just listened to part one of ken with rupert sheldrake

can anyone tell me the difference between the theory of morphogenetic fields and the hundredth monkey theory ?

they sound like the same thing to moi

 

Hey there FF my darling....

I think the difference is largely around interpretation.  The 100th Monkey theory might indeed be pointing to the effect of morphic resonance (if the studies weren't actually a comlpete hoax) but it's when someone begins to think of THEMSELVES as the 100th Monkey that you really run into rampant narcissism and embarrasingly vulgar displays of Ego Gone Wild.  It's one thing to notice the patterns and symmetries in Form, and quite another to place ourselves in the very center of these patterns, as if the entire universe will somehow crumble if you don't play out the divine role your remarkable birth has fated you with--i think these are the sorts of sentiments that are generally jumped to when we think of "The 100th Monkey syndrome...."

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Corey W. deVos (dj rekluse)
Brand Manager, Integral Naked
Audio Manager, Integral Institute
Managing Editor, KenWilber.com
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Yes, I so enjoy this kind of discussion.

Because this exchange is part dialogue and part integral educational, I understand why there would be a reiteration of integral theory, as always well-done. And I wanted to hear Rupert's material and outlook so much that I got frustrated when the time was gone without getting as much of it as was possible.

He and ken lay out the basics of formative causation and reinforcement of attractor states and conditions in a clear way that can be tracked, starting with simple seeming cosmic forms, then crystals, plant life, human embryos where the processes are more difficult to see, and to human psycho-socio-cultural processes that Ken lays out in integral theorizing.


One thing I like about hearing Rupert is that he starts before complex theory and at observation, curiosity, and then along the way through integration with other speculations, such as western and eastern cosmologies. He acknowledges that his early mental organizations were probably formed by some baseline philosophical conceptualizing, but he was guided a lot by the eyes and senses on material that was his academic, scientific discipline.

I think it is fun to see how platos and then aristotle's ideas, more ephemeral-like mental/cosmic occultly-anchored constructs are echoed as morphogenic fields, which I really like the sound of, and also in the more tidy integral language of nested holons at every imaginable level from fundamental form/structure onward.

Good stuff and I'm eager for more. Along with the other broadening/deepening human cultural interviews, easily worth the $10/month. ambo

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Ambo Suno

thx corey darling .. i had thought it was an interesting theory that once a hundred monkeys on one island exhibit a new behavior .. that monkeys on another island begin to also exhibit the same behavior .. i wasn't aware that there are little egos out there who credit themselves with being the 100th ..

 

 

ambo:

I wanted to hear Rupert's material and outlook so much that I got frustrated when the time was gone without getting as much of it as was possible.

the good news is that this was only part 1. the bad news is we don't know how many more parts we may get to see nor when.

kw and rs have one obvious thing in common: they aren't that well understand by the reputed experts. so it's good that at least they can occasionally get together and talk with someone who may half understand them. unfortunately, people like them are not usually understood and accepted by the powers that be. all too often it takes a subsequent generation for that to happen. put another way, a single individual, a first monkey, is not able to establish a kosmic habit on her own, and it can take quite awhile to get to the 100th one.

incidentally, kw wrote a chapter about rs's ideas that appears in vol. 4 of his collected works. it raises some very interesting questions, ambo, if you want to take a peek at where this conversation might go in subsequent parts.

ralph

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Yes, Ralph, it's fun to hear these two bright knowledgable people talk on this subject. I was lucky to hear Rupert speak with Krishnamurti, I think in the early 80's. Rupert and David Bohm also had conversations here, and I was lucky to spend a couple of weekends with David while he was exploring what "dialogue" could be about, but there only touching on his understanding of the unfolding of implicate order and morphogenic fields in the process of these "dialogue" dialogues. Bohm and Krishnamurti were similar in their appreciations of deep-going conversations with one another, as you suggest between Rupert and Ken. I'm sure K appreciated Rupert's scientific investigations of how life works. In my own turgid way, even from my low spiritual altitudes, I have been quite interested in these sparks of life, these bright people, for a few decades. Gradually, at least my cognitive understanding is increasing. This exchange between Ken and Rupert woke this good stuff up for me again. Yoh, ambo

PS- edit - I am embarrassed to say that I may be confabulating something about my memory of the K-Rupert dialogue. I remember R being here and all of the excitement around the conversations with K, and how Rupert and David's ideas were fleshing out K's understanding; and I remember sitting in on so many small gatherings and seeing so many videos of various conversations - I'm suddenly not sure. Ehem, blush, oh, well, ambo

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Ambo Suno

"Be the first monkey."   Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

;)

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the fabric begins to tear
and i don't really care

speaking of morphogenetic fields .. i think i'm growing wings out of my shoulder blades

and i'm sure i'm not the first or the 100th 

 

 

Enjoyed this talk, alot to be getting on with.

