Month: August 2002

Google Search: Jung Mandala

Thanks Stephen, for the tips to the links I have been making. Mandala, is what we are returning to, as David Sibbet mentions here:

I knew from the start that there was a format beyond drawing, a pattern of ultimate complexity and inclusiveness. This would be the ”mandala” or circular drawing. For the brain to figure out how everything relates to everything in a central way requires the most amount of insight. In a macro kind of way, it takes us back to the point of it all—to see the world in a whole way.

This image is from here A Medicine Wheel is made of stones. There were about 20,000 medicine wheels in North America, before the Europeans came. Medicine wheels are places for energy and healing, teaching and understanding. They are used for times of reflecting on life, and for joyous celebrations. The Medicine Wheel represents all of creation. all races of people, animals, birds, fish, insects, trees,and stones, the sun, moon and earth are in the circle of the medicine wheel. Each stone tells part of the story. The circle is all of the cycles of nature, day and night, seasons, moons, life cycles, and orbits of the moon and planets.

Another site: What is a Medicine Wheel?

In discussions recently the name Erich Jantsch came up. I am on the trail: Critqiue of Economic Reason monograf:

This is why the problem of the transitional period–the period of formation of the Noosphere, the period of transition of the Biosphere into a qualitatively new state, when the character of its evolution will be determined by the systems reason of coevolution, of man and the Biosphere–is the most important problem of our time.

We shall yet have to formulate a strategy for the development of mankind. It will cover a very wide range of questions which concern practically all areas of human activity. This circumstance is stimulating intellectual life, the establishment of an array of alternative paths of human development and a new view of the world. [ Moiseev 1989:596.] It calls for a new synthetic life-affirming discipline for the theory of noo”genesis must merge natural and social forms of knowledge. [ Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution , (New York: Brazilier Books, 1975):296.]

Interview with Kevin Kelly

No One is as smart as everybody

“we project onto technology what in earlier eras we would have projected onto the supernatural” – Jung

The Star in Man by Dolores Brien. Alchemy, gnosticism, Jung and technology. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology

According to Jung, we project onto technology what in earlier eras we would have projected onto the supernatural. For many, indeed, technology is experienced as numinous. Under the influence of science along with technology, we are less willing to attribute events to divine intervention. But unconsciously, we still cling to the hope of a revelation of that archetype of “order, deliverance, salvation and wholeness.” We express this hope, however, in symbols derived from technology rather than from traditional religious beliefs or from mythology.

It is characteristic of our time that the archetype, in contrast to its previous manifestations, should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man. The possibility of space travel has made the unpopular idea of metaphysical intervention much more acceptable. (CW,10, para. 623. )

Update, 7 August 2002: I have completed reading this essay and I find it good, and pertinent to my current project. There are plenty of themes here that I am contemplating at this time.

One idea that is important in probing cyberspace is the question of perception and or creation? Do we discover it or create it. Here is Brien quoting Jung:

… the self is more than passive receptor mirroring, or imaging what it has received. …The self it seems is not only a receptor, but an agent as well, or in alchemical terms, the artifex. It is the “self” who achieves the transformation of the energy into gold.

But later on in the essay Jung is quoted again:

Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter.(CW 13, para 163).

So has the psyche gained anything? This made me think that it had gained these “made not born” things to allow the self to transform. There is a loop here that adds “gold” at each iteration, because we make, create and then we also make it anew in our perception.

Another quote, Brien quoting Jung:

The alchemists made a distinction between God who became Man in Christ, the light of the world and the filius philosophorum, “the light of nature,”who was “extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer.”( CW 13, para. 163.) In the case of the former man’s situation is “I under God.” With the other, it is “God under me.” Jung excuses the alchemists as being naive and not aware of what they were doing. Nevertheless the splitting off of divine from human power had been irrevocably accomplished. From now on, human beings will think and act if they were God. Nature is subordinated too, becoming primarily a tool to fulfill our needs and desires.

This is interesting when juxtaposed to This from Stuart Brand: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Which by only one degree leads to the conversation about all this with Steve Talbott and Kevin Kelly.

Useful to have. Click here to convert.

Academic article on the navigation metaphor. Useful in my writing about the steering inherent in Cyberspace, etymologically.

The C.G. Jung Page: Archetypes of the Internet by Dolores Brien. adapted from a review of Mark Stefik’s book Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors

One last word-if the Internet acknowledges a god, that god has to be Hermes: mediator, communicator, messenger, trickster, patron of merchants, always on the move. His attributes seem as inexhaustible as does the Internet, of which he seems to be the soul.