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 2 Sep 2008 @ 11:30
Sexual Identity is Basic on the Material Plane
In the past, since the beginning of modern progressive thought, it has been the case that anti-racism was the touchstone of the movement against the hatred of Difference, which is better described as discrimination and Fascism. In my last article, ”HomoRacism” I questioned this fact and put forward the idea that if we are to consider priorities it is not in fact racism which is fundamental. I put forward my personal opinion that sex, gender and sexuality are even more basic than the colour of our skin. The emergence of contradictions in the different attitudes of minorities who themselves discriminate against other minorities shows that a new and complex situation is developing. It is actually my belief that whereas the material identity that is crucial is the one outlined above, namely sexuality, the spiritual identity is something different. Specifically I believe in what Erwin Schrodinger, the famous Quantum physicist, called the “Law of Identity” that we all in our consciousness are one with God. This is the real identity which I believe will be revealed in the era of post-modernism. And this accounts seemingly for the huge importance which people are placing on questions of spiritual identity and particularly Religion. So I do think that the traditional paradigm on identity and ant-fascism has to be critically looked at and the new realities taken into consideration.
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31 Aug 2008 @ 09:19
HomoRacism : Homophobia and Racism
I’ve never really liked the terms Islamophobia or Homophobia because people don’t take these terms very seriously, even though they reflect the truth of the problems some people have with Muslims and those of different sexuality. The public consider these terms psychobabble and have always seemed to prefer more gutsy terms like racism, fascism etc. for analogous conditions. I would like to suggest that we rename the hatred of gays as HomoRacism.
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, said a while ago in defence of gays that the hatred people showed for them was the new Apartheid and the new racism. Desmond Tutu, in my opinion, is one of the greatest men alive and a beacon to all. With religion playing such a large part in this new homoracism, it is noticeable that a large number of black people are themselves the perpetrators of this new form of racism. This seems paradoxical, and to an old-fashioned liberal a person of colour could never be a racist. But this is patently true. This fact makes us look closer into the complexities of being human, and makes us question the belief held almost as a truism that racism is the basic form of fascism. Similarly anti-racism is held to be the corner-stone of Anti-fascism. The Truth is that this view is too simplistic. Fascism is a huge problem, and always has been, with Identities and the Other.
Gays have always been persecuted, just like Jews, through-out history even in societies like the Roman Empire which was completely multicultural, and where racism was unknown. At that time it was a capital offence to be homosexual, and also the Jews were persecuted on account of their monotheistic religion, because they would not worship the emperor, and not because of their race. It is my personal view that identities based on sex are more fundamental than those based on race or religion and the modern emergence of the contradictions referred to earlier confirm this fact.
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27 Aug 2008 @ 08:32
Theology of the Other
It is my basic belief that the fundamental contradiction of the human condition, our basic duality, is that we are all both human and divine. We are all human but we also partake of the nature of the divine godhead. This has been known to mystics for millennia and perhaps before that to the people who shared the Perennial Philosophy as part of their indigenous culture.
It is also my belief that it is the denial of this fact that leads to the problems people have with “the Other”. It is not just minority groups or Nature itself that represent our problem with “the Other” but essentially our denial that we are divine. It is indeed ironic that traditional “civilised” accounts of the “Fall” of man and woman portray it as a result of the “hubris” of wanting to be like God. Our “hubris” consists rather in thinking we are greater than God in our isolated individuality, cut off from ourselves, each other, Nature and the Source itself. Putting our faith in this isolated individuality, and all hopes of global salvation based on it are the two main fallacies that have to be tackled by humankind. The reality is exactly the reverse. It is the Self-conscious level of awareness which cuts us off from this knowledge of the real duality of our nature. We don’t have to become like God, we have always shared in being so, and the “Fall from Grace” is a forgetting of this basic truth. Original Sin is not thinking we are Gods, but that we are greater than God/dess on account of our isolated, alienated individuality. Our extreme individuality, narcissism, is an expression of this. All the problems which are besetting the world today from racism, war, homophobia, sexism, hatred of disabled people, all sorts of scapegoating of others, and particularly climate change all stem from this crisis of identity. Everything in the world is teaching us the same lesson concerning “the Other”. God is the real Other, and our denial of all “the Others”, within us and society, is the same thing on a different scale. More >
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24 Aug 2008 @ 15:14
This is a restatement of the classic Twin Prime conjecture in a more particular and provocative form
If you take any prime number greater than 2 and square it then take the next prime above the original one and square that,then the intervening numbers will always contain at least two pairs of twin primes.
