Blood sacrifice
How we hope emerging new answers by processes dressed-up to be palatable by reason?
Wherever the remnants of mysteries appear, like the bull fight in Spain, they are one by one eradicated paying no heed to the less rational aspect of our natures. How we burn up trust and credence, stake and lose reputations, on the hope of emerging new answers by processes dressed-up to be palatable by reason? It is a process that brings us face to face with the most incomprehensible contradictions. Who hasn’t heard the clamor for entrepreneurial discovery only to be followed by a request for a business plan?
Why is that we tend finding the rituals where anything irrational takes place totally abhorrent? Whether the Bullfight, or something else. Why do we fear blood, the life giving current which may indeed stop, but on which we thrive?
The intellect finds it all too easy to sever the connection to the blood, the mysteries, the possibility emerging from the impossible, from the unseen — the irrational, the creative. An agenda, a plan and set of principles are much preferred.
Even the wonderful Internet may be dying when corporates snap up cool community places one after the next as property, and nurturing places lose ground to tech-dude gentrification.
Blind spots
This is a huge blind spot not only in science, but in all ‘rational’ activity. How can’t we see that we remain mostly prisoner of magical thinking when most of our intentions fail or foul up — innovations, ideas, businesses, rules, you name it. We can’t educate creators, inventors, performers beyond the level of repetition which never excels. Life and excellence we simply have no clue how they emerge from a divided and splintered prism of reality.
Yet despite our voiced disbelief, we stay as true to the mysteries as ever. The blood we spill may look different but is it not clearly visible? Think of how we constantly gift grants and subsidies, careers and prestige, and ask our young to become entrepreneurs with dismal chances of success? How we commit teams to projects that fail far too often? How we incessantly engage in innovation patterns that face staggering odds?
The situation to change is the connection to the mysteries, to the nuances of life that don’t yield to reason, that don’t follow a nice laid out logic we expect to find. The issue is that our fundamental guiding image of Freedom does not allow any sensuality in, and thus lacks any suitable means of steering a course with no rules (an order that we cannot understand.) The ex-ante conditions for transformation are never truly met, because of the loss of connection to the blood, the mystery of the Grail, of Noah’s Dove, critically the loss of any true moral freedom.
We will see in what follows how this situation is built up, and it may become clear then, why the hopes we have for a prosperous outcome rest on bringing together sworn opposites — reason and unreason, which our systems and methods are ill-equipped to do.
What can you restore with a mythological script?
Europa — a deeper pattern to bring balance to Liberty
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Sensuousness lost
The seemingly rational is revealed as magical and out of control. We know quite a bit about cognitive biases (so many) and our attention to the prevalence of irrational behavior grows (Kahneman, Ariely, and many others.) But what does it change? Why can´t we hear but our Echo? and see but our own image?
All are literary images the scientist Norbert Wiener used to make the point that we fool ourselves if we think we have our technologies firmly under control. That Wiener was instrumental in creating the technologies he warned about demonstrates the insistent obstinance of his peculiar genius.
The images came from, respectively, Goethe’s poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the “Fisherman and the Genie” fable in One Thousand and One Nights, and W.W. Jacobs’ short story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which a magical talisman gives an elderly couple more magic than they bargained for. The common theme is unexpected consequences, specifically the often tragic ones that can overtake us when we seek to exploit mechanisms of superhuman power.
“The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence,” Wiener wrote in 1964, “not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
The result is that consumption cannot gratify and grows unbounded. Diversity is subsumed in global common place experiences and no amount of activity seems to assuage the need to have meaningful events in life. Instagrams, Tweets, Kodak moments, trillions of pictures and notes and not one person to listen to your heart or mirror your true Self.
The sense of Aisthesis Eros is replaced by narcissism and delight: seeking knowledge as collections of facts, objects as possessions, austerity for spiritual exaltation, health (or its lack) as a form of addiction. But even the extremes of all sorts cannot compensate the general lack of meaning, the lack of health, of jobs. Some say it is globalization—but what is that beside an abstraction? Is it not a system of rules and expectations? Who if not the Libertas, overstretched order giver, civilizer, that has managed to drive nature out altogether?
