The depth and limits of words

The depth and limits of words

The Net of Nets . . .

C.G.Jung wrote:

"We live today in a time of confusion and disintegration. Everything is in the melting pot. As is usual in such circumstances, unconscious contents thrust forward to the very borders of consciousness for the purpose of compensating the crisis in which it finds itself. It is therefore well worth our while to examine all such borderline phenomena with the greatest care, however obscure they seem, with a view to discovering the seeds of new and potential orders."  [1]

  I would like to suggest that these “borderline phenomena” – are usually ignored, because of the condensed, nuclear space in which they often gestate. Put in other terms, these borders, or liminal states are ignored by the monolithic beams of our conscious mind. Small Things are overlooked, and the Gods of Small Things – are driven to extinction. 

     It is said that Jain monks  sweep the ground in front of them to avoid tramping on insects. It is a Buddhist practice to buy animals that are destined to be slaughtered and eaten, and release them. But there are some living creatures that we find difficult to show compassion to, for example, spiders and snakes. 

"...the family was also respectful of spiders: Mary Berners-Lee hung cotton threads down into the bath tub so fallen spiders could scale the smooth sides."  [2]

   I have personally seen spiders caught in the bath.  I usually use a towel or a cloth to help them to escape. This story would not be so unusual – unless we know who Mary Berners-Lee was, or to be more exact, who she mothered. Her son, is Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web.  I find the connections rather fascinating. Born and raised in London, [ruled by Gemini] - Tim Berners-Lee is an unsung visionary.  His book: Weaving the Web. The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor  -[3] published 10 years ago is an important read for everyone involved in the digital/virtual/world web.  He writes:

“Link by link we build paths of understanding across the web of humanity. We are the threads holding the world together.”

These are very beautiful words,  of wisdom, and point towards what we have to work towards, in these terrible and promising times.  How extraordinary then, that another great visionary of the 20^th Century  gives us an almost identical  . . .

"Everywhere on earth there are people of our kind. That for a small part of them, I can be a focal point, the nodal point in the net, is the burden and the joy of my life."  [4]

As these are quotes from a larger work on the Symbolism of the Net, I will only continue with one more example here:.

“Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell, or an atom. Each jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.” [5]

From this elevated perspective, we more back to Tim Berners-Lee:

“Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey. We don’t find the individual being subjugated by the whole. We don’t find the needs of the whole being subjugated by the increasing power of an individual. But we see more understanding in the struggles between these extremes.” [6]

    These interconnections are very important in a Buddhist  approach to life.  Ideas of networking –preceded the actual emergence of the World Wide Web. In the little magazines I published from 1972 – the word ‘network’ appears consistently. [See Appendix 1] It is thus appropriate, that on this edge of a new decade, and in the midst of an ongoing crisis of confidence in politicians and businessmen  - we might re-examine our own networks – even though the sense of co-operation and sharing has been shot down along with the concept of a Rainbow Nation.  It is not merely enough to network.

Yours sincerely

Samten de Wet

14 January 2010

[1]   C.G.Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, p. 160.

[2]   Scientific American, December 1997, Vol. 227 No.6. p.21.

[3] Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor, Texere, London-New York, 2000. [1999]

[4]   Hermann Hesse, private letter, 1955.

[5]   Mitchell, Stepen, The Enlightened Mind: Harper Perennial, New York, 1991.

[6]   Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor, Texere, London-New York, 2000. [1999]

Gye Nyamehu

The PRESENCE OF GOD Ikon is an Adinkra symbol called Gye Nyame, which is a symbol of the omnipresence and omnipotence of god. It comes from an Akan aphorism that can be translated:

“This great panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial: no one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see its end, except God”.

Adinkra are symbols common in West African societies that represent concepts and aphorisms. There are seventy to eighty core symbols. They provide a framework of moral virtues and lessons for the good life. See: http://www.adinkra.org/htmls/adinkra/aya.htm

“THE PERFECT ANIMATE BEING is one possessing sense and intellect. This being should be thought as a cosmographer who has a city with five gates, which are the five senses. Through these gates messengers enter from all over the world, announcing the disposition of the entire world in the following order: those who bring news of the world’s light and color enter through the gate of sight; those who bring news of sound and voice through the gate of hearing; those who bring news of odors, by the gate of smell; those who bring news of flavors, through the gate of taste; and those who bring news of heat, cold, and other tangible things, through the gate of touch. The cosmographer should sit and note down all things that are related to him, in order to have a description of the entire perceptible world represented in his own city. But if any gate of his city always remains closed — the gate of vision, for example—then the he will be a defect in the description of the world because the messengers of the visible did not gain entrance. The description would not make mention of the sun, the stars, light, colors, or the forms of men, animals, trees, cities, and the greater part of the world’s beauties. And the same holds true for the other gates. The cosmographer therefore tries as hard as he can to keep all the gates open, to listen constantly for the reports of new messengers, and to bring his description ever closer to the truth.

