A hierophany is like a strange attractor in chaos theory - the world organizes around it in recursive self-similarity. A hierophany is historically a site of recognition of divinity in the phenomenal world - a connection to mythological time. Individual psyches and societies organize around these intense regions of awareness localized in time and space. It is in a field of heightened awareness that meaning and synchronicity become apparent. This may be the recognition of a ubiquitous connectivity. However, we may only be capable of this recognition when and where that much awareness is present. Because the experience and recognition of that connectivity may not always be available to us we may have to create a way to remember. This way can be created in a mythological story involving the deep synchronistic symbolisms of the hierophany. It may also occur in a logical or mathematical model built on axioms, in turn built upon ontological interpretations of experience into concept.
Ekhart Tolle is a man who had an experience of incredible value. A transformational, dissociative, ecstatic, sattvic, satori, samadhi, OBE, NDE, healing, orienting, hierophanic experience. Upon finding his complete satisfaction in this experience he began to tell people. Then it becomes a vision. People pick up on the way he is articulating his experience and the different ways of articulating and relating the experience become a model. This conceptual model is then a reference point to illustrate Ekhart Tolle's relationship to the cosmos. Many people find that his experiences and models reflect theirs and so they find assistance in establishing and/or discovering their relationship to the cosmos. Ekhart Tolle is now an established author and organizational force in society because he held to the integrety of his vision and found ways of articulating it with people.
In my process of developing my understanding of my relationship to the cosmos, i find conversations with other people to be something that i cannot do without. Like expressive arts therapy, the creative act of conversation (collaborative improvisation) externalizes the internal processes and images in ways that are meaningful and communicative of unconscious knowledge of the subject. In modelling, this allows one's very structures of identity and conceptual reality (not the only experienced reality) to undergo the gauntlet process of peer review. More than that, it is a participatory relational power involvement that facilitates transformation and growth. Holding a set of ideas in an open space with others allows for user driven innovation - it becomes open source. It becomes community-relevant.
What about opening up the process more? The Open Cosmology Project. Party to the Boone Community Network. Invite the community into a cosmological discussion to see who wants to weigh in on the perennial philosophy. It could consist of a Wiki of cross-referenced ideas and researches. Invite research not just speculation. Invite suggestions for categorizing and including data. Find out who's already doing it. Would a Boone-local one be relevant to Boone? Would a localized cosmology project, perhaps just scaled down, allow me to get some reflective assistance on my particular cosmology? How open would it be if it were designed to be oriented around my cosmology. And if anyone is doing it on a grand scale could it be participated in or done better? Or specifically from a different angle? Is it accessible to non-academics?
My cosmology is relevant to me because it hangs on my axioms. My experience is my axiom. My embodied self is an integration of all my influences and disciplines. And any product is somehow an integration of all those knowledges. My actions need not always be categorical and divided. It is possible to act in flow, in total integration.
When action is the development and maintenance of conceptual models, however, it is almost inevitably a categorical and divided experience. Concepts are of that nature. They correspond to structure. They are held beliefs, identities of self and other. (//footnote?//The noun-orientation of our language is systemic with divided, hyperstructural thought and general being and perception.) When the flow of reality makes holding such a structure go against the grain, we experience cognitive dissonance, the suffering of attachment.
I am quite concerned with describing the space in which entities and processes as i describe them can occur. In an omni-dimensional space change in form amounts to a change in distance. Proximity by similarity means morphology as a distance function in a non-Euclidian topology or Hilbert space. Whitehead's "extensive continuum" may help me articulate this farther. The notion of alternate dimensionalities is a good segway for the idea of an empathetic dimensionality. Annie Dillard's vision of the scarf and Dr. Kubler-Ross's white throne judgment are evidence of an empathetic dimensionality (i will unpack that later). When we perceive emotional closeness to others perhaps that is a relevant perception. (Alan Watts says we are all metaphysicians.) They are perhaps the most similar entities there are to us and so we may describe the experience of closeness in terms of morphology. And as people change we "grow apart' or "grow together", these are changes in morphology and thereby changes in distance in an omni-dimensional or empathetic space. Since the psyche is recognized as operational beyond boundaries of time and space (causality) can we suggest that psyche exists and operates in omni-dimensional space?
Rather than actual events i use entities. Even processes are entities. For a conceptual model it makes sense that we use defined objects. The use of atomistic entities allows us access to mathematical tools for description - points and dimensions.
