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Chapter#14

Objective and subjective knowledge. Objective and subjective art. The Enneagram. Almost Final Version

1. How do you interpret the suggestion that no one can give a person anything he or she did not possess before?
2. How do you interpret the suggestion that the union of knowledge and being produces Great Doing?
3. How do you interpret the suggestion that what a person cannot put into an enneagram he or she does not really understand?
4. How do you interpret the suggestion that objective art is based on inner octaves?
5. How do you interpret the suggestion that mechanical humanity can have subjective art only?
6. Do you believe that myths and symbols can have access to your higher emotions--and that verbal formulas can provide access to the higher levels of your intellect?
7. Do you feel that a greater frequency of moments of pausing to remember yourself will result in an increase in your activities, relationships and involvements and a sustained line of will?
8. Do you really believe that pausing frequently just to be present will bring ever greater harmony into your on-going thinking, feeling, moving, and instinctive functions?
9. Which of the following has the greatest appeal to your head and heart: Numbers, geometrical figures, letters, or words?
10. Which of the following disciplines appeals most to your head and heart: Astrology, numerology, magic, or the tarot?
11. Are you begining to understand that your mechanical response to objects and events is the most fundamental cause of your anxieties, frustrations, and fears?
12. How does one experience a symbol?
13. Have you, as yet, found the key to unifying your experiences?
14. Do you sometimes look outside yourself for that which you should be looking within yourself?
    Notes:
    All the stuff I know about the mind is from the books of Freud, Jung, Adler and so on, that I have studied. Apart from these descriptions and definitions that are there in the books, do you know anything about the mind?
    
    Sigmund Freud(1856 - 1939) Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856. His father was a small-time merchant, and his second wife was Freud's mother. Freud had two half-brothers some 20 years older than he. His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and though he often claimed he hated the city, he lived there until it was occupied by Germany in 1938. Freud's family background was Jewish, though his father was a freethinker and Freud himself an avowed atheist.
    The Theory of the Unconscious: Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental, and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behaviour is explicable only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behaviour of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable - which had been the prevailing approach for centuries - Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behaviour, and dreams - all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control Gurdjieff seems to be a Freudian. Important book "The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) by Sigmund Freud in 1927. It describes his interpretation of religion's origins, and development.(Has anybody seen the unconscious?)
    
    Alfred Adler(1870 - 1937) was born in the suburbs of Vienna on February 7, 1870, the third child, second son, of a Jewish grain merchant and his wife. As a child, Alfred developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. At five, he nearly died of pneumonia. It was at this age that he decided to be a physician. Alfred was an average student and preferred playing outdoors to being cooped up in school. He was quite outgoing, popular, and active, and was known for his efforts at outdoing his older brother, Sigmund. He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1895. During his college years, he became attached to a group of socialist students, among which he found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein. She was an intellectual and social activist who had come from Russia to study in Vienna. They married in 1897 and eventually had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists. Although Freud named Adler the president of the Viennese Analytic Society and the co-editor of the organization's newsletter, Adler didn't stop his criticism. A debate between Adler's supporters and Freud's was arranged, but it resulted in Adler, with nine other members of the organization, resigning to form the Society for Free Psychoanalysis in 1911. This organization became The Society for Individual Psychology in the following year. During World War I, Adler served as a physician in the Austrian Army, first on the Russian front, and later in a children's hospital. He saw first hand the damage that war does, and his thought turned increasingly to he concept of social interest. He felt that if humanity was to survive, it had to change its ways! After the war, he was involved in various projects, including clinics attached to state schools and the training of teachers. In 1926, he went to the United States to lecture, and he eventually accepted a visiting position at the Long Island College of Medicine. In 1934, he and his family left Vienna forever. On May 28, 1937, during a series of lectures at Aberdeen University, he died of a heart attack. All info was taken from www.ship.edu. Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivating force behind all our behavior and experience. By the time his theory had gelled into its most mature form, he called that motivating force the striving for perfection. It is the desire we all have to fulfill our potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. It is, as many of you will already see, very similar to the more popular idea of self-actualization. "Perfection" and "ideal" are troublesome words, though. On the one hand, they are very positive goals. Shouldn't we all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in psychology, they are often given a rather negative connotation. Perfection and ideals are, practically by definition, things you can't reach. Many people, in fact, live very sad and painful lives trying to be perfect! As you will see, other theorists, like Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, emphasize this problem. Adler talks about it, too. But he sees this negative kind of idealism as a perversion of the more positive understanding. We will return to this in a little while.
    Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was the aggression drive, referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. It might be better called the assertiveness drive, since we tend to think of aggression as physical and negative. But it was Adler's idea of the aggression drive that first caused friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would detract from the crucial position of the sex drive in psychoanalytic theory. Despite Freud's dislike for the idea, he himself introduced something very similar much later in his life: the death instinct.
    Adlers types:Psychological types:Although all neurosis is, for Adler, a matter of insufficient social interest, he did note that three types could be distinguished based on the different levels of energy they involved:
    1. The first is the ruling type. They are, from childhood on, characterized by a tendency to be rather aggressive and dominant over others. Their energy -- the strength of their striving after personal power -- is so great that they tend to push over anything or anybody who gets in their way. The most energetic of them are bullies and sadists; somewhat less energetic ones hurt others by hurting themselves, and include alcoholics, drug addicts, and suicides.
    2. The second is the leaning type. They are sensitive people who have developed a shell around themselves which protects them, but they must rely on others to carry them through life's difficulties. They have low energy levels and so become dependent. When overwhelmed, they develop what we typically think of as neurotic symptoms: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, general anxiety, hysteria, amnesias, and so on, depending on individual details of their lifestyle.
    3. The third type is the avoiding type. These have the lowest levels of energy and only survive by essentially avoiding life -- especially other people. When pushed to the limits, they tend to become psychotic, retreating finally into their own personal worlds.
    4. There is a fourth type as well: the socially useful type. This is the healthy person, one who has both social interest and energy. Note that without energy, you an't really have social interest, since you wouldn't be able to actually do anything for anyone!
    Adler noted that his four types looked very much like the four types proposed by the ancient Greeks. They, too, noticed that some people are always sad, others always angry, and so on. But they attributed these temperaments (from the same root as temperature) to the relative presence of four bodily fluids called humors. If you had too much yellow bile, you would be choleric (hot and dry) and angry all the time. The choleric is, roughly, the ruling type. If you had too much phlegm, you would be phlegmatic (cold and wet) and be sluggish. This is roughly the leaning type. If you had too much black bile -- and we don't know what the Greeks were referring to here -- you would be melancholy (cold and dry) and tend to be sad constantly. This is roughly the avoiding type. And, if you had a lot of blood relative to the other humors, you be in a good humor, sanguine (warm and moist). This naturally cheerful and friendly person represents the socially useful type. One word of warning about Adler's types: Adler believed very strongly that each person is a unique individual with his or her own unique lifestyle. The idea of types is, for him, only a heuristic device, meaning a useful fiction, not an absolute reality! Gurdjieff and Adler are not qite on the same page. Determine to live your own life, not the one dictated by hypnotized society.
    
