Civilization Next? Gleaning the Complexity of Human Action?

[MetroPunk]

CORWIN: I cannot express how appalled and distraught I am with the condition of humanity and the relationship we have with our environment. I need to figure out what variables are most central to this blind, wreckless relationship and what of those I can most feasibly manipulate.

how do we evolve past then?

CORWIN: I don't know. I think our evolution has to occur mostly on the individual level. When we try to redesign our social, political and economic systems, we are basically trying to minimize the extent to which the flaws of the individual manifest in the larger system. This is not stable or adaptive, it is a temporary solution to the symptoms of a disease that runs very deep.

i follow your analysis, and do not totally disagree,
in fact we might agree strongly on many of the symptoms,
and what they suggest...

but it is my opinion that humans have been ‘designing’
(thus far within the dominant civilizations)
our social, political and economic systems
in ways that most often reflect the interests of POWER,
guided by Elites and their subcultures,
sometimes influenced by interest groups (in a broad sense)
and perhaps, only recently, as citizens…

civilization operates in ways that are influenced,
informed and dominated by a variety of
ideologies, practices, procedures, discourses, traditions
- based in the historical and material development of
pre-modern, modern and post-modern life-ways & emergence…

however, it is my proscription (prescription maybe?)
is that we instead try to design our ‘systems’, practices, institutions, etc...
in ways that MAXIMIZE the potential of humans, ecologies, social systems
AND thus begin appropriately linking these potentialities
into a pragmatic matrix of resiliencies and adaptation,
- but in way that also allows for chaotic occurrences,
and supports creativity…

in a very simplified nutshell:
we should act and know is ways that
more effectively align ourselves with the TAO…

where you might see the managed minimization of “flaws”
i see opportunities for exploration and more sophisticated adaptation…

why does evolution have to take place ONLY at the individual level?
are we isolated automatons,
completely distinct from the contexts from which we come?

CORWIN: The systems do need continual reassesment in order for our species to survive until this radical individual transformation occurs on a large enough scale, but our focus should be on the individual.

i think its too narrow to just focus on the individual…
people exist within systems (contexts),
and these systems co-generate individuals…
(tetra-evolve in AQAL terms)

i think “radical” and positive change must evolve/involve
the ‘dance’ of collectives and individuals,
and between systems and within environments…
the dynamics are complex - and transformation can occur
on multiple levels…

MORE TO COME....

[BrightAbyss~]

Punk,

That is broad enough, but who gets to be in charge of such interventions? Who do we endow with the ability to make potential 'integral' decisions?

M~

[MetroPunk]

we look at 'credentials'
(capacity, skills to understand, etc.)
and we promote based on
'integral' outcomes...'

what actually produces more health
and adaptation...

[Steph]

Re: Who should be in charge of interventions (BrighAbyys) and "credentials" (MetroPunk)

Yep. All I can think of right now is to rejoice in, and show my support, for the people already in power that seem trustworthy ... how do you spot them? I look for people with vision. I wonder what Integral Folk think of our M.P. George Galloway? He's a tough old boot that's for sure, but with a Heart of Gold! We lost Sir John Mortimer last month ... remember him? (P'haps not, he was famous for the TV Series, Rumpole of the Bailey). He was known as the "Devils Advocate" because he took on cases no-one else would touch ... the Trials for Oz being the most famous ... he worked for Amnesty too.

My point is that those who do profound service to the world, (Bohisattvas? Who can say?), who demonstrate innate integral vision - or at least consderation for the plight of others - don't go round quoting "Integral" something or other every time they speak. It would be nice if it was that easy.
S.

[BrightAbyss~]

Exactly. The reference to 'integral' is redundant and inappropriate if people actually operate from (embody) that orientation. But just because someone is a leader or interested in "doing good worK", that doesn't make them qualitatively 'better' broadly speaking.

[Jaguar]

You can blame AIDs on the big pharma companies.
Check out Dr. Rath site, he says people with HIV given natural treatments don't get AIDs, only those given the drugs do...compromising and already compromised immune system. http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/ Dr. Rath, “End Aids”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2D4-noTiCg —Codex Alimentarius Lecture by Ian R. Crane


Check out the latest stuff by Alex Jones, pretty interesting.




I tend to use the daimon spelling.
(dia-) < διά (διά), “‘through, across, by, over’”)
(mon) one, single

Basically it is reference to the "One" god or soul of the individual...that which is beyond the multiplicity of the mind.
I call mine Thete...for Theta or infinity...Sophia or Void.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(mythology)

[MetroPunk]

so you "arbitrarily" choose
what to value as 'natural',
and what to let alone;
choosing to value what is perfect
and should be worshiped,
ultimately telling people where to direct
their emotional efforts?

how pragmatic is it to 'let it be'?
and to whom is it pragmatic?
dying kids?

you seem to offer sophism
where actual PRAXIS
(application of thought forms)
is what is ethical...

