Friday, March 25, 2011

Jose Arguelles: Earth Ascending

Jose Arguelles: “art of living in harmony with the land, and deriving the greatest benefit, peace and prosperity from being the right place at the the right time is called feng-shui.” Stephen Skinner-- living earth manual 1982.
goes on to say “just as yoga cultivates the life force in man both East and West, so feng-shui can cultivate the life force or ch’i in the earth as easily in the West.”

  • astrobiology- mathematical expression with biological rhythms of the earth.

  • art and sciences in ancient Chinese civ. revolved around geomagnetic cycles and transformations of five elements _ I Ching. Taoist nature mysticism eventually the Ch’an (or Zen) Heaven-earth-man. that is the “axis”. “the resonance, of the self-existing order-- the natural hierarchy-- of the universe”. The resonance has never changed. same resonance, same frequency

  • both man and weather-- the changes of the phenomenal world available to our sense-- are unified by revolving around the same axis.

  • 17th century- Robert Fludd- “Cosmic Meteorology-- winds, earthquakes, rainbows AND their correspondence to psychic conditions and stages of development.

  • Binary progression.

  • Influenced. Posits an inherent sacredness that is non theistic and organic. Demonstrated by garden and landscape arts that were ‘birthed in China”.

    1978 George Leonard-- The Silent Pulse-- termed ergonomics- as the nature of a hologram. term descriptive of holistic knowing, i.e. “knowing that is simultaneously intuitive and rational, scientific and artistic.” Therefore holonomics described the order of reality, as well as the way we come to know and express that order.

  • principle governing whole systems. it is the study of the principle.

  • if the universe is holonomic, then there are holarchies (subsystems) that reflect the order of the total systems.

  • if this is true, then the parts and whole are facets of “one mutually interacting, interpenetrating set of orders and operations.”

  • there is capacity for self-transcending knowledge

  • non rational realm of knowing-- psi. dependent on the self-reflective consciousness; the clear perception and ability to account for and create order.

  • 18th century was blunted by the materialist sciences.


  • holonomics role is in unifying the various strands of thought the have come apart during the grinding war-torn course of the 20th century.”

  • this approach accounts for interdependence


Oliver Reiser- physicist
complete theory of any complex social phenomenon” philo of history and theory of man. human society as a part of the “evolving giant creature” (earth)
radiation belt and psi field-- 2 poles or binary elements of which generate between them the “world sensorium”. Reisner refers to as the “guiding field controlling the psychosocial evolution of mankind.”

  • all this implies that the human mind and the environment are connected and can actually operate in harmony.


Pierre Teilhard de Chardin-- catholic mystic and paleontologist.

  • termed “noosphere” the thinking layer of the earth. a “probable place and disposition of the thinking element through the universe.” Planets with noosphere, far from being a curiousity in nature, would quite simply be the * normal and ultimate product of matter carried to its completion.”

  • supposition that the noosphere was like “an envelope thrown like a very thin but super active film all around the earth.”


pointing towards the planetization of consciousness. he says, the manifestation of noosphere is “dependent upon the appearance of man as a self-reflective being.

Oliver Reiser-- physicist at the University of Pittsburgh. 1966.

  • what Reiser called the psi field was a combination of Chardin’s noosphere with Van Allens radiation belts and the genetic code (with the binary double helix system)

  • this field “ functions as both a shield and as an electromagnetic membrane recharging and recirculating the atmosphere of the earth. DNA of course has proven to be the decipherable code common to all living organisms, from protozoa to protean man.”

  • genetic code and radiation belts were “discovered” in 1953.

  • Reiser envisioned this field something like a planetary cerebral cortex. The two hemispheres somehow corresponded to the right and left sides of the brain, correspond somehow to the two hemispheres of Western (rational) and Eastern (intuitive) thought.”

  • Suggestion of complimentary thought: the intuition of the East wit the rational of the West comprise a global totality. 2 side of the global brain. Which is happening right now. With globalization the rational and intuitive are blending, merging and sharing to unite the two together.


  • the BINARY CODE:
    pos/neg division. underlies the genetic code. but also the electrical, electromagnetic, and and neurological functions as well. **?
    operates:
    sunspots (regulate the earth’s magnetic field and appearance of the aurorae), synaptic leaps in brain functions (neurons processing information as well as computer programming), and most minutely-- the atomic structure (the stabilization of electrons and protons).
    that all these binary operations figure in the composite description of the psi bank only gives further weight and substance to the conceptualization of the psi bank as a holonomic mind (or brain) giving at this point in time an actual conscious direction and purpose t o the evolution of the planet.” p. 18
    Jose goes on to say,

this read-out would provide us with not only an ideologically sanitized nonsectarian guide to our psychosocial evolution as it has developed this far, but also with a gauge and map of our future as well. In this way the psi bank offers a full-blown philosophy of the history and theory of man, while providing a completely non-linear, holistic interpretation of man’s relationship to the organismic unfolding of planet earth as a conscious member of the universe.” p. 18

THE HISTORY: While studying Art history in 1969, Jose was dissatisfied with the methodology of the academic discipline of the subject. He was looking for a just and comprehensive approach that went beyond The European Renaissance. He found that all art history textbooks and all course in the US and Europe presumed that the “high point of and even the reason for the history of art occurred in the Euro Renaissance.” To correct this bias he went a quest to establish a methodology that was genuinely global.

