the afterlife is generally an individual's life after death, and the Kingdom of God could be in the present (such as Realized eschatology) or the future. In Hindu eschatology the current age is the Kali Yuga, a period of decline. Kalki ('Destroyer of Filth') will appear to purge all evil, beginning a golden age of Satya Yuga. There have been a range of dates predicted, purportedly from different methods of calculation.Sri Potuluri Virabrahmendra Swami, for example, wrote 400 years ago in his Divya Maha Kala Gnana, or 'Divine Knowledge of the Time,' that Kalki would arrive when the moon, sun, Venus and Jupiter entered the same sign. This is not a rare occurrence and last happened in early 2012, passing without event.The time of arrival of Kalki has not been consistently asserted by astrologers. Resurrection of the dead, fresco from the Dura-Europos synagogue HaOlam HaBa, or "the world to come", is an important part of Jewish eschatology, although Judaism concentrates on the importance of HaOlam HaZeh ("this world"). The afterlife is known as Olam haBa, Gan Eden (the Heavenly Garden of Eden) and Gehinom. According to the Talmud, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a Ger toshav (righteous gentile), and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an 1887 painting by Victor Vasnetsov. The Lamb of God is visible at the top.
Main article: Christian eschatology Under Christian eschatology, the phrase is found in the Nicene Creed (current Ecumenical version): "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." It is also found in the King James Version of the New Testament at Matthew 12:32, Mark 10:30, Luke 18:30, Hebrews 2:5, Hebrews 6:5. Other related expressions are "age to come" which is typically found in more recent translations, Kingdom of God, Messianic Age, Millennial Age, The New Earth and New Jerusalem, and dispensation of the fulness of times and possibly also eternal life. There have been a number of unsuccessful predictions (a partial list of unsuccessful predictions can be found at Predictions and claims for the Second Coming of Christ) of the date of the Christian End Times, despite Jesus' admonition at the end of the Olivet Discourse that only God the Father knows when the end times will begin (Mark 13:32–37).
In Zoroastrian eschatology, the world to come is the frashokereti, where the saoshyant will bring about a resurrection of the dead in the bodies they had before they died. This is followed by a last judgment. The yazatas Airyaman and Atar will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and the molten metal will then flow across the earth like a river. All humankind—both the living and the resurrected dead—will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous (ashavan) it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned. The river will then flow down to hell, where it will annihilate Angra Mainyu and the last vestiges of wickedness in the universe.
The New Testament frequently cites Jewish scripture to support the claim of the Early Christians that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, and faith in Jesus as the Christos and his imminent expected Second Coming. The majority of these quotations and references are taken from the Book of Isaiah, but they range over the entire corpus of Jewish writings. People of the Jewish faith do not regard any of these as having been fulfilled by Jesus, and in some cases do not regard them as messianic prophecies at all. These either were not prophecies (the verses make no claim of predicting anything) or the verses do not explicitly refer to the Messiah.In Abrahamic religions, the Messianic Age is the future period of time on earth in which the messiah will reign and bring universal peace and brotherhood, without any evil. Many believe that there will be such an age; some refer to it as the consummate "kingdom of God" or the "world to come".
Apocalyptic literature is a genre of prophetical writing that developed in post-Exilic Jewish culture and was popular among millennialist early Christians. "Apocalypse" (ἀποκάλυψις) is a Greek word meaning "revelation", "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling". As a genre, apocalyptic literature details the authors' visions of the end times as revealed by an angel or other heavenly messenger. The apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity embraces a considerable period, from the centuries following the Babylonian exile down to the close of the Middle Ages.Apocalyptic elements can be detected in the prophetical books of Joel and Zechariah, while Isaiah chapters 24–27 and 33 present well-developed apocalypses. The Book of Daniel offers a fully matured and classic example of this genre of literature.
The non-fulfillment of prophecies served to popularize the methods of apocalyptic in comparison with the non-fulfillment of the advent of the Messianic kingdom. Thus, though Jeremiah had promised that after seventy years Israelites should be restored to their own land, and then enjoy the blessings of the Messianic kingdom under the Messianic king,[6] this period passed by and things remained as of old.[7] Some[who?] believe that the Messianic kingdom was not necessarily predicted to occur at the end of the seventy years of the Babylonian exile, but at some unspecified time in the future. The only thing for certain that was predicted was the return of the Jews to their land, which occurred when Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon in circa 539 BC. Thus, the fulfillment of the Messianic kingdom remained in the future for the Jews.
Haggai and Zechariah explained the delay by the failure of Judah to rebuild the temple, and so hope of the kingdom persisted, until in the first half of the 2nd century the delay is explained in the Books of Daniel and Enoch as due not to man's shortcomings but to the counsels of God.[8] Regarding the 70 years of exile predicted in Jeremiah 29:10, the Jews were first exiled in 605 BC in the reign of king Jehoiakim and were allowed to return to their land in c. 536 BC when King Cyrus conquered Babylon. This period was approximately 70 years, as prophesied by Jeremiah.[citation needed] But some people[who?] believe that the 70 years of Jeremiah were later interpreted by the angel in Daniel 9 as 70 weeks of years, of which 69½ have already expired, while Enoch 85 interprets the 70 years of Jeremiah as the 70 successive reigns of the 70 angelic patrons of the nations, which are to come to a close in his own generation.[8] The Book of Enoch, however, was not considered inspired Scripture by the Jews, so that any failed prophecy in it is of no consequence to the Jewish faith.
The Greek empire of the East was overthrown by Rome, and prompted a new interpretation of Daniel. The fourth and last empire was declared to be Roman by the Apocalypse of Baruch[8] chapters 36–40 and 4 Ezra 10:60–12:35. Again, these two books were not considered inspired Scripture by the Jews, and thus were not authoritative on matters of prophecy. In addition, earlier in Daniel chapter 7 and also in chapter 2, the fourth and final world empire is considered to be Rome since Babylon, Medo-Persia (Achaemenid Empire), Greece, and Rome were world empires which all clearly arrived in succession. Thus, it might be interpreted[by whom?] that Daniel was saying that Rome would be the last world power before the kingdom of God.
Such ideas as those of "the day of Yahweh" and the "new heavens and a new earth" were re-interpreted by the Jewish people with fresh nuances in conformity with their new settings. Thus the inner development of Jewish apocalyptic was conditioned by the historical experiences of the nation. But the prophecies found in Jewish scriptures, which have not changed over time, await their fulfillment.
Another source of apocalyptic thought was primitive mythological and cosmological traditions, in which the eye of the seer could see the secrets of the future. Thus the six days of the world's creation, followed by a seventh of rest, were regarded as at once a history of the past and a forecasting of the future. As the world was made in six days its history would be accomplished in six thousand years, since each day with God was as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day; and as the six days of creation were followed by one of rest, so the six thousand years of the world's history would be followed by a rest of a thousand years.
The object of this literature in general was to square the righteousness of God with the suffering condition of His righteous servants on earth. Early Old Testament prophecy taught the need of personal and national righteousness, and foretold the ultimate blessedness of the righteous nation on the present earth. Its views were not systematic and comprehensive in regard to the nations in general. Regarding the individual, it held that God’s service here was its own and adequate reward, and saw no need of postulating another world to set right the evils of this one.
But later, with the growing claims of the individual and the acknowledgment of these in the religious and intellectual life, both problems, and especially the latter, pressed themselves irresistibly on the notice of religious thinkers, and made it impossible for any conception of the divine rule and righteousness to gain acceptance, which did not render adequate satisfaction to the claims of both problems. To render such satisfaction was the task undertaken by apocalyptic, as well as to vindicate the righteousness of God alike in respect of the individual and of the nation. Later prophecy incorporated an idea of future vindication of present evils, often including the idea of an afterlife.
Apocalyptic prophets sketched in outline the history of the world and mankind, the origin of evil and its course, and the final consummation of all things. The righteous as a nation should yet possess the earth, either via an eternal Messianic kingdom on earth, or else in temporary blessedness here and eternal blessedness hereafter. Though the individual might perish amid the disorders of this world, apocalyptic prophets taught that the righteous person would not fail to attain through resurrection the recompense that was due in the Messianic kingdom or, alternatively, in heaven itself.
Some may distinguish between the messages of the prophets and the messages of proto-apocalyptic and apocalyptic literature by saying that the message of the prophets was primarily a preaching of repentance and righteousness needed for the nation to escape judgment; the message of the apocalyptic writers was of patience and trust for that deliverance and reward were sure to come. Neither the prophets nor the apocalyptic authors are without conflict between their messages, however, and there are significant similarities between prophecy and apocalyptic writings.
Apocalyptic literature shares with prophecy revelation through the use of visions and dreams, and these often combine reality and fantasy. In both cases, a heavenly interpreter is often provided to the receiver so that he may understand the many complexities of what he has seen. The oracles in Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, and Jeremiah give a clear sense of how messages of imminent punishment develop into the later proto-apocalyptic literature, and eventually into the thoroughly apocalyptic literature of Daniel 7–12. The fully apocalyptic visions in Daniel 7–12, as well as those in the New Testament’s Revelation, can trace their roots to the pre-exilic latter biblical prophets; the sixth century BCE prophets Ezekiel, Isaiah 40–55 and 56–66, Haggai 2, and Zechariah 1–8 show a transition phase between prophecy and
Prophecy believes that this world is God's world and that in this world His goodness and truth will yet be vindicated. Hence the prophet prophesies of a definite future arising out of and organically connected with the present. The apocalyptic writer despairs of the present and directs his hopes to the future, to a new world standing in essential opposition to the present. This becomes a dualistic principle, which, though it can largely be accounted for by the interaction of certain inner tendencies and outward sorrowful experience on the part of Judaism, may ultimately be derived from Mazdean influences. This principle, which shows itself in the conception that the various nations are under angelic rulers, who are in a greater or less degree in rebellion against God, as in Daniel and Enoch, grows in strength with each succeeding age, till at last Satan is conceived as "the ruler of this world" or "the god of this age." The prophet stood in direct relations with his people; his prophecy was first spoken and afterwards written. The apocalyptic writer could obtain no hearing from his contemporaries, who held that, though God spoke in the past, "there was no more any prophet." This pessimism limited and defined the form in which religious enthusiasm should manifest itself, and prescribed as a condition of successful effort the adoption of pseudonymous authorship. The apocalyptic writer, therefore, professedly addressed his book to future generations. Generally directions as to the hiding and sealing of the book[ were given in the text in order to explain its publication so long after the date of its professed period. There was a sense in which such books were not wholly pseudonymous. Their writers were students of ancient prophecy and apocalyptical tradition, and though they might recast and reinterpret them, they could not regard them as their own inventions. Each fresh apocalypse would in the eyes of its writer be in some degree but a fresh edition of the traditions naturally attaching themselves to great names in Israel’s past, and thus the books named respectively Enoch, Noah, Ezra would to some slight extent be not pseudonymous. Apocalyptic writing took a wider view of the world's history than did prophecy. Whereas prophecy had to deal with governments of other nations, apocalyptic writings arose at a time when Israel had been subject for generations to the sway of one or other of the great world-powers. Hence to harmonize Israel's difficulties with belief in God's righteousness, apocalyptic writing had to encompass such events in the counsels of God, the rise, duration and the downfall of each empire in turn, until, finally the lordship of the world passed into the hands of Israel, or the final judgment arrived. These events belonged in the main to the past, but the writer represented them as still in the future, arranged under certain artificial categories of time definitely determined from the beginning in the counsels of God and revealed by Him to His servants, the prophets. Determinism thus became a leading characteristic of Jewish apocalyptic, and its conception of history became mechanical.
Characteristics of Old Testament apocalyptic literature[edit]
The revelations from heavenly messengers, about the end times, came in the form of angels, or from people who have been taken up to heaven and are returned to earth with messages. The descriptions not only tell of the end times, but also describe both past and present events and their significance, often in heavily coded language. When speaking of the end times, apocalyptic literature generally included chronologies of events that will occur and frequently places them in the near future, which gives a sense of urgency to the prophet’s broader message. Though the understanding of the present is bleak, the visions of the future are far more positive, and include divinely delivered victory and a complete reformation of absolutely everything. Many visions of these end times mirror creation mythologies, invoke the triumph of God over the primordial forces of chaos, and provide clear distinctions between light and dark, good and evil. In such revelations, humankind is typically divided into a small group that experiences salvation, while the wicked majority is destroyed. Since the apocalyptic genre developed during the Persian period, this dualism may have developed under the influence of Persian thought. The imagery in apocalyptic literature is not realistic or reflective of the physical world as it was, but is rather surreal and fantastic, invoking a sense of wonder at the complete newness of the new order to come. According to Jewish tradition, the Messianic Era will be one of global peace and harmony, an era free of strife and hardship, and one conducive to the furtherment of the knowledge of the Creator. The theme of the Messiah ushering in an era of global peace is encapsulated in two of the most famous scriptural passages from the Book of Isaiah: They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare.— Isaiah 2:4 The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.— Isaiah 11:6-9
In his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides describes the Messianic Era:"And at that time there will be no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry. For the good will be plentiful, and all delicacies available as dust. The entire occupation of the world will be only to know God... the people Israel will be of great wisdom; they will perceive the esoteric truths and comprehend their Creator's wisdom as is the capacity of man. As it is written (Isaiah 11:9): "For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea."
According to the Talmud,the Midrash, and the ancient Kabbalistic work, the Zohar, the Messiah must arrive before the year 6000 from the time of creation. In Orthodox Jewish belief, the Hebrew calendar dates to the time of creation, making this correspond to the year 2240 on the Gregorian calendar. The Midrash comments: "Six eons for going in and coming out, for war and peace. The seventh eon is entirely Shabbat and rest for life everlasting."
There is a kabbalistic tradition[ that maintains that each of the seven days of the week, which are based upon the seven days of creation, correspond to the seven millennia of creation. The tradition teaches that the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath day of rest, corresponds to the seventh millennium, the age of universal 'rest' - the Messianic Era. The seventh millennium perforce begins with the year 6000, and is the latest time the Messiah can come. Supporting and elaborating on this theme are numerous early and late Jewish scholars, including Rabbeinu Bachya, Abraham ibn Ezra,the Ramban,Isaac Abrabanel, the Ramchal,the Vilna Gaon,Aryeh Kaplan, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
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Christian eschatology includes several views of the Messianic Age. According to realized eschatology, the Messianic Era, a time of universal peace and brotherhood on the earth, without crime, war and poverty, is already here. With the crucifixion of Jesus the Messianic Era had begun, but according to inaugurated eschatology it will only be initiated and fulfilled by the parousia of Christ.
The Book of Revelation is commonly interpreted as referring to the "unveiling" or "revelation" of Jesus as the Messiah in the apocalypse or end of the world. It tells of a 1000-year period after the apocalypse in which Satan will be bound so that he cannot influence those living on the Earth, and Jesus Christ will reign on the Earth with resurrected saints. After that Satan will be defeated once and for all, the Earth and heaven will pass away, and people will face judgment by Jesus Christ to determine whether or not they will enter the new heaven and Earth that will be established. (Revelation 21) The Nicene Creed, professed by most Christians, expresses the belief that Christ ascended to Heaven, where he now sits at the Right hand of God and will return to earth at the Second Coming to establish the Kingdom of God of the World to Come.
