Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

The CBC Massey Lectures 2009by Wade Davis

CBC Series audio 

Lecture 1 - Season of the Brown Hyena

© Wade Davis One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that, in the Amazon, the Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of the Dharma is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.

But whether we travel with the nomadic Penan in the forests of Borneo, a Vodoun acolyte in Haiti, a curandero in the high Andes of Peru, a Tamashek caravanseri in the red sands of the Sahara, or a yak herder on the slopes of Chomolungma, all these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope. Together the myriad of cultures makes up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well being of the planet as is the biological web of life that we know as the biosphere.

You might think of this social web of life as an “ethnosphere,” a term perhaps best defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we, as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species, have created.

Lecture 2 - The Wayfinders

The ancient Polynesians, Nainoa Thompson told me, were not navigators in a modern sense so much as wayfinders. Sailing from Tahiti for Oahu, for example, they did not set course for Pearl Harbor; they set out to find a chain of islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago. Moreover, the distances in the Pacific are not as formidable as they appear on a chart. With the exception of the three most distant points of the Polynesian Triangle, Rapa Nui, Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand), no voyage from Melanesia through Polynesia has to traverse more than 500 kilometres of open water, at least as the crow flies. And there is more land than the maps reveal. At sea one can see roughly 50 kilometres in any direction. Draw a circle with a radius of 50 kilometres around every landfall, and suddenly the ocean shrinks and the area effectively “covered” by land increases.

© Wade Davis

Clouds also provide clues to the wayfinder - their shape, colour, character, and place in the sky. Brown clouds bring strong winds; high clouds no wind but lots of rain. Their movements reveal the strength and direction of winds, the stability of the sky, the volatility of storm fronts. There is an entire nomenclature to describe the distinct patterns clouds form as they gather over islands or sweep across the open ocean. Light alone can be read, the rainbow colours at the edge of stars, the way they twinkle and dim with an impending storm, the tone of the sky over an island, always darker than that over open sea. Red skies at sunrise and sunset indicate humidity in the air. A halo around the moon foreshadows rain, for it is caused by light shining through ice crystals of clouds laden with moisture. The number of stars within the halo anticipates the intensity of the storm; if there are fewer than ten, expect trouble, high winds, and torrential rain. If a double halo surrounds the moon the weather will move in on the wings of a gale.- Wade Davis

http://aroomofonesownotherspaces.blogspot.com/2010/01/wayfinders-ancient-wisdom-audio.html

ax·i·o·mat·ic (ks--mtk) also ax·i·o·mat·i·cal (--kl)

1. evident without proof or argument ~ relating to or resembling an axiom; self-evident

2. containing maxims; aphoristic

3. (Philosophy / Logic) (of a logical system) consisting of a set of axioms from which theorems are derived by transformation rules

apodeictic [ˌæpəˈdaɪktɪk], apodictic [ˌæpəˈdɪktɪk]

adj

1. unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration

2. (Philosophy / Logic) Logic archaic

a.  necessarily true

b.  asserting that a property holds necessarily Compare problematic [2] assertoric

[from Latin apodīcticus, from Greek apodeiktikos clearly demonstrating, from apodeiknunai to demonstrate]

apodeictically , apodictically adv

 

spaces

'it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out is own secret'

Rainer Maria Rilke

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

mindful awareness

At its simplest, mindfulness is calm awareness—of one's thoughts, feelings and body

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/archive/audioonly/sfs_20091224.mp3

waking meditation / walking meditation - a kinaesthetic engagement with the world 
The nature of art and the creative process that underpins the practice of artmaking is mindful meditation in its full, un-dual, embodied form.

For Bill Viola, this mindful awareness comes in part from the fact that video art is performing in the present moment and in part from a certain dialogue with the self that video enables.

In conversation with Sherre DeLys, Viola discusses the flow of time in his work and how his study of Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism have informed his artistic investigation into the relationship between an individual's inner life, the experience of the body and the outer world.

