Involution

Description

A poetic Odyssey through the chronology of Western scientific thought, from Ancient Greece to Modernism to reveal the crucial role of inspiration (involution) as the recovery of evolutionary memory. The separation of intellect (science) from consciousness (God) has resulted in Man's alienation from the natural world and his true spiritual nature.

Sujets

• Popular science

Informations

• Publié par: CollaborArt Books
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780957500211
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Responses to the original ‘Theory of Involution’
‘At long last I have read your typescript from A to Z. Needless to say I agree with much, even most of what you have to say. This implies an answer to your question whether it is right to rewrite and expand your theory. It would be definitely worth it. I feel less optimistic about the possibilities of publication.’ Arthur Koestler, 1978.
‘I thank you very much for sending me your Theory of Involution. I have just begun to read it and it interests me enormously.… I certainly do share your views … and believe, like you, that so called evolutionary progress is explicable in scientific terms. I shall write again…’ Prof Konrad Lorenz, 1970. Nobel Prize 71 (Max Planck Institute, Bavaria)
‘Thank you so much for your letter and your manuscript on the “Theory of Involution”… I have had a good look at it and it seems you have a great deal to say that is of vital importance right now.…’ Irwin Schumacher, 1974, (Author of Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered.)
Praise for ‘Involution- An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God’
‘A brilliant and profoundly erudite epic charting the evolution of Western thinking processes, probing the frontiers of rationality and naturalism and opening up a deeper understanding of the nature of reality based on the reality of mystical experience. The author’s grasp of the principal elements of Western culture is masterly and her poetic narrative woven together with extraordinary subtlety. The detailed footnotes demonstrate a rare depth of perceptive scholarship. This is nothing short of a heroic intellectual tour de force and deserves the widest readership.’ (David Lorimer, Director Scientific and Medical Network)
‘Philippa Rees wrote a book that is a rarity: it is on a controversial, actually hair and eye-brow-raising subject, and it is totally sincere. And totally insightful. If you the reader are as brave as this author, you are in for a fantastic ride. Getting close to science as well as to God at the same time. That’s no mean feat. Enjoy the ride – and the light!’ Ervin Laszlo
‘…Your journey through poetry is more than just an alternative treatment of the material you originally theoretically described; it is the very act of genius, which is able to treat the ambiguous nature of the world differently. The poetry is an alternative for how the world makes meaning from the ambiguous. It is a completely alternative direction for an exploration of the world in itself.
The scale of the feat you have thereby achieved by writing in poetry is immense. This goes far beyond the mechanistic notions of wholeness arrived at by some modern scientific authors. Your work reintroduces the aesthetic, beautiful, meaningful process that is poetry into science. The genius of involution is not just a mechanism of science relating to the whole but a completely different realisation of the beautiful, within living process.’ (Philip Franses. Editor. The Holistic Science Journal. Lecturer Schumacher College)
"Involution is, at least in terms of ‘subject’, a daring, Dantean feat.
Rees’s profound notion that the evolution of humankind is made possible by the dormant dominions of evolutionary memory in our unconscious - the eponymous ‘involution’ - is, I would suspect, a theory Charles Darwin would have gratefully embraced as a curative to his own bleaker ‘discoveries’, which he initially emotionally and religiously resisted.
That Rees has chosen to communicate her dialectic in the medium of sprung-rhymed blank verse is ingenious in itself, as well as being in the narrative spirit of the poetry of the ancients.
Whatever one’s poetic, religious or scientific response to Involution may be, what will be difficult for even the most scouring of critics to deny is it’s scholastic vitality, compositional discipline and macrocosmic scope. Involution is a work of indisputably tall ambition, and an accomplishment which may well prove much more than the sum of its invariably exceptional parts". (Alan Morrison. Poet. Editor: The Recusant On-Line Magazine)
INVOLUTION
An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God
P. A. Rees
Published by
CollaborArt Books
Prose Editor: Karin Cox Cover design: Ana Grigoriu Back Cover Image : Z Thomas Interior Design: Shore Books and Design Internal Diagrams : Philippa Rees
First Print Edition 2013
Published by: CollaborArt Books.
( collaborartbooks.com )
Copyright© Philippa Rees 2013
ISBN 978-0-9575002-1-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.
