Unsung genius: the overlooked Jungian analyst

Many so-called “depth” psychologists have very little acquaintance with the Jungian analyst Dr. Maurice Nicoll. The historical context is helpful for understanding this anomaly. At the time that Alfred Adler was studying under Jung (he had already asserted his autonomy from Freud), Maurice Nicoll was there with him. Several biographers have noted that Jung had attached a great deal of promise to both Nicoll and Adler, but that in 1921, Nicoll parted company and never looked back. Adler, of course, became an important psychoanalyst and theorist in his own right, one of the first to emphasize social factors in the development of personality. Nicoll was essentially discarded by the mainstream, and in fact Freud is quoted as making a snide remark about him. But Nicoll was actually transcending and not betraying his Jungian background, as his later writings make obvious. Nicoll was a seeker, looking for the clues to transpersonal development. Nicoll had many friends among the psychologists, psychiatrists, authors and physicians associated with the influential quarterly, The New Age with its brilliant editor A.R. Orage. Banding with them, they created a “psychosynthesis” group long before Roberto Assagioli made the term commonplace. Among the group, Rowland Kenny wrote in the fall of 1921 about psychoanalysis that, “it would never help one to re-create one’s own inner being… What we wanted, we decided, was a psychosynthesist.” (Webb). The psychosynthesis group included Havelock Ellis, David Eder, James Young, Rowland Kenny and Maurice Nicoll along with a few other occasional contributors. But as biographer Beryl Pogson details dramatically, it was the introduction to Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky in August, 1921 that inspired Nicoll to strike out boldly in a new direction. Nicoll felt that he had found just what he was looking for. And he found it among people who were not established in western academia. Never mind that the scope and depth of vision of what he found far surpassed the western academia he was leaving behind. If you don’t play the game according to the rules, you are trash who existence does not dignify recognition. Therefore, the very Jungian analyst who did the most to show the extent to which Jungian concepts can be successfully employed in the pursuit of transpersonal development and its psychology is the one who name has been deliberately erased from history and science. It is not uncommon to ascribe a mystical dimension to the work of Carl Jung, who himself endorsed a mystical element as important to his psychology. Jung’s own epistemology of mysticism, however, to the extent that it even exists suffers from inappropriate formulation and reductionism. He nevertheless remains in contrast to some of his followers who have retained his psychoanalytic constructs but thoroughly eradicated all transpersonal elements of his teaching. Don’t assume I’m being naïve here – I am aware that some retain the language. But they have violently annihilated what little transcendental meaning was there in the first place. A good example is James Hillman. Having nothing constructive to offer himself apart from rejecting Cartesian dualism and announcing the lack of unity in ego, Hillman does Jungian constructs a great disservice by restricting their domain to the lower fulcra of developmental psychology (as outlined by Ken Wilber). The result is that their remarkable efficacy for the higher fulcra remains undiscovered. Were it not for the spectacular work of Nicoll in this regard, the Jungian genius in its application to transpersonal psychology would remain largely unknown and unexplored. Jung himself never came close to seeing it as Nicoll did. Nicoll has important contributions to make in the fields of psychology, Christian theology and in metaphysics. In psychology, his magnum opus is his six-volume set called Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He could have just as well added Jung in the title, as the application of Jungian constructs is almost universal throughout. These two diverse strands of thought, Jungian psychology and fourth way esotericism – along with a third of Christian scriptures - are so seamlessly and harmoniously integrated in these commentaries that it seems they were intended for amalgamation all along. Nicoll applies Jungian constructs to Christian scriptures and to esoteric teachings with an ease and a fit that suggests inevitability. Each of the three strands enhances the other two and reveals additional depth and genius to the originals. In Christian theology, Nicoll has two small jewels. The Mark is a book examining to a large extent Old Testament scriptures. This work only looks second fiddle when compared to the little masterpiece The New Man, which exclusively examines the canonical gospels. The New Man is easily one of the most important theological contributions to come out of the twentieth century. His contributions in metaphysics, apart from scattered content in the commentaries, are found in Living Time and the Integration of the Life. An important biography of Nicoll is Beryl Pogson’s Maurice Nicoll: A Portrait. This biography is nicely done. A couple additional historical references are James Webb, The Harmonious Circle where I took the quote of Rowland Kenny, and C.S. Nott, Journey Through This World.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF REVEALED TRUTH

Let me begin with a brief statement about the meaning of epistemology. The term refers to the philosophy of knowing: how do we know, different kinds of knowing, and such issues as the “fit” between the truth content of a knowledge-event and the reality it is supposed to represent. To help you catch onto the point, I’ll use the “fit” statement I just made as an illustration. That “issue” as I presented it actually makes an epistemological assumption. It assumes a dualism between truth and reality, and a “representational” relation between them as in simple mapping. But this is already a presupposed epistemology, and one that has some merit but also has shortcomings in some applications. It is not always appropriate. Does direct perception, like the color of grass, follow this “representational epistemology”? Were you and I to get into a discussion of this question, we would be discussing epistemology. We do not need a great deal of depth in epistemology for the issue at hand. Notice very simply that there are a variety of ways that we can come to know something. We can read it in a book. We can see it with our eyes; hear it with our ears, etc. We can show elements of instinct, we can measure, we can use instruments, we can watch TV, and we can notice what our emotions are telling us. Ultimately, the vast “stew” of the accumulated content of this knowing becomes unwieldy. We develop philosophies and ideologies to help us make sense of the world and organize our thoughts. And different people at different places and times and different cultural contexts have different philosophies and ideologies, sometimes contradictory one with another. This in itself becomes an issue of epistemology – how do we know how to sort out all this mess of diverse ways of interpreting the world? Among the various answers that have been presented to this question, one of the common ones largely in vogue in my own time and culture is social relativism. This seems to be especially popular in ethical philosophy. Social relativism honestly notes that people do not agree and that they also don’t agree on criteria to assess their disagreements, and different positions are taken seriously by different people in different places, times and cultures. Therefore, they argue, it is all relative – there are no objective criteria, and no one can say their version of the truth is any better than someone else’s. Taken to the extreme, I sincerely hope that even the social relativists know this would end up absurd: the answer to two plus two is not relative or culturally dependent. The relativists would counter that I miss the point, as they are not talking about such straightforward facts, but opinion issues and perspectives. And the domain of the content of what is included in that is very broad. All of religious doctrine, for example, belongs squarely in this domain. Therefore, they would say, one person’s opinion is as good as another’s essentially. This is popular even among supposedly intelligent people. I do not see this as intelligent because it leaves no room whatsoever for greater or lesser authority. Sure, people recognize differences of authority in certain categories. No one would let a barber do brain surgery on their child. People seem to understand that in matters of medicine, science, technology and many other fields, there are experts who can be trusted, and these are the people who should be taken seriously. But in matters of the soul, or even very broadly in religion, people will listen to anything. And they will resent even the notion that one should demand a certain credentialed authority. One merely needs to stand behind a pulpit and shout “Jesus” a few times. And yet, it is here as much as anywhere else that competence is critical. It is also exceedingly rare. But I am not just concerned with people who consider themselves true believers. I wish to include a broad, loosely defined group that includes almost all secularists, agnostics, and casual social “Pharisee” church-goers. There is a certain form of relative religious epistemology that can be seen among all of these. Not many, perhaps, take social relativism to the extreme, but most will give a cold reception to any claims that a person knows better on religious subjects than they themselves or, for that matter, than anyone else. They may admit to more knowledge or academic learning, but not more reliability. It is taken as arrogance. One is supposed to admit that one cannot understand these things. You cannot say that you understand certain things. God’s answer to Job is the ultimate epistemology of religion. It is labeled as humility, but more realistically, it is usually a security blanket for a lazy and cowardly mind. What I want to make perfectly clear is that social relativism and spirituality are flagrantly contradictory in their epistemologies. Spirituality denotes the idea of the sacred. In terms of human understanding, it specifically denotes a sacred truth. This is usually to be found in certain writings that are considered to be sacred texts. Thus we have the Bible for Christians, the Koran for Muslims, and so on. Now the fundamental premise behind all sacred texts is the idea of revealed truth. This is what makes the texts sacred – what separates them from ordinary writings. What is revealed truth? It is truth that purports to derive from God or some sort of transcendental level beyond that of ordinary mortal consciousness. It is claimed in principle that this gives the truth a level of authority beyond what ordinary mortals can claim in ordinary states. No one who believes in God would say that God’s opinion is merely on a par with everyone else’s. So social relativism does not pertain to God. By extension, it does not pertain to revealed truth. Revealed truth by very definition says that its knowing is at a greater level of authority than ordinary people in ordinary states. Therefore, the epistemology of revealed truth is incompatible with social relativism. At this point, most people will simply agree and wonder why I am making an issue of this. It is in fact a very important issue, because we have to consider how revealed truth gets to be revealed. We find that the actual ink to the paper comes from human hands. Sacred texts are written in human languages and show human contexts in the times and places of their origin. Structuralists who analyze the texts accordingly might lay bare much of this context, but will face serious challenges trying to unravel the presumed transcendental content. Their toolbox will not have all of the right tools. Sacred texts incorporate built-in metalanguages, as the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky examined in the gospels decades before Barthes. They achieve universalism in time and place (every culture, every age) by means of the tools that can do that: myth, symbol and parable – an insight that, even if not fully articulated, was understood and employed by Jesus, Socrates and Buddha (and their text authors) millennia ago. Many simplistic religious people tout the Bible as the “Word of God” in such a manner as to suggest that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets downloaded God’s word on their PC after God handed it to them on a flash drive. Obviously this issue is complex, and a full analysis is beyond the scope of my intentions here. But I wish to reiterate wording I have already employed and state categorically that ordinary people in ordinary states do not write scripture. This is true if you accept the idea of revealed truth. Of course, if you do not accept that idea, you are renouncing the texts as sacred. In that case, you can be a relativist with these texts and tout your own opinion as just as good as those of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, if you find that suggestion outrageous, you are denouncing relativism in regard to these texts. You can’t have your cake and eat it too – it is either one or the other. And to accept the texts as revealed truth in spite of human authorship requires acceptance of my statement that ordinary people in ordinary states do not write scripture. We are confronted directly with the mechanism of revelation – how is revealed truth revealed? Simply put, people cross an epistemological threshold by virtue of transcendental inner states collectively appropriate for the domain of mysticism (for a technically accurate definition of mysticism see my June, 2008 blog post “Proper definitions of “mystic” and “mysticism”). So a person undergoes a mystical state (or a master like Jesus or Buddha attains the state permanently) and is privy while in that state to insight unavailable in more ordinary states. This gives the insight of the person a level of authority that cannot be challenged by people in ordinary states without committing the MTE fallacy (see my June, 2008 blog post “The fallacy of Misconstrued Transcendental Empiricism”). Notice that social relativists would simply denounce the validity of the fallacy (which I applied to transcendental states collectively). But many of these people claim to believe in revealed truth. They may get around the contradiction by saying they accept the concept of revealed truth only for certain texts, which came about as a miracle from God. But they continue to “play ostrich” with the mechanism. They have no epistemology. They are back to the flash drive. They are not facing human authorship and its implications. Now we come to something very interesting. Either we open the door to revealed truth or we do not. If we open that door, we must accept that the door is open and all that is implied by it. We cannot say that the door is open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays but not on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We cannot say the door is open in Europe and not America. We cannot say that the door was open for Moses but not for Socrates. We cannot say the door was open two thousand years ago but not today. There exists a vast literature of consistent mystical writings that give testimony in virtually all cultures and periods of history to revealed truth. This literature, stripped of cultural embellishments, proclaims in some form or fashion various more-or-less consistent ideas that belong to the body of revealed truth. These ideas are fundamentally consistent in general with the concept of spirituality and its content. Spirituality pertains to the notion of hierarchy in inner development, and the possibility of an inner evolution. In broad strokes, this is what all spirituality proclaims. Revealed truth is consistently concerned with proclaiming that possibility – the “good news” of the gospels – and casting some light upon it. Authentic spiritual traditions ostensibly harbor some portion of an inner technology for achieving this evolution, although the actual practice has always been confined to one-on-one oral teaching and is essentially absent from the literature. Here we find ourselves confronting the MTE fallacy leering in our face. Notice a very curious thing that has just happened here: we can no longer confine our discussion of relative versus revealed epistemology to the issue of sacred texts. Again, either the door is open or it isn’t. If the door is open to revealed truth it is open universally. There will always be mystics and pseudo-mystics. For the real thing, we cannot rule out the possibility of revealed truth from them unless we rule out the entire concept completely in all applications. Mystics can actually know things that are only opinion issues for others. If you do not accept that, don’t turn around and tell me the Bible is the “Word of God”, because you are contradicting yourself. The mechanism is essentially the same. Either both are possible or neither is possible.