    Carl Jung:(1875 - 1961) Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. -- Carl Jung Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious. He certainly made that the goal of his work as a theorist. And yet he makes the unconscious sound very unpleasant, to say the least: It is a cauldron of seething desires, a bottomless pit of perverse and incestuous cravings, a burial ground for frightening experiences which nevertheless come back to haunt us. Frankly, it doesn't sound like anything I'd like to make conscious! A younger colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this "inner space" his life's work. He went equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of mythology, religion, and philosophy. Jung was especially knowledgeable in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabala, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If anyone could make sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form, it would be Carl Jung. He had, in addition, a capacity for very lucid dreaming and occasional visions. In the fall of 1913, he had a vision of a "monstrous flood" engulfing most of Europe and lapping at the mountains of his native Switzerland. He saw thousands of people drowning and civilization crumbling. Then, the waters turned into blood. This vision was followed, in the next few weeks, by dreams of eternal winters and rivers of blood. He was afraid that he was becoming psychotic. But on August 1 of that year, World War I began. Jung felt that there had been a connection, somehow, between himself as an individual and humanity in general that could not be explained away. From then until 1928, he was to go through a rather painful process of self-exploration that formed the basis of all of his later theorizing. He carefully recorded his dreams, fantasies, and visions, and drew, painted, and sculpted them as well. He found that his experiences tended to form themselves into persons, beginning with a wise old man and his companion, a little girl. The wise old man evolved, over a number of dreams, into a sort of spiritual guru. The little girl became "anima," the feminine soul, who served as his main medium of communication with the deeper aspects of his unconscious. A leathery brown dwarf would show up guarding the entrance to the unconscious. He was "the shadow," a primitive companion for Jung's ego. Jung dreamt that he and the dwarf killed a beautiful blond youth, whom he called Siegfried. For Jung, this represented a warning about the dangers of the worship of glory and heroism which would soon cause so much sorrow all over Europe -- and a warning about the dangers of some of his own tendencies towards hero-worship, of Sigmund Freud! Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the unconscious itself -- not the "little" personal unconscious that Freud made such a big deal out of, but a new collective unconscious of humanity itself, an unconscious that could contain all the dead, not just our personal ghosts. Jung began to see the mentally ill as people who are haunted by these ghosts, in an age where no-one is supposed to even believe in them. If we could only recapture our mythologies, we would understand these ghosts, become comfortable with the dead, and heal our mental illnesses. Critics have suggested that Jung was, very simply, ill himself when all this happened. But Jung felt that, if you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well. The elder Jung started Carl on Latin when he was six years old, beginning a long interest in language and literature -- especially ancient literature. Besides most modern western European languages, Jung could read several ancient ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the original Hindu holy books. Carl was a rather solitary adolescent, who didn't care much for school, and especially couldn't take competition. He went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he found himself the object of a lot of jealous harassment. He began to use sickness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint under pressure. Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career. After graduating, he took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. He also taught classes at the University of Zurich, had a private practice, and invented word association at this time! Long an admirer of Freud, he met him in Vienna in 1907. The story goes that after they met, Freud canceled all his appointments for the day, and they talked for 13 hours straight, such was the impact of the meeting of these two great minds! Freud eventually came to see Jung as the crown prince of psychoanalysis and his heir apparent. But Jung had never been entirely sold on Freud's theory. Their relationship began to cool in 1909, during a trip to America. They were entertaining themselves by analyzing each others' dreams (more fun, apparently, than shuffleboard), when Freud seemed to show an excess of resistance to Jung's efforts at analysis. Freud finally said that they'd have to stop because he was afraid he would lose his authority! Jung felt rather insulted. World War I was a painful period of self-examination for Jung. It was, however, also the beginning of one of the most interesting theories of personality the world has ever seen. After the war, Jung traveled widely, visiting, for example, tribal people in Africa, America, and India. He retired in 1946, and began to retreat from public attention after his wife died in 1955. He died on June 6, 1961, in Zurich.
    
