ENDNOTES
By Michael O'Callaghan
-
According to the World Heath
Organisation, one percent of the world population is diagnosed as
"schizophrenic". This means sixty million people in 1999. But the
number may in fact be as much as two percent - i.e. one hundred and
twenty million - since the official methods of definition vary, some
countries like to under-report, and China, where 20% of the world
population lives, apparently denies that any such phenomenon exists.
The term schizophrenia
was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who was
noted for his kindness and humanity. Bleuler was Carl Jung's teacher,
Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zürich, and head of its
Burghölzli Clinic, which was regarded as the most significant
institution of its kind in the world at the time. Before this, the
medical name for the condition (given by the German psychiatrist Emil
Kraepelin) was Dementia Praecox, from the Latin meaning
prematurely out of one's mind. Whereas "dementia" means only
infatuation, idiocy, or enfeebled mind, the etymology of
"schizophrenia" implies some method in the madness. In medical
parlance, the "acute schizophrenic break syndrome" refers to the
initial spontaneous onset of a non-ordinary state of consciousness
involving visual and / or auditory hallucinations.
For an excellent review of death / rebirth imagery, see Über Wiedergeburt (On Rebirth), by Carl Gustav Jung, Eranos Jarhbuch 1939, Zürich, 1940.
For good exposés of the interpersonal and social aspects of visionary states of consciousness, see Ronald D. Laing, MD: The Politics of Experience, Ballantine Books, New York, 1968; The Politics of the Family and other essays, New York, 1969; The Divided Self, Pantheon, New York, 1962; Sanity, Madness and the Family, (written with H.Phillipson), Tavistock Publications, London, 1966; Interpersonal Perception:
A Theory and a Method of Research. Gregory Bateson also describes
mental process cybernetically in interpersonal, international, and
ecological terms, in Steps To An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972, and in his book Mind And Nature: a necessary unity, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1979.
See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
(with Bill Moyers), Doubleday, New York, 1988; there is also an
excellent television series of the same name, available as a six-part
boxed set of videotapes which can be purchased by online mailorder from
Mystic Fire Video at www.mysticfire.com. See also Joseph Campbell's essential study of the common theme of all mythology (which he called the Monomyth) in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, and later by Bollingen University Press, New York, 1968.
Gregory Bateson, Perceval's Narrative: A Patient's Account of his Psychosis, Stanford University Press, 1961, Stanford. See also The Double-Bind Theory of Schizophrenia, re-published in his Steps To An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972.
See Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices:
A Survey of Visionary Narratives, E.P. Dutton, New York; re-issued (Rei
Edition), Arkana, 1994, ISBN: 0140193480. See also Joan Halifax, Shaman (Art and Imagination), Reprint Edition, Thames & Hudson, 1988, ISBN: 050081029X. See also Joan Halifax, Shaman : The Wounded Healer, Crossroad Publishing Co, 1983, ISBN: 082450061X.
See Terrence McKenna, Plan, Plant, Planet
in Whole Earth Review, number 64, POINT, Sausalito, California, Fall
1989. For a thought-provoking and very humorous re-visioning of history
focusing on the cultural decline of psychoactive plant traditions,
listen to: Terrence McKenna, History Ends in Green:
Gaia, psychedelics, and the archaic revival, a boxed set of audio tapes
recorded at the Esalen Institute; Mystic Fire Audio, New York, 1992 ,
which can be purchased by online mailorder from Mystic Fire Video at www.mysticfire.com.
For more on R.D. Laing, see note 3 above. A short interview with Laing may also be found on the Global Vision web site at www.global-vision.org/interview/rdlaing.html
John Weir Perry has written a number of books including The Self In Psychotic Process: Its Symbolization in Schizophrenia; with an introduction by C.G.Jung, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1953. The Far Side of Madness, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1974. The Heart of History: Individuality in Evolution, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1987; and Trials of the Visionary Mind: Spiritual Emergency and the Renewal Process, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999.