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The Quran states that Isa ibn Maryam (Jesus, son of Mary) was the Messiah or "Prophet" sent to the Jews.[Quran 3:45] Muslims believe he is alive in Heaven, and will return to Earth to defeat the Masih ad-Dajjal, an anti-messiah comparable to the Christian Antichrist and the Jewish Armilus. A hadith in Abu Dawud (37:4310) says: Narrated Abu Hurayrah: The Prophet said: There is no prophet between me and him, that is, Jesus. He will descend (to the earth). When you see him, recognise him: a man of medium height, reddish hair, wearing two light yellow garments, looking as if drops were falling down from his head though it will not be wet. He will fight for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill the swine, and put an end to war (in another tradition, there is the word Jizyah instead of Harb (war), meaning that he will abolish jizyah); God will perish all religions except Islam. He [Jesus] will destroy the Antichrist who will live on the earth for forty days and then he will die. The Muslims will pray behind him. Both Sunni and Shia Muslims agree Imam Mahdi will arrive first, and after him, Jesus. Jesus will proclaim that the true leader is al-Mahdi. A war, literally Jihad (Jihade Asghar) will be fought—the Dajjal (evil) against al-Mahdi and Jesus (good). This war will mark the approach of the coming of the Last Day. After Jesus slays al-Dajjāl at the Gate of Lud, he will bear witness and reveal that Islam is the true and final word from God to humanity as Yusuf Ali's translation reads:[Quran 4:159 (Translated by Yusuf Ali)] And there is none of the People of the Book but must believe in him before his death; and on the Day of Judgment He will be a witness against them.― (159) He will live for several years, marry, have children and will be buried in Medina. A hadith in Sahih Bukhari (Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:55:658) says: Allah's Apostle said "How will you be when the son of Mary descends amongst you and your Imam is from amongst you."Very few scholars outside of Orthodox Islam reject all the quotes (Hadith) attributed to Muhammad that mention the second return of Jesus, the Dajjal and Imam Mahdi, believing that they have no Quranic basis. However, Quran emphatically rejects the implication of termination of Jesus’ life when he was allegedly crucified. Yusuf Ali’s translation reads: That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";― but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not. (157) Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise. (158)[Quran 4:157–158] So Peace is on me the day I was born, the day that I die and the day that I shall be raised up to life (again).[Quran 19:33] Many classical commentators such as Ibn Kathir, At-Tabari, al-Qurtubi, Suyuti, al-Undlusi (Bahr al-Muhit), Abu al-Fadl al-Alusi (Ruh al-Maani) clearly mention that verse 43:61 of the Qur'an refers to the descent of Jesus before the Day of Resurrection, indicating that Jesus would be the Sign that the Hour is close. And (Jesus) shall be a Sign (for the coming of) the Hour (of Judgment): therefore have no doubt about the (Hour)...[Quran 43:61] In Ahmadiyya Islam, the present age (the Messianic age) has been a witness to the wrath of God with the occurrence of the World Wars and the frequency of natural disasters. In Ahmadiyya, Ghulam Ahmad (d.1908) is seen as the promised Messiah whose Islamic teachings will establish spiritual reform and ultimately establish an age of peace upon earth. This age continues for around a thousand years as per Judeo-Christian prophecies; and is characterised by the assembling of mankind under one faith that is Islam as per Ahmadiyya belief. In the Bahá'í Faith, the "Messianic Age" refers to a 1000-year period beginning with the Declaration of Bahá'u'lláh in 1863. Bahá'ís believe the period of peace and prosperity is gradually unfolding and will culminate in the appearance of "The Most Great Peace".The prophet stood in direct relations with his people; his prophecy was first spoken and afterwards written. The apocalyptic writer could obtain no hearing from his contemporaries, who held that, though God spoke in the past, "there was no more any prophet." This pessimism limited and defined the form in which religious enthusiasm should manifest itself, and prescribed as a condition of successful effort the adoption of pseudonymous authorship. The apocalyptic writer, therefore, professedly addressed his book to future generations. Generally directions as to the hiding and sealing of the book were given in the text in order to explain its publication so long after the date of its professed period. There was a sense in which such books were not wholly pseudonymous. Their writers were students of ancient prophecy and apocalyptical tradition, and though they might recast and reinterpret them, they could not regard them as their own inventions. Each fresh apocalypse would in the eyes of its writer be in some degree but a fresh edition of the traditions naturally attaching themselves to great names in Israel’s past, and thus the books named respectively Enoch, Noah, Ezra would to some slight extent be not pseudonymous.
Adjustable for all philosophical fashions.
Previously used for both scientific realism and anti-realism trends; also used in a nominalist show; and the previous owner was a causalist designer.
The metaphysical mystery novel "THE HIDDEN FACE" by M. I. VERRAS shocked the world with its plot and podcasters named it the "EXISTENTIAL MASTERPIECE."
Sold on Amazon, EBay, Barnes&Noble, Walmart, Bookshop, and more. Published by Palmetto Publishing.
1. The Mind-Body Problem and the History of Dualism
1.1 The Mind-Body Problem
The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?
Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self. Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by anyone. Some physical properties – like those of an electron – are not directly observable at all, but they are equally available to all, to the same degree, with scientific equipment and techniques. The same is not true of mental properties. I may be able to tell that you are in pain by your behaviour, but only you can feel it directly. Similarly, you just know how something looks to you, and I can only surmise. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them of a kind no-one has to the physical. The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem breaks down into a number of components. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?
The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?
Different aspects of the mind-body problem arise for different aspects of the mental, such as consciousness, intentionality, the self. The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of the self: what is the self? How is it related to the brain and the body? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example:
The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?
The seemingly intractable nature of these problems have given rise to many different philosophical views.
Materialist views say that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just physical states. Behaviourism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and the computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists attempt to explain how this can be so. The most common factor in such theories is the attempt to explicate the nature of mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behaviour, but there are versions of materialism that try to tie the mental to the physical without explicitly explaining the mental in terms of its behaviour-modifying role. The latter are often grouped together under the label ‘non-reductive physicalism’, though this label is itself rendered elusive because of the controversial nature of the term ‘reduction’.
Idealist views say that physical states are really mental. This is because the physical world is an empirical world and, as such, it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.
Dualist views (the subject of this entry) say that the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other. For the various forms that dualism can take and the associated problems, see below.
In sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body.
Other entries which concern aspects of the mind-body problem include (among many others): behaviorism, consciousness, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, identity theory, intentionality, mental causation, neutral monism, and physicalism.
1.2 History of dualism
In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.
The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts’. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato’s dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics.
One problem with Plato’s dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.
Aristotle did not believe in Platonic Forms, existing independently of their instances. Aristotelian forms (the capital ‘F’ has disappeared with their standing as autonomous entities) are the natures and properties of things and exist embodied in those things. This enabled Aristotle to explain the union of body and soul by saying that the soul is the form of the body. This means that a particular person’s soul is no more than his nature as a human being. Because this seems to make the soul into a property of the body, it led many interpreters, both ancient and modern, to interpret his theory as materialistic. The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind – and, indeed, of his whole doctrine of form – remains as live an issue today as it was immediately after his death (Robinson 1983 and 1991; Nussbaum 1984; Rorty and Nussbaum, eds, 1992). Nevertheless, the text makes it clear that Aristotle believed that the intellect, though part of the soul, differs from other faculties in not having a bodily organ. His argument for this constitutes a more tightly argued case than Plato’s for the immateriality of thought and, hence, for a kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because if it were material it could not receive all forms. Just as the eye, because of its particular physical nature, is sensitive to light but not to sound, and the ear to sound and not to light, so, if the intellect were in a physical organ it could be sensitive only to a restricted range of physical things; but this is not the case, for we can think about any kind of material object (De Anima III,4; 429a10–b9). As it does not have a material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.
It is common for modern Aristotelians, who otherwise have a high view of Aristotle’s relevance to modern philosophy, to treat this argument as being of purely historical interest, and not essential to Aristotle’s system as a whole. They emphasize that he was not a ‘Cartesian’ dualist, because the intellect is an aspect of the soul and the soul is the form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny (1989) argues that Aristotle’s theory of mind as form gives him an account similar to Ryle (1949), for it makes the soul equivalent to the dispositions possessed by a living body. This ‘anti-Cartesian’ approach to Aristotle arguably ignores the fact that, for Aristotle, the form is the substance.
These issues might seem to be of purely historical interest. But we shall see in below, in section 4.5, that this is not so.
The identification of form and substance is a feature of Aristotle’s system that Aquinas effectively exploits in this context, identifying soul, intellect and form, and treating them as a substance. (See, for example, Aquinas (1912), Part I, questions 75 and 76.) But though the form (and, hence, the intellect with which it is identical) are the substance of the human person, they are not the person itself. Aquinas says that when one addresses prayers to a saint – other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to retain her body in heaven and is, therefore, always a complete person – one should say, not, for example, ‘Saint Peter pray for us’, but ‘soul of Saint Peter pray for us’. The soul, though an immaterial substance, is the person only when united with its body. Without the body, those aspects of its personal memory that depend on images (which are held to be corporeal) will be lost.(See Aquinas (1912), Part I, question 89.)
The more modern versions of dualism have their origin in Descartes’ Meditations, and in the debate that was consequent upon Descartes’ theory. Descartes was a substance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks. Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body was quite different from that held in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, there is no exact science of matter. How matter behaves is essentially affected by the form that is in it. You cannot combine just any matter with any form – you cannot make a knife out of butter, nor a human being out of paper – so the nature of the matter is a necessary condition for the nature of the substance. But the nature of the substance does not follow from the nature of its matter alone: there is no ‘bottom up’ account of substances. Matter is a determinable made determinate by form. This was how Aristotle thought that he was able to explain the connection of soul to body: a particular soul exists as the organizing principle in a particular parcel of matter.
The belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one reason for Aristotle’s rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it is already a collection of determinate objects in its own right, and it becomes natural to regard the properties of macroscopic substances as mere summations of the natures of the atoms.
Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except where there are minds interfering with it, matter proceeds deterministically, in its own right. Where there are minds requiring to influence bodies, they must work by ‘pulling levers’ in a piece of machinery that already has its own laws of operation. This raises the question of where those ‘levers’ are in the body. Descartes opted for the pineal gland, mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain, so it is a candidate for having a unique, unifying function.
The main uncertainty that faced Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not where interaction took place, but how two things so different as thought and extension could interact at all. This would be particularly mysterious if one had an impact view of causal interaction, as would anyone influenced by atomism, for whom the paradigm of causation is like two billiard balls cannoning off one another.
Various of Descartes’ disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, concluded that all mind-body interactions required the direct intervention of God. The appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. Now it would be convenient to think that occasionalists held that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body. In fact they generalized their conclusion and treated all causation as directly dependent on God. Why this was so, we cannot discuss here.
Descartes’ conception of a dualism of substances came under attack from the more radical empiricists, who found it difficult to attach sense to the concept of substance at all. Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness as objects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims, and proclaimed the self to be nothing more than a concatenation of its ephemeral contents.
In fact, Hume criticised the whole conception of substance for lacking in empirical content: when you search for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find nothing but further properties. Consequently, the mind is, he claimed, nothing but a ‘bundle’ or ‘heap’ of impressions and ideas – that is, of particular mental states or events, without an owner. This position has been labelled bundle dualism, and it is a special case of a general bundle theory of substance, according to which objects in general are just organised collections of properties. The problem for the Humean is to explain what binds the elements in the bundle together. This is an issue for any kind of substance, but for material bodies the solution seems fairly straightforward: the unity of a physical bundle is constituted by some form of causal interaction between the elements in the bundle. For the mind, mere causal connection is not enough; some further relation of co-consciousness is required. We shall see in 5.2.1 that it is problematic whether one can treat such a relation as more primitive than the notion of belonging to a subject.
One should note the following about Hume’s theory. His bundle theory is a theory about the nature of the unity of the mind. As a theory about this unity, it is not necessarily dualist. Parfit (1970, 1984) and Shoemaker (1984, ch. 2), for example, accept it as physicalists. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they wish to ascribe the unity to the brain or the organism as a whole. Before the bundle theory can be dualist one must accept property dualism, for more about which, see the next section.
A crisis in the history of dualism came, however, with the growing popularity of mechanism in science in the nineteenth century. According to the mechanist, the world is, as it would now be expressed, ‘closed under physics’. This means that everything that happens follows from and is in accord with the laws of physics. There is, therefore, no scope for interference in the physical world by the mind in the way that interactionism seems to require. According to the mechanist, the conscious mind is an epiphenomenon (a notion given general currency by T. H. Huxley 1893): that is, it is a by-product of the physical system which has no influence back on it. In this way, the facts of consciousness are acknowledged but the integrity of physical science is preserved. However, many philosophers found it implausible to claim such things as the following; the pain that I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see the ferocious lion bearing down on me or the conscious sense of understanding I have when I hear your argument – all have nothing directly to do with the way I respond. It is very largely due to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness that we owe the concern of twentieth century philosophy to devise a plausible form of materialist monism. But, although dualism has been out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviourism (Watson 1913) and in philosophy since Ryle (1949), the argument is by no means over. Some distinguished neurologists, such as Sherrington (1940) and Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977) have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can preserve the data of consciousness. Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century. At least some of the reasons for this should become clear below.
2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology
There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism. One natural way is in terms of what sorts of things one chooses to be dualistic about. The most common categories lighted upon for these purposes are substance and property, giving one substance dualism and property dualism. There is, however, an important third category, namely predicate dualism. As this last is the weakest theory, in the sense that it claims least, I shall begin by characterizing it.
2.1 Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d’etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances. Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)
2.2 Property Dualism
Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane. One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism. In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon.
2.3 Substance Dualism
There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them. So the mind is not just a collection of thoughts, but is that which thinks, an immaterial substance over and above its immaterial states. Properties are the properties of objects. If one is a property dualist, one may wonder what kinds of objects possess the irreducible or immaterial properties in which one believes. One can use a neutral expression and attribute them to persons, but, until one has an account of person, this is not explanatory. One might attribute them to human beings qua animals, or to the brains of these animals. Then one will be holding that these immaterial properties are possessed by what is otherwise a purely material thing. But one may also think that not only mental states are immaterial, but that the subject that possesses them must also be immaterial. Then one will be a dualist about that to which mental states and properties belong as well about the properties themselves. Now one might try to think of these subjects as just bundles of the immaterial states. This is Hume’s view. But if one thinks that the owner of these states is something quite over and above the states themselves, and is immaterial, as they are, one will be a substance dualist.
Substance dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian dualism’, but some substance dualists are keen to distinguish their theories from Descartes’s. E. J. Lowe, for example, is a substance dualist, in the following sense. He holds that a normal human being involves two substances, one a body and the other a person. The latter is not, however, a purely mental substance that can be defined in terms of thought or consciousness alone, as Descartes claimed. But persons and their bodies have different identity conditions and are both substances, so there are two substances essentially involved in a human being, hence this is a form of substance dualism. Lowe (2006) claims that his theory is close to P. F. Strawson’s (1959), whilst admitting that Strawson would not have called it substance dualism.
3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction
If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. Common sense tells us that they interact: thoughts and feelings are at least sometimes caused by bodily events and at least sometimes themselves give rise to bodily responses. I shall now consider briefly the problems for interactionism, and its main rivals, epiphenomenalism and parallelism.
3.1 Interactionism
Interactionism is the view that mind and body – or mental events and physical events – causally influence each other. That this is so is one of our common-sense beliefs, because it appears to be a feature of everyday experience. The physical world influences my experience through my senses, and I often react behaviourally to those experiences. My thinking, too, influences my speech and my actions. There is, therefore, a massive natural prejudice in favour of interactionism. It has been claimed, however, that it faces serious problems (some of which were anticipated in section 1).
The simplest objection to interaction is that, in so far as mental properties, states or substances are of radically different kinds from each other, they lack that communality necessary for interaction. It is generally agreed that, in its most naive form, this objection to interactionism rests on a ‘billiard ball’ picture of causation: if all causation is by impact, how can the material and the immaterial impact upon each other? But if causation is either by a more ethereal force or energy or only a matter of constant conjunction, there would appear to be no problem in principle with the idea of interaction of mind and body.
