Psyberspace

Test post. Blogger is so messy. Pro features don’t work for me. Email posts need too much editing later. They mess up the future posts. Drafts get lost. Spell checking is too slow, I am better off cutting and pasting into an editor. Never mind. Good to be on the Pro mailing list. I hope it all gets sorted.
Later: Still having trouble, network errors all day, me or Blogger? Now trying IE. Now trying Pro1. Later… Pro1 got the next post up, but posted the future post again, which I can’t remove. Now in Pro1, testing.

This is from the intro by Julian Huxley, p 16 in my Fontana edition, to Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. amazon

Père Teilhard was a strong visualiser. He saw with hie minds eye that ‘banal fact of the earth’s roundness’ the sphericity of man’s environment — was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial
activity. In an unlimited environment , man’s thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outward: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to the spreading over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.

It is all very well calling it energy but that is not quite it? I have a sense that the passage below (in an earlier post), where I talk about about Moreno’s sociometric matrix shows that the two were grappling with the same idea. Note that Moreno too saw this matrix as a return of God.

My hypothesis:

Moreno’s sociometric matrix, Chardin’s noosphere, McLuhan’s ‘audio space’, Jung’s ‘objective psyche’ are all ways of exploring cyberspace.

Here is a quote from Chardin, p 78 in my Fontana edition:

When I speak of the ‘within’ of the earth I do not of course mean those material depths in which — a few miles beneath our feet — lurks one of the most vexatious mysteries of science: the chemical nature and the exact physical condition of the internal region of the globe. The ‘within’ is used here … to denote the ‘psychic’ face of that portion of the stuff of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the scope of the early earth.

Chardin puts it a little differently from the sympathetic but less metaphysical Huxley.

So was the ‘psychic’ always there, or did it emerge with our activity?

I have posted up more of my distractions!

THE GROUP AND ITS PROTAGONIST

The term psyche, underlying forces, focal conflict, central concern, unconscious processes and Bion’s notion of basic assumption have all been used in theis paper. Moreno’s concept of sociometric matrix brings in a new understanding of the unconscious of the group, and covers all of these ways of seeing the interconnections. It is satisfying to have found the concept of sociometric matrix in Moreno’s writing. That it is a “matrix” is a profound idea, which links it to a source, the womb, or more accurately the placenta, which nurtures all of life. That it is “sociometric” means that it can be empirically and experientially explored. Moreno’s work emphasises that sociometry is a science which can name and measure the living links between people and thus give us a secular grasp of what otherwise might remain exclusively intuitive and spiritual.

I like that.

Here is the link. Here because this weblog is also my bookmarks. I have kept bookmarks for years but they tend to get lost when I change OSs or machines. And this weblog can be Googled, and thus keywords will return this page of philosophical, psychological, essays. I note that Robert D. Romanyshyn is on the board and that Jonathan Moreno is a contributor.

Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”

www.rumi.org.uk

Heaven Retains Within Its Sphere Half of All Bodies and Maladies [Paracelsus] Very clear on literalism.

I love this paragraph, with its interesting word epistrophé:

Each time an astrological consultation can return a characteristic to its divine character, polish a problem so it shines in a different light, reveal the God in the disease, let the client see clearly for a moment that other heavenly half, the astrologer is performing an epistrophé, returning a mess in the human to a myth in the Gods.

I get this from dictionary.com:

epistrophe

\E*pis”tro*phe\, n. [L., from Gr. ? a turning toward, return, fr. ? to turn toward; ‘epi` upon, to + ? to turn.] (Rhet.) A figure in which successive clauses end with the same word or affirmation; e. g., “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I.” –2 Cor. xi. 22.

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

But it is much more than a rhetorical device. Hillman links this process to Neoplatonism and ta’wil in Persian mysticism. See also: Epistrophe

Found this from the Pacifica site. I like the essay a lot. James Hillman does what he does so well that it is a work of art in its own right. Some of the luddite comes through, but that is a welcome antidote to crass technological excess. More speed less haste. He seems to decry both. Here is an idea I am entertaining right now: Speed makes cyberspace visible. A subscription to a Journal was to be in a virtual community, a cyberspace, but the speed was too slow for us to see that, now in hindsight we can.

Here we must distinguish the moment of arrested movement from an identification with the arrest itself, as if beauty must stand still. But beauty, like caution, is not meant to stand still. The saying is not “Don’t leap,” but “Look before you leap.” Beauty means only for us to arrest for a moment the senseless insensitive forward thrust, in order to open the senses by inviting the aesthetic response. Then, as the arresting moment flees, the principle of precaution can incorporate into its innovative explorations an aesthetic awareness, insisting that any plan or project does not neglect the demand that beauty makes, or the deleterious effects of ugliness.

Here is an extrodinary weblog. There I could spend months on this site! I will.

transcript