Rocks, Water and Nietzschean Ethics.

I've been thinking about Nietzsche's "Revaluation of Values": his maxim that whatever creates strength and power is good, whatever causes weakness is bad. I think this principle is valid, as long as strength is defined in a broad sense rather than a narrow one. In particular, I would include the Taoist idea that apparent weakness can sometimes be strength; that the soft, yielding and pliable can in some situations triumph over the hard, rigid, and resistant, as water wears away stone.

I am reminded also of the Taoist theory of the elements, which contains as sequence similar to the game of "Rock-Paper-Scissors", in which the elements are presented in the order in which one element destroys or overpowers another: fire burns wood, water extinguishes fire, etc. The sequence comes round in a circle; the weakest element is also the most powerful.

Thus, an ethic based on power as the primary good need not be a crude, simplistic creed of "Might Makes Right", but instead can utilize a complex, subtle and sophisticated understanding of power as true efficacy, incorporating characteristics such as adaptation, feedback, and sustainability.

Below: A beautiful landscape in the "Rocks and Water" style by the contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Qiu Yue.

Paradoxes of Opposition

Session 1799 (Group/Chicago)

In this session, Elias deals with the concept of opposition. This is a tricky issue for me, since in my philosophy opposition, competition and conflict play a necessary and vital role in the evolutionary process. Without the contest of opposing factors, different alternatives could not be tried out against each other, and the progressive unfoldment of evolutionary selection could not occur. A certain kind of opposition also is an essential part of creative action. For example, in playing the violin, the bow must push against the string, and the string must resist the bow. Without tension and friction, there is no music. Thus, I view opposition, in the general sense, as a positive value.

Elias, however, uses the term in a specialized sense, as resisting one's own process of creation and projecting onto others or external circumstances the blame for what seems to go "wrong".This generates inefficiency, since it involves disowning and alienating part of your own Will. The Will then goes off and does what it wants to anyway, and you are working at cross-purposes to yourself. To resolve opposition, in these terms, you must take back your Will and say 'I' to it, and release the judgement and discounting which caused you to project it in the first place. In this manner, you generate acceptance and allowance.

In this session, Elias begins by asking what brings people "opposition and irritation", with the implication that this is unique to every individual. What opposes you reveals the unique contours of your existence.

Interestingly, I experienced some synchronicity with regard to these concepts. I've been using the Learning the Tarot website to keep current on my tarot skills, and the card that came up for me recently was the Five of Wands, which deals precisely with these issues. The Wands represent the element of Fire, signifying vitality, energy and aggression. The Fives represent general chaos and disruption. This card shows both the positive and negative apects of opposition: energy either being dissipated in many small hassles, or focused into a competitive endeavour.

Next, Elias speaks about the concept of "presence" and its connection with opposition:

The most common example of an individual actually experiencing their own existence and presence is generally in situations in which the individual creates some extreme uncomfortable situation in some manner. Generally speaking, pain is an excellent example of being present of your existence within yourself – be it physical pain, emotional pain or what you term to be mental pain.

Pain generates an automatic response, for it generates an intensity and in that intensity the individual automatically directs their attention to the element of pain. But in directing to the element of pain, they are also more highly aware of their actual existence. The other automatic response that follows the initial response of focusing upon the pain is to attempt to move away from the pain or to generate some action that severs the pain from their existence

If you shoot your foot, you shall focus upon the pain of the wound in your foot, and it shall probably be intense enough that your first automatic response shall be “I wish to cut off my foot!” for you generate a similar extreme in your response to the extreme intensity of the experience. You are experiencing that as an element of your existence and your presence with yourself. It is uncomfortable, and therefore the automatic response is to sever it from your existence.

First, there is an acknowledgement here of the positive value of common-sense "opposition", pain, suffering and discomfort. If nothing else, pain gives you a sense of presence, makes you vividly and unmistakably present to yourself. It makes you feel alive.

Second, notice the paradoxical nature of this effect: It brings the experience vividly to one's awareness and simultaneously induces an automatic response of avoidance, withdrawal, splitting-off. Pain is simultaneously presence and dissociation, acknowledgement and denial. In cases of extreme trauma, this can even result in a fragmentation of consciousness which can grow into a new, independent personality. This is how trauma-based multiple systems are created. (Note, however, that not all plural systems are trauma-based).