See Stanislav Grof, MD, Realms Of The Human Unconscious: Observations From LSD Research, E.P.Dutton, New York, 1976; Beyond The Brain: Birth, Death And Transcendence In Psychotherapy, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1985. Also Spiritual Emergency:
When Personal Transformation Becomes A Crisis; edited by Stanislav Grof
and Christina Grof; contributions from R.D.Laing, Roberto Assagioli,
John Weir Perry, Ram Dass, Lee Senella, Jack Kornfield, Paul Rebilot,
Holger Kalwert, Anne Armstrong, Keith Thompson and others; Jeremy
Tarcher Inc., Los Angeles, 1989. See also The Psychological Roots of Violence and Greed,
published on the Global Vision web site at
www.global-vision.org/un/grof1.html. In this connection, see also the
web site of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), in Mill
Valley, California at www.nbn.com/people/Transpersonal/itahome.html.
For more on the ITA, see note 44 below.
Galileo Galilei
was condemned by an Inquisition court in 1663 for saying the Earth is
not the centre of the universe, as Catholic church teaching then held.
While the ancient Greco-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy had held that the
Earth was stationary and that it was located at the centre of the
universe, Nicholas Copernicus, a Pole, asserted that the earth went
around the sun. Galileo endorsed the Copernican view in 1613. Three
years later, the church denounced Copernicus's theory as dangerous to
the faith, and warned Galileo to stop teaching it. But Galileo
published his Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
in 1632, and the book was banned. He was put on trial one year later as
a heretic. Galileo defended himself by saying that religious
understanding would be enhanced by studying nature. But during his
trial, the church forced him to renounce his theory that the earth
revolves. At the end of the trial, however, he is said to have
whispered, "Nevertheless, it does move!" Galileo was condemned to life
imprisonment, later commuted to house arrest. He died eight years
after, in 1647. More than 350 years later, in October 1992, Galileo was
rehabilitated by Pope John Paul II! A Vatican statement said that 13
years of study by the Commission for the Study of the
Ptolemaic-Copernican Controversy had ended, and that the church was
wrong. Even the Church, it seems, is capable of motion.
Since the mind
and the body are not separate, of course different states of
consciousness are linked with different states of metabolism. But to
make the assertion that someone's spontaneous non-ordinary state of
consciousness is caused by a biochemical difference in his or
her body is an epistemologically untenable case of outrageously bad
logic. This kind of dualistic hangover of the mind-body split has
plagued scientific thinking from Aristotle, through Descartes, right up
to the socio-biologists. Metabolism and consciousness are at least
mutually causal. On a deeper level of epistemological description,
metabolism is consciousness, so the issue of causality is a
false one to begin with. But the belief that you can fix schizophrenia
with a pill is one that materialists relish, since it enables them to
deny the mental dimension in favour of the biochemical - and, by
resulting in life-long medical treatment, has the added advantage of
guaranteeing vast profits for the pharmaceutical industry. In most
countries, it also makes it possible for governments, the police, and
the medical establishment to have anyone who has had the label
"schizophrenic" affixed to them locked up and/or drugged against their
will. From this perspective, the whole question of "schizophrenia" is a
major human rights issue.
For more on the mind / body linkage, see The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience, by Francisco J. Varela, Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, Reprint Edition, MIT Press, Cambridge,
1993, ISBN: 0262720213
Defective genes
are now being touted as the latest explanatory principle for
"schizophrenia". John Weir Perry says that although science may one day
announce its discovery of a "gene for schizophrenia", what will really
have been found is a gene for sensitivity! When genetic engineering
begins to market recombinant human DNA, prospective parents will no
doubt be delighted to order their Sears-catalogue designer babies with
perfect physiques, profit-maximising attitudes, and not too much
sensitivity. No more Buddhas, Christs, Beethovens or Van Goghs to stir
up trouble.
Thirty thousand people were lobotomised in the USA before the practise was outlawed.
