Category: Re:Creation

rePatch ·19

Creation and transformation

If the natural world is ‘the primary revelation of the divine’ or ‘primary scripture’ as Thomas Berry says (1988, 105), then language is the secondary scripture (and written/printed texts are tertiary). However, many of the mystical branches of scripture-based religions have seen this order in reverse.

In the Kabbalistic view, the Torah existed before the physical world, which was created by means of the Word. The Qur’án has been likewise regarded by Muslims as ‘uncreated,’ giving it metaphysical priority over the created world. For Sufis such as Baha al-Din (father of Jalal al-Din Rumi), ‘all creation came into being with God’s command, “Be,” so that the universe is speech, created by a single word’ (Lewis 2000, 90). Consequently it makes sense to organize one’s whole life around reading and meditating on the Qur’án or Torah, as the case may be. ‘Always busy yourself with the word of the Koran and know that the meaning of the whole world is in that one word of the Koran,’ advised Baha al-Din (Lewis 2000, 87). Kabbalists like Abraham Abulafia took the compression of meaning even further, ‘focusing on the pure forms of the letters of the alphabet, or on the name of God’ (Matt 1995, 12). This for them was the way of renewal or recreation, of reunion with the creative power.

Today we could read this practice as metaphorically affirming the semiotic nature of the universe. Spirit is significance itself; and as Peirce put it, physical matter is ‘effete mind’ (CP 6.25) – a portion of original Minding which has fallen so far into habitual patterns that its original spontaneity is almost completely exhausted. Human mentality, with its symbolic media and extensions enabling foresight, planning and conscious decision-making, is a specific refinement in concentrated form of more universal (larger-scale, slower, vaguer) mental processes such as evolution (Bateson 1979) or development (Salthe 1993).

The cosmic mind impersonates itself in each of us, and we return the favor by personifying it as God, who is Author of the universe just as we author our own conceptions. The danger here is that we may wrap ourselves up in our own creations, be they conceptual or technological, and thus cut ourselves off from the more-than-human reality around us. The glories of the biosphere itself may come to seem a mere distraction, which we shut out with an artificial cocoon – an ‘Abominable Corruption’ of our nature, as Thomas Traherne put it (First Century, 31).

Leaving the cocoon is becoming homeless in the sense honored by religious traditions (especially Buddhism: Snyder 1990, 103 ff.) – leaving behind the temptations and complications of social life, especially urban life, and thus becoming free to venture into the more-than-human world. ‘“Homeless” is here coming to mean “being at home in the whole universe”’ (Snyder 1990, 104).

Can such a metamorphosis take place at the higher scale of a human community? Elisabet Sahtouris argued in EarthDance that the process is already under way, as bioregionalism begins to replace the global culture of extractive capitalism:

Bioregionalism is consistent with grassroots democratic movements that are cropping up all over the world, creating new local self-sufficiency systems with their own currencies. From huge housewives cooperatives in Japan to sustainability movements in the hi-tech Silicon Valley world, ordinary people are taking control over their lives into their own hands and practicing local democracy.

Many people wonder how long we have to turn things around. It is really not a question of some critical turning point, but of nurturing more viable systems even as the old ones decay. One metaphor for our changing world is Norie Huddle’s story of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly. After consuming hundreds of times its own weight daily as it munches its way through its ecosystem, the bloated caterpillar forms its chrysalis. Inside its body, new biological entities called imaginal discs arise, at first destroyed by its immune system. But as they grow more in number and begin to link up, they begin to survive. Eventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails, its body goes into meltdown and the imaginal discs become the cells that build the butterfly from the spent materials that had held the blueprint for the butterfly all along. In just this way, a healthy new world, based on the principles of living systems, can emerge through today’s chaotic transformation.
— Sahtouris 1999 (Kindle edition)

(This is a transformation of a post originally published in September 2015.)

Good for

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places people reject and so is like the Tao.

— Tao Te Ching 8 (Feng/English)

The same text translated by Red Pine:

The best are like water
bringing help to all
without competing

A comment on this text by Wang Pi (included in Red Pine’s edition, p. 17):

The Tao does not exist, but water does. Hence, it only approaches the Tao.

