Seeing things: The daimonic nature of reality

[Soul_of_Shu]

Some here may already have checked out this Essentia Foundation essay by Patrick Harpur, but I feel it warrants another mention here, just in case it has been missed, as surely it's well worth a look ... Seeing things: The daimonic nature of reality

[Soul_of_Shu]

If that whets the appetite for more of Mr. Harpur, here's a good interview with him as well ...

[AshvinP]

Some here may already have checked out this Essentia Foundation essay by Patrick Harpur, but I feel it warrants another mention here, just in case it has been missed, as surely it's well worth a look ... Seeing things: The daimonic nature of reality

Thanks, this guy is quickly becoming my favorite Essentia contributor (other than BK and Hoffman, of course) just from reading a few paragraphs of that one essay so far.

[SanteriSatama]

Haven't watched Harpur yet, but maybe this is somehow related?

[AshvinP]

If the realm of subatomic particles is a literalized image of the immanent Otherworld, the transcendent Otherworld is literalized by our picture of the cosmos, whose fantastic denizens—Black Holes, Quasars, Dark Matter—resemble the ogres of fairy tales or else the elements of some ancient Gnostic myth. Within a black hole, for instance, there lurks a singularity about which nothing can be known because all the laws of physics break down at this point. Nor can it ever be observed directly because nothing can escape from it, not even light. Since time slows to nothing at the speed of light, anything crossing the ‘event horizon’ of a black hole will (from the viewpoint of an observer outside) take an infinite amount of time to reach the centre. And so on. It is easy to see that whatever else a black hole is, it is a knot of mythic resonances, an Otherworld where as usual everything is reversed and where time is distorted. Like an archetype or god, its influence is all the more powerful for being invisible and unknowable. As a daimon in a soulless universe, a black hole can only manifest itself as a devouring Charybdis that whirls everything in its vicinity into oblivion. It is incomparably smaller than a star, but its power is commensurately greater. It shape-shifts—black holes as tiny as atomic nuclei have been proposed. It is a materialistic image of the Unknown God who dwells in the unfathomable abyss and a negative image of the One beloved of the Neoplatonists.

The modern ego’s literalizing drive means that its scientific myths have to be acted out; the Otherworld has to be turned into this world. The supernatural and magical powers of the heroes and shamans who travel through the Otherworld are mechanically approximated by our technology. Guns and bullets supply the ability to do occult harm at a distance; telephony and radio supply the ability to communicate telepathically over long distances (the telescope is a kind of second sight, a way of seeing what is happening far away); X-rays and surgery literalize the shaman’s ability to ‘see inside’ his patients and to extract (by hand or by sucking!) the cause of the disease; aircraft and rockets literalize magical flight. The search for electricity was originally the quest for the ‘light of Nature’, a mystical counterpart to the ordinary light of fire or sun which could shine suddenly in the darkest night, surrounding every visit of a god or goddess, such as the Virgin Mary, or indeed every visitation from an angel or UFO. The closer science came to harnessing it, the more its elusive volatile nature, as the alchemists say, became fixed. Its mystical properties were distilled away, leaving only the dross of ordinary light. Illumination was literalized into mere light, whose profane brightness and glare were inimical to the dim sacred light in which true enlightenment occurs.

Television’s strange power to addict us stems from its literalization of Imagination itself: we gaze enchanted at the ‘little people’ in the artificial Otherworld on the screen. Because television feeds us images which are not, as Plato would say, representations of Eternal Forms (or, as we might say, Art), we remain—our souls remain—unnourished. We crave more images, and more, in the vain hope of that repletion which only relations with an authentic Otherworld can give. Indeed, whenever technology is divorced from true imagination it always proliferates manically, and we always want more—more machines, more images, and now more ‘information’, as if this quantitative ‘more’ could fill the void; as if ‘information’ were knowledge. Hence, however useful a tool a world-wide web of information is, it will never become the world-soul it is unconsciously imitating because it is a web spun out of our own entrails. Computer technology constantly drives towards the literalizing of daimonic reality. Its ‘chips’ are little souls to animate everything from ‘smart’ toasters to bombs; its cyberspace is a fantasy Otherworld; ‘virtual reality’ a counterfeit daimonic reality. We are fooled by the cleverness of computers into thinking that we can create an Otherworld and manipulate it. But the Otherworld is not our creation—if anything, it creates us. Nor can we manipulate it—we can only be transformed by it.