example: 3 squared is 9 and 5 squared is 25 and between the numbers 9 and 25 you will find two pairs of twin primes namely 11,13 and 17,19
Comments appreciated
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12 Aug 2008 @ 09:13
The Truth, Denial and Fascism
According to Gandhi, God is Truth and he considered it the most important thing in his life to tell the truth and honour it when others did too. There’s nothing wrong with denying something which is false or obviously untrue. Yet everyday we witness people repeatedly denying things which every one else believes and there is something pathological in it. Often it is obvious that what they are denying is a part of themselves.
The sort of denial we are talking about here is nothing to do with telling white lies, being discreet and tactful or even being “economical” with the truth. It is rather the sort of falsehood and denial involving parts of oneself and disowning important characteristics of our basic humanity.
There is clearly a strong psychological reason why people engage in systematic denial and in fact Freud called the “Denial Mechanism” one of the most significant of the defence mechanisms with which we protect the Ego.
People deny things in this way in order to protect their ego from destruction or the fear of it. It’s that important to their psychological balance. Whatever you’re saying to them is perceived as so threatening to the fragile stability of their ego that they deny it at all costs. They deny it, avoid it, change the subject, brush it under the carpet, but above all they “exclude” it and get rid of any evidence of its existence. It’s something which they consider completely alien in the same way as they consider certain human characteristics as alien. They are completely ill-at-ease with the truth of what you’re saying, in the same way as they are completely ill-at-ease with black people, gays. women, disabled people or any of the other myriad identities that exist in the human constellation.
By now you will have realised that the people I’m referring to who engage in systematic denial of parts of themselves and who systematically destroy the human basis of their personality, are border-line fascists.
The Law of Analogy, which I’ve referred to many times in previous articles and essays, shows clearly as we go from level to level the sinister emergence of full-blown fascism.
On the level of the personality and everyday life it is the denial defence mechanism itself. At the economic level it is the denying of equal job and other similar opportunities to marginal groups. At the social level it is the literal physical exclusion of these same minorities from access to the common life, often called social exclusion. At the political level it becomes full-blown discrimination of a legal and political sort enforced by law and force, such as Gandhi fought against in South Africa and India. At the combined legal, political and military level it becomes genocide, pogroms, concentration camps and all the horrors of the totalitarian system.
Each level is a qualitative step from a border-line fascist personality to open totalitarian political system. It starts with excluding parts of ourselves we feel uncomfortable with, but at every level it is accompanied by projecting onto others, excluding others, scapegoating others. The real battle is obviously within. Only when we are at ease with ourselves will all this cease. More >
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4 Aug 2008 @ 09:07
Why is Dialectic Important
In an article a while ago I contrasted the Taoist approach to solving problems with the Confucianist one. Taoism tries to grasp the essence of anything it analyses or any problem it is trying to solve. Confucianism, on the other hand, seems content with looking at and considering secondary, superficial, irrelevant and numerous inessential aspects of a subject or thing. Occasionally this leads to a solution, but usually this is arrived at only after years of piecemeal efforts by different people. The Taoist approach often yields a quick answer to the solitary enquirer.
The Confucianist way is analytical but reductionist, it splits things into a myriad of incoherent aspects that seem to lack a connecting thread. This is the method of traditional science. It is also very anxious to eradicate qualitative aspects of the matter in favour of purely quantitative ones. As part of this it gets rid of any analysis of the problem into complementary opposites or dialectical categories.
One can say that there is almost a phobia, as yet unnamed, which people have when dealing with qualitative and dialectical angles of the problem or idea. And I will tell you why. This fear, almost pathological, of qualities and opposites is very similar to the fear of intimacy which you find in a neurotic person, usually men. Because dialectical analysis, literally, is a way into the heart or Essence of a thing. And just as many people shun intimacy, likewise many people feel very uncomfortable with the essence of anything, preferring instead all sorts of distractions, secondary aspects and irrelevancies.
The analysis of anything in terms of its opposites and contradictions is a time-honoured method of getting to the heart or essence of it, and has been part of the Perennial Philosophy for thousands of years.
Some people think that the Taoist way of solving problems always involves an incredible “Eureka” moment, akin to a moment of mystical Enlightenment, which relies on the complete grasping in one stroke, of something’s essence. It does sometimes happen like that, but often it involves the hard work of thoroughly analysing and understanding the opposites and contradictions in the thing and their mutual connections.
More >
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1 Aug 2008 @ 09:10
Dual Nature as applied to Personality
It is a mystical belief that everything has a dual nature. This can be applied to personality in a number of different ways, but the one I want to focus on in this writing is the Yin/Yang divide which is observable in most people and which represents separate states of being. This is similar to Eric Berne’s assertion in his Games Theory and Transactional Analysis of there being three distinct Ego states: Parent, Adult and Child. In fact there are almost an infinite number. It is my belief that any collection of archetypes or sub-personalities can be made the basis of a theory of personality or therapy. When dealing with the neuroses brought about by the interactions of family life, then Berne’s choice of Parent, Adult and Child is obviously relevant. From a different perspective, and there are many, we can say that there are two distinct and separate states which we can call Yin and Yang.
The Yin state is loving, generous, kind, co-operative, patient and many of the qualities we normally associate with the feminine Yin polarity. The Yang state, as I have observed, whether in man or woman, is aggressive, provocative and uncooperative and many other traditional Yang qualities which vary from individual to individual. People seem to be in one state or the other and “flip” from one to the other as the result of different things such as stress, depression, intimacy, boredom and many other reasons. Just like Berne’s Parent, Adult and Child (PAC), these states are accompanied by distinct and characteristic body postures, movements, gestures, verbal quirks, phrases and patterns of speech which are repeated. Yin and Yang can be very different and extreme, completely different opposites, and so can the behaviour which I have observed in myself and others, which corresponds to them. This view accounts for the seeming inconsistency of human behaviour, and its extremes, and suggests possible courses of action to deal with it. The alienated behaviour Berne terms “games” can also be examined from this perspective.
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14 Jul 2008 @ 09:06
My Philosophy in a Nutshell
Alienation and Integration are cosmic processes, opposite and complementary, which are manifestations of Yin and Yang, those primeval expressions of duality.
Alienation is less familiar to us than Integration, which most people feel more attracted to, as representing oneness, wholeness and totality. Alienation, however, belongs to the darker side of things and is represented by separation into parts; differentiation into individual and unique entities. It is connected to the establishing of identities. In philosophy we have the instance of it given by Hegel when he says that Spirit “alienates” into Matter. This is Spirit becoming individual, differentiated material entities. Similarly in society and psychology, “undifferentiated” young people separate themselves from their parents and society, often quite rebelliously, and forge for themselves, after great struggle and hardship, their own unique identities as adults.
In Science we have the example, similar to Hegel’s, of energy, as in the Big Bang, gradually cooling into different forms of matter, first sub-atomic particles, then atoms and molecules and finally organic matter and life forms.
In history we see the process of alienation taking place as societies and people gradually evolve over millennia to higher states of consciousness and organization. This process is uniquely connected with the form of social organization we call “civilization”. Leaving earlier societies behind civilization is a unique form. As yet a higher form has never surpassed it, though dozens of civilizations have arisen and passed away. Yet many thinkers predict that a higher form will emerge; a supercivilization perhaps which will be based on a sort of higher consciousness, variously called SuperConsciousness or Cosmic Consciousness by different mystics.
This predicted process is the opposite of the previous alienation and comprises the coming together of the whole world as a unity, in a process of integration. Put simply Integration is the reverse of differentiation or alienation, and consists of all the parts reuniting into a whole or totality.
Here we hit the vexing problem of “the Other” which is intimately connected with our status as unique individuals with a dual nature. Individual identity creates the problem of the Other, and the other within ourselves, just as Self-Consciousness creates the problems of original sin, shame etc., which hardly existed in previous (tribal/clan) societies, where people were less differentiated.
Outside is but a mirror-image or reflection of the inside. In our problems with the “Other”, and in the world there are countless different others, we are confronting, essentially, the contradiction of our finite, limited individuality versus the infinite unlimited nature of the godhead of which we are part. We are both finite and infinite at the same time. We are unique, limited individuals and also non-unique, unlimited aspects of the god-head at the same time. The almost infinite number of human identities and sub-personalities of the human condition are the bridges between these two states.