"everthing is perfect"
is true in one sense,
and in one sense only
(and in that sense I agree).

yet evolution is a dynamic process
of change and adaptation,
in which we participate (and in fact are)
consciously or unconsciously...

if consciousness is "perfect"
then why not perfectly use it?

why would we be kosmically conservative?
why not promote meaning-full engagement
and positive change
for the sake of kosmos
not in spite of it..?

that is,
kosmically progressive...

[Dungan]

Fascinating start to the discussion! I have to second Bright Abyss on the Invention tip. It's way too easy to stray into Integral eugenics once we decide that some of us have a more complete vision of humanity's future. I'm confused tho where the initial post came from, is this a dialogue btw two people or a creative piece?

[BrightAbyss~]

"Integral eugenics" is a fascinating concept. Genetically enhance or select those most inclined to an "integral" cognitive (in the broad sense) orientation..?

Of course 'selection' is unethical, but the implications are interesting.

The "integral decision-makers" would either be philosopher-kings, or kosmic fascists. Or at least some kind of hybrid multi-agent and collective Ubermensch system!

I shutter.

[MetroPunk]

it is both:
it is mock dialogue
and a creative piece,
just to make people think,
and react...

what say you..?

[Jaguar]

One has to understand the broad reach and historical context of the cultural waters one finds oneself in, in order to transcend the machinations of said social-ocean.

My new book...Awakening the Body looks at how civilization creates the type of brain that determines the fate of that civilization. To turn the Titanic of a degenerative culture around...one needs to change the brain and hence thought, behavior and sociability toward the regeneration (respiritualization) of earth and human. Once the mechanisms of the nature of the individual within the collective become clearly visible, it is only a matter of time before the tide of individual awakening becomes so great that global civilization itself will transmute to a benign peace-loving state in which a permanent evolving visionary culture emerges. This book deals briefly with how we have molded our brains and behavior towards our own and planetary downfall...and then outlines some of the steps needed to rise to our full spiritual and ethical stature. It is up to the preceptors of this transcendent state to lead the way.

Hypnogogic or Hypnopompic, Holozoic, Hylotheistic—God Present in All Things.
I had a dream this morning that I was at this house by the water. I was discussing the great thinkers whom had tried to emancipate humans from the machinations of material-fascism...Robert Aton Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna and those that offered models of culture to aspire to. What was apparent in the dream was the embodied tension of the difference between Uptopia and Dystopia. Shambhala...the higher city of man is an inside job, which is then bought into the world through the creative tension of knowledge of a "larger reality" and limitless possibilities.

Next the dream turned up a 4" light green shiny fish that had a hook with string attached in its belly. I was very concerned about saving the fish, but there didn't seem like any safe way of removing the hook, so I quickly pulled at it and felt the tissue tear. The little fish then had a hole in its belly and I put it aside on a wall by the river, knowing that now in order to heal the fish had to be left alone to its own internal healing devises. (This fish didn't seem to need the water.)

I think the combo of these to dream scenes describes how when we have emerged from the collective...through the courage to obtain inner peace and the imagination of vast potentials...we have to simply tear ourselves away from the hook and line of the old ways...and allow nature to heal us. If we remain confused and refuse to dispense with the hook and line, then we do not make ourselves available to the cosmic reconstruction. The great heretics who were brave enough to see beyond the given are the founding fathers of a new species emerging out of the old, and yet this new species is really just inner-potential realized that was previously being suppressed through conformity to anti-life cultural programs.

We got into our present mess through the ego-centric belief that the earth is there for our own use, to exploit and abuse as we see fit. As we degenerate, lose our sensory acuity, divide our brain to reduce our emotional connection to nature…we become hardened and deadened to the living force and the endless wisdom of atunement with the natural world and cosmos. Without this foundation in the true nature of physical reality, our attempts at mind and spirituality are “all in our head.” Piloting our affairs from this disadvantaged, disconnected fiction, can only result in superficial, vacuous success…which in final contemplation is no success at all.

“Don’t Be Just Another Member of Society, Be A Living Example of Your Dreams And Goals.” Benjamin Disraeli

You can't predict the future because the future depends on how you react to it.

[Zakariyya]

This is a very intelligent discourse because it gets to the root of the problem.

