The Archetypal Calculus Part 1: Introduction

A friend of mine once said to me, “Simon, you suck at marketing.” Now, I have to admit I was rather pricked by this accusation, although in hindsight I could see his point. There is an inherent tension between any creative activity and the marketing activities which go alongside it. When handled properly, that tension is healthy. At an abstract level, the creative activity brings something new into the world and the marketing activity ties that new thing to what already exists. Both of these processes are necessary, although arguably it works better if the person doing the creative part is not the same as the person doing the marketing part. Maybe that’s what my friend was hinting at.

The context in which the above discussion took place was one which I have mentioned previously on this blog: the Melbourne indie music scene of which I used to be an active member. Music provides a good case study for how marketing works because it is separated into genres. While genres do often denote categories that are meaningful from a musical standpoint, they are also vehicles for marketing because they allow new bands to be easily grouped together with those that already exist.

In practice, the choice of genre happens automatically in the types of instruments and the musical background of the people in the band. Choice of band name is also crucial. If you happen to be playing thrash metal, calling your band “Dreamy Daisy and the Lollipops” isn’t going to work. A good marketer would recommend you change it to something like “Psycho Susie and the Splatterers”. Most of the time, bands can figure this part out for themselves.

Paying attention to basic marketing concerns is a good idea. But it’s also true that letting marketers run the show is a very bad idea. Since marketers are always looking to connect back to what already exists, the easiest thing to market is what already exists. Put marketers in charge and they will systematically remove anything which doesn’t conform. Any novelty disappears and is replaced by a never-ending parade of mediocrity.

Marketing should never inform the creative process. It should come at the end of that process. When done properly, marketing fulfils a useful function which is to help integrate the new thing into what is already there. Is marketing actually required to achieve that outcome or are marketers hijacking a process that would happen “organically” anyway? I suspect it’s a bit of both. Good marketers are like good farmers: they can enhance and build on natural processes. But there’s always a very fine line between enhancing natural processes and twisting them beyond all recognition. As a society, we’ve allowed our marketers to well and truly step over that line. 

As it happens, I’ve recently had to wrestle with the issue of marketing again with the completion of my most recent book. As a self-published author, I’m left to do my own marketing. This has its advantages but it’s a job I would outsource if I could. In fact, for the Universal State of America I did spend quite a long time trying to find a publisher that might be interested in the work. My search came up empty. Marketing is about linking a new work to an existing milieu. What happens when that milieu doesn’t exist?

But my difficulty was not just about marketing. If I had presented the Universal State of America in a scholarly setting, I would have been forced to connect the ideas in that book to their intellectual precedents since that is a basic expectation in any scholarly work. My freedom not to have to do that was valuable since it allowed me to be more creative in exploring the ideas in the book but it came with the drawback that I had not identified the intellectual milieu to which the book belonged.

Now that the book is finished, I’ve had time to think about that issue in more detail and it’s the question which I will be exploring in this series of posts. The question is: where does an “archetypal calculus” fit into the broader scheme of western thought?

Now, it has to be said, the phrase “archetypal calculus” is one that would have any marketer wailing in opposition. Not only is it ambiguous and therefore unable to provide a clear link to existing ideas, it also contains the word calculus, which is guaranteed to trigger the latent trauma that many people will have from being dragged kicking and screaming through that subject during high school maths class. Ambiguity and vaguely negative connotations are not qualities that make for good marketing.

Still, I chose the phrase archetypal calculus for what I think are solid intellectual reasons and, in any case, it does establish a link back to a precedent that is adjacent to my work: the cybernetics and systems thinking movement that arose during the 20th century. One of the main exponents of that movement was Francisco Varela, who coined the well-known concept of autopoiesis. One of Varela’s other main ideas was what he called the calculus of self-reference. Like my archetypal calculus, however, it’s a phrase whose meaning is not immediately apparent.

