OK that Geocities upload is most of it but missing ONE section.... THIS section - that's from the Wayback machine...
Contents || Preface || Introduction || Sound-Current Nondualism || Bibliography
From this primacy of energy as consciousness and virtue, we can begin to analyze the history of how the "wisdom was thrust away" in the West as Bateson describes. Starting with the foundation of music theory for western analysis Bateson comments:
This discovery hit the Pythagoreans squarely between the eyes and became a central secret (but why secret?), an esoteric tenet of their faith. Their religion had been founded on the discontinuity of the series of musical harmonics ( the demonstration that discontinuity was indeed real and was firmly founded upon rigorous deduction. And now they faced an impossibility proof. Deduction had said no. As I read the story, from then on it was inevitable to 'believe,' to 'see' and 'know' that a contradiction among the higher generalizations will always lead to mental chaos. From this point on, the idea of heresy, the notion that to be wrong in Epistemology could be lethal, was inevitable. All this sweat and tears ( and even blood ( was to be shed on quite abstract propositions whose Truth seemed to lie, in some sense, outside the human mind.215Rothstein makes the same point, "When they [the Greeks] discovered that numbers exist which are neither integers nor ratios of integers ( numbers which confounded all their notions of harmony and rationality ( they were so horrified that the discovery was kept secret. Alogon ( the unutterable ( these numbers were called..."216 As will be shown further below, since both rational numbers and rational logic were based on reified closed linear symbolic systems, then in order to maintain a "rational divine" (later religion of technology) universe the concept of transcendental nondualism had to be publicly repressed. It is not that Pythagoras needed the "right symbol" to understand the infinite transcendental, or irrational number, as it is called by the modern paradigm. The transcendental could be expressed in Greek culture with resonating harmonic proportions, but the concept of a smooth continuous rational universe could not be maintained with the linear discrete symbols of music-math and linear logic. Also the analysis of the ratios of ratios, or the zero beats that lead to the concept of all harmony coming from nothingness was unfathomable to Greek culture - "zero" was "not yet accepted."217 But importantly although Aristotle denied the existence of zero or the void and made that the norm of the post-Pythagorean Greek knowledge system, the Pythagorean way of knowing was based in the concept of the void as arising out of the transcendental "discontinuous gap" discovered by music analysis.218 As Peter Gorman says, "The dyad [or Diapason] was a symbol of infinity, hence Pythagoras must have known about its irrational [sic] properties."219 It can be surmised, and will be further verified from the below evidence, that while Pythagoras had knowledge of the spiritual power of multidimensional fundamental harmonics and understood the model that we have outlined as sound-current nondualism ( representing that knowledge was deeply problematic if not undesirable.220 In fact that spiritual harmonic knowledge was at an advanced esoteric level of initiation ( accessible to only those who were prepared to understand its power.221 The transcendental infinite ( first modeled in the West in Pythagorean music analysis, has, just as with the different tuning systems to deal with the repressed comma of Pythagoras, been a continued stickler for the western closed linear knowledge system. Using math to measure space and time, the goal of mapping continuity and smoothness was maintained, according to Rothstein, with integers and rational number ratios. The transcendental (or western irrational number), though, continues to present a gap since there is no way to arrive at it from the rational numbers. Calculus was formed as a means to deal with this unreachable gap and at the beginning the gap in math was filled with infinitesimals (smaller than any number but greater than zero). Leibniz used this concept to model that, as Rothstein states, "summing an infinite number of zeros and reaching one half proves that the world could be formed from nothing."222 Euler had similarly created an equation of "something from nothing." But this concept, as with the Pythagorean principles, was deemed unsuitable to the means of the materialistic modern paradigm. According to Rothstein infinitesimals were critiqued by Berkeley as trying to be on the level of the divine. Weierstrass created the derivative that became, as with the concept of beats, another order or class of mathematical information. The derivative is a concept of process, the limit is the never-ending goal, thus allowing the irrational, once again, into the rational universe as simply a different type of calculation and steering away from the transcendental consequences of analysis.223 Further exploration about this hidden kernal of ideology for western logic nondualism is done by scholar Dr. Steven M. Rosen in his "Concept of the Infinite and the Crisis of Modern Physics," for Speculations in Science and Technology.224 "The Greek word for ratio is logos," according to music analyst Jamie James.225 To further understand the direct translation from the hidden secret of linear closed music-math analysis (the repression of the infinite transcendental) and the development of the inaccurate, destructive knowledge system we can also examine the reflection of the latter directly in the structure of western language. Social systems theory analyst Bateson makes the point that "logic cannot model causal systems-paradox is generated when time is ignored....apart from language, there are no named classes and no-subject-predicate relations."226 In Loy's Yale text Nonduality: A Study of Comparative Philosophy he emphasizes "the isomorphism between our conceptual thought-processes and the subject-predicate structure of our language."227 Even more relevant to our context, music analyst Berendt elaborated on this rare insight:
For a long time western rationalists smiled at the notion that the sound of a single word [a vowel mantra], a single syllable should have a formative, shaping, creative power.... Aristotelian logic is based on the law of identity (A equals A), the law of contradiction (A cannot be equal to non-A) and on the law of the excluded third (A cannot be equal to A as well as to non-A). Beside it stands (and has stood since ancient times) what is known as paradoxical logic; which postulates that A and non-A can both be predicates of X....Our western concept of logic is strongly conditioned by western language. Weizsacker points out that 'the philosophies are closely related to the grammatical structures of the language.' The subject-predicate scheme of Aristotelian logic corresponds to the grammatical structure of the Greek declarative sentence... In his tome, Nietzsche noted that the 'astounding family likeness' seen in Western philosophies could be explained 'simple enough,' namely by their 'unconscious domination by the same grammatical functions.'Berendt emphasizes the difference in Asian languages from western languages (see below footnote) and the cultural analyst Noël Burch has examined the subsequent different symbolic interpretations of reality.229 Similarly the translator of ancient Greek, philosopher and mathematician Robert Schimdt, has shown that western logic was derived out of a broader language system of phasis ( which is the means by which objects spoke to the Greeks. Phasis is a multiple variant, or multiple-meaning, non-linear language system, just as the Plato dialogues are ( and they have subsequently not been correctly translated by logic according to Schimdt. Schimdt contends that logic is an incorrect simplification of phasis and that the western knowledge system has structural errors due to its dependency on logic.230 In contrast, in the Taoist Ch'an (or Zen) training enlightened language "can be interpreted 'perpendicularly,' or 'horizontally'.... like a prism or spectrum of multi-leveled meanings."231 Schimdt's position mirrors the findings of Kingsley, worth quoting at length:
...from the point of view of the history of philosophy we are presented with a very different picture of prePlatonic Pythagoreans from the usual stereotype of them as impractical dreamers, their minds fogged and obsessed with number mysticism, who had no 'clear idea of the value of empirical research' because all that interested them was discovering metaphysical principles....Pythagoreans could be far more practical than is usually supposed, sometimes deadly practical. For Plato this emphasis on practicality remained a powerful ideal; and yet, ideals apart, practically speaking it went against the grain of his temperament, his abilities, and against the conditions of the times in which he lived. With him and Aristotle the philosophical life as an integrated combination of practice and perception fell apart at the seams, and another ideal came to predominate instead: 'a new type of man, the unworldly and withdrawn student and scholar'.As with Berendt and Bateson, Rothstein has recognized that both true math and music theory, instead of the linear logic of the West, follow dialectical reasoning that he traces to the Pythagorean-roots of Plato. He quotes Socrates, "argument itself grasps with the power of dialectic" and then follows, "the inner life of the arts is in the world of Forms, in the processes of dialectic and its argument by metaphor."233 Bateson constructed his social systems theory, mirroring the phasis of ancient Greek, around the transcendental dialectical syllogism of metaphor-- "Grass dies; Men die; Men are grass" in response to the limited linear logical paradox "Epimenides was a Cretan who said, 'Cretans always lie.'" Although we can not attempt to elaborate on his investigation here, Bateson states in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity that "syllogisms in grass must be the dominant mode of communicating interconnection of ideas...."234 Quantum theory has even called for a curved space-time non-Boolean "quantum logic" to be developed.235 Paralleling Bateson's Pythagorean social systems theory, the foundation of radical ecology chaos and complexity, or open systems theory, is also based from sound-current nondualism. As the radical ecologist and theoretical physicist Dr. Fritoj Capra describes in The Web of Life:
In the 1950s scientists began to actually build models of such binary networks, including some with little lamps flickering on and off at the nodes. To their great amazement they discovered that after a short time of random flickering, some ordered patterns would emerge in most networks. They would see waves of flickering pass through the network, or they would observe repeated cycles. Even though the initial state of the network was chosen at random, after a while those ordered patterns would emerge spontaneously, and it was that spontaneous emergence of order that became known as 'self-organization.'236From the seemingly random non-linear dialectical network of nodes, ordered patterns of meaning create harmonic structures of self-organization (i.e. spiro-vortex of the absolute void, the superstring, primary perception, negentropy, morphogenesis, cymatics, syllogisms of metaphor, and quantum logic).237 The infamous "butterfly effect" of chaos and complexity, where small changes have widespread and unpredictable systemic transformations, is simply a change in the fundamental node of the multidimensional pattern of harmonic oscillations. The linear Cartesian phase-space dimensions of the musically and linguistically inaccurate closed clock-pendulum are now, Capra states, represented by, "a curve spiraling inward toward the center" ( an "attractor" or the Pythagorean law of growth.238 In the more complex multidimensional system the Pythagorean fundamental is called a "strange attractor." Predictions, by chaos theory, are no longer reductionist or of the modern paradigm. Capra remarks, "The new mathematics thus represents a shift from quantity to quality that is characteristic of systems thinking in general.... All trajectories starting within a certain region of phase space will lead sooner or later to the same attractor...The result is a dynamical picture of the entire system, called the 'phase portrait.'"239 Structures of nature are modeled by Pythagorean chaos and complexity with fractals being a prominent example. Like other chaos theorists, Martin Gardner describes the Pythagorean foundation behind fractals with "scaling noise" in Fractal Music, Hypercards and More: "If you play a recording of such a sound at a different speed, you have only to adjust the volume to make it sound exactly as before. By adjusting the spectral density we obtain an auto correlation of zero-in other words the same ratio that expands."240 As with the dialectical Pythagorean principles, the Taoist Tai Ch'i is also a symbol found in harmonic fractals and represents a system "governed by the law of logistic equations."241 A new mathematical treatise called Chaos Near Resonance further confirms the harmonic foundations of radical ecology open systems theory. The book is known as the first systematic exposition to understand and predict the global effect of resonances in multidimensional phase space. Or as the author György Hall states:
