John Grieve

John Grieve 2008-10-01T08:40:23Z User 532 http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/ OrgSpace NewsLog Consciousness, Mind and Information

Consciousness, Mind and Information

Mystics and indigenous cultures talk of a cosmic shift in consciousness occurring in the early part of the 21st century. The Mayan calendar even gives a date for this process late in the year 2012. It is appropriate then for me to consider the subject of consciousness and see if any light can be shed on it and these events.
As you may recall, Hegel spoke of the process whereby Spirit “alienates” itself into matter and then develops, through many forms, to return to itself in Mind. In an earlier article I proposed a “translation” of these terms into scientific ideas. Thus for Spirit we have Energy, and matter remains as matter, with the added idea that it is frozen or alienated energy or spirit. Also matter is discrete, individualised whereas Spirit is continuous and undifferentiated. So also we imagine is energy continuous and undifferentiated. Now when we arrive at the third term of Hegel’s triad, namely Mind, we reach the very thing we are concerned about today. For Mind, in an alternative formulation is the same as Consciousness. The consciousness of the godhead. In that essay “Mind Identity” I put forward the idea that Mind is translated by the scientific and journalistic term “Information”. Hence consciousness and information are related in some way. What I am suggesting is that just as matter is a discrete form of energy, both of which find their synthesis in “Mind” or consciousness, in the same way information is both individual, discrete bits of data/information, and also continuous like a field or wave. In other words information is the union of energy and matter in the same way as Consciousness/Mind is the union of Spirit and Matter.

Now there are many issues connected with these ideas. Indeed, everything I have written about, such as identity, and Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity”, alienation, archetypes and sub-personalities, are all connected in various ways with this.
Information is usually regarded in the context of computers and networks. And for many years there has been information science. But we don’t have to be specialists in this field to know that it is relevant to our present inquiries. Just looking at the events of the past few years is enough to confirm the belief that information is central to what’s happening and about to happen in the world. In this country (England) there have been numerous examples recently of lost or stolen information/data concerning thousands of people and their identities. This never used to be an issue but it is now. Also, it is said “information wants to be free” which puts it on a par with spirit which also tends to greater and greater freedom. Money is becoming less and less material and more and more digitalised and ethereal and spiritualised. Indeed it is becoming electronic information. Money has been proliferating for a long time at an uncontrollable rate and so has data/information. In the realm of culture the Matrix movies portrayed consciousness as pure information many times. All this, and the growing dominance of the information class, the media, suggests to me that information is the springboard by which we will all reach consciousness and identity with God.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000038.htm 2008-10-01T08:40:23Z 2008-10-01T08:40:23Z The Other Erwin Schrodinger

The Other Erwin Schrodinger

I was recently reading a small book by Physicist Erwin Schrodinger, noted for his Nobel prize and contributions to Quantum theory and the paradox of “Schrodinger’s Cat”. What is not well known is his mystical approach to certain things for example his concept of “negative entropy” to explain some unique characteristics of life itself. Writing over 50 years ago he states that classical physics has reached an impasse and has to change its ideas in some ways, in order to be able to advance further. The first way is to adopt what he calls the “Law of Identity”, which he borrows from the Hindu religion. This asserts that we all share in our consciousness in the consciousness of God. Schrodinger sees the question of whether this involves souls as an unnecessary complication, and seems not to believe in them. Linked to his view of consciousness is his profound belief that the split between Subject and Object, central to Classical Science, is an illusion. He believed that it is really a split in our minds, in our consciousness, that creates this illusion of a separation between observer and object. His views were remarkable at that time and are still cutting-edge today. I completely agree with his analysis and add here a few thoughts of my own. Recently I have been thinking and writing about “the Other” and it is clear to me that the split between Self and Other, which is the cause of so much trouble in the world, is a split in consciousness similar to what he describes. Self/Other is a false dichotomy, an illusion, on a par with that between Observer and Observed. It is caused by a split in our consciousness, our way of looking at things, and I will now elaborate why.
Schrodinger’s “Law of Identity” says that we all share, in our individual consciousness, in the consciousness of God. This is the Hindu view and that of many mystics. But most world religions resolutely deny that we are part of the Godhead and consider it blasphemy to say this. Yet it is this very same denial, I believe, that is the cause of this split in our consciousness that leads us to create “the Other” and “the Object”. First we deny that we are like God, then we start to perceive God as the Other, then we perceive parts of ourselves as other, then Nature, Woman, Gays, Blacks, Muslims and so on. This condition is called Alienation. In these circumstances the alienated Self, the Ego, itself splits into countless inner others. To the alienated, everything is other, nothing is self. In reality everything is God, but alienated people cannot see that. One consequence of this estrangement from God, and ourselves, is that we try to destroy everything we see as other. But this is impossible. The other is everywhere. It is like our shadow. In attempting to destroy the other all we do is destroy ourselves. All the environmental problems we have, such as climate change, come from this unconscious desire to destroy the other, and Nature is a huge other. The remedy for this malaise and all such, is to accept that there is no Other; Everything is Self, Everything is God.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000037.htm 2008-09-09T08:58:40Z 2008-09-09T08:58:40Z Sexual Identity is Basic on the Material Plane

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000036.htm 2008-09-02T11:30:49Z 2008-09-02T11:30:49Z HomoRacism

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000035.htm 2008-08-31T09:19:29Z 2008-08-31T09:19:29Z Theology of the Other

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000034.htm 2008-08-27T08:32:48Z 2008-08-27T08:32:48Z Grieve''s Twin Prime Conjecture

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]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000033.htm 2008-08-24T15:14:29Z 2008-08-24T15:14:29Z Truth, Denial and Fascism

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000032.htm 2008-08-12T09:13:45Z 2008-08-12T09:13:45Z Why is Dialectic Important

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.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000031.htm 2008-08-04T09:07:24Z 2008-08-04T09:07:24Z Dual Nature as applied to Personality

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.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000030.htm 2008-08-01T09:10:13Z 2008-08-01T09:10:13Z My Philosophy in a Nutshell ---- Part 1

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.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v532/__show_article/_a000532-000029.htm 2008-07-14T09:06:36Z 2008-07-14T09:06:36Z