Nazi Germany
was notorious for involuntary sterilisation and / or murder of the
"mentally ill". But it happened in many other countries as well. In the
USA, by the 1930s, 30 states had passed laws allowing involuntary
sterilisation of the "mentally ill." According to Professor Gerald
Gelb, author of The Mad Among Us,
approximately 60,000 people were given vasectomies or tubal ligations
in the USA between 1907 and 1960. Ethnic groups in the US were also
targeted. According to the London newspaper, The Independent (Mentally
Ill Made Sterile By Force in US, August 30, 1997), the US Government
admitted in 1975 that its Indian Health Service had conducted a secret
programme of forced sterilisations on about 40 per cent of Native
American women. A similar eugenics programme was introduced in Canada
in the 1920s. Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia,
India, China and many South American countries also allowed forced
sterilisation of the "mentally ill" (mostly women). In Sweden,
according to an article in London's The Independent newspaper ("Dark
Shadow On A 'Model State'", August 30, 1997), 62,000 people underwent
forced sterilisation between 1935 and 1975 (again, 90 per cent of them
were women). This Swedish programme, which predated and outlived Nazi
Germany, started out as an attempt to weed out perceived genetic
weaknesses, mental or physical defects and ended as a method of social
control. In the worst years covered by the Swedish Sterilisation Act,
the weak, the poor, the 'feeble-minded', the gypsies and those who did
not fit the image of the desired Swedish physique were not allowed by a
big brother government to breed." Widespread forced abortion still
continues under Chinese-occupied Tibet in the 1990s, where thousands of
Tibetan women, discovered to be pregnant without government approval,
are aborted at gunpoint by Chinese army doctors.
See The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th. Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Press, 1994, ISBN: 0890420629.
Joan Halifax,
Shamanic Voices : A Survey of Visionary Narratives, E.P. Dutton, New
York; re-issued (Rei Edition), Arkana, 1994, ISBN: 0140193480. For more
on shamanism, see Joan Halifax, Shaman (Art and Imagination), Reprint
Edition, Thames & Hudson, 1988, ISBN: 050081029X. See also Joan
Halifax, Shaman : The Wounded Healer, Crossroad Publishing Co, 1983,
ISBN: 082450061X. See also Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series , vol. 76, New York, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, 1964. In popular fiction, see Carlos Castaneda's
series of novels about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan.
The Saami - the
last truly Indigenous People of Europe - still herd reindeer in the
Northern areas of Norway, Sweden and Finland ("Lapland"). Their
traditional pastoralist lifestyle has been seriously jeopardised by
high levels of radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,
which contaminated the vegetation on which the reindeer browse. Many
herds have had to be destroyed. For more on Saami culture see, The Ancient Religion of the Finns
by Professor Juha Pentikäinen (University of Helsinki Department of
Religious Studies) on the web at
http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/muinueng.htm.
Regarding the shamanic tradition in archaic Greece, see the chapter entitiled The Greek Shamans and Puritanism, in The Greeks and the Irrational, by E. R. Dodds, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951. See also E. Rohde's books, Psyche (1895?) and Die Religion der Griechen.
The Celts did not traditonally build towns, but this changed in the first century BC, when they founded their Oppida.
These fortified settlements came about as advance trading posts for
commerce with the expanding Roman empire and with the Etruscan cities
of Northern Italy, and served as the main Celtic civil, military and
political centres thereafter. These oppida have since developed into
some of the greatest Europan cities - including London, Paris, Milan,
Dublin, Lyons, Bologna, Turin, Trento, and Boulogne - whose names are
all of Celtic origin. For more on this, see Fergus Kelly, Celtic Law,
in The Celts, a Catalogue of the 1991
Exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (published under the editorial
direction of Mario Andreose, by Bompiani, Milan, 1991).
Europe's main rivers also have Celtic names: the Rhone (latin Rhodanus), from the Celtic ro - great, and Danu - the Goddess; the Rhine (Rhenos) from renos - sea); the Seine, from the Celtic river deity Sequanus; the Thames, from the Celtic tamesis - river of darkness; and the Danube (Danuvius) from the Goddess Danu, although its German name Donau also means brown river (don au )
in modern Irish (apologies to Johann Strauss, but having lived on the
shore of the Danube at Melk for a whole year, I can assure the reader
that this river usually does appear brown rather than blue!). For more
on the Celtic legacy in Europe, see Celt and Roman: The Celts in Italy, by Peter Berresford Ellis, Constable, London 1998.
Regarding the Irish language, the leading linguistic expert
Calvert Watkins of Harvard points out that the nominal and verbal
systems of Old Irish are far closer to the original Indo European
tongue than Classical Greek or Latin, and its structure can only be
compared with that of Vedic Sansksrit or Hittite of the Old Kingdom.