I have just delved into KWs theory of subtle energy (excerpt G) and, as is often the case when reading his work, I feel like he is merely unvocevering self evident truth or verbalising and clarifying my own hotch potch of understandings.

I hope that ken brings his work on subtle energies into the discussion at a later stage, as I was often thinking of Sheldrake as I was reading it.

I have one question regarding subtle energies and this conversation. Ken mentions a process of involution, in which godhead unfolds itself through various ontological realms or 'sheaths' eventualy manifesting in gross/matter bodies and experience.

In our evolution back up to godhead he implies that we develop a spectrum of 'bodies' through which these pre-ordained realms (life,emotion,mind,transcendental) can manifest. all good so far.

however in this discussion and elsewhere he is increasingly forwarding the sense that evolutionary stages are not pregiven (partly to placate the post modernists?) and are created out of emegent novelty.

so where does he really stand??

Hi - aldous'.

I like your question, and I like the idea, the dynamic that is apparently expressed in your phrase "emergent novelty".

As I have finished this post, I am coming back to the top with my apology that I don't get directly to your questions, but I riff meanderingly a bit, as is often my way. I hope it connects with you sufficiently. I also hope it is sufficiently intelligible.

"I have one question regarding subtle energies and this conversation. Ken mentions a process of involution, in which godhead unfolds itself through various ontological realms or 'sheaths' eventually manifesting in gross/matter bodies and experience.
In our evolution back up to godhead he implies that we develop a spectrum of 'bodies' through which these pre-ordained realms (life,emotion,mind,transcendental) can manifest. all good so far.
however in this discussion and elsewhere he is increasingly forwarding the sense that evolutionary stages are not pregiven (partly to placate the post modernists?) and are created out of emegent novelty.
so where does he really stand??"
It may be that noone here is able to answer your question succinctly, and it may be that the question therefore will have to continue to percolate as you discover whether it's this or that or some where in between or something else. I am curious how you think it works.

I personally have been slow to grok this idea, this model of 'godhead' unfolding. I am getting this view's analogy to the many forms in manifest life arising and/or organizing according to some 'intelligence' of morphogenic fields, and the analogy of encompassing ideals or mental/cosmic constructs of Plato and Aristotle, and that these can be modeled as holons. So I can't help you with this - I'm slow to get to the party.

It sounds that you have read and heard other KW information so maybe you can sort it out from there. If you haven't heard his exchange with Michael Murphy, I think they may get into this subject, partly via Aurobindo's views. I don't specifically remember Ken's "increasingly forwarding the sense that evolutionary stages are not pregiven" exactly - but I like that. I also wonder what "pregiven" might mean. I'm sort of sure that it doesn't mean an exact unfolding according to a blueprint, a totally mechanistically modeled DNA-like unfolding. I'm quite sure that he would model evolutions unfolding as an interaction of various dynamics and materials and somewhat "pregiven" form tendencies. I guess that this is more how I put it as I try to guess with you.

I feel pretty comfortable with the scientific language of nonlinear dynamic systems that Rupert used, as with "attractors" or attractor states, conditions, patternings. These patterns though having some momentum or inertia to continue in a certain way, also are in dynamic flux, so they may suddenly change. A trough may surge up and become wave-top as some, perhaps, invisible to us occurence, shifts elsewhere in the field. An entire field, the appearance of things may be re-arranged, formed, manifested. If there is some templating-like dynamic as with a morphogenic field, it may 'tell' the star fish to grow a new appendage to replace the broken one, or when there are particular and exceedingly complex conditions present in an organism, biologically certainly, and maybe sociobiologically, then individuals and groups may begin to morph into other configurations that over time become more reliable patternings.

Biologically, and scientifically in terms of our modeling of atoms, molecules, cells, organs and such, as you know, we say that new "higher" levels of organization occur over time. This model, this metaphor is applied to evolutions of social groups, consciousness, spiritual attunement. The more modern and postmodern culturally easy way to think about these "evolutions" is apparently from the bottom up. We climb out of the muck towards finer and less dense vibrational attunements. Is the 'godhead' down theory simply wanting to give acknowledgement of descending influence, as much as the ascending often gets? I don't understand this so well, but isn't this where the words "unfolding" and "enfolding" can also come in? Are sometimes these 'intelligent' organizational latencies and dynamics that manifest from lower to higher invisibly enfolded into a godheadness or co-creating a "godhead"? And sometimes isn't it 'seen' as preexisting "godhead" unfolding in a somewhat designlike way our lives and the materials and energies of our lives? (I don't think I'm applying this unfolding/enfolding quite right or completely, and I'd be happy if you, aldous' or someone corrected me, enlarged my view. I am adding my questions along side of yours.)