Bill Viola and Mindfulness ~ http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/archive/audioonly/sfs_20100114.mp3

Two Women 2008

Color High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall
Performers: Pamela Blackwell and Weba Garretson
Photo: Kira Perov

http://www.billviola.com/

BILL VIOLA
Ocean Without a Shore, 2007
Video/sound installation

Bill Viola - video extracts from The Eye of the Heart

Viola BBC interview Soundcheck

art and the body ~ visceral audio

medicine and art: imagining a future for life and love
mori art museum, tokyo

28 nov. 2009- 28. feb. 2010 

part 1: discovering the inner world of the body
how did people around the world first acquire understanding of the mechanisms of the
human body and the vast world it contains? the first section of the exhibition answers
that question by tracing various scientific developments through a vast array of artifacts.
exhibited works include anatomical drawings by leonardo da vinci and michelangelo,
anatomical diagrams and models from around the world. there are also works of contemporary art
by andy warhol, magnas wallin, and bai yilao, as well as traditional japanese works of art by maruyama ōkyo and kawanabe kyosai.

part 2: fighting against death and disease
this section looks at how people perceive death and disease and how they have tried to fight against it. in addition to presenting the history of medicine, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and scientific technology, this section poses philosophical questions about the nature of life and death. exhibited works include japanese anatomical texts as well as medical journals and historical medical instruments from around the world. there are also paintings on the theme of medicine and works of contemporary art made by damien hirst, marc quinn and yanagi miwa.

part 3: toward eternal life and love in light of the latest developments in biotechnology, cybernetics and neuroscience, and with reference to medical materials and works of art, the third part of the exhibition poses the  following questions: considering reproduction is simply the endless repetition of the life-death cycle, what really motivates humans to reproduce? is it possible to pinpoint the real objective of human life and its likely future? what is life? exhibited works include drawings by rené descartes, illustrations by francis crick of the double-helix structure of DNA, and contemporary artworks by francis bacon, jan fabre, matsui fuyuko and others. see Tibetan anatomical drawing below

and .... mapping the body through sound

By Jane Elliott Ever wondered what sounds your heart makes? Each part of the body has its own special sounds as it works deep within us. Now an artist and a doctor are hoping to make a new map of "The Sonic Body", by revealing its sounds, from veins to organs and muscles. The noises they record, using sensitive medical equipment such as scanners and the trusted stethoscope, will then be made into an interactive art installation triggered by visitors walking through a model of a body. Body Curator Rowan Dury said the project, which should be completed by next autumn, would provide a new way of perceiving the human body. "We will be using high-tech medical facilities and the aim will be to find interesting sounds. There could be very rhythmic sounds going on within all of us that we are unaware of. "We will then take these, they will be sampled and an audio sound will be created." Ms Dury said there would also be text explanations about the parts of the body being sampled, creating a greater awareness of the organs or body parts involved. Artist Marcus Woxneryd said he hoped the project would reveal a number of unusual sounds, many of which are currently only audible to medics as they carry out examinations. "We will be sampling the sounds using things available to us like stethoscopes and ultrasounds, and we will try to use them to record sounds such as blood flowing and then bring those sounds out into a public place. "People will need to walk around the installation it to trigger the sounds. As they interact, the movement will change the sounds and they will get an orchestral symphony of the sounds of the body. "It will definitely give them a different experience of the body and hopefully they will relate to the body in a newway. "We are not sure how factual it will be, but we hope to make it medically informative as well as exciting." Mr Woxneryd has previously created a similar installation 'Terminal' using sampled and archival sound from Liverpool Street Station. He said he was very excited about the opportunity of working so closely with the human body. Engaging Dr Francis Wells, consultant cardiothoracic surgeon, at Papworth Hospital, who will be working with Marcus, agreed: "It is a really fascinating idea trying to turn it into a piece of engaging art work and of using the sounds. "How we will deal with the silent brain is an interesting phenomenon. "We intend to use pretty much all of the body, even the muscle creaks, and we are looking to see what we can then do with them." He said patients would be asked if they wanted to take part and added that the sounds could be taken as part of their routine investigations. Most of the sounds will be recorded from outside the body. Dr Wells said he had always been very interested in the link between arts and medicine and recently pioneered a new way to repair damaged hearts after being inspired by artist Leonardo da Vinci's medical drawings. Verity Slater, from the Wellcome Trust, which has just given the project a £15,000 grant as part of their Sciart awards, given to support and encourage a collaboration between art and the sciences, said: "This project really brought the idea of exploring the body to life."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4318160.stm

3 Tibetan Anatomical Drawings c. 1800

in this way, the body can be seen as the meeting point, or the point of departure for journeys
into the two very different worlds of medicine and art. the scientist/artist who obviously stood
most prominently at this intersection was leonardo da vinci. he left us not only accurate anatomical
drawings, but also the mona lisa. developments in science and technology have been essential
to the advancement of medicine in the past, and these days medicine is advancing with progress
in molecular biology. we are now able to explain the mechanism of DNA and shed new light
on the question of what a living organism is. this exhibition brings together roughly
150 important medical artifacts from the wellcome collection in london, historical art works
as well as about 30 works of contemporary art. it is a unique attempt to reconsider the
fundamental question of the meaning of life and death from the parallel, yet rarely compared
perspectives of medicine and art, or science and beauty. also, three anatomical drawings by
leonardo da vinci from the royal collection will be on display for the first time in japan.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/8241/medicine-and-art-imagining-a-future-for-life-and-love.html

Interview with Jan Fabre

I drive my own brain

"The pursuit of aesthetics for those educated in the eighteenth century did not belong to art academies and paintings alone, but was a way of life. The body increasingly became a visible and tangible medium through which artists could transmit codes of aesthetics that were also interpreted as codes of ethics.

"As Eagleton points out in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990): ‘The beautiful is just political order lived out on the body, the way it strikes the eye and stirs the heart’. Cultural ideologies harnessing scientific exactness to artistic beauty were the canons on which paintings and sculptures were produced. Like the reading of text, the reading of art also had its own language and could be deciphered and translated accordingly.

"While life classes involving a nude female were restricted to married men, there was no shortage of ‘anatomized’ females adorning the medical folios of this period. Many of the truncated and finely engraved images show female anatomy in all shapes and sizes. The lack of open access to the life class at the Royal Academy of Arts for single men and women artists necessitated their learning anatomy from such folios; consequently, there was a growing medical interest in biological sex and sexual differences, and a growing market for publications of this kind. Anatomical folios used in the teaching of art had a scientific influence on artists in their studies. In addition to the rules of proportion as laid down by the Renaissance architect Vitruvius, classical ideals of beauty, and the slavish adherence to anatomical accuracy, artists were beginning to address new

scientific theories concerning female anatomy and biology."

http://www.answers.com/topic/art-and-the-body

I wonder if this lead to the meddling of medicine in the female body and the fascination with 'Other' being subsumed by control of the Other through medicine

embodied imagination

Robert Bosnak ~ dream + memory

“When you pay attention  to your dreams, you inhabit a much larger part of your soul.”  Robert Bosnak

Embodied Imagination, based on neuroscience and on the phenomenological work of C.G. Jung, James Hillman and Henry Corbin, as well as on theories of mimesis, complexity, and non-linear dynamics, assumes that all psychological states are embodied.

In a hypnagogic state, a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping, a dream memory or a historical memory, traumatic or not, can become a flashback experienced as identical or similar to the previously experienced events.
Slow and careful observation while in a flashback state leads to the experience of multiple affective embodiments. These affective embodied states are anchored as sense memories in the body and can be triggered simultaneously. In this way a network of experience comes into being which is very different from habitual conscious experience. By containing a network as differentiated as possible, new cognitive positions are obtained and deep psychophysical changes become possible.

http://www.psychevisual.com/lecture.html?lecture=21

"I'm trying to go back to the preconceptual Jung where Jung was a phenomenologist   himself and he just looked at what he saw and what he experienced. ... 
"... I am trying to get back to, the visceral direct experience of the phenomenon. The difference in my work and Jung's work is that I slow down the process of being inside the image environment to the point that it goes so slow that it suddenly jumps into the body and becomes an embodied experience. ...
"... we're finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very, very young. MRIs started in 1993, so we've been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s, so it is just beginning. And I think neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours."

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/01/aim_20100102.mp3

Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences. When you encounter the images of your dreaming mind do you find one Self, or many? 

