It's Elemental

Tag: Mercury

  • Bifurcations, Chaos Theory, and Alchemy — oh, and YOUR LIVER

    Bifurcations, Chaos Theory, and Alchemy — oh, and YOUR LIVER

    Bifurcations are “splits” in the way a system develops from one state to the next.  Think of them as two roads diverging in a yellow wood; one leads to some unknown mystery.  The other leads to MILKSHAKES (stay tuned).

    My understanding is that bifurcations are always relative (did that paradox slip by you?); depending upon how you look at the system you my find quite ‘steady’ states, or at least steady states within limits (which are generally set by the way you look at the system).  Take a different look from a different perspective and you might find bifurcations going on at a different level while some OTHER level maintains its steadiness.  This is the whole “order is maintained through change” and “change is maintained by order” song and dance. (Not familiar? Welcome to CYBERNETICS.)

    Usually bifurcations occur when energy from ‘outside’ is introduced into the system.  Bifurcations don’t occur just because “time passes”, but that as time passes you typically get changes in the amount of energy available for a system.  The usual channels by which order is maintained through lower-level change can no longer handle the energy in the same old way… leading to a bifurcation where multiple new possible states result (but quite notably, NOT the ‘old state’–at least as far as I’m aware… Input anyone? Anyone? Beuller?).  But those new states are usually less stable and more sensitive to changes in energy or initial conditions; drive the energy up even a little more and you get bifurcations of the bifurcations… and so on.  But then, WHAM!  More and more and more chaos produces… not more chaos, but suddenly ORDER… a very FEW possible states that sort of ‘collapse’ all the previous activity into a limited set of possibilities.  WEIRD.  The upshot? Add energy/action/motivation/enthusiasm/motion to a system and things can get a lot more interesting… and FAST.  You know this because you have some friend who always takes things one step too far at parties.

    by Garrick Besterwitch

    Now this does not describe all chaotic systems, at least as far as I am aware, but does give a good picture of how chaotic systems can evolve in general.  Now a friend of mine was wondering (he’s not a normal guy; he’s WAY cooler, you can tell because his name is SNAKE) whether humanity as a whole is wasting a lot of time thinking about transforming when we should just take a cue from the caterpillar, who sets up a chrysalis and can just hang out, because transformation is just going to HAPPEN, without having to do anything to produce it.  Despite the fact that this is something of a bastardization of his point, it serves my purpose here.

    Now it would be nice if we could just sit back and watch humanity transform like a caterpillar into a beautiful soaring butterfly… but more likely if we sat back to watch the show we’d end up with some kind of oozing slime-mold, or “Twilight“.  Ummm, I could be wrong about the slime-mold thing, they are actually pretty awesome.  The POINT is that a caterpillar changing into a butterfly takes a LOT of energy; it’s not a ‘quiet, relaxing period’… but one where the caterpillar more or less EATS ITSELF (“Ouroboros, table for two, I mean one?”).  Have you ever tried to digest yourself?  Well you do every day.  Eat a big lunch and get the afternoon sleepies because your liver just got slammed with an order to break down a milkshake so it doesn’t end up in your blood, clogging your arteries. “Too much to do here!” says your liver to your consciousness. “You need to get outta here cause you are holding up my work.”  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

    From your perspective you didn’t have to “do” anything to digest your lunch.  But on a systemic level we are talking serious amounts of activity… it’s just that the activity is occurring on the basis of processes that are not readily available to your consciousness (even if you remained awake).  The system as a whole is changing its state — bifurcating, if you will — because 720 calories of ice cream is a LOT of energy, which drives the system from its previous ‘steady’ state.

    Now we can eat milkshakes for lunch (for the record, I have… okay DEFINITELY done this before) and have the systemic relationships activate which result in our loss of ability to influence the system effectively, or to even be aware of where it is headed… Or we can maybe snack on some almonds (or at least eat a reasonable meal–from your liver’s perspective; THINK OF YOUR LIVER!!!) and help steer the context towards one that can more robustly handle the higher-level situations (boss yelling at you, papers to write, world peace and such), which you can’t do very well when your consciousness gets kicked out by your much more powerful digestive processes.

    There is some sort of dynamic harmony (not really BALANCE, which is too static) here; you need enough energy to keep the system from stagnation and ossification, but not too much energy that you drive it too fast, yielding bifurcations too quickly (cancer), which pushes the system into a new steady state by virtue of undesirable transformation (death).

    As the Rosicrucians were fully aware, you can’t avoid death, BUT YOU CAN DIE BEFORE YOU DIE.  By consciously approaching these processes (rather than them approaching you–too late!), they discovered that we could have ‘little deaths’ that allow us to experience the world in a more engaged and subtle and effectively wise way.  This was a form of conscious suffering.

    And these sorts of processes DID have some order.  There were various stages, and it was VITALLY important not do to things out of order; this could ruin the whole work.  Alchemists discovered quite a few different processes (every “stage” is really a process), but to boil it all down and oversimplify it you have something like this:

    1) Undifferentiated unity (prima materia) 
    2) Differentiation into parts 
    3) Purification of parts 
    4) Integration of parts into a new unity (what I call a “differentiated unity”)

    And all of THAT can be summed up in one nice Greek word (perhaps coined by Paracelsus): Spagyrics, from spao, to tear open, + ageiro, to collect.

    So in terms of alchemical processes, the WHOLE THING can be understood as a big cycle of taking apart and putting together, with the purification of the parts implied by the fact that they can be put back together again.  Thus, at the very least, this is the most important and significant ‘order’ to any alchemical process.  All the other sub-processes are, shall we say, bifurcations of this large gesture into smaller and smaller sub-cycles.

    Now if you want to get real alchemical about it, it might be worth pointing out that there were three basic ‘gestures’, which was another way to understand this process.  They were called Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury.

    The Salt corresponds to the taking apart, the Mercury to the purification, and the Sulfur to the re-integration.  You’ll find these three processes ALL OVER alchemy, precisely because they represent the WHOLE WORK.  These three physical substances exhibited properties–really qualitative transformations, which we usually call ‘processes’ because we like to think we are scientific–which embodied in the material realm the qualities that were found to describe essentially ANY transformation, and came to stand for the higher-level ‘gesture’ of a three-fold transformation of unity into unity.

    Simple, huh?

  • On “The Moral Collapse of the University” by Bruce Wilshire

    As a philosopher and an educator, I enjoyed Wilshire’s book. Quite a number of his experiences parallel my own with regards to teaching and the self-reflective processing and mulling over the ‘educational act’. I felt very at home with a number of his statements, like “we arrive at the capital feature of the educating act: self-awareness, or self-reflexivity” (Wilshire, 1990, p.27), or my favorite, “The ultimate educating force is who I am” (Wilshire, 1990, p.31 – italics mine).

     

    These two statements are old-hat for Waldorf teachers (of which I am one), and I found most of what Wilshire brought in regards to his educational analysis familiar territory — but this is a good thing, as the educational philosophy behind Waldorf education is to educate the whole child. Much modern education lacks an awareness of the importance of consciously developing not only an open face-to-face relationship with one’s students, but also — going much further than Wilshire — developing an open spiritual relationship as well, through contemplative practices. And of course we should also play with the above statements by Wilshire in a cybernetic context: the educating act calls forth self-reflexivity through its realization, while self-reflexivity opens vast arenas of potential educability. Likewise, the force of education helps make us who we are, and who we are as educators.

     

    I am grateful that Wilshire so adroitly points out the various cultural forces that worked to create the over-professionalization we have today — recognizing these causes is both enlightening and freeing. I especially appreciate his remark that “the organizing center of the university ought to be the organizing center of the developing human person” (Wilshire, 1990, p.85). In other words, I see Wilshire calling for the re-humanization of education, the recognition that education is not about knowledge, but about the development of human beings (Wilshire speaks of the returning the university to the “human scale” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 226)).