PROPER DEFINITIONS OF "MYSTIC" AND "MYSTICISM"

MYSTIC – A person whose mystical experiences have so influenced the person’s perspective and ideology that these cannot be properly understood without taking the mystical aspect into account. MYSTICISM – The acceptance and understanding of the fact that consciousness is hierarchical [or “holarchical”] and that the hierarchy involves epistemological thresholds extending beyond the level of commonplace human experience. NOTE: The definition of “mystic” should be straightforward and non-controversial. I am disposed to say the same about the definition of “mysticism” but readily note that the point will likely not be obvious for many. Indeed, the definition will require some elaboration and unraveling for most readers. That is beyond the scope of this document, but I wish to point out that this definition is both precise and universal. “Precise” means that it offers a scalpel to carefully cut away all content that does not belong, while “universal” means that in so doing nothing is eliminated that should not be eliminated. At the present time I will confine myself to a single example of each to illustrate my meaning more fully. In regards to precise, there are many kinds of remarkable experiences, such as powerful ecstatic emotional states. But this content does not in itself qualify the experience as mystical. If an experience is sufficiently remarkable, it may involve some increase in awareness or consciousness, and thereby qualify it as mystical, but it depends on this component specifically for it to so qualify. In regards to universal, I reject – for example - Evelyn Underhill’s definition involving a vector in the experience toward union with God. This restricts mysticism to theological varieties, which is woefully incomplete. A famous example to the contrary is that of Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. He speaks openly of himself as a mystic and recounts the story of a single five-minute mystical experience that permanently turned him into a staunch pacifist, whereas he was not one before that experience. And yet Bertrand Russell is also well known as a confessed atheist, and his experience did not change that. I cannot claim to have examined all sources of definitions of these terms, but I have examined large numbers over several decades, and found them all inadequate. I am open to discussion of the definitions here, which are from a primary source that I trust – namely, myself. Perhaps in the near future I will post another short document elaborating more fully on some misconceptions about mysticism. Steve Adams, June, 2008

THE FALACY OF MISCONSTRUED TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM

A fallacy of epistemology involving equivocation between phenomenology and ideology, and potentially relevant to understand as a culprit in politically incorrect behavior… Yeah, I know – the above is a mouthful. I have tried to think of a way to express it more simply, but I lose the clear meaning and so I find myself accepting the awkward language. The concept behind this fallacy is not new, but I am unaware of anyone else ever attempting to formulate it specifically as a titled fallacy. I find in my own experience that this needs to be done, so I am taking it upon myself to do so – partly for my own efficient future reference in communicating to others about mysticism. This is important for both theoretical and practical understanding, including issues of respect, functional communication and mutual understanding. Let me begin by explaining what I mean by a “fallacy of epistemology”. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowing – how we know, different ways of knowing, how to assess the truth of our knowing, and so on. Especially relevant here is different ways of knowing. A couple of examples will do much of my job of explaining this fallacy. I know that grass is green. I know this directly through perception, and there can be no confusion about it. If I wish to know the distance to Andromeda Galaxy, I can look it up in a book. I do not know the answer the same way that I know grass is green. For one thing, the green color of grass is a part of my actual being – demonstrated by the fact that I would never forget it (if, for example, asked on a test). I would also take issue with anyone challenging the answer. But I trust the answer to the distance to Andromeda. If someone argues, I may suggest a certain window of inaccuracy but continue to assert my faith in the science. Yet a respectful discussion is possible. Also, the answer is not part of my being. It is in personality (acquired) and not essence (innate) so I could forget it on a test. The distinctions drawn above reflect differences in the epistemology of the two examples. No doubt for the two examples given you have no problem with the distinction. But there are certain circumstances where this same distinction commonly fails to be recognized. That, in a nutshell, is the fallacy. You see that the problem does not arise in the above examples because of common ground. You share my experience of the color of grass. One can argue shades of color, or that dried up grass turns brown, but that misses the point – you know the difference between a generic statement and a meticulous accounting. So you accept that arguing over this issue is inappropriate. But should you fail to fully have a common ground in the experience of some truth claim under consideration, you might fail to recognize its character – that this is “grass is green” sort of stuff. In short, you might not recognize the epistemology of the situation as phenomenological, meaning that it pertains to direct perceptions and experiences. You might instead see it as “book learning” sort of stuff, like the distance to Andromeda. Or even worse, you might misconstrue it as an opinionated issue of ideology subject to debate. I could give accounts of actual instances of this fallacy – the fallacy of misconstrued transcendental empiricism – to show that such a thing can and on occasion does happen. At this point we need to look at those two words in the fallacy I have not yet explained. In the context of what I just said, it is not hard to understand why this fallacy would arise in the context of what-is-called transcendental experiences. Whatever else this means, it tells us for our purposes here that we are speaking of the kind of experiences that are not always universally common ground in commonplace experience, and therefore vulnerable to the fallacy. If people do not have common ground for certain kinds of experiences, it is easy for them to doubt their existence. The term mysticism is often invoked to collectively cover this turf, as we find in Ken Wilber. I offer in a separate blog post document a precise definition of this term (please refer to it as needed), but the more broad-stroked usage I just suggested will suffice here. Mystics (real ones) are obvious candidates for the most misunderstood people in the world, and the fallacy – MTE fallacy for short – is indisputably the single most important reason for that. Second place, I’ll mention in passing, goes to pseudo-mystical clap-trap from lunatics and charlatans like virtually all occultists. They make it easy for people to commit the MTE fallacy and remain confident in the soundness of their judgment. The word empiricism conveys an idea very similar to phenomenology. The “phenomenal” world is the world of appearances. The “empirical” world is the world subject to observation. Science studies the empirical world. Science cannot see my inner emotional states, but it can see overt manifestations of them and record my verbal or written accounts of them. That becomes the data for the psychologists. My inner states are empirical to me but to no one else (Ken Wilber’s upper left quadrant). To outsiders, my account of these states is a second-hand “book learning” sort of epistemology subject to considerations of trust (Ken Wilber’s lower left quadrant). But that does not mean the content fails to have an empirical referent. An outsider who denies that is actually accusing me of lying about those states. And, you see, the outsider could do that simply by misconstruing the epistemology of “inner states” as something like “ideology”. Let’s be clear about that: the outsider is not simply claiming I have a different opinion, even if that is what the outsider actually says. An outsider who frames the issue in that manner is committing the MTE fallacy. The outsider might be unaware of any disrespect entailed. Let’s make the fallacy and its ramifications blatantly clear. I can do that easily with a rather silly anecdotal example. My gender is empirical “grass is green” sort of stuff. It may not be so for the reader, but proof can be had – we will not go there. I am a male. Suppose you were to respond to me that I am being too “closed minded”. Perhaps I am a female, or something unspecific. You say that some academic psychologists remain unconvinced of the thorough validity and usefulness of the distinction, some even denying it altogether. I should be open to other opinions. How would I respond to this? In this case, I would be laughing too hard to actually be offended. I would respond in no uncertain terms that I know my own gender, thank you, and you are out of line challenging it. To that you respond that I am not only close minded, but arrogant and stubborn, and obviously not amenable to intelligent discussion. By this point I am probably feeling what-is-called “pissed”, and you are liable to encounter more spectacular examples of this alleged arrogance and stubbornness. The fault will be perceived as mine – arrogance, closed mindedness, etc. But the actual problem is that you have misconstrued the epistemology of the situation. You are treating phenomenology as if it were ideology. You have committed the MTE fallacy. Perhaps you are thinking that nothing nearly as ridiculous as this example would happen in reality and that I am making a mountain out of a molehill in presenting the fallacy. With all due respect, you would be mistaken. You have to understand that the experiences of mystics are typically by very definition (mine) more certain, clear, awake, unclouded, undistorted, unambiguous and reliable than their more commonplace states. (Of course, most of the time for all but a tiny handful of people in the whole of human history, the states of mystics are like that of everyone else – they can forget where they left their car keys, etc. Perhaps they distort the reality of their own being by identifying so heavily with exceptional states, but they more than anyone else can speak meaningfully of the contrast). Although plenty of epistemologically incompetent reductionists deny it, many people know, as I just hinted, that our usual states fall into the general basket of relative consciousness that is in reality less trustworthy than these exceptional experiences. This is why several major philosophies and spiritual traditions call our usual state “sleep” or other such terms denoting its incomplete reliability and “vivifyingness”. Examples are abundant, including the very premise of the entirety of the religion of Buddhism (the title “Buddha” means “the one who is awake”). Mystics are universally well known for proclaiming their position with authority. They say in effect, “I know what I know!” In my own most powerful experience, I proclaimed to myself (paraphrasing closely) that, “As God is my witness, I will never in my ordinary states question or second-guess what I have learned, as I know and mark it down for myself that I will never have the clarity and certainty in ordinary states that I have now!” That was three decades ago, and I kept my promise. I know what that experience was or entails with an essentially comparable kind of clarity, of direct knowing and of certainty as I know my own gender. For me, this is “grass is green” sort of empirical stuff. And claims by reductionists who commit the MTE fallacy with inflexibility and arrogance do not come across to mystics as much less ridiculous and disrespectful than the example of questioning my gender. Their stubbornness carries the weight of social conditioning and sanction, including many respected and popular academicians. An example in the course I am now taking is James Hillman, whose unequivocal and brazen proclamation that all transcendentalism is dangerous (he calls it “titanism”) is just as stupid, just as sick, and just as rude as the silly example of denouncing the concept of gender. And this scary myopia carries the weight of academic respectability. It is the “flatland” of Ken Wilber, whose entire third section of his book “A Brief History of Everything” makes it screamingly clear that this reductionism is the single most dangerous ideological problem facing the academic world today. Personally, I can be very tolerant and understanding of people who commit the MTE fallacy (with a great deal of innocence in most cases). But I am presently involved in a course that has the agenda of tackling these issues directly and attempting to move forward for a vision for the future that takes into account contemporary insights such as those of Wilber. I cannot be other than I am, and cannot avoid revealing in such a context the most fundamentally important fact of my existence – that of my mystical insight. Take that away from me and I am just another digit in one of Annie Dillard’s numbers (referencing her book For the Time Being). Disrespect toward me does not matter – I am not anything to get excited about, and fail to live up to my own ideology. But failure to learn and respect the MTE fallacy is a failure of respect toward the whole circumstance of our species at this point in its history, and a failure to provide it with one of its most important tools for any authentic hope for the future. Steve Adams, June, 2008