Francisco Varela

The difficulty in naming these concepts comes from the fact that many of them belong to a genuine paradigm shift that happened in the 19th century which was centred mostly around the work of Darwin and Wallace. It’s no coincidence that Varela was a biologist. So, too was Gregory Bateson. Alfred North Whitehead made the Organism the centre of his new philosophy. What was taking place was the attempt to define a new metaphysics based on the lessons learned from biology.

Difficulty in naming concepts at a lower level is an indication that something is missing from the larger philosophical framework. What was needed, then, was a new framework. That’s what the cybernetics and systems thinkers were trying to do. That’s was Varela, Bateson, Whitehead and others were trying to do. What we’ll be doing in this series of posts is summarising the results of their efforts.

Until recently, this is a task I would have shied away from and here’s where the story takes a twist.

The trouble with the cyberneticians such as Varela is that their work is highly technical. I admit I haven’t read Whitehead, but his work has a reputation for also being incredibly dense and with the same mathematico-logical focus as Varela. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but personally I’m pretty much allergic to having to learn a brand new symbolic language in order to do philosophy, especially if that language is logic-based.

Gregory Bateson

That brings us to Gregory Bateson who has been my go-to reference on the philosophical basis of the new paradigm since Bateson does not lack rigor but also explains his concepts in language that is not overly technical. The trouble with Bateson is that, although he provides all the main concepts, he never manages to tie them together in a satisfactory way. Ambiguity remained.

Bateson also shared the habit of coming up with ambiguous names. Consider Bateson’s phrase epistemology of the sacred. This is problematic because the word epistemology is ambiguous and so is the word sacred. Putting the two together creates ambiguity squared. The combination also has the connotation of sacred knowledge which Bateson would not have liked since he was trying to ground his analysis in the results of science. (Or, perhaps it is better to say he was trying to find the sacred in science).

Another of Bateson’s phrases was an ecology of mind, which combines two broad concepts into a more ambiguous concatenation. Finally, there is the title of his great book – Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity. Well, if they’re a unity, then why do we have two words for them? More to the point, what word should we use to denote the unity?  

Of course, the most obvious candidate for that word would be “God”. Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred hints at just that conclusion. That was never going to be a possibility, however. What all the thinkers we have mentioned had in common was that they were coming at the problem from within the sciences and, more specifically, the life sciences. Since Darwinism had precipitated the final collapse of the old God of Christianity, at least among the educated classes in Europe, referring to God was always going to be a non-starter.

But there’s another reason why the religious angle would not have been suitable in this context. We noted above that these thinkers were trying to create a new epistemology, a new way of knowing. The reason they had to do that was because they were stuck in the old paradigm that had been brought over from the Classical civilisation through the Catholic Church. Europe had inherited from the ancients the idea of truth as being eternal and unchanging. What biology and the other life sciences needed was a framework which allowed for becoming, creativity and change. There really did need to be a new definition of “truth” and so Bateson’s reference to epistemology is totally accurate.

Against this backdrop, the thinker who, in my opinion, has summarised both the issues at hand and a potential way forward in the clearest and most accessible terms is somebody who is not primarily known as a thinker at all. I’m talking about the erstwhile Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts.

Jan Smuts in his very non-scholarly outfit

Smuts was born on a farm in the Cape Colony in 1870. As the second-eldest brother, in the Afrikaner tradition he was destined to be the one to take over the family farm while his elder brother received an education. When his brother died young, Smuts became the one to receive the education instead. It turned out he was a brilliant intellect. He ended up studying law at Cambridge where he excelled to such an extent that some of his professors thought him one of the greatest scholars to ever set foot in the place.

Smuts graduated in law and could have gone on to a career in that field but chose to return to his homeland where he got involved in politics. Since the Boer War was just around the corner, political service ended up becoming military service and Smuts would also become a great military leader including later in the world wars where he was a core part of the war cabinet in London and a trusted adviser to Winston Churchill.