Translators have turned aisthesis into ‘sense-perception,’ a British’s empiricist’s notion (Locke). But if we turn to the Greek ‘sense-perception’ this cannot be understood without taking into account the Greek Goddess of the senses or the organ of Greek sensation, the heart, and the root in the word — that sniffing, gasping, breathing in of the world (Baltes.)
In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, “Apollo and Daphne” pictures the moment when the Soul (the nymph Daphne) fled the light/love of Apollo and is turned into a Laurel tree by her father. The feminine principle sinks into nature, into earth, to avoid the willful desire, the body sinks into earth, in the dark, another aspect of the toads and ravens we saw in the Magic Circle. Apollo will wear the laurel crown thereafter to always remember her, slave to her passions that can overwhelm, worn as red robes.
What the myth communicates can be interpreted as the loss of sensuality. The Dove (Columbia, from Kolumbos “deep diver”)— that symbolizes this sensuality, and will guide at some point Noah back again to land, after the deluge, is lost in this tension with Libertas (related story).
Through sensation, the world is perceived as the sum of isolated objects, but it is sensuality what helps experience the isolated object, as belonging to a system of meaningful correspondences.When sensuality is disturbed problems arise to identify, control and integrate body image with natural image. (citing Gaston Bachelard’s Water and dreams, p24)
Narcissism is the sickness of sensuality. We could add that narcissism is also the sick aspect of Self that reflects and is reflected, and of the ego-reflector. The capacity to be reflected and to reflect — as ego function — is realized through sensuality. Sensuality allows us reflect our body image and experience our body as it is; it helps us reflect the natural image, making us aware of the other. A disturbed sensuality disturbs the reflective capacity. (citing Rudolf Ritzema, p98) —Maria Abach Klemm, The veiled personality.
To get a sense of what sensuality really is has become very hard. We really lack almost any points of reference for it is a process of the heart, of blood.
What is to ‘take in’ or breathe in the world? First, it means aspiring and inspiring the literal presentation of things by gasping. The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder. This aesthetic reaction which precedes intellectual wonder inspires the given beyond itself, letting each thing reveal its particular aspiration withing a cosmic arrangement.
Second, ‘taking in’ means taking to heart, interiorizing…
Third, ‘taking in’ means interiorizing the object into itself, into its image so that its imagination is activated (rather than ours), so that it shows its heart and reveals its ould, becoming personified and thereby lovable — lovable not only to us and because of us, but because its loveliness increases as its sense and its imagination unfold. —James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World (p.46)
There we find a challenge that any policy or our wills cannot solve. No best practices or imitation, no amount of prioritization and dissection, but something only experience and sincerest effort can grant — which takes us back to moral choice:
Reason grants you no concession: move a finger; what’s Simpler than that; and you’ll err. But no amount of incense Makes an ounce of wisdom cling to fools for an instant. It’s wrong to dabble in things; when you’re an oaf in Other ways, to dance even three steps of Bathyllus’ Satyr.
‘I am free.’ Why assume that; subject to so many things? Is the only master you recognise one who waves a rod? ‘Be off, boy, take Crispinus’s back-scrapers to the baths.’ Or who scolds? ‘Still hanging about, you idler?’ No bitter Slavery impels you, nothing external enters you and sets Your muscles working; but if what masters you is born Of diseased passions, how shall you emerge as freer than That slave, sent with the back-scrapers, fearing the whip? — Persius, Satire V
How could the qualities of the local life and the sensibility of culture become an activated sense instead of a mirror to the past, or mere custom?
Related Story
It is quite unavoidable, considering the recurrence of the myth, that what was once lived out symbolically as a psychological reality, is quite conceivable a pattern for modern man. It may be ascribed to coincidence that we fear most the rising seas, but clearly this is not the first time.
We can believe what we like about the human factor´s influence on climate change, but the manifestations are altogether the same. And the demands of the time call for a new type of freedom, which breeds in the restraint of the outpouring of passion. In favor of listening to what is truer of each one, and every local group. And this is what we rediscover every day in working with teams and groups learning about the subtle forces at work in co-creative activity.
Myth organizes our understanding of reality at deeper levels than we recognize. It is the basis of `pattern language´ which we use at Katlayst to design platform solutions for organizational growth and to deal with complex issues @growthpartners.eu