In molecular dynamics, resonances are known to give rise to chaotic patterns, multiple time scales, and apparent irreversibility in the transfer of energy between different oscillatory states of molecules. In engineering structures, interactions among resonant modes are responsible for most complicated dynamical phenomena, which again include energy transfer, multi-time-scale behavior, and chaotic motions. It is of great practical importance to understand the common mechanism behind these irregular features....242Even with new paradigm science revealing this ancient simple harmonic foundation of analysis, the deeply rooted inaccurate linear symbolic reification is just as strong today in the community of public intellectuals (or academics focused on structural change and exposing hegemonic ideologies). For instance, while grand theorist Slavoj Zizek has done a brilliant job clarifying dialectic thinking and crucially applying it to cultural analysis, he devoted a large part of a recent book to attacking rhythmic vibrations of energy. It is not that Zizek's theory is incorrect but only that he refuses to systematically take into account dialectic analysis beyond that of Hegel and Lacan-or beyond the limits of language as represented by the Freudian "primordially repressed."243 (see below for further description of primordially repressed) Zizek writes, "Hegel's point is not a new version of the yin/yang balance, but its exact opposite: 'truth' resides in the excess of exaggeration as such."244 What is missing from Zizek's understanding of Taoist qi gong is that the disease is considered the teacher for the cure, just as Zizek states, "the wound is healed by the spear that smote it." In other words, the dialectical process, accurately modeled by music theory and Taoist qi gong as will be shown, uses resonance-the exaggerated 'comma of Pythagoras' ( to achieve a new synthesis or a new form. Zizek does recognize the meaning of music as "the pre-ontological texture of relations" when he refers to Plato's "chora" (i.e. chorus) from the Pythagorean dialogue Timaeus ( calling it "a kind of matrix-receptacle of all determinate forms, governed by its own contingent rules."245 Zizek also impressively traces the history of the ego or the modern Subject as corresponded with the development of opera. The end of the cultural dominance of opera coincides with the beginning of the modern paradigm and the hysterical subject as the object of psychoanalysis.246 In a chapter on music Zizek writes:
What is music at its most elementary? An act of supplication: a call to a figure of the big Other (beloved Lady, King, God...) to respond, not as the symbolic big Other, but in the real of his or her being (breaking his own rules by showing mercy; conferring her contingent love on us...). Music is thus an attempt to provoke the 'answer of the Real': to give rise in the Other to the 'miracle' of which Lacan speaks apropos of love, the miracle of the Other stretching his or her hand out to me. The historical changes in the status of 'big Other' (grosso modo, in what Hegel referred to as 'objective Spirit') thus directly concern music - perhaps, musical modernity designates the moment when music renounces the endeavour to provoke the answer of the Other.247One of the main cultural criticisms emphasized by Zizek is that the dialectical process of Hegel has been misunderstood as a new ideological Absolute Subject thus, as Berendt also points out, causing materialistic Marxism to be a distorted example of dialectical thought. Currently Zizek has pinpointed new age thinking as also being representative of a misguided Absolute Subject through the goal of a new balanced order of harmonious nature or "New Age Consciousness: the balanced circuit of Nature."248 But to correct Zizek, contrary to a reified Absolute Subject or big Other of nature, prominent analysis of qi gong ironically distinguishes dialectics from the common misunderstanding of Hegel ( the same error that Zizek has focused on clarifying:
The term synthesis in this context does not refer to polar opposites merging into a higher unity so as to be separately indistinguishable. (This form of synthesis was one of the goals of the dialectical process identified by the philosopher G.W. Hegel in his development of the Absolute). The method may be simply described as positing something as a thesis, then realizing that it can only be truly defined by taking other aspects or its opposite into account (antithesis), and finally arriving at the explicit recognition that the thesis and antithesis are related on a higher level of objective truth: synthesis). To understand ongoing process, which Chinese philosophy favors in the spirit of synthesis, we might consider the psychological concept of integration.249The true open systems ongoing process is modeled by sound-current nondualism in a manner that very specifically and simply clarifies the correct dialectical analysis that has been the focus of Zizek's investigation. As Zizek states, in dialectics first there is a thesis then an antithesis and as each is taken to their extreme logical conclusions both points negate each other by their mutual absurdity (called the dialectical reversal after the unity of opposites). Then that negation is affirmed as a new ground that both points now hold in common. This last formal step is naming or recognizing the first negation and called double negation or determinate reflection. The point, not recognized in the dominant linear interpretation of dialectics, is that it is "the very lack [void] they have in common" which enables a new synthesis. Zizek writes, "Being reveals itself as Nothing at the very moment we try to grasp it in its pureness," and in reference to Hegel, "the subject is precisely that which is not substance." Zizek then states that the dialectic process is the same "nodal" problem again and again.250 Taking Zizek quite literally is more appropriate than he may ever realize for it is exactly the nodes of sound-current nondualism, by modeling different orders of information, that so precisely describe the dialectical process. To give some background information, the ratios of the fourth and the fifth are inverse opposites of the octave overtone ( both ratios cause a pull to resolve at the fundamental (and octave). When the ratios are explored at depth, the relation of their overtones is in dissonance. As Rothstein describes, "These two consonant tones (fifth and fundamental) have strongly dissonant overtones...[and] are the poles of tonal musical drama."251 It is this paradox of the poles that defines the description of thesis and antithesis in the dialectics of music theory. Erno Lendvai states,
By taking a V-I cadence the essential notes in the five chord bear an equal tritonic relationship according to their overtones. These essential notes are what cause the strong feeling to I. By inverting these notes the same tritone relationship is formed...The tritones' overtones act as subdominants [fourths] and as dominants [fifths] at the same time. These two positions neutralize and again, the tritone's relationship to the tonic [fundamental] is found, the two are acoustically interchangeable.252Jeans provides the following on the topic: "In the case of wider intervals such as C and F# [the tritone] there are no beats to be heard, either pleasant or unpleasant, but Helmholtz asserted that C and F# sound badly together because certain of their harmonics (e.g. g' and f'#) make unpleasant beats."253 The dialectical process is demonstrated through sound-current nondualism by the splitting of nothing (the zero beats root of the fundamental) into two parts: the fundamental and the octave, that freely resonate into the next multiple of the fifth, forming complimentary opposites to the fundamental. The fifth splits the octave and fundamental in half but also pulls to or, resolves to, the octave and fundamental. As described by Lendvai and Rothstein, the free vibration of the fifth and its overtone become extreme opposites to the fundamental, via the overtone forming tritonic relations to the tonic. The tritone has traditionally been known as "the unutterable" or "diabulus in musica" and for Pythagoras it was the secret transcendental ratio from which the Pythagorean theorem was derived.254 Lendvai points out that the tritone overtones act as both the fourth and the fifth, the yin and yang, thereby unifying and neutralizing and modeling the dialectical reversal. In the scale the tritone (F#) is in between the subdominant or fourth (F) and the dominant or fifth (G). As Jeans states, the tritone has no beats (zero) with the fundamental-thus forming the first negation. The analysis of the transcendental dyad at the tritone was the source for the concept of the void in Pythagorean doctrine.255 The tritone overtones then act as the original consonant fifth to the fundamental, as described by Lendvai, thus completing the double negation or determinate reflection for the new synthesis. This final synthesis is on-going, represented by the multidimensional resonance of the spiral of fifths (not the incorrect circle of fifths taught in the West) that is basic to sound-current nondualism( or again, the same beautiful "nodal problem" again and again.256 While Zizek, like Bateson, does not stray beyond the linear symbolic limit of the primordially repressed, he does describe that limit as being magical pre-verbal sound. The primordially repressed are myths that "have no 'original' in the language of intersubjective communication.'" He gives a very significant example,
...at the very moment when the reign of (symbolic) Law was being instituted (in what Moses was able to discern as the articulated Commandments), the crowd waiting below Mount Sinai apprehended only the continuous, non-articulated sound of the shofar [a trumpet-type horn]: the voice of the shofar is an irreducible supplement of the (written) Law.Zizek defines the shofar as "a kind of 'vanishing mediator' between the mythical direct vocal expression of the pre-symbolic life-substance and articulated speech...this strange sound...is strictly analogous to the unconscious act of establishing the difference between the unconscious vortex of drives and the field of Logos in Schelling."257 The primordial supplement mentioned by Zizek is also the same Lacanian surplus of desire for psychological analysis, the "excess of exaggeration" that is crucial to the dialectical process and the commodity fetish and surplus-value of Marxist theory. These key components of Zizek's analysis are equivalent to the comma of Pythagoras: The inherent resonance patterns of fundamental vibrations are what create the jouissance (Barthes' cathartic sublime enjoyment or energy) that is central to psychological desire and to ideological fanaticism as analyzed by Zizek. Catharsis is originally a Pythagorean concept that was later used by Aristotle. Zizek also refers to Lacan's use of systems theory self-organization feedback to model the "return of the repressed." (whether the repressed is psychological or whether, as systems theory is used in political economy, the repressed is the "externalities" or social and environmental costs of linear development).258 This sublime linearly repressed energy is the heresy that Bateson describes as driving genocidal western linear epistemology. Both the symbol for Lacanian jouissance and for the symbol for the eternal Pythagorean law of growth are the Greek character phi.259 George Frazer's classic cultural analysis, The Golden Bough, that was a major influence on Freud, reflecting Zizek's mythic source, systematically documents the spiritual process of the "killing of the king" (sacrifice) that in the West became transferred to symbolic structures and reified into a closed linear knowledge system. The neuropsychologist Karl Pribram, who did pioneering brain and consciousness research and presented a open systems multidimensional resonance model of the mind, made a similar case: "...when, because of linguistic and cultural affluence, the means-ends reversal occurs, these languages begin to live lives of their own. Thus complexity is compounded and the original organization can easily be lost sight of."260 Zizek's rejection of social theories that critique the modern paradigm science as a repressive social institution no longer holds because of the formal accuracy of sound-current nondualism as arising out of the void. For his dismissal he refers to Heidegger, pointing out that,
...modern science at its most fundamental cannot be reduced to some limited ontic, 'socially conditioned' option (expressing the interests of a certain social group, etc.), but is rather, the [Lacanian] real of our historical moment, that which 'remains the same' in all possible ('progressive' and 'reactionary', 'technocratic' and 'ecological', 'patriarchal' and 'feminist') symbolic universes.261This is the same symbolic limit of the linear knowledge system that was emphasized by Bordwell and Flinn and to which sound-current nondualism gives a formal answer. Zizek again describes the limits,
When typical modernist artist speak about the Spiritual in painting (Kandinsky) or in music (Schoenberg), the 'spiritual' dimension they evoke points towards the 'spiritualization' (or, rather, 'spectralization') of Matter (colour and shape, sound) as such, outside its reference to Meaning...it dwells in a kind of intermediate spectral domain of what Schelling called geistige Körperlichkeit. From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to identify this "spiritual corporeality' as materialized jouissance....262By claiming spiritualization or jouissance is outside the "reference to Meaning" Zizek falls into the same profound knowledge system trap and misses the crucial open systems connection modeling the Lacanian Real. As music analyst Rudolf Haase puts it, "in nature an important role is played by those quantities which in man can be transformed into qualities."263 Or as Zizek himself admits when analyzing Mozart's Don Giovanni, "the very external form of the Count's melody, its discord with its own content (the words sung), articulates the unconscious truth as yet inaccessible to him, to his psychological experience."264 Richard Leppert also, like Zizek, examines the subsequent effects of Plato's conceptual error and notes that Barthes conceived of jouissance as arising from the energy that music models. Leppert connects music, nature and politics through a historical poetics of western art, analyzing how socially the role of music, used for control, has also paradoxically undermined rationalism of the West. Leppert states,
If Barthes is right, the radical political act of making music for oneself ( in Victorian culture, this means especially women-involves a temporary reinscription of human 'totality' (mind with body at art) in the lived experience of 'humanities' second sex. This reinscription marks a refusal to abide by the terms of Cartesian dualism, the very foundation of the politics of gender, class, and racial difference-according to which certain men think and all women merely feel.265As with Fraser, Pribram, Zizek and others, symbolic transference of spiritual power to linear repressive thought and language is the problem traced by David F. Noble that has created the modern "religion of technology" and that we are now tracing further back to the root of its western origin. The inherent western genocidal mass killing of heretics and "primitive peoples," by considering them "pre-cognitive," is explained from a purely formal analysis, as we will further show. Because of the deeply seated linear knowledge system, even the successful grand theorist Ken Wilber falls into the trap of advocating repressive western evolution based on a deterministic brain model that does not fully process the findings of Pribram's resonance brain analysis.266 Wilber subsequently incorrectly portrays indigenous cultures as having "preoperational cognition" and being inferior-i.e. claiming that their sustainable indigenous knowledge systems are merely haphazard occurrences reflecting their lack of western technology.267 The latest scholarly discussion by anthropologists of the relation between indigenous cultures and their values toward the environment is social scientist Kay Milton's "Nature and the Environment in Indigenous and Traditional Cultures," in Spirit of the Environment.268 The anthropological research shows that within the "oneness of nature" myth accorded by the West to indigenous peoples, what is actually accurate is that traditional cultures dominate their environments with defining values of mutual respect that do not usually view nature as a separate, objectified Other. Or as she states when cultures become more intensive,
