=kit067.txt

KIT 67 - Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New

            The very turn of the season beckons upon us to turn a
chapter in our lives. A change of tack is a precious instant
because it is in a condition of unstable equilibrium that the
slightest impulse will cause the largest effect - the creative
instant. This is where hope has its chance, hence the custom of
making New Year resolutions. The only way for your New Year to be
Happy is to make it Happy.

            The solstice is a singularity - that it an exceptional
conjunction in space and time in the elliptical orbit of our
Planet. It marks a special though annually recurrent, transitional
configuration in the rapport between our Planet and its
environment: the solar system, in which the equator is farthest
removed from the sun. Conditions of precarious equilibrium are
favorable to change.

            Since the time of Jesus, the inhabitants of the
Northern Hemisphere of our Planet have enjoyed a grand-stand look
out upon the constellations of our galaxy around Capricorn. Now
our perspective is shifting towards Sagittarius. This shift is due
to the precession of the equinoxes: the axis of our Planet traces
a complete circle around the center of the Earth's ecliptic orbit
every 25,800 years. It is at the precise instant of the sunrise at
the vernal equinox (around Easter - March 21st) that the
precession of the equinoxes is established. (Of course it could be
calculated from the winter solstice.)

            A parallel between the zodiacal houses and the advent
of new religious outlooks or prophetic messages reveals the
influence of astrological constellations and major shifts in
history, in the spiritual evolution of humanity. In the prehistory
of Egyptian Mythology, the sun rose at the vernal equinox in the
zodiacal house of Gemini, hence the cult of Shu (the sky) and
Tefnu (the earth), obviously Gemini. In the ancient empire in
Memphis, between the years 4380 and 2200, it was the cult of Apis,
the bull, (in Asia Mithra). From 2200 till the time of Christ it
was the cult of Amon, the Ram, epitomizing Aries. With the advent
of Christianity, Pisces, the fish which indeed we find in medieval
symbols. As the year 2000 approaches, we are gradually moving into
the Aquarian age - a time presaging abundance, the horn of plenty,
the many-splendored gift of the bounty we have arrived at in our
civilizations which is what we would be enjoying if it were not
for our quarrels, crimes and wars. Incidentally, we need to
consider that the period of 26,000 years is divisible in 4
decades. This explains the advent of Buddhism 7 centuries before
Christ and Islam 7 centuries after Christ.

            These powerful zodiacal influences account for the
tremendous shifts in motion in our civilizations, the dramatic
political, social, and technological reorganizations, including
the spiritual awakening in our time, plagued with the shocking
decadence and uncertainty about the fate of our beautiful Planet.
Transitional conjunctions favour spectacular progress providing
that the inhabitants of the Planet take advantage of these
conditions to pledge themselves to join in common action,
otherwise it can lead to a catastrophe. Quite apart from the
environmental problems, our social problems can only untangle if
we discover a spirituality in keeping with our time, freed from
beliefs and observances but soaring on the wings of awakening, the
discovery of meaningfulness, mutual respect, kindness, world
service.

            At the personal level, the change of tack of the
Planet on its course at the solstice bids us a unique chance of
turning a new leaf by making a pledge. Life keeps relentlessly
luring us forward. If we do not honor in ourselves that creative
forward thrust of life straining on the lead in ourselves, we will
be pushed out of the race and lose our very reason d'etre.

            To extricate ourselves from the stalemate which we may
well have maneuvered ourselves into, owing to a faulty strategy in
the game of life, or from the rut into which we may have
inadvertently stranded ourselves by taking things for granted, we
need to rethink our lives. 

To achieve this, we need to hoist our vantage point from the
commonplace narrow range of the immediate environment and look at
things in a wider context. This is where some of the skills of
meditation can prove helpful. It is somewhat like witnessing how
different a familiar landscape looks when flying over it in a
helicopter or suspended from a hang-glider. Doing this, we realize
that our assessments of our life-situations change with the
altitude as it were, and furthermore that they are function of our
values which manifest the higher levels of our being - and monitor
our motivations. Moreover we realize that our sense of personal
inadequacy or our pessimistic judgement in our assessment of a
situation were due to our mind's having gotten entrapped in a way
of thinking from which we failed to see a way out. Yes, one can
get trapped in one's thinking and ascribe the prison to one's
fate. The bind is in the mind.

            To escape from this prison takes two things: a flash
of insight and resolve. 

How do we trigger off the flash of insight? We need to first ask
ourselves: what if my assessment of my life situations, (or of
people around me), upon which I have relied all this time and
which I have always taken for granted was wrong? What is more, if
this is true, any new assessment we might convince ourselves of at
this point stands an equal chance of proving later erroneous. If
we therefore forego not only previous assessments, but any attempt
at a reassessment, then, faced with the collapse of our opinion,
we find ourselves hopelessly groping our way in the dark night of
understanding. Bereft of any crutches, a different mode of
understanding dawns upon us. Imagine that, walking in pitch dark,
suddenly you were able to see the auras of people and that the
features of their real countenance would be revealed to you in
contrast with the features of their faces.