    Glossary:
    The Seal of Solomon:There is a hexagram called 'The Seal of Solomon'. It has two different side lenghts. One of them is 1 and the other T^-1 = phi^-1 = (1+sqrt[5])/2. Has anyone ever seen or heard about it before?? I would love to hear something about it's 'history' - when, who, where...etc It is to be used in a project I'm writing about Greek historical math and the crisis concerning irrational numbers. The two irrational numbers I'm focusing on are sqrt(2) and phi, both illustrated as a diagonal in a regular polygon; the square and the regular pentagon. Perhaps you now guessed why this certain hexagon is so interesting to me...it combines the unit, sqrt(2) and phi with a diagonal of a hexagon (next polygon in the row)! And if any of you know how to prove that the shorter diagonal is sqrt(2) without using the trigonometrical functions (sin, cos, tan and all those). It can easily be done by using cosinus relations, but that's not very satisfying, if you know what I mean.
    Enneagram: The Sufis believe the "design" ("naqsh") is hidden underneath appearances, which are false: reality lies beneath appearances. They must see through outward appearances to find the truth, the reality, under them, where the design can be found. This especially includes looking beneath their own appearances. They must come to know their "real selves" and only then they can know "Reality". To know Reality, and then act on it, is the ultimate goal of the Sufi religion. Discovering one's "true self" and the real motives for everything one does, concealed as the Sufis believe they are beneath false appearances, is vital to the Sufi religion; it is not part of Christianity. On the other hand, goodness and holiness, to know, love, and serve God on Earth and be happy with Him forever in Heaven, are the proper goals of the Christian, and these are not goals for the Sufi. If evil must be done for the sake of the design, that is not a problem for them. They believe the ends always justify the means: it makes no difference at all whether human evolution is set right through good or through evil actions on the part of the Sufi.

    My comments: According to post modernist Jack Derrida: there's no such thing as the real self. In his final analysis ( when he deconstructs his mind, there's nothing there, but some chatter. So Plato's famous saying " Know Thyself is meaningless to the post moderns. Anyway, how does one know oneself?)

    Another definition: The Enneagram is one of the newest personality systems in use, and emphasizes psychological motivations. Its earliest origins are not completely clear - the circular symbol may have originated in ancient Sufi traditions, and was used by the esoteric teacher George Gurdjieff (1866-1949). The Enneagram personality types as they are most commonly known today originated more recently, with Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo. In the last few decades, the system has undergone further change, incorporating modern psychological ideas in the writings of Naranjo, Helen Palmer, Kathy Hurley/Theodorre Donsson, and Don Riso/Russ Hudson. here essentially the Enneagram is a system of assigning a number from 1 to 9 to oneself and every human being. This number is said to reveal the hidden motivation for everything a person does. Intelligence is given three "centers": thought, emotion, and instinct. Mainly because of the environment, the three centers are always imbalanced. The result of this imbalance is that a person's "true self" is always hidden beneath a "false self". The Enneagram is supposed to enable a person to gain knowledge of his true self, exposing the true motivations for actions and illusions developed regarding himself and regarding how to deal with the world. (I guess this can help) The Enneagram - Symbol of All and Everything
    What the Enneagram Is and Is Not. The Enneagram is a diagram for the cooperative functioning of the two fundamental cosmic laws, the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, so structuring the Overall Universal Law. The Enneagram is not a list of personality types. The Enneagram is a sacred, very powerful symbol, brought to us by Gurdjieff himself, and by no other. It is not a Sufi symbol. If not correctly used, the enneagram can be harmful, due to its high power of transformation. This is why Gurdjieff left it only in the sphere of oral teaching. From this we conclude that the Enneagram is not to be used superficially, without knowledge of the laws. According to Gurdjieff's Five Being-obligolnian-strivings (Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, p. 386), only the last striving is concerned with helping others. Do not try to help other when you do not know. Either you know and do things in the right way, or just do nothing, and live your life the way you can. This is the point of view of this book. The Enneagram - Symbol of All inner octaves:
    Line of will:a warrior waits for his will! (Carlos Casteneda via Don Juan)
    Objective music: It seems that there's no objective music. Music by its very nature subjective, but what about the sitar music from India.
    In the legend of Orpheus there are hints of objective music, for Orpheus used to impart knowledge by music. Snake charmers’ music in the East is an approach to objective music, of course very primitive. Very often it is simply one note which is long drawn out, rising and falling only very little; but in this single note “inner octaves” are going on all the time and melodies of “inner octaves” which are inaudible to the ears but felt by the emotional center. And the snake hears this music, or, more strictly speaking, he feels it, and he obeys it. The same music, only a little more complicated, and men would obey it.From In Search of the Miraculous, p. 297
    Objective Art: To define what I call objective art is difficult (it's difficult to define any art) first of all because you ascribe to subjective art the characteristics of objective art, and secondly because when you happen upon objective works of art you take them as being on the same level as subjective works of art…. In subjective art everything is accidental. The artist, as I have already said, does not create; with him “it creates itself. ” This means that he is in the power of ideas, thoughts, and moods which he himself does not understand and over which he has no control whatever. They rule him and they express themselves in one form or another. And when they have accidentally taken this or that form, this form just as accidentally produces on man this or that action according to his mood, tastes, habits, the nature of the hypnosis under which he lives, and so on. There is nothing invariable; nothing is definite here. In objective art there is nothing indefinite. (from In Search of the Miraculous p. 296)
    Inner Octaves: An octav whitin an octave. See Kamancheh it's an instrument. You can hear this music on the youtube. I can also hear it in my dreams....almost like a memory. I want to listen to it for a long time. It's in the Meeting with Remarckle Man"movie. It is msgical.
    