Does the flow of water exist? Does energy flow exist? We can say it does when we see work being done, some purpose being served. But what determines which product or service exists or occurs as a result of the process? The Way it works.

Charles S. Peirce would agree with Wang Pi that the highest good (or God) does not exist, but is real, because it ‘determines the suchness of that which may come into existence, when it does come into existence’ (Peirce, EP2:269). Who or what is that good for?

Mnidoo

21 years ago my wife Pam and i settled on M’nidoo M’nissing, better known to settlers as Manitoulin Island. The Anishinaabe word manitou is often rendered in English as “spirit.” But what does that mean? Anishinaabe scholar Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning relates what she learned about mnidoo from her mother:

This concept mnidoo derives from the word Gizhemnidoo, from my mothers’ dialect …. She translated Gizhemnidoo in several ways; primary among these was Great Spirit (the most common translation in our area). Gizhe (great) is similar to chi (big). We can separate gizhe from mnidoo, which she called spirit, potency, potential— dynamic energy. She said that the word spirit is the anglicized interpretation, but mnidoo is something that is happening, and is about to happen at the same time. Gizhemnidoo is the Great Mystery/Spirit, mind boggling, because it is beyond human comprehension. But virtually everything is mnidoo, little spirits. Everything has a little spirit that is propelled by, and exists, due to this energy.

Mnidoo-Worlding: Merleau-Ponty and Anishinaabe Philosophical Translations, p. 3
The big and little spirits correspond more or less to the Big and Little Currents in Turning Signs (Chapter 9). The mnidoo which is ‘something that is happening and is about to happen at the same time’ also corresponds to Dogen’s being-time, and with the Buddhist Heart Sutra:

the Heart Sutra mantra — Gaté, gaté, paragaté, parasamgaté, Bodhi! Svaha! — can be interpreted as “Arriving, arriving, arriving all the way, arriving all the way together: awakening. Joy!” This is a marvelous reminder for our meditation practice that each moment of our practice is, as Dogen suggests, not separate from awakening or enlightenment. Each moment of our practice and of our life is blessed.

Tanahashi 2014, 44-45

The languages are many, but as far as we call tell, the meaning is one. Now is the time we need to hear it, especially from the First Peoples of the Earth.

Turning points?

Yesterday was Canada Day, but few of us felt like celebrating, after the discovery that hundreds (probably thousands) of Indigenous children lie buried in unmarked graves near the residential schools where they died. We had heard the stories told by survivors of the horrors of those government-sanctioned institutions, but this was even worse. Will this cause Canada as a whole to recognize the systemic racism that has plagued our history right up to the present, and to make an honest effort to eradicate it? Time will tell.

Time is already telling the horror story of global heating. Hundreds have died in the past week under the heat dome in Western Canada, where a town in British Columbia hit the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada, just under 50 C. (over 120 Fahrenheit). Now the same town has been almost wiped out by one of the forest fires raging in the region. Will this convince Canadians that climate change is a real emergency? Parliament has just passed Canada’s Net-Zero Climate Accountability Act (Bill C-12), which finally sets some near-term targets for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and even includes provisions for monitoring and enforcement, so that could be seen as a turning point. But that point should have been reached decades ago, here and elsewhere, so it’s hard not to feel that this progress is too little, too late.

Meanwhile on Manitoulin Island we’ve had an unusually cool June; yesterday’s high was about 19 C. Normal weather patterns are being disrupted in all directions. Even closer to home, my blog posting has been interrupted by another writing project (for publication elsewhere). Now I’m back to revision toward a 2nd edition of Turning Signs, and have now finished (or refinished) Chapter 16. Does it contribute anything to the the global transformation I’ve been blogging about for years now? I think it does, but only for readers who can relate it to their experience, and especially to their practice of living this time, which is the subject of the chapter.

I can’t resist copying here a couple of quotes from near the end of the chapter. One is by C.S. Peirce, about the “spiritual reality” of a human:

by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely, but as the share which God permits him to have in the work of creation.