For more on the Sanskrit - Irish connection, see Miles Dillon, Celt and Hindu (University College Dublin, 1973), and Celts and Aryans (Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla, 1975).
Widespread urbanisation is largely a twentieth century
phenomenon. In 1900 only 15 percent of Humankind lived in cities. By
1996 this number had grown to 50 percent. The world's urban population
increased from 600 million in 1950 to over 2 billion in 1986. This
number is expected to double by the year 2050. In 1996, there were 213
cities of more than one million inhabitants, and twenty-three
mega-cities with populations of ten million or more. The largest
migration in the history of the human species is happening now: the
migration from the countryside to the cities of the developing world.
For more on cities, see the web site of the Second United Nations
Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) at
www.undp.org/un/habitat. See also Global Vision's project to develop Sustainable City,
a computer programme for any town or city to see itself - and its
surrounding environment - as a whole system. Published on the Global
Vision web site at www.global-vision.org/city/index.html, this web site
features a good list of other city-related websites too numerous to
mention here. See also Assessing the Future of Urbanisation,
by Lester R.Brown and Jodi Jacobson, in State of the World 1987, A
Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society,
W.W. Norton & Company, New York & London, 1987. For a revealing
transcultural study of the deep psycho-mythological changes associated
with the first appearance of urban centres in various parts of the
world, as reflected in the appearance of male gods and the decline of
animist and goddess metaphors in the mythological track record, see
John Weir Perry, The Heart of History: Individuality in Evolution, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1987.
See Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1988.
See Early Irish Myths and Sagas, translated by Jeffrey Gantz, Penguin Classics, London, 1981.
See Martin Brennan, The Stars and the Stones:
Ancient Art and Astronomy in Ireland (Thames and Hudson, London, 1983),
which contains detailed drawings of the petroglyphs and a very good
examination of their astronomical references based on field
observations in situ during the relevant astronomical alignments. See
also Martin Byrne's excellent Solas Atlantis website at http://gofree.indigo.ie/~ogma
which contains alot of detailed information and pictures of Irish
megalithic monuments. According to him, the oldest cairn discovered as
of 1999 (on a hill called Croughan in the Ox Mountains in County Sligo,
on the West Coast of Ireland) has been dated to 5,800 BC. A huge
neolithic complex was recently discovered on Benbulben and Kings
Mountain, but has not been explored yet.
See The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, Viking Penguin, New York, 1987
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries,
W.Y. Evans-Wentz, with a new introduction by Terrence McKenna; Library
of the Mystic Arts, Citadel Press, published by Carol Publishing Group,
1990. (Originally published in Oxford, 1911.)
Quoted from C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963.
See Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Atheneum, New York, 1979.
See The Book of Genesis, where the urban god Jahveh gives man dominion over this Earth.
For a richly
illustrated overview of the vast archeological legacy of the Goddess
cultures in Europe during the Neolithic period, see Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess,
with a foreword by Joseph Campbell, Harper and Row, San Francisco,
1989. This legacy includes stunning decorated pottery from the fourth
millennium BCE whose refined elegance equals that produced in Minoan
Crete three thousand years later. For a psychological overview of
Goddess cultures, see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother:
An Analysis Of The Archetype, translated from the German by Ralph
Manheim, Bollingen Series XLVII, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1955. For a poetic and literary tour de force on the same subject, see
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1948.
From a recommendation to scientists by the English Attorney General, Francis Bacon, in 1870.
Pope Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, Rome, 1484.