Control makes trust redundant; indeed, it removes the autonomy which is part of the essence of trust. The non-human animals, once deprived of their freedom, come to be seen as lacking the capacity to act on their own behalf; they are seen less as persons and more as objects. It is easy to perceive, in the intensive farming methods of the industrial world, an extreme form of this perspective, in which the sensibilities of non-human animals are denied for the convenience of human routines and industrial systems.269The defining contrast to the West is the predominance of "a non-oppositional perspective [that] is consistent with an extensive pattern of economic activity which makes people familiar with every part of their environment."270 Ironically the central text of Tibetan Buddhism, a philosophy from which Wilber draws heavily, commonly called "The Book of the Dead," has its origins in the indigenous Bön culture and is literally translated as "Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate State."271 Wilber criticizes social theorists for even "eulogizing" tribal cultures, when in fact currently still existing with distinct languages, 4,000 to 5,000 of the 6,000 human cultures are indigenous, but extremely threatened by corporate state elite attacks.272 (Exxon in Chad-Cameroon, Shell in Nigeria, Freeport in Indonesia, Texaco in Ecuador, Occidental Petroleum in Colombia, Unocal-Total in Burma).273 Without "romanticizing" the infinite complexity between and within each distinct language group, there is extensive evidence of indigenous cultures commonly interacting in a proportionally reciprocal or law of Pythagoras relationship with the environment as a conscious value system.274 The outstanding examples of unbalanced indigenous development patterns that Wilber incorrectly suggests are the norm, are due to particular breaks in those cultures from extreme and unpredictable influences, for example, as we have discussed, reification of linear symbolic systems, or dramatic climate change and colonialism. Wilber does not recognize the fact that there has been a strong backlash against indigenous research, precisely because of its psychological threat to the linear western worldview. His use of Hawaii to explain his theory of holons is an inaccurate portrayal of genocidal U.S. imperialism-he actually claims the contrary occurred.275 Certainly neither Pribram and Schmidt or the global green movement that Wilber also supports, are advocating a "regressive" return to pre-industrial society as the immediate dominant fear arises, but instead the societal model of an open multidimensional process that continually reaffirms the universal common ground of the void. From systems theory music analysis, Leonard Meyer calls this societal model "fluctuating stasis" based on "steady-state" systems theory, a prediction of the same recommendation from radical ecologist open systems theorist Fritoj Capra.276 In Noise: The Political Economy of Music Jacques Attali presents a similar societal vision-predicted by and achieved through profound music practices that challenge the hegemony of linearly repressed symbolic abstraction of the western knowledge system.277 John E. Peck documents how in fact indigenous cultures already enact concepts of sophisticated open systems theory:
Given its sensitivity to time and place, indigenous knowledge would seem to be better situated to successfully adopt and apply a nonequilibrium perspective to ecosystem management than conventional scientific thinking, particularly in settings unfamiliar to western policy makers. Ecosystemic trajectories are so contextually contingent that an observer can hardly afford to entertain a theoretical framework built upon universal "objectivity" and reductionist "rationality."The great contribution of Wilber is that he also, as with sound-current nondualism, models an understanding of the absolute void as accessible in each state of information. He discusses many of the same western knowledge system errors ( but the crucial qualitative difference of modeling the void with music theory is that the long-established inaccurately linear and immoral, genocidal bias against indigenous cultures need not apply. The music analyst John Chernoff in his important work with the Dagomba, African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, notes that "The power and dynamic potential of the music is in the silence, and the gaps between the notes, [the absolute void] and it is into this openness that a creative participant will place his contribution, trying to open up the music further." Chernoff realized that music serves as a conscious cultural practice to access the absolute void and obtain transformative powers in these cultures. He points out that "both [the dialectical Marcuse and Lacan] are suggestive of ways in which Western philosophical literature on alienation is addressed in the aesthetics of African music."279
214 Bateson, Angels Fear, p. 60. 215 Bateson, Angels Fear, p. 24. Bateson was drawing from "On the Discovery of Deductive Science," The St. John's Review (January, 1980): 21-31 216 Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, p. 29. 217 Robin Hartshorne, "Teaching Geometry According to Euclid," Notices of the AMS, Vol. 47, no. 4, p. 461. 218 Dominic J. O'Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 67-68. 219 Peter Gorman, Pythagoras: A Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 137. For the latest biography see John Strohmeier, Peter Westbrook, John Scrohmeier, Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras (CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999). 220 The latest analysis that assumes Pythagoras did not know about the transcendental or "irrational" only approaches the problem from arithmetic or geometry and leaves out the actual music proportional approach that Pythagoras used. Philip Hugly; Charles Sayward, "Did the Greeks discover the irrationals?" Philosophy 74 (April 1999): 169. 221 For the connection between the Taoist and Pythagorean use of initiation and the transcendental see, "A. Volkov, "Zhao Youqin and his calculation of pi," Historia Mathematic 24 (Aug. 1997): 301-331. Zhao Youqin was a Taoist Master. 222 Leibniz, the founder of calculus and binary logic, was bent on creating a "characteristica universalis" or universal method of reasoning enabling direct communication. His motivation was the complete destruction of the great thirty year religious war from which a desire for dogmatic abstract certainty or the modern paradigm arose. Leibniz though was already transcending the linear materialistic religion of technology suffering of his day, by using the I Ching as a parallel basis for his multidimensional approach, unlike Descartes. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, pp. 100-102 and Schönberger, The I Ching and the Genetic Code, pp. 59-67. 223 Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, pp. 50-56,148. 224 Steven M. Rosen, "Concept of the Infinite and the Crisis of Modern Physics," Speculations in Science and Technology 6 (1983): 413-425. 225 Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (NY: Grove Press, 1993), p. 36. Lawlor gives logos the more specific definition of the three-termed proportion (vs. four term)."The Measure of Difference." Logos is the term Ashok Gangadean uses to describe his universal grammar of "meditative reason" that he also calls a "primal bonding force." See Ashok Gangadean, Between Worlds: The Emergence of Global Reason (NY: Peter Lang, 1998) 226 Bateson, Angels Fear, p. 27, 117. 227 Loy, Nonduality, p. 4. 228 Berendt also gives the broader cultural context: "Chuang-tzu, the ancient Chinese sage, wrote 'What is one, is one. What is not-one, also is one.' And Erich Fromm notes: 'Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in Heraclitus' philosophy, and then again under the name of dialectics in the thought of Hegel and Marx'.... By way of contrast the thinking behind the Chinese and Japanese languages do not move in a straight line from the subject to the object with no aid of the verb. It circles around its object and envelops it until it is specified as precisely as the objects in our Western languages (which presupposes an inner predicate); in fact, specialists feel that these Asian languages are even more precise since they do not simply 'objectivate' but rather let subject and object 'become one' so that the active and the passive mode fall together...." 228 The World Is Sound, pp. 44-49. 229 Noël Burch, To The Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 230 Robert Schmidt, "Phasis and Logos," presentation at FortFest, Fall 1997, of The International Fortean Organization (INFO), MS available at 532 Washington St., Cumberland MD 21502 see his Project Hindsight at http://www.projecthindsight-tghp.com/ INFO, founded in 1965 to expand the original Fortean Society, is dedicated to disseminating and building upon the pioneering research of scientific anomalies by Charles Fort, best known today as the basis for the The X-Files television show. INFO Journal, P.O. Box 367, Arlington, VA 22210-0367. The Complete Books of Charles Fort, introduction by Damon Knight (New York : Dover Publications, 1974). 231 Lu K'uan Yü, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, pp. 46-47. 232 Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 158 See also "The birth of philosophy as a falsification of history," in Antonio Capizzo, The Cosmic Republic: Notes for a non-peripatetic history of the birth of philosophy in Greece (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1990). 233 Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, p. 238. 234 Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 116. 235 Herbert, Quantum Reality, pp. 20-21. 236 Fritoj Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understand of Living Systems, pp. 83-84. See also Per Bak, How Nature Works: The science of self-organized criticality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the simple and the complex (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1995). 237 The biologist Kammerer also discovered this law of nature and called it the "Law of Seriality," P. Kammerer, Das Gesetz der Serie (Stuttgart: Dtsch. Verl-Anst., 1919), quoted in Watson, Supernature, p. 111. Dr. Wilhelm Reich was persecuted for his discovery of self-organizing vital energy that he called orgone. 238 Chaos theory thus models the lost multidimensional proportional knowledge system of ancient wisdom. The modern paradigm is dependent on the closed circle linearly determined ratio system for music analysis, Cartesian analysis, the incorrect supply and demand economic model, Euclidian zoning, and the linear subject-predicate (ratio) structure of western language. 239 Ibid., pp. 129-130, 135-136. Another example to describe the paradox of order out of chaos is a Pythagorean spiral-vortex, like water flowing down a drain. We know the system limits of the drain and even the principles of the flow but the water itself is constantly moving. 240 Martin Gardner, Fractal Music, Hypercards and More: Mathematical Recreations from Scientific American Magazine (NY: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1992), p. 3. 241 HJ Sun, L. Liu, AK Guo, "Iteration logistic map dynamics in the polar coordinates," Fractals-An Interdisciplinary Journal on the complex geometry of nature 6 (March 1998): 11-22. 242 György Hall, Chaos Near Resonance (NY: Springer, 1999), vii. 243 Bateson was similarly held back by the prominence of Freud's primordially repressed and Wilber also points out this limitation. 244 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997). p. 92. 245 Ibid., p. 208. 246 Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, p. 165. 247 Ibid., p. 192. 248 Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, p. 237. 249 Dong and Esser, Chi Gong, p. 199. 250 Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 122-123. Just like the derivative for Weierstrass, for Zizek, the linear symbolic limit is the never-ending goal, still repressing the transcendental consequences of analysis. The focus of Zizek's latest book The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For (NY: Verso, 2000) is an overt attack on the growing recognition of "the sacred" and is literally a full embrace of linear symbolic logic reflected by the materialistic western religion of technology. 251 Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, p. 28. 252 Lendvai, Bela Bartok, p. 24. The intervals, although found in the chords, are dependant on the chord inversions as well. 253 Jeans, Science and Music, p. 157. 254 Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, p. 29. For tritone as source of the infinite transcendental (or "irrational" [Ã2] in the modern paradigm) see "Music's Discipline of the Means: An Interview with Ernest McClain." Parabola 16 (Winter, 1991): 85. 255 On the void as the source of the dyad see O'Meara, Pythagoras Revived, pp. 67-68. 