Peirce, CP 5.402n

For me at least, this “esthetic ideal” is not some static image that one aims to achieve in the future, but a way of living the time now into the future. Eihei Dogen comes as close to expressing it in words as anything I’ve come across:

A buddha’s practice is to practice in the same manner as the entire earth and all beings. If it is not practice with all beings, it is not a buddha’s practice. This being so, from the moment of arousing the aspiration for enlightenment to the moment of attaining enlightenment, all buddhas realize and practice the way together with the entire earth and all beings.

Dogen, SBGZ ‘Yuibutsu yobutsu’ (Tanahashi 2010, 880-1)

So is this moment a turning point? Yes, but not a discontinuity in what Dogen calls continuous practice. The earth and all beings continue to turn.

The Determinator

The early Wittgenstein wrote that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus 5.6). But the deeper limiting factor is the limits of experience due to the mind’s embodiment, which enables even the wildest imagination. This includes one’s conception of the Creator of the universe. Peirce as a pragmaticist held
that man is so completely hemmed in by the bounds of his possible practical experience, his mind is so restricted to being the instrument of his needs, that he cannot, in the least, mean anything that transcends those limits. The strict consequence of this is, that it is all nonsense to tell him that he must not think in this or that way because to do so would be to transcend the limits of a possible experience. For let him try ever so hard to think anything about what is beyond that limit, it simply cannot be done. You might as well pass a law that no man shall jump over the moon; it wouldn’t forbid him to jump just as high as he possibly could.
For much the same reason, I do not believe that man can have the idea of any cause or agency so stupendous that there is any more adequate way of conceiving it than as vaguely like a man. Therefore, whoever cannot look at the starry heaven without thinking that all this universe must have had an adequate cause, can in my opinion not otherwise think of that cause half so justly than by thinking it is God.
CP 5.536, c. 1905
Unfortunately, for many believers the conception of “God” has not been anywhere near vague enough, as they imagine the ‘stupendous agency’ to be something like a dominating alpha male, rather than a Mind whose only embodiment is the lived and living universe of experience. Surely the Creator and Determinator of whatever happens cannot be as determinate as any willful or existing Self. There is no Dominus but the dominance of reality itself, and we poor creatures can only determine what that is within the limits of our own embodiment.

What Peirce called ‘the scientific method’ in his ‘Fixation of Belief’ essay, he later called ‘the method of experience’ – emphasizing the wild reality of experience and the humility of the method.
Changes of opinion are brought about by events beyond human control. All mankind were so firmly of opinion that heavy bodies must fall faster than light ones, that any other view was scouted as absurd, eccentric, and probably insincere. Yet as soon as some of the absurd and eccentric men could succeed in inducing some of the adherents of common sense to look at their experiments – no easy task – it became apparent that nature would not follow human opinion, however unanimous. So there was nothing for it but human opinion must move to nature’s position. That was a lesson in humility. A few men, the small band of laboratory men, began to see that they had to abandon the pride of an opinion assumed absolutely final in any respect, and to use all their endeavors to yield as unresistingly as possible to the overwhelming tide of experience, which must master them at last, and to listen to what nature seems to be telling us. The trial of this method of experience in natural science for these three centuries – though bitterly detested by the majority of men – encourages us to hope that we are approaching nearer and nearer to an opinion which is not destined to be broken down – though we cannot expect ever quite to reach that ideal goal.
from How to Reason, 1893 (R 407: 20–21, CP 5.384fn)
Over a century later, is ‘the trial of this method of experience’ still encouraging us? Or is it proceeding like Kafka’s Process?

Creation Evolving and other stories

I’ve been busy exploring some of the information about the transition accessible on the Net now, especially from the Post Carbon Institute – more on that below – and looking into ways to enhance the resilience of my local community here on Manitoulin Island. But i’ve also been busy revising the last chapter (19) of my book Turning Signs.