(As a side note, Smuts represented South Africa at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations and slammed the deal as not a peace treaty but a “20 year armistice”. Given the treaty was signed in late June 1919 and we all know what happened in September 1939, that’s got to go down as one of the more precisely accurate predictions in political history).

Smuts’ academic career, if you could call it that, happened entirely during the brief stints in his life where he found himself out of politics. Since politics came to dominate his life later on, he ended up writing only a few works including the one which is key for the topic of this series of posts. He called it Holism and Evolution. It was published for the first time in 1926.  

Smuts was primarily at Cambridge to study law and so his knowledge of biology and the other subjects covered in Holism and Evolution came not from the position of a specialist. I’m quite sure that is the reason for the clarity of presentation in the book. Smuts was not the kind of guy to get bogged down in the details. It’s noteworthy that Gregory Bateson also worked in a wide range of disciplines in his career including biology, psychology and anthropology. This cross-disciplinarity seems to be a key factor in the new kind of thinking which is based not primarily on deduction or induction but abduction: the ability to see shared patterns across different domains. The only way to see shared patterns across domains is to know the basic ideas from those domains and that’s what Smuts had achieved during his scholarly period.

The need for cross-disciplinarity explains why the new paradigm which Smuts wrote about has been stifled in the post-war years since we have seen the increasing specialisation of scholarship. Alongside the commercialisation of knowledge, this has created several generations of siloed scholars all stuck down in their own rabbit holes, certainly not an environment conducive to holistic thinking. Instead, it produces what the Germans call fachidioten; subject-matter idiots.

We’ll get into the details of his work in later posts, but the primary thrust of Smuts’ viewpoint mirrors that of Bateson and the other thinkers mentioned above. What was needed was a concept which generalised the new object of study that biology had discovered and which seemed also to extend into psychology, sociology and other domains too. For Bateson, that concept was Mind. For Whitehead, it was Organism. The problem with both of these, as Smuts pointed out, is that they already refer to specific concepts in both biology and psychology and to generalise them was to lose the valid differences that they already denoted. Smuts’ proposal for the generic concept was Wholes, hence the concept of Holism.

Again, we’ll look at the details of this concept in future posts. For now, there is one key point I would highlight and it’s a point I’ve made in several posts over the last couple of years. The word whole is etymologically related to the words healthy and holy. All of them are related to the concept of the sacred, which is the process by which wholeness, health and holiness are temporarily relinquished in order to allow something new to be integrated. It is no coincidence that process was also central to Whitehead’s philosophy.

Thus, I would argue that Smut’s Holism and Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred deal with holiness and the sacred not as adjectives or nouns but as verbs (processes). Process is a cornerstone of the new paradigm. Since process implies time, time also becomes a central concern.

All of this was born out of the paradigm shift that had come from within science itself in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bateson, for example, saw his work as attempting to address the schism he believed had been introduced by Newton and Descartes. That schism can be called, using Whitehead’s phrase – scientific materialism. It features a single minded focus on mechanical explanation. Mechanical explanation worked beautifully in the fields of classical physics and chemistry, but that paradigm had begun to breakdown in the 19th century and something new was needed.

This breakdown was not limited to the austere surroundings of university departments and science faculties. The industrial revolution was predicated on mechanical explanation and there can be no doubt that this was the cause of enormous ructions in the political and cultural sphere too.

If all this is true, the question then becomes why are we still stuck in the old paradigm, even as the real-world problems with it seem to mount by the day? Our society has continued to pursue industrialisation and mechanisation well beyond the point of diminishing returns. The reason is because our economy and, perhaps more importantly, our geopolitical power is based on them. The people who run our societies are addicted to that money and power and are not going to give them up without a fight.