    Additional Notes:
    This probably will be moved.

    Gurdjieff recognizes seven general types of Man - Man Number Seven is almost unimaginably evolved relative to us. He defines four levels of consciousness: 1) what we usually call sleep, 2) our normal state of so-called waking consciousness, 3) self consciousness - characterized partly by constant "self-remembering", and a capacity to act with non-mechanical independence - and 4) objective consciousness, the level of enlightened, transcendent Being. To pursue awakened, independent Being is harrowingly difficult. One needs a relentless will to work, rooted in an inexhaustible Wish, a hunger to learn to be - and, even that is not enough. One also needs help from others. And there's worse news yet: authentic help is hard to find, since few in our world are awake. Few have created real I. We live in a world of sleepwalkers, and it shows. As James Moore puts it, "We are all asleep. This is not a metaphor but a fact. It is also a social perception more subversive and revolutionary than anything remotely conceived by all the Troskys and Kropotkins of history; an idea which, like death and the sun, cannot be looked at steadily - a world in trance!"

    Mandichia Upanishad 4 states of consciousness 1, 2, 3 ,4 Turia
    Russel"Principia Mathematics
    The flame which kindels desireand illuminates thought never burns more than a few seconds. the rest of the time we just try to remember it.
    The map is not the teretory. daydreaming=living death.
    Paly the Shakuhachi.
    By the time Hesse returned to civilian life in 1919 his marriage had shattered. His wife had a severe episode of psychosis, but even after her recovery, Hesse saw no possible future with her. Their home in Bern was divided and Hesse resettled alone in the middle of April in Ticino. He occupied a small farm house near Minusio (close to Locarno), living from 25 April to 11 May in Sorengo. On 11 May he moved to the town Montagnola and rented four small rooms in a castle-like building, the 'Casa Camuzzi'. Here he explored his writing projects further; he began to paint, an activity which is reflected in his next major story Klingsor's Last Summer, published in 1920. In 1922 Hesse's novel Siddhartha appeared, which showed the love for Indian culture and Buddhist philosophy, which had already developed in his earlier life. In 1924 Hesse married the singer Ruth Wenger, the daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger and aunt of Meret Oppenheim. This marriage never attained any stability, however. In 1923 Hesse received Swiss citizenship. His next major works, Kurgast (1925) and The Nuremberg Trip (1927), were autobiographical narratives with ironic undertones, and foreshadowed Hesse's following novel, Steppenwolf, which was published in 1927. In the year of his 50th birthday, the first biography of Hesse appeared, written by his friend Hugo Ball. Shortly after his new successful novel, he turned away from the solitude of Steppenwolf and married art historian Ninon Dolbin, née Ausländer. This change to companionship was reflected in the novel Narcissus and Goldmund, appearing in 1930. In 1931 Hesse left the Casa Camuzzi and moved with Ninon to a large house (Casa Hesse) near Montagnola, which was built according to his wishes.
    Robert Duval Tango Strange melady from CS Lewis Paul-Jean Toulet
    Strange Roads The Great God Pan, Gloomy Sunday.