His book ~ Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel 

thought experiments 2

Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. We need only list a few of the well-known thought experiments to be reminded of their enormous influence and importance in the sciences: Newton's bucket, Maxwell's demon, Einstein's elevator, Heisenberg's gamma-ray microscope, Schrödinger's cat. 

The 17th century saw some of its most brilliant practitioners in Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. And in our own time, the creation of quantum mechanics and relativity are almost unthinkable without the crucial role played by thought experiments.

Thought experiments can teach us something new about the world, even though we have no new empirical data, by helping us to re-conceptualize the world in a better way. Tamar Gendler has recently developed this view in a number of important respects. Recent years have seen a sudden growth of interest in thought experiments. The views of Brown (1991) and Norton (1991, 1996) represent the extremes of platonic rationalism and classic empiricism, respectively. Norton claims that any thought experiment is really a (possibly disguised) argument; it starts with premisses grounded in experience and follows deductive or inductive rules of inference in arriving at its conclusion.  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/

art + science

8th Congress and Exhibition  The 8th Congress and Exhibition of ISIS “Symmetry: Art and Science” will be held in Austria, from 23-29 August 2010. Contact Denes Nagy d.nagy@patrick.acu.edu.au for details.  http://symmetry-us.com/ and http://www.synapse.net.au/projects and ... http://www.synapse.net.au/  these are beautiful plays with time ...http://www.latrobe.edu.au/visualarts/research/mcardle.htm  watch this .. http://studentwork.hss.uts.edu.au/float/bwh.html Float was created by Megan Lawrence at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Australia 2007 http://www.otheredge.com.au

Lake Mungo http://www.cmar.csiro.au/news/events/aqualux/index.html  Mungo National Park & Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area – is one of Australia’s richest archaeological finds. To the Elders & care takers of the land, this has been a special meeting place since the dream time.

The archaeological treasures of Mungo Man and Mungo Woman were found here at Mungo National Park and are carbon dated to over 40,000 years old.

These human remains indicate that Aboriginal people inhabited the area during this time, and make this the oldest known site of human occupation in the southern hemisphere. There is much speculation and debate in scientific circles, with some believing that there was human occupation in the region over 65,000 years ago.  Many of the archaeological treasures have been exposed at Mungo through natural erosion rather than by means of organised archaeological exploration. Ancient artefacts, plant matter and animal bones can be found in their natural habitat along the ‘Great Walls of China’ – an amazing 33 kilometre stretch of Australian Sand dunes and lunettes, formed by centuries of sand storms.
Black marks dotted on the ground throughout the region, indicating the remains of ancient fireplaces.

Lake Mungo, a dry lake in Australia. Famous archeological site. Lake Mungo is the brown area in the centre, the white line is the Walls of China, a series of sand dunes. The southern portion of Lake Leaghur is visible in the top of the picture.

ISIS Symmetry definition ISIS-S US Discussion Forum » What is Symmetry Introduction to Symmetry

• Started 5 months ago by CriniavaR
• Latest reply from  CriniavaR

Symmetry generally conveys two primary meanings. The first is an imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically pleasing proportionality and balance; [1] such that it reflects beauty or perfection. The second meaning is a precise and well-defined concept of balance or "patterned self-similarity" that can be demonstrated or proved according to the rules of a formal system: by geometry, through physics or otherwise.Although the meanings are distinguishable in some contexts, both meanings of "symmetry" are related and discussed in parallel.

The "precise" notions of symmetry have various measures and operational definitions. For example, symmetry may be observed with respect to the passage of time; as a spatial relationship; through geometric transformations such as scaling, reflection, and rotation; through other kinds of functional transformations[3]; and as an aspect of abstract objects, theoretic models, language, music and even knowledge itself.[4][5]This article describes these notions of symmetry from three perspectives. The first is that of mathematics, in which symmetries are defined and categorized precisely. The second perspective describes symmetry as it relates to science and technology. In this context, symmetries underlie some of the most profound results found in modern physics, including aspects of space and time. Finally, a third perspective discusses symmetry in the humanities, covering its rich and varied use in history, architecture, art, and religion.