And so, here we are, almost a hundred years after Smuts published his great work. Having seemingly exhausted the physical aspects of industrialisation and mechanisation, we now pour vast sums of money into trying to mechanise intelligence (AI). Not only is that intellectually and spiritually wrong, it is increasingly turning into a political nightmare as well. Smuts saw in his concept of Holism the key to freedom and I don’t think it would surprise him in the slightest to see that more and more mechanisation has only led to less and less freedom in our society.

Thus, Holism and related ideas are not only worth pursuing for their intellectual promise but for their political aspect too. At the very least, those of us who aren’t interested in sleepwalking into the mechanist dystopia that is being laid for us can use the philosophical ideas of Smuts, Bateson, Whitehead to understand what is happening to try and navigate a different pathway. The promise of the new paradigm is that it does not require us to renounce modern science. On the contrary, the new paradigm comes from within science itself.

All of those are good enough reasons to discuss these issues. But, from a more personal point of view, Smuts has finally given me the clear and concise overview of the domain that has enabled me to see where my concept of the archetypal calculus fits into the larger scheme of things. I half-jokingly called it a theory of everything in a recent post and, actually, I was far closer to the truth than I knew. Whether the archetypal calculus is better seen as an element within Holism or whether they are, in fact, the same thing is something I am still working through. Maybe we’ll get to an answer to that question by the end of this series of posts.

20 thoughts on “The Archetypal Calculus Part 1: Introduction”

  1. I’ve always thought that the holistic systems based thinking that arose in the 20th century was simply a return to God dressed up in scientific language.

    I think the cart is often before the horse regarding mechanics and science. The former might be the prime mover and the latter is just the abstract theory that dresses it up after the fact.

    Therefore is makes sense that mechanics is more and more moving towards something satanic for its own sake, science and reason be damned. It is not science that has brought about the mechanic world, but that the mechanic world uses science to justify itself, and ‘itself’ is just the old will to power over nature and other people.

    The experimental method itself is based of a real life mechanic implementation rather than contemplation.

  2. Just bought your book ‘The Devouring Mother’. It’s very powerful, very much a kind of archetypal calculus. Looking forward to reading you new book too. Thank you for all your great writing.

  3. Skip – I think that’s true to a large extent but I think there is more to it. For example, even though Smuts doesn’t call it that, he references the Great Chain of Being which was an idea going back to Plato and which was a cornerstone of medieval theology. It was also used by the Catholic Church and the kings of Europe to subdue any dissent since to go against the pope or the king was to break the chain. So, the Protestants obviously broke the chain and Holism wants to put it back together. But what’s particularly interesting in Smuts is that it turns out the chain is necessary to solve some actual problems in science. Thus, even though you could argue it’s the same old chain of being, in fact it’s a much different and more interesting construct. I’d also add that the key factor is that the whole thing is now dynamic rather than the static chain of the ancients.

    George – thank you!

  4. Hi Simon,

    Ah, so you are getting into the ‘why’ of it all, what a fascinating subject and I’d not considered how deeply held mechanistic thinking is and followed. Hadn’t considered that at all. The systems theorists (is that the correct terminology?) have a lot to say and offer, and provide a different way of looking at the world. It’s also been said elsewhere that the ideas for the future often derive from the fringes of a society facing failed ideology. And also, the thinking which got us into all these messes, might be the thinking that will get us out of them again! I’ll tell you a funny story, my computer screen on start up courageously tells me that AI is somehow assisting the Amazonian rainforests. A truly startling claim, although I’ll concede that it may be true.

    Exactly! Marketing comes at the end of the process, and should never be allowed to drive the process itself. You can see this mindset in sports where professionals seek particular forms of people and neglect the wild card choices. And, if you look at how politics works nowadays, what with things such as budget leaks, and all that sort of weirdness, there’s a lot of marketing driving policies and strategies – where does that leave room for the greater vision though? i.e. in the simplest possible language: What the heck are we trying to achieve here? You’d be surprised how frequently that question is avoided, and that troubles me deeply. Little wonder there is so much consensus, and so little discussion.

