DISQUS

postlinearity: Science and the Problem of Subtle Energy

  • Guest · 11 months ago
    Gregory,

    You suffer the frustration of observing the social media world a bit too close to the monitor some times, but other than that you are an essential element of this place.

    You could not have put it better than the above. Let me point out a few supporting items and natural follow-ups to this gnosis:

    1) The stance in nature designed to solve this problem is the female human being. Men tend toward linearity more than women, and yet women do not (always) fall into linearity to resurrect their man. They observe silence, knowing truth speaks louder, or they engage in service of an intuitive, surprising, original and unique nature which mystifies, distracts, usurps, solves. This is our mode today relative to mechanistic serial hyper-masculinity. I mention what I did not to single out women as "only" having this, or men not having it. I only mean it is native to women primarily, and for men it is an additional effort as we start from a different impulse.

    2) Arguing the assumption is useless as you said. But to avoid watching at the monitor very closely with critique, oh, say on twitter, it is important to give the mind an alternative. This is not to displace meditation, but to mention that there are times when it is impossible. To fill that gap, we must see to it that we lead the charge into this female mode of being I mentioned. Your voice is already at work in this direction. As we follow the model of the dedicated wife, we build up the man and no incompetence in a man can out wit a true woman.

    3) Calendrics widens the gap. We must push forward into a perpetual reminder of universality. The @kincompass bot, and many www.kincompass.com tools and other such synchronization means are simple to implement, even non-issues, but they free us from materialistic presuppositions. When we mark time by orbits of planets around stars, we are in the same mental area as scientists and material reality. This is not to say one is evil nature and the other is spirituality and subtle, that being "good." I only mean there are these two focuses. We need both, but we must only "look" to one. As we look to spiritual calendrics, science will be forced to move too, because we are the scientists.

    4) Unsymbolized truth is the final and pivotal piece in the game of change. You go into language and I agree on the premise that semantic maps bind us. To overcome that, we are approaching a new angle on communication which uses both sides of the brain. It communicates in universes, galaxies, and solar systems. I will show you a demo shortly. That is the saving grace for both information systems and humanity in my view, because it removes excess that is set to be fatal right now. When communication on a level of angels is possible for man, heaven will be impossible to hide.

    So it is a gender thing, metaphorically. And guess who has the kid?
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    shakti, consciousness, kundalini, are all feminine in the indian world .... they have a great festival, navaratri, nine days and nights of goddess worship, and covering 9 chakras, icluding two above the head ...

    as to sexual intercourse, it is the woman who initiates the man into the realm of multi-orgasmic experience, which is a direct doorway into the subtle body, in terms of abiding there, living from there ...

    that is just my response to your first point ... let me read the rest :-)

    thanks
  • madpotter · 11 months ago
    My husband the science writer uses mojo to represent the energetics you describe in partial oblivion to prana, shakti, chi and other eastern references to the subtle body. Nice to find your new blog, Gregory, Hope you stick with this one. :)
  • madpotter · 11 months ago
    his partial oblivion, not yours. ;)
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    what are we going to do about those scientists? ... the funny thing is, they are the ones with the limited beliefs ... yogis understand them perfectly, and they haven't a clue about yogis .. oh, well, time, and any way the river is moving so fast now, they will have to adjust ...

    enjoy
  • madpotter · 11 months ago
    the doubt, the skepticism, all part of it... they have to see to believe. well, they better get ready for the big unveiling, huh? :)
  • tweetip · 11 months ago
    With ten years of work, 'Now we are discovering things! Watch Out'. Technologists, not scientists, are trying new ways to perceive collective consciousness.

    Here's our art :) using tweets - http://tweetip.us/lk8j4
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    what does this mean on that site? ..

    "12/30/08 22: 05:00 After the Mumbai event, we decided to tweet more of our internal markers to our @tweetipFH twitter timeline. This has worked well. But we also stopped twittering headlines of Events. This has failed. Our current status is confused. The next few days will help us determine how fast the sand pile is building."

