Rhythm is precisely the dance of Being toward and around an
elusive and presumably nonlocalizable Center.
– Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being
We start with resonance.
Resonance
constructive/ deconstructive interference in a chaordic environment which, above a certain threshold, results in the production of order (pattern, protension, gradiant array).
Two particles “wave” at each other. The principle of ingression means that there is mutual interference. Interference is an unpleasant word here. The physicists say that there is either constructive or destructive interference. The waves either grow together, or cancel each other out. They come into contact and there is a pertubation, a fluxuation, a turbluence. Two particles enter, something new comes out. Resonance means they begin to sing together, conjoining twins. Every atom in your body resonates, within and without. Hummmmming. How the circada makes his song--- captures the universe beneath his skin, resonating for a mate.
It’s resonance, all the wave up and all the wave down.
All of the molecular work being done in this video is a result of highly sophisticated resonance patterns, formations and deformations.
Rhythm overcomes the epstemological split between subject and object,
the anthropological fissure between knowledge and love,
and the metaphysical dualism between the human and the divine.
– Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being
Sentience:
positive/negative valence in an ordered environment which, abovie a certain threshold produces feeling. Sentience creates new order as the environment ingresses as self, creating the habitas/habitat (chiral) relation.
Resonance produces order, enabling sentience to emerge. It would be impossible for a merely sentient creature to survive in a disordered environment, because we are defining sentience as an organism that just oscillates in response to what it senses in its envrionment. This creature cannot cognize other possibilities. It just responds to moment-by-moment stimuli. Individual neurons are sentient.
So are these plants and animals
The amoeba, tho --- might just be on the cusp of another level.
Rhythm is real growth, overcoming the dualism between continuity and discontinuity; it is new creation, both objective and subjective.
– Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being
Individual neurons might be merely sentient, but immune cells might be cognizant!
Cognizance
successful/unsuccessful or satisfying/not satisfying outcomes in predicated environments (moving into search spaces, possibility spaces, curiosity) … resulting in affect-laden value -directed drive states, from which, above a threshold of evolutionary fitness, all human values are derived.
Cognizance is just resonance bubbling up from deeper below… Just?
Can you see how many new values are being derived here by 007, the crow? Values propogate inside cognitive events that grow.
If Being is rhythmic, each entity will enjoy a real freedom
according to tis nature in relation to the Whole.
– Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being
Consciousness
predictive processing in simulated novel environments that the agent then builds intentionally, creating a conscious feedback loop between the agent and the arena--- world building.
With the exception of man, no being wonders at its own existence … With this reflection and this wonder there arises therefore in man alone, the need for a metaphysic; he is accordingly an animal metaphysicum.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Reflexive Consciousness
the ability to simulate your self inside a simulated environment, and the ability to simulate realities directly into the minds of others; leads to modes of simulacra: Logological > Videological > Algorithmic (computational)
Barry Sandywell describes the problem situation:
The production of systems of reflexive capitalism with its global simulacral machines and telecommunications networks have destroyed the dominant epistemology along with the socail and political world it expressed and authroized. But by colonizing everyday life and transforming lived experience, modern electronic media reveal the dialectic of communication and technology as one of the crucial armatures of modernity: we are oriented in our basic ways of seeing and experiencing by technically mediated modes of saying and doing. …
The fabric of so-called ‘ordinary life,’ in other words, has been thoroughly penetrated by apparatuses embodying and reproducing advanced technical knowledge. And today these pervasive technological apparatuses function as powerful agencies of social change. I will refer to this as the technopoiesis hypothesis: human beings make representations; but they have first been made by representations.
Reflexivity in this sense can be seen as a turn inward, toward the virtual self. But where exactly is “inward?” The sense of “interiority” --- that the self somehow resides “inside my body-being” is a symptom of the simulated self. It leads to the Homunculus Fallacy:
Many people already know that there is not a “little man” in one’s head. Yet, they still operate as if there is a Little Me, or several “me’s” or even an “authentic me” that remains behind the scenes, as it were, contemplating reality, making decisions, and running the show (for better or for worse). This version places the seat of the self in the psychological structures (or the soul) oftentimes felt as located in the solar plexus region. What is interesting, is that the brain and the heart are the two centers of electical signalling --- resonant centers, as it were --- in your body.