     

    In this way, Wilshire parallels Rudolf Steiner’s view (as the originator of Waldorf education) that education is for the soul what medicine is for the body: a bringing to harmonic wholeness of diverse aspects. We are presently suffering from an overdevelopment — using the body metaphor that Wilshire favors — of the head. Specifically, we have brought education out of the realm of the heart and the hands, which have become atrophied, almost useless remnants when forced to squeeze themselves through the tight gates of academia. Education, to be a source of life, of passion, of deep inquiry and engagement, must explicitly and integrally include what in the body manifest as the rhythmic and metabolic realms. The techniques of much of modern education (I’m thinking here of grades, testing, quantitative reductionism, departmentalization, and so forth), from an alchemical perspective, are too heavy on the salt and too light on the sulfur, with almost NO mercury to be found. I won’t go on about these metaphors, although they are what we could call exact analogues.

     

    Wilshire, in his language, points out the continual presence of ‘archaic’ forces, while showing how the university lacks awareness of the process of ‘mimetic engulfment’ and its concomitant effects on the thoughts and actions of both the professors and the students. And of course he continually relates both these aspects to the willfully obfuscated sense of the self as a ‘body-self’, with all the unrecognized or semi-recognized purification rituals which subersively accompany the imbalance:

     

    “The failure to grasp the concept of body-self means the failure to grasp the utter inability of seventeenth-century psycho/physical dualism to grasp the nature of knowledge and the knower, the reality of the human situation” (Wilshire, 1990, p. 183).

     

    We could just as easily point out the same drama via the polarity of Apollo/Dionysus (Wilshire mentions this in passing on p. 225 and p.230), nervous/metabolic, salt/sulfur, male/female, contraction/expansion, centric/peripheral. In every case what is missing is the third aspect: Eros, rhythm, mercury, the universal human, and the dynamic, responsive and evolving membrane; Wilshire speaks of the ‘reciprocating field’ (Wilshire, 1990, p. 224), a physicist might talk about entanglement, and Western esotericist the Cosmic Christ.

     

    That “education is basically a moral relationship between persons devoted to truth” (Wilshire, 1990, p.229) is a much more sane approach than what presently passes for education is without much doubt for those of us who have experienced both sides of the screen, as it were. His call to reclaim, following Wordsworth, the “feeling intellect” (Wilshire, 1990, p.231) is a call put forth much more directly and strongly in regards to education by Steiner almost a hundred years ago. He recognized that education must fit the reality of the developing human being, not vice-versa, and partly for this reason included practical arts as well as aesthetic arts in addition to more intellectual topics — all of which were presented in time to work with whatever stages of body, soul, and spirit growth the child was experiencing. Steiner also embodied and presented the model of the educator as model, in which the presence of the educator is more educating for life than any specific verbalization of concepts, even if those concepts are about life.

     

    Wilshire’s last chapter on Reclaiming the Vision of Education: Redefining Definition, Identity, Gender was the most juicy for me. I appreciate his delving into the need to reframe the discussion in a way that includes the feminine aspects of the situation. His suggestion (following Dinnerstein) that male and female parents take a nearly equal hand in raising children (Wilshire, 1990, p.271) is probably a bit oversimplistic, although I’d love to see it happen!!! A crucial aspect, as he points out, is that we desperately need “examples of meaningful human lives, [which] must be provided first and foremost in person” (Wilshire, 1990, p.230). By human, I presume, he means human qua human universalis, or perhaps human archetypus, for the central mystery of the archetype is that it is both universal and particular, both dynamically evolving and homeostatic… just like us.

  • Alchemy and narcissistic, reproductive, and creative learning

    Alfonso Montuori, one of my professors at CIIS, has identified three styles, or modes, of learning, which he calls the narcissistic, the reproductive, and the creative.

