Cycle/Web: A Summary
Cycle Web Summary
I. UNIVERSAL SUBJECT VS. UNIVERSAL OBJECT
We do not doubt that a man walking down the street is a living interconnectedness of changing moods. If we stick him with a pin, his whole body jumps. If we see him bending every effort toward one thing we nevertheless know that twelve hours later he may well be sound asleep, repairing himself. Life, which holds him together, could be called a field, like a gravitational field or an electromagnetic field. But in this life-field purposes alternate, so we may call it a purpose field. No computer anywhere is in jail because we instinctively know that a mechanism need not have a purpose field. New work by Sheldrake would suggest this purpose field has shaping powers. New work by Lovelock and Margulis suggests that earthlife as a whole—called Gaia—is a larger purpose field in which we smaller ones are embedded. The author’s own impression, influenced by the Heraclitus/ Nietzsche/Spengler viewpoint of unending struggle, is that the objective physical world studied by science is embodied memory, like an ongoing video tape, played on by the overall purpose field in present time.
To accept life as strife involves a grasp of the Heraclitean “enantiodromia,” defined as, “Every trend must go too far and evoke its own reversal.” Not by choice we ride extreme mood swings on the wheel of fortune.
The world as purpose field is inherently wild. Discipline is to merge with the wildness of nature, not to cripple its vitality.
Meta
Unknowing Actor’s Theory
A video door into P.Q.’s book, Destiny Is Real. Does the collective unconscious dictate events instead of vice versa?
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