The footnotes to this work provide full credit to all quotations and interpretations mentioned in the text. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and obtain permissions; nevertheless, the author welcomes correspondence from copyright holders wishing to suggest amendments in subsequent printings and editions.
This First edition printed by Berforts, Stevenage, Hertfordshire
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Père Teilhard de Chardin
For many silent companions: those who brought gifts but mistook the mood of the party, arrived too early and left unsung.
Preface
This work is not what it may at first appear – a quirky or contrived way to tell the familiar scientific story. Instead, it offers a journey, not of instruction or persuasion, but of discovery. The language of poetic suggestion, less domineering than prose, constructs a ladder from familiar material, but only to afford a panoramic view of what lies beyond science, and all languages: the laying down and recovery of memory, and memory’s crucial role in the processes of evolution. It is the enfolding and recovery of memory that this book descends inwards (and thereby upwards) to expose.
To list the constituents of the ladder (the scientific facts and arguments – merely the necessary vocabulary) as ‘contents’ would be to misrepresent the book, and obscure its real purpose, which is simply to provide a wider and alternate view. Neither poetry nor science on their own could achieve this, but somewhere between them a new vision might take shape, rather as music carves melody from silence, and having changed everything, returns to it. Involution, the in ‘folding’ of memory, and its recovery by man, does not seek to challenge Darwin, whose world is the evolution of outer forms, but offers a counterbalance, the in‘forming’ of evolving awareness that shapes his creatures and their relationships.
The central premise of this book is that evolution, prior to man, has been achieved through the infolding of experience – involution – and that its legacy, memory, resides in the very structure of matter. After the emergence of man, this continues at a higher level in the building of the conscious mind. Involution, in man, continues through the recovery of memory by incremental inspiration, and it builds the scientific model of that memory; the collective intellect. Since instances of inspiration are individual, never repeated, and cannot be validated, it does not therefore qualify as a scientific theory. Not yet.
As inspiration is momentary, spontaneous and wordless, excluded from legitimate scientific enquiry, the only evidence for this hypothesis is the entire sweep of human history. Only a high perspective reveals the parallel between the successions of increasingly complex creatures and their sequencing through time, (evolution) and the reverse chronology of science’s recovery (higher level involution). Scientific disciplines emerge in answer to the demands of that recovery. From the comprehensive cosmologies of the ancients, through the fracturing of specialist division, back towards modern universal theories of the cosmos, the unbroken continuity accelerates in the last hundred years, just as evolution did in its convergent ascent to Man. The furious pace of technology is the debris of that hectic recent recovery, and the approach to origins.
The mirror that involution offers to evolution provides compelling evidence of a collective process which implies an underpinning law–not a law imposed, but a coherent law that evolves. They are two sides of a single coin, matter-mind. In time, science may accept the inevitability of extending its legitimacy into the realms of consciousness. Not brain waves enclosed in skulls but the structure of the shared field of consciousness in which all forms partake and which brains interpret. All this premise can offer by way of evidence is the pattern of recovery and the circumstances conducive to scientific inspiration and inspiration’s echoes of mystical experiences. Both point towards the same creative truth.
This building of the ladder, or what might be more appropriately and helpfully visualised as a single collective DNA helix, begins with pre-human molecular and cellular memory and rises to the expanding complex consciousness that has afforded Man a view of everything except perhaps the compelling rope of his climb. In the company of Reason and Soul, who between them support the opposing mirror coils, this journey is about the climb, through those maverick geniuses who, through visionary syntheses, set the unifying connecting steps for all to follow, and one after the other, shimmied up the centre. The unerring thread of memory drew and linked them, from Omega to Alpha, from the Hellenic Aegean to the Mverse and the Large Hadron Collider. It has been a single journey, collectively achieved, collectively paced, and lit by the torch bearers.
The Table of Contents below roughly lists the epochs through which this journey travels, and some themes that distinguished each, but the d