THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 3:06 PM
Subject: The Great Chain of Being
ID: 259879

As I get a moment, I continue to rake up the elements of this work, into neat piles. Yes, I am sure it is true (prove me wrong) that there is almost no-one out there who has looked at all these simultaneous factors, and seen (or felt they have seen) ways they can come together. But something in me knows they can.

The intellectual/spiritual mystery of "the integral vision" is like a great jig-saw puzzle of the mind. This condition of "maya" or illusion that besets us -- is largely grounded in our inability to see beyond the immediate local now, including the broader context. This is why it is often said that it was the initial view of the earth as seen from space that began this era of broadly inclusive understanding. Seen from that point of view -- "as God sees it" -- the wholeness of things in this world seems much more apparent.

But putting the pieces of human understanding together? Involving all these arcane subjects -- like "ontology", or "epistemology", or "taxonomy"? That stuff is demanding, or seems to be...

What I like to say is -- actually, this stuff isn't rocket science. It's not that the individual pieces are so difficult. It's that there are a lot of them -- and it takes some powerful mental gymnastics to get them all clarified and laid out in neat rows.

The way I put it is -- this is the science of alphabet blocks -- lining up lots of simple little pieces -- like a child's blocks, to form these hugely complex combinations we know as the forms of human knowledge -- medicine, biology, physics, chemistry -- rocket science...

And these tools or methods I am mentioning -- they are just the categories of human understanding for looking at this sort of question. How DO we "know what we know?" How do we know that we actually KNOW it -- and aren't just thinking we do (how much religion takes that form???)

When I have thought about how to present this stuff, and bring it all together into one place, in a way that could conceivably be interesting to people, it has seemed to me that the explanation itself should take the form of a multi-level spectrum.

I could begin with deep intuition -- gathering up all kinds of mystical symbols that I believe can be interpreted as a "pre-mathematical metaphors" (yin/yang, for example, is clearly a mathematical model). And there are others -- the cross, for example -- is both an addition symbol and a two- dimensional coordinate frame with an origin. And mandala -- well, this might be arguable -- but when I started studying these things, I decided that mandalas could generally be understood as hierarchies -- and I went on with that analysis for years, figuring out how, and in what way. Earlier today, I was thinking about writing something on that theme -- "the mandala of logic". I'll get back to that....

But right now, I am just thinking about how to "stage" this overwhelming array of simultaneous facets, that we civilized human beings have conveniently compartmentalized, in order to maintain our sanity (so we think). We keep all these things separate, because we are blinded by the simultaneity. Plus, the integral connectivity has never been clearly defined. Philosophers and scientists don't agree about this stuff, and the world remains in blind fragmentation. Everything in the world is connected point-to-point in a huge confusing network, instead of in an integral framework that holds all the pieces in relationship.

But the philosophers and visionaries have been studying these issues for 1000 years or much more. The holistic metaphors go back to ancient days. Some would argue that the simplicity of earlier epochs made thinking about these things easier and more intuitive.

Here's an example of this concept -- "The Great Chain of Being". Ken Wilber has built almost his entire philosophy on this concept -- and I was amazed and excited to discover, when I was in Montserrat Spain as a delegate to the 2004 Parliament of World Religions, that there is a statue there to the patron saint Ramon Lull, built just exactly like this below diagram -- the stages, or levels -- in this "great hierarchy" of conceptual forms....

There is a mosaic of Ramon Lull in the Barcelona subway. That was amazing. The genius of Catalonia...

Well, Ramon Lull, 14th Century Spanish Saint and madman and poet, invented his "Ars Magna" -- the art of proving logical syllogisms on mandala-like wheels.... And Lull is often credited with influencing Descartes and Leibniz, inventors of much of our modern conceptual world...

Ken Wilber has followed this model himself. But for all his brilliant intuition, Ken Wilber is not a scientist, or a mathematician, or an engineer. His models, intriguing though they may be, don't stand up under critical analysis. They don't "work" as engineering designs.

But mandala as inspiring template -- I think that can work. Follow the deep intuition -- and use the tools of cyberspace. We can build models that work as clean as crystal clocks, like the stuff coming out of the Intel corporation. But our models can be as inclusive as the ancient philosophers dream -- the dream of wholeness, the dream of The One...

Not all the King's Horses and not All the King's men -- but maybe an inspired design from the heart of the One, combining the most demanding standards of empiricism with the most inspired visions of the highest thinkers who ever lived...