Asking for conceptual data involves asking conceptual questions. Building a conceptual model relies on concepts as entities. They can be nested holisms, integrated processes, but in order to make a concept out of anything you must first be able to describe its boundary - what the entity is and what that says about what it is not. Boundaries are abstractions but may be relatively real. Ken Wilbur's "no boundaries" may be an extreme in process orientation and too deconstructionist to be useful. Perhaps it is an attempt to model without divisive concept but that may translate into a lack of structure. Talking about an embodied way of being may be something you can do without divided concept, but as soon as you begin to model it you are necessarily diving into divisive categorical concept creation (for the expediency of mass market media?). So, in creating my lived way of being I am indeed very process oriented. My article of faith is Trust Process. But for the practice of conceptually modelling a cosmological or metaphysical idea it makes sense to use boundaries and entities.
In the discussion of boundaries, Wilbur is very effective at showing where our physical concepts of boundaries are blurry. There are areas of crossover and ways in which the two spaces are not dissimilar at all. However there is till a perceptible boundary. Allbeit the same stuff on both sides, it undergoes an alternation in its qualitative nature across the boundary that is ontological, axiomatic experience.
As much as western philosophy has associated reason with divinity, ontological axiomatic experience must be a hierophany of conceptual reality. Intense presence can be hierophanic in a process sense. I believe there are ways to construct and relate to your conceptual model which can facilitate immense psychic energy and cosmic belonging. Cosmic belonging as an embodied integrative experience may be reflected in cosmological belonging, or an understanding and modelling of relationship between self and other. This can allow the identity (illusion) structure to mitigate the flow of the universal across the boundaries of self, allowing it to adjust qualitatively to find harmony between the inside and the outside. The CMB is synonymous and yet liminal to physical boundaries. In a sense It is the shadow compliment to physical boundaries. As the physical is externalized perception, causal, linear, and the psychic (and thereby conceptual)
i must admit that i feel that i work with conceptual material that is not linear and feels more like interacting with fields than isolable concepts until I learn to articulate the fields and then as an abstraction that more inclusive level of reality becomes available to the modelling process. But even in the most non-linear, non-localized examples of process, for the purposes of academic exercise, they are only useful to us to the degree that we can refer to them and define them. And so much of all of our perspectives go unarticulated in common language.
You can define your terms by using others terms, thereby creating a dimensional map of the relative position of your perspective on the many spectra of thought available. Each discernable mode of thought and articulated value could be abstractly entered into a topology in proximity by similarity (morphological distance function). I believe that we operate in such a space empathetically and are locatable along dimensionalities described by those points. Examples for points of thought that would describable, dimensionable, and mappable spectra for other ideas may be process versus atomistic interpretation of phenomena. Ideas and experience can be described into structure and flow (what is the liminal, contextualizing space for structure/flow? flowing structure).
begin with an axiom
I want to be humble at this and all points in the process. Although it may be so that when someone has a legitimate satoric experience there is value in it for others, that is often attempted in inaccessible language. Language itself is not forthcoming to the description of what is behind it; of what is constant and ubiquitous words fail us. You can't really talk effectively about absolutes - hence destructive postmodernism - but you can more effectively talk about real entities and processes when described between a spectrum of absolute ideals.
The knowledge formation occurs in the flavor of the mode of inquiry. A certain way of asking a question yields a certain type of answer. Asking for conceptual data requires the use of entities. As articulable concepts, processes become entities for the sake of model building. Even Whitehead, in describing process, for the sake of description had to make entities out of processes to be able to talk about them. Model building is a structural behavior crystallizing structural resources into a framework. Through attraction and aversion we build a structure intended to optimize flow, Leo's "Ahh", the subjective aim, joy, openness, connectedness, belonging in a reciprocation across boundaries between the self and the Universe.
Being "bad at life" means that you have trouble adapting to the world joyfully. Psychology must explore how stagnation in the formation of new associations results in maladaptive disorder. Being "good at life" means that you obviously belong here. Alan Watts interpreted Jesus as someone with a deep sense of comsic belonging.
the new atomism - any describable entity in a world where abstractions are relatively real becomes a dimensionless point, only given meaning by context of other points (i.e. dimensionality)
A significant amount of our experience may occur in acausal space. If external dimensionalities of time and space are the criteria for causality, then causality really does just represent a portion of our experience. If the external as well as the internal operate in synchronicity then might it be safe to assume that the dimensions of externality and therfore causility are imposed by us conceptually onto our field of view by processes of perception? Causality is an interpretation that we enforce because it is regular within a specific slice of the pie. But even in a causal situation, the participating elements and the event itself have more properties than accounted for by causality. Any actual event has the connectivity to all others that gives rise to the experience of meaning. If experience is both of the causal, the acausal, and other then experience as a category is more inclusive than either. Perhaps in the seeking to use the term Synchronicity to describe my vision, I am looking for a more semantically appropriate term, such as connectivity. Perhaps We could say that connectivity is the underlying principle that gives rise to experiences of synchronicity and meaning in time.