I suppose that regardless of the direction of manifestation, I think you are asking how predetermined, how set, how lock-step does Ken think that the steps, stages, and levels of organization are as new organization come into being. One way that you might be wanting to clarify is, "How linear is this unfolding from above or below?" No? Maybe you are wondering, as do I sometimes, "How predictably rhythmic does he think that evolution happens?" My sense of him is that he mostly thinks that the stage level categories are at least roughly mapped out already, and that their order is pregiven. Unless I misunderstand him, he often uses the word "always" to describe the order of evolutionary stages and he does that out of the power of the idea of the subsequent and the greater subsuming and integrating the prior and the lesser organized. If you have questions about this "always", as applied to the may lines of development of which he speaks, like social, psychological, moral, spiritual, and so on, I too have questions about the blanket application of this evolutionary model and metaphor with any similar suggested tidiness of molecular holons subsuming and integrating atomic holons as we learned in our science classes.

I am trying to remain open, aldous', to what Ken is offering in his synthesis of many things into a unifying grand map and theory, while I have and want to respect the myriad of loose ends flapping in the winds of my own making and the winds of the cosmos/kosmos


'god' speed, ambo

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Ambo Suno

hi ambo, hi aldous?

have you checked out the chapter in vol.4? of course, it was written before the excerpts, but it more specifically addresses sheldrake's notion of morphogenetic fields.

i think the answer to your question, aldous?, is neither 'either... or...', but 'both... and...'. it depends how you are looking at it. evolutionary biologists used to like to talk about how 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', until that was supposedly disproved. again, it depends how you're looking at it. you can say that ontogeny follows the morphogentic fields of phylogeny, but is it all habit? isn't there some new creativity? yes, there are the pregivens of phylogeny, but we aren't enslaved to them, are we?

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Hi Guys, thanks for your thoughts 'n good writing.

I suppose it is important to differenciate between levels of being

for instance I can see how societal movement develop habitualy, and have a tendency to pop up in the same order around the world. They appear to be rigid, but are really just engrained patterns of what were once innovative and creative decisions made by the leading edge of consciousness.

however there are greater patterns that override even that process. For instance as ken says, the movement from ego to group to world and kosmic centred development. We can freely decide the tone and texture of our experience, but that movement appears to be quite predefined and fundamental

As is often the case, when I encounter such intractable dialectic between two force (free-will/determinism, form and emptiness) my mind kind of blanks out and rests in the eternal paradox between them.

I would like to see 'paradox' as a felt  and  lived experience make its way into the functioning paradigms of all areas of society.

aldous:

I would like to see 'paradox' as a felt and lived experience make its way into the functioning paradigms of all areas of society.

hi, again, aldous,

wikipedia says: A paradox can be an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition; or it can be, seemingly opposite, an apparent contradiction that actually expresses a non-dual truth (cf. Koan).

this first possibility sounds to me like what we call a logical contradiction, which is what can happen at an orange (form-op)altitude, and i imagine this has to happen to us a number of times for us to realize that there is a problem with orange itself, and that we need to begin looking beyond it. in this sense, logical contradictions serve something like Koans to get us from orange to green.

i believe ken wilber has suggested that each level of consciousness has its paradoxes, which can operate in the same way to transform beyond a given level in order to resolve the paradoxes we're confronted with at that level. in the work we're anxiously waiting for from him (actually two works: 'overview' and 'superview'), he distinguishes between two types of levels, called structures and states. structures, he says, are dynamically stable patterns, which partly build on each other in such a way that they have to be assimilated in a prescribed order without any skipping: they are nested, holarchical, in contrast to states, which are mutually exclusive. while Koans are used in state training, my sense is that they actually promote the necessary structural transformation to be able to inhabit higher states in a more permanent way, so to speak.

gotta go now,

ralph

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Hi, Ralph - I don't have his collected works. If I come across it, I'll try to remember a chapter in volume 4.  Yes, I agree - it does seem that it would have to be creativity and unknown dynamics plus the current pattern reinforced into it's current form. Wellness, ambo

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Ambo Suno

hi ambo,

some of the excerpts are also good to look at: G, as aldous mentioned, and i think also A and, maybe, B. they can be found at one of wilber's subsites at shambhala.com or kenwilber.com.

vol. 4 comprises alot of material, including 'integral psychology' and his contribution to 'transformations of consciousness'. what i've read of it has been really good, including some material that can't be found anywhere else (i know of).

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