    Looking forward to where you are headed with this, and will begin reading your book ‘The Universal State of America’ in the next week or so.

    Cheers

    Chris

  5. Chris – wow, is there anything AI can’t do!?

    Yeah, there is no vision left in politics and I think that’s because the power no longer resides with the politicians. In a very real sense, they have become nothing more than marketers. Their job is to sell ideas to the public in whatever country they happen to be “leading”. Corona was a great example of that. So was the Voice referendum. Both of those were “global” ideas which needed to be marketed locally in much the same way marketing department at a multi-national corporation operates.

  6. I’d be interested to know what problems Smuts saw as needing the great chain of being to solve. It seems to me to stem from the old problem of causality and destiny. Western (and most other cultures) Science, from it’s very first precepts, takes causality as something that is true and worth investigating, but this requires closing one’s eyes to time and history. It is impossible to disprove destiny, one just has to make a choice as to whether it or causality is favoured. It’s a leap of faith that science likes to ignore.

    For much of the 18th and 19th century science played a fun game while ignoring time, but then along comes entropy, quantum effects and relativity as an abstract attempt to acknowledge that the whole thing is built on flimsy philosophical foundations. This crisis of confidence is what I think leads to things like Holism etc, but they seem to me to be more of a retreat to an older truth than a bold development. Systems thinking is the default human setting, it takes a lot of training to get us out of it.

  7. I don’t think Smuts’ version of Holism is born out of a crisis of confidence. On the contrary, it is, in my opinion, overly optimistic. What I find particularly impressive, though, is that it integrates materialist science with older notions like the chain of being, whereas the materialists had convinced themselves that anything that couldn’t be explained causally was epiphenomena. Nice trick when you can just say that anything that can’t be explained by your theory doesn’t exist! This is why I say that thinking is dangerous. There’s a particular kind of stupidity that only a thinking person can fall into. Since the Germans are a thinking people, I guess they really needed a word like Fachidiot.

  8. Simon.

    “This is why I say that thinking is dangerous. There’s a particular kind of stupidity that only a thinking person can fall into.”

    Hahaha. I told a junior monk today: “Look, there are times where the mind just needs to sit down and read some fairytales.” Especially if you’re “educated”.

    “It is impossible to disprove destiny, one just has to make a choice as to whether it or causality is favoured. It’s a leap of faith that science likes to ignore.”

    I reckon it the links between past, present and future is something like this: The future is something that we imagine based upon what we’ve experienced and contemplated in the past. Imagining something now is an act that has consequences in the future. What we imagine now is also influenced by what we have imagined before. Destiny is a future that people regular imagine into being. Destiny and causality need not be seen as mutually exclusive. But one needs to think of causality primarily as something that happens as a result of mental acts rather than physical ones.

    However, there are limits to what can be imagined into being. Exactly what those limits are? Well … the sages claim to know. Unfortunately, the sages tend to disagree with each other. In the meantime, common sense, ecology and history are good guides.

    Faith is the choice to suspend disbelief in relation to a seemingly unlikely idea over and over again over a long period of time. In it most rudimentary form, everyone can do it. It’s the mental faculty that makes movies feel real. But because the choice to imagine something over and over again can actually make it happen — self-fulfilling prophecies — it’s dangerous to leave one’s belief system in the basement.

    No matter how secular people say they are, everyone believes something, it’s just their beliefs are in the basement. Underlying beliefs and prejudices always come out when people perceive threats to their survival. The most civilized people can turn into killers overnight. Corona was just the tip of the iceberg of what unconscious, unindividuated people can do … especially when in power. Remember the pacifist movement was strong shortly before WWI.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/20th-century-international-relations-2085155/Militarism-and-pacifism-before-1914

    It’s not so much a case of individuate/integrate or die, as individuate/integrate or become a killer. The latter fate is much worse if one believes in karma and rebirth. Just-War is the most dangerous of concepts. It’s funny how just everything we do can suddenly seem when we’re scared …

  9. Jinasiri – well, you’ve opened multiple cans of worms there 🙂

    The word destiny comes from the Latin meaning “to make firm”. Can we create our own destiny by making ourselves firm through faith/imagination/willpower? There’s several variations on the following quote which imply that is true:

    Plant a thought and reap a word;
    plant a word and reap an action;
    plant an action and reap a habit;
    plant a habit and reap a character;
    plant a character and reap a destiny.

