PSYCHOLOGY AND BEING: MANA

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY: MANA

Document status, June 7, 2003

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New Vision:

On heroes: “I don’t have heroes any more.” Heroism is distributed among the people and not just with the few who may be exalted

Where will I find myself if I explore the depths of my mind?

New Vision: Considering the 20th century accumulation of knowledge and information... the total amount of “real knowledge” can not be that much... Even if one insists on a scientific paradigm, a unitary picture of the universe can be abstracted from science -from physics, cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology... and from linguistics, logic and mathematics... and this unitary picture should not involve large amounts of information

New Vision...Re relations with my father: the real changes are in me and my relations with the [my] universe... Who am I, what am I, what are my dimensions, potentials, and relations, what is my mind and is it “in” my body, and where does it extend to???... I can see and notice the change and that it is more and more under my direction, a matter of intent and choice

Friends have noticed the changes: confidence in addition to passion

Attitude toward patients

Originally, this was a lament but the main point: respect, tolerance and flexibility

New Vision: Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, Ralph G. Neihardt [Flaming Rainbow.]

Recounts the visions of Black Elk - and the use of the vision in the way of life of the Plains Indian of North America... that is the importance of the vision and the desire, intent and attempt to live out vision-in-life..

Vision the ability to have vision, trust in vision as guide

Also excellent as a subjective [inside] account of the end of a way of life... the way of the Plains Tribes

The visions are intensely elaborate but also possessed of “themes.”

The story of the lives and events are so direct and simple and written in such an unhistorical and non-judgmental mode as to give me little reason to doubt the inner truth of the story. That is, I believe a proper mode of judgment for the story to be empathy rather than science or history

The story has elements of hope but ends in “failure” and “defeat.” It begins with hope and vision... but there is a thread of pessimism running through the account especially in the later parts when the people are dying and the tribes are being disbanded, are losing hope and are being sent to distant places, being relocated far from their familiar and well loved home

But perhaps “pessimism” is my projection and the reality is in fact simple and natural response to circumstance without repression

I read the book because I am interested in vision and the idea of vision themselves and in their relation to other mental processes and to individual and group / social action

I took from the book that regardless of material outcome and pain, the quality of life is related to the quality of its vision - eidetic, hallucinatory, conceptual, or otherwise - and to living the truth of the vision and to integrity, openness and commitment in this regard

Regarding powers of vision: there was a way of life interwoven with a way of vision. The life was open to its way of vision, respected and cultivated it. The way of life was receptive and sensitive to the way of vision and built it into its ritual and so into the group consciousness - at the level of intuition and body - and so organically into being and action.... and this is over and above overt incorporation into life and action

At the same time there was an existential openness to other ways and to the organic and arbitrary elements of reality and the world; and the arbitrary includes shock

New Vision: Self-knowledge and “walking meditation” = flowing awareness in the midst of action, flow and chaos

Further comments on the unitary picture of the Universe!

Consider the following quote from a few pages ago:

“... the 20th century accumulation of knowledge and information... the total amount of “real knowledge” can not be that much... Even if one insists on a scientific paradigm, a unitary picture of the universe can be abstracted from science -from physics, cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology... and from linguistics, logic and mathematics... and this unitary picture should not involve large amounts of information.”

I might add that, along the same lines, there is not in the world [universe]:

That much essential knowledge;

Nor are there

That many important ideas

That many important books

That many important people

1. My focus is all KB-^[R]-PA and not just knowledge

2. Each individual lives in her / his own universe of awareness. Likewise each society

3. With regard to the exponential proliferation of “information”:

Some of this is mere proliferation, serving no real function; the publication is a “vanity” publication

Some information serves some specific putatively functional domain. Domains exist with varying degrees of specialization and actual function

There are sub-cultures within cultures; societies, civilizations... modes of being, Being...

And being includes: BK- ^[R] -PA in its distributed and its cumulated modes. And all of these modes are part of our experience and without prejudice to metaphysics

These hierarchies form multiple pyramids with a single apex that represent the relationship between the many and the one

Alternatives

to “New Vision:” 4.13.97

K or essential K

G: Gnosis

R: relation

P: perception; but also conception; and to be intelligible!

New Vision: 4.13.97

Consciousness / mind:

Primality, Tradition]

Evolution Internalized

This shows the pervasion of mind

On Primality

The self that needs no description; the relation of this to Heidegger’s “there can be no theory of theory” and to the concept of being

The ineffable and the ultimate