Lyric Reflexivity offers an alternative to this kind of reflexivity which bounds the self inside the boundary of the body. Here the body is represented as an interface between “objective reality” on the outside and “subjective reality” on the inside. If you reject the one, you spoil the other--- either being locked inside one’s own mind bound to subjective solipsism, or being exiled from your inner life and bound to a world of mere appearances and surfaces. As Erizam Kohak (in The Embers and the Stars) writes:
The crucial distinction is not between an “outer” and an “inner” reality but, as Bergson recognized, between understanding any and all reality from within and explaining it superficially from without. The significance of Saint Augustine’s injunction is not to lead us to some funky, touchy-feely solipsism but to an understanding of reality “from within” in this sense, in terms of its meaningful being rather than in terms of categories arbitrarily imposed upon it from without.
It calls for a radical opening of our life and thought to the world of others, human, animate, inanimate, in the integrity of its otherness and the meaningfulness of its being. It is what we have come to think of as the objective “outward” turn which leaves the subject an isolated alien, considering the world solely from without, an object of our doings, asking not for the inner rightness of tis being but subsuming it high-handedly under the arbitrary categories of our cognitive and practical utility. When we so approach the world, each subject finds himself locked in the solitude of his own purposes, taking in nothing, imposing his will on others until he in his turn comes to see himself solely in terms of the surface of his own being.
[That] is no longer how we understand the terms “inner” and “outer.” In our ordinary usage, those terms have acquired a distinctively spatial significance, as if they designated regions of entities rather than modes of being and understanding.
The objectivist perspective is solipsistic intrinsically. Since it conceives of reality as consisting solely of surfaces, it permits … neither cognitive nor emotive empathic understanding of the other in his integrity. The other necessarily appears as an object, and the ego as solus ipse. Then “turning within” appears as a turn away from the world which necessarily leads to a subjective solipsism a sticky, self-indulgent preoccupation with the subject’s putative “feelings.” Such an option then constitutes a mirror image of the objectivist solipsism, not an alternative to it. It would be hard to decide which side of the coin is less attractive.
Kohak calls for philosophy to imagine new metaphors to describe the relationship between the inner and outer. We have been utilizing process phlosophical relations, the notions of ingression, habitat and habitas, as powerful interaction metaphors to ground a new participation with the world. When we use the phrase “human *nature” *we want the word “nature” to point to the same “nature” as when we point “out there.”
Here again, we can bring in the metaphor of chirality --- to observe my “inner nature” I must simply attend closely to the activity in “outside” nature (including other people), and know that I am re-cognizing my own self. In fact, observation of the natural world is actually much easier than trying to observe the meta-activity of my own mind. By learning the art of attending I can observe my self as I observe nature --- with sensefulness.
The Radiance of Being: transpersonal, a-perspectival resonances:
The rhythms of beings is a powerful interaction metaphor to describe the Radiance of Being as waves that propagate--- resonant, sentient, cognizant, conscious, and reflexive events *that grow. *It is possible to sense, to resonate with the fundamental radiance of being which propagates all the rhythms of being. This requires a new way of attending, which is not directed toward reflexivity, which turns back on itself, but towards openness. There are three modes of open awareness:
Receptive awareness
Receptive awareness is a state of allowing reality to just be --- just let it all be --- and allowing yourself to receive it. In meditative traditions this is often called “equanimity.” The term “receptive” points out that this state is rather passive. You experience reality as happening, and your self as observing, sensing, or attending to reality. So there is still a separation.
Open awareness
Open awareness is characterized by an active curiosity, an openness to surprise. Whereas receptive awareness is like looking at the stars in the night sky and just allowing all that wonder to wash over you… open awareness is like trying to see further and further out into the spaces in between the stars. There is a palpable sense of the energy moving out from you into the open vastness of the night sky. The sense of separation is still there, but much more subtle. You are down here, reaching toward up there. The energy signature is chiral.
Pure Radiance (luminosity)
Pure Radiance, or luminosity, is a state where even the subtle separation between you and reality disappears. You experience your own self as a luminous, radiant center, and you instantly recognize it as the radiant energy of the universe, and that all centers are the same center, which is the Center. Radiance is the center of all rhthmic pulsation.
Freed from the categories of our collective monad, nature and our life therein do present themselves as ordered and meaningful. There is an order, there is a moral and a vital law, there is a place and a task for humans therein. Abandoned by its human maker, our urban world may appear absurd. The forest, abandoned by humans, lives on in its ageless rhythm. – Erizam Kohak, The Embers and the Stars
Bonus Material
The Rhythms of Being
Cohort
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