Even if there is no objection in principle, there appears to be a conflict between interactionism and some basic principles of physical science. For example, if causal power was flowing in and out of the physical system, energy would not be conserved, and the conservation of energy is a fundamental scientific law. Various responses have been made to this. One suggestion is that it might be possible for mind to influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity. (See Averill and Keating 1981). Another response is to challenge the relevance of the conservation principle in this context. The conservation principle states that ‘in a causally isolated system the total amount of energy will remain constant’. Whereas ‘[t]he interactionist denies…that the human body is an isolated system’, so the principle is irrelevant (Larmer (1986), 282: this article presents a good brief survey of the options). This approach has been termed conditionality, namely the view that conservation is conditional on the physical system being closed, that is, that nothing non-physical is interacting or interfering with it, and, of course, the interactionist claims that this condition is, trivially, not met. That conditionality is the best line for the dualist to take, and that other approaches do not work, is defended in Pitts (2019) and Cucu and Pitts (2019). This, they claim, makes the plausibility of interactionism an empirical matter which only close investigation on the fine operation of the brain could hope to settle. Cucu, in a separate article (2018), claims to find critical neuronal events which do not have sufficient physical explanation.This claim clearly needs further investigation.
Robins Collins (2011) has claimed that the appeal to conservation by opponents of interactionism is something of a red herring because conservation principles are not ubiquitous in physics. He argues that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. Why then, should we insist on it in mind-brain interaction?
Most discussion of interactionism takes place in the context of the assumption that it is incompatible with the world’s being ‘closed under physics’. This is a very natural assumption, but it is not justified if causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible. There could then be a complete physical cause of behaviour, and a mental one. The strongest intuitive objection against overdetermination is clearly stated by Mills (1996: 112), who is himself a defender of overdetermination.
For X to be a cause of Y, X must contribute something to Y. The only way a purely mental event could contribute to a purely physical one would be to contribute some feature not already determined by a purely physical event. But if physical closure is true, there is no feature of the purely physical effect that is not contributed by the purely physical cause. Hence interactionism violates physical closure after all.
Mills says that this argument is invalid, because a physical event can have features not explained by the event which is its sufficient cause. For example, “the rock’s hitting the window is causally sufficient for the window’s breaking, and the window’s breaking has the feature of being the third window-breaking in the house this year; but the facts about prior window-breakings, rather than the rock’s hitting the window, are what cause this window-breaking to have this feature.”
The opponent of overdetermination could perhaps reply that his principle applies, not to every feature of events, but to a subgroup – say, intrinsic features, not merely relational or comparative ones. It is this kind of feature that the mental event would have to cause, but physical closure leaves no room for this. These matters are still controversial.
The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess. Some argue that indeterminacy manifests itself only on the subatomic level, being cancelled out by the time one reaches even very tiny macroscopic objects: and human behaviour is a macroscopic phenomenon. Others argue that the structure of the brain is so finely tuned that minute variations could have macroscopic effects, rather in the way that, according to ‘chaos theory’, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China might affect the weather in New York. (For discussion of this, see Eccles (1980), (1987), and Popper and Eccles (1977).) Still others argue that quantum indeterminacy manifests itself directly at a high level, when acts of observation collapse the wave function, suggesting that the mind may play a direct role in affecting the state of the world (Hodgson 1988; Stapp 1993).
3.2 Epiphenomenalism
If the reality of property dualism is not to be denied, but the problem of how the immaterial is to affect the material is to be avoided, then epiphenomenalism may seem to be the answer. According to this theory, mental events are caused by physical events, but have no causal influence on the physical. I have introduced this theory as if its point were to avoid the problem of how two different categories of thing might interact. In fact, it is, at best, an incomplete solution to this problem. If it is mysterious how the non-physical can have it in its nature to influence the physical, it ought to be equally mysterious how the physical can have it in its nature to produce something non-physical. But that this latter is what occurs is an essential claim of epiphenomenalism. (For development of this point, see Green (2003), 149–51). In fact, epiphenomenalism is more effective as a way of saving the autonomy of the physical (the world as ‘closed under physics’) than as a contribution to avoiding the need for the physical and non-physical to have causal commerce.
There are at least three serious problems for epiphenomenalism. First, as I indicated in section 1, it is profoundly counterintuitive. What could be more apparent than that it is the pain that I feel that makes me cry, or the visual experience of the boulder rolling towards me that makes me run away? At least one can say that epiphenomenalism is a fall-back position: it tends to be adopted because other options are held to be unacceptable.
The second problem is that, if mental states do nothing, there is no reason why they should have evolved. This objection ties in with the first: the intuition there was that conscious states clearly modify our behaviour in certain ways, such as avoiding danger, and it is plain that they are very useful from an evolutionary perspective.
Frank Jackson (1982) replies to this objection by saying that it is the brain state associated with pain that evolves for this reason: the sensation is a by-product. Evolution is full of useless or even harmful by-products. For example, polar bears have evolved thick coats to keep them warm, even though this has the damaging side effect that they are heavy to carry. Jackson’s point is true in general, but does not seem to apply very happily to the case of mind. The heaviness of the polar bear’s coat follows directly from those properties and laws which make it warm: one could not, in any simple way, have one without the other. But with mental states, dualistically conceived, the situation is quite the opposite. The laws of physical nature which, the mechanist says, make brain states cause behaviour, in no way explain why brain states should give rise to conscious ones. The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law. Why there should have been by-products of that kind seems to have no evolutionary explanation.
The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, via its effect on the problem of other minds. It is natural to say that I know that I have mental states because I experience them directly. But how can I justify my belief that others have them? The simple version of the ‘argument from analogy’ says that I can extrapolate from my own case. I know that certain of my mental states are correlated with certain pieces of behaviour, and so I infer that similar behaviour in others is also accompanied by similar mental states. Many hold that this is a weak argument because it is induction from one instance, namely, my own. The argument is stronger if it is not a simple induction but an ‘argument to the best explanation’. I seem to know from my own case that mental events can be the explanation of behaviour, and I know of no other candidate explanation for typical human behaviour, so I postulate the same explanation for the behaviour of others. But if epiphenomenalism is true, my mental states do not explain my behaviour and there is a physical explanation for the behaviour of others. It is explanatorily redundant to postulate such states for others. I know, by introspection, that I have them, but is it not just as likely that I alone am subject to this quirk of nature, rather than that everyone is?
For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
3.3 Parallelism
The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those – like Leibniz – who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.
4. Arguments for Dualism
4.1 The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism
One category of arguments for dualism is constituted by the standard objections against physicalism. Prime examples are those based on the existence of qualia, the most important of which is the so-called ‘knowledge argument’. Because this argument has its own entry (see the entry qualia: the knowledge argument), I shall deal relatively briefly with it here. One should bear in mind, however, that all arguments against physicalism are also arguments for the irreducible and hence immaterial nature of the mind and, given the existence of the material world, are thus arguments for dualism.
The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist – call him Harpo – may have been born stone deaf, but become the world’s greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear – the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia – are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.)
There are at least two lines of response to this popular but controversial argument. First is the ‘ability’ response. According to this, Harpo does not acquire any new factual knowledge, only ‘knowledge how’, in the form of the ability to respond directly to sounds, which he could not do before. This essentially behaviouristic account is exactly what the intuition behind the argument is meant to overthrow. Putting ourselves in Harpo’s position, it is meant to be obvious that what he acquires is knowledge of what something is like, not just how to do something. Such appeals to intuition are always, of course, open to denial by those who claim not to share the intuition. Some ability theorists seem to blur the distinction between knowing what something is like and knowing how to do something, by saying that the ability Harpo acquires is to imagine or remember the nature of sound. In this case, what he acquires the ability to do involves the representation to himself of what the thing is like. But this conception of representing to oneself, especially in the form of imagination, seems sufficiently close to producing in oneself something very like a sensory experience that it only defers the problem: until one has a physicalist gloss on what constitutes such representations as those involved in conscious memory and imagination, no progress has been made.
The other line of response is to argue that, although Harpo’s new knowledge is factual, it is not knowledge of a new fact. Rather, it is new way of grasping something that he already knew. He does not realise this, because the concepts employed to capture experience (such as ‘looks red’ or ‘sounds C-sharp’) are similar to demonstratives, and demonstrative concepts lack the kind of descriptive content that allow one to infer what they express from other pieces of information that one may already possess. A total scientific knowledge of the world would not enable you to say which time was ‘now’ or which place was ‘here’. Demonstrative concepts pick something out without saying anything extra about it. Similarly, the scientific knowledge that Harpo originally possessed did not enable him to anticipate what it would be like to re-express some parts of that knowledge using the demonstrative concepts that only experience can give one. The knowledge, therefore, appears to be genuinely new, whereas only the mode of conceiving it is novel.
Proponents of the epistemic argument respond that it is problematic to maintain both that the qualitative nature of experience can be genuinely novel, and that the quality itself be the same as some property already grasped scientifically: does not the experience’s phenomenal nature, which the demonstrative concepts capture, constitute a property in its own right? Another way to put this is to say that phenomenal concepts are not pure demonstratives, like ‘here’ and ‘now’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, because they do capture a genuine qualitative content. Furthermore, experiencing does not seem to consist simply in exercising a particular kind of concept, demonstrative or not. When Harpo has his new form of experience, he does not simply exercise a new concept; he also grasps something new – the phenomenal quality – with that concept. How decisive these considerations are, remains controversial.
4.2 The Argument from Predicate Dualism to Property Dualism
I said above that predicate dualism might seem to have no ontological consequences, because it is concerned only with the different way things can be described within the contexts of the different sciences, not with any real difference in the things themselves. This, however, can be disputed.
The argument from predicate to property dualism moves in two steps, both controversial. The first claims that the irreducible special sciences, which are the sources of irreducible predicates, are not wholly objective in the way that physics is, but depend for their subject matter upon interest-relative perspectives on the world. This means that they, and the predicates special to them, depend on the existence of minds and mental states, for only minds have interest-relative perspectives. The second claim is that psychology – the science of the mental – is itself an irreducible special science, and so it, too, presupposes the existence of the mental. Mental predicates therefore presuppose the mentality that creates them: mentality cannot consist simply in the applicability of the predicates themselves.
First, let us consider the claim that the special sciences are not fully objective, but are interest-relative.
No-one would deny, of course, that the very same subject matter or ‘hunk of reality’ can be described in irreducibly different ways and it still be just that subject matter or piece of reality. A mass of matter could be characterized as a hurricane, or as a collection of chemical elements, or as mass of sub-atomic particles, and there be only the one mass of matter. But such different explanatory frameworks seem to presuppose different perspectives on that subject matter.
This is where basic physics, and perhaps those sciences reducible to basic physics, differ from irreducible special sciences. On a realist construal, the completed physics cuts physical reality up at its ultimate joints: any special science which is nomically strictly reducible to physics also, in virtue of this reduction, it could be argued, cuts reality at its joints, but not at its minutest ones. If scientific realism is true, a completed physics will tell one how the world is, independently of any special interest or concern: it is just how the world is. It would seem that, by contrast, a science which is not nomically reducible to physics does not take its legitimation from the underlying reality in this direct way. Rather, such a science is formed from the collaboration between, on the one hand, objective similarities in the world and, on the other, perspectives and interests of those who devise the science. The concept of hurricane is brought to bear from the perspective of creatures concerned about the weather. Creatures totally indifferent to the weather would have no reason to take the real patterns of phenomena that hurricanes share as constituting a single kind of thing. With the irreducible special sciences, there is an issue of salience , which involves a subjective component: a selection of phenomena with a certain teleology in mind is required before their structures or patterns are reified. The entities of metereology or biology are, in this respect, rather like Gestalt phenomena.
Even accepting this, why might it be thought that the perspectivality of the special sciences leads to a genuine property dualism in the philosophy of mind? It might seem to do so for the following reason. Having a perspective on the world, perceptual or intellectual, is a psychological state. So the irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of mind. If one is to avoid an ontological dualism, the mind that has this perspective must be part of the physical reality on which it has its perspective. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally agreed, is one of those special sciences that is not reducible to physics, so if its subject matter is to be physical, it itself presupposes a perspective and, hence, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological. If this mind is physical and irreducible, it presupposes mind to see it as such. We seem to be in a vicious circle or regress.
We can now understand the motivation for full-blown reduction. A true basic physics represents the world as it is in itself, and if the special sciences were reducible, then the existence of their ontologies would make sense as expressions of the physical, not just as ways of seeing or interpreting it. They could be understood ‘from the bottom up’, not from top down. The irreducibility of the special sciences creates no problem for the dualist, who sees the explanatory endeavor of the physical sciences as something carried on from a perspective conceptually outside of the physical world. Nor need this worry a physicalist, if he can reduce psychology, for then he could understand ‘from the bottom up’ the acts (with their internal, intentional contents) which created the irreducible ontologies of the other sciences. But psychology is one of the least likely of sciences to be reduced. If psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate (Robinson 2003).
4.3 The Modal Argument
There is an argument, which has roots in Descartes (Meditation VI), which is a modal argument for dualism. One might put it as follows:
It is imaginable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is conceivable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is possible one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
One’s mind is a different entity from one’s body.
The rationale of the argument is a move from imaginability to real possibility. I include (2) because the notion of conceivability has one foot in the psychological camp, like imaginability, and one in the camp of pure logical possibility and therefore helps in the transition from one to the other.
This argument should be distinguished from a similar ‘conceivability’ argument, often known as the ‘zombie hypothesis’, which claims the imaginability and possibility of my body (or, in some forms, a body physically just like it) existing without there being any conscious states associated with it. (See, for example, Chalmers (1996), 94–9.) This latter argument, if sound, would show that conscious states were something over and above physical states. It is a different argument because the hypothesis that the unaltered body could exist without the mind is not the same as the suggestion that the mind might continue to exist without the body, nor are they trivially equivalent. The zombie argument establishes only property dualism and a property dualist might think disembodied existence inconceivable – for example, if he thought the identity of a mind through time depended on its relation to a body (e.g., Penelhum 1970).
Before Kripke (1972/80), the first challenge to such an argument would have concerned the move from (3) to (4). When philosophers generally believed in contingent identity, that move seemed to them invalid. But nowadays that inference is generally accepted and the issue concerns the relation between imaginability and possibility. No-one would nowadays identify the two (except, perhaps, for certain quasi-realists and anti-realists), but the view that imaginability is a solid test for possibility has been strongly defended. W. D. Hart ((1994), 266), for example, argues that no clear example has been produced such that “one can imagine that p (and tell less imaginative folk a story that enables them to imagine that p) plus a good argument that it is impossible that p. No such counterexamples have been forthcoming…” This claim is at least contentious. There seem to be good arguments that time-travel is incoherent, but every episode of Star-Trek or Doctor Who shows how one can imagine what it might be like were it possible.
It is worth relating the appeal to possibility in this argument to that involved in the more modest, anti-physicalist, zombie argument. The possibility of this hypothesis is also challenged, but all that is necessary for a zombie to be possible is that all and only the things that the physical sciences say about the body be true of such a creature. As the concepts involved in such sciences – e.g., neuron, cell, muscle – seem to make no reference, explicit or implicit, to their association with consciousness, and are defined in purely physical terms in the relevant science texts, there is a very powerful prima facie case for thinking that something could meet the condition of being just like them and lack any connection with consciousness. There is no parallel clear, uncontroversial and regimented account of mental concepts as a whole that fails to invoke, explicitly or implicitly, physical (e.g., behavioural) states.