256 Although I have never seen the multidimensional spiral fifths used to demonstrate the dialectical process before, Ernst Levy did perceive the relationship when he described the cadence of the dominants of dominants of tonics (the cycle of fifths) as a "dialectical process." Levy, A Theory of Harmony, p. 98 citing Moritz Hauptman, The Nature of Harmony and Metre (London: Swan Sonnenschien, 1888). This process is what is called "nondual duality" in Dr. Steven Rosen's Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle: The evolution of a "transcultural" approach to wholeness (SUNY, 1994) and it also addresses the criticisms of materialistic monism raised against George Picht, as cited by Thomas Bargatzky. David Loy in Nonduality discusses this same approach to reality as found in Buddhism and John Milbank starts to touch on the concept while discussing postmodernism: "Hence transcendence as envisaged by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo does indeed imply dualism, and yet a kind of perpetually self-cancelling dualism. This is the nearest we can get to nondualism...." See "Problematizing the Secular: The post-postmodern agenda," in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds., Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 42. 257 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder : An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (NY: Verso, 1996), p. 104. The basis of Pythagorean principles as the foundation for mythic meaning is also analyzed by Fred Fisher, "Music and the Wheel: The Oedipus Story," Interdisciplina I/3 (Spring 1976): 38-54. As music theorist Ernest McClain states, "There seems to be, from the archaeological evidence, a considerable ubiquity of musical artifacts from the early third millennium, and, from what I read into the early mythology and its numerology, I believe all major cultures possessed the harmonic system we call Pythagorean." "Music's Discipline of the Means: An Interview with Ernest McClain," Parabola 16 (Winter, 1991): 85. 258 See "the paradox of a finite totality," in Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a political factor (NY: Verso, 1991). See also limit or threshold of octave Gurdjieff footnote above. Although I will give further references for addressing the symptoms of political economic "externalities," again the focus of this work is modeling the formal foundation for those externalities so that they can be effectively approached considering the immense power of repression (socially, psychologically and spiritually). 259 For jouissance as phi see Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Subjectivity, (London: Verso, 1989). For Pythagorean law of growth, divine proportion as phi see Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, p. 336 and Rothstein, Emblems of Mind, p. 157. Rothstein, still based in linear thinking, captures the pathos of the modern western paradigm: "The music 'in itself' is the abstract model whose essence defies even a purely formal analysis," Emblems of Mind, p. 212. 260 Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain: Experimental paradoxes and principles in neuropsychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hill, Inc., 1971). See also Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991). 261 Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 38. Sound-current nondualism enables a resolution to the highly problematic yet remarkable influence of Heidegger on postmodern and radical ecology theory. Rosen notes that according to Heidegger, "We are to retrace our steps, work our way back through our 2500-year-old tradition... By so returning to the primal origin of philosophy, a fresh perspective would be gained on its fundamental problems...this question [of Being] has been shrouded in obscurity or entirely misunderstood since the time of Plato and Aristotle. So Heidegger was concerned with the form of thinking, over and above its content...." Rosen, "Psi and Non-Dual Duality," in Parapsychology, Philosophy and Religious Concepts, p. 73. Loy draws the same fundamental point from Heidegger that brings us back to the Pythagorean physis analysis of George Picht: "that the Greek concepts of physis and hypkeimenon ('that which lies before') embodied some naive understanding of this 'thought,' [nondualism] later lost when they were transformed into techne and the self-conscious subjectum, respectively." And "techne or 'thinking...without result" is the "more calculative, re-presentational...the 'technical interpretatoin' of thinking: thinking, as Plato and Aristotle (but evidently not Socrates) took it to be...." Loy, Nonduality, p. 166. 262 Ibid, p. 32. 263 Haase cited by Berendt, The World Is Sound, p. 80. 264 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 189. See also Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic experiences in life and music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953). 265 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 213-215. 266 This is even after Wilber edited The Holographic Paradigm and other paradoxes: exploring the leading edge of science (Boston: Shambhala, 1982). 267 See Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for several references on "tribal consciousness," pp. 52, 166, 571, 582. Michael Horace Barnes in his Stages of Thought: The co-evolution of religious thought and science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) provides a seemingly more "balanced" promotion of the preoperational category of analysis (Chp. 3, "Cognitive Styles in Primitive Cultures,"). Applying Piaget's preoperational category for children to cultures is advocating linear teleological brain evolution to the goal of western rationality, reinforcing the same linear western culturally genocidal assumptions as well. (again this is in contrast to Pribram's neuro-psychological research and the work of other anthropologists cited in this book, see especially Junzo Kawada's "Human Dimensions in the Sound Universe," in Redefining Nature). Drawing from the extensive analysis of this structural issue by Graham Richards, On Psychological Language and the Physiomorphic Basis of Human Nature (NY: Routledge, 1989), Mary Midgely notes: "The notion of 'primitive animisim' comes from a familiar Enlightenment myth that compares the intellectual development of the human race to that of an individual -- there are obvious reasons why people in simpler [sic.] cultures might count as more adult than highly civilized people, since they have to be much more self-reliant." Mary Midgley, Science As Salvation: A modern myth and its meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 171. Even Paul D. McClean, the creator of the triune theory of linear brain evolution that is the basis of Wilber's analysis, has switched to the resonance theory of Pribram! (as cited in the first section of this book, "Sound-Current Nondualism") The real problem of tribal consciousness according to Wilber is that it is missing "a level of law and morality" to build unified societies that can deal with social conflict beyond the limited small tribes. Ward Churchill documents that Native Americans, contrary to Wilber's claim, were known for just the opposite ability. That the democratic federation of native nations was a direct inspiration for the structure of the U.S. government is also well documented. Many scholars have argued it is precisely the superior social skills of indigenous societies that differentiate them from top-down linear western institutions. See Ward Churchill, Struggle for the land: Indigenous resistance to genocide, ecocide and expropriation in contemporary North America, forward by John Trudell, preface by Winona LaDuke (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993). See also Jerry Manders, "Our Founding Mothers and Fathers ( the Iroquois," Earth Island Journal: International Environmental News (Fall 1991): 30. 268 Kay Milton, "Nature and the Environment in Indigenous and Traditional Cultures," in David E. Cooper and Joy A. Palmer, eds., Spirit of the Environment: Religion, value and environmental concern (NY: Routledge, 1998), pp. 86-100. 269 Ibid., p. 96. 270 Ibid. Milton emphasizes that even the terms indigenous and traditional are contentious, while environmental perspectives are diverse and fluctuate, and that the effects of those values are contingent to the intensity of impact. She emphasizes a "trans-cultural" approach that identifies environmental cultures. See also Kay Milton, "Ecologies: Anthropology, culture and the environment," International Social Science Journal 49 (1997) and Kay Milton, Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the role of anthropology in environmental discourse (New York: Routledge, 1996). 271 Berendt, The World Is Sound, p. 145. 272 See the Indigenous Environmental Network at http://www.alphacdc.com/ien/subject.html 273 The 4,000-5,000 of 6,000 figure and the conscious sustainable ecological practices of the world's indigenous cultures are documented by Alan Thein Durning, "Supporting Indigenous Peoples," State of the World 1993: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society (NY: W.W. Norton, 1993). See also FO Adeola, "Cross-national Environmental Injustice and Human Rights Issues: A review of evidence in the developing world," American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000): 686-706. 274 See for example, Howard L. Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American sacred ecology and animal kinship (Tucson: University of Arizon Press, 2000); Barabara Noske, "Speciesism, anthropocentrism and non-western cultures," Anthrozoös 10 (1997): 183-190; S. Sharma, HC Rikhari, LMS Palni, "Conservation of Natural Resources Through Religion: A case study from Central Himalaya," Society and Natural Resources 12 (1999): 599-612; PH Stephenson, "Environmental Health Perspectives on the Consequences of an Ideology of Control in 'Natural' Systems," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 34 (1997): 349-367; and M. Richards, "Common Property Resource Institutions and Forest Management in Latin America," Development and Change 28 (1997): 95-117; PM Jostad, LH McAvoy, D. McDonald, "Native American land ethics: Implications for natural resource management," Society and Natural Resources 9 (1996): 565-581. 275 For a review of the backlash against indigenous research see David Watson (aka George Bradford), Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a future social ecology (NY: Autonomedia, 1996) as well as the anthropological references of anarcho-primitivist researcher John Zerzan. One example is Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the myth of primitive harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992). Edgerton does an impressive job cataloging every extreme behavior in indigenous cultures and certainly proves the point that indigenous cultures are not lacking violence, destruction of the environment and, even on occasion, organized warfare. What is missing from his critique is not only the context for each example he cites but the relative several orders of magnitude difference in comparison with the impact of the West on indigenous societies. This lack of comparison with the qualitative difference of industrialism as well as the assumption of western rationality as universally superior can also be found in Peter Coates' otherwise informative summary of the issue in his Nature: Western attitudes since ancient times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); For the latest and most sophisticated version of this backlash see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999). Krech starts the book off with the infamous "Keep America Beautiful" teary-eyed Indian infomercial and states that this anti-pollution ad just helped feed the incorrect environmental stereotype about indigenous cultures. He neglects to mention the campaign was actually funded by "greenwashing" corporations that were attacking and twisting the true environmental concerns of traditional indigenous cultures. Krech's book is a similar high profile trojan horse disguised as sincere concern. On the repressed history of the destructive U.S. take-over of Hawaii see Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993). See also Annette M. Jaimes. The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonialization and Resistance (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992); Bruce E. Johansen. Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples. (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1995); Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D, "The Survival Path: Cooperation between Indigenous and Industrial Humanity" at http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/ A balanced overview can also be found in the books on the topic by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. 276 Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, p. 172. See also former World Bank senior economist Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) and his earlier work, Steady-State Economics (San Francisco: Island Press, 1991). Daly works with John B. Cobb an advocate of Alfred Whitehead's Pythagorean process theology also studied by David Griffin. Herman E. Daly, John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Polkinghorne notes the Cobb process theology in Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 55. For the evidence of Pythagoras' continued social systems influence on "organizational behavior:" James Bedfore-Roberts, "Concepts from Pythagoras," Hewleet-Packard technical report; HPL-91-22, 1991. 277 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 16) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 278 John E. Peck, "Nonequilibrium Perspectives and Indigenous Knowledge for Community Management of Natural Resources in Zimbabwe," (MS, Geography 920, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996). See also PS Sriraj, CJ Khisty, "Crisis Management and Planning Using Systems Methodologies," Journal of Urban Planning and Development-ASCE 125 (1999): 121-133. 279 John Chernoff, African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1979). See also Philip M. Peek, "The Sounds of Silence: Cross-world communication and the auditory arts in African societies," American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 474-494. There is a large literature base proving indigenous cultures' use and understanding of sophisticated spiritual-philosophical concepts: Frances Densmore, Chippewa Customs (St. Paul, MN: MHS Press, 1929, reprint edition, 1979); Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins. (MHS Press, January 1910); Charles Boiles, Man, Magic and Musical Occasions (Montreal, Quebec, Canada: University of Montreal Press, 1978); Marina Roseman, Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest : Temiar Music and Medicine. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care, Vol 28. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); William K. Powers, Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). Tom Brown Jr., Awakening Spirits (NY: Berkley Publishing, 1994); Alan Ereira, The Heart of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).
