This is a retrospective of week 5, 2024 (2024-01-29–2024-02-04). Here is the retrospective of the previous week.
I finished reading Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali by Leanne Whitney this week. I found the book very interesting and will write a book review in the coming weeks.
Whitney writes,
Classical Yoga methodology, through the total involution of thought forms, mobilizes a radically empirical scientific methodology.1
Whitney suggests,
…our affective states…may offer empirical evidence of life’s power realizing itself over and above our knowledge construction and re-presentation.2
Leanne Whitney mentions that Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli tried to understand the correlations between the material and mental domains. Whitney emphasizes the following three main points in the Pauli-Jung framework:
- The aspects of mind and matter are not reducible to one another.
- The underlying domain is holistic and does not consist of separate elements.
- The mental and material aspects emerge by a decomposition of the whole.
The underlying domain, or implicate order, is “independent of its observation and any knowledge construction”.3 When “we see the world through subject-object distinction…we psychologically solidify “something” that in essence cannot be solidified ontically”.4
To claim subjects and objects are literally distinct, and not just apparently distinct, is to confuse the epistemic with the ontic.5
I wrote this about moving beyond the grasping of the mind.
I added A Job to Die For by Lisa Cullen to my reading list. It’s a book about why so many are killed, injured, or made ill at work, and what to do about it.
I listened to Edward Frenkel’s 2018 Einstein Lecture during the week. Frenkel is a Russian-American mathematician. He quoted Sofya Kovalevskaya, another Russian mathematician, in his talk:
It is not possible to be a mathematician without being a poet at heart. It seems to me that a poet should see what others can’t see, see deeper than others. And that’s what a mathematician should do as well.6
Edward Frenkel says,
Truth cannot be expressed by an algorithm—in principle. … Even the process of mathematical discovery…has elements which cannot be captured by computation alone. There is more to what we do.7
It’s up to us how we approach the world!
Without imagination–without the sense of wonder, the sense of awe–there is no wholeness. … It’s all in our hands, it’s up to us, it’s our choice.8
I wrote this about wholeness.
Notes:
1. Leanne Whitney, Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid..
4. Ibid..
5. Ibid..
6. Sofya Kovalevskaya, 2018 Einstein Lecture: Edward Frenkel, YouTube, https://youtu.be/VZbNOrcsWLQ. Accessed: 2024-02-03. Published: 2018-04-25.
7. Edward Frenkel, 2018 Einstein Lecture, YouTube, https://youtu.be/VZbNOrcsWLQ?t=2501. Accessed: 2024-02-03. Published: 2018-04-25.
8. Edward Frenkel, 2018 Einstein Lecture, YouTube, https://youtu.be/VZbNOrcsWLQ?t=3132. Accessed: 2024-02-03. Published: 2018-04-25.