myth means emergent truth

Mosaic Voices - Mosaic Multicultural Foundation

The gravitas of the awakened soul helps tie the thread of the eternal to the presence of the present moment. When the dark times come around and the end seems near again, it becomes more essential for the individual person to learn and live the story the soul carries from before birth. If people are not invited into a living stream of culture, tragedies begin to grow. Unlived dreams become tragedies waiting to happen. Lose the sense that each life carries meaning and death becomes meaningless as well.

Traditionally, it has been the function of myth to wrap people in stories that make intuitive sense of the world and point to meaningful ways of being part of it. Yet, under the harsh rule of materialism and the dull spell of literalism myth becomes dismissed as fantasy, as something out of touch with reality. Yet in the inner recesses of the human soul, where the facts of life mingle with the mysteries of eternity, myth means "emergent truth."

emergence, causation, synchronicity

Jeff Vail - Litigation Strategy & Innovation: Emergence 8: (Interim) Conclusions

I've long argued that there are at least two remaining "great" mysteries that modern science has no viable explanation for: morphogenesis (how one cell turns into such different, complex, and specific forms), and consciousness (an example of emergence). Sheldrake's book is fascinating because it shows just how fundamental these two gaps in our understanding are. We don't understand almost everything with a few minor holes. Rather, we fool ourselves into thinking we understand almost everything despite the fact that these two gaps arguably swallow up any confidence that we deserve to have in any of our "conclusions." Sheldrake's discussion of morphogenesis demonstrates that we may have causation completely wrong--not a minor affair, that causation thing. Our failure to understand consciousness, is also a failure to understand causation.

in language

Does Our Language Restrict What and How We Think? « how to save the world

There is some compelling evidence that indigenous languages are significantly different in the worldview they represent from European languages, and that the language that we first learn affects and reinforces our worldview in a way that reflects the culture behind the language and which permeates and perhaps constrains the way which we henceforth think about everything

the fallacy of the pre/trans fallacy

Evolution of Consciousness: The End | The Edge of Grace

Regarding their degree of evolved consciousness, Wilber likens the developmental stage of indigenous people to the infant’s “animism,” wherein the child’s undifferentiated consciousness believes that everything happens because of him.

I don’t find them comparable at all, except in superficial ways. I find him committing his own error, his pre/trans fallacy.

I find this assessment of primal consciousness just plain wrong. Everything I’ve read about indigenous peoples, past and present, and my pitiful encounters with attempts to live in their way, shows a tremendous canniness, intelligence, diversity, and sophistication according to many different measures—just not the same measures we modern humans are accustomed to, such as technological complexity or specialization of roles. And, at base, you can’t be in an infant state of immersion in your surroundings when you have to make really clear distinctions in order to avoid getting eaten by predators! ....

[...] In my eyes, these things challenge some of the very foundations of Wilber’s theory. If those early stages of development are, in fact, very advanced, then how can you speak of an evolution from then to now? That evolutionary theory is exposed as just another version of the myth of progress that we’ve been hypnotized into believing in.

Thus, Wilber’s theory loses its strength for me.

[....] embracing the linearity of Wilber’s model has led me to this place where I’m running into the “orange meme,” and according to the model, I can only move forward into higher levels of rationality and transrationality.

And what I’m realizing lately is that I don’t want to move forward along those lines. Neither do I want to move backward. I want to move … sideways. And step out of his model, the same model that says indigenous spirituality is less developed and scientific reasoning more, the same model that says that ritual magic is prerational and mystical states of yogic meditation transrational.

I think I do want to conflate what he considers prerational and transrational. I begin to feel that the differences are not as he believes, at least when it comes to cultures and whole peoples. And if so, I want to commit the pre/trans fallacy.

syncretic shamanism?

Singing to the Plants: by Erik Davis

...Beyer frames the shaman’s work through an understanding of performance. Like stage magicians (or western doctors), shamans are, on one level, performers with an audience, and aspects of their performance are deeply linked with everything from the sleight of hand of conjurers to costume. ...

Beyer roots shamanic performance and the ayahuasca ceremony in the body. As initiates know, the aya ritual can be an intensely physical experience—a woozy, vibrating, literally gut-wrenching dance of coughing, spitting, burping, and, of course, puking. ...This carnal and even carnivalesque dimension reminds us that ayahuasca is not a mystic or transcendentalist affair, and resists the highly internalized or even disembodied approaches that many American seekers bring to it, with their background in meditation or other more internalized psychedelics. ....

While Beyer uses plenty of concepts and lingo drawn from anthropology and psychology, he does not offer these views in a spirit of reductionism. After all, Beyer has been learning the ropes for years, and has spent far too much time wrestling with wizardry to try to dissipate its dialectic of healing and harming with the word-spells of academe. Beyer’s critical discussions only help illuminate the central mystery with greater intensity. So while he offers up useful maps of the phenomenology of visionary states, when it comes to talking about the spirits themselves, Beyer just calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. Spirits—or “doctores”—are simply part of the picture; there is no need to reduce them to projections or myths—they harm and they heal, converse and confuse. As long as we remain aware of the various contexts which structure our encounters, we have every reason to acknowledge and engage the spirits as part of our world—an aspect of nature and consciousness, but also—and this is crucial—an aspect of modernity itself.

In contrast to many Euro-American aya fans, who fetishize the otherness of the Amazonian shaman, Beyer does not characterize the Amazon’s techniques of religious ecstasy as archaic residues free from any contamination from today’s globalized world. The culture of ayahuasca is both stronger and weaker than that, more expansively eclectic and also more ordinary. Beyer notes that Dona Maria’s spirit doctors regularly spoke in “computer language,” just as an earlier generation of shamans used metaphors of electro-magnetism and radio to characterize the spirit world. The UFOs found scattered through Pablo Amaringo’s paintings are icons of this visionary futurism. But they are equally signs of the syncretic, mix-and-match, opportunistic, and almost willfully contaminated aspects of mestizo culture—which must make itself up as it slips along between jungle and city, modernity and the indigenous forest.

scientific shamanism?

Jeremy Narby IV: by Erik Davis

Narby attempts to “defocalize” his gaze so that he can perceive science and indigenous understandings at more or less the same time. [....]

After co-editing a powerful collection of first-hand reports of Western encounters with shamans, Narby came out with the book Intelligence in Nature. Rejecting the idea that plants and “lower” animals are mute mechanisms, Narby uncovers scientific evidence that impressive feats of cognition are going on outside the precious smartypants club of the higher primates. Narby [spends....] too little time wrestling with how “intelligence” relates to choice, or awareness, or intention. Nonetheless, the book is a worthwhile example of Narby’s “defocalized” gaze – an undeniably scientific appreciation whose inspiration lies with the fundamental shamanic belief that other creatures, and even some plants, are, in their own world, “people” like us.