This line is significant

"I don't know. I think our evolution has to occur mostly on the individual level. When we try to redesign our social, political and economic systems, we are basically trying to minimize the extent to which the flaws of the individual manifest in the larger system. This is not stable or adaptive, it is a temporary solution to the symptoms of a disease that runs very deep".
I like most of this statement because it is an accurate analysis of the microcosm and its relationship with the macrocosm, in social and spiritual terms.

Though the problem with it in my view is the phrase [a mistaken notion from Wilberian Integral Spirituality] is “our evolution has to occur mostly on the individual level.” This is in my view the great flaw in Integral Philosophy as it now stands. It’s juxtaposing “evolution” with spirituality.

Evolution in my view is accidental to the spiritual, in other words has nothing to do with it.

I have pointed out many times that the reason evolution has no relationship to enlightenment or the final stage of completion of the human spirit is because one) evolution is ONLY a physical phenomena relating to the matrix of this world,. and 2) the final completion of the human is related to a transcendent reality that far transcends anything evolutionary. It has no relationship with it.
But that’s my opinion.



"where you might see the managed minimization of “flaws”
i see opportunities for exploration and more sophisticated adaptation"…`

This guy should be more specific here.. I think genocide, starvation, oppression are more than flaws.


CORWIN: The systems do need continual reassesment in order for our species to survive until this radical individual transformation occurs on a large enough scale, but our focus should be on the individual.

“radical individual transformation occurs on a large enough scale”

But this statement according to the all the ancient documents of metaphysics is not going to occur. Why? Because this is only a theoretical possibility. Prophetically, logically, metaphysically and intuitively “radical individual transformation occuring on a large enough scale” wont likely ever occur in the world as it is made up now.

A radical change in the macrocosmic nature of the world, on a spiritual level can only bring this about. That will eventually allow for the “radical change in individuals” but not within the context of this present world matrix.

[Imre von Soos]

Greetings,

I have dropped in on this forum after an absence of over a year, and, finding quite a few interesting postings, I join in on this one with some – I suppose – mostly unpopular thoughts, to induce some further controversy.

What I mostly want to say, I have already said about 14 months ago on this forum under the title of "First was – and IS – the differentiating-integrating Individual" – http://opensourceintegral.ning.com/forum/topics/1615967:Topic:4361 and discussed with Bill, BrightAbyss, Michael and Zakariyya in the follow up under http://opensourceintegral.ning.com/forum/topics/1615967:Topic:11681

Here are some actual additions:

"Humanity" – or rather, the overwhelming majority of humans – live in a pack of self-concocted lies and delusions, ossified through their religions and social conventions, but primarily through human self-centeredness.

Founded on these lies, every human considers himself superior to all the other life-manifestations on this planet, and, at the same time, equal in quality, rights – but not in obligations! – to all the other humans.

To this I have to remind that the intelligence spectrum of this same Homo sapiens, the far most heterogeneous species as far as cephalization – and thus evolutionary level – is concerned, spreads between about IQ50 and IQ220, sharing the lower 40 IQ points (IQ50 to IQ90) with the other apes, monkeys and maybe even with some tarsiers. (These are through scientific findings separately established facts, without anybody having the interest, or the guts, to integrate them into one sentence.) It is also ignored that, according to scientific studies made between the populations of developed nations, well above 90% cannot think but in terms of effects; and only a fraction is able to reason rationally and has the ability to conceptually connect thought processes. So much for equality.

Evolution – and degeneration – does occur only on the level of an entity. Evolution represents progression towards cephalisation, individualisation, towards higher degree of life-competence and independence under any kind of environmental condition; where 'environment' refers to everything and everybody outside the individual organism. Degeneration means declining towards general incompetence, dependence, following others and becoming thus one of the herd, one of the mass. The individual element refers to itself with the personal pronoun "I", and the mass-man with that of "we". Not the flaws of the individuals manifest in the larger systems, but those of the mass-men.

Darwin maintained – contrary to his pseudo-followers, the neo-Darwinians, who have borrowed his name, but not his fundamental ideas and, most certainly, not his brain – that the evolutionary change has happened by and in the individual organism itself and that "morality is the major evolutionary drive", and held the competitive individual to be the driving force of evolution, entering teleology into the evolutionary process as against blind chance.

While most people realise by now that the general situation became unsustainable, and is in need of immediate change, the old mentally is so deeply ingrained that the only solutions offered are based on the old, existing status quo and the old, existing way of thinking.