    From his article, The Quest for a New Education, From Oppositional Identities to Creative Inquiry, narcissistic learning is “an approach to education that sees the source of knowledge as inside the knower.  It focuses on the expression of the knower’s experience and interiority and his or her personal growth and transformation.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

    Reproductive learning, by contrast, is “an approach to education that sees the source of knowledge as almost exclusively outside the knower, and focuses on the accurate reproduction of that knowledge by the knower.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

    Creative learning is a middle path, “an approach that views inquiry as a creative process.” (Montuori, Quest: p5)

    I see a correspondence with Montuori’s categories and those of the alchemical tradition and the anthroposophical tradition.  Alchemically, what Montuori describes as reproductive, creative, and narcissistic learnings are embodied in the principles of Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur.  The Salt principle is one which is observable when you have a solution out of which a precipitate falls.  The process is ruled by Gravity and tends to result in innumerable discrete bits with a greater density than the original solution.  The precipitate literally ‘falls out’ of the continuously interconnected fluid mass to become something distinct, something identifiable and separate.  Alchemically, the Salt process produces forms which have Earth characteristics.  This describes the process of reproductive learning as an exact analogue: more of the same.  Specific bits of information carry the value in reproductive learning, to the detriment of the interconnectedness of the facts when they were ‘in solution’.  It is a strange irony that reproductive learning has most strongly co-opted the very metaphor that exemplifies the state of being inextricably contextually connected and turned it into its rally cry: “Solve!”  The word ‘solve’ actually means to loosen, but the Salt process of reproductive learning inverts the dynamic into one that requires a singular, discrete, and correct answer to the undifferentiated mass of the original ‘solution’ out of which a ‘solution’ is derived!  The Salt process densifies, separates, and agglomerates into ‘false’ wholes by virtue of external pressures while lacking inner coherence or connectivity.

    Taken to the other extreme, we end up in narcissistic learning, exemplified by the process known alchemically as Sulfur.  Here, learning ignites itself from within, taking its own substance as fuel.  Sulfur is ruled by the higher-order process of Levity, and is precisely what counteracts (in a polar-opposite way) the Gravity of the Salt process.  The Sulfur process tends towards the periphery, taking the facts in only inasmuch as they can be added fuel to the fire; i.e. Sulfur as a process is completely self-involved.  The particularity, the individuality, the singularity of the specific facts are burnt away exactly to the extent that they carry within them what relates to the particular mode of manifestation of the Sulfur process.  Everything else gets left behind as a char, an ash, devoid of (apparent) life (in fact, you may notice, the Salt and Sulfur processes always occur together in reciprocity, complementarity, or opposition).  Sulfur, like narcissistic learning, takes only itself as its object and contextualizes everything else around its own process.

    Creative inquiry embodies the Mercuric process.  Mercury is the process that links the Salt and Sulfur – it is the process that performs the alchemical ‘marriage’ between the Salt and the Sulfur.  The goal “to make the academic transformative and to ground the transformative in the academic” (Montuori, Quest: p5) is a way of saying that the transformative (Sulfuric) needs to ‘marry’ the academic (Salt) in order for a healthy learning to occur.  Montuori recognizes explicitly that the path of creative inquiry is one that exemplifies “a middle way, a spectrum of possibilities between extremes” (Montuori, Quest: p5).  The Mercuric process is the go-between, the walker of boundaries, the oscillator, the Messenger, the one who takes on the characteristics of the other while leading the other beyond itself.  It embodies aspects of both the Salt and Sulfur processes, by integrating them into a new form – a creative act – that is impossible without either the Salt or Sulfur.  Mercury’s/Herme’s caduceus, with its two entwined snakes, can be considered the alchemical Mercuric ideal of continuous interplay and harmonizing between the Salt and Sulfur processes, acted out in the being himself and carried as his most prominent symbol.

    Anthroposophically speaking, the Salt process is linked to a being known as Ahriman (a name taken from ancient Persia) while the Sulfur process is linked to a being known as Lucifer (whom I imagine you are all familiar with in some form).  The Mercury process – the middle way – is linked to the Christ being.  However, I won’t go into the details as this post has probably already put some people to sleep (another dual Salt/Sulfur process: part of you becomes a precipitate – your physical and life bodies – while another part of you expands to the periphery – your astral body and “I”; and in your dreams you embody Mercury…)

    Tulip-5