            It takes courage to let go of all that one has built
up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn
upon one's horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted
with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a
bud unfurls, or where things remain at a stand-still or run the
chance of reversing into decay, or where nature proceeds by leaps
and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their
outer circumstances, but will change by one's changing oneself or
by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases - perhaps the
most meaningful -, there is no slow transition from one
perspective to the other, the transit is sudden. Here lies the
difference between the moment of time where there is an overlap
between past and future and the instant where there is a sudden
and irreversible break of continuity.

            These rare conditions called singularities in astro-
physics occur in our lives and in our thinking. They may be
illustrated by a sunrise or sunset, or solar or lunar eclipse, or
the equinoxes or solstices where there is an alignment in space
between two luminaries at a given time called a syzygy. Let us
bear in mind that the coincidence is only meaningful from our
vantage point, therefore relates the objective world to our
subjective dimension.

            A particularly rare coincidence between two numbers,
illustrated in mathematics by an algorithm, illustrates our mind's
ability to grasp coherence of a sudden where two mental constructs
seemed previously to be irreconcilable. More generally what we
mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind's ability to click
when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had
hitherto appeared unrelated. The grasp of congruence sparks our
being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync
with the thinking of the universe and feeling in resonance with
the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our
holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not
just at the physical level, but at all levels.

            "At the moment of birth, two worlds meet: all that we
have cumulated in our descent through the spheres and that which
we have inherited from our ancestors."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            We are ourselves hybrids, born of the alchemical
betrothal between heaven and earth. Moreover we can rebirth
ourselves by going through the steps that led us to our present
state, altering them willfully and consciously. Here we witness in
ourselves the very task we have investigated so far: conjugating
in our very personality our celestial and ancestral inheritance so
that they actually click.

            C. G. Jung spent much ponderous enquiry upon this
paradoxical conjunction between our psyche and the physical world.
In paradoxical cases, rather than it be a perception or an event
that impacts our psyche and gets processed by our psyche, it is
our psyche that triggers off the event. He called it
synchronicity. He defines these rare and surprising cases that one
would normally explain away as situations which cannot be causally
determined as: "the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but
not causally connected events."

 Yet he still strived to grasp the mystery behind occurrences that
could not be connected in a chronological sequence where one
occurrence could have triggered off the other; rather they seemed
to be causally connected in a network irrespective of the arrow of
time.

            "The connections of events may in certain
circumstances be other than causal and requires another principle
of explanation."
(JUNG)


 Then it occurred to him that rare events (like a syzygy or
singularity) cannot be governed by the same laws that apply to
statistics, for example. Indeed the conjunctions that take place
in an instant of time are rare events as compared with the gradual
transformations where at each moment, the past overlaps with the
future.

            "Probability theory is able to predict with uncanny
precision the overall outcome of processes made up out of a large
number of individual happenings, each in itself is unpredictable."
ARTHUR KOESTLER

            Of course granted is that our minds can affect our
body functions:

           "You see the deep changes of meaning is a change in the
deep material structure of the brain; we already know that certain
meanings can greatly disturb the brain, but other meanings may
organize it in a new way."
DAVID BOHM

            But how does a grasp of meaning affect the outer
physical world? (Incidentally this is what it meant by psycho-
kinesis). 

After years of painstaking research in psycho-kinesis, Dr. J. B.
Rhine arrived at conclusions that throw some light on the problem.
For Rhine space and time are dependant upon psychic conditions and
therefore can be reduced to almost a vanishing point

            A parallel with David Bohm is called for here, 

"but there is still a mental pole at every level of matter..and
eventually if you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach
something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind."
DAVID BOHM

[ Kaivan fails not to note that the preceeding is a quote, and
that the quote is by Bohm.  The SOS failed to use quotation marks. 
"Nobody's perfect." (USA slang, usually deployed ironically.  Cf.
"Sorry about that." -- sa]

            We are touching upon a most important point: space-
time is only meaningful regarding physical reality. Indeed for the
psyche, space is only meaningful where one is reminiscing physical
occurrences or the mind functions creatively in the act of
imagination. Yoga distinguishes where the mind adopts as it were
the form of that which is perceived or reminisced (Nirvetarka),
from the state where the mind absorbs the quintessence of the
perceived irrespective of form (Nirvecara), and at some point the
mind looses notions of space altogether (Asmita) and a further
point at which the mind looses the sense of time (Asamprajnata
Samadhi). 

For Speiser, at a certain level of our thinking, our psyche
touches upon a level prior to causality.