That choosing aspect of you does not concern itself with what is comfortable and what is not comfortable; it concerns itself with what is efficient and what matches the intensity of what you are presenting to yourself in information. But you are not victims and you are not out of control.

And there it is: the mystery of mysteries, Vorsehung, the Will. What the Will is in its innermost essence is, as Schopenhauer intimated, ruthless efficiency in the pursuit of desire, which by its nature generates suffering; yet, as Nietzsche understood, is also the root of all value and valuing. And we are the Will, each and every one of us. Yet, we do not know what we are, for we do not know what we are doing; we have split off and disowned that knowledge. Yet, we can use our suffering itself as a means to give ourselves (back) that information, to re-connect. And so it comes full circle: through opposition we become free, through being broken we are healed.

Elias and Schopenauer on the Will.

I've been noting the similarities between the Elias material and German Romanticism, in particular, Arthur Schopenhauer. Like Schopenhauer, Elias asserts the primacy of the Will. According to Elias (and in contradiction to various other New Age and New Thought writers), thought alone does not create reality. The primal source of all phenomenal manifestation Elias ascribes io the faculty of "attention", "doing" and "choosing" -- in other words, Will. As in Schopenhauer's schema, the Will manifests phenomenal reality via perception (Schopenhauer's Anschauung), organized in accordance with the Ten Primary Belief Systems (roughly comparable to Schopenhauer's Fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason, encompassing time, space, matter, causation, logic and the like).

It is interesting that Elias rarely uses the word "Will" itself; he refers to this function almost always in terms of action: "choosing",. Perhaps through his use of verbs he wishes to avoid reifying the Will, making it into a concrete "thing", just as he rejects Seth's "All-That-Is" in favor of the less concrete but more verbally cumbersome "Creating Universal One and Whole". Also, Elias frequently exhorts his listeners to consciously identify; in my terms, "Say 'I' to the Will." He repeatedly says, "You are attention." If you are attention, how can you pay attention? You are the doing. By substituting verbal forms for nouns, Elias encourages the hearer to verb herself, to identify self as process. This de-reification of the self is similar to that found in Postmodernism, Zen, and Taoism, but without the anti-individualistic bias of these philosophies.To be fluid process is not to be less self, less individual, but even more so -- the river which never flows the same twice.

There seems, to my perception, to be an interconnection between Elias, Schopenhauer, and the other German Romantics. Perhaps the connection is through Beethoven, a Romantic Era composer and one of Elias' foci. There is certainly a strong resonance with my own way of thinking, including the aspect of me that resonates to the 19th c.Germanic Zeitgeist,

Active Use of Inner Senses: Intuition

Each of the inner senses can be used actively as well as passively.

The active mode of Intuition is probability-shifting, or coincidental magick -- changing, adjusting and shaping the workings of chance and coincidence. The Law of Attraction and the Power of Intent are two popular ways of describing projective intuition. In this mode, you actively select future probabilities rather than merely sensing them.

The synthesis of active and passive intuition, or the midpoint between them, is what Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi called the Flow State. In this state, a person moves and acts spontaneously in accord with intuition, and the barrier between subject and object dissolves. The flow state is common in sport, dance, and other highly focused activities. Quite often it results in performance that seems extraordinary or miraculous, as when a figure skater spins on the ice with the exquisitely precise abandon of a gyroscope, or an athlete seems to defy weight and gravity, or a mountain-climber surmounts inhuman amounts of pain and fatigue to reach the summit. Not surprisingly, the flow state is also commonly found in war. It is no respecter of civilized proprieties.

When you are perfectly centered in the now, you do not think of the next moment, and so you can act spontaneously, freeing time from its linear sequence, unbound by cause and effect.

Notes on Schopenhauer 1.

Notes on The World as Will and Idea (WWI), Book 1.

Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea was first published in 1819, and its second edition in 1844. In 1963, three months before she began channeling Seth, Jane Roberts composed a piece of automatic writing with a similar title, "The Physical Universe As Idea Construction". This was to be the nucleus of the complete body of work later elaborated in her channeled and unchanneled writings.

There are some interesting parallels between Schopenhauer's philosophy and the Roberts/Seth material. Seth identifies the nature of being and consciousness as action, while Schopenhauer states that the nature of matter is action and causation, and that it, like time and space, is an idea of perception (consciousness). In a pre-Einsteinian intimation of the relativistic space-time continuum, he explains that time, space, matter and causality are all forms of the principle of sufficient reason, and that matter, or mass, is nothing other than the union of space and time. Seth explains how physical time and space flow from psychological time and space, the outer from the inner, while Schopenhauer describes time and space as categories of the "understanding", Verstand, and frameworks of "perception", Anschauung, which in German also means "intuition", "insight", "outlook" and "perspective".

The fact that all these meanings are carried by a single word in his language perhaps explains why he does not clearly distinguish between the inner and outer senses; it is often unclear whether he is referring to actual, external perceptions or to mental images. He certainly attributes things to Anschauung which go beyond mere sense-perception, such as solving physics problems and designing complex mechanical systems. The relationship between the terms is expressed thus:

"All intuitive perception [Anschauung] is intellectual, for without the understanding [Verstand] we could never achieve intuitive perception," thus implying a formal contribution of the brain to the Anschauung. In the second volume of his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer says that "perception is not only the source of all knowledge, but is itself knowledge... it alone is the unconditionally true genuine knowledge." We can interpret his use of the word Verstand to mean the operation undertaken by the brain and leading to the intuitive perception [Anschauung], since Schopenhauer tells us that "the forms underlying Verstand, the Verstand is a function of the brain." http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/1D.html

In comparison, Seth presents a detailed list of Inner Senses, which are fleshed out still further by Elias. These senses depend not upon the brain alone, but also upon nonphysical apects of the self, although they are received and processed through the brain.

Preference, Evolution and the Law of Attraction.

The Abraham-Hicks book Ask and It Is Given contains some striking passages about the role that individual preferences play in evolution:

Do not underestimate the value of your preferences, for the evolution of your planet depends upon those of you on the Leading Edge of thought continuing to fine-tune your desires. And the contrast, or variety, in which you are standing provides the perfect environment for the formation of your personal preferences. (p. 17)

Your current time-space-reality, your current culture, your current ways of looking at things -- all of the things that make up your perspective -- have evolved over countless generations. In fact, it would not be possible to retrace all the desires, conclusions, and perspectives that have resulted in your unique point of view right here and now. (p. 30)

According to Abraham, therefore, preferences are evoked by the environment, by conditions of variety and contrast, which generate uniqueness of perspective and viewpoint. These individual desires manifest new realities, and continue the expansion of the universe.

This closely parallels evolutionary biology. Preferences are themselves evolved, and they play a role in further evolution. The environment selects for preferences which aid survival and reproduction. Animals have evolved preferences for various factors such as food, location, and temperature. One of the most important types is mate preference, because it directly influences which genes will be passed on. There is the rather strange fact that animals can prefer things which do not yet exist. For example, female fish of a species related to swordfish prefer males with swords (even artificial ones), even though their own males are swordless. The species that evolved swords may have done so through sexual selection: males with swords became fathers because the females liked them better -- and the females wanted swords on their mates even before the males had them!

(If Sigmund Freud ever incarnated as a fish, he might have some odd things to say about this situation.)

Looking at it in Vitalistic terms, the fish are using the Law of Attraction, imagining (in some dim, instinctual fashion) the realities they wish to manifest. Seth says that plants and animals dream themselves into being. The dreaming is the source, and the seemingly random mechanism of natural selection is the means through whch it manifests.

For humans, our preferences are also shaped by heredity, as well as by environment and learning. The hereditary component represents cumulative genetic selection over many generations, while the learned component encompasses personal experience and what we absorb from culture. Our experiences are also determined by choice. Our preferences, in turn, become the basis of further choices, the means of selection of future realities -- and so it comes full circle. Our selection is a part of Natural Selection. And, since we have conscious minds, we can be consciously selective about what we select. We can even, through choice, shape our own preferences, cultivate new desires and extinguish old ones. This gives us enormous leeway and flexibility in creating our reality.

