What would drive our research if not capitalism?

Re: Post Human Variations ('Imaginary' vs. 'Imaginal')
by Debashish on Sat 27 Jan 2007 03:33 AM PST Profile Permanent Link
Ron, The "idyllic scenario" you present where "technology has disappeared into the human" is a seemingly non-dual world mediated by nano-technology. Moreover, you write that in this world "Commodification in the form of physical products is minimal, because we've grown beyond that." I find difficulties in imagining such a world (whether with the imagino phatastica or the mundus imaginalis) because of the two kinds of dualities and the nature of intermiscience of technology and capitalism I have pointed to in my postings on "Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies."

To start with the last, without the driving power of greed, the ignoble motivation of capitalism, it is difficult to think of this flash-point of technological history. What would drive our research if not capitalism? Stalinistic or Hitlerian governments? That would be a prospect far more frightening than neo-liberal globalization. The collective will towards human godhood? Without some desire motivation for the vital ego or some imposed coercion it has been impossible to mobilize the collective will of even small numbers of humans leave alone of the human race so from where can we expect this disappearance of collective apathy in the interests of Science and its global offerings? But even accepting for a moment that by some miracle "[c]ommodification in the form of physical products is minimal, because we've grown beyond that" - i.e. we have outgrown capitalism, what does this mean? Can nano-tech give us a non-dual world-experience?

The answer coming from the integral realization of Sri Aurobindo and that of the accumulated wisdom of Vedantic phenomenology is a resounding "no." No, because tech, whether nano or otherwise is ultimately a modeled reality, a more or less serviceable fragment masquerading as the integrality, not the non-dual knowledge underlying the appearance of Matter or of the totality of Universe or of the equivalence of Subject and Object.

Moreover, no, because a silicon intelligence as the substrate of non-duality has its own conditioning restrictions proper to its ontology - an essence which will always remain "different" from the essence of the human. This is the story of human "civilization" through the millenia - a story of ascent, decline and disintegration and repetitions under innumerable guises but doomed to be a labor of Sisyphus because it is the history of Mind trying to control Life - an ultimate impossibility since the laws of these two cosmic principles co-habiting the world and the human are radically discontinuous.

Finally, no, because the "idyllic scenario" you speak about is one which leaves the individual consciousness as a "consumer" of "universality" (a prime target for future capitalism), not as an universalized individuality. The human here remains dependent on extended prakritic instrumentation of a dubious non-duality and any such dependence is an objectification and commodification of the human. Unless we can be identified with purusha, as RC has brought out in his posting and take posession of the universe through identity in consciousness, we will only be the producers and recepients of imagino phantastica since mundus imaginalis, the Universal Subjective cannot be simulated by prakritic means however holistic but needs realization through becoming the One free of mediation. DB

by Rich on Sat 27 Jan 2007 01:51 PM PST Profile Permanent Link
The language of the Mazadean angeology of Corbin's inspired Sufism, would suggest that the soul has its own occult physiology chiefly expressed in its organ or perception which Corbin refers to as imaginito vera or active imagination. Although creative imagination finds its source here, the highest function of this organ of perception is to symbolize events in this world with their instantiations in other occult universes, chiefly among these is what he refers to as the archetypal earth (Earth of Hurqalya) of which this planet we know is but a faint echo. The development of this vision requires the cultivation of a subtle organ of perception that resides on a plane which materialist technology has no access (nano-technology included). To put it in Bertrand Russell's philosophical terminology, it is an organ of perception of a different logical type than any technological apparatus - which merely extends our gross earthly senses - can facilitate.

Moreover the transmutation of matter into the reality of its spiritual correspondences can only be accomplished by elevating sense data or sensual experience through this organ of the soul's perception. Here is a brief summary I have made, of the imaginal process whose goal is to facilitate the appearance of the angel. The angel has two aspects which are expressed as the individual soul (anima) and the soul of the world (anima mundi) From Corbin's masterpiece Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth -from Mazdean Iran to Shi-ite Iran - (Princeton University Press Bollingen Series)

1)The organ of sight is active imagination

2)Because of the psychic effects it produces in him who meditates and interiorizes it, is essentially carried out in the Earth of Hurqalya. (archetypal earth)

3)Alchemy transmutes the terrestrial elements into the subtle elements of the Earth of Hurqalya

4)The active imagination will not produce some arbitrary , even lyrical, construction standing between us and reality but will on the contrary function directly as a faculty of knowledge just as real as the sense organs. The organ is however not a sensory faculty but an archetypal image The property of the Image will be precisely that of effecting transmutation of sensory data, their resolution into the purity of the subtle world, in order to restore them as symbols to be deciphered

5) It changes the physical datum impressed upon the senses in a pure mirror, the things and beings of the earth raised to incandescence allow the apparition of their angels to penetrate to the visionary intuition.

6) The world of archetypal images is an intermediary world in which transmutation of the ephemeral into spiritual symbols take place and which, by virtue of this the world where the resurrection of bodies is effected

7) The angel takes shape exactly at the point where sensory data are raised to the diaphanous state of the active imagination rc