More >
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3 Jun 2008 @ 09:12
Phi, The Pentagon and Self-Similarity
It is my contention that there is just one unified knowledge, there is just one mathematics, not straight mathematics versus “mystical” mathematics, or straight geometry versus “sacred” geometry, just one science which is the union of the strong points of mysticism with the strong points of quantitative science.
To this end I am putting forward the assertion that Phi (1.61803….) is the constant of Self-similarity and that they are always found together.
I have previously shown this to be the case where we have the Fibonacci sequence and also the Pythagorean theorem ( through the use of self-similar right-angled triangles). Now I will add to this by demonstrating that the so-called “mystical” pentagon exhibits self-similarity, and that the well-known prevalence of Phi in anything connected with pentagons, pentacles or pentagrams is connected with this fact and not anything other-worldly.
Phi (1.61803…..) is a very unusual ratio and is demonstrated by Euclid in his Elements where he calls it division “in the extreme and mean ratio”. What this means is that in any straight line, if you cut it at a certain point where the ratio of the whole to the greater part is exactly the same as the ratio of the greater part to the smaller part, that ratio will be the irrational number Phi, approximately 1.61803989. Then Euclid goes on to use this line to construct a regular pentagon and the regular solids based on it. All the remarkable properties of pentagons are based on the fact that the diagonals of a pentagon cut each other in this ratio of Phi. What has been overlooked in all this is that if you draw all the diagonals of such a pentagon, then they cut each other in this ratio and they create in the middle of the previous pentagon an exactly self-similar pentagon, rotated 180 degrees, whose sides are smaller than the larger pentagon by a factor of Phi squared. This is well-known but its significance seems to be ignored. Clearly if we construct diagonals of this smaller pentagon we create a smaller one and so on ad infinitum. This is clearly a case of self-similarity as I have sought to demonstrate as the basis of Phi. I would also speculate, though this is unproven, that the expression for Phi =(1 + SquareRoot(5)) / 2 is but a specific example of a general formula which links the number of sides of a polygon, in this case 5, to the ratio of the intersecting diagonals of that polygon, whether it has 5, 6, 7 or more sides. In other words this remarkable ratio is produced by ordinary mathematical processes, which need to be explained and clarified and not mystified. The real deep mysteries in all this are self-similarity,fractals, chaos and complexity theory which as yet are imperfectly understood. More >
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23 Apr 2008 @ 09:25
Pascal’s Triangle, Self-Similarity and Phi
In maths the simple operation of adding two consecutive elements in a sequence and then iterating, which process is well-known to us in the Fibonacci sequence, leads to many of the more remarkable properties we come across in nature and mathematics. The Fibonacci sequence, as I pointed out in my last article, is based on self-similarity and exhibits the mystical number and proportion called the “Sacred Ratio”, approximately 1.618… which is an irrational number.
Now something very similar occurs in that very famous table of numbers, known to the ancient Chinese, but known to us as Pascal’s Triangle. This is a symmetrical table, with ones at the apex and at each edge, with the intervening numbers created by adding together the two numbers directly above and to either side. Pascal’s triangle has a multitude, maybe indeed an infinite number of remarkable properties. Every interesting thing in mathematics more or less, can be found in different ways in this pyramid. Fibonacci itself, can be found in sequence if you add the short diagonals. This of course yields Phi, the Golden Proportion. However, this is a bit misleading, because Phi is conspicuously absent from the other patterns you will find in this triangle. This is because if you divide any two of the numbers in the table they will be a rational fraction, not irrational. Adding different numbers together, as in the Fibonacci example, is the only way to get a sequence which gives Phi. The whole structure is based on the iterative technique mentioned above, and I suspect that this technique is a cornerstone of self-similarity, though I can’t demonstrate it as convincingly here as I did in my previous article on Fibonacci.
I believe, since Nature produces Phi all over the place, and Fibonacci sequences in the number of petals of flowers and the spirals of shells, that at an early stage in the evolution of life, in plant RNA and animal DNA, the simple iterative technique I refer to, was encoded and passed down to following generations. Thus we find Phi everywhere in Nature. Why it leads to very remarkable properties in mathematics is another issue and one I will address in a later article. More >
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