    On the other hand, evolution says that we are the product of aeons of repetition not just as a member of the species called human but all the descendants going back to and including matter. So, what is “firm” in us is largely not of our own choosing. Nevertheless, as humans we have more freedom to make firm our destiny than any other creature.

  10. Simon,

    “So, what is “firm” in us is largely not of our own choosing.”

    Depends on whether one views materiality as more powerful than mind. But if the mind is assumed to precede materiality and be superior in influence, then the question becomes whether it is possible to train the mind. If it is made wieldy, we can take out the word “not” from the quote. But the deep training is long and arduous, so it won’t happen for most people — thus the truth of the inevitable degenerate phases in general world cycles.

    The emphasis on the material evolution tends to lead to the idea that “we’re just animals in the end”. The popularity of foregrounding of animal drives by Freud can be seen in this light. It’s fun in the short term but despairingly lacking in vision and thus hopeless in the long. The Catholic commentators in Darwin’s era did warn.

    I can’t remember which post we were talking about Early Buddhist textual references to the cycles of history (Kosmos), so I’ll just give one here (there all over the place). It’s a bit psychedelic so you’ll probably like it … https://suttacentral.net/dn27/en/sujato

    Just launched a blog, btw. You’re on the roll.

  11. Well, I think Smuts’ point is that there already was mind there from the beginning. So, he’s kind of giving a standard evolutionary account but absolutely not from the point of view of scientific materialism since he allows mind to be fundamental and present from the beginning and ends up positing that mind has become far more powerful than matter. When we connect this to Jungian thought, however, we find that mind is also not without history and that’s the point I was making. The archetypes are then the structures which we inherit and must work within. That’s not a bad thing since if we had no inheritance at all then we’d have to learn everything from scratch and even the ancient Greeks could see that this was impossible.

  12. “The archetypes are then the structures which we inherit and must work within.”

    … or it would really suck if the surfer had to produce the waves.

  13. Yeah I’m not saying Smuts in particular was in a crisis, I was more getting at culturally western scientific thought had reached the limits of reductionism, and from that naturally arises more holistic methods that have more in common with older methods.

    The problem of destiny and causality I was getting at is really the difference between life and death. Reductionism kills things to attempt to understand (the original meaning of the world science is to seperate is it not?), and causality likewise kills a section of living time to attempt to have some understanding of the whole. Destiny isn’t fatalism but an acknowledgement of living time which is of course directed and irreversible as we experience it.

    Thats why I think Smuts et al are on the side of life (he was a politician after all), but at the same time it must be acknowledged that one can’t have their cake and eat it too. Once you step out of causality you’re back in other domains where appeals to human created systems and theories can easily be dismissed, it’s more art than science.

  14. Gotcha. I think we’re saying the same thing. What’s interesting is that Smuts drew the same conclusion as the systems thinkers but from a different perspective. So, we either we expand the scope of “science” or we draw a border around “reductionist science” and come up with some new thing eg. integral science, holism, sacred epistemology or whatever. Either way, though, reductionist science is finished. There’s no new breakthroughs. All the low hanging fruit has been picked and we’re betting the farm on the pipe dreams of quantum computing/AI to be the deus ex machina that comes in a saves the day.

  15. Simon.

    “the musician create the notes of the scale.”