Questions are asked like "Who do 'we' endow with the ability to make potential 'integral' decisions", "to be in charge"? They are ignoring that "we" do nothing, as "we" never did anything; and that any future, dedicated to the proposition that two nitwits can outvote one Einstein, can end up again only in the same predicament this one is ending up in. To those I only have to quote again Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking millions at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honour and their conscience. In old Egypt it was established law that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much underestimated."

"The state exists for man, not man for the state. The same may be said of science. These are old phrases, coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value. I would hesitate to repeat them, were it not for the ever recurring danger that they may be forgotten, especially in these days of organization and stereotypes." Albert Einstein

"We may take very seriously the principle that the State exists in order to make possible the development of individuals as free and responsible persons." Aldous Huxley

"Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

"Ideas, – as Locke said – belong to man, as man and not as a member of society." This statement, confirmed for me by long experience and on various academic fields, refers to any kind of society or association, because nobody, who belongs to and is following the trend of a paradigm-sharing community, has the capacity to have, or dares to come up with new or different ideas.

A "system" can be defined as a complex of elements in dynamic interaction with a particular common purpose. Individuals make up systems. Mass-men make up conglomerations. Systems do not co-generate individuals: individuals generate themselves freely within any environment, and change their particular environment in spite of its actually ruling system.

Whenever making any consideration on these subjects, it must be accepted as a fundamental fact that we are living in a consciousness time zone where the metabolism and the evolution of the planetary life-system is based on feeding interrelations, overbreeding, competition and the prevalence of the more capable. In other words, the planetary life-system is meritocratic, hierarchic and it favours its strong elements, which promote the evolution of the life-system. Consequently, the relationship between the particular elements of the various trophic levels and between the competing elements within each level can be only dualistic; it can have only self/other relations, while serving the monistic background of Universal Evolution. All life-communities, including the natural human tribes, are built on and are obeying these conditions.

An interest-group is not a system, a life-community or a society; self-interested herd-behaviour is not the evolutionary, constructive, organismic behaviour of interacting individuals towards higher aims and achievements, but the degenerative herding into self-righteous pressure-groups of dependent personalities; followers with their utilitarian ethics and their majority principle, directed towards uniformisation and dogmatisation of acquired belief-systems. As the exceptional men of science, art and philosophy have always met and are still meeting with the hostility of the above characterized members of set scientific, religious and philosophical belief-systems, the concept 'herd' fits well these particular paradigm-sharing communities. And, of course, as Albert Einstein has put it, "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."

We did not emerge from the collective: each survived as an individual constituent of a tribe. In tribal state, should that be human or animal tribe, every member is a constituting individual, carrying more than its own weight in the tribe. Those who could not, have degraded themselves to become a member of a mass-society. And the massified state is a social pathology.

To the question: "why does evolution have to take place ONLY at the individual level?", I can only answer that: Because evolution needs inner drive, which is an individual quality.

Not species survive: organisms do. The species Homo sapiens finds itself in a process of evolutionary split, which does not happen along geographic border-lines. It is a state where each particular element decides for himself to get down from the trees, and join the few who are already on the planes, where the vision is open and the dangers great, and build together a new species; or stay with the rest and keep on hugging each other and the branches. Why look for or elect somebody to make your decisions and lead you? Make your own decisions, be your own lamp, and come off the trees, look into the far horizons and face its dangers. Don't look back. Listen to Disraeli. And let all the others make their own decisions according to the qualities and strength of their inner beings, and bear their consequences.

My own stance, as a "planetarist" stands in my often repeated statement, that "the task does not involve the creation of circumstances that are needed to build a homogenous 'Homosphere' out of an unruly conglomeration, whatever that may cost to the Planet, but the creation of circumstances that are needed to reinstate the Planet into a healthy life-community with a spiritually motivated, mentally productive, ethical, equilibrated and physically healthy and active new human species of authentic individuals: integral constituents of and in harmony with that life-community, whatever that may cost to an unruly conglomeration."

And, finally, evolution has very much to do with the spiritual.
Spirituality, for me, has nothing to do with religions; it does not mean knee-bent image-supplication or cross-legged navel-watching, but to know – not to believe, but to know! – that "I" am a spirit and "I" am manifesting and evolving myself on the physical plane in a physical body. As I am evolving myself – my spiritual being – I am also evolving my actual physical body – which I have acquired, together with its potentialities built in by many generations, through my parents at the genesis of my present incarnation. Thus evolution is primarily a spiritual phenomenon, like are also all physical manifestations.
Spirituality also means to know that "I" am a differentiated fraction of the "Infinite I", of the Summa Being, That is manifesting and evolving Itself, through all Its differentiated fractions, on the physical plane in a physical body, which is the physical Universe.

Imre von Soos