In a Vitalistic sense, the Law of Attraction applies on every level. The creative Will within the environment itself, the Platzgeist or Place-Spirit, manifests itself as the selective forces which shape Life's evolution. The preferences within individuals, which in turn shape and select the environment, are manifestations of this same Will. The desire of the individual and species draws forth the factors needed for future growth. And so do we and the world coevolve, woven in a web of desire, attraction and joyous striving.

The Selfish Gene and the Nondual Self.

I finished Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene a while back. It confirmed many of my previous insights, and provoked new ones. One interesting thing about selfish gene theory is that it calls into question the nature of the self.

Indeed, "the" self may itself be a misnomer. The standard usage in the West is to define self as single, discrete and unified: You either are or are not something. Yet, biology calls this into question, not only for other living creatures but for our own selves as well.

Biologically, self and other are not a dichotomy but a continuum. The more genes that two or more organisms, or pieces of protoplasm, have in common, the more closely they are related, and the more they will act as if they share a common identity. Some well-known examples of this are kin-selection resulting in altruism between kin, even to the point of self-sacrifice; the hive-minds of the social insects; asexual lifeforms which reproduce by budding and fission, and for which reproduction is indistinguishable from growth; clonal organisms which form identical duplicates; and the incorporation of endosymbionts, such as the mitochondria in our cells, into their host organisms. An organism itself is a colony of individual cells. Each of these illustrates a different way in which some degree of common selfhood is distributed among multiple organic forms, multiple bodies, and multiple lives.

Viewed through a biological lens, selfhood is a "fuzzy set". Self shades gradually into other through degrees of relatedness, which are determined by shared information content -- genes and other replicators. (From a Vitalistic standpoint, one can also speak of shared will and intent. I will expand on this later.) In this sense, biological identity is cladistic: formed of interconnected clusters.

"Clade" means "branch" or "cluster"; in biological science, Cladism is a system of classifying organisms in terms of relatedness and lines of descent rather than in fixed, hierarchical categories as in the old system of Linnaean Taxonomy. I shall employ the term in a more general sense, to refer to the overall concept of identity as composed of partially overlapping clusters of information, energy, and will. In the Cladist vision, individuality is not a mere illusion; the information patterns which compose self are real, particular and unique. But self is, for all that, neither discrete nor atomistic; it is fluid and without fixed boundaries.

Here is a notion of self-identity which is not bounded by the skin, nor limited to the conscious ego. How does this relate to traditional concepts of nondualism, as in Eastern mysticism?

The concepts are similar, but not quite identical. Nondualism is generally seen as an absolute, rather than a matter of degree. Things simply are nondual, not more or less so. It is often expressed in paradoxical language such as "not one, not two", or "the sound of one hand clapping." By contrast, nondiscrete identity is a matter of degree and percentage. You can overlap with something a little or a lot, and with some things more than others.

Putting it metaphorically: duality is the sound of two hands clapping, nonduality is the sound of one hand clapping, and nondiscreteness is the sound of one-and-a-half hands clapping.

Are these two views incompatible? Not necessarily. They can be seen as belonging to different levels of reality. In Kashmir Shaivism, there is a graduated series of states or phases called tattwas which mediate between pure unity and duality. In the "triple-decker" cosmos of the Integral Paradigm, a similar collection of phenomena occupies the intermediate level. the Subtle plane, realm of the soul and psyche. Plants and animals have their own equivalent of this, as varying expressions of conscious Life- Force. Elias and Seth both describe consciousness at this level as organized in complex, clustered structures, analogous to lines of biological descent, called essence families or families of consciousness.

Even on the conscious level, it is not uncommon to have intermittent experiences of partial nonduality, and some people experience it frequently as a natural state -- for example, those who identify as median/ midcontinuum. Elias describes a similar concept which he terms dispersed essence. As humans become more open to alternate levels of consciousness, we will no doubt all gain more flexible, open and free notions of selfhood.