|
Contents || Preface || Introduction || Sound-Current Nondualism || Bibliography
Part 2
One of the main arguments that Wilber uses to inadvertently promote the inaccurate linear knowledge system over indigenous sustainable models is the concept of depth via holons-it is holons (or whole/parts grounded in nothingness, just as music models) that fill the Pythagorean Kosmos. "The greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness," and Wilber incorrectly claims that "tribal awareness" is "indissociated" and therefore shallow.282 In correction of Wilber, sound-current nondualism models "depth" but in a more direct manner and formalizes how the dominant post-Pythagorean modern worldview is not as sophisticated or accurate as the majority of human cultures (i.e. sustainable indigenous cultures) that its corporate-state policies are destroying.283 In the application of the law of Pythagoras and its transcendent principles (of harmony and growth) music analyst Berendt notes that "Each spin [of all particles] contains all prior whole-number spins.... This is the process of differentiation and development...the higher the spin, the higher the state of consciousness."284 Thus the multidimensional spiro-vortex of consciousness expresses the same concept of Wilber's depth. Instead of Wilber's repressed implicit promotion of the linear knowledge system, sound-current nondualism successfully models a combination of the hierarchy (vertical) and heterarchy (horizontal) perspectives that have riddled radical ecology theorists.285 But demonstrating this concept through music theory has another profound implication, as Berendt quotes musicologist Gerhard Nestler:
One-line music with an indefinite pitch and with its wide range of intermediate tones and overtones has a wider base of expression than polyphonic music with its definite pitch and its interval structure, than Conventional Western music, that is. In the final analysis, such music is unhearable. What we hear is its symbol. The symbol is the tones that man chooses from the wealth of tones provided by the universe. Such music grows out of the polar tensions between the audible and the inaudible.286Nestler's point further explains the limitation of the original spiritually repressed western symbols of the first order of information. The reified linear logic of repressed ratios of the scale lead to the loss of the multidimensional analysis modeled by the open-systems music typically found in indigenous cultures. Modal music, according to Berendt, has a "certain mental, spiritual attitude" because it is consciously reflecting the deep values of those sustainable cultures.287 As Berendt documents, "Many of the world's cultures have passed down sagas and myths, legends and tales in which the world has its origin in sound, from the Aztecs to the Eskimos, from the Persians to the Indians and the Malayans."288 Complexity and chaos theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have argued, similarly to Pibram and Schimdt, that language itself is a development of rhythmic vibrations of energy. Capra reports that they come to the same cultural implications as Pribram, Frazer and others:
...due to resonance phenomenon...cognitive experiential states are created by the synchronization of fast oscillations in the gamma and beta range that tend to arise and subside quickly.... Varela's hypothesis establishes a neurological basis for the distinction between conscious and unconscious cognition.... Since language results in a very sophisticated and effective coordination of behavior, the evolution of language allowed the early human beings to greatly increase their cooperative activities and to develop families, communities, and tribes that gave them tremendous evolutionary advantages.The argument presented by the radical ecology open systems theorists is backed by the historical analysis of Kingsley who also further confirms that Plato and Aristotle specifically instituted denigration of a more complex Pythagorean language of meaning. As Kingsley puts it, "By the time of Plato and Aristotle, the doors of understanding were closed.... Argument [became] more important than appreciation, reinterpretation, an easy substitute for understanding.... [The devolution] destroyed the mythical dialectic." The Pythagoreans orally conveyed a language and lifestyle built on "see-saw oscillations and balancing forces" that created an accurate and sophisticated system of meaning which integrates and explains in detail eschatology, cosmology, geology, mathematics and energy systems practice. 290 Included in this system was the "incantatory use of poetry for harmonizing emotions." Kingsley documents that the Pythagoreans were the source for Plato's Phaedo, Gorgias and Orphic allegories-even the accurate heliocentric system of astronomy. Plato was "indebted to the Pythagorean oral tradition" and Plato "himself was only too aware of the limitation of the written text as a medium of genuine communication."291 The degeneration of complexity is well established, as is its intentionality:
...since the publication of Cherniss's work on Aristotle and the Presocratics in 1935 there has been a deeper awareness not only of the fact that Aristotle and his school were frequently capable of misunderstanding the Presocratics at a very fundamental level, but also of the fact that he and his followers systematically used deliberate misunderstanding and 'shameless' misrepresentation as a way of silencing their predecessors.292The formal reversal of the secret transcendental multidimensional music analysis and its mirrored inaccurate closed symbolic circle variant and linear written system can be traced historically:
We have already seen evidence of the role played by Archytas' school in reinterpreting - often quite radically - Pythagorean mythological ideas which were current in the generation of Philolaus...; It is quite possible that the idea of the centre of a circle, or sphere, as its most 'honourable' place [in the reinterpretation] is related to Archytas' exaltation of the geometric properties of the circle and sphere.293Music theorist Jamie James points out that not only, as is well known, did Plato have a disdain for music and its uncontrollable social power, but he was hostile "towards mousike (which it ought to be born in mind, meant any human activity governed by the Muses)." James cites researcher Cornford, who remarks how in Timaeus Plato defines the concept of the World Soul by the Pythagorean ratios but he stops at the end of the fifth octave overtone, where the overshooting comma of Pythagoras occurs. According to Cornford Plato's choice of the Pythagorean Limited over the Unlimited (the prime dialectic of Pythagoras) was a reflection of Plato's perception of a closed system reality.294 This example further demonstrates the direct connection between the reified repressed ratios of music and the repressed logos and language of the western knowledge system. As Jeans states, in contrast to Plato, "[Pythagoras] did not think of his series of notes as forming a closed circle."295 The Greek modes that previously have been an expression of open system divine harmonics became, under Plato and Aristotle, a closed system used for social control. Plato himself only allowed two of the twelve original modal systems. Aristotle recommended some music education but no music professionals while the European elite similarly outlawed the other modes.296 After the Aristotelian holy Roman empire attacked the multidimensional music-ritual based cultures of what became Europe, the troubadour songs of a spiritual "erotic asceticism" or "mystic love" were largely the inspiration for, and were the first targets of, the Crusades.297 The Cathars (from the Greek word katharos or pure) were wiped out and their subversive multidimensional sound-current mass movement was co-opted by the western elite as the cult of Mary, later being commercialized as romantic love.298 In the transitional development of capitalism, dialectically furthered by the Reformation, a movement of Pietism or an ecstatic mystic upsurge, swept through Germany, based on the fluid energy of the newly affordable claviers.299 Unlike the previous harpsichord, the clavier allowed the crucial loud and soft dynamics fitting for transcendental rituals of meaning. The Burghers, to assimilate this cultural threat to elite materialistic control, channeled the subversive power into the more expensive piano enforcing mass produced demand for the protestant capitalist values of repressed delayed gratification. The focused energy of the piano, with its eight thousand, eight hundred intricate parts became not only a reified symbol of bourgeois individualism but, the epitome of the religion of technology.300 The player pianos were a direct model for reducing labor's traditional control over technology and in creating what David F. Noble calls today's postmodern late-capitalist "automation madness."301 As Noble states the writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. while a publicist for General Electric and immersed in the military-industrial complex, "wrote one of his earliest and most powerful novels. Appropriately entitled Player Piano, the novel issued an early warning to the world about the social and human dangers inherent in the untempered impulse to automate."302 Vonnegut's Player Piano in discussion of the structural crisis states that "yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."303 With the threat of African-American forced migration from automation madness, the subversive blues and jazz subculture became, as with the Cathars and Pietism, similarly assimilated as a new unifying force for the U.S. global corporate-state hegemony.304 The powerful electrified music of the 1960's global upheaval also became under the mass commodification of the Beatles, a means of channeling subversion into capitalist means.305 Music though, as Attali and others have demonstrated, will continue to be a dominant channel of mass movement resistance to the inaccurate linear western knowledge system.306 True to the sound-current dialectical process or the Tao, the influence of Pythagorean principles has been so profound for western culture that it is the exact original spiritual source for the western elite degeneration to linear materialism that goes back to Aristotle.307 Hermeneutic theory of the West, noted by Bordwell, has been traced back to Pythagoras.308 Pythagoreans were also highly adept at creating sophisticated technologies.309 Furthermore Kingsley writes "Dieterich devoted a book to showing the extent to which the Christian Apocalyspse-found only in fragmentary form at Akmin in Upper Egypt and in a version in Ethiopic-is dependent on Orphic and Pythagorean traditions."310 Paralleling the self-fulfilling elite enactment of the apocalypse described by Noble, for the Pythagoreans,
it is not difficult to detect an underlying schema of descent into the underworld as prelude to a celestial ascent. This apparent illogic is the logic of myth. One dies to be reborn; one descends into the depths in order to ascend....This fundamental idea was so strong that it managed to survive intact in spite of the cruder Christian dramatizations of hell-fire, suffering, and punishment,....311The crucial difference between the Pythagoreans and the later western elite is the following: For the Pythagoreans finding the divine is not dependant on a linear materialistic restoration of the Fall of Adam through a misguided, closed denial of the self and a projected repressive power over the Other (nature, gender, non-whites, the poor).312 The Pythagoreans, believing in God as immanent in nature, were focused on preserving and utilizing nature in its multidimensional harmony of the infinite void. The mathematikoi were the highest level initiates of Pythagorean doctrine and held all property in common. Pythagoras taught reincarnation and that the ultimate level of knowledge was to experience all life as one and to be immortal.313 Gabriela Roxana Carone in a recent article called "Plato and the Environment" takes issue with the growth of analysis that traces the unique and extreme environmental injustice of the West to the philosophy of Plato. She certainly proves that not only was Plato concerned about the destruction nature, and believed in the souls of animals but that these values were based on a cosmology of a living universe.314 But again the fundamental difference is the foundation of dualism that Plato promoted as a means of control. As Mary Midgely importantly points out, according to Plato, the "soul cannot be properly understood till it has obeyed 'the impulse that would disencumber it of all that wild profusion of rock and shell, whose earthy substance has encrusted her....'"315 J. Donald Hughes has traced Pythagorean culture to hunter-gatherer societies and Peter Kingsley in his latest work In the Dark Places of Wisdom documents that Pythagoreans were in touch with nondualist cultures from India and Africa.316 Anthropologist Tim Ingold aptly describes the difference in thinking that, from his comparative analysis, he argues is universal to hunter-gatherer cultures:
To speak of the forest as a parent is not, then, to model object relations in terms of primary intersubjectivity, but to recognize that at root, the constitutive quality of intimate relations with non-human and human components of the environment is one and the same.... Life is a total field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the particular forms that they do.317As with the power of Pythagoreanism, Taoist qi gong has also been recognized and misappropriated by the elite-for instance when Dr. Yan Xin first visited the U.S. President George Bush requested that master Xin visit the White House eight separate times! Similarly the military elite of Burma, home of the world's worst regime, regularly look to the local spiritual masters as a hopes of maintaining power.318 The symbolic dialectics of Pythagoreans and the subsequent dialectics of Hegel are also directly connected to the dialectics of Taoist qi gong.319 Kingsley notes, "In terms not only of formal and structural analogies but also of historical contacts, there can be no separating the Thracian Orpheus [of Pythagorean equivalence] from central-Asiatic shamanic tradition." This connection with Taoism is also made explicit by the motif of the Pythagorean master Empedocles who, "dies a miraculous death by vanishing into thin air but who leaves a tell-tale item.... A more classic Taoist concept is that of achieving the divine state either by fashioning a spirit-body...thoughtfully leaving a pile of discarded garments...."320 According to qi gong master Dr. Yan Xin, qi gong is actually older than Taoism and the global qi gong upheaval will, according to Dr. Yan Xin, achieve a new scientific and moral revolution-or sound-current nondualism.321 As Kingsley points out, "On these principles...the notion of sympathies and antipathies [the law of Pythagoras] in Greek magic and alchemy and the analogies to both in China, see Needham [Science and Civilization in China]."322 Because of the deep western roots of the inaccurate materialistic knowledge system, as Berendt and Zizek have pointed out, the Hegelian dialectical process, just as with true music theory and Taoist qi gong, has been misinterpreted by the West as a goal of the closed Absolute Subject. Similarly the dialectical theory of radical ecology systems theory where the limits of rationalism are marked by "wildness" (akin to Kant's antinomies) have also been misinterpreted, by Zizek, and by Keulartz's "cosmic nature characterized by perfect harmony."323 Systems theorist Gregory Bateson gives an example of this "wildness" in action:
To see myself as part of a system which includes me and the chaparral frames a reason for my action-to preserve the ongoing cycling of us (me and the chaparral) by actively burning the chaparral. I think synchronic action-framed like that-is Taoist-it's a sort of passivity. There is no diachronic action in the Eternal Present. But to rush to preserve the human species against a galactic threat or to get ready for a biblical apocalypse, that would be diachronic.324Unfortunately, as Morris Berman and David F. Noble have documented, precisely because of the psycho-spiritual western repression under a reified linear closed symbolic system when the undercurrent of nondualism is tapped it is assimilated by the dominant reactionary forces.325 Corporate-state fascism has already promoted the guise of being nature-loving under the label of Nazism. Now eco-fascism, a term Berman uses, is considered to be the threat of a genetically-engineered micro-chipped social cleansing lead by the religion of technology-derived, "world saving" "life sciences" of Cargill, Monsanto and their interlocking elite associates.326 Systems theory, ever since it was co-opted by the Rand Corporation for the promotion of military jingoism and the corporate-state, has been applied in an inaccurate, deterministic and thus immoral manner.327 Unlike the unified authoritarian structure of the corporate-state, radical ecology, based in sound-current nondualism, does not call for an all-encompassing hegemonic plan but only basic principles ( the most important of which is that all energy derives from the absolute void that connects us. We are forced to literally accept nothing and its infinitely cycling potential. Or as Kelartz states, "Power is in the hands of the people, to be sure but it 'belongs' to no one; it retains its transcendent position in a sense, but this position is necessarily vacant."328 Sound-current nondualism and its resultant infinitely complex universal chaotic steady-state, uniquely emphasizes this fundamental priority, thus counteracting the social Darwinism of other so-called "holistic" models based in positivism-affirming Keulartz's critique of Murray Bookchin's social ecology. Bookchin has also been discredited by radical ecology itself ( demonstrated by David Watson in his Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a future social ecology.329 To further correct Keulartz's otherwise insightful criticisms, unlike Foucault's concept of bio-power that arose during the Victorian age, death is not disavowed in radical ecology, as Bateson's above open systems dialectical and cycling "burning" example shows. Also, unlike Keulartz' description of repressive bio-power, the institutions of society are considered creations of people's sovereignty and inalienable rights in radical ecology, as expressed by the movement's consistent call for the legal right to revoke corporate charters.330 Master Mantak Chia points out that people, as the most complex receptors of universal energy, play a special role in manifesting universal harmony (structurally our heart-brain is the direct recipient of refined energy whereas for most animals their tail channels the energy to the body first).331 Crucially important is the rarely noted insight that the concept of sovereignty was originally derived from Pythagorean music analysis but was corrupted by Plato as Socrate's oppressive "seemingly impenetrable 'sovereign' political number."332 Keulartz's dismissal of open systems anarchism is equally misplaced since, arising out of classical liberalism, the concept of sovereignty is a central principle. Radical democracy is based on true open systems dialectical change: Each level of organization has a representative that passes on the effects or the difference of the group decision made at the previous level ( whether it is an anarchist federation or the Iroquois federation ( as Marx realized in his last unpublished and totally unrecognized essay that questions repressed Civilization itself.333 Noam Chomsky, the most-well known proponent of anarchism, bases his theory in the arguments of freedom found in classical liberalism. Anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan has, like some other grassroots activists working for social justice, incorrectly critiqued Chomsky, mainly labeling him as a statist or a pro-technology industrialist. The expositions on anarchism that are classic anti-statist documents and, according to Chomsky, the best theoretical overviews of anarchism to date are, for the most part, unknown even by those who claim to be anarchists! Most theorists looking to climb the intellectual ladder are too quick to want to dethrone Chomsky, assuming the details in his prolific writings are not worth the time.334 As far as Chomsky being a pro-technology industrialist, on the contrary, he was one of the first main New Left theorists to support a questioning of this issue. He states, "Students are also reacting against the values of industrial society.... In fact, there may be very serious questioning, in coming years, of the basic assumption of modern society that development of technology is inherently a desirable, inevitable process."335 Although one would think Chomsky would be hesitant to support sound-current nondualism since he frequently cites his strong roots in the Enlightenment. But I have shown that there is nothing irrational about the knowledge system. Chomsky, as I mentioned, was largely influenced by the spiritual scholar Martin Buber. Chomsky refers more than once to Wilhelm von Humboldt's promotion of "the spiritual life." Chomsky commonly states that there will need to be a change of consciousness for justice to be achieved. The passage of Rousseau that Chomsky refers to regularly for his example of freedom emphasizes an "against civilization" perspective: "... when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence,..."336 Even though Chomsky's political analysis is understandably marginalized by the corporate-state structural crisis that he exposes, a recent review in Business Week made the following remarks: "With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us ( and to discern what they are leaving out.... If there is anything new about our age, it is that the questions Chomsky raises will eventually have to be answered. Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." 337 In continued response to Keulartz, I cite ecofeminist Dr. Vandana Shiva who further clarifies the connections between systems theory, sovereignty and radical ecology:
One of the rights is local sovereignty. Local resources have to be managed on the principle of local sovereignty, wherein the natural resources of the village belong to that village....Self-healing and repair is another characteristic of living systems that derives from complexity and self-organization...External control reduces the degrees of freedom a system has, thereby reducing its capacity to organize and renew itself...A system is autopoietic when its function is primarily geared toward self-renewal. An autopoietic system refers to itself [sovereignty].In fact, Keulartz's promotion of Hannah Arendt's theory on inter-subjective power, mirrors the similarity between Keulartz's fear of "submission to a higher force" and the role of resonance in music theory. As he describes, "Power appears as soon as and as long as people act and speak together. Unlike violence, power can never be appropriated and in fact is increased by sharing. [the principle of resonance]"339 The concept of submission draining energy is emphasized by Mantak Chia and both Taoist qi gong and music theory are premised on the indigenous concept of natural law or reciprocity, as the proportional law of Pythagoras formalizes. Keulartz goes on to refer to Habermas' assertion that "The more language succeeds in freeing itself from sacral bonds...the better able we are to arrive at a shared understanding by ourselves."340 It is precisely this affirmation, via sound-current nondualism, of the reified roots of linear language and the materialistic modern worldview that enables a psychological cure to the repressed "sacral bonds." Keulartz's final point is that postmodern chaos theory evolutionary ecology has eclipsed systems ecology. But evolutionary ecology is based on the same teleological "systems theory" foundation that he dismisses, namely the principle, easily modeled by sound-current nondualism, of absolute void negentropy or self-organization (order out of chaos).341 The comma of Pythagoras is precisely the evolutionary threshold overshoot that explains rapid transformation by punctuated equilibrium, the crucial concept behind evolutionary ecology. The principle of self-organization reflects the Pythagorean natural law from which radical ecology is derived from but it is not the same problematic "natural law" to which Keulartz refers to: Kingsley documents that natural law is not accurately described by Keulartz' referenced "divine logos" of the Stoics.342 Also to correct Keulartz there is a fundamental qualitative difference between dissipative structures of chaos and complexity occurring through natural evolution and the planet's fastest mass extinction that has been enacted by corporate-state mega-cide.343 "Democracy" has recently become a slogan344 for the thousands of radical grassroots civil society organizations around the planet challenging the global corporate-state elite institutions and their genocidal actions. Gad Horowitz in an essay called "Groundless Democracy" well describes the application of sound-current nondualism in order to understand democracy. Horowitz builds from the positively received theoretical analysis of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy. Addressing the problem of democracy simply becoming a new Orwellian slogan for top-down repression, radical democracy becomes dialectically grounded in "groundlessness" and the constant creativity of self-critique and even "the questioning of questioning itself" (the absolute void). This foundational process creates a "radically pluralist," "common-sensical balance" in reality (the harmonic nodes) but the "conflict is eternal." (the waves).345 Even though the work of Laclau and Mouffe has been highly regarded (see Zizek for example) Horowitz points out that it has been criticized because the groundlessness or "negativity" of the absolute void still relies on the discourse of positivity, on ideological language ("the common-sensical balance"). As other scholars have pointed out, while radical democracy makes significant steps it still fails by "opposition equivalence," but Horowitz, by turning to Asian philosophy and giving an indepth description of nondualism, provides the correct recourse: The body of nature has its own coherence, not prior to or apart from discourse, and not simply as physiochemical process, but as a field of lived meanings that are not derived solely from linguistic forms [sound-current nondualism]: Various discourses can draw the line between flowers and weeds in many different places; this drawing of the line in itself is empty [the nodes]; nevertheless as empty [the absolute void], it is drawn in all discourses [the waves of universal energy]. Moreover, it can be said to be drawn correctly by some and incorrectly by others. [the multidimensional harmonic waves emanating from the absolute void] The tomato has been mistakenly classified as a poisonous berry. (emphasis in original)346 With this overview of the relationship to the lost logos, multidimensional rhythmic patterns of energy are an accurate premise for the matrix of grand theorist Deleuze's "life-forces" mentioned in the promotion of his "eco-philosophy" by Rosi Braidotti in the recent Sustainability and the Social Sciences.347 I agree with Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader's recommendation (and give it an added meaning)( let us all be resonating nodes or "epicenters of justice."348
Pythagoreans very much represented a vast integrated and extremely influential culture that was cooperative, multidimensional and reflected a love of wisdom (the origin of philosophy), ecology, and compassion. Pythagoreans practiced a culture of equality of sexes, integrity of justice, sophisticated herbology and vegetarianism.349 Pythagoras focused on social change and creating a cosmopolitan ecological society of transcendence founded in the absolute void-for this activism his center of learning was burned down by the materialist, repressive Greek elite but his teachings of universal Truth live on. The famous mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, gave the following unusual comment about Pythagorean thought:
Truly, Pythagoras in founding European philosophy and European mathematics, endowed them with the luckiest of lucky guesses (number in relation to the periodicities of music and atoms) ( or was it a flash of divine genius, penetrating to the inmost nature of things?"350Building from the organism approach of Whitehead's process theory and Bateson's system theory, like Morris Berman, C.A. Bowers, in The Culture of Denial, bases a radical ecological model of learning and sustainability from the Pythagorean-inspired open social systems theory. Those ideas are also conveyed by radical ecologist, Pythagorean and Taoist-based theorist Fritoj Capra who makes the following appeal:
We need to think systemically, shifting our conceptual focus from objects to relationships. Only then can we realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence.... This reconnecting, religio in Latin, is the very essence of the spiritual grounding of deep ecology.... A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, where as our industrial systems are linear... The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production [as well as intrinsic value] are not part of current economic models.351 Through easily accessible music theory, along with my contributions to social criticism and philosophy, I have asserted that it is necessary for those striving for ecological justice to understand the fundamental principles of multidimensional reality modeled by sound-current nondualism. Through those principles I have also shown how western consciousness is formally inaccurate and I have shown how that consciousness can be transformed at its roots. I have demonstrated the direct connection between the formal origins of western materialistic consciousness and the creation of inaccurate linear logic, science, technology and, oppressive legal concepts of sovereignty manifested in the corporate-state. I contend that unless the energy or power roots of open systems radical ecology are fully processed and unless the eternal multidimensional harmonic consciousness is restored, then the roots of formal inaccuracy will remain and the future will be a deepening of suffering on the planet.
280 Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, p. 38. 281 Ibid., pp. 41-42. 282 Ibid., pp. 57, 167. 283 See Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations (Boston: South End Press, 1993). Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997); Joel Jay Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization: The limits to economic growth and the repoliticization of advanced industrial society (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990). 284 Berendt, The World is Sound, p. 126. 285 For another example of extended attention given to this heterarchy/hierarchy dichotomy proven false by sound-current dualism see Christopher Mane's essay in Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 286 Berendt, The World is Sound, p. 154 from Gerhard Nestler: Die Form in der Musik (Freiburg and Zurich: Atlants Verlag, 1954). 287 Today's "tonal" music (i.e. major and minor scales) was originally derived from the Lydian and Aeolian Greek modes, as will be further discussed. Jeans, Science and Music, p. 168. 288 Berendt, The World Is Sound, p. 174. See also H.G. Nicklaus, "The Philosophy and Mythology of Sound-Based Creation," (Ph.D. Dissertation, Technische Universtaet Wien [Austria], 1992); Herbert Whone, "Music, the Way of Return: Sound and music as the root of our existence," Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning V (1980): 6-14; Ernest McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The origin of the gods, mathematics and music from Rg Veda to Plato (NY: Samuel Weiser, June 1985); Frank Denyer, "The Rainbow Bridge: A perception of the images and myths of musical creation," (Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University, 1977). 289 Capra, The Web of Life, pp. 292-294. See also Humberto R Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1998). 290 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, p. 203, p. 198, p. 256. The same Pythagorean proportional principles of basic universal Truth are communicated through myth, math, cosmology and architecture worldwide as documented by the following works: Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. M.I.T. professor Giorgio de Santiallana, with Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit Inc., 1969). Thomas Worthen, The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods and Order in the Universe (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). Michael Hayes, The Infinite Harmony. 291 Ibid., pp. 108, 110. Scholar Antonio T. de Nicolas also describes the Pythagorean musical foundation for Plato: "The model of musical operations performed in Books Eight, Nine and Ten of the Republic, through the marriage myth, the myth of the Tyrant, the myth of Er, and equally in the circulation of souls in the Phaedrus, the myth of archaic times in the Statesman, or the World-Soul in the Timaeus, is the internal circulation of selection itself in the total narrative of foundation according to which selectivity may be applied. The mythical grounds the philosophical;..." Antonio T. de Nicolas, "The First Metaphysics: Revisioning Plato," in Robert C. Neville, ed., New Essays in Metaphysics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 173. 292 Ibid., p. 3. 293 Ibid., p. 203. The closed circle versus the multidimensional open spiral. 294 James, Harmony of the Spheres, pp. 46-47, citing E.M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (London: Routledge, K. Paul, 1937). 295 Jeans, Science and Music, p. 66. 296 Ibid., p. 170. See also John A. Kimmey, A Critique of Musicology (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1988), p. 227 citing Plato's Book X of The Republic and The Politics of Aristotle. 297 Prudence Jones, Nigel Pennick, Contributor, A History of Pagan Europe (London: Routledge, 1997); Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. (New York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 186-188. 298 Berman, Coming to Our Senses, p. 191, pp. 208-213. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastasis of Enjoyment: Six essays on woman and causality (NY: Verso, 1994), pp. 95-105. 299 As the sociologist Max Weber originally pointed out and has been followed up by Jameson and Zizek, by further expanding the religion of technology, protestants obtained a linearly induced asceticism in the economic sphere thus creating the ground for capitalism. See Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 182. 300 On Pietism and the role of the piano, see Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 18-20, 50, 58. Under the new industrialism a "piano fever" spread until the speculative market crash when the corporate public relation elite actually purposely destroyed pianos on a large scale and encouraged the public to do the same. In the dialectical reversal of bourgeois individualism, Wagner, a major inspiration for fascism, literally hated pianos. Dieter Hildebrandt, trans. Harriet Goodman, Pianoforte: A social history of the piano (New York: G. Braziller, 1988). Arnold Perris, Music As Propaganda: Art to persuade, art to control (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). 301 David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (NY: Knopf, 1984), pp. 148-150. 302 Ibid, pp. 166 and 359-360. 303 David F. Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co, 1993), p. 59. 304 Rob Backus, Fire Music: A political history of jazz (Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1978). 305 Mark David Chapman who assassinated John Lennon claimed he did it to keep Lennon from becoming "fake" in the sense described by underground fiction writer J.D. Salinger. While Paul McCartney, although physically alive, was already dead (i.e. sold out). Jack Jones, Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon (NY: Warner Books, 1994). See also former CIA agent Fenton Bresler's Who Killed John Lennon? 306 See Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992). Ron Sakolsky and Fred Wei-ahn Ho, Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution (NY: Autonomedia, 1995), Give Peace a Chance: Music and the struggle for peace (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1983); David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984); Bob Marley brought together the warring political factions of Jamaica during his "One Love" peace concert and when the globally famous Marley passed on, the government of China sent a wreath to his funeral. Jon Lurie, "The King of the Third World: Bob Marley Remembered," Pulse, 2-2-2000. 307 So as to maintain the fantasy, for structural-psycho-ideological reasons, the kernal of Pythagoras has been marginalized and dismissed (see analysis of Zizek for explanatory parallels). Or as Peter Gorman states, "no other ancient person was so often mentioned by posterity; yet some scholars have the temerity to state that we know nothing certain about Pythagoras...eyewitnesses testify to the twin features...his love of learning and his miraculous powers." Peter Gorman, Pythagoras: A Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 4. 308 M.J. Edwards, "Precursors of Origen's hermeneutic theory," Studia Patristica 29 (Louvain: Peeters, 1997): 232-237. 