Man that was a fantastic essay, especially the sections above. These correlations between the psycho-spiritual realm and the 'physical' realm will be what most idealists have a hard time accepting. I personally have a lot of hesitancy and skepticism about them. I start to wonder, how far can we really take this? Can we draw correlations between every single 'object' in the physical realm and an underlying 'psycho-spiritual' being or process? Kantian idealism would reply with a hard "NO". Hoffman's IPT model similarly implies a world of 'icons' which cannot possibly correlate to the things-in-themselves, although perhaps IPT is only dealing with sensory correlations and not psycho-spiritual ones? BK's MAL model seems much more flexible and could accommodate such correlations, since the 'natural world' is already viewed as being representative of 'orderly' excitations within MAL.

Despite my ingrained skepticism, it also seems to me that idealism necessitates a correspondence between the appearances and the represented 'things' as such. Our givens of experience in the world of conscious activity should always link back to some fundamental aspect of that world. Phenomenology and Jungian psychology pursued that path very fruitfully. And then you have Steiner's Anthroposophy which clearly aligns with what Harpur is discussing in his essay. So maybe everything from quarks and gluons to rocks and rivers and 'dark matter/energy' and black holes reveals, in our rationalistically distorted way, a fundamental insight into the noumenal reality, if we can just reframe the axioms through which we perceive and think about them.

Thoughts?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Haven't watched Harpur yet, but maybe this is somehow related?

You know you're getting old when this guy who does these artful 'Thoughts on Thinking' video essays looks to be, with his wisp of a moustache, about 16 ~ and yet still packs so much food for thought into 16 minutes. Near that age, I knew Abraxas to be the name of a Santana album, and investigated no further, since not having the 'www 'at one's fingertips would've meant having to actually step inside an uncool library. I was probably content upon first seeing the record sleeve artwork with exclaiming, "Far out man !! ... pass the joint" ... It surely was a cool album cover though.

[SanteriSatama]

These correlations between the psycho-spiritual realm and the 'physical' realm will be what most idealists have a hard time accepting.

Of course art, writing, theology etc. technology are also forms of shamanhood. "Otherworlds" mixing with 'physical' realms in the cycle of creation. What is the "hard time accepting"? Yes, sometimes it feels like we are doing hard time here on Earth. Whether "objectively" true or not, it can help to think that we chose this, to live interesting times.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Man that was a fantastic essay, especially the sections above. These correlations between the psycho-spiritual realm and the 'physical' realm will be what most idealists have a hard time accepting. I personally have a lot of hesitancy and skepticism about them. I start to wonder, how far can we really take this? Can we draw correlations between every single 'object' in the physical realm and an underlying 'psycho-spiritual' being or process? Kantian idealism would reply with a hard "NO". Hoffman's IPT model similarly implies a world of 'icons' which cannot possibly correlate to the things-in-themselves, although perhaps IPT is only dealing with sensory correlations and not psycho-spiritual ones? BK's MAL model seems much more flexible and could accommodate such correlations, since the 'natural world' is already viewed as being representative of 'orderly' excitations within MAL.

Despite my ingrained skepticism, it also seems to me that idealism necessitates a correspondence between the appearances and the represented 'things' as such. Our givens of experience in the world of conscious activity should always link back to some fundamental aspect of that world. Phenomenology and Jungian psychology pursued that path very fruitfully. And then you have Steiner's Anthroposophy which clearly aligns with what Harpur is discussing in his essay. So maybe everything from quarks and gluons to rocks and rivers and 'dark matter/energy' and black holes reveals, in our rationalistically distorted way, a fundamental insight into the noumenal reality, if we can just reframe the axioms through which we perceive and think about them.

I tend to feel much the same ambivalence ... In any case, it seems that whatever such primal noumenal ideation may be like, whatever fundamental inspirations the phenomenal representations of nature bespeak, are irrevocably lost in poor translation into our inherently limited languaging of it, such that even the most inspired poets are left with "the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao". Perhaps when one is ready to utterly die, and abandon every possible alter-mode expression, then one can once again know this primal state. But then what remains to tell anyone? You see the conundrum.

[Ben Iscatus]

Patrick Harpur's "A Complete Guide to the Soul" and "The Philosopher's Secret Fire" are wondrous. The only comparable work (perhaps even more appropriate for Americans than Brits, because of the wilderness emphasis) is Bill Plotkin's "Soulcraft". Also brilliant.

[AshvinP]

These correlations between the psycho-spiritual realm and the 'physical' realm will be what most idealists have a hard time accepting.

Of course art, writing, theology etc. technology are also forms of shamanhood. "Otherworlds" mixing with 'physical' realms in the cycle of creation. What is the "hard time accepting"? Yes, sometimes it feels like we are doing hard time here on Earth. Whether "objectively" true or not, it can help to think that we chose this, to live interesting times.

Intellectually. It's a question of whether we want to think it through carefully and have a way of relating it to others, like Harpur, or simply tell everyone "of course it's true" and move on. I prefer the former, although I get some people feel it's a waste of time and are content with the latter.