Essays – Page 2 – Numbers of a Living Planet

Evolving Intelligence of the Biosphere:

An Essay from DuVersity Newsletter 35 – 2014

The Light and Dark, as Value and Fact, could be viewed as reconciled by an evolved mind, within the biosphere. They could indeed be the cause of the arising of proto-minds, since existential situations in the Biosphere are of value for its beings whilst being factual. As Bennett points out, sex and death are innovations of the biospheric world, and we can now date their arrival during the Cambrian “explosion” (around 542 million years ago) when plants and animals (multicellular life forms) innovated sex to reproduce their organisms as a whole as well as regenerating their cells through cell division. Animals, unlike single-celled algae, are able to express action but must die to benefit from generational improvement by natural selection. Only by such means could the three brains of humans, motive, emotive and cognitive, be selected through their effectiveness in adaptation to living conditions within a variety of different biomes.

But there have been problems for humans in their maintaining a shared cultural harmony towards nature and the biosphere, due to the success of their cognitive brain capacity to solve environmental problems based upon facts. Technologies can arise whose consequences may conflict with social values that are somewhat weakly held to. Arguments can break out over values and the impact of technologies and those that wield them, but the factual benefits generally dominate other human views. The environmental argument is being lost whilst technology becomes an ever stronger threat to the biosphere as we know it. The modern world is simply the latest and greatest in which actions often clearly go against valuing the environment over the wealth it can create, and better-off populations have become used, inured and psychically hardened to human and biospheric tragedy.

The Cult of Seven Days

Published in Nexus Magazine in 2004

When understanding the origins of human knowledge, we tend not to look into the everyday aspects of life such as the calendar, our numbering systems and how these could have developed. However, these components of everyday life hold surprising clues to the past.

An example is the seven day week which we all slavishly follow today. It has been said that seven makes a good number of days for a week and this convenience argument often given for the existence of weeks.

Having a week allows one to know what day of the week it is for the purposes of markets and religious observances. It is an informal method of counting based on names rather than numbers. Beyond this however, a useful week length should fit well with the organisation of the year (i.e. the Sun), or the month (i.e. the Moon) or other significant celestial or seasonal cycle. But the seven day week does not fit in with the Sun and the Moon.

The Week and the Year

Death of Zeus in Crete

written in 2004

How can an immortal god die? Especially Zeus who was not just a god but head of the Olympians, a new breed of gods that had replaced the Titans and their “despotic” ruler, Chronos. A Rome holding to Zeus/Jupiter perhaps rejected the Cretan tradition of the god’s death with the well-broadcast adage “All Cretans are liars”.

But we all should know that mythology uses contradictory, or at least inconsistent, versions of the same story, to express alternative perspectives and to transmit more knowledge in the process, rather than “a lie”.

The importance of the death of Zeus is that the story emerges exactly from that point in time and cultural transformation in which Zeus is also born and at that time it was familiar for a vegetative god, representing nature blooming in spring and dying in autumn, to die and be re-born within the immortality of the eternal round of the year or yearly daemon.

There were other norms too, including the birth of men and their world of form, out of the Earth and from within The Cave, as a natural sacred space created by the Mother or earth goddess. Directly symbolic of her womb, form emerges as shapes in formation like dreams, travelling towards the definite order found on the surface.

Figure 1 The Dictyan Cave, one of two in Crete claimed claimed to be Zeus’ Nursery

Autonomous Nature of Ancient Numerical Mysteries

The numerical foundations of the “earth mysteries” were nominally present in the medieval doctrine of the four numerical arts, the Quadrivium of sacred numbers, geometry, musical harmony and astronomy. However, these foundations need to be applied to something real which is: the numerical nature of the world seen from being alive upon it. This application gives a completely different set of results to modern science where, instead, numbers are being employed for measurements and calculations (using the physical laws discovered after the medieval period came to an end.)

The ancient mysteries treated numbers as having characteristics
seen to be active within the world.

In applying these numerical arts, one comes into contact with mysteries in the form of ancient monuments, art and literary works, these containing the clues required for developing, in oneself, a kind of skill. This skill can mature into being able to recover information in the most unlikely circumstances because something apparently other to oneself is active within you: a developed sense. This I call the autonomous nature of the mysteries, which is essential when going beyond what is simply data in books, monuments, etc. I believe it is mistaken to call such mystery work historical since it is actually happening in the present moment to create something new, whilst appearing to reference data from the past. Historical data provides the necessary starting points for a new work of reconstructing the mysteries within oneself.

Cosmic Origins of Religion and Death

written October 2014 and published in DuVersity Magazine

In order to think about the cosmic world one has to recognize that it is more than the world of life found on the earth and the living world, or biosphere, is most probably a result of how the cosmic world organised evolution on the earth.

Threefold Manifestation: The light triangle of the Trinity represents God, who remains ‘beyond all things’, entering the black hole of matter (hyle). As a result, three worlds arise: the angelic (empyrean), stellar (ethereal), and elemental. From Robert Fludd by Joscelyn Godwin, Thames & Hudson (Shambhala: Boulder, 1979, page 52)

Search for Intelligence within the Biosphere

Published in DuVersity Online Magazine “Views” May 2014

John G. Bennett received a very unusual teaching from G.I. Gurdjieff, his early teacher, and from an early student of these ideas, P.D. Ouspensky, who acted as mentor during Bennett’s early development of the ideas then seen in his Dramatic Universe and other books.

The classic form of Gurdjieff’s ideas (c.1916-8) were fortunately reconstructed from student notes from lectures and eventually piblished in Ouspensky’s 1950 book In Search of the Miraculous. What emerged was a vision of everything that existed and how this Whole structure we call the Universe was layered into systems of differing size and how each of these scales of structure had its own type of operation including an intelligence which enables it to do things within its own world and organise its environment.

The commonly held idea of the universe, defined by our scientists, corresponds with structures of distinctive scale, such as galaxies, stars, planets, the Earth’s biosphere and planetary moons. In contrast, human kind used to attribute intelligence and being to celestial objects yet today, there is almost no scientific tolerance for large scale structures having an innate intelligence or being.

Yet it is hard not to attribute an intelligence within large cosmic structures when confronted with the fortuitous structure of the universe in producing life, and life with a degree of intelligence such as ourselves. Also, one has to ask: Why do these structures exist if not to create the conditions within which, at least, human beings can live in such a beautiful and benign environment as our biosphere?

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The Week and the Year

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