For an analytical behaviourist the appeal to imaginability made in the argument fails, not because imagination is not a reliable guide to possibility, but because we cannot imagine such a thing, as it is a priori impossible. The impossibility of disembodiment is rather like that of time travel, because it is demonstrable a priori, though only by arguments that are controversial. The argument can only get under way for those philosophers who accept that the issue cannot be settled a priori, so the possibility of the disembodiment that we can imagine is still prima facie open.
A major rationale of those who think that imagination is not a safe indication of possibility, even when such possibility is not eliminable a priori, is that we can imagine that a posteriori necessities might be false – for example, that Hesperus might not be identical to Phosphorus. But if Kripke is correct, that is not a real possibility. Another way of putting this point is that there are many epistemic possibilities which are imaginable because they are epistemic possibilities, but which are not real possibilities. Richard Swinburne (1997, New Appendix C), whilst accepting this argument in general, has interesting reasons for thinking that it cannot apply in the mind-body case. He argues that in cases that involve a posteriori necessities, such as those identities that need discovering, it is because we identify those entities only by their ‘stereotypes’ (that is, by their superficial features observable by the layman) that we can be wrong about their essences. In the case of our experience of ourselves this is not true.
Now it is true that the essence of Hesperus cannot be discovered by a mere thought experiment. That is because what makes Hesperus Hesperus is not the stereotype, but what underlies it. But it does not follow that no one can ever have access to the essence of a substance, but must always rely for identification on a fallible stereotype. One might think that for the person him or herself, while what makes that person that person underlies what is observable to others, it does not underlie what is experienceable by that person, but is given directly in their own self-awareness.
This is a very appealing Cartesian intuition: my identity as the thinking thing that I am is revealed to me in consciousness, it is not something beyond the veil of consciousness. Now it could be replied to this that though I do access myself as a conscious subject, so classifying myself is rather like considering myself qua cyclist. Just as I might never have been a cyclist, I might never have been conscious, if things had gone wrong in my very early life. I am the organism, the animal, which might not have developed to the point of consciousness, and that essence as animal is not revealed to me just by introspection.
But there are vital differences between these cases. A cyclist is explicitly presented as a human being (or creature of some other animal species) cycling: there is no temptation to think of a cyclist as a basic kind of thing in its own right. Consciousness is not presented as a property of something, but as the subject itself. Swinburne’s claim that when we refer to ourselves we are referring to something we think we are directly aware of and not to ‘something we know not what’ that underlies our experience seemingly ‘of ourselves’ has powerful intuitive appeal and could only be overthrown by very forceful arguments. Yet, even if we are not referring primarily to a substrate, but to what is revealed in consciousness, could it not still be the case that there is a necessity stronger than causal connecting this consciousness to something physical? To consider this further we must investigate what the limits are of the possible analogy between cases of the water-H2O kind, and the mind-body relation.
We start from the analogy between the water stereotype – how water presents itself – and how consciousness is given first-personally to the subject. It is plausible to claim that something like water could exist without being H2O, but hardly that it could exist without some underlying nature. There is, however, no reason to deny that this underlying nature could be homogenous with its manifest nature: that is, it would seem to be possible that there is a world in which the water-like stuff is an element, as the ancients thought, and is water-like all the way down. The claim of the proponents of the dualist argument is that this latter kind of situation can be known to be true a priori in the case of the mind: that is, one can tell by introspection that it is not more-than-causally dependent on something of a radically different nature, such as a brain or body. What grounds might one have for thinking that one could tell that a priori?
The only general argument that seem to be available for this would be the principle that, for any two levels of discourse, A and B, they are more-than-causally connected only if one entails the other a priori. And the argument for accepting this principle would be that the relatively uncontroversial cases of a posteriori necessary connections are in fact cases in which one can argue a priori from facts about the microstructure to the manifest facts. In the case of water, for example, it would be claimed that it follows a priori that if there were something with the properties attributed to H2O by chemistry on a micro level, then that thing would possess waterish properties on a macro level. What is established a posteriori is that it is in fact H2O that underlies and explains the waterish properties round here, not something else: the sufficiency of the base – were it to obtain – to explain the phenomena, can be deduced a priori from the supposed nature of the base. This is, in effect, the argument that Chalmers uses to defend the zombie hypothesis. The suggestion is that the whole category of a posteriori more-than-causally necessary connections (often identified as a separate category of metaphysical necessity) comes to no more than this. If we accept that this is the correct account of a posteriori necessities, and also deny the analytically reductionist theories that would be necessary for a priori connections between mind and body, as conceived, for example, by the behaviourist or the functionalist, does it follow that we can tell a priori that consciousness is not more-than-causally dependent on the body?
It is helpful in considering this question to employ a distinction like Berkeley’s between ideas and notions. Ideas are the objects of our mental acts, and they capture transparently – ‘by way of image or likeness’ (Principles, sect. 27) – that of which they are the ideas. The self and its faculties are not the objects of our mental acts, but are captured only obliquely in the performance of its acts, and of these Berkeley says we have notions, meaning by this that what we capture of the nature of the dynamic agent does not seem to have the same transparency as what we capture as the normal objects of the agent’s mental acts. It is not necessary to become involved in Berkeley’s metaphysics in general to feel the force of the claim that the contents and internal objects of our mental acts are grasped with a lucidity that exceeds that of our grasp of the agent and the acts per se. Because of this, notions of the self perhaps have a ‘thickness’ and are permanently contestable: there seems always to be room for more dispute as to what is involved in that concept. (Though we shall see later, in 5.2.2, that there is a ‘non-thick’ way of taking the Berkeleyan concept of a notion.)
Because ‘thickness’ always leaves room for dispute, this is one of those cases in philosophy in which one is at the mercy of the arguments philosophers happen to think up. The conceivability argument creates a prima facie case for thinking that mind has no more than causal ontological dependence on the body. Let us assume that one rejects analytical (behaviourist or functionalist) accounts of mental predicates. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases. This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested. For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena. All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness. The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them.......
5.2 The Unity of the Mind
Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise, declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution (though quite why is not clear from the text).
The five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth) of Chinese metaphysics are closely related to certain colours, mainly due to the colours being made up of specific frequencies. Each colour is therefore believed to have different characteristics and be related to one of the five elements. This also depends on the element that complements each year – for example, water would be the complementary element for the year of the Rabbit in 2023. Five main groups of colours corresponding to the respective elements are namely – blue and black (water), yellow and beige (earth), white (metal), red (fire), and green (wood). The colours of the set and the model's outfit correspond to the five elements.
To summarise, azure blue, apple green, pearl white, fiery red and imperial yellow are the lucky colours that incorporate the wood, fire, water, metal and earth elements of feng shui. It is safe to say that wood and water elements (green and blue) may dominate all the art, fashion and decor trends going by feng shui. Green also symbolises the environment and ‘go green’ as a mantra has been adopted in a big way to encourage sustainable fashion, a cleaner way of living and thriving on this planet.
284. Metaphysical realisation, ultimately, is open to anyone, but it does not mean at all that everybody is fit for it. For only those are fit for metaphysical realisation who represent the ascending and upward aspect of the unique, Universal Man.
[i.e. - as it is stated in the 120th aphorism - every single man is the versional incarnation of the Universal Man.]
285. Principally, metaphysical realisation is open to every man, since almost directly behind and above the person stands the Subject; practically, though, only the elite of the spiritual elite have a chance for realisation, for the totality of existence, the whole cosmos lie between person and Subject.
what are you doing today, vern?
hey, jerry. I'm examining the nature of the universe, existence and being.
that's cool. I'm gonna make a sandwich. then I think I'll wash my underwear.
sounds productive.
hey, I'm ambitious that way.
a redo of this: www.flickr.com/photos/jescervoni/8520758856/ and the final piece to the Metaphysics series.
“There was something disquieting about the way an intimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions. Any old thing forgotten in a corner, if the eye dwelt on it, acquired an eloquence of its own, communicating its lyricism and magic to the kindred soul. If a neglected object of this kind were forcibly isolated, that is, divested of its warmth and of the protective coat of its environment, or even ironically combined with completely unrelated things, it would reassert its dignity in the new context and stand there, incomprehensible, weird, mysterious.”
—Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1982)
"a watercolor by Carlo Siligato": here a detail of the metaphysical garden of Casa Cuseni."
“un acquarello di Carlo Siligato: qui un dettaglio del giardino metafisico di Casa Cuseni.”
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click to activate the icon of slideshow: the small triangle inscribed in the small rectangle, at the top right, in the photostream;
or…. Press the “L” button to zoom in the image;
clicca sulla piccola icona per attivare lo slideshow: sulla facciata principale del photostream, in alto a destra c'è un piccolo rettangolo (rappresenta il monitor) con dentro un piccolo triangolo nero;
oppure…. premi il tasto “L” per ingrandire l'immagine;
www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards/winners-...
www.fotografidigitali.it/gallery/2726/opere-italiane-segn...
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A history of Taormina: chronicles of a forbidden love and its great secret (not only Paolo and Francesca) with an unexpected "scoop".
This story is an integral part of the story previously told, the historical period is the same, the place is the same, the various characters often meet each other because they know each other; Taormina, between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, in an ever increasing growth, became the place of residence of elite tourism, thanks to the international interest aroused by writers and artists, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , or great personalities like Lady Florence Trevelyan: Taormina becomes so famous, thanks to the paintings of the painter Otto Geleng and the photographs of the young Sicilian models by Wilhelm von Gloeden; in the air of Taormina there is a sense of libertine, its famous and histrionic visitors never fail to create scandal, even surpassing the famous Capri, in which, to cite just one example, the German gunsmith Krupp, trying to recreate the he environment of Arcadia that one breathed in Taormina (thanks to the photos of von Gloeden) was overwhelmed by the scandal for homosexuality, and took his own life. Taormina thus becomes a heavenly-like place, far from industrial civilizations, where you can freely live your life and sexuality; this is the socio-cultural environment in which the two protagonists of this story move, the British painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson (1873 - 1947) and the painter Carlo Siligato (born in Taormina in 1875, and died there in 1959). Robert H. Kitson, born in Leeds in England, belonged to a more than wealthy family, as a young engineer he had begun to replace his father in the family locomotive construction company (Kitson & Co.), on the death of his father in 1899 sells everything and decides to move very rich in Sicily to Taormina (he had been there the previous year with a trip made with his parents, here he had met, in addition to Baron von Gloeden, also the writer and poet Oscar Wilde who came to Italy, immediately after having served two years in prison in forced labor, on charges of sodomy); Kitson settled there because he was suffering from a severe form of rheumatic fever (like von Gloeden was advised to treat himself in the Mediterranean climate milder), and because as a homosexual, he leaves England because the Labouchere amendment considered homosexuality a crime. The other protagonist of this story is Carlo Siligato, he was from Taormina, he had attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, a very gifted painter, he was very good at oil painting (he exhibited his paintings in an art workshop, even now existing, in via Teatro Greco in Taormina), the meeting with the painter Robert Kitson, led him to adopt the watercolor technique: almost to relive Dante's verses on Paolo and Francesca "Galeotto was the book and who wrote it" the common passion for painting led the two artists to live an intense love story. Kitson built his home in the "Cuseni" district of Taormina, called for this "Casa Cuseni", the house was built between 1900 and 1905, its decorations were entrusted to the artists Alfred East (realist landscape painter, president of the Royal Society ), and Frank Brangwyn (painter, decorator, designer), he was a pupil of William Morris, leader of the English movement "Arts and Crafts" which spread to England in the second half of the nineteenth century (the Arts and Crafts was a response to the industrialization of Europe, of mass production operated by factories, all this at the expense of traditional craftsmanship, from this movement originated the Art Nouveau, in Italy also known as Liberty Style or Floral Style, which distinguished itself for having been a artistic and philosophical movement, which developed between the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, whose style spread in such a way as to be present everywhere). Casa Cuseni has kept a secret for 100 years that goes far beyond the forbidden love lived by Robert and Carlo, a secret hidden inside the "secret room", that dinning room that was reopened in 2012; entering the dining room, you can witness a series of murals painted on the four walls by Frank Brangwyn, in Art Nouveau style, which portray the life and love story between the painter Robert Kitson, and his life partner, the Carlo Siligato from Taormina, but the thing that makes these murals even more special, full of tenderness and sweetness, is that "their secret" (!) is represented in them, it is described visually, as in an "episodic" story that really happened in their lives: Messina (and Reggio Calabria) are destroyed by the terrible earthquake with a tsunami on December 28, 1908, Carlo Siligato, Robert Kitson, Wilhelm von Gloeden and Anatole France leave for Messina, to see and document in person the tragedy, the city was a pile of rubble, many dead, Robert and Carlo see a baby, Francesco, he is alone in the world, without parents who died in the earthquake, abandoned to a certain and sad destiny, a deep desire for protection is born in the two of them, a maternal and paternal desire is born, they decide to takes that little child with them even knowing that they are risking a lot ... (!), what they want to do is something absolutely unthinkable in that historical period, they are a homosexual couple, what they are about to do is absolutely forbidden ..(!) but now there is Francesco in their life, thus becoming, in fact, the first homogenitorial family (with a more generic term, rainbow family) in world history: hence the need to keep the whole story absolutely hidden, both from an artistic point of view , represented by the murals (for more than 100 years, the "dinning room" will be kept hidden), both of what happens in real life, with little Francesco cared for lovingly, but with great risk or. I have allegorically inserted, in the photographic story, some photographs of the artists of the company "Casa del Musical", who came to Taormina to perform during the Christmas period: today as yesterday, Taormina has always been (starting from the last 20 years of the 19th century) center of a crossroads of artists and great personalities, Casa Cuseni also in this has an enormous palmares of illustrious guests, too long to state. The young boys painted on the murals of Casa Cuseni, wear white, this is a sign of purity, they wanted to represent their ideal homosexual world, fighting against the figure dressed in black, short in stature, disturbing, which acquires a negative value, an allegorical figure of the English society of the time, indicating the Victorian morality that did not hesitate to condemn Oscar Wilde, depriving him of all his assets and rights, even preventing him from giving the surname to his children. The boys are inspired by the young Sicilian models photographed by Wilhelm von Gloeden, dressed in white tunics, with their heads surrounded by local flowers. The only female figure present has given rise to various interpretations, one could be Kitson's detachment from his motherland, or his detachment from his mother. On the third wall we witness the birth of the homogenitorial family, both (allegorically Carlo and Kitson with the child in their arms) are in profile, they are walking, the younger man has a long, Greek-style robe, placed on the front, next to him behind him, the sturdier companion holds and gently protects the little child in his arms, as if to spare the companion the effort of a long and uncertain journey, there is in the representation of the family the idea of a long journey, in fact the man holding the child wears heavy shoes, their faces are full of apprehension and concern: in front of them an empty wall, so deliberately left by Frank Brangwin, since their future is unknown, in front of them they have a destiny full of unknowns (at the same time, their path points east, they go towards the rising sun: opening the large window the sun floods everything in the room). In the "secret room" there is the picture painted in 1912 by Alfred E. East, an oil on canvas, representing Lake Bourget. Carlo Siligato later married Costanza, she was my father's grandmother's sister, they had a son, Nino, who for many years lived and worked as a merchant in his father's art workshop. I sincerely thank my colleague Dr. Francesco Spadaro, doctor and esteemed surgeon, owner and director of the "Casa Cuseni" House-Garden-Museum, who, affectionately acting as a guide, gave me the precious opportunity to create "this photographic tour" inside the house- museum and in the "metaphysical garden" of Casa Cuseni. … And the scoop that I announced in the title ..? After photographing the tomb of Carlo Siligato, in the Catholic cemetery of Taormina, I started looking for that of Robert Kitson, in the non-Catholic cemetery of Taormina: when I finally found it (with him lies his niece Daphne Phelps, buried later in 2005) ... I felt a very strong emotion, first of all I was expecting a mausoleum, instead I found a small, very modest tomb on this is not a photo of him, not an epitaph, not a Cross, not a praying Angel to point it out, but ... unexpectedly for a funerary tombstone ... a small bas-relief carved on marble (or stone) depicting ... the Birth ... (!), obviously , having chosen her could have a very specific meaning: a desire to transmit a message, something very profound about him, his tomb thus testified that in his soul, what was really important in life was having a family, with Carlo and baby Francesco, certainly beloved, saved from a certain and sad fate, in the terrible Messina earthquake-tsunami of 28 December 1908 ... almost recalling in an absolute synthesis, at the end of his life, what had already been told in the "secret murals" of Casa Cuseni.