He was pressed against a two-fold barrier. One was simply the shear challenge of undertaking such a task. To establish such a global method was to chronological the history of art that was not only “herculean, but encyclopedic, and to do justice to the scope of it.” The second barrier was precisely the hardened institution he was trying to expand. By looking to understand the deeper historical and universal patterns, he was inherently challenging and pushing against the established artistic histories of major civilization regions, cultural episodes and spiritual traditions that he was very well in the midst of perusing.

In the wanderings through time, he came to see that the artistic expression of a people was inseparable from their world-view, and that beneath the bewildering array of names, styles and cultures there lay a common psycho cultural root and civilization structure. It was in the effort to find the common underlying principles and causation for the similar forms, symbols, and techniques of expression that led him to consider a mental or psychic medium of diffusion (the spreading of these forms in the widely separated geocultural zones).

In the course of following the “thread he began to unravel”, he stumbled upon three essential components to the structure and function of the psi bank. These were, I Ching or The Book of Changes; the Sacred Calendar of ancient Mesoamerica known as the Tzolkin among the Mayan an d the Tonalpohualli among the Aztecs; and the resonant field model of Charles Henry.

Jose states, the I Ching is not to be considered Chinese. That would be to say that electricity is American because Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison were pioneers in the understanding use of it. I Ching should rather be considered the code of biopsycic transformation-- “based on the binary permutations of eight primary triplet structures, thus yielding a total of sixty four six-lined structures, kua, or hexagrams. Much like the DNA codons are the code of more purely biological transformations.

The Sacred Calendar-- has “long baffled archeologists, scholars and historians in the general for the simple reason that as a calendar it operates on a 260-day cycle.” The permutations are brought upon through the combination of 13 numbers and 20 symbols; thus yielding 260 possibilities. This perpetually repeating calendar or sequence was found to “mesh” with the solar cycle every 52 years, and the Venusian cycle every 104 years. Generally this calendar played a highly significant role in both everyday and high cultural affairs of ancient Mesoamerican civilization from its inception some 3,000 years ago to its demise no more than 500 years ago. No known “organic terrestrial cycle could be found to which the 260- day cycle had a correspondence.” To whom was this cycle devised? Why and when?

The system is vigesimal ,counting by twenties instead of by tens. Also by employing the dot and bar notation system (similar to the broken and unbroken line system of the I Ching), the pattern of pulsations emerge and are considered in relation to the binary sunspot cycles.

Charles Henry (1852-1926) French scientist, mathematician and philosopher. In Generalization of the Theory of Radiant Energy (1924), e wanted to present a spherical model to indicate a condition of dynamic equilibrium “otherwise known as the ‘atom of life’ consisting of three intersecting fields of resonance: electromagnetic, gravitational and bio psychic.” p. 21.

These three intersecting fields were not meant to psycho cultural merely as a atomic model or structure, but as the “three resonant experience of reality may be defined.” p. 21. These 3 fields correspond to the I Ching’s heaven, earth and man. Heaven being the electromagnetic field- the world of the senses, as well as the sensations comprising our experience of the phenomenal world. Earth corresponding to the gravitational field, the grounding and evolving “terrestrial-physical experience”. And finally man, seen in the biosychic field, as the DNA-linked biological organism and the self-reflective mind, knowing and joining heaven and earth.

Jose claims, while shamanism provides the common psycho cultural root for human social development, it is the correspondence between “mathematical heaven and biological earth that invested the emergence of the seven pristine streams of civilization (with a common geomantic world-view and hieratic structure). Pristine is used to describe the civilizations “which appeared to have emerged and developed quite independent of each other.” These include: Egypt (Nilotic), Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica, Andean (Peru) and Nigeria (West Africa).

Jose says:

  • emerging at different points in time, the streams comprise of a “geochronological totality, unfolding as the hieratic octave of civilization.” p.22

  • built and expressed differently, all share a uniform degree of sophistication.

  • discovered a common artistic or iconographical similarities that deeply unify the otherwise often geographically and chronologically disparate streams of pristine civ.

  • he posits, “if civ were a unitary function of global unfolding, and humanity in reality a single organism, then the underlying cause and principle for the diffusion of common ideas, motifs, and symbols would be in the normal course of events and would not necessarily depend on material diffusion.”

Talks about 4 stages of human psycocultural development:

  1. Holonomic topocosm

  2. Pristine civilizations- independent emergence.

  3. Rise of cosmopolitan religions-- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam (consequent creation of the medical world) imperial social structures. They shared much in common. The artistic expression developed by the spiritual forces, possessed common qualities. again not necessarily explicable by means of material diffusion. universal mental factor?

  4. Global-industrial- “swiftly undid whatever common aesthetic, spiritual or cultural language was being forged in the medieval world.” is this too bias? Materialist science + industrial technology created a kind of universal condition he calls “holonomic amnesia, a forgetfulness not only of the whole nature of things but also greater common purpose. Institutionalization. patriotism, racial bigotry, ideological chauvinism, dominated by an unbending allegiance to and faith in the alleged problem-solving power of materialist science” p. 22


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