Finally, when he has made a complete representation of the perceptible world in his own city, he compiles it into a well-ordered and proportionally measured map lest it be lost. He then turns to it, sends away the messengers, shuts the gates, and transfers his inner understand to the creator of the world, who is none of those things that he understood and recorded from the messengers, but rather the maker and the cause of all of them. He considers that the creator was prior to the entire world, just as he himself was prior to the map. And from the relationship of the map to the true world, he beholds in himself, in so far as he is a cosmographer, the creator of the world.”

Nicolas of Cusa, Compendium, VIII. 1464

Italo Calvino On the City

“This idea of the city as an encyclopaedic discourse, as the collective memory, is part of a whole tradition: think of the Gothic cathedrals in which every architectural and ornamental detail, every space and element, referred to notions which were part of a global wisdom, was a sign that found echoes in other contexts. In the same way we can ‘read’ the city as a reference work, just as we read Notre-Dame, capital by capital, pluvial after pluvial. And at the same time we can read the city as the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a huge catalogue, an enormous bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a book of dreams, an album of our unconscious, a catalogue of horrors.”  

Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris. Autobiographical Writings, Vintage, London, 2004, p.173.

SUFFERING

“To free ourselves from suffering fully and finally we have to eliminate it by the root, and that means to eliminate ignorance. But how does one go about eliminating ignorance? The answer follows clearly from the nature of the adversary. Since ignorance is a state of not knowing things as they really are, what is needed is knowledge of things as they really are. Not merely conceptual knowledge, knowledge as idea, but perceptual knowledge, a knowing which is also a seeing. This kind of knowing is called wisdom (pañña). Wisdom helps to correct the distorting work of ignorance. It enables us to grasp things as they are in actuality, directly and immediately, free from the screen of ideas, views, and assumptions our minds ordinarily set up between themselves and the real.”

Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path. The Way to the End of Suffering, The Wheel Publication No. 308/311 (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1984), second edition (revised) 1994. Transcribed from a file provided by the BPS. Online at:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.html

The Moment Being

Jami, in the Law'ih, summarises the doctrine of the Moment (or "interior Time") according to Ibnu'l-'Arabi: "the universe consists of accidents pertaining to a single substance, which is the Reality underlying all existences. This universe is changed and renewed unceasingly at every moment and every breath. Every instant one universe is annihilated and another resembling it takes its place... In consequence of this rapid succession, the spectator is deceived into the belief that the universe is a permanent existence...

The being of the world's a wave, it lasts

One moment, and the next it has to go...

In the world, men of insight may discern

A stream whose currents swirl and surge and churn,

And from the force that works within the stream

The hidden working of the Truth may learn...

Thus, it never happens that the Very Being is revealed for two successive moments under the guise of the same phenomenon".

From:      Ananda K. Coomarasway, Time and Eternity, Artibus Asiae. Supplementum, Vol. 8, Time and Eternity, (1947), pp.98-100

New Births

It is only the full realization of our shared self-destructive behaviour, whether of Eastern or Western bloc, northern or southern hemisphere, which can adequately move us to change. I have called this change a time to bloom.

   Beyond the mainstream of global social and economic disintegration, this change appears to be already happening. A vibrant minority is engaged in birthing a new social order, one which will be sustainable into the foreseeable future and one which will more equitably distribute wealth, power, knowledge and services within the human community.

   This book deals with the death-throes of the constricting nation-state society and provides motivation for allowing the new and more fruitful human phase to unfold and come to birth. The present national constraints to life and growth in the developing world - hunger, poverty and repression - and those in the developed world - unemployment, cancer and nuclear threat – are clearly interrelated.

   The present dangers to the foetal stage of  the new social structure are extreme. Yet we find hope and joy in the growing global consensus among ordinary people that war is as anachronistic as cannibalism, slavery and colonialism. New international relationships based on justice and law must be forged. A new technology in harmony with life and earth, and a new social order which assures a secure future for the world's children must be developed.

   Although I can point the way and identify the promising directions, I cannot spell out the nature of this new social order. A mother cannot sketch a picture of her child-to-be-born. We do not plan a flower. It is our part to nourish the good growth and to provide a welcoming environment. We must neither give birth in fear nor abort through cowardice. It is necessary to trust the creativity and vitality of the life process itself.

Rosalie Bertell, from her book 'No Immediate Danger', The Women's Press, London, 1985, p.ix: