Collingwood's Idea of History & Speculum Mentis

[Voyageur]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

When I go to other people's homes (for work), I like to look around - trying to feel the atmosphere of the house, looking at the furniture and stuff. I particularly like to look at family photos on display - on the wall, on cupboards… trying to imagine what kind of family it is, what kind of life they live. When it's old B&W photos or photos of people who are now dead, I try to imagine how they were like when they were alive. When you ask them, most people love to tell their life/family stories, and it's always very interesting to listen to them. Some stories are quite sad, too.

Back when we were living in Canada, every weekend in the summertime, we would go to neighbourhood garage sales to search for interesting and unique items to resell in our store. You can get a good sense of the people living inside by the things that they getting rid of and no longer have any use for, and also what they choose not to sell. But I found nothing more entertaining and informative than to see what kind of books were on display. Many houses had no books at all, which is also interesting, but those who had were filled mostly with light genre fiction, romance, suspense, horror, etc. Every once in a while though, we'd stumble across a family with a wide range of interesting literature, fiction and non-fiction and we'd promptly buy most of their titles. I've often thought that perusing someone's library is like taking a peek inside their mind.

I've always looked at books in peoples homes, including their art works (if both happen to be displayed in the open), and you are right, many people have very little in the way of books yet you can be surprised once in awhile and it can lead to conversations and even exchanges.

Speaking of exchanges, our local post office (and some other places in the area) has a book exchange; so people come in pick up their mail and drop books off and others pick them up if interested. So it's kind of gives you a snapshot of even what some people in the towns interests are, and a few books left have interesting titles that are being exchanged; although noting yet that has really jumped out at me.

 

[PERLOU]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

VOYAGEUR : excellente initiative de votre poste...

VOYAGEUR : excellent initiative of your post ...

 

[Laura]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology


Can we please get back on topic?

 

[genero81]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Well I finished Speculum Mentis. I always felt Theism and Atheism were two side of the same coin and Collingwood really made it clear why. Both make the error of taking the idea of 'God' literally instead of metaphorically. Collingwood's intellect was astonishing. So now I'm reading 'Anatomy of Violence' I'm close to a third the way through the book. I was really pleased to see some information on successful psychopaths. And yes, it's shocking to see just how much genetics can run the show without our being aware of it.

Just a quick update of where I'm at. Gotta go to work

 

[luc]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

I'm currently reading Speculum Mentis as well - that is one difficult text, but also full of gems. Collingwood's dialectic of the artistic, religious, scientific etc. stages seems a very interesting angle to look at things. I'm currently into his discussion of religion:

The distinction between symbol and meaning is implicit in religion [i.e. not explicit], and this is perhaps the most fundamental thing about religion in general as distinct from other forms of experience. All religious terms, phrases, acts, are symbolic, but if they were explicitly recognized to be symbolic they would be recognized to be exchangeable with others. If churchgoing was an explicit symbol, we should know what it symbolized—the unity of human society as informed by the divine spirit, or whatever it may be—and we should be able to find the same meaning exemplified in other acts, like waiting to be served in a shop or travelling in a third-class carriage. These other acts would then become symbolic of the same meaning, and would be substitutes for churchgoing. If a boy learns a certain geometrical truth, he is taught to symbolize it in terms of a particular triangle. But if he is unable to separate it from this triangle and to see it equally well in another, we say that he does not yet understand it. So a truth which is only grasped under the symbol of a particular act or phrase and cannot be freely symbolized in other acts or phrases is as yet imperfectly grasped.

This reminds me of "Life is religion" and also of the FOTCM principles, where it says:

We recognize the interconnectedness of the natural, human, and divine worlds. Just as the patterns in Nature reveal higher truths, the social sphere of humanity represents the classroom whereby lessons are learned. The way a person lives reflects their inner development and application of knowledge. As such, the way we interact with each other is of the utmost spiritual importance. Just as the early Christians stressed the “Kingdom of God” and its source within, the PaleoChristian way of life comes from within its people, and is not based on ethnicity, nationality, political affiliation, or linguistic groups. Rather, where two or more PaleoChristians are gathered, whether in a physical location or “in spirit”, this constitutes a Place of Worship.

In Collingwood's system, this would transcend religion as commonly understood, because we are making religious truths explicit, which at the same time means giving up mere "belief in symbols"/expressing religious feeling in rituals and metaphors and such. But this also means that religion is everywhere, that our whole life must be religious. As Collingwood writes:

The great saints really do find God everywhere, really do prove their proposition about any triangle that is presented to them, really do transfuse with religion the whole of life. This is at once the perfection and the death of the religious consciousness. For in grasping the inmost meaning of ritual and worship it deprives these special activities of their special sanctity and of their very reason for existing, the whole body of religion is destroyed by the awakening of its soul. But the awakened soul, in this very moment of triumph, has destroyed itself with its own body it has lost all its familiar landmarks and plunged into that abyss of mysticism in which God himself is nothing. Mysticism is the crown of religion and its deadliest enemy; the great mystics are at once saints and heresiarchs.

Also, Collingwood's idea of the "question -> answer -> knowledge -> question based on more knowledge" process is fascinating and represents some kind of tapping into the information field; Sheldrake's morphic resonance comes to mind here. Looking forward to finishing the book and what he has to say about science and so on!

 

[nature]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I've always looked at books in peoples homes, including their art works (if both happen to be displayed in the open), and you are right, many people have very little in the way of books yet you can be surprised once in awhile and it can lead to conversations and even exchanges.

Speaking of exchanges, our local post office (and some other places in the area) has a book exchange; so people come in pick up their mail and drop books off and others pick them up if interested. So it's kind of gives you a snapshot of even what some people in the towns interests are, and a few books left have interesting titles that are being exchanged; although noting yet that has really jumped out at me.

You could put there 1 or 2 specimen of Collingwood's books :D
It'll be a beautifull STO gesture ;D

 

[Altair]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Finished the book. What a fascinating read! The guy is really brilliant. At the very beginning of the book he defines its task, namely construction of the map of a knowledge and proceeds through different forms of human experience: art, religion, science, history and philosophy. Here are some quotes.

Art

Art in its pure form is therefore unaware even that it is imagination, the monad does not know that it is windowless, the artist does not say ‘I am only imagining’, for that would be to distinguish imagination from knowledge, and this he does not do.

About importance of questioning and collecting of knowledge:

Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge, assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force. Questions undirected by positive information, random questions, cut nothing; they fall in the void and yield no knowledge. Information, when it is not ground to a keen edge of inquiry, is not knowledge but mere pedantry, the talent buried in the earth. It ought to be put out at interest, to yield new knowledge and so to purify and correct itself as well as to increase its bulk.

Art must perish as knowledge grows. But it perishes like the phoenix, to rise again from the very ashes of its own body. To speak of the growth of knowledge is to imply that new thoughts, new facts, are perpetually coming to consciousness.

In so far as he is a real artist, his artistic creation is a self-critical creation, and the criticizing moment or concept— the idea of structure or relevance— is always in advance of the criticized moment, the flow of imaginations which it controls. To be conscious of this control is to have broken with the life of dreams and to have entered upon the life of art in the ordinary sense. The rationality which distinguishes the artist from the dreamer is nothing but the consciousness of control. Not only is the result of the control conscious, so that the work of art when complete is seen as a systematic whole whose every part is relevant to the rest, but the actual control itself is conscious.

But however truly the secret of the world is expressed under the form of beauty, the expression is always formally imperfect. It is of the essence of truth that the mind should be able to say what it is, to state it in explicit terms, subject it to criticism and attack, and watch it emerge strengthened from the ordeal. The secret revealed in art is a secret that no one can utter, and therefore not truly revealed...

Religion

About transition of Art into Religion:

Religion, relatively to art, is the discovery of reality. The artist is an irresponsible child who feels himself at liberty to say exactly what comes into his head and unsay it again without fear of correction or disapproval. He tells himself what story he likes and then, at the bidding of a whim, ‘scatters the vision for ever’. In religion, all this irresponsibility has gone. His vision is for the religious man no toy to make and mar at will; it is the truth, the very truth itself. The actual object of imagination, which in art obscurely means a truth that cannot be clearly stated, in religion is that truth itself: the secret of the universe is revealed, no longer merely shadowed forth in parables but made manifest in visible form; and this revelation makes explicit for the first time the distinction between reality and unreality, truth and falsehood.

Holiness is to religion what beauty is to art. It is the specific form in which truth appears to that type of consciousness. As religion, therefore, is a dialectical development of art, so holiness is a dialectical development of beauty. Now religion is art asserting its object. The object of art is the beautiful, and therefore the holy is the beautiful asserted as real.

In science, language is transparent and we pierce through it, throw it on one side, in reaching the thought it conveys in religion, language is opaque, fused with its own meaning into an undifferentiated unity which cannot be separated into two levels. Lose the symbol, and in religion you lose the meaning as well, whereas in science you merely take another symbol, which will serve your purpose equally. The distinction between symbol and meaning is implicit in religion, and this is perhaps the most fundamental thing about religion in general as distinct from other forms of experience. All religious terms, phrases, acts, are symbolic, but if they were explicitly recognized to be symbolic they would be recognized to be exchangeable with others.

Thus art is the last possible degree of the implicitness of thought. In religion thought knows that it exists; religion asserts and knows that it asserts. But though here thought knows that it exists, it is so far ignorant of its own nature that it mistakes imagining for thinking, and asserts the reality of what is really only symbol. Hence the truth is in religion only intuitively known, not logically known, and its real nature as truth— as concept, as object of thought— is concealed.

Science

Because the abstractness of science is a perpetuation of the abstractness of religion, science most naturally arises out of a religion which has not overcome this abstractness, that is to say, out of a non-Christian religion. Hence European science has its roots in the religion of pagan antiquity.

No object is material, in the metaphysical sense of the word, except so far as scientific thinking conceives it so; for materiality means abstractness, subjection to the formulae of mechanical determination and mathematical calculation, and these formulae are never imposed upon any object whatever except by an arbitrary act which falsifies the object’s nature.

When the mind becomes conscious of itself as thought it simultaneously becomes conscious of itself as action. Thought and action, truth and freedom are inseparable, and are in fact correlative aspects of an indivisible reality. Hence they became simultaneously explicit in the mind’s process of self-discovery. Till then, they have both been implicit only, and in that implicitness they have not been distinguished.

Religion is always looking forward to the day when it shall be set free from this body of death which, as its own shadow, it perpetually carries with it. That freedom is nothing but the self-revelation of thought, the discovery by the mind of its own nature as a thinking mind. However abstract and barren may be the first-fruits of this discovery, the discovery itself is an incalculable advance in the history of man. As art and religion lift man above the level of the beasts, science lifts the civilized man above the level of the savage.

History

...a mind which is ignorant of its true nature does not in the fullest sense possess this nature. The true nature of the mind does not exist ready-made somewhere in the depths of the mind, waiting to be discovered. Till it is discovered it does not exist, but yet it does exist in a confused and distorted form, since the errors made about it are only partial errors, and the dialectical task of bringing it into existence or coming to know it (the two are the same) is simply the clearing up of these confusions, which appear as inconsistencies, conflicts between what, at a given stage, the mind finds itself to be and what it feels it ought to be.

There is thus no feature of experience, no attitude of mind towards its object, which is alien to history. Art rests on the ignoring of reality: religion, on the ignoring of thought science, on the ignoring of fact; but with the recognition of fact everything is recognized that is in any sense real. The fact, as historically determined, is the absolute object.

Thus the work of art, God, and the abstract concept are all attempts on the part of thought to reach the organized individuality of history. Art comes nearest to success, religion fails more openly, and science most openly of all. But this order of relative failure is due to an inverse order of seriousness in facing the problem. Art ignores the real world altogether, and constructs an arbitrary cosmos of its own; religion contents itself with a cosmos outside the world; and science alone tries to bring the concrete world into the unity, but destroys its concreteness in the attempt. But because all are agreed that the real object must be an absolute individual, their failure is wholly redeemed by the success of history, which actually achieves the idea of an object beyond which there is nothing and within which every part truly represents the whole.

Every action is an integral element in the complete world of fact, and is determined by its place in that world as the relevant action for the given facts. The existence of a world of fact constitutes the obligation to perform the relevant action, and thus the ‘station’ of the agent as a member of the world of fact dictates his ‘duties’ as a contributor to that world.

History is the knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context. But since this context is always incomplete, we can never know a single part as it actually is.

Thus history is the crown and the reductio ad absurdum of all knowledge considered as knowledge of an objective reality independent of the knowing mind. Here for the first time we place before ourselves an object which satisfies the mind, an object individual, concrete, infinite, no arbitrary abstraction or unreal fiction, but reality itself in its completeness. This object is what we have tried and failed to find in art, in religion, and in science. In history we have found it, and we have found it to be an illusion. In its perfect reality it is perfectly unknowable, and our efforts to achieve it can do nothing but frustrate themselves. In art, the individual work is actually enjoyed; the mind grasps it in its wholeness, clasps it to its bosom and becomes one with it. In religion, God is glorified and enjoyed in a mystic union which achieves the same intimacy, but the clamour of the world outside is never wholly forgotten and the union is always therefore imperfect. In science the mind grasps the concept in an act of a priori thought, but the concept is a mere phantom and thought recognizes its own impotence to clothe it with reality. The progressive alienation of the mind from its object is in history complete. The world is triumphantly unified as object, only to find itself separated from the mind by a gulf which no thought can traverse.

But in this process, which seems to travel at every step farther from that intimacy of subject with object which constitutes knowledge, the indispensable condition of knowledge is progressively and inversely realized. We know at last in history what we never knew before, namely, what kind of object it must be that is alone knowable. It must be an object not merely of imagination, like the work of art, but of thought; but, like the work of art, it must be concrete and individual. It must be, like the object of religion, absolute and eternal; but unlike this again, it must be a real object and not the imaginative or metaphorical presentation of an object. It must be conceived, like the object of science; but it must not be an abstraction. And like the object of history, it must be fact, an absolute concrete individual; but it must be accessible to the knowing mind.

Now in the course of our inquiry the truth has from time to time forced itself upon us that there is one object at least of which it can be said that its nature is altered by being known, without entailing the consequence that error concerning it is impossible. This object is the knowing mind. In this case, we saw, an error reacts on the mind itself, and alters its behaviour, which (in the case of a mind) is its nature, for a mind is what it does. If therefore the infinite given whole of fact is the nature of the knowing mind as such, our problem is solved, and the possibility of knowledge is vindicated.

We have hitherto been uniformly searching for an object of knowledge. We have found that in art we get no true object, because the ostensible object, the work of art, points beyond itself to some hidden mystery as the real object of which it is the symbol. In other words, art pretends to be pure imagination but is not; it is the implicit assertion of something which is not explicitly asserted, and this is its real object. But what the nature of this real object may be, art cannot say. We went on to religion. Here again we found that the ostensible object, God, was not the real object. The mythology of religion does not say what it means. It points beyond itself, even more unmistakably than the work of art, to a concealed mystery, a truth which is not stated. The real object of religion is not grasped by religion itself. We tried science, and here we found that the ostensible object, the abstract concept, which is indifferently called the physical or material world, the realm of (abstract) thought, pure being, or the like, is confessedly an arbitrary construction, an expedient of thought, not the object of thought. In history alone we found a type of thought which, to all appearances, meant what it said, and when it pointed to fact as its object really meant that fact was its object. We therefore ventured to assume that fact this same fact which comes face to face with the mind in history, is the hidden object not only of science— that is admitted— but of religion and art also. But what is this fact: fact about what?

The fundamental principle of history itself, namely, the concreteness of the object, thus makes it impossible for the object to ignore the subject, and compels us to recognize an object to which the subject is organic, in the sense that the subject’s consciousness of it makes a real difference to it as a whole and to all its parts. The subject is thus no mere separable part of the world of fact, but an essential element which penetrates its whole fabric, a constitutive element in the object itself. Being known, whether truly known or erroneously known, must make a difference to the object to deny this, we can now see, is to turn one’s back on concrete thought and revert to the fallacies of abstraction. This does not reduce the object of knowledge to the position of a figment of imagination. On the contrary, a figment of imagination is created by imagining it, not by knowing it, and exists— in the only sense in which it does exist— precisely as it is imagined, so that there is in its case no such thing as error, just as there is no such thing as truth. The conception of an object which we have now reached is the conception of something determined by the knowing it, in the sense that error deranges it, though not so far as to bring it into harmony with the erroneous judgement; because this would then cease to be erroneous. This object can only be the knowing mind itself. A mind’s error about itself, we have seen, actually deranges it and causes it to behave abnormally; and it is only by correcting this error that the mind can regain its true nature.

Philosophy

Of this real object we have been in continual search; and we seem now to have arrived at the conclusion that it is nothing but the mind itself. Thus the two definitions of philosophy seem to coincide. Intelligence alone is absolutely intelligible, and therefore absolute knowledge can only be the knowledge of a knowing mind by itself.

This C's quote comes to mind:

All there is is lessons. This is one infinite school. There is no other reason for anything to exist. Even inanimate matter learns it is all an "Illusion." Each individual possesses all of creation within their minds. Now, contemplate for a moment. Each soul is all powerful and can create or destroy all existence if know how. You and us and all others are interconnected by our mutual possession of all there is. You may create alternative universes if you wish and dwell within. You are all a duplicate of the universe within which you dwell. Your mind represents all that exists. It is "fun" to see how much you can access.

Q: (L) It's fun for who to see how much we can access?

A: All. Challenges are fun. Where do you think the limit of your mind is?

Q: (L) Where?

A: We asked you.

Q: (L) Well, I guess there is no limit.

A: If there is no limit, then what is the difference between your own mind and everything else?

Q: (L) Well, I guess there is no difference if all is ultimately one.

A: Right. And when two things each have absolutely no limits, they are precisely the same thing.

Art, religion, science, and history are thus philosophical errors, and owe all their characteristics, and the characteristics attributed by them to their ostensible objects, to the initial error on which each is based. None is a mere or complete error, for such a thing does not exist. Each grasps ‘one aspect of the truth’, as we say, forgetting that truth is a whole whose aspects cannot be thus separated each is true, even while it is false; and only its truth enables it to effect that self-criticism which leads to something better.

There is only one type of concrete thought, namely, what we call philosophy, the mind’s explicit consciousness of itself...

Philosophy as Absolute Knowledge:

Art has turned out to be philosophy; and concrete philosophy is therefore art. That beauty which is the fleeting quarry of the artist is no stranger to the philosopher. His thought must clothe itself in speech, and to him all the quire of heaven and the furniture of earth becomes a divine language, symbolizing in sensuous imagery the eternal truths of thought. Nor is this imagery to him mere art, for art in his mind is enriched and deepened into religion in the knowledge that what he was taught in his youth, and in his haste perhaps rejected as fable, is true that God really lives and is his father, that the voice that speaks in nature is truly the voice of her creator, and that this very God became man to die for him and to atone by a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. And this knowledge is not, for him, in any conflict with the regularity and uniformity of nature, with the fact that he can and does abstract, generalize, conceive everything as matter and motion or in modern language as space-time; for this abstract conception of the world is to him only the schematic order which, without doing it violence, he detects in that infinite whole which is at once spirit and nature, the whole of which the starry heavens above him and the moral law within him are parts. And in learning to know this whole, a whole of truly objective fact in which art and religion and science all play their parts— so, and only so, he comes to know himself.

...concrete life of philosophy is no mere haven of rest, but a ceaseless act of achieving this balance. The balance is achieved not by the static contemplation by mind of its own fixed given nature— mind has no fixed given nature— but by the self-creation of this nature in a perpetual discovery of fact which is at the same time the creation of fact: the creation of the fact of its discovery, which is only the indispensable subjective side of the fact itself. The life of absolute knowledge is thus the conscious self-creation of the mind, no mere discovery of what it is, but the making of itself what it is.

Absolute Mind:

The absolute mind, then, unites the differences of my mind and other people’s, but not as the abstract universal unites rather as the concrete universal of history unites. The absolute mind is an historical whole of which mine is a part.

The absolute mind is not ‘one stupendous whole’. It lives in its entirety in every individual and every act of every individual, yet not indifferently, as triangularity is indifferently present in every triangle, but expressing itself in every individual uniquely and irreplaceably. This is its necessary nature as concrete, it cares, so to speak, how many individual reduplications of itself there are, and will have so many as form a real organic whole in which every element is essential to the being of the whole.

Thus, the reader may have imagined that when we spoke of the process of thought we were presupposing the reality of time, since every process is a process in time. Hence time would appear to be something external to the absolute mind, the necessity which stands over Zeus himself. But so to regard time is to forget that the process of which we are speaking is a process not of mechanical change but of thought a self-knowing process. A mind which knows its own change is by that very knowledge lifted above change. History— and the same is true of memory and even perception— is the mind’s triumph over time.

All concrete thought is, in its immediacy, temporal, but in its mediation extra-temporal. The mind in its actual thinking at once recognizes and defies temporal (and spatial) limitations.

Man is one with God, no mere part of a whole, but informed by the indwelling of the divine spirit. Now man, by his misguided thirst for knowledge, partakes of that knowledge which is forbidden, namely error, or the human wisdom which negates God’s wisdom. This error deforms his own true, that is divine, nature, and the deformation takes the shape of banishment from the presence of God into the wilderness of the visible world. Having thus lost even the sight of God, the knowledge of what he himself ought to be, he cannot recover his lost perfection until he comes to know himself as he actually is. But not knowing himself as he ought to be, he cannot know himself as he is.

In absolute ethics the agent identifies himself with the entire world of fact, and in coming to understand this world prepares himself for the action appropriate to the unique situation. This is not an act of duty, because the sense of an objective and abstract law, whether lodged in the individual ‘conscience’ or in the political ‘sovereign’, has disappeared. The agent acts with full responsibility as embodying and identifying himself with the absolute mind, and his act is therefore the pure act of self-creation.

It is the mind itself. And thus the external world is not a veil between it and its object, but a picture of itself, drawn to aid its own self-vision, a picture which as it grows firmer and harder, takes surface and polish and steadiness, becomes the Mirror of the Mind; and all the detail visible in it is seen by the mind to be the reflection of its own face.

To err, and to believe in an external world over against the mind, are one and the same thing. Now if error were mere error, the mind would merely assert the external object, which is what it thinks itself to be, and thereby deny itself, and resolve the dualism. But all error contains an element of truth, and the conflict between the truth and the error appears as the externality of the object, its otherness with respect to the mind. Because these two are really one, all knowledge of the external object is really the mind’s knowledge of itself. But all this knowledge, however true it may be, is affected by the fact that it is projected upon an external world it is, so to speak, reversed like the face we see in the glass.

This life has no map and no object other than itself: if it had such an object, that would be its map, for the features of the object would be its own features. Thus the external world, whose origin, growth, and structure we have been, throughout this book, investigating, is the Mirror of the Mind and the Map of Knowledge in one.

Concrete knowledge is not generically different from abstract knowledge, it is abstract knowledge freed from its own abstractness by simply recognizing that abstractness. The mind is not one among a number of objects of knowledge, which possesses the peculiarity of being alone fully knowable it is that which is really known in the ostensible knowing of any object whatever. In an immediate and direct way, the mind can never know itself it can only know itself through the mediation of an external world, know that what it sees in the external world is its own reflection. Hence the construction of external worlds— works of art, religions, sciences, structures of historical fact, codes of law, systems of philosophy and so forth ad infinitum— is the only way by which the mind can possibly come to that self-knowledge which is its end.

But education does not mean stuffing a mind with information, it means helping a mind to create itself, to grow into an active and vigorous contributor to the life of the world. The information given in such a process is meant to be absorbed into the life of the mind itself...

At the completion of its education, if that event ever happened, a mind would step forth as naked as a new-born babe, knowing nothing, but having acquired the mastery over its own weaknesses, its own desires, its own ignorance, and able therefore to face any danger unarmed.

So if the external world is a Mirror of our minds (individually and collectively) then "paying strict attention to objective reality right and left" can be paraphrased as seeing ourselves as a reflexion in this Mirror as undistorted as possible (by overcoming cognitive biases, thinking driven by shallow emotions, narratives and simply our own lies about ourselves) to "become the reality of the ‘Future’. And our goal would be to use this Mirror as effectively as possible.

I guess, we will find more clues about proper using of this Mirror in the books of Adrian Raine.

 

[Phill4]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

My speculative thoughts on how Collingwood’s quote relates to the C’s session quoted below and gravity, is the question and answer dynamic or the seeking to understand reality via question and answers is gravity and/or creates unstable gravity waves. It seems to me from looking at the perspective from 1D (matter) to 7D (pure consciousness and full view of all reality) that using the senses, perception and thinking, such as a 3D human using their five senses and the ability to think, continually validates reality via a seamless process given whatever abilities a being has to perceive, think and understand reality. It is possible that this is what binds the universe together and the C’s have said is gravity and a binder. If information and theories on information for the universe forms a key aspect of understanding reality, then questioning and finding answers is an active or activating component of information and fundamental component of reality. Could this active process from 1D thru to 7D be in and of everything as the C’s explain about gravity?

The question and answer dynamic also provides a being with the ability to choose a polarity, be it STO or STS then take action toward the path they have chosen. Information -> Question -> Answer-> Choice -> Action from choice.

This all seems pretty wild to speculate about and I may be way off, but figured I’d post it since the Collingwood quote is excellent for many reason and made me think about the C’s session and info on gravity.

I was re-reading the session on the Wave Chapter 5 when I saw your post, and It made a whole lot of sense to put it in that manner.
The act of asking comes from everything we are, and what we are faced with, we already have the information of what could and could not happen speculatively, true or false.
If a question gives an answer that is part true part false, it can re-structure the grounds upon which we ask the question, it re-shapes our assumption which is a form of internal reconfiguration. (That is if a person is open to have active internal self-questioning mechanism)
We literally change pathways in our brain, which in turn change reactions throughout the whole organism.
This state of opening the self or training the self to be ready to challenge one's own assumptions is the state that we need to achieve, the knowing that we could be wrong, and have an open attitude to change in order to assimilate the answer.

I keep thinking the idea that our perception is narrowed by the constitution of our personality as the filtering mechanisms of details , where we "choose unknowingly" or choose to place our attention, and that this narrowness produces a limited perception.
Tuning to the nature of undirected and non linear receivership of an answer is key, which then allow us to assimilate more information.

I think that we need to understand our consciousness , our body and all else that makes us to the max of our ability, because these are systems of receivership and processing of information, our body as well as our mind, receive and process information differently so tuning our perception to have awareness at all levels, is important because that way we perceive a sensation as a sensation and an emotion as an emotion and a thought-loop as a thought-loop and have better grounds to organize each impression.

I think that the gravity we perceive through our 3D limitations of space and time, appears as a sequence of beginning and end variables, of possibilities through a scope, it exists through time, but as we move higher gravity expresses in suspension in our perception, there is not time therefore the force of pulling in sequence is suspended, in which case gravity (just my guess) could be perceived as a non material force "moving" through everything.

the session says that if a photon moves at the speed of light it has, no time, not mass, yes gravity..

For the longest time, I had placed "energy" as the central ingredient, and the accumulation and structurization of energy polarized, (polarity being a structurization in itself at the that fundamental level), and that the condensation of it created mass, that somehow the emanations of energy in matter created a field, (the ether) through which information and higher frequencies could pass through. But my knowledge of this matter does not go that far, it failed to explain the process of information transcending into matter. I had admit I had no conceptual imagination of how, or where the middle point between matter and information could be.
My question at present about this , is that if gravity is everything, the difference between the various levels of existence need to have an structural logic, what is the principle of organization.
I had thought that if a person has all gravity of all existence within, that the structures we perceive follow the logic of the self, and the reason we cannot tap into it, is because we are more unaware of ourselves than we think, and the many layers in which our consciousness operates.



From that session, the only thing I can equate to gravity is information, information shapes itself through information. It forms structures, matrices, codes, and become manifestation through levels within itself.

The act of questioning considering the many processes involved physically , then psychically, then mentally, is a process that seems to create an opening in the field or fields in the self to those openings in the information field, like a match of frequencies, for an answer , if our frequency is led by a mundane question, the systems we are opening are limited by the configuration of our self at the time of the question, and therefore the information coming we seldom reach. (we don't have all the antennas on)
This opening is an unstable vibration, a choice to ask and step outside the logic of mechanical cause and effect, we move the "waters" already set in place, apply the logic of a higher realm into a lower one.


An example that keeps coming to mind is personal but very common, when I was little I used to pray for things to happen or not happen, and many times I was met with disappointment, after many attempts I felt praying was a way to make ourselves feel better about something that was never going to end, but my awareness was nowhere near unification, such disappointment was probably the way in which information bounced and resonated with my infantile configuration at the time, and led to ask more refined question, "what is the nature of good and evil", the way people resonate to the answer from the universe reflect their state of being and openness to receivership, if we ask and do something completely unrelated , we never see the effect of the bouncing of a wave of information anywhere.


A picture that I have in mind, in reference to receivership of information through the various structures that make up our body and psyche, is the electromagnetic spectrum, we perceive through different senses different aspects of the same wave, and if we tune to perceive each part with each corresponding organ and then organize impressions in our minds we get a more complete picture, the job of the brain is connecting the relationships.
This same example is the one i refer to when trying to understand the accounts of people with synesthesia , who can taste numbers, and that sort of thing, the brain makes those connection directly, as opposed to regular people who would have to train and re-shape perception to effect the necessary neurochemical changes to achieve such thing.

I had many thoughts about the session, I just thought it was very interesting how you proposed this idea of question being unstable gravity was, in utilization, accumulation and dispersion

 

[PERLOU]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Un grand Merci ALTAIR pour ce partage des citations dont j'ai pu prendre connaissance avec la traduction Google...

A big thank you ALTAIR for sharing quotations that I got to know with the Google translation ...

 

[Laura]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Thank you, Altair, for the excellent selections; they demonstrate the progression very well. IMO, the book is rich and dense with insight and I was regularly startled at passages that reflected things the Cs had said at various times. Of course, Collingwood's discussion is much more complete and fills in all the blanks, but the similarities are undeniable. I feel pretty sure that it is one of those "destined books".

 

[maxtree]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Thank you,Altair, for these quotes. I read them this morning and thought about it a lot . (I finished "the Idea" ,not yet "Speculum mentis".)
I must confess that I had to read them twice and just now, again, and still I think I have to read them another time while translating them in my own language just to make sure I really understand the very meaning.
Finished "G and hypnosis" and waiting now for the Raines and Samenow.

Since Laura pointed out Collingwood's work I have the impression that a new door has been opened.

Well, "It is the nature of the mind to change it's mind" with every new bit of information that comes along.
That is why I am extremely glad to have found Laura's work. Thank you!
And also the Chateaux crew and the forum members

 

[Laura]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology


I think it is important to read these books in a more or less orderly way. It would be very hard to understand Speculum Mentis without reading Idea of History first; the latter sort of breaks you in gently to the trend of Collingwood's thought.

I don't think that the cognitive/neuro-science books really need a particular order, but they are all important because they give somewhat different perspectives.

The Gurdjieff and Hypnosis book is up in the air. I know that there are those who read it first and, because they did not have the other information, it didn't make so much of an impact, so I think it should be read AFTER Collingwood. Without the context, you can't really understand Gurdjieff and that is something that Tamdgidi does NOT give.

And, most definitely, knowing the neuroscience is very helpful when you read about Gurdjieff because then you are better able to evaluate his ideas; you can see where he made very astute observations, but may have elaborated a bogus underlying cause; and you can see where he was completely off and just making stuff up.

Right now I'm reading Fallon's "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain"; he's the neuroscientist who discovered he had the brain of a psychopath from a scan; the book is about subsequent discoveries and his own "self-examination". He doesn't really have insight, but it is interesting the way he uses what he does have: good "cold cognition" to suss out what goes on in his own head. Gives one a lot to think about.

 

[Divide by Zero]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Right now I'm reading Fallon's "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain"; he's the neuroscientist who discovered he had the brain of a psychopath from a scan; the book is about subsequent discoveries and his own "self-examination". He doesn't really have insight, but it is interesting the way he uses what he does have: good "cold cognition" to suss out what goes on in his own head. Gives one a lot to think about.

Raine also showed that had similar brain scans to pathological criminals, which also probably gave him a similar insight into the condition.

 

[Laura]

Re: Collingwood's Idea of History, Speculum Mentis & Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

Right now I'm reading Fallon's "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain"; he's the neuroscientist who discovered he had the brain of a psychopath from a scan; the book is about subsequent discoveries and his own "self-examination". He doesn't really have insight, but it is interesting the way he uses what he does have: good "cold cognition" to suss out what goes on in his own head. Gives one a lot to think about.

Raine also showed that had similar brain scans to pathological criminals, which also probably gave him a similar insight into the condition.

Yes; and it's interesting that both of them have taken a strong ameliorating approach to the problem of the psychopath. Not so bad with Raine, but stronger with Fallon who had exactly the opposite view before his discoveries about himself. That's why Samenow is something of an antidote. And, interestingly, Samenow and his mentor, Yochelson, are the ones who developed a real "Work Method" for helping criminals (of any ilk, psychopathic or not) to change their thinking errors.

This method is very similar to things we already know: self-observing and The Mirror though, as I said, for the criminal therapy it is WAY more intense. Nevertheless, Samenow's book describes pretty precisely what one most needs to do to change, to become self-aware and master of oneself; and it applies to everyone.

 

[loreta]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I have a habit from childhood, where while walking on the street I like to look into other people's windows and see how they live. It isn't due to being a "Peeking Tom" or anything like that. ;) And it isn't because I am interested in their decor per se. It has to do with wanting to feel the atmosphere of their home, try and immerse myself in it and imagine how would it be to live there. For no particular reason, just out of curiosity.

When I go to other people's homes (for work), I like to look around - trying to feel the atmosphere of the house, looking at the furniture and stuff. I particularly like to look at family photos on display - on the wall, on cupboards… trying to imagine what kind of family it is, what kind of life they live. When it's old B&W photos or photos of people who are now dead, I try to imagine how they were like when they were alive. When you ask them, most people love to tell their life/family stories, and it's always very interesting to listen to them. Some stories are quite sad, too.

I love to look at old pictures, it is a fantastic way to travel in time, and feel. When I see a picture of people that are not here anymore, I can enter the picture and see so many things, because a picture is just a door that you can open if you wanted. Imagination plays a big part in this, you go inside the picture, you look around, you look at details, movements that the photographer stopped but that are there, expressions of visages that continue to express emotion, the temperature of the day, etc. And then you can go near the people in the picture and be part of the picture that you are looking and the people on the picture are not anymore strangers but people you know.