    (hehe, at first i was looking for art)

    data mining in hindsight, that is a cool concept, and machine/algorithm doable ...

    but i feel dumb, what is that site trying to do?

    aggregation, that much i can see ... and some categories ..

    but since i am actually and truly dumb, what is the 25 words or less pitch on what that site is doing, please? and the link to paul saffo is nice ... and the bits quoted from my art video ... :-)

    what are you guys, geniuses or something?

    enjoy, gregory
  • tweetip · 11 months ago
    gregory asks "what are you guys, geniuses or something?"

    just something :)

    The sand pile refers to complexity theory - http://tweetip.us/lk9u7

    Tweetip algo's tag tweets as a 'blink' - subtle flowing energy of 140 chars - nurturing discovery of novel usage when randomly mixed. Within many messages can be one message forecasting future Events.

    Like this - http://tweetip.us/lk6y4
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    that wordle is interesting ...

    you guys must know about this, right? http://brainpaint.com/globalbrainpaint/ ... and there is another collective consciousness experiment going on for a decade, will try to find it
  • tweetip · 11 months ago
    Thank you. The Princeton EGG project uses random bits, we use random words. Our goals are very similar - quantifying a feeling.
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    this one, the global consciousness project .. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
  • Shefaly · 11 months ago
    Gregory

    Whilst I agree on the need for more systems thinking - I am also a proponent of cross- and multi- disciplinary thinking rather than narrow approaches - but I have to disagree with "Science rejects the unprovable". It is more accurate to say that "Whatever remains unproved, Science holds it hypothetical until evidence comes along". It may be that we are limited by the methods of collecting evidence but that is not the same as rejection. Being intrigued and curious are also not the same as rejection. Most western scientists are, in private, curious about many things but they do not express that publicly for fear of being branded crazy. By people who do not have a systems thinking, perhaps?
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    you are right. i took some blows on friendfeed from scientists who really do practice the rejection of the unprovable .. and was forgetting that not all are, and certainly the basis of science is not, like that ...

    Now ... the most interesting and revealing thing in your note should be an entire book ... "Most western scientists are, in private, curious about many things but they do not express that publicly for fear of being branded crazy." .... why the hell IS that?

    because so much that is destructive happens because of that .... in fact, let's do a whole conversation about this somewhere ... you can be "john doe" if need be :-)
  • Shefaly · 11 months ago
    It is not just about the fear of destruction but because funding sources/ agencies are remarkably conservative. At least in the UK, path-breaking stuff - especially multi- and cross- disciplinary research - is rarely funded. In the US, it is more common for such work to be funded but it is also relatively nascent as a phenomenon. The few scientists who express opinions about controversial subjects are often rejected by the establishment (e.g. see Professor Colin Blakemore, FRS*, a superb scientist snubbed year after year in the Honours Lists because he defends vivisection vigorously). There is a huge price tag on being iconoclastic. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

    *Fellow of the Royal Society
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    this is one of several reasons i consider scientists to be fundamentalists, exactly like that word is used for religious fundamentalists ... mmmmmman, they do not like to hear that at all ... :-)

    rupert sheldrake, and others, have talked about this too ..
  • Shefaly · 11 months ago
    That Blakemore does not get his due recognition is not the scientists' fault. They have expressed their faith in him by electing him Fellow of The Royal Society (that is the highest peer honour for scientists in the UK; time and again the Royal Society has refused to admit Susan Greenfield, a brain scientist who has nonetheless been made 'Baroness' so welcome by establishment despite her iconoclastic ways but not by the Royal Society; may be it is that despite being a scientist, she is blonde, and wears short skirts and red lipstick!).

    Every system/ bunch of experts has its biases. One has to look at the sources of those biases. This applies to scientists as well as scientist-bashers.

    It is easy for all to preach _others_ to keep an open mind but we all must start at ourselves :-) No?
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    and thanks for the comment, i forgot to say ...
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    Sometimes, no, oftentimes, I feel I am warring within myself based on the feminine and masculine energies. My schema, ego, or identity seems to be masculine, that is like the map of myself, who I see myself to be in the world. However, the person I've chosen to be, an artist, a writer, relies on feminine subtle energy.

    I'm often at odds with my productive male side, the side that says I need to do this in order to succeed; and my female side which says to relax and open up and forget what I think I know. To create artwork, you cannot be driven, you must be open, to really flourish you need to be totally playful and open, and willing to suspend the masculine faculties. This I believe.

    Subtle energy exists; but we cannot say what it is; it eludes language which is why science beginning with the refutation of a spiritual world and down cannot wrap its schema (masculine) around the feminine world of the senses.

    There is a great metaphor/scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The novel is a portrait of a family and the father is a philosopher. He sits in his study all day, trying to work out his own abstract metaphysics. He is caught in the logical extreme and the narrator uses the metaphor of an alphabet. That's how he sees his inquiry. Here I found the section:

    "It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless gainst a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it to them. But what after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters to the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by the man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R-- Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R . . ." He braced himself. He clenched himself.

    This perfectly illustrates the masculine, linear, rational, logical mind. Woolf understood post-linearity perhaps better than any 20th century author.
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    lovely writing from her, thanks much for the post ... and she probably illustrates the difficulty of trying to resolve seemingly conflicting opposites in our being, using mind - considering that she put rocks in her pockets and walked into a river, quite a nice metaphor for a solution, in fact ....

    because in the river, meaning in consciousness, there is no conflict, unity contains duality quite easily ..

    meditation is great for integrating opposites, starting with the brain hemispheres!

    great post from you .. and is that your art blog? http://www.escapeintolife.com/pages/art.php with a title perfectly appropriate to your point here ... i like it ... you can see my art here ... http://www.gregorylent.com

    thanks so much for your time, enjoy
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    Escape into Life is a literary arts webzine, combining the power of both literature and the arts. The page you're looking at is dedicated to Outsider Art; I'm always looking for submissions!

    Look forward to continuing our healthy debates . . .

    Just looked at your site . . . Gorgeous work! Does each piece take a long time?

    Chris
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    too dang long :-) ... but when it flows, what is time anyway?
  • Shefaly · 11 months ago
    Are you familiar with the concept of Ardhanareeshwar in Indian mythology and philosophy? I found a simple reference on the web. Not complete but gives you a rough idea:

    http://www.jinendra.org/glossary/?view=1&gid=353

    Alas, Woolf has less depth than she may be credited with. Her depictions of male protagonists are inspired by her father, who was aloof and whose attention and approval she clamoured for all her life in an odd love/ hate relationship :-/
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    ah, ardhishwara is a very great and very well-known symbol ... and like all the gods in india, a symbol of the Self .... i could talk a long time about this concept .. in lalita shashranama, almost the last verse, i bow down to the form which unites shiva and shakti ...

    wholeness ... this is what post-linear thinking is all about ..

    thanks again ..
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    I find it interesting that you find Woolf overrated . . . what's the basis for this?
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    ah, not me, the reply is to shefaly above ..
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    i meant to direct my comment to Shefaly
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    I find it interesting that you find Woolf overrated . . . what's the basis for this?
  • lethe · 11 months ago
    woops
  • geneveive · 11 months ago
    Maybe a change in western attitudes to subtle phenomena will come / is coming from broader cultural changes.

    Science has been so successful at what it does that it's been given special status in the west as a means of knowing that is believed superior to other means of knowing.

    And as far as i can tell, its territory has been exploring what can be known, directly or indirectly, by the senses. And I'm not sure how you define subtle phenomena,.........but I'm thinking of phenomena that are not detectable by the senses. And if those things are so, (and they may not be), then maybe science doesn't see this as its territory of investigation ... ...(the denial of such possibilities is another story, sure).

    And change may come through society giving more value to the methods of enquiry which already exist for exploring subtle phenomena - I'm thinking meditation, some kinds of artistic enquiry, there's probably more.... If these practices were given more respect as means of knowing, the 'legitimacy' of the subtle would grow and our understanding of it would likely develop.

    And then maybe if the whole culture opened up to the subtle in a conscious way, science would follow, and who knows what would come .......
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    nice observations ..

    the senses themselves exist at subtler levels, and consciousness has subtler levels, is one of the understandings in eastern cultures, especially those in which spiritual practices evolved.

    real? dunno. experience-able? yes. imagination? according to science, probably .. to yogis, maybe not:-) ...

    my feeling about science, they could go a bit faster, by allowing a bit of the eastern viewpoints into their models...
  • geneveive · 11 months ago
    thanks for opening up such a great area for discussion. About the senses existing at subtler levels......do you think the subtle is a discrete thing interacting with the gross? or are the two on a kind of continuum? with our minds just finding it useful (?) to make a distinction about the different ends of that.
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    i agree with your whole statement :-)

    there are some specific terms in sanskrit for different layers, such as sukshma sharira, karana sharira (subtle body, causal body), which could lend itself to the interpretation that there are discrete levels .... and just because the mind uses words, and words are a bit chunky, and mind is a great categorizing machine, making differences in order to do its job, lets say discrete is how it is....

    and experientially, let us say continuum, from gross to subtlest ....

    perhaps this is why the metaphor of a path has been so popular, continuous journey, milestones along the way ....

    and why it is at first gently suggested, and then later insisted upon, that the mind is not completely useful in getting where we are going ....

    one thing about meditation, it expands things in such a way that seeming opposites become reconciled ...
  • geneveive · 11 months ago
    thanks.

    sorry you're thinking of retiring the blog
  • Duff · 11 months ago
    Great article. I've been thinking lately about the use of the word "energy" in reference to chi/kundalini/etc.

    "Energy" is a word that refers primarily to physics, as is "force" as in "life force energy." By using the metaphors of physics, we subtly reinforce the materialist reductionist paradigm, the idea that all of the universe is reducible to physics. This pisses off scientists--because one can't measure "subtle energy"--and confuses the matter. "Subtle energy" is not objective...but then again, neither is physics, as "objectivity" continues to be revealed as being a myth.

    What are some alternative words for "energy" which capture the subjective reality of this phenomena? Well, we could simply use chi, kundalini, n/om, shakti, etc., or we could use English words like vitality, aliveness, or even *gasp* spirit.

    Personally I think we should strongly advocate for subjective language like spirit instead of attempting to fit into the fundamentalist materialist paradigm of physics, thus solving the problem of subtle energy by rejecting the frame of the discussion.
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    wow, i love this from you .. "By using the metaphors of physics, we subtly reinforce the materialist reductionist paradigm, the idea that all of the universe is reducible to physics." and what follows ...

    that should be an entire post right there ..

    i was thinking about radio waves, prior to radio receivers, (would they have been "real" to the scientific mind?) and growth in the subtlety of instrumentation ...

    a lot to consider in your great comment, language, conceptual systems ..

    let me say thank you for this, right now, and then maybe revisit it later...

    wow, again
  • Duff · 11 months ago
    Most people in our materialist culture tend to want to defend their interior experience (which is more direct) with the indirect knowledge of science, saying things like "eventually science will catch up and prove that subtle energy/mind/love really exist." But I think that's backwards.

    I say, "eventually science will catch up--and it is beginning to catch up--and realize that the whole notion of objectivity is flawed, that there is no observed without an observer, and that therefore subjectivity and interconnectedness is more primary and real than this abstraction called objectivity."

    If science finds ways of detecting subtle energy, that's great. But science can't even detect or understand love! Most psychological science still believes that mind is an "epiphenomenon," a myth created by neuronal activity. Are we to argue that love is biochemical and neurological to justify our care for each other? Seems ridiculous to me! It's time to say my experience is real, dammit, and I'm not justifying it through that-which-can-be-measured.

    Measuring is also good to not get too carried away, which is why I appreciate people like Dean Radin who are looking into the effectiveness of things like distance healing/prayer, psychic phenomenon, etc. Integration of mind and heart is very important so that you don't make an ass out of yourself! :)
  • gregorylent · 11 months ago
    i agree with you ..

    thanks much,

    gregory