…………………………………………………………………..
Una storia di Taormina: cronache di un amore proibito e del suo grande segreto (non solo Paolo e Francesca) con inaspettato “scoop”.
Questa storia fa parte integrante della storia precedentemente raccontata, il periodo storico è lo stesso, il luogo è lo stesso, i vari personaggi spesso si frequentano tra loro poiché si conoscono; Taormina, tra la fine dell’800 e l’inizio del’900, in un sempre maggiore crescendo, diventa luogo di residenza del turismo d’élite, grazie all’interesse internazionale suscitato ad opera di scrittori ed artisti, come Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, o grandi personalità come Lady Florence Trevelyan: Taormina diventa così famosa, complici i quadri del pittore Otto Geleng e le fotografie dei giovani modelli siciliani di Wilhelm von Gloeden; nell’aria di Taormina si respira un che di libertino, i suoi famosi ed istrionici frequentatori non mancano mai di creare scandalo, superando persino la famosa Capri, nella quale, per citare solo un esempio, l’armiere tedesco Krupp, cercando di ricreare l’ambiente dell’Arcadia che si respirava a Taormina (grazie alle foto di von Gloeden) viene travolto dallo scandalo per omosessualità, e si toglie la vita. Taormina diviene quindi un luogo simil-paradisiaco, lontana dalle civiltà industriali, nella quale poter vivere liberamente la propria vita e la propria sessualità; questo è l’ambiente socio-culturale nel quale si muovono i due protagonisti di questa vicenda, il pittore britannico Robert Hawthorn Kitson (1873 – 1947) ed il pittore Carlo Siligato (nato a Taormina nel 1875, ed ivi morto nel 1959). Robert H. Kitson, nacque a Leeds in Inghilterra, apparteneva ad una famiglia più che benestante, da giovane ingegnere aveva cominciato a sostituire il padre nell’impresa familiare di costruzioni di locomotive (la Kitson & Co.), alla morte del padre nel 1899 vende tutto e decide di trasferirsi ricchissimo in Sicilia a Taormina (vi era stato l’anno precedente con un viaggio fatto coi suoi genitori, qui aveva conosciuto, oltre al barone von Gloeden, anche lo scrittore e poeta Oscar Wilde venuto in Italia, subito dopo aver scontato due anni di prigione ai lavori forzati, con l’accusa di sodomia); Kitson vi si stabilisce perché affetto da una grave forma di febbre reumatica (come von Gloeden gli fu consigliato di curarsi nel clima mediterraneo più mite), sia perché in quanto omosessuale, lascia l’Inghilterra perché l’emendamento Labouchere considerava l’omosessualità un crimine. L’altro protagonista di questa storia è Carlo Siligato, egli era taorminese, aveva frequentato l’Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, pittore molto dotato, era bravissimo nel dipingere ad olio (esponeva i suoi quadri in una bottega d’arte, ancora adesso esistente, in via Teatro Greco a Taormina), l’incontro col pittore Robert Kitson, lo portò ad adottare la tecnica dell’acquarello: quasi a rivivere i versi di Dante su Paolo e Francesca “Galeotto fu ‘l libro e chi lo scrisse” la comune passione per la pittura condusse i due artisti a vivere una intensa storia d’amore. Kitson costruì nel quartiere “Cuseni” di Taormina la sua abitazione, detta per questo “Casa Cuseni”, la casa fu costruita tra il 1900 ed il 1905, le sue decorazioni furono affidate agli artisti Alfred East (pittore verista paesaggista, presidente della Royal Society), e Frank Brangwyn (pittore, decoratore, designer, progettista), egli era allievo di William Morris, leader del movimento inglese “Arts and Crafts” (Arti e Mestieri) che si diffuse in Inghilterra nella seconda metà del XIX secolo (l’Arts and Crafts era una risposta alla industrializzazione dell’Europa, della produzione in massa operata dalle fabbriche, tutto ciò a scapito dell’artigianato tradizionale, da questo movimento ebbe origine l’Art Nouveau, in Italia conosciuta anche come Stile Liberty o Stile Floreale, che si distinse per essere stata un movimento artistico e filosofico, che si sviluppò tra la fine dell’800 ed il primo decennio del ‘900, il cui stile si diffuse in tal modo da essere presente dappertutto). Casa Cuseni ha custodito per 100 anni un segreto che va ben oltre quell’amore proibito vissuto da Robert e Carlo, segreto celato all’interno della “stanza segreta”, quella dinning room che è stata riaperta nel 2012; entrando nella sala da pranzo, si assiste ad una serie di murales realizzati sulle quattro pareti da Frank Brangwyn, in stile Art Nouveau, che ritraggono la vita e la storia d’amore tra il pittore Robert Kitson, ed il suo compagno di vita, il pittore taorminese Carlo Siligato, ma la cosa che rende questi murales ancora più particolari, carichi di tenerezza e dolcezza, è che in essi viene rappresentato “il loro segreto” (!), viene descritto visivamente, come in un racconto “ad episodi” quello che è realmente avvenuto nella loro vita: Messina (e Reggio Calabria) vengono distrutte dal terribile sisma con maremoto il 28 dicembre del 1908, partono per Messina, Carlo Siligato, Robert Kitson, Wilhelm von Gloeden ed Anatole France, per vedere e documentare di persona la tragedia, la città era un cumulo di macerie, moltissimi i morti, Robert e Carlo vedono un piccolo bimbo, Francesco, egli è solo al mondo, privo dei genitori periti nel terremoto, abbandonato ad un certo e triste destino, nasce in loro due un profondo desiderio di protezione, nasce un desiderio materno e paterno, decidono di prende quel piccolo bimbo con loro pur sapendo che stanno rischiando moltissimo…(!) , quello che vogliono fare è una cosa assolutamente impensabile in quel periodo storico, loro sono una coppia omosessuale, quello che stanno per fare è assolutamente proibito..(!) ma oramai c’è Francesco nella loro vita, divenendo così, di fatto, la prima famiglia omogenitoriale (con termine più generico, famiglia arcobaleno) nella storia mondiale: da qui la necessità di tenere assolutamente nascosta tutta la vicenda, sia dal punto di vista artistico, rappresentata dai murales (per più di 100 anni, la “dinning room” verrà tenuta nascosta), sia di quanto accade nella vita reale, col piccolo Francesco accudito amorevolmente, ma con grandissimo rischio. Ho inserito allegoricamente, nel racconto fotografico, alcune fotografie degli artisti della compagnia “Casa del Musical”, giunti a Taormina per esibirsi durante il periodo natalizio: oggi come ieri, Taormina è sempre stata (a partire dagli ultimi 20 anni dell’800) al centro di un crocevia di artisti e grandi personalità, Casa Cuseni anche in questo ha un enorme palmares di ospiti illustri, troppo lungo da enunciare. I giovani ragazzi dipinti sui murales di Casa Cuseni, vestono di bianco, questo è segno di purezza, si è voluto in tal modo rappresentare il loro mondo ideale omosessuale, in lotta contro la figura vestita di nero, bassa di statura, inquietante, che acquista un valore negativo, figura allegorica della società inglese dell’epoca, indicante la morale Vittoriana che non ha esitato a condannare Oscar Wilde, privandolo di tutti i suoi beni e diritti, impedendogli persino di dare il cognome ai suoi figli. I ragazzi sono ispirati ai giovani modelli siciliani fotografati da Wilhelm von Gloeden, vestiti con tuniche bianche, col capo cinto dei fiori locali. L’unica figura femminile presente, ha dato spunto a varie interpretazioni, una potrebbe essere il distacco da parte di Kitson dalla sua madre patria, oppure il distacco da sua madre. Sulla terza parete si assiste alla nascita della famiglia omogenitoriale, entrambi (allegoricamente Carlo e Kitson col bimbo in braccio) sono di profilo, sono in cammino, l’uomo più giovane ha una veste lunga, alla greca, posto sul davanti, accanto a lui, alle sue spalle, il compagno più robusto sostiene in braccio e protegge con dolcezza il piccolo bimbo, quasi a voler risparmiare al compagno la fatica di un lungo ed incerto percorso, vi è nella rappresentazione della famiglia l’idea di un lungo percorso, infatti l’uomo che regge il bimbo indossa delle calzature pesanti, i loro volti sono carichi di apprensione e preoccupazione: davanti a loro una parete vuota, così volutamente lasciata da Frank Brangwin, poiché il loro futuro è ignoto, davanti hanno un destino pieno di incognite (al tempo stesso, il loro cammino indica l’est, vanno verso il sole nascente: aprendo la grande finestra il sole inonda ogni cosa nella stanza).
Nella “stanza segreta” c’è il quadro dipinto nel 1912 da Alfred E. East, un olio su tela, rappresentante il lago Bourget.
Carlo Siligato, successivamente si sposò con Costanza, una sorella della nonna di mio padre, da lei ebbe un figlio, Nino, il quale per tantissimi anni ha vissuto e lavorato come commerciante nella bottega d’arte del padre. Ringrazio di cuore il mio collega dott. Francesco Spadaro, medico e stimato chirurgo, proprietario e direttore della Casa-Giardino-Museo “Casa Cuseni”, il quale, facendomi affettuosamente da cicerone, mi ha dato la preziosa opportunità di realizzare “questo tour fotografico” all’interno dell’abitazione-museo e nel “giardino-metafisico” di Casa Cuseni.
…E lo scoop che ho annunciato nel titolo..? Dopo aver fotografato la tomba di Carlo Siligato, nel cimitero cattolico di Taormina, mi sono messo alla ricerca di quella di Robert Kitson, nel cimitero acattolico di Taormina: quando finalmente l’ho trovata (insieme a lui giace sua nipote Daphne Phelps, seppellita successivamente nel 2005)…ho provato una fortissima commozione, innanzitutto mi aspettavo un mausoleo, invece ho trovato una tomba piccola, molto modesta, su questa non una sua foto, non un epitaffio, non una Croce, non un Angelo pregante ad indicarla, ma … inaspettatamente per una lapide funeraria…un piccolo bassorilievo scolpito su marmo (o su pietra) raffigurante…la Natalità…(!), evidentemente, l’averla scelta potrebbe avere un significato ben preciso: un desiderio di trasmettere un messaggio, qualcosa di molto profondo di lui, la sua tomba testimoniava così che nel suo animo, ciò che in vita fu davvero importante fu l’aver avuto una famiglia, con Carlo e col piccolo Francesco, certamente amatissimo, salvato da un molto probabile triste destino, nel terribile terremoto-maremoto di Messina del 28 dicembre del 1908…quasi rievocando in una sintesi assoluta, al termine della sua vita, ciò che era già stato raccontato nei “murales segreti” di Casa Cuseni.
………………………………………………………………………………….
TRADITON AND ANTITRADITION
291. Tradition means a handing over (latin trans-dare): the handing over of a supertemporal circle of principles here in time.
292. Tradition is the atemporal thrown into temporality.
293. Knowledge of the origin, knowledge of the path, knowledge of the all-transcending, ultimate goal: this is metaphysical realisation.
294. Tradition springs forth from the eternal, points at the eternal, and in the human modality of being represents the aspiration towards the eternal.
295. Metaphysical tradition is at the same time solar and polar: polar for though it appears in the earthly-human sphere, yet it is of heavenly origin and for this reason its origin is not subject to the whirlpool of existence (samsara), it is solar for the powers characteristic of my self-awareness which provide the rule of the auton are present in it.
296. There is only one primordial tradition for there is only one metaphysics, and there is only one metaphysics for there is only one being.
297. Tradition can never be identified simply with metaphysical doctrines or with symbology bearing a doctrinal value, and even less with the archaic documents that present these. Tradition is the total acceptance of a world and the total denial of another.
298. Metaphysically speaking, tradition is nothing other than »remembrance«, and the bearing of the connection with the origin. Modernity, however, is not only the lack of this »remembrance«, but at the same time the denial of this metaphysical »remembrance« and aims at the destruction of every kind of representation of remembrance.
299. The most sinister thing is forever if something subsists, but not truly; this is really much worse than if it disappeared. Since if something does not truly subsist, it will sooner or later come to function as a caricature and antithesis of the original.
[It especially refers to those legitimate traditional, spiritual and initiatory organisations which have maintained their continuity, but whose original features have gradually faded away or turned directly to their opposites.]
300. Each and every language is a tradition.
301. In the earthly-human sphere there cannot be a bipolar opposition bigger and tenser than of that between tradition and antitradition, and traditionality and antitraditionality, respectively.
302. Antitradition can be understood only from tradition; it cannot stand by itself.
303. Since the offensive form of antitraditionality appeared, the slightest compromise between traditionality and antitraditionality has been an enormous antitraditional triumph.
[An example: »Catholic-Marxist dialogues always implied the defensiveness of the Church and the success of Marxism - regardless of the fact that in the course of these dialogues it was invariably the Marxists whose performance was weaker than that of the Catholics. Since the very fact that in religious circles the question was not whether to send Marxists to the stake but to find the common ground among the opposing views, demonstrated the defensiveness of the Church. For Marxists it was not the outcome of the dialogues which was important but that the Church started to »court« them.« (András László)]
304. A traditional man should become a scholar in antitradition.
-----
Metaphysical aphorisms by András László
I really ought to say a great deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am relating here. It is born of the moment. ... The work is the expression of my inner development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be regarded as stations along my life’s way…...
Words by Jung
Jung experienced a psychotic phase in his life and during this time became immersed in the world of the dead, which lead him to write Seven Sermons of the Dead under the name of second century Gnostic writer, Basilides, which was published in 1916.
For N....'Always With Us....♥'
for Flickriver - Sophie Shapiro
.
Rudolf Steiner
Steiner um 1905.jpg
BornRudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
27 (25?) February 1861
Murakirály, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (now Donji Kraljevec, Croatia)
Died30 March 1925 (aged 64)
Dornach, Switzerland
Alma materVienna Institute of Technology
University of Rostock (PhD, 1891)
Spouse(s)
Anna Eunicke (1899–1911)
Marie Steiner-von Sivers (1914–1925)
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolMonism
Holism in science
Goethean science
Anthroposophy
Main interests
Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, esotericism, Christianity
Notable ideas
Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Steiner Seven Apocalyptical Seals Transparent.png
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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 (or 25) February 1861[5] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist.[6][7] Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.[8]
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality.[9] His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,[10]:291 differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts.[11] In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked to establish various practical endeavors, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture,[12] and anthroposophical medicine.[13]
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe's world view, in which "Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas."[14] A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.[15]
Contents
1Biography
1.1Childhood and education
1.2Early spiritual experiences
1.3Writer and philosopher
1.4Theosophical Society
1.5Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities
1.6Political engagement and social agenda
1.7Attacks, illness, and death
1.8Spiritual research
1.9Esoteric schools
2Breadth of activity
2.1Education
2.2Biodynamic agriculture
2.3Anthroposophical medicine
2.4Social reform
2.5Architecture and visual arts
2.6Performing arts
3Philosophical ideas
3.1Goethean science
3.2Knowledge and freedom
3.3Spiritual science
3.4Steiner and Christianity
3.4.1Christ and human evolution
3.4.2Divergence from conventional Christian thought
3.4.3The Christian Community
4Reception
4.1Scientism
4.2Race and ethnicity
4.2.1Judaism
5Writings (selection)
6See also
7References
8Further reading
9External links
Biography[edit]
Childhood and education[edit]
The house where Rudolf Steiner was born, in present-day Croatia
Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper[16] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn – 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Murakirály (Kraljevec) in the Muraköz region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje region of northernmost Croatia). In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.[13]
Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudörfl and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt.[17]:Chap. 2
Rudolf Steiner, graduation photo from secondary school
In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology,[18] where he enrolled in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy, on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883, at the end of which time he withdrew from the Institute without graduating.[2]:122,443,446,456,503[19]:29 In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers, Karl Julius Schröer,[17]:Chap. 3 suggested Steiner's name to Joseph Kürschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe's works,[20] who asked Steiner to become the edition's natural science editor,[21] a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications.[19]:43
Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Kant, Fichte and Schelling.[22]
Early spiritual experiences[edit]
Rudolf Steiner as 21-year-old student (1882)
When he was nine years old, Steiner believed that he saw the spirit of an aunt who had died in a far-off town asking him to help her at a time when neither he nor his family knew of the woman's death.[23] Steiner later related that as a child he felt "that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry ... [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences. In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced ... I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world 'which is not seen'."[17]
Steiner believed that at the age of 15 he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance.[22] At 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, Steiner met an herb gatherer, Felix Kogutzki, who spoke about the spiritual world "as one who had his own experience therein".[17]:39–40[24] Kogutzki conveyed to Steiner a knowledge of nature that was non-academic and spiritual.
Writer and philosopher[edit]
In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe's works, Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. Steiner remained with the archive until 1896. As well as the introductions for and commentaries to four volumes of Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe's philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886),[25] which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation and justification for his later work,[26] and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897).[27] During this time he also collaborated in complete editions of the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and the writer Jean Paul and wrote numerous articles for various journals.
Rudolf Steiner around 1891/92, etching by Otto Fröhlich
In 1891, Steiner received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock, for his dissertation discussing Fichte's concept of the ego,[10][28] submitted to Heinrich von Stein, whose Seven Books of Platonism Steiner esteemed.[17]:Chap. 14 Steiner's dissertation was later published in expanded form as Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, with a dedication to Eduard von Hartmann.[29] Two years later, he published Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom or The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—Steiner's preferred English title) (1894), an exploration of epistemology and ethics that suggested a way for humans to become spiritually free beings. Steiner later spoke of this book as containing implicitly, in philosophical form, the entire content of what he later developed explicitly as anthroposophy.[30]
Marie Steiner 1903
In 1896, Steiner declined an offer from Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to help organize the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. Her brother by that time was non compos mentis. Förster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher; Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom.[31] Steiner later related that:
My first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings belongs to the year 1889. Previous to that I had never read a line of his. Upon the substance of my ideas as these find expression in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Nietzsche's thought had not the least influence....Nietzsche's ideas of the 'eternal recurrence' and of 'Übermensch' remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the 19th century....What attracted me particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a 'dependent' of Nietzsche's.[17]:Chap. 18
In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He became part owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy. Many subscribers were alienated by Steiner's unpopular support of Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair[32] and the journal lost more subscribers when Steiner published extracts from his correspondence with anarchist John Henry Mackay.[32] Dissatisfaction with his editorial style eventually led to his departure from the magazine.
In 1899, Steiner married Anna Eunicke; the couple separated several years later. Anna died in 1911.
Theosophical Society[edit]
Main article: Rudolf Steiner and the Theosophical Society
Rudolf Steiner in Munich with Annie Besant, leader of the Theosophical Society. Photo from 1907
In 1899, Steiner published an article, "Goethe's Secret Revelation", discussing the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of Theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, becoming the head of its newly constituted German section in 1902 without ever formally joining the society.[10][33] It was also in connection with this society that Steiner met and worked with Marie von Sivers, who became his second wife in 1914. By 1904, Steiner was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1904, Eliza, the wife of Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, became one of his favourite scholars[34]. Through Eliza, Steiner met Helmuth, who served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914[35].
In contrast to mainstream Theosophy, Steiner sought to build a Western approach to spirituality based on the philosophical and mystical traditions of European culture. The German Section of the Theosophical Society grew rapidly under Steiner's leadership as he lectured throughout much of Europe on his spiritual science. During this period, Steiner maintained an original approach, replacing Madame Blavatsky's terminology with his own, and basing his spiritual research and teachings upon the Western esoteric and philosophical tradition. This and other differences, in particular Steiner's vocal rejection of Leadbeater and Besant's claim that Jiddu Krishnamurti was the vehicle of a new Maitreya, or world teacher,[36] led to a formal split in 1912/13,[10] when Steiner and the majority of members of the German section of the Theosophical Society broke off to form a new group, the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner took the name "Anthroposophy" from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann, published in Vienna in 1856.[37] Despite his departure from the Theosophical Society, Steiner maintained his interest in Theosophy throughout his life.[8]
Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities[edit]
RudolfSteiner.jpeg
The Anthroposophical Society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find an artistic home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Edouard Schuré and Steiner, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. In 1913, construction began on the first Goetheanum building, in Dornach, Switzerland. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to a significant part by volunteers who offered craftsmanship or simply a will to learn new skills. Once World War I started in 1914, the Goetheanum volunteers could hear the sound of cannon fire beyond the Swiss border, but despite the war, people from all over Europe worked peaceably side by side on the building's construction. Steiner moved from Berlin to Dornach in 1913 and lived there to the end of his life.[38]
Steiner's lecture activity expanded enormously with the end of the war. Most importantly, from 1919 on Steiner began to work with other members of the society to found numerous practical institutions and activities, including the first Waldorf school, founded that year in Stuttgart, Germany. At the same time, the Goetheanum developed as a wide-ranging cultural centre. On New Year's Eve, 1922/1923, the building burned to the ground; contemporary police reports indicate arson as the probable cause.[13]:752[39]:796 Steiner immediately began work designing a second Goetheanum building - this time made of concrete instead of wood - which was completed in 1928, three years after his death.
At a "Foundation Meeting" for members held at the Dornach center during Christmas, 1923, Steiner spoke of laying a new Foundation Stone for the society in the hearts of his listeners. At the meeting, a new "General Anthroposophical Society" was established with a new executive board. At this meeting, Steiner also founded a School of Spiritual Science, intended as an "organ of initiative" for research and study and as "the 'soul' of the Anthroposophical Society".[40] This School, which was led by Steiner, initially had sections for general anthroposophy, education, medicine, performing arts (eurythmy, speech, drama and music), the literary arts and humanities, mathematics, astronomy, science, and visual arts. Later sections were added for the social sciences, youth and agriculture.[41][42][43] The School of Spiritual Science included meditative exercises given by Steiner.
Political engagement and social agenda[edit]
Steiner became a well-known and controversial public figure during and after World War I. In response to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, he proposed extensive social reforms through the establishment of a Threefold Social Order in which the cultural, political and economic realms would be largely independent. Steiner argued that a fusion of the three realms had created the inflexibility that had led to catastrophes such as World War I. In connection with this, he promoted a radical solution in the disputed area of Upper Silesia, claimed by both Poland and Germany. His suggestion that this area be granted at least provisional independence led to his being publicly accused of being a traitor to Germany.[44]
Steiner opposed Wilson's proposal to create new European nations based around ethnic groups, which he saw as opening the door to rampant nationalism. Steiner proposed as an alternative "'social territories' with democratic institutions that were accessible to all inhabitants of a territory whatever their origin while the needs of the various ethnicities would be met by independent cultural institutions."[45]
Attacks, illness, and death[edit]
The National Socialist German Workers Party gained strength in Germany after the First World War. In 1919, a political theorist of this movement, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner and suggested that he was a Jew.[46] In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews,[47] while other nationalist extremists in Germany called for a "war against Steiner". That same year, Steiner warned against the disastrous effects it would have for Central Europe if the National Socialists came to power.[46]:8 In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.[48][49] Unable to guarantee his safety, Steiner's agents cancelled his next lecture tour.[32]:193[50] The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup [Hitler and others] came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country.[51]
From 1923 on, Steiner showed signs of increasing frailness and illness. He nonetheless continued to lecture widely, and even to travel; especially towards the end of this time, he was often giving two, three or even four lectures daily for courses taking place concurrently. Many of these lectures focused on practical areas of life such as education.[52]
Steiner's gravestone at the Goetheanum
Increasingly ill, he held his last lecture in late September, 1924. He continued work on his autobiography during the last months of his life; he died on 30 March 1925.
Spiritual research[edit]
Steiner first began speaking publicly about spiritual experiences and phenomena in his 1899 lectures to the Theosophical Society. By 1901 he had begun to write about spiritual topics, initially in the form of discussions of historical figures such as the mystics of the Middle Ages. By 1904 he was expressing his own understanding of these themes in his essays and books, while continuing to refer to a wide variety of historical sources.
"A world of spiritual perception is discussed in a number of writings which I have published since this book appeared. The Philosophy of Freedom forms the philosophical basis for these later writings. For it tries to show that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of spirit." (Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Consequences of Monism)
Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences.[53] He believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others.[32] Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more moral, creative and free individual – free in the sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.[54] His philosophical ideas were affected by Franz Brentano,[32] with whom he had studied,[55] as well as by Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe's phenomenological approach to science.[32][56][57]
Steiner followed Wilhelm Dilthey in using the term Geisteswissenschaft, usually translated as "spiritual science".[58] Steiner used the term to describe a discipline treating the spirit as something actual and real, starting from the premise that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind what is sense-perceptible.[59] He proposed that psychology, history, and the humanities generally were based on the direct grasp of an ideal reality,[60] and required close attention to the particular period and culture which provided the distinctive character of religious qualities in the course of the evolution of consciousness. In contrast to William James' pragmatic approach to religious and psychic experience, which emphasized its idiosyncratic character, Steiner focused on ways such experience can be rendered more intelligible and integrated into human life.[61]
Steiner proposed that an understanding of reincarnation and karma was necessary to understand psychology[62] and that the form of external nature would be more comprehensible as a result of insight into the course of karma in the evolution of humanity.[63] Beginning in 1910, he described aspects of karma relating to health, natural phenomena and free will, taking the position that a person is not bound by his or her karma, but can transcend this through actively taking hold of one's own nature and destiny.[64] In an extensive series of lectures from February to September 1924, Steiner presented further research on successive reincarnations of various individuals and described the techniques he used for karma research.[52][65]
Esoteric schools[edit]
See also: Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development
Steiner was founder and leader of the following:
His independent Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1904. This school continued after the break with Theosophy but was disbanded at the start of World War I.
A lodge called Mystica Aeterna within the Masonic Order of Memphis and Mizraim, which Steiner led from 1906 until around 1914. Steiner added to the Masonic rite a number of Rosicrucian references.[66]
The School of Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1923 as a further development of his earlier Esoteric School. This was originally constituted with a general section and seven specialized sections for education, literature, performing arts, natural sciences, medicine, visual arts, and astronomy.[41][43][67] Steiner gave members of the School the first Lesson for guidance into the esoteric work in February 1924.[68] Though Steiner intended to develop three "classes" of this school, only the first of these was developed in his lifetime (and continues today). An authentic text of the written records on which the teaching of the First Class was based was published in 1992.[69]
Breadth of activity[edit]
After the First World War, Steiner became active in a wide variety of cultural contexts. He founded a number of schools, the first of which was known as the Waldorf school,[70] which later evolved into a worldwide school network. He also founded a system of organic agriculture, now known as biodynamic agriculture, which was one of the very first forms of, and has contributed significantly to the development of, modern organic farming.[71] His work in medicine led to the development of a broad range of complementary medications and supportive artistic and biographic therapies.[72] Numerous homes for children and adults with developmental disabilities based on his work (including those of the Camphill movement) are found in Africa, Europe, and North America.[73] His paintings and drawings influenced Joseph Beuys and other modern artists. His two Goetheanum buildings have been widely cited as masterpieces of modern architecture,[74][75][76][77][78] and other anthroposophical architects have contributed thousands of buildings to the modern scene.[79] One of the first institutions to practice ethical banking was an anthroposophical bank working out of Steiner's ideas; other anthroposophical social finance institutions have since been founded.
Steiner's literary estate is correspondingly broad. Steiner's writings, published in about forty volumes, include books, essays, four plays ('mystery dramas'), mantric verse, and an autobiography. His collected lectures, making up another approximately 300 volumes, discuss an extremely wide range of themes. Steiner's drawings, chiefly illustrations done on blackboards during his lectures, are collected in a separate series of 28 volumes. Many publications have covered his architectural legacy and sculptural work.
Education[edit]
The Waldorf school in Verrières-le-Buisson (France)
Main article: Waldorf education
As a young man, Steiner was a private tutor and a lecturer on history for the Berlin Arbeiterbildungsschule,[80] an educational initiative for working class adults.[81] Soon thereafter, he began to articulate his ideas on education in public lectures,[82] culminating in a 1907 essay on The Education of the Child in which he described the major phases of child development which formed the foundation of his approach to education.[83] His conception of education was influenced by the Herbartian pedagogy prominent in Europe during the late nineteenth century,[80]:1362, 1390ff[82] though Steiner criticized Herbart for not sufficiently recognizing the importance of educating the will and feelings as well as the intellect.[84]
In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture to his workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Out of these lectures came a new school, the Waldorf school. In 1922, Steiner presented these ideas at a conference called for this purpose in Oxford by Professor Millicent Mackenzie. He subsequently presented a teacher training course at Torquay in 1924 at an Anthroposophy Summer School organised by Eleanor Merry.[85] The Oxford Conference and the Torquay teacher training led to the founding of the first Waldorf schools in Britain.[86] During Steiner's lifetime, schools based on his educational principles were also founded in Hamburg, Essen, The Hague and London; there are now more than 1000 Waldorf schools worldwide.
Biodynamic agriculture[edit]
Main article: Biodynamic agriculture
In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help. Steiner responded with a lecture series on an ecological and sustainable approach to agriculture that increased soil fertility without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.[12] Steiner's agricultural ideas promptly spread and were put into practice internationally[87] and biodynamic agriculture is now practiced in Europe,[88] North America, South America[89], Africa[90], Asia[88] and Australasia.[91][92][93]
A central aspect of biodynamics is that the farm as a whole is seen as an organism, and therefore should be a largely self-sustaining system, producing its own manure and animal feed. Plant or animal disease is seen as a symptom of problems in the whole organism. Steiner also suggested timing such agricultural activities as sowing, weeding, and harvesting to utilize the influences on plant growth of the moon and planets; and the application of natural materials prepared in specific ways to the soil, compost, and crops, with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces. He encouraged his listeners to verify his suggestions empirically, as he had not yet done.[91]
Anthroposophical medicine[edit]
Main article: Anthroposophical medicine
From the late 1910s, Steiner was working with doctors to create a new approach to medicine. In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda which now distributes natural medical products worldwide. At around the same time, Dr. Ita Wegman founded a first anthroposophic medical clinic (now the Ita Wegman Clinic) in Arlesheim.
Social reform[edit]
Main article: Threefold Social Order
For a period after World War I, Steiner was active as a lecturer on social reform. A petition expressing his basic social ideas was widely circulated and signed by many cultural figures of the day, including Hermann Hesse.