309 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, p. 146. Even John Scotus Erigena, the source for the religion of technology, wrote a treatise entitled, "On the Harmony of the Celestial Motions and the Sounds of the Stars." Joscelyn Godwin, ed., The Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition, pp. 104-108. Morris Berman has documented the dialectical relation of linear theory of the esoteric schools (Masons, Rosicrucians, etc.) being inspired, like Plato, by the nondualistic Pythagorean roots, just as propaganda is based on half-truths. See The Occult Conspiracy by Michael Howard (New York: MJF Books, 1997, 1989). I found Howard's book to be not only the most informative overview but also the analysis with the greatest nuance. Wertheim's Pythagoras' Trousers flips these half-truths around arguing that Pythagorean is the origin of our modern unbalanced crisis, when, although she identifies the right problems, in fact the cause was, as has been shown, the degradation and repression of Pythagorean culture. John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor in Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion give an important description of the history that Berman analyzes in detail: "The ancient Pythagorean correlation of musical tunes with the lengths and tensions of strings meant that for Newton, as for Kepler, references to the harmony of creation were not merely metaphorical. Enthralled by the problem of dividing the octave, Newton appears to have relished a correlation between the seven tones of the scale, the seven colours of his spectrum, and the seven planets of the solar system. Newton also believed that the elegance of his inverse-square law of gravitation had been known to Pythagoras for whom the pursuit of cosmic harmony had been a means of spiritual purification." John Brook and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstruction Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Edinburgh, T. T. Clark, 1998), p. 220, citing J.E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the Pipes of Pan," Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21 (1966): 108-43 and P. Gouk, "The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science," in J. Fauvel, R. Flood, M. Shortland, and R. Wilson, eds., Let Newton Be! (Oxford, 1988). 310 Ibid., p. 119. For connections between Pythagorean music analysis and early Christian symbolism see David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient cosmology and early Christian symbolism (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993). 311 Ibid., p. 252. 312 Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract builds off The Sexual Contract to trace the oppressive dualistic epistemology of racism back to Aristotle. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For the savage-"saved" dichotomy and other linear religious intersectionalities to the western "Great Chain of Being" see also Paula S. Rothenberg, ed., Race, class, and Gender in the United States: An integrated study (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). Radical ecological politics has formally connected to this intersectionality through eco-feminism, environmental racism and the "blue-green" or "green collar" alliances. 313 Spiers, Pythagoras-Guru and Absolutist, p. 240. Also see the Introduction to The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library. For a focused study of Pythagorean reincarnation see Herbert Strainge Long, "A Study of the Doctrine of Metempsychosis in Greece: From Pythagoras to Plato," (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1948). 314 Gabriela Roxana Carone, "Plato and the Environment," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 115-134. 315 Mary Midgley, Science As Salvation: A modern myth and its meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 93, citing Plato, Republic, Book X, 611-12. 316 J. Donald Hughes, "The Environmental Ethics of the Pythagoreans," Environmental Ethics 3 (1980): 195-213; Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Shaftesbury, UK: Element, 1999) 317 Tim Ingold, "Hunting, Gathering and the Environment," in Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui, Redefining Nature: Ecology, culture and domestication (Oxford: Berg, 1996), pp. 117-156. 318 Personal communication, Aung Koe, co-director of The Minnesota Free Burma Coalition, March, 2000. 319 For further insights see, "A Postmodern Tao," Antipode, 1995, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 312-16. 320 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, p. 236. 321 Qi gong Master Chunyi Lin's motto is "a healer in every family and a world without pain." 322 Ibid., p. 298. See also Xiushan Ye, "Pythagoras school and Greek science spirit," She hui ko hsueh chan hsien 62 (1993): 106. Frank Swetz, T.I. Kao, Was Pythagoras Chinese?: An examination of right triangle theory in ancient China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977). 323 Keulartz, The Struggle for Nature, p. 110. 324 Bateson, Angels Fear, p. 108. For a sophisticated analysis of "wildness" see Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 325 For this well-researched important history see Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World. (New York: Bantam, 1989) and Coming to Our Senses. 326 For the misguided religion of technology motivations and dangerously corrupt actions of Monsanto and Cargill see Brewster Kneen, Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology. (New York: New Society Publishers, 1999); Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (NY: Viking Press, 1979). 327 See Morris Berman, "The Shadow Side of Systems Theory," Journal of Humanistic Psychology 36 (Winter '96): 28-54. Capra discusses this history of systems theory in The Web of Life. On cybernetics used to promoted genocidal social Darwinism see Jeremy Rifkin, in collaboration with Nicanor Perlas, Algeny (NY: Penguin Books, 1984). Zizek makes the same argument ( a section called "Cyberspace, or The Unbearable Closure of Being" in The Plague of Fantasies. Peter Drucker is considered a leading proponent of this deterministic inaccurate use of systems theory. E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. (New York: Knopf, 1998) is regarded as the same co-optation. 328 Keulartz, The Struggle for Nature, p. 140. 329 Bookchin's work as been improved upon by his followers, see Chaia Heller, Ecology of everyday life: Rethinking the desire for nature (Montreal: Black Rose, 1999). It should also be pointed out that Bookchin, like Wilber, does draw from Pythagorean tradition with such references being equated with Taoism by others. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, citing John Clark, "On Taoism and Politics," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 10 (1983): 65-67. 330 As it stands legally corporations have usurped citizen sovereignty since corporations were given legal person-hood in 1886. Corporations have used that status to hijack constitutional rights ( rights created to protect the sovereignty of citizens, not state-chartered economic institutions. Campaign finance reform and, any other significant reforms have been legally nullified by corporations currently claiming the legal right of free speech, due process, etc. Regulatory bodies are just a reflection, a historical symptom of the creation of corporate sovereignty. For insight into the movement to legally reassert citizen sovereignty see the Program on Law, Corporations, and Democracy at www.poclad.org. 331 Chia, Awaken Healing, p. 24. For further connections between open systems theory and Taoism see ZT Wang, "Meta-decision making: concepts and paradigm," Systemic Practice and Action Research 13 (Feb. 2000): 111-115. Also H. Sabelli, "The union of opposites: From Taoism to process theory," Systems Research and Behavioral Science 15 (Sept-Oct 1998): 411-429. 332 Ernest McClain, The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 1978), p. 3. Plato's computation of the role of the sovereign is equated to the repressed circle of fifths Just Tuning versus the true multidimensional sovereignty of Pythagoras. 333 See Marx's Ethnological Notebooks as exposed by Franklin Rosement, Karl Marx and the Iroquois (Mitch Cohen c/o Red Balloon Collective, 2652 Cropsey Ave., #7H, Brooklyn, NY 11214). Cohen is a promoter of "Zen Marxism." 334 For the two most lucid explanations of anarchism see Rudolf Rocker, preface by Noam Chomsky, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989) and Daniel Guérin, introduction by Noam Chomsky, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1970). For current proposals see the GEO (Grassroots Economic Organizing) Newsletter at http://www.geonewsletter.org/ 335 Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York, Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 310. 336 Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. 298. On Rousseau quote, Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics (NY: Verso, 1995), p. 161. 337 Patrick Smith, "The New World Disorder," Business Week, April 17, 2000. For the connection between Taoism and anarchism see Chris Kortright, "The Tao and biocentric anarchism," Earth First! Journal 17 (Feb. 1997), p. 9 and John Clark, "The Tao of anarchy," The Fifth Estate 33 (Summer 1998). 338 Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 31-33, 111. For further connections between sovereignty and spirituality see Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (NY: Vintage, 1969). Lynd traces the "inner-light" of the Quakers to a continuous past and future time line of progressive social justice revolutionaries. 339 This phenomenon of sharing literally creating resonance or social harmony arising from the void has been proven scientifically to exist cross-culturally by Paul Byers of Columbia University as well as Boston scientist William Condon. Berendt, The World Is Sound, p. 116. 340 Keulartz, The Struggle for Nature, pp. 41, 107-108. 341 The new general text for the chaotic "new ecology" is Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A new ecology for the twenty-first century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 342 For documentation on the Stoics consciously distorting the principles of Pythagoreans see Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, pp. 14, 15, 17-18, 26n., 32n., 34, 36, 41n., 47, 124. 343 Dissipative structures are explained by the resonance Pythagorean principles. Corporate-state policies have instituted a faster rate of extinction, by several orders of magnitude, than any time in planetary history. see Earth Island Journal at http://www.earthisland.org/ and Rainforest Action Network at http://www.ran.org/. For a scientific overview of the extinction crisis from conservation biologists see Reed F. Noss and Allen Y. Cooperrider, Saving Nature's Legacy: Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (D.C.: Island Press, 1994). 344 Personal communication with grassroots coordinator of Rainforest Action Network, July 10, 2000. 345 Gad Horowitz, "Groundless Democracy," in Phillippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds., Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 157, citing Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe; translated by Winston Moore and Paul Cammack, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics (London: Verso, 1985). 346 Ibid, p. 161. 347 Rosi Braidotti, "Towards Sustainable Subjectivity: A View from Feminist Philosophy," in Egon Becker and Thomas Jahn, eds., Sustainability and the Social Sciences, p. 86. 348 Inversely, McClain documents that Plato promoted a symbolically linear musical theory model of social means (the 4th, 5th, and tritone equaled the arithmetic, harmonic, and geometric means) ( a system of deciding social outcomes). It excluded the transcendental golden mean and literally used the repressed unequal comma as justification for his aristocratic anti-democratic materialistic repressed unequal social system. "Music's Discipline of the Means: An Interview with Ernest McClain." Parabola 16 (Winter, 1991): 88-89. See also Ernest McClain, The Pythagorean Plato. 349 Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, p. 162 (equality of sexes), pp. 223, 299, 342 (herbology). See also Laura Westra and Thomas M. Robinson, eds., The Greeks and the Environment (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997); "His [Pythagoras'] Theory of Justice and Political Philosophy," in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, p. 99. 350 Cited by Spiers, Pythagoras-Guru and Absolutist, p. 248. 351 Capra, The Web of Life, pp. 296, 299, 300. For the best overview of how to address this clash see Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (NY: Little Brown and Co., 1999). For an overview of sustainable projects see Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Boston: South End Press, 1999). C.A. Bowers, The Culture of Denial: Why the Environmental Movement Needs a Strategy for Reforming Universities and Public Schools. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). 38
|
previously, I linked to a really great thread on ATS The Devil's Chord: The conspiracy to open the portal of consciousness and mystery of the octave, page 1
had read that back when it was developing but alot of it was way over my head so Ive been reviewing it and the authors other works now that I have more knowledge on various background subjects to be able to gleen more from him. I almost forgot how much of a really big deal this all was so Im glad Ive doubled back now and also want to share some excerpts that might entice other seekers here to read Hempels stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment