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by Bin-Ra » Sun Feb 24, 2019 1:02 pm
Our forbears held the assumption that Idea was creative cause.
The idea of a discrete physical Universe is a recent development of thought - that I see as embodying the achetype of the son killing and usurping the father and the reversal of cause effect - ie matter makes consciousness (idea) of its own existence.
Universal ideas are 'perfect' because they are timeless - and perfectly shared. Ie the whole in every part and all parts serving the whole.
Promethean ideas, are taken out of their true light in the sense sense as exchanging a living inheritance for the act of taking for oneself - as the basis of a collective self-exploration of partial, limited and limiting and conflicting ideas - whose generated experience provides the archetypes of not just our personality mapping to a world of threat, rival and survival, but the experiencing of Creation (non physical or timeless) in frameworks that both filter and limit - but also serve structures of development.
In some sense then I see the world as a way of experiencing 'what is' that can take on radically different meanings according to the active interpretive layer - ie through a dissociate sense of control - and subjection that mutually reinforce.
I sense that zooming into or expanding out of a fractal will never arrive anywhere 'else' but that does not negate the capacity to shift focus within idea as part of the full experience of it.
I find Frank Chester's work interesting - and your theme brings him to mind - for he not only investigates 'sacred geometry' but its organic function in terms that embrace the physical - but as an expression of embodiment of innate qualities, ratios, harmonics and transmutational structures (shifting perspectives and phase shift).
I often see the term 'explain the world' used for our forebears seeming primitive 'explanations' for what we now believe ourselves enlightened. I don't feel for the word used, so much as the term justifications.
I feel we are incapable of experiencing or seeing anything that we are not already the vibration of.
This is a correlation of thought and experience - but remember the human dissociative mind is the capacity to not know, to look elsewhere, render unconscious or redefine to terms that effectively erase or cover the true nature of anything (and therefore of everything).
From the idea of generating an experience of idea unfolding or extending its own recognition in time and therefore as an object positioned continuity - the metaphor of film frames may be useful. Object continuity is part of an infant mind's training to hold focus in 'its' world - after face recognition. I have a sense of billions of frames per second - but that is simply BIG 'n' - I haven't counted! But I also have a sense of such communications running through our cells, bodies, and environment from the frontiers of biology and physics.
Then there are 'altered states' where the 'normal' or conditioned focus of consciousness is distorted or unable to operate its filtering rules - and in such experience time of a few moments can be huge relative to extremely rich informational sensing but rarely any more integrative to the 'waking' or normal consciousness than dream experience that cannot recall what does not fit or translate to the 'physical' framework.
I have a sense that a 'loss of perfection' drives an attempt to regain it - and by inappropriate means - because as you intimate, it is not IN the physical world, rather the physical world-experience is OF it.
I feel that the undoing or correction of distortions effects an integrative experience and that this is called for in the desire to free ourselves and each other of illegitimate and destructive 'thinking' that reflects previous developmental phases that were right in their timing - from a sense of wholeness.
Nothing seems 'right' from a sense of fragmentation excepting the assertion of it (power from grievance) or the seeking of appeasement from it (sacrifice).
I quite like the term adams as a play on atoms. I believe the original represented the idea of the smallest or indivisible units or perhaps unions and the idea of Indivisibility also equated to the idea individuality.
In this sense wholeness CANNOT be divided but is always whole in any seeming 'part' or partiality.
This then suggests to me that the Original is not user-editable, but that a working copy operates a displacement mapping in imaged symbol that then acquires conceptual association or meaning.
In a work on the Idea of Progress in Ancient Greece, was an introduction to Plotinus that I felt puts this rather well.
Chapter 8, Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus from (The Ancient Concept of Progress - E.R Dodds).
extracted and tidied (from a pdf):
He (Plotinus) sees the map of reality as a complex field of forces kept in equilibrium by the everlasting interplay of two impulses, which he calls the Out-going and the Return. For the Outgoing his favourite image is that of an expanding circle, whose radii all take their rise in the pure simplicity of an unextended and indivisible point and carry outwards towards the circumference a trace of that potent simplicity, which fades gradually as the circle expands, but is never wholly lost. We may think of the continuously expanding and continuously weakening circles of ripples that you get when you throw a stone into still water - save that here there is no stone-thrower, and no water either : reality is the ripples and there is nothing else. The unitary source and the weakening of its influence in successive emanations was the common assumption of the time. But there are three distinctive marks which differentiate this Plotinian Out-going from other ancient theories of substance.
(i) It is a dynamic conception. For Plotinus all Being derives from the overspill of a single infinite reservoir offorce, a reservoir which is, in Blake's language, not a cistern but a fountain. And this initial dynamism communicates itself to all the subsequent levels of existence. The Platonic Forms are no mere static archetypes, as Aristotle
mistakenly supposed, creative potency, is the very stuff of their being. And the overspill continues in the sensible world: Nature, in Plotinus' homely metaphor, 'boils over with life'; and life is at all levels a transmission of power.
(ii) The Plotinian theory is not a historical or mythological account of the origin of the universe. For Plotinus, the universe had no origin : there was never a time when the fountain did not overflow, just as there will never be a time when it runs dry. Causation is not an event: it is a relationship of timeless dependence by which the intelligible world is sustained in eternal being, the sensible world in a perpetual becoming comparable to the 'continuous creation' in which some astronomers now believe. This differentiates Plotinism from Jewish or Gnostic creation-myths, as well as from the kind of Platonism which took the Timaeus literally. It follows that creation is not for Plotinus the result of an act of will. The fountain overflows simply because it is its nature to do so, and all subsequent creation is similarly automatic and involuntary; the higher produces the lower as an incidental consequence of its own being.
(iii) This brings me to the third of my distinctive marks: the relationship between cause and effect is for Plotinus non-reciprocating: that is to say, the higher determines the lower without itself being determined or modified by its own causative activity; it communicates its own force, in a diminished degree, to its product, but itself suffers thereby no diminution of force, or change of any kind, any more than a man suffers change or diminution through casting a shadow. This doctrine perhaps originated in the Middle Stoa, which was concerned to give God a real place in the Stoic system over against the Cosmos. But it is in any case the essential feature which differentiates Plotinism from any kind of pantheism or pampsychism. Without it, the cause must eventually be exhausted by dissipation among its effects, the creative Unity swallowed up in the creation.
If this Outgoing, this timeless outward and downward impulse, stood alone in the system of Plotinus, with no inward and upward impulse to balance it, his universe would be a domain of rigid determinism-a mentalist determinism, it is true, and not a materialist one, but none the less crushing to the individual for that. Such a doctrine could have little appeal to a world that craved above all for 'salvation', that is, for the escape of the individual from the paralysing power of Heimarmene. But the individual for Plotinus is more than the helpless product of a cosmic overflow: he is a creature possessed of will, and it is open to him to realize his true self-not by the assertion ofan illusory independence, but by a voluntary self-identification with his source, a deliberate reversal ofthe Outgoing, in a word, by a Return. This possibility is not, in theory, confined to man: we are told that it is eternally exercised by the Divine Intelligence in relation to the One and by the World Soul in relation to the Intelligence. But it is plain that the only model for such a conception is to be found in human experience. Its germ appears in the Phaedrus myth, and in the well-known passage of the Republic about the 'turning round' of the eye of the soul; and it may have more immediate antecedents in Middle Stoicism, to judge by sayings like Seneca's 'sursum illum vocant initia sua'. But for Plotinus it is the linchpin of the whole system : the value which Reality necessarily lost in the process of expansion or unfolding is restored to it again by the voluntary act of Return, without thereby annihilating the individuality which the expansive process is perpetually creating. He is thus enabled to reconcile freedom with necessity, and the reality and worth of the part with the unity of the whole.