Maybe I'm talking about God. Huxley's God within and God without. (Ch 5) "there is a way tp reality in and through the soul and there is a way to reality in and through the world." This reminds me of your Torus model of self. "the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived" reminds me of the sort of unified ordering principle I am trying to relate. If this is not synchronicity, is it connectivity or God?
homeostasis, balance. Starting where there is opposition, synchronistically facilitate cooperation and complimentarity. This agrees across medical philosophies and therefore across cosmologies. It is relevant to the body and to society and to other meta- and micro- structres. Other than medical philosophies we can look at theories of conflict transformation, in which a method of approach is given for existing in the turbulent space between
This also plays very much into my thoughts on participation and relational power. Chi is generated on the line between yin and yang, at the site of and by the process of the co-limiting co-enabling (is Yin-Yang co-dependant or interdependant?) - by the harmonization of the compliments. The story of the rainmaker gives an example of how it is not necessarily a causal thing but a participation in the natural order.
Stagnation implies maladaptive structure.. is a commonality in all cosmologies and medical systems that i know of. In Jungian cosmology, these areas are constellated around archetypes and repel the awareness (even though they are staggeringly beautiful). In chaos theory the strange attractor is the constant point around which the patterns of the fractal are organized into flavors of self-similarity. In Eliade's cosmology hierophanies are hard to think of as stagnant, yet they are fixed in perceptions of mythological constancy. In the body, areas of tightness and inarticulation repel awareness. These are centers of stagnation and the birthplace of disease. Clear boundaries between structure and flow can be what is needed. If areas of structure and flow become too much like each other - self similarity bleedover ‑ the process is halted, there is pitiful diseased flow.
The primary task of any entity may be boundary maintenance.
In the story of the evolution of consciousness, conceptual consciousness is relatively recent, a new toy. And as a power tool or new car in the hands of an unsupervised youth i believe we have hurt ourselves with it. The statement "the mind is a better servant than master" i think refers to the conceptual area of the mind, which can be a tool of great value but also has the capacity to run away with our captive awareness. This is the training of monkey-mind. It is not to take away mind itself, but just get it to see the space in which categorization and conceptualization is contextualized and to stop it from spasmodically reacting to threats on its sovereignty. The tame elephant is a serious boone (instead of wild monkey).
So i recognize that to develop a conceptual model is to give a lot of power to the conceptual mind.
The modifier "objective" reflects a dissociative perspective. Dissociation as a reintrepretation of the relationships between entities allows for a removal of dimensions habitually imposed by perception and the development of newer and more adequte dimensional tools and values. Dissociation is how you work with dimensionality. Constructive dissociation necessitates re-association.
To create a logical axiom necessarily involves reductive interpretation. Where do we draw the first points to get it all started?
Internal dimensionalities + Proprioceptive anatomy = Proprioceptive dimensionalities? Dimensionalities of experience from different chakras or locations for the mobility of mind.
Mobility of Mind: Each actual entity or nexus is a locus of experience, as an entity. Every entity constitutes a different point of view. Remote viewing occurs from the point of view of other organisms. Dissociative experience allows the point of view of untold materials and qualities of nature. What and where we identify may be mobile along an omnidiemsional plane of adjacent or nested entities. People experience going deep into cellular and quantum levels of awareness as well as expansively embodying groups of people, the world-soul, or other more inclusive metaphysical structures and processes.
You know, a process is a way of describing structure and flow at the same time. We can also describe S/F in terms of the experience of "effortless mastery" - training hard structure that allows for an effortless flow state as a compliment.
I want to describe a structure that helps people understand the experiences that they are having in a different way. I would like to perpetuate this through academic, musical, and other authorship.
In our language noun=dimensionless point in abstraction. Each point may be a process and thereby a verb. It may be in constant relationship with other points and transforming its boundaries. It may even soon disintegrate as and identifiable entity as the boundaries are degraded.
I found some great stuff on "negentropic" processes that may help me describe my image of a hierophany of awareness which acts in complimentary opposition to entropy - the application of awareness ascribes order.
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