I’ve been growing more dissatisfied with that chapter since i first published it in 2015, but not until now have i come up with a version that seems to work as a culmination of my whole 19-chapter argument. It’s called ‘Creation Evolving’, it’s online now, and i’d appreciate any comments on it from critical readers. (Since it frequently refers back to previous parts of the book, i’ve included lots of links back to the key concepts, but i don’t claim that it’s an easy read!)

This reflects my habit of going back and forth from a local focus on current practice to a more global contemplation of “deep time” and the deeper practices of nature and cultures. It’s like my other habit of alternating between silent walks in the woods and spells of wrestling with words. (The photo below was taken by Pam during one of our November strolls. Note the rare patch of blue sky reflected in the puddle.) I feel that the two practices enhance one another by alternating, somewhat like sleeping and waking. (After all, how can you wake up if you haven’t been sleeping?)

Anyway, this sort of back-and-forth seems to help me keep my balance in this Era of Upheaval. I’ve lifted that phrase from the title of a Post Carbon Institute book, The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval. You can buy this book from the usual sources, or you can get access to it online for free by registering with the PCI.

Another relevant book you can get for free, thanks to the generosity of the authors, is Your Post has been Removed: Tech Giants and Freedom of Speech, by Frederik Stjernfelt and Anne Mette Lauritzen. This new book delves into the roles of the ‘tech giants’ (especially Google and Facebook) in the current cultural/political upheaval. I’m halfway through it now, and although its main focus is ‘freedom of speech,’ it also throws light on the role of social media in the ecological/economic crisis.

As Stjernfelt and Lauritzen point out, ‘freedom of speech’ includes freedom of access to information, so it’s appropriate as well as fortunate that they’ve allowed open access to it. Like Turning Signs, it comes with a Creative Commons license. At this traditionally hyperconsumptive time of year, it’s good to see the Commons growing!

Finally i’m really happy to see the website of Local Food Manitoulin. This is the kind of community initiative that can address all four sides of the current crisis: ecology, energy, economy and equity. It doesn’t ask you to indulge in either optimism or pessimism about the climate emergency, because it can work (locally, of course) toward both prevention and mitigation of the worst effects of global heating.

At our latitude, we’re sinking into the darkest part of the year (for those of us who are solar powered, at least). But we have the winter solstice coming up in less than two weeks, and things are bound to get brighter after that. In the meantime let us carry on with the upheaval, or transition, or whatever we call it. And keep in touch with the Earth.

Novemberpuddle
photo by Pam Jackson

Conscycles

And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light.

— Finnegans Wake 226

Symbols (and even natural or non-symbolic dicisigns as self-representing signs) are the semiotic equivalent, or mental manifestation, of the brain processes that appear as consciousness. This self-representation is a feedforward-feedback cycle like the meaning cycle. Thomas Metzinger explains:

In conscious visual processing, for example, high-level information is dynamically mapped back to low-level information, but it all refers to the same retinal image. Each time your eyes land on a scene (remember, your eye makes about three saccades per second), there is a feedforward-feedback cycle about the current image, and that cycle gives you the detailed conscious percept of that scene. You continuously make conscious snapshots of the world via these feedforward-feedback cycles. In a more general sense, the principle is that the almost continuous feedback-loops from higher to lower areas create an ongoing cycle, a circular nested flow of information, in which what happened a few milliseconds ago is dynamically mapped back to what is coming in right now. In this way, the immediate past continuously creates a context for the present— it filters what can be experienced right now. We see how an old philosophical idea is refined and spelled out by modern neuroscience on the nuts-and-bolts level. A standing context-loop is created. And this may be a deeper insight into the essence of the world-creating function of conscious experience: Conscious information seems to be integrated and unified precisely because the underlying physical process is mapped back onto itself and becomes its own context. If we apply this idea not to single representations, such as the visual experience of an apple in your hand, but to the brain’s unified portrait of the world as a whole, then the dynamic flow of conscious experience appears as the result of a continuous large-scale application of the brain’s prior knowledge to the current situation. If you are conscious, the overall process of perceiving, learning, and living creates a context for itself— and that is how your reality turns into a lived reality.

— Metzinger 2009, 31-32