            "It is an initial state which is not governed by
mechanistic law, but is the pre-conditioning of law, the chance
substrate upon which law is built."
ANDREAS SPEISER

            Compare with Bohm:

            "The mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional
modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the
depths of the implicate order where this timeless state is the
primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a
secondary structure."
(DAVID BOHM) 

            Indeed our commonplace concepts of causality are based
upon our concept of time as being uni-dimensional: the event that
we infer having been causated by another one, followed it in a
sequential order. In our ordinary thinking, we also assume that an
event causes another if they are related in space either by
electro-magnetic forces that extend in space or gravity that also
extends in space (including the strong and weak forces between
sub-atomic particles) . But modern physics questions the
mechanistic theories of their predecessors, replacing them with
acausal, non-local laws.

            If everything in the cosmos is connected with
everything else as in the holistic paradigm, then location in
space is irrelevant in the determination of events: it is simply
easier for our minds to see the connection between the motion of a
billiard ball and that of the one it has hit, then to see how the
surge of a wave we think is in the Pacific could influence that of
a wave which we think is in the English channel. Yet, as DR. DAVID
BOHM points out, a wave in the ocean is not caused by the previous
one, but each wave is introjected back into the whole ocean and it
is the whole ocean that projects itself in the next wave. 

"A form emerges or is creatively projected from the whole, then it
influences the whole, or is injected back into it; in the
implicate order, it resonates with similar forms and then is
projected back into the explicate order."
(DAVID BOHM, I presume.)

[ SOS sets this off as a quote.  From context, and from PVK's
style in these KIT's, particularly his long lines of thought and
sometimes sentence strucutre, it seems clear that he considered
that he had adequately indicated that the quote was by David Bohm. 
Cf. the long line of the closing phrase in the theme of Bach's
Golderberg Variations. -- sa ]  

            However, long before the holistic paradigm envisioned
by General Smuts revolutionized science, the Sufis saw the
insufficiency in reducing causality to the dimension of time which
we call the process of becoming. One needs to account for at least
another dimension of time moving from transcendence to transiency
and vice-versa.

            The Sufi Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi felt that beyond the
sidereal empyrean, other universes would be found in a
hierarchical sequence of spheres of light of increasing subtlety .
The higher ones precede the lower ones and enjoy a hierarchically
higher value (precellence) and consequently sovereignty
(prevalence); the lower ones proceed from the higher ones in a
causal order in a different time order that the commonplace arrow
of time - a kind of exponential order. This so called vertical
hierarchy which he refers to as the 'world of mothers' then splits
up in a lateral order where equality takes over from dominance.
Here we find the prototypes of the species. It is at this level
that our ordinary notions of the process of time take effect.

            But it is in the conjunction between a physical
phenomenon and a spontaneous thought that was not triggered off by
an actual occurrence that our delight reaches a degree of
intensity such that it could spark our creative faculties -
whether of a work of art or of our personality. One could define
creativity as the act of exploring unchartered regions of the mind
while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus
gleaned and a form or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of
matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless
and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly.

            "We could say that our action toward the whole
universe is a result of what it means to us . . . In the long run
only those meanings that allow changes that tend to bring about
accord between us and the rest of the universe will be possible."
DAVID BOHM

            "We shall sooner or later have to give up many of our
old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better
adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the
past - and is also living in the presence of the future, and open
to continuing creation."
RUPERT SHELDRAKE

[ In Kaivan, but not in SOS, PVK adds the following bibliography:
]

Books relating to the subjects:


Bohm, David, Unfolding Meaning, Ark 1985

Burckhardt, Titus, Mystical Astrology according to Ibn 'Arabi,
Beshara, 1950

Corbin, Henri, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Bollingen
Series, Princeton Un., 1977

Corbin, Henri, Oeuvres Philosophiques et Mystiques de Shihabuddin
Yahya Sohrawardi, '52

Costa de Beauregard, La seconde dimesnion du Temps. Seuil.

Gribbin, In Search of Shrodinger's Cat, Bantam, 1984

Grof, Stanislov, Beyond the Brain, State University of New York
Press

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Soul Whence and Whither, Cf
Complete Works

Hujwiri, Kashf al Mahjub, tr.R.A.Nicholson, Gibb Memorial, Luzac,
1911

Jung, C.G., Synchronicity, Bollingen Series, XX, Princeton
University, 1973

Koestler, Arthur, The Roots of Coincidence, Vintage Books,
Ny.,1973

Mircea, Eleade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, Bollingen,
Princeton Un. 1969

Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press,
1989

Prigogine, Ilya, From Being to Becoming, 1980

Schwaller de Lubicz, Le Roi dans la theocracie Pharaonique,
Champs,Flammarion, 1961

Sheldrake, Rupert, The Presence of the Past, Times Books, (Random
House) 1988.

Speiser, Andreas, Uber die Freiheit

Weber, Renee, Dialogues with Mystics and Scientists, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1986
    
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