The most important short essay on consciousness ever written

NOTE: Before I present the text by P.D. Ouspensky my title above refers to, I wish to place it somewhat in context. The book is, in my opinion, almost unbelievably important, but it has accessibility issues. It must be understood that it is not a work of science, but on the other hand, nor should one be too quick to dismiss it as counter to science because of the way it is written and the way the concepts are packaged. I spent fifteen years myself grappling with how to reconcile the book with science and translate from one to the other. I ultimately discovered that the book needs translation, and in some respects is very badly “packaged” but is nonetheless mostly commensurate with cutting edge science – the more recent the better the fit. This shows that the intuitions of the book (published 1949, based on oral teaching presented from around 1910 to 1925) from a scientific standpoint were precocious. I must admit up front though, that this is not easy to see. The book draws from ancient traditions and retains myth, symbols and terminologies from these ancient non-scientific traditions. So, for example, we have the “ray of creation” from the Gnostics. This is actually very profound, but read as science it is nonsense. Even worse, science terms in at least one place are used in a new application that will never be acceptable: names of elements are used for something different. Nor is this necessary – the usage calls for new words. It was done as a corollary to the ancient philosophical usage of the “four elements” (earth, air, fire and water). The book presents a small part of the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff (called in the book “G”) who uses what I call “pragmatic absolutism”. Like William James, Gurdjieff cared little for abstract theory that could not be practically applied, and he often spoke in statements too absolute or inflexible for literal abstract acceptance but very appropriate for his practical teaching and work with his pupils. The text below, as is true of the whole book, shows “G” in action discussing matters with his pupils, in this case the issue of consciousness. Notice that all material he presents is part of an actual practical program and that the pupils are following an applied tradition of self-transformation. One last point about Ouspensky: the text introduces a new concept, “self-remembering”. In another of Ouspensky’s books, The Fourth Way, Ouspensky writes, “For me personally …the most interesting idea [of Gurdjieff] was that of self-remembering. I simply could not understand how people could miss such a thing. All European philosophy and psychology just missed this point. There are traces in older teachings, but they are so well disguised and placed between less important things that you cannot see the importance of the idea” (page 13). I can relate to Ouspensky on this. I once had a friend read the text given below who claimed to respect it ostensibly, only to be with him a few days later and find him praising his newly acquired copy of Daniel C. Dennett’s misnomer Consciousness Explained. There is not one word about consciousness in Dennett’s entire book – it only speaks about the content of consciousness. So my friend was just one more “Volinsky” (self explanatory when you read the text). The part about Volinsky below is important. Ouspensky knew what he was talking about in the quote I gave above. In fact, his insistence on the significance and novelty of the idea of self-remembering is enough alone to rank Ouspensky as one of the top most important philosophers of the twentieth century. – Steve Adams Text quote from P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, chapter seven, pages 116 through top of page 122… On one occasion while talking with G. I asked him whether he considered it possible to attain “cosmic consciousness,” not for a brief moment only but for a longer period. I understood the expression “cosmic consciousness” in the sense of a higher consciousness possible for man in the sense in which I had previously written about it in my book Tertium Organum. “I do not know what you call ‘cosmic consciousness,’ said G., “it is a vague and indefinite term; anyone can call anything he likes by it. In most cases what is called ‘cosmic consciousness’ is simply fantasy, associative daydreaming connected with intensified work of the emotional center. Sometimes it comes near to ecstasy but most often it is merely a subjective emotional experience on the level of dreams. But even apart from all this before we can speak of ‘cosmic consciousness’ we must define in general what consciousness is. “How do you define consciousness?” “Consciousness is considered to be indefinable,” I said, “and indeed, how can it be defined if it is an inner quality? With the ordinary means at our disposal it is impossible to prove the presence of consciousness in another man. We know it only in ourselves.” “All this is rubbish,” said G., “the usual scientific sophistry. It is time you got rid of it. Only one thing is true in what you have said: that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it. And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards. I mean that when it comes again you can see that it has been absent a long time, and you can find or remember the moment when it disappeared and when it reappeared. You can also define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from consciousness. But by observing in yourself the appearance and the disappearance of consciousness you will inevitably see one fact which you neither see nor acknowledge now, and that is that moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical working of the machine. You will then see that you can think, feel, act, speak, work, without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not. “Your principle mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is.” I cannot say that what was said about consciousness became clear to me at once. But one of the subsequent talks explained to me the principles on which these arguments were based. On one occasion at the beginning of a meeting G. put a question to which all those present had to answer in turn. The question was: “What is the most important thing that we notice during self-observation?” Some of those present said that during attempts at self-observation, what they had felt particularly strongly was an incessant flow of thoughts which they had found impossible to stop. Others spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing the work of one center from the work of another. I had evidently not altogether understood the question, or I answered my own thoughts, because I said that what struck me most was the connectedness of one thing with another in the system, the wholeness of the system, as if it were an “organism,” and the entirely new significance of the word to know which included not only the idea of knowing this thing or that, but the connection between this thing and everything else. “Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you,” he said. “That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember yourselves.” (He gave particular emphasis to these words.) “You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, ‘it observes’ just as ‘it speaks,’ ‘it thinks,’ ‘it laughs.’ You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still ‘is noticed,’ ‘is seen.’…In order really to observe oneself one must first of all remember oneself.” (He again emphasized these words.) “Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?” These words of G.’s made me think a great deal. It seemed to me at once that they were the key to what he had said before about consciousness. But I decided to draw no conclusions whatever, but to try to remember myself while observing myself. The very first attempts showed how difficult it was. Attempts at self-remembering failed to give any results except to show me that in actual fact we never remember ourselves. “What else do you want?” said G. “This is a very important realization. People who know this” (he emphasized these words) “already know a great deal. The whole trouble is that nobody knows it. If you ask a man whether he can remember himself, he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself, he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness. If a man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the understanding of his being.” All that G. said, all that I myself thought, and especially all that my attempts at self-remembering had shown me, very soon convinced me that I was faced with an entirely new problem which science and philosophy had not, so far, come across. But before making deductions, I will try to describe my attempts to remember myself. The first impression was that attempts to remember myself or to be conscious of myself, to say to myself, I am walking, I am doing, and continually to feel this I, stopped thought. When I was feeling I, I could neither think nor speak; even sensations became dimmed. Also, one could only remember oneself in this way for a very short time. I had previously made certain experiments in stopping thought which are mentioned in books on Yoga practices. For example there is such a description in Edward Carpenter’s book From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, although it is a very general one. And my first attempts to self-remember reminded me exactly of these, my first experiments. Actually it was almost the same thing with the one difference that in stopping thoughts attention is wholly directed towards the effort of not admitting thoughts, while in self-remembering attention becomes divided, one part of it is directed towards the same effort, and the other part to the feeling of self. This last realization enabled me to come to a certain, possibly a very incomplete, definition of “self-remembering,” which nevertheless proved to be very useful in practice. I am speaking of the division of attention which is the characteristic feature of self-remembering. I represented it to myself in the following way: When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe – a line with one arrowhead: I -> the observed phenomenon. When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line: I ↔ the observed phenomenon. Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else. Moreover this “something else” could as well be within me as outside me. The very first attempts at such a division of attention showed me its possibility. At the same time I saw two things clearly. In the first place I saw that self-remembering resulting from this method had nothing in common with “self-feeling,” or “self-analysis.” It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavor. And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood. They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I am in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one’s head, when one hears one’s own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside. I saw quite clearly that my first recollections of life, in my own case very early ones, were moments of self-remembering. This last realization revealed much else to me. That is, I saw that I really only remember those moments of the past in which I remembered myself. Of the others I know only that they took place. I am not able wholly to revive them, to experience them again. But the moments when I had remembered myself were alive and were in no way different from the present. I was still afraid to come to conclusions. But I already saw that I stood upon the threshold of a very great discovery. I had always been astonished at the weakness and the insufficiency of our memory. So many things disappear. For some reason or other the chief absurdity of life for me consisted in this. Why experience so much in order to forget it afterwards? Besides there was something degrading in this. A man feels something which seems to him very big, he thinks he will never forget it; one or two years pass by – and nothing remains of it. It now becomes clear to me why this was so and why it could not be otherwise. If our memory really keeps alive only moments of self-remembering, it is clear why our memory is so poor. All these were the realizations of the first days. Later, when I began to learn to divide attention, I saw that self-remembering gave wonderful sensations which, in a natural way, that is, by themselves, come to us only very seldom and in exceptional conditions… Sometimes self-remembering was not successful; at other times it was accompanied by curious observations. I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself and I turned into the street on the left having firmly decided to keep my attention on the fact that I would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line of thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy streets. I reached the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. Just round the corner on the Nevsky was a tobacconist’s shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes. Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my flat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters. Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izvostchik and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. – And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself. I spoke of my observations and deductions to the people in our group as well as to my various literary friends and others. I told them that this was the center of gravity of the whole system and of all work on oneself; that now work on oneself was not only empty words but a real fact full of significance thanks to which psychology becomes an exact and at the same time a practical science. I said that European and Western psychology in general had overlooked a fact of tremendous importance, namely, that we do not remember ourselves; that we live and act and reason in deep sleep, not metaphorically but in absolute reality. And also that, at the same time, we can remember ourselves if we make sufficient efforts, that we can awaken. I was struck by the difference between the understanding of the people who belonged to our groups and that of people outside them. The people who belonged to our groups understood, though not all at once, that we had come in contact with a “miracle,” and that it was something “new,” something that had never existed before. A. L. Volinsky, whom I had met and with whom I had talked a great deal since 1909 and whose opinions I valued very much, did not find in the idea of “self-remembering” anything that he had not known before. “This is an apperception.” He said to me, “Have you read Wundt’s Logic? You will find there his latest definition of apperception. It is exactly the same thing you speak of. ‘Simple observation’ is perception. ‘Observation with self-remembering,’ as you call it, is apperception. Of course Wundt knew of it.” I did not want to argue with Volinsky. I had read Wundt. And of course what Wundt had written was not at all what I had said to Volinsky. Wundt had come close to this idea, but others had come just as close and had afterwards gone off in a different direction. He had not seen the magnitude of the idea which was hidden behind his thoughts about different forms of perception. And not having seen the magnitude of the idea he of course could not see the central position which the idea of the absence of consciousness and the idea of the possibility of the voluntary creation of this consciousness ought to occupy in our thinking. Only it seemed strange to me that Volinsky could not see this even when I pointed it out to him. I subsequently became convinced that this idea was hidden by an impenetrable veil for many otherwise intelligent people – and still later on I saw why this was so.

A QUOTE ON THE AUTHORITY OF MYSTICS

NOTE: Those sharing with me the course “Modern Problems of Belief” will likely discover that I can and probably will speak comparably to the quote below over the duration of the course, and I do not require someone else to say what is said here for me. However, I wish to note that I am not a lone voice in speaking about mystical authority as Rhea Miller does here. For example, Ken Wilber in numerous places in A Brief History of Everything and in many of his other books makes the same or similar points. There are other examples I could give, including many of the top scientists and philosophers of the twentieth century. But I like what Miller says and the way she says it, and so I share it with you. – Steve Adams, June, 2008 From: Rhea Y. Miller, Cloudhand, Clenched Fist, pages 53-54… One of history’s best kept secrets is that mystics are reformers, if not outright revolutionaries, precisely because of their authority. Contrary to public opinion, mystics are not wimpy, hidden away, uninvolved, “other worldly” folk. Mystics experience a vision, a new way of seeing; they believe in these visions and act upon them. Mystics exude authority. Mystics quite regularly shake up worldviews… The fact of the matter is that the authority, or truth of a knowledge-event or mystical event, is rarely given the opportunity to be verified, due to political agendas. [I would add social, religious, economic, scientific, and other agendas – SA] The problem is not that there is no way in which to verify the authority of a knowledge-event or mystical event. The problem is that such events are so threatening that we rarely have the opportunity to examine them before the mystics and their ideas are whisked away, belittled, dismissed, swept under the carpet, or destroyed. The irony is that the real danger lies not in the true mystical or knowledge-event but in the idolatry. Gestalt therapist Barry Stevens has provocatively asked why, when someone steps out of line, we order them back into line rather than asking them where they are going or what they are seeing. When we stop questioning and assume that what is “re-presented” to us is the truth, without ourselves experiencing its validity or authority, we engage in idolatry.

Q. How should the US view China's developing relations with her neighbors? Should the US modify its foreign policy toward these same nations in light of their changing relations with China? I wish to humbly suggest without too long a tangent to defend it that the word "should" in these questions is loaded, and suggests an ideal to which the US does not possess the necessary being to recognize and enact. I actually believe that morality is hierarchical, and involves epistemological threshholds, such that the whole idea of "revealed truth" basic to all spiritual tradition is a claim of a higher moral authority, which, could it be perceived correctly, would serve as a yardstick to amend our own ethical philosophies - that is to say, what makes sense to us on our own level. For example, many people snicker at the "simpleton" pacifism of Gandhi, assuming that their culturally conditioned worldview faces reality much better in a violent world. Yet anyone who studies the life of Gandhi knows he was far from being naive about the realities he faced. He saw deeper and further, and proved that a pacifist philosophy could in principle be pragmatic to the extent that on occassion it makes more sense that the brute force mentality of the rest of the world. No one who supports a trillion dollars and thousands of lost lives for a decade-long heinously violent imperialist campaign to stubbornly cling to fossil fuel myopia in a patch of Middle East desert has any room to call pacifists naive. That last remark pulls me back on track for the questions at hand. And having spent time in discussion board on Southeast Asia, I will devote more attention here to Central Asia. My source is Sean L. Yom in his discussion of SCO: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This is an alliance of Russia and China with the four "stans" that I'll not torture myself typing out. (The prior "Shanghai Five" left out Uzbekistan). The six countries pledged to fight "three evil forces": terrorism, extremism and separatism (violent Islamic radicalism). The alliance was lopsided with Russian and Chinese hegemony. But 9/11 and the Afgan conflict altered the playing field with more western influence and attention and Russia and China a bit diluted. The economic and political future of the region is dependent on three principle vectors: Sino-Russian relations,, the US presence, and Islamic militancy. All the "stans" have positive US relations. The US has two primary interests there: 1) oil and gas reserves, and 2) tactical ground. Needless to say, Russia and China are less than happy with the US presence development. US presence is the key variable of SCO's future. I'll spend my time more on one of the three vectors - Islamic militancy, and US presence will ride piggyback on that discussion. The militants are not well organized and are weak in resources. They are not terribly imposing as a military front, but more effectual in isolated terrorists tactics. Russian and Chinese hawkish policy actually overstates the threat, and on this the US hopscotches depending on where situated - placating in the "stans" and in accord with Russia and China in Iraq and elsewhere. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International complain that hawkish policy "actually sustains an ebb-and-flow cycle of Islamic violence". Brutal repression alienates unemployed youths who face little economic opportunity. Networks easily recruit more fighters from among them. Moscow and Beijing in the face of that population justify even further suppression and the cycle repeats in a positive feedback loop. The US might seem a counterbalance in the "stans" if their motive was humanitarian and not oil. The US first needs to extricate itself from the Bush regime (and not fall into another Republican oligarchy) and then re-think both motive and action in its policy. There is a part of me like many others that does not much care how the Muslims fare in all of this. They don't inspire my sympathy. But another part of me knows that such a position is the most myopic of any of my inner Munchkin's opinions. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International represent a wiser perspective, though I shall not presume to know much less elaborate on how this would or should play out. But at a time in a higher state I myself made the following quote: "Whoever sees reality for what it is knows that the only sensible consistent inner response to one's fellow humanity is one of compassion." I know that I was across a higher epistemological threshhold when I said that - said it not glibly but with real insight. I know to trust that insight. And yet, most of my life I do not live in the state where this is evident and it sounds hollow. I am just another cynic who would be more comfortable if all the Muslims were gone. US policy comes from this kind of level upon which I spend most of my time. Whoever has spent a trillion dollars on a decade-long experiment to put my quote into practice can call it naive. Steve

Blame tardiness on "black karma"

All that talk of movements, and here I am with a cold! Serves me right! Hard to make myself do anything, and I didn't see what I wanted on RSS feeds - I can't do the Tibetan Buddhists because I get too emotionally involved. But to pick something that "interests you" - I can do that. Our reading in Blum and Jensen (okay, so it's not from the news - flunk me!) included an essay by Dru Gladney, "Ethnoreligious Resurgence in a Northwestern Sufi Community". I have been interested in Sufism for many years (and no, I'm not naive enough to interpret it through the lens of Idries Shah). Here we have the Hui people in China in the small north-central province of Ningxia. The Hui here belong to the Khufiyya brotherhood which "developed from a branch of the Naqshbandiyya" - of interest to me if no one else, as the early Naqshbandi Order held an esoteric school. My reading of Gladney made it very obvious (to me) no such thing is present here in contemporary China, which is one reason the sociology takes on the character it does. (That's an observation - not a judgment). Sufism in general is a diverse set of mystical or quasi-mystical heterodox Shiite sects whose origin can be ultimately traced to a Hermetic influx that took on the garb of Islam as a cover against persecution (see Tobias Churton, "The Golden Builders"). The Hui in China don't seem to match such a description very well - to me, they're just Muslims, which is fine but (to me) doctrinally boring. In fact, I'm hitting at a main point here - these Hui are not very doctrinal at all. Researchers cite the most common answer they give as to why they believe in Islam: "We believe in Islam because we are Hui." Okay... Most of the sociological research reported on by Gladney centered on a village called the Na Homestead. These people during the Cultural Revolution had deviated from the straight-and-narrow, engaging in alcohol and tobacco among other things. Now they are very strict. Attendence at the local mosque is very high. Large numbers of men, some elderly, prostate for over an hour in prayer even when the ground is frozen. Han influence is all around, and the state is up to its usual nonsense, while the Hui cling to their identity strongly in practice even if not in overt ideology. Ironically, the economic liberalization policies of China in the post-Mao era has led to an increase in religious conservatism and practice. Chinese economic and political reforms are making the Hui feel closer to Islamic neighbors than to Beijing and intensified their religious and social identity. The state wishes to keep ethnic identity separate from religious belief and practice, but for the Hui these are shown to be nearly inseparable. This is especially the case in conservative Na Homestead. We tend to see the modern reforms in China as a unifying force leading toward globalization, but it can also be fragmenting, or lead toward greater unity in directions very different than intended by Beijing.

A Tale of Two Factories

Before I started this course, China was this "thing" over there that was taking American jobs and buying us out, and sending us cheap imports while "it" was getting rich off of us and we were getting poorer. This is a typical view of Americans - with lots of media scaffolding - toward China, and as a caricature, it has some degree of merit - provided it is not mistaken for anything more than a caricature. I was actually pretty good about that. I have this strong doctrinal position that one should not have an opinion about everything in the world about which one knows nothing whatever, that this in society may be seen as clever but I see it as lying. I am not perfect about practicing what I preach, but I did at least confine my attitudes to the impact here and not presume to understand what was happening over there - I knew my "thing" over there was a vacuous label. Now I'm even more messed up, because I presume to know something about that "thing" over there as well. And no sooner do I get a more "enlightened" perspective than I am hit with the realization that the situation is so fluid and dynamic that to know what I am talking about, I have to continuously update it. That point was driven home this morning - April 5, 2008 - when I looked for a news post to use on this blog post. Hot off the press in the New York Times it sat at the top of the list: an article in today's business section by Joe Nocera, with this title: "Seeing the Sights of Industrial China: 2 Factories, 2 Futures". The article was sufficiently rich to pose a dilemma of how to streamline it here... The context is the RMB against the dollar. RMB stands for "renmimbi" - also called the "yuan" - which is the Chinese currency. The yuan, as I will call it, rose 4% against the dollar since the start of the year. It would have risen higher, but it is moored to government control. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson praised the increase, but wants China to let the yuan be "free floating" (the US sees a rising yuan as beneficial if Paulson's view is taken as "official"). The author visited two Chinese factories, both on the outskirts of Shanghai. The first is the Shanghai Jinjue Fashion Company directed by Mr. Jin Jue. This is the stereotypical run-down one-room cavernous complex with a dirty looking river running behind it, making stereotypical cheap goods garments for mainly European markets. But it is largely vacant: 60% of the work force either quit or has been laid off. Business is bad. "The RMB is killing me," groaned Jin Jue. With the rising currency, cheap goods are not so cheap anymore. Inflation was up 8.7% in February alone, and workers cry for more money to make ends meet. Recent labor laws have passed for worker protection, but this also raises Jin Jue's costs. Some Chinese goods are actually being labeled "Made in Mexico" and routed through Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA. Mr. Jin Jue said that with a rising yuan "all these factories will go out of business." The author said that it may turn out accordingly, inflicting short-term pain, but that it would be good for the Chinese economy in the long haul. "And it won't be a lot of fun for the West to watch" he added. In China today there is much talk of "moving up the value chain." China wants business to gravitate toward more complex, higher-value goods that bring bigger profit margins and depend less on cheaper goods made on the premise of rock-bottom costs. One strategist spoke of a deliberate policy to push manufacturing up the value chain, and added that it comes at the same time as rising raw materials costs. For example, in the high tech goods market such as iPods, the Chinese are no longer content to simply assemble the components. They want to make them as well, and own the brand. The second factory the author visited is an example of a business that has already fulfilled this dream. Li Xian Shou is founder and CEO of ReneSola, that makes silicon wafers for solar panels. His first quarter 2007 earnings were up 200% from the previous year. He made $53 million in 2007, almost double his 2006 profit. In January of this year he raised $130 million in a stock offering on NYSE. His complex is spreading like a wildfire, with some buildings no more than six months old. The number of people he employs rose from twenty in 2005 to 3300 now. At first his company assembled solar panels for companies in Germany and Japan who supplied him the silicon wafers. But assembly, he notes, is a "commodity business" and attracts much competition. So in 2005 he converted to producing the wafers themselves and now competes with the foreign companies. Because he does not export directly, but sends the wafers to solar panel assembly plants in China, he can demand payment in yuan. Asked about the effect of a rising yuan, "he gave an indifferent shrug." After all the other background from Blecher, Han Dongfang and others, I was encouraged to hear about the recent worker reform laws being passed, but nothing further about them was said. Here I confine my attention to the polemic posed by these two factories. I qualifyingly presume to agree that a rising yuan is in the best long term interest of China, but I am also inclined to the impertinence of suggesting that the same is true for us. In other words, the pain it may inflict here with rising prices and adjustments of competition will likewise prove a check on unrestrained myopic growth unattached to resources and long-term vision. For one thing, as a geologist I know there is only so much oil in the ground, and the implications of that fact are not being seriously faced. My wish for China is not that it cease to "get rich" at the expense of the United States, but that this "thing" over there ostensibly "getting rich" should include all the people of China and not just a few. I wish China good economic health. I wish all of us good economic health. We all need to start thinking more holistically global about that, or all of us may find ourselves missing out.

Chinese youth culture - the one and the many

It was a pleasure watching the interview of the bright young Alex - so upbeat and articulate, and speaking revealingly as a contemporary Chinese youth. The number one question that interview raised in my mind was how typical he was of Chinese youth as a whole. I had hoped to find other personal narratives reflecting comparisons and contrasts, but found little. What I did find in some ways may be even better - a recent thorough survey of Chinese youth culture that effectively answered my number one question about Alex. It also begs a question or two, leading finally to considerations of one of the main elements of contemporary youth - their use of the Internet. But with that, I am ahead of myself. Lets briefly hit the main points of Alex's interview, and then look at some data from a survey of Chinese youth ages 16-29 completed in December, 2007. Alex is a Chinese college student studying computer science (I assume here in North Carolina). He was interviewed by Dr. James Anderson. In summary, Alex said his hopes and desires for the future are just to be successful, and maybe help his family. This is similar, he noted, to his parents generation except that they had "smaller" goals to live and dress better, while the younger generation has bigger goals. Work means a good future in a comfortable career helpful to his family and country. His major could help his country perhaps by bringing high technology back to China. The future looks good for him now, noting that the economy is doing quite well and the government becoming more democratic. He sees the government as having already taken lessons from the Cultural Revolution and the Beijing Massacre, giving them experience that will aid the future. Parents and the government show responsiveness to youth in their emphasis on education, which is very important, costly, and devoted. Today's youth mainly pay attention to competition in the job market, which is much more intense as universities have increased capacity and many graduates are looking for jobs. The young generation likes western culture, with big influences from Europe, America, Japan and Korea. They pick western culture in a mixed way, having grown up in China and retaining Chinese culture which they do not dispose of. Their pop culture is a mix that adapts western culture to Chinese tradition. For example, dressing western does not make them think western. A web-based organization called Kairos Future out of Stockholm, Sweden posted this month (March, 08) a feature titled: "Chinese Youth - Down to earth people reaching for the stars". The feature, written by Ms Anna Kiefer, summarizes a December, 2007 survey of 22,000 Chinese, with an older comparison group to contrast with the emphasized study of youth from ages 16 to 29. I begin with a condensed paraphrase of her opening statement... Young Chinese are very optimistic about the future and have great plans. Important is to have a prosperous career, high status and earn a lot of money. Material possessions and fame are more important to Chinese than to Europeans. They [claim] importance to spiritual values, anxious to blend in, want to be similar to friends, and to live up to the expectations of others as well as of self. This dual loyalty may reflect the one-child policy. I will highlight a few of the specifics... They want it all: high status and high salary jobs with good benefits, but they know they have to work hard to achieve this. 60% of young men and 42% of young women want to start their own company. 81% think material possessions provide meaning in life. 60% consider certain brands important to express identity - three times the number of European youth who answered the same. But most answer "yes" that spiritual values should be more emphasized. Typical youth are satisfied with most aspects of their lives. Most are optimistic about the future, believing they have complete control over their own future and confident of having a good job. 82% say they have a lot in common with their compatriots compared to 48% in Europe. But a much larger proportion want to live and work abroad for a temporary period compared to Europeans. Watching TV is the most common media habit. Books are popular. Only 20% read foreign magazines and newspapers. Very few listen to radio. The number one activity during free time is surfing the Internet, ahead of spending time with family and friends or listening to music. My immediate observation is that my question about Alex is answered: according to what I read here, Alex is quite typical. Another observation is how easy it is to answer "yes" to the spiritual values question, but how far removed that is from meaning it and acting accordingly, for which the data compellingly proves otherwise. Chinese materialists are no different than American (whether they warm Sunday morning pews or not) in failing to recognize that any spirituality demands the primacy of an inner orientation that does not deny the material but puts it in its place. This will soon cost them, because they have a warped sense of reality. I wish them well and do not belittle the value and legitimacy of their optimism, but it needs to have a firm foundation in reality as a stable platform to construct their future. Their sense of invincibility will make spectacular success stories out of some, but jerk the rug out from others. They seem to me to be out of touch politically, spiritually and environmentally (including in regard to resources). Economics has been operating under the fallacy that continued growth is not checked by the natural infrastructure. It is its own world. This is building a Tower of Babel, and the Chinese youth seem to be busy laying the bricks. But there is one other concern I wish to bring out. The survey presented above was conducted online. This makes the results biased toward computer users. The chapter in Weston and Jenson about the Internet by Xiao Qiang was revealing in showing how the government sustains some level of success in controlling Internet content, but with diminishing returns as reform and greater openness inevitably result from the expansion of its use. The effect on society is quite profound: affecting public opinion, influencing and drawing out other media, and occassionally leading to successful reforms and acts of justice in response to public outcries, as in the case of police brutality on Sun Zhigang. Parallel to this article, The World News Network posted on March 4, 2008 on YOP.com (Youth Opportunities) a Reuters release (February 21, 2008) titled "Chinese youth push political expression online." This feature was very similar in content to that of Xiao Qiang. But it differed in having a youth orientation, and was an eye-openner on how extensively Chinese youth use the Internet and how fast that is growing. The feature said that the number of people using the Internet at the end of 2007 was up 50% from 2006. It said there is an "additional 200,000 new Chinese users going online every day", and that "the vast majority of Chinese users are young people - 70% are under 30." Telecom expert Duncan Clark was quoted that "Technology is driving reforms in Chinese society right now much more than political reform." Internet addiction and enthusiasm (long hours of use) show statistics that appear to surpass those of the United States among Chinese youth. The Kairos Future survey may be biased in only sampling online users, but that is hardly a subculture of Chinese youth. Rather, it is the mainstream. For balance, I would like to see a survey of rural agrarian youth. But the picture I am seeing here is, I believe, the bigger story. And Alex, our computer science major, fits right in.

China a world power?

Q. With all that you have learned from the recent reports about China's current internal problems, do you think that its world power status should be reconsidered? Can China successfully overcome these difficulties to achieve such status on the world stage? The simple answer is "yes", but it begs the question of just what "reconsidering" means, by whom and with what weight. And would it make any difference. "Reconsidering" here refers to policies by the world community toward China, whether those policies be political, economic, social, humanitarian, environmental, religious or cultural. An obvious example: should Beijing have won the bid for the 2008 summer Olympics? I understand the motive as a catalyst for reform, but I answer "no", as I do not accept China's sincerity or uniformity in this. Instead, it is a ploy and plays games -pun intended - with the rest of the world. I have the spring issue of Amnesty International's quarterly, and it includes an article on the Olympics calling for boycotts, protests, and appeals for reform. If I had any doubt before, it vanished Tuesday night (18th of March) when I heard the press conference with Wen Jiabao on C-SPAN. Frankly, it was hard to stomach. It was tedious, as he kept pausing to carefully craft his lies. Nearly everything that came out of his mouth was the stuff emitting from the south end of male-gender cattle travelling north. He was inflexible in their "one China" doctrine toward Taiwan. As for Tibet, he made it sound like China was just trying to support them and help them any way it could and the unprovoked ungrateful barbarians there violently and heinously committed atrocities against the Chinese. He called the Dalai Lama's appeals for peace lies. If that is how it really was, why has China gone to such great lengths to squelch all media coverage and videotaping of the conflicts? Why not show the whole world just how these terrorists are treating the poor innocent Chinese soldiers? Why does the cell phone footage that slipped out tell a different story? The ancients in the Genesis story (parable even if also historic) who tried to build the tower of Babel with slim for mortar found it would not hold. Well, guess what: BS doesn't make a successful mortar either. I always try to zero in on the central hub of any discussion issue and build upon it. In this case, I thought the best exposition to come close was the last part, part 7, of "China on the rise" by Paul Solmon on the Lehrer report. What he said about technical innovation applies well, I think, to other categories such as the environment, etc. "We in the west", he said, "assume that political freedom and technical innovation go hand in hand". Not a bad assumption, especially given, as Solman, pointed out, that most actual "innovation" is foreign: China's machines, replacing their labor force, are not Chinese made. Who can name a Chinese product? They are US products, etc., made in China. There is unchecked corruption, no public forum, and perhaps most scary of all, the young intellectuals are so economic oriented they are apathetic about control and repression. Fear is the paramount driving force of China's regime internally. Economic growth in some fashion will continue, forced as it is by policies oblivious to consequences, but it is married to communist oppression. In Solman's words, the "worst marriage." A second possibility trumped by optimists is that politics will develop along with economics. And there's a third possibility: economic growth will co-exist with no political reform. I wish to dig a little deeper into these scenarios. The second possibility listed just above entails that the government is reacting - not acting. Typical of its history, with embarrassing results. The government remains stubborn, but adjusts when its hand is forced. It's a slow evolution. Look at the long history of suffering the Chinese have reaped waiting on such an evolution! This could show superficial success as it has in the past. But when the forcing surpasses equilibrium, all hell breaks loose and the system goes chaotic. That's a law of nature as well as the lesson of Tienanmen Square. That leads to the third possibility. China seems very resilient. So does nature when it remains in equilibrium. The famous supreme court justice Oliver Wendel Holmes was also quite a poet, most famous for his poem "The Chambered Nautilus". But he also wrote a poem called "The Deacon's Masterpiece". In this poem, a local well-to-do deacon ordered the custom building of an exceptional horse-drawn carriage with every part designed to last indefinitely. The carriage did indeed far outlast all others with no repair problems, until one day the entire thing massively collapsed. The Chinese leaders are trying to build a deacon's masterpiece. Like an earlier such effort: "and slim and BS they had for mortar". Fear is a terribly mechanical modus operandi, and no long-term constructive evolution can be supported by it.

The closely related factors of environment and population now figure prominently. These will not go away. China's insistence on six-percent annual economic growth is myopia as long as it refuses to deal with these problems pre-eminently. Let's look at the issue of apparent Chinese political resilience from the standpoint of how these and other factors play out. I will quickly add to the list of these: inflation, unemployment, gap between the rich and the poor, corruption, lack of social services and health care. All of these were on showcased display in the Frontline documentary "China in the Red". Honestly, I found there to be a certain striking arbitrariness whenever I considered different references to cite both to make my case and to demonstrate (what petty insecurity!) that I had "done my homework". I reached the point where I felt I could poke my finger randomly at any point in any book, article or video and relate whatever my finger touched to my case. That suggests to me that I may be on track, but I will spare an overly-tedious manifesto to document it. At this point, notice that none of the issues listed occur in a vacuum - they all tie together. Here, I will use the two logs of environment and population as representative of the whole - the load on the wheelbarrow.

Environment and population are both growth vectors: they move in one direction - getting bigger. A one-wheeled wheelbarrow is an excellent metaphor for discussing equilibria (and hence stability versus collapse). If you have ever used one much, as I have, you know they are easy to keep in balance if empty or with a light load. As the weight of the load increases, you have to be more and more careful about its balance. With a light load, it can hit a bump and tilt some but you can hold it. With a heavy load, the tiniest tilt is hopeless: the whole thing goes over and you lose your load. In this case, the wheelbarrow itself stands for the resilience of the Chinese infrastructure politically, economically and socially. The logs of environment and population are already in the wheelbarrow, and since the device has been pushed along so far successfully, it is easy to assume it can be handled with those two logs in it. But those are not static logs. They gradually increase, and because the increase is gradual, the consequences are easier to ignore. But at some point their forcing - the actual term used in equilibrium science - will surpass the capacity of the system (strength of the arms holding the handles). At this point, which can't be far away, you better be on very smooth level hard flawless pavement! The load can be kept only if the balance is perfect. Intuitively, the Chinese leaders get it - that is why they are so paranoid about social stability. But they refuse to properly take the growth of the weight into account. They refuse because it comes at the expense of their power and their lack of transparency: the very ingredients of the strength of their arms. Notice that nearly all of the increase in weight is internal - the outside world largely just plays referee.

Can China successfully overcome these difficulties and secure its status as a world power? Can the boy Douzi become the girl Dieyi? They can put on a good show. No doubt we will see one this summer. A stage performance reform is not an essential reform, and China at the leadership level has long abandoned all sense of the distinction within themselves as their ancient traditions more thoroughly understand. The external will reflect the internal, and all of China pays the price. They squelch the very Buddhists and Taoists who have the wisdom that could save them. My talk of balancing the wheelbarrow, framed in the modern science terms of punctuated equilibria, will not sound strange to these ancient ears.

So now we return to the beginning: "reconsidering" China as a world power is like watching to see if the referee throws a flag. To what extent can we "reconsider" in any meaningful way? Is it our place to tell China that if you become a world power we will send you to bed with no supper? No, but neither is it our place under a phony guise of real friendship (and only watching our own wallets) to cater to China's myopia at the top level. I believe that if we in the west are scared of China becoming a world power, we don't need to do a whole lot about it: China is quite capable of messing up its own bed. I believe that our position should be one of passive force, engaged but not meddlesome, and somewhat authentically (imagine that!) a friend who is secure in giving constructive criticism without pandering to self interest. It's a hand on China's shoulder saying that we do not believe China will succeed in its world power endeavors and we will not hesitate to say why. Our policies should not continuously hand them carrots feeding their myopia. We should take a hard line on their support of Somalia, their heavy-handedness toward Tibet, their warped nationalist pride toward the Taiwan issue, etc. Bush should not say - as he did - that he will attend the games in spite of events in Tibet (of course he doesn't give a piss about what happens to Buddhists). We should tie economic carrots to reform. We should put major pressure on environmental reform - including the pressure of setting a good example. We will not be preventing them from becoming a world power. If they continued in current fashion the wheelbarrow will dump anyway. We do not oppose them. They can become a world power if they want to. We will not send them to bed with no supper. But they must learn for themselves what "wanting to" actually entails. I don't think they will. I think the wheelbarrow will dump. What this means in terms of actual events I do not presume to know. But I am ready to wager that the metaphor will prove apt.

CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

I wish to comment on two different but closely related news items that appeared on the China Digital Times on Sunday, March 2, 2008... CAPTION: "China Agency Gets More Power" The report, closely paraphrased... AP reports this week that the Chinese government plans on the creation of a cabinet ministry to hold SEPA. Officials believe this would give SEPA more authority. The plans are expected to be formerlly approved in March. The agency would becomethe "Ministry of Environment" said Hongjun Zhang, who said staff could be increased from 200 to 300-400. Over time the body would be given more authority over local environental bureaus which tend to be beholden to local industries and politicians that flout the rules. Critics say this change will have little impact and regulations will continue to be ignored. Up front, I applaud this action of the Chinese government. It is certainly a move in the right direction. The most critical and beneficial part seems to me to be the increase of authority over local bureaus. While the power-mongering of the central government of China makes me cringe, yet the corruption on the local level, especially in regards to the environment makes me cringe much worse. I trust the central government to be more sincere on matters of the environment than the local officials. This concern was made crystal clear by two of our main readings, those of Judith Shapiro and of Elizabeth C. Economy. But why "over time"? Why not right away? Already we sense a good thing falling short. Economy writes, "Even when Beijing sets ambitious targets to protect the environment, local officials generally ignore them, preferring to concentrate on further advancing economic growth. Really improving the environment in China will require revolutionary bottom-up political and economic reforms." Curiously, she gives the figure of 300 for already-existing full-time members of SEPA, the State Environmental Protection Administration, whereas the news posts speaks encouragingly of increasing staff numbers up to 300 or more from the current 200 - a discrepancy. Economy asks why is China unable to get its environmental house in order. She says, "they are unwilling to pay the political and economic price to get there" She says Beijing's message is that economic growth cannot be sacrificed to environmental protection. No wonder critics are cynical about the reform making much difference. I believe it will make some difference, but it will be too little too late. It falls short of "revolutionary bottom-up political and economic reforms" that Economy so compellingly argued for. She and Shapiro run parallel in their concerns and appeals. Economy writes, "Effective environmental protection requires transparent information, official accountability, and an independent legal system. There is little indication that China's leaders will risk the authority of the Communist Party on charting a new environmental course." Compare this with Shapiro's last paragraph on page 65. The current leaders of China do not suffer from environmental myopia as severely as Mao Zedong did, but they are not immune to it. China is not just living on borrowed time, they are living on triple-mortgaged borrowed time. The officials seem terrified of losing control of their authoritarian regime. They should be much more scared of NOT losing it! CAPTION: "China to Log its Worst Polluters" The post, condensed and paraphrased... China has announced a new survey in which it will require factories, farms and other major polluters to declare how much and what kind of pollution they release. As an incentive, the government has promised immunity from prosecution for all willing participants. "We need reliable data..." said Ma Jun of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. Wang Yuqing, the man in charge of the project, said the main aim was to get a clear picture of China's pollution problem. The government will then use the information to develop new policies. Mr. Wang said the government will not use the information against the polluting firms. This news elicits very mixed feelings in me. As a scientist, I applaud the effort to get good empirical data upon which to formulate policy. The anti-scientific Bush regime over here could take some pointers. But this strategy is fraught with problems. An incintive is needed for sure, but so is accountability. People will deliberately take this as a license to behave however they please environmentally and get out of it at the price of a data report. Besides, it smells much too heavily of insider corruption, with the government and the corporations in cahoots. Even if that is unfounded, the policy is vulnerable to this, and certainly vulnerable to the suspicion of it, leading to even more public mistrust. I'm not sure how to approach giving incentive and accountability simultaneously - obviously a tricky path. Perhaps the immunity could be put on a time limit such as one year. After all, China can't twiddle its thumbs too long just gathering data - they need to do something. Maybe one impure motive for this whole thing is just to buy time anyway without committment to reform. At best this policy should be a quick sneak peak - then shut the policy down.

Re: Gurdjieff on Movements (compare to qigong)

NOTE: These words need to be taken in context - he is speaking to pupils at his Institute who have taken on a serious program with a holistic aim - Steve

Gurdjieff on Movements [COMPARE TO QIGONG]

Gurdjieff wrote sparingly about movements. The following excerpt taken from Views from the Real World is reprinted by the kind permission of Triangle Editions, Inc.

First Talk in Berlin

November 24, 1921

You ask about the aim of the movements. To each position of the body corresponds a certain inner state and, on the other hand, to each inner state corresponds a certain posture. A man, in his life, has a certain number of habitual postures and he passes from one to another without stopping at those between.

Taking new, unaccustomed postures enables you to observe yourself inside differently from the way you usually do in ordinary conditions. This becomes especially clear when on the command "Stop!" you have to freeze at once. At this command you have to freeze not only externally but also to stop all your inner movements. Muscles that were tense must remain in the same state of tension, and the muscles that were relaxed must remain relaxed. You must make the effort to keep thoughts and feelings as they were, and at the same time to observe yourself.

For instance, you wish to become an actress. Your habitual postures are suited to acting a certain part—for instance, a maid—yet you have to act the part of a countess. A countess has quite different postures. In a good dramatic school you would be taught, say, two hundred postures. For a countess the characteristic postures are, say, postures number 14, 68, 101 and 142. If you know this, when you are on the stage you have simply to pass from one posture to another, and then however badly you may act you will be a countess all the time. But if you don't know these postures, then even a person who has quite an untrained eye will feel that you are not a countess but a maid.

It is necessary to observe yourself differently than you do in ordinary life. ...Everyone has a limited repertoire of habitual postures, and of inner states. She is a painter and you will say, perhaps, that she has her own style. But it is not style, it is limitation. Whatever her pictures may represent, they will always be the same, whether she paints a picture of European life or of the East. I will at once recognize that she, and nobody else, has painted it. An actor who is the same in all his roles—just himself—what kind of an actor is he? Only by accident can he have a role that entirely corresponds to what he is in life.

Views from the Real World, pp. 167–170

Gmail - Emailing: Wild Goose Qigong - eakerite@gmail.com

http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/1186ba331336e59d NOTE: Open the "download" link in the mail window that the above brings up in order to view this remarkable document - Steve

Gmail - Pyromorphite-A - China.jpg

Gmail - Pyromorphite-A - China.jpg This is a specimen of natural crystals of a rare chlorophosphate mineral called pyromorphite. The specimen was found in the Daoping Mine in Yangshuo, Guangxi, China

The New York Philharmonic is WHERE?

Retyped word-for-word from saved draft: typed between midnight and one AM [posting clock is not correct]... Hot off the press - just today, February 23, 2008 in he New York Times! We find the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in Shanghai: five members of the orchestra at Shanghai Datong High School coaching pupils, including violinist Mei-Ching Huang. This is the orchestra's debut in Shanghai. New York Philharmonic president Zanin Mehta told local journalists, "It astonishes me that we've never been to this cultural capital before." The orchestra was here after visits to Taiwan and Hong Kong. They were to travel to Beijing on Saturday (today-23rd). The Times referred to Beijing as the "staging ground" for the "ballyhooed journey" to North Korea for a concert Tuesday, making "some anxiety among them". That is no surprise. While China supported North Korea in the Korean War, and the two nations share communist ideology, the tables are turned more recently. For one thing, the vibrant economy of South Korea is more commensurate with modern Chinese economic ambitions. But beyond that, recent nuclear threats in North Korea have alarmed China as well as the rest of the world, and China took a leading pro-active role in the 2003 six-party talks. When North Korea fired missiles and tested a small nuclear device in 2006, China's leaders got tough with Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator. (See Shirk, pages 123-127). China needs to be more conciiatory to this bordering regime with past ties and uncomfortably close proximity than does the United States where George Bush proclaims it to be an "axis of evil", but China is not happy with it. It is also no surprise that all of these Asian orchestra appearances were "two years in the making." I found it interesting that "audience members were considerably younger than most at Avery Fisher Hall" [the orchestra's home in Manhattan]. The Times pointed out that a man in his twenties wore a tee-shirt and several people wore stylish leather jackets. Government officials in contrast wore mutually conformist formal drab suits. Globalization has improved the ecnomy of Chinese citizens and introduced them to capitalist concerns for style and individual expression as opposed to communal dress, and also given them the economic means to take advantage of it. In contrast, the fuddy-duddy officials are a page out of the pre-reform past. "At Datong, the Philharmonic deployed three Chinese-speaking members" the Times reported. One, a Ms. Huang, "announced at the outset that she was Taiwanese" because students had some difficulty with her accent. The Times went on to say, "She later said she felt no political overtones in coaching children from the mainlan, given the sensitive relationship between the mainland and her country." To explain the whole history of China-Taiwan relations is beyond the scope of this blog, but it is interesting and perhaps encouraging to see this kind of harmony presently, even if it is an isolated incident and no generally indicative. That raises an interesting question: just how indicative is it? Taiwan is indeed a very sensitive issue, nearly bringing the United States into a war with China in 1996. Japan had taken Taiwan from the Qing government of China in 1895 inj a humiliating war. After World War II, it appeared ostensibly - at least to the Chinese - that with the defeat of Japan, China should get Taiwan back. It didn't happen. The US Navy saw to that. Taiwan is a pride issue, and blown out of proportion by Chinese propaganda in the past to where China can no lo0nger be soft on Taiwan. Public opinion in China is venomous toward what has more recently been emerging as a more-and-more democratic republic (dare I call it that?) The CCP is afraid it will fall if Taiwan wins its independence. This belief is so ingrained it has a life of its own and may be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Yet the Taiwanese musician felt comfortable. Is it because she was dealing with children and not adults? Is there an "emperor's new clothes" lesson here?