    Now we’re we’re cooking with woodfire! And when we try to reinvent the scale we just play out of key. And that also happens to be the key to understanding how to revive healthy genres and traditions: making the choice to be creative inside of tried and proven limits. We can be happy if we see that the ancient limits set by the old patterns in physics, ecology, biology, psychology, society, culture and religion etc etc need not be broken (though can be stretched) for us to progress. Those limits encourage fruitful creativity and authentic progress because we dig deep instead of spread wide. The simple idea of going for quality in plainness instead of quantity in variety is the key to sustainable and happy living.

    The marketing quandary you’re facing is not due to a lack of pre-existing genre. In better and wiser times integral works were simply included under the rubric of religion. Doing anything at a high level of quality – mastery – requires integration of otherwise disparate forces inside of what the Sages have described variously as Samādhi, God, Allah, the Tao, Brahma, etc etc.

    Life lived for God, in this sense, is how we face wars and deal with plagues with our noggins still on our necks. It’s
    also the way to lose our heads (if we must) without losing our minds.

    It may also be the way to get more people to read your books. 😀

  16. Skip,

    “The experimental method itself is based on a real life mechanic implementation rather than contemplation.”

    Right on. But experimentation and contemplation can be integrated. What integral contemplative experimentation does is include the purity, peace, harmony and integration of mind of the pious experimentor as a relevant variable to be factored into the implementation and evaluation of any experiment. This is likely th reason why science of yesteryear, done by religious men of ethics, prayer and contemplation, yielded such extraordinary fruits compared to the greed-driven stuff that happens today. When the mind is polluted with greed it gets motivated to do work, but it asks the wrong questions, gathers evidence negligently and dishonestly and draws up faulty conclusions. Over specialisation is as much driven by a subconscious desire to not look at the evidence resting in wider domains that would indicate that the specialist isn’t as clever as his salary bracket indicates as any genuine desire to progress. Faaaaroutfoolery.

  17. Chogyum Trungpa coined the term _spiritual materialism_ for the problems created by trying to break down and label spiritual experiences. It is an interesting correlate to _scientific materialism_ and makes me wonder what (if anything) inspired Trungpa. He studied western culture in quite some detail so Bateson is a possible precursor.

    ‘Cutting through Spiritual Materialism’ is a book on the subject created from talks Trungpa gave in the early 70s. It has an inherent Buddhist perspective, but the introduction notes that the problem of spiritual materialism also applies to theistic spiritualities as well.

  18. Jinasiri – yes. The desire to break the rules is common to the teenager (Orphan archetype) but the Adult learns that self determination comes through the rules. Having said that, I think the occasional prodding of the rules to make sure they’re still there is a healthy practice :). It’s an interesting suggestion about the religious angle. I think you’re right that religions are integral institutions and I alluded to fact that Bateson and Smuts both implied a religious take in their body of thought. In any case, “science” functions as a quasi-religion in the modern West so calling yourself a “scientist” is not much different from a priest 😛

    Daniel – had a quick look at Trungpa’s book and saw that he classifies the Self as a process which is exactly in line with Smuts and Bateson’s work. As I noted to Jinasiri recently, a number of western thinkers following this line of work in the 20th century do seem to have found a lot of common ground with Buddhism and I can start to see why.

  19. Daniel. “Chogyum Trungpa coined the term _spiritual materialism_ for the problems created by trying to break down and label spiritual experiences. It is an interesting correlate to _scientific materialism_ and makes me wonder what (if anything) inspired Trungpa. He studied western culture in quite some detail so Bateson is a possible precursor.”

    The historical Buddha does use words to label factors to be developed, but he doesn’t go into pedantic details. That was a later development, especially in Abhidhamma commentary. I’d venture that the latter was the beginnings of spiritual materialism or the mechanization of the Buddha’s teaching and, unfortunately, has been the mainstay of Theravāda Buddhism since 500CE.

    The historical Buddha’s method of description was pragmatic as opposed to academic — much like a master surfer using words to describe the relevant aspects of the ocean that he needs to get intimate with in order to rip up the waves.

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