In Steiner's chief book on social reform, Toward Social Renewal, he suggested that the cultural, political and economic spheres of society need to work together as consciously cooperating yet independent entities, each with a particular task: political institutions should establish political equality and protect human rights; cultural institutions should nurture the free and unhindered development of science, art, education and religion; and economic institutions should enable producers, distributors and consumers to cooperate to provide efficiently for society's needs.[94] He saw such a division of responsibility, which he called the Threefold Social Order, as a vital task which would take up consciously the historical trend toward the mutual independence of these three realms. Steiner also gave suggestions for many specific social reforms.
Steiner proposed what he termed a "fundamental law" of social life:
The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.
— Steiner, The Fundamental Social Law[95]
He expressed this in the motto:[95]
The healthy social life is found
When in the mirror of each human soul
The whole community finds its reflection,
And when in the community
The virtue of each one is living.
Architecture and visual arts[edit]
First Goetheanum
Second Goetheanum
Detail of The Representative of Humanity
English sculptor Edith Maryon belonged to the innermost circle of founders of anthroposophy and was appointed to head the Section of Sculptural Arts at the Goetheanum.
Steiner designed 17 buildings, including the First and Second Goetheanums.[96] These two buildings, built in Dornach, Switzerland, were intended to house significant theater spaces as well as a "school for spiritual science".[97] Three of Steiner's buildings have been listed amongst the most significant works of modern architecture.[98]
His primary sculptural work is The Representative of Humanity (1922), a nine-meter high wood sculpture executed as a joint project with the sculptor Edith Maryon. This was intended to be placed in the first Goetheanum. It shows a central, free-standing Christ holding a balance between the beings of Lucifer and Ahriman, representing opposing tendencies of expansion and contraction.[99][100][101] It was intended to show, in conscious contrast to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Christ as mute and impersonal such that the beings that approach him must judge themselves.[102] The sculpture is now on permanent display at the Goetheanum.
Steiner's blackboard drawings were unique at the time and almost certainly not originally intended as art works.[103] Josef Beuys' work, itself heavily influenced by Steiner, has led to the modern understanding of Steiner's drawings as artistic objects.[104]
Performing arts[edit]
See also: Eurythmy
Steiner wrote four mystery plays between 1909 and 1913: The Portal of Initiation, The Souls' Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold and The Soul's Awakening, modeled on the esoteric dramas of Edouard Schuré, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[105] Steiner's plays continue to be performed by anthroposophical groups in various countries, most notably (in the original German) in Dornach, Switzerland and (in English translation) in Spring Valley, New York and in Stroud and Stourbridge in the U.K.
In collaboration with Marie von Sivers, Steiner also founded a new approach to acting, storytelling, and the recitation of poetry. His last public lecture course, given in 1924, was on speech and drama. The Russian actor, director, and acting coach Michael Chekhov based significant aspects of his method of acting on Steiner's work.[106][107]
Together with Marie von Sivers, Rudolf Steiner also developed the art of eurythmy, sometimes referred to as "visible speech and song". According to the principles of eurythmy, there are archetypal movements or gestures that correspond to every aspect of speech – the sounds (or phonemes), the rhythms, and the grammatical function – to every "soul quality" – joy, despair, tenderness, etc. – and to every aspect of music – tones, intervals, rhythms, and harmonies.
Philosophical ideas[edit]
Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings.
Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom. Chapter 9
Goethean science[edit]
See also: Goethean science
In his commentaries on Goethe's scientific works, written between 1884 and 1897, Steiner presented Goethe's approach to science as essentially phenomenological in nature, rather than theory- or model-based. He developed this conception further in several books, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897), particularly emphasizing the transformation in Goethe's approach from the physical sciences, where experiment played the primary role, to plant biology, where both accurate perception and imagination were required to find the biological archetypes (Urpflanze), and postulated that Goethe had sought but been unable to fully find the further transformation in scientific thinking necessary to properly interpret and understand the animal kingdom.[108] Steiner emphasized the role of evolutionary thinking in Goethe's discovery of the intermaxillary bone in human beings; Goethe expected human anatomy to be an evolutionary transformation of animal anatomy.[108] Steiner defended Goethe's qualitative description of color as arising synthetically from the polarity of light and darkness, in contrast to Newton's particle-based and analytic conception.
Particular organic forms can be evolved only from universal types, and every organic entity we experience must coincide with some one of these derivative forms of the type. Here the evolutionary method must replace the method of proof. We aim not to show that external conditions act upon one another in a certain way and thereby bring about a definite result, but that a particular form has developed under definite external conditions out of the type. This is the radical difference between inorganic and organic science.
— Rudolf Steiner, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Chapter XVI, "Organic Nature"
Knowledge and freedom[edit]
See also: Philosophy of Freedom
Steiner approached the philosophical questions of knowledge and freedom in two stages. In his dissertation, published in expanded form in 1892 as Truth and Knowledge, Steiner suggests that there is an inconsistency between Kant's philosophy, which posits that all knowledge is a representation of an essential verity inaccessible to human consciousness, and modern science, which assumes that all influences can be found in the sensory and mental world to which we have access. Steiner considered Kant's philosophy of an inaccessible beyond ("Jenseits-Philosophy") a stumbling block in achieving a satisfying philosophical viewpoint.[109]
Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other. He sees in thinking itself an element that can be strengthened and deepened sufficiently to penetrate all that our senses do not reveal to us. Steiner thus considered what appears to human experience as a division between the spiritual and natural worlds to be a conditioned result of the structure of our consciousness, which separates perception and thinking. These two faculties give us not two worlds, but two complementary views of the same world; neither has primacy and the two together are necessary and sufficient to arrive at a complete understanding of the world. In thinking about perception (the path of natural science) and perceiving the process of thinking (the path of spiritual training), it is possible to discover a hidden inner unity between the two poles of our experience.[54]:Chapter 4 Truth, for Steiner, is paradoxically both an objective discovery and yet "a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality."[110]
In the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner further explores potentials within thinking: freedom, he suggests, can only be approached gradually with the aid of the creative activity of thinking. Thinking can be a free deed; in addition, it can liberate our will from its subservience to our instincts and drives. Free deeds, he suggests, are those for which we are fully conscious of the motive for our action; freedom is the spiritual activity of penetrating with consciousness our own nature and that of the world,[111] and the real activity of acting in full consciousness.[54]:133–4 This includes overcoming influences of both heredity and environment: "To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts – not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality."[10]
Steiner affirms Darwin's and Haeckel's evolutionary perspectives but extended this beyond its materialistic consequences; he sees human consciousness, indeed, all human culture, as a product of natural evolution that transcends itself. For Steiner, nature becomes self-conscious in the human being. Steiner's description of the nature of human consciousness thus closely parallels that of Solovyov:[112]
Spiritual science[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development
Rudolf Steiner 1900
In his earliest works, Steiner already spoke of the "natural and spiritual worlds" as a unity.[32] From 1900 on, he began lecturing about concrete details of the spiritual world(s), culminating in the publication in 1904 of the first of several systematic presentations, his Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos. As a starting point for the book Steiner took a quotation from Goethe, describing the method of natural scientific observation,[113] while in the Preface he made clear that the line of thought taken in this book led to the same goal as that in his earlier work, The Philosophy of Freedom.[114]
In the years 1903–1908 Steiner maintained the magazine "Lucifer-Gnosis" and published in it essays on topics such as initiation, reincarnation and karma, and knowledge of the supernatural world.[115] Some of these were later collected and published as books, such as How to Know Higher Worlds (1904/5) and Cosmic Memory. The book An Outline of Esoteric Science was published in 1910. Important themes include:
the human being as body, soul and spirit;
the path of spiritual development;
spiritual influences on world-evolution and history; and
reincarnation and karma.
Steiner emphasized that there is an objective natural and spiritual world that can be known, and that perceptions of the spiritual world and incorporeal beings are, under conditions of training comparable to that required for the natural sciences, including self-discipline, replicable by multiple observers. It is on this basis that spiritual science is possible, with radically different epistemological foundations than those of natural science. He believed that natural science was correct in its methods but one-sided for exclusively focusing on sensory phenomena, while mysticism was vague in its methods, though seeking to explore the inner and spiritual life. Anthroposophy was meant to apply the systematic methods of the former to the content of the latter[116][117]
For Steiner, the cosmos is permeated and continually transformed by the creative activity of non-physical processes and spiritual beings. For the human being to become conscious of the objective reality of these processes and beings, it is necessary to creatively enact and reenact, within, their creative activity. Thus objective spiritual knowledge always entails creative inner activity.[32] Steiner articulated three stages of any creative deed:[54]:Pt II, Chapter 1
Moral intuition: the ability to discover or, preferably, develop valid ethical principles;
Moral imagination: the imaginative transformation of such principles into a concrete intention applicable to the particular situation (situational ethics); and
Moral technique: the realization of the intended transformation, depending on a mastery of practical skills.
Steiner termed his work from this period onwards Anthroposophy. He emphasized that the spiritual path he articulated builds upon and supports individual freedom and independent judgment; for the results of spiritual research to be appropriately presented in a modern context they must be in a form accessible to logical understanding, so that those who do not have access to the spiritual experiences underlying anthroposophical research can make independent evaluations of the latter's results.[54] Spiritual training is to support what Steiner considered the overall purpose of human evolution, the development of the mutually interdependent qualities of love and freedom.[10]
Steiner and Christianity[edit]
In 1899 Steiner experienced what he described as a life-transforming inner encounter with the being of Christ; previously he had little or no relation to Christianity in any form. Then and thereafter, his relationship to Christianity remained entirely founded upon personal experience, and thus both non-denominational and strikingly different from conventional religious forms.[10] Steiner was then 38, and the experience of meeting the Christ occurred after a tremendous inner struggle. To use Steiner's own words, the "experience culminated in my standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge."[118]
Christ and human evolution[edit]
Steiner describes Christ as the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and human history, redeeming the Fall from Paradise.[119] He understood the Christ as a being that unifies and inspires all religions, not belonging to a particular religious faith. To be "Christian" is, for Steiner, a search for balance between polarizing extremes[119]:102–3 and the ability to manifest love in freedom.[10]
Central principles of his understanding include:
The being of Christ is central to all religions, though called by different names by each.
Every religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born.
Historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed in our times in order to meet the ongoing evolution of humanity.
In Steiner's esoteric cosmology, the spiritual development of humanity is interwoven in and inseparable from the cosmological development of the universe. Continuing the evolution that led to humanity being born out of the natural world, the Christ being brings an impulse enabling human consciousness of the forces that act creatively, but unconsciously, in nature.[120]
Divergence from conventional Christian thought[edit]
Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements.[108] However, unlike many gnostics, Steiner affirms the unique and actual physical Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the beginning of the Christian era.
One of the central points of divergence with conventional Christian thought is found in Steiner's views on reincarnation and karma.
Steiner also posited two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew; the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke.[94] He references in this regard the fact that the genealogies in these two gospels list twenty-six (Luke) to forty-one (Matthew) completely different ancestors for the generations from David to Jesus. See Genealogy of Jesus for alternative explanations of this radical divergence.
Steiner's view of the second coming of Christ is also unusual. He suggested that this would not be a physical reappearance, but rather, meant that the Christ being would become manifest in non-physical form, in the "etheric realm" – i.e. visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life – for increasing numbers of people, beginning around the year 1933. He emphasized that the future would require humanity to recognize this Spirit of Love in all its genuine forms, regardless of how this is named. He also warned that the traditional name, "Christ", might be used, yet the true essence of this Being of Love ignored.[108]
The Christian Community[edit]
In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin, who asked if it was possible to create a more modern form of Christianity. Soon others joined Rittelmeyer – mostly Protestant pastors and theology students, but including several Roman Catholic priests. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the spiritual potency of the sacraments while emphasizing freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. He envisioned a new synthesis of Catholic and Protestant approaches to religious life, terming this "modern, Johannine Christianity".[94]
The resulting movement for religious renewal became known as "The Christian Community". Its work is based on a free relationship to the Christ, without dogma or policies. Its priesthood, which is open to both men and women, is free to preach out of their own spiritual insights and creativity.
Steiner emphasized that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity was a personal gesture of help to a movement founded by Rittelmeyer and others independently of his anthroposophical work.[94] The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with Anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality.[119] He recognized that for those who wished to find more traditional forms, however, a renewal of the traditional religions was also a vital need of the times.
Reception[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy § Reception
Steiner's work has influenced a broad range of notable personalities. These include philosophers Albert Schweitzer, Owen Barfield and Richard Tarnas;[32] writers Saul Bellow,[121] Andrej Belyj,[122][123][124] Michael Ende,[125] Selma Lagerlöf,[126] Edouard Schuré, David Spangler,[citation needed] and William Irwin Thompson;[32] child psychiatrist Eva Frommer;[127] economist Leonard Read;[128] artists Josef Beuys,[129] Wassily Kandinsky,[130][131] and Murray Griffin;[132] esotericist and educationalist George Trevelyan;[133] actor and acting teacher Michael Chekhov;[134] cinema director Andrei Tarkovsky;[135] composers Jonathan Harvey[136] and Viktor Ullmann;[137] and conductor Bruno Walter.[138] Olav Hammer, though sharply critical of esoteric movements generally, terms Steiner "arguably the most historically and philosophically sophisticated spokesperson of the Esoteric Tradition."[139]
Albert Schweitzer wrote that he and Steiner had in common that they had "taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings".[140]
Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy: "His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional."[141]
Robert Todd Carroll has said of Steiner that "Some of his ideas on education – such as educating the handicapped in the mainstream – are worth considering, although his overall plan for developing the spirit and the soul rather than the intellect cannot be admired".[142] Steiner's translators have pointed out that his use of Geist includes both mind and spirit, however,[143] as the German term Geist can be translated equally properly in either way.[144]
The 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner's birth was marked by the first major retrospective exhibition of his art and work, 'Kosmos - Alchemy of the everyday'. Organized by Vitra Design Museum, the traveling exhibition presented many facets of Steiner's life and achievements, including his influence on architecture, furniture design, dance (Eurythmy), education, and agriculture (Biodynamic agriculture).[145] The exhibition opened in 2011 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany,[146]
Scientism[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy: Scientific basis
Olav Hammer has criticized as scientism Steiner's claim to use scientific methodology to investigate spiritual phenomena that were based upon his claims of clairvoyant experience.[139] Steiner regarded the observations of spiritual research as more dependable (and above all, consistent) than observations of physical reality. However, he did consider spiritual research to be fallible[2]:p. 618 and held the view that anyone capable of thinking logically was in a position to correct errors by spiritual researchers.[147]
Race and ethnicity[edit]
Steiner's work includes both universalist, humanist elements and historically influenced racial assumptions.[148] Due to the contrast and even contradictions between these elements, "whether a given reader interprets Anthroposophy as racist or not depends upon that reader's concerns".[149] Steiner considered that by dint of its shared language and culture, each people has a unique essence, which he called its soul or spirit.[139] He saw race as a physical manifestation of humanity's spiritual evolution, and at times discussed race in terms of complex hierarchies that were largely derived from 19th century biology, anthropology, philosophy and theosophy. However, he consistently and explicitly subordinated race, ethnicity, gender, and indeed all hereditary factors, to individual factors in development.[149] For Steiner, human individuality is centered in a person's unique biography, and he believed that an individual's experiences and development are not bound by a single lifetime or the qualities of the physical body.[33] More specifically:
Steiner occasionally characterized specific races, nations and ethnicities in ways that have been termed racist by critics.[150] This includes descriptions by him of certain races and ethnic groups as flowering, others as backward, or destined to degenerate or disappear.[149] He presented explicitly hierarchical views of the spiritual evolution of different races,[151] including—at times, and inconsistently—portraying the white race, European culture or Germanic culture as representing the high point of human evolution as of the early 20th century, although he did describe them as destined to be superseded by future cultures.[149]
Throughout his life Steiner consistently emphasized the core spiritual unity of all the world's peoples and sharply criticized racial prejudice. He articulated beliefs that the individual nature of any person stands higher than any racial, ethnic, national or religious affiliation.[13][94] His belief that race and ethnicity are transient and superficial, and not essential aspects of the individual,[149] was partly rooted in his conviction that each individual reincarnates in a variety of different peoples and races over successive lives, and that each of us thus bears within him or herself the heritage of many races and peoples.[149][152] Toward the end of his life, Steiner predicted that race will rapidly lose any remaining significance for future generations.[149] In Steiner's view, culture is universal, and explicitly not ethnically based; he saw Goethe and idealist philosophy in particular as the source of ideas that could be drawn upon by any culture, and he vehemently criticized imperialism.[153]
In the context of his ethical individualism, Steiner considered "race, folk, ethnicity and gender" to be general, describable categories into which individuals may choose to fit, but from which free human beings can and will liberate themselves.[33]
Judaism[edit]
During the years when Steiner was best known as a literary critic, he published a series of articles attacking various manifestations of antisemitism[154] and criticizing some of the most prominent anti-Semites of the time as "barbaric" and "enemies of culture".[155] On a number of occasions, however, Steiner suggested that Jewish cultural and social life had lost all contemporary relevance[156] and promoted full assimilation of the Jewish people into the nations in which they lived. This stance has come under severe criticism in recent years.[149]
Steiner was a critic of his contemporary Theodor Herzl's goal of a Zionist state, and indeed of any ethnically determined state, as he considered ethnicity to be an outmoded basis for social life and civic identity.[157]
Towards the end of Steiner's life and after his death, there were massive defamatory press attacks mounted on him by early National Socialist leaders (including Adolf Hitler) and other right-wing nationalists. These criticized Steiner's thought and anthroposophy as being incompatible with National Socialist racial ideology, and charged him of being influenced by his close connections with Jews and even that he himself was Jewish.[46][155]
The Hereios are in a funk. You will find them in exile today at the Metaphysical leper colony, the Flickr home to “castaways, cast outs, social rejects, pissed-off individuals, perverted hermits” and the self-exiled.
Over at 7 Days of Shooting the weekly theme is “A Book Title”.
All that, and the fact that it’s “Black and White Wednesday, sent me off in search of a book title about leper colonies. I know that’s all very strange – but it’s just how my mind works.
Anyway, I found a book title, and it is so utterly intriguing I put a hold on it at the library and will probably lay my hands on it this weekend. It sounds like fiction, but it’s a true story about a real place. Here’s a good recording about the place:
www.thestory.org/stories/2013-08/legacy-home-leprosy-pati...
Here’s a bit of the review from Goodreads:
In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
by Neil W. White III
White . . . had it all . . . The problem was he didn't have the money to pay for it. So he began kiting checks [and] found himself sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Justice, it turned out, would be more than skin deep. White was assigned to Carville, a prison that doubled as a leper colony. Everything about Carville was tailor-made to make White rethink his priorities. He didn't change overnight, but as White turned his incarceration into a crusade to end the stigma of leprosy, he learned lessons in humility, generosity, and the simple transcendent beauty of the human spirit. His story is well worth reading.
www.goodreads.com/book/show/6217732-in-the-sanctuary-of-o...
Book jacket for the New Metaphysical Library no.006,
Contemporary, depending on whatever place in time you find yourself...
Chapters include: Staying on the Path, Ethics of Time Traveling, Avoid Imploding the Universe.
(oh and Olly Moss and Spacesick hold the crown for fake-retro book covers!)
The Symbolic and Metaphysical Meaning of Water - Ancestral Connections and Self-Recognition by Daniel Arrhakis (2025)
With the music : VÉRA // ⫶ somewhere other, somewhere else by INEKT
The Symbolic and Metaphysical Meaning of Water - Ancestral Connections and Self-Recognition
Our bodies are composed of 55 to 65% water, making it essential to our organism.
The sensations of real physical experiences, such as "freshness and calm" that water provides, are psychological, emotional, and sensory responses. But we also have another spiritual dimension, as a dynamic of mutual recognition, interaction, and balance.
This "spiritual" dynamic goes beyond individual psychological processing and involves a transcendent connection with something greater than ourselves, as if establishing an ancient link that takes us back to a distant evolutionary past.
The water in our bodies acts as a repository that connects us directly with the origins of life and with past generations.
Water is thus also a kind of interconnected memory that retains information and energetic patterns from a past that we record as something that is part of us and the memories of our ancestors.
This mystical perspective links water to ancestral memories and to the history and evolution of life, suggesting that memory is inherent in nature and universal, and that systems inherit a collective memory from similar past systems.
Therefore, our connection to water is not only physical and spiritual, but also temporal.
__________________________________________________________
O Significado Simbólico e Metafísico da Água - Ligações Ancestrais e Autoconhecimento
Os nossos corpos são compostos por 55 a 65% de água, tornando-a essencial ao nosso organismo.
As sensações de experiências físicas reais, como a "frescura e a calma" que a água proporciona , são respostas psicológicas, emocionais e sensoriais. Mas temos também uma outra dimensão espiritual, como uma dinâmica de reconhecimento mútuo, interação e equilíbrio.
Esta dinâmica "espiritual" vai para além do processamento psicológico individual e envolve uma ligação transcendente com algo maior do que nós próprios, como se estabelecesse um elo ancestral que nos leva a um passado evolutivo distante.
A água nos nossos corpos atua como um repositório que nos liga diretamente com as origens da vida e com as gerações passadas.
A água é, por isso, também uma espécie de memória interligada que retém informação e padrões energéticos de um passado que registamos como algo que faz parte de nós e das memórias dos nossos antepassados.
Esta perspetiva mística associa a água às memórias ancestrais e à história e evolução da vida, sugerindo que a memória é inerente à natureza e universal, e que os sistemas herdam uma memória coletiva de sistemas semelhantes do passado.
Portanto, a nossa ligação com a água não é apenas física e espiritual, mas também temporal.
Text and Image by Daniel Arrhakis (2025)
To discover that metaphysical Tree which hid
From my worldling look its brilliant vein
Far deeper in gross wood
Than axe could cut.
But before I might blind sense
To see with the spotless soul,
Each particular quirk so ravished me
Every pock and stain bulked more beautiful
Than flesh of any body
Flawed by love's prints.
— Sylvia Plath “On The Plethora Of Dryads”
In civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality.
Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge.
Thus a true hierarchy is always and everywhere preserved: the relative is not treated as non-existent, which would be absurd; it is duly taken into consideration, but is put in its rightful place, which cannot but be a secondary and subordinate one; and even within this relative domain there are different degrees of reality, according to whether the subject lies nearer to or further from the sphere of principles.
Thus, as regards science, there are two radically different and mutually incompatible conceptions, which may be referred to respectively as traditional and modern. We have often had occasion to allude to the 'traditional sciences' that existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages and which still exist in the East, though the very idea of them is foreign to the Westerners of today. It should be added that every civilization has had 'traditional sciences' of its own and of a particular type. Here we are no longer in the sphere of universal principles, to which pure metaphysics alone belongs, but in the realm of adaptations.
(…)
By seeking to sever the connection of the sciences with any higher principle, under the pretext of assuring their independence, the modern conception robs them of all deeper meaning and even of all real interest from the point of view of knowledge; it can only lead them down a blind alley, by enclosing them, as it does, in a hopelessly limited realm.
Moreover, the development achieved in this realm is not a deepening of knowledge, as is commonly supposed, but on the contrary remains completely superficial, consisting only of the dispersion in detail already referred to and an analysis as barren as it is laborious; this development can be pursued indefinitely without coming one step closer to true knowledge.
It must also be remarked that it is not for its own sake that, in general, Westerners pursue science; as they interpret it, their foremost aim is not knowledge, even of an inferior order, but practical applications, as can be deduced from the ease with which the majority of our contemporaries confuse science and industry, and from the number of those for whom the engineer represents the typical man of science.
(…)
Modern experimentalism involves the curious illusion that a theory can be proven by facts, whereas in reality the same facts can always be equally well explained by several different theories; some of the pioneers of the experimental method, such as Claude Bernard, have themselves recognized that they could interpret facts only with the help of preconceived ideas, without which they would remain 'brute facts' devoid of all meaning and scientific value.
Since we have been led to speak of experimentalism, the opportunity may be taken to answer a question that may be raised in this connection: why have the experimental sciences received a development in modern civilization such as they never had in any other?
The reason is that these sciences are those of the sensible world, those of matter, and also those lending themselves most directly to practical applications; their development, proceeding hand in hand with what might well be called the 'superstition of facts', is therefore in complete accord with specifically modern tendencies, whereas earlier ages could not find sufficient interest in them to pursue them to the extent of neglecting, for their sake, knowledge of a higher order. It must be clearly understood that we are not saying that any kind of knowledge can be deemed illegitimate, even though it be inferior; what is illegitimate is only the abuse that arises when things of this kind absorb the whole of human activity, as we see them doing at present.
(…)
One of the characteristics of the present age is the exploitation of everything that had hitherto been neglected as being of insufficient importance for men to devote their time and energy to, but which nevertheless had to be developed before the end of the cycle, since the things concerned had their place among the possibilities destined to be manifested within it; such in particular is the case of the experimental sciences that have come into existence in recent centuries.
There are even some modern sciences that represent, quite literally, residues of ancient sciences that are no longer understood: in a period of decadence, the lowest part of these sciences became isolated from all the rest, and this part, grossly materialized, served as the starting-point for a completely different development, in a direction conforming to modern tendencies; this resulted in the formation of sciences that have ceased to have anything in common with those that preceded them. Thus, for example, it is wrong to maintain, as is generally done, that astrology and alchemy have respectively become modern astronomy and modern chemistry, even though this may contain an element of truth from a historical point of view; it contains, in fact, the very element of truth to which we have just alluded, for, if the latter sciences do in a certain sense come from the former, it is not by 'evo-lution' or 'progress' - as is claimed - but on the contrary, by degeneration.
(…)
These are the two complementary functions proper to the traditional sciences: on the one hand, as applications of the doctrine, they make it possible to link the different orders of reality and to integrate them into the unity of a single synthesis, and on the other, they constitute, at least for some, and in accordance with their individual aptitudes, a preparation for a higher knowledge and a way of approach to it - forming by virtue of their hierarchical positioning, according to the levels of existence to which they refer, so many rungs as it were by which it is possible to climb to the level of pure intellectuality.
It is only too clear that modern sciences cannot in any way serve either of these purposes; this is why they can be no more than 'profane science', whereas the 'traditional sciences', through their connection with metaphysical principles, are effectively incorporated in 'sacred science'.
The ways leading to knowledge may be extremely different at the lowest degree, but they draw closer and closer together as higher levels are reached. This is not to say that any of these preparatory degrees are absolutely necessary, since they are mere contingent methods having nothing in common with the end to be attained; it is even possible for some persons, in whom the tendency to contemplation is predominant, to attain directly to true intellectual intuition without the aid of such means; but this is a more or less exceptional case, and in general it is accepted as being necessary to proceed upward gradually.
The whole question may also be illustrated by means of the traditional image of the 'cosmic wheel': the circumference in reality exists only in virtue of the center, but the beings that stand upon the circumference must necessarily start from there or, more precisely, from the point thereon at which they actually find themselves, and follow the radius that leads to the center. Moreover, because of the correspondence that exists between all the orders of reality, the truths of a lower order can be taken as symbols of those of higher orders, and can therefore serve as 'supports' by which one may arrive at an understanding of these; and this fact makes it possible for any science to become a sacred science, giving it a higher or 'anagogical' meaning deeper than that which it possesses in itself.
Every science, we say, can assume this character, whatever may be its subject-matter, on the sole condition of being constructed and regarded from the traditional standpoint; it is only necessary to keep in mind the degrees of importance of the various sciences according to the hierarchical rank of the diverse realities studied by them; but whatever degree they may occupy, their character and functions are essentially similar in the traditional conception.
What is true of the sciences is equally true of the arts, since every art can have a truly symbolic value that enables it to serve as a support for meditation, and because it’s rules, like the laws studied by the sciences, are reflections and 'applications of fundamental principles: there are then in every normal civilization 'traditional arts', but these are no less unknown to the modern West than are the 'traditional sciences'. The truth is that there is really no 'profane realm' that could in any way be opposed to a 'sacred realm'; there is only a 'profane point of view', which is really none other than the point of view of ignorance.
This is why 'profane science', the science of the moderns, can as we have remarked elsewhere be justly styled 'ignorant knowledge', knowledge of an inferior order confining itself entirely to the lowest level of reality, knowledge ignorant of all that lies beyond it, of any aim more lofty than itself, and of any principle that could give it a legitimate place, however humble, among the various orders of knowledge as a whole. Irremediably enclosed in the relative and narrow realm in which it has striven to proclaim itself independent, thereby voluntarily breaking all connection with transcendent truth and supreme wisdom, it is only a vain and illusory knowledge, which indeed comes from nothing and leads to nothing.
This survey will suffice to show how great is the deficiency of the modern world in the realm of science, and how that very science of which it is so proud represents no more than a deviation and, as it were, a downfall from true science, which for us is absolutely identical with what we have called 'sacred' or 'traditional' science. Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order-the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality-has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word 'intellectuality' the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the 'rationalist' error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.
The root of this error, as of a great many other modern errors - and the cause of the entire deviation of science that we have just described - is what may be called 'individualism', an attitude indistinguishable from the anti-traditional attitude itself and whose many manifestations in all domains constitute one of the most important factors in the confusion of our time; we shall therefore now study this individualism more closely.
----
excerpts from The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guenon
Chapter 4: Sacred and profane science
----
Dekoulou Monastery, Greece
Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 cm, 2018. ORIGINAL SOLD.
This series of paintings was inspired by the metaphysical landscapes of De Chirico. I have always been fascinated by their clear vision of the architecture, with the precise design of the shadows, almost anticipating the modern use of three-dimensional modeling software. In the way I feel, however, more introverted and almost unsociable, the outer space is transformed into a closed one, private and protected, from which the human presence is totally gone away. In those rooms then, it may happen that some strange objects and some unexpected decorations appear, suggesting that the person who lives there has overcome the lack of relationship to the outside world with the richness and complexity of his inner world.
It's the 15th day of February Alphabet Fun, and the We're Here! gang is visiting the group Metaphysical Leper Colony. The group lists hermits as admissible subjects, and this of course, is a hermit crab.
But I thought about the group name after I chose it for today's theme. Leprosy (Hansen's Disease) is no laughing matter, and it still exists in our world. There are hundreds of thousands of new diagnoses every year, and many who go undiagnosed. Leprosy is curable, not highly contagious, and most people have a natural immunity to it, but a lack of knowledge and understanding about the disease is one of the key challenges as we seek to defeat it entirely.
When I was a kid, as many of you know, I lived on a tiny island lighthouse (Race Rocks). Weirdly, the words "quarantine" and "leper colony" were commonplace for me, because we lived across from Albert Head, where the original Quarantine Station stood, and across from Bentinck Island -- a leper colony from 1924 to 1956. It is now a national defence site, where they test weapons.
Before Bentinck, the leper colony (also known as a lazaretto, leprosarium, or lazar house), was on D'Arcy Island. From 1891 to 1924, Chinese immigrants with leprosy were condemned to D'Arcy Island. It was basically a life sentence.
www.timescolonist.com/life/victoria-banished-chinese-lepe...
And in the U.S., a tiny number of cured Hansen’s disease patients still remain at Kalaupapa, a leprosarium established in 1866 on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.