The conversion
of the Europeans from their old religions to Christianity took
different forms. In most places, it involved grass-roots missionary
proselytising against the evil Pagan ways, followed by a process of
gradual osmosis. ("Pagan", by the way, means "peasant" in Latin;
Christianity was the new religion of the cities). In Germany, the
official "conversion" of the Teutonic tribes from their old belief in
Wotan (the lone-hunter God of the forest) appears to have been more a
process of coercion. As soon as some Roman Legion had captured a
Teutonic chieftain and dragged him back across the Rhine, not only was
he forced to abjure his traditional faith himself, but his entire tribe
was placed under a legal obligation to adopt the religion of their
conqueror, and embrace the trappings of Christianity against their
will. "In those times", as Carl Jung points out, "the omnipresent,
crushing power of Rome embodied in the divine Caesar, had created a
world where countless individuals, indeed whole peoples, were robbed if
their cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy." (C. G.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1963). In this regard Jung observed that if one wants to construct a
house, it's best to start building up from the foundations, not from
the roof down. Jung ascribed the sudden explosion of violent and
destructive energies in Fascist Germany in part as the psychological
outburst of the accumulated pent-up frustration of the deeper part of
the Teutonic psyche which had been repressed under a veneer of
Christianity in the first place, rather than being allowed to build
itself up organically from pagan roots to a conscious acceptance of
Christian values. As Gregory Bateson observed, it is not possible to
control absolutely, and any attempt to modify other peoples' behaviour
will eventually backfire, and the result will be worse than the
original problem the control was meant to cure. In this case, it took
ten or fifteen centuries, but the candle was not worth the price. For
more on this, see Jung's article Wotan published in the Neue Schweitzer Rundschau, March 1936 (later republished in Essays on Contemporary Events 1947, and in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Civilisation in Transition, Vol. 10); on this theme see also After the Catastrophe, in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Civilisation in Transition, Vol. 10, 1945.
Similar coercion appears to have been used when St. Augustine (354 -
450), one of the founding fathers of Christian thought and the author
of De Civitate Dei (the City of God), introduced Christianity to England. Augustine was also much preoccupied with spreading ideas about demons.
The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, translated with an introduction, bibliography and notes by the Reverend Montague Summers, Dover, New York, 1928 and 1984.
The hallucinatory "disappearance" of the penis is most likely to have
been a psychological projection of subconscious historical fears about
the threat to nature's fertility, associated with the first stirrings
of the new scientific way of thinking in the European psyche (as
explained a few paragraphs further on in the main text). There may be a
contemporary parallel in the so-called "Koro syndrome", a culture-bound
acute anxiety reaction associated with (real or perceived?) shrinking
of the penis, said to occur mostly in China (where it is known as
"suk-yeong") and in South-East Asia, but also in Europe. Whereas
mainstream psychiatrists have described it as "a psychogenic disorder
caused by sexual excesses", and treated it by the administration of
electroshocks and medication, a folk cure in Asia precribes fellatio!
There is said to be a corresponding syndrome in women with (real or
perceived?) shrinking of the breasts and genitals. (These reports come
from a book called "Synopsis of Psychiatry", by Kaplan and Sardock).
Pope Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, Rome, 1484.
For illustrated details, see Inquisition:
A Bilingual Guide To The Exhibition Of Torture Instruments From The
Middle Ages To the Industrial Era presented in various European cities;
Qua d'Arno publishers, Florence.
As many as nine
million people accused of withchcraft were murdered by European
Christians, although some historians maintain the number was as low as
100,000. James Sharpe (of the latter persuasion) reckons that 80% of
the victims were women. See his book Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550 - 1750, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1996, for a good bibliography on the subject.
See Irish Witchcraft and Demonology, St.John D. Seymour, Hodges Figgis & Co. Ltd., Dublin, 1913.
See J. Français, L'église et la Sorcellerie, Noury, Paris, 1910.
A proper
account of the Church's brutal suppression of the spiritual traditions
and entire cultures of Indigenous Peoples would fill an entire library.
An emblematic example is their destruction of Maya culture. The Maya
were the most advanced urban civilisation in the pre-Columbian
Americas. They invented the concept of "zero" centuries before it was
independently formulated in India, and measured the solar year with an
error of only 17.28 seconds. Having flourished for two millennia in an
area of 3255,000 sq.km, they were first invaded by Spain in 1527, but
put up such fierce resistance that the capital of their last kingdom to
fall, Itza at Nojpeten, was not captured until 1697. Had the Maya not
been decimated by European diseases such as chicken pox and measles,
some historians believe the Spanish conquest might have ended in total
defeat. According to Roderick Conway Morris, "One of the greatest
crimes perpetrated against the Maya was the destruction of their
thousands of books, spearheaded by the Franciscans, who - while
preaching harmony and brotherly love - presided over a scorched-earth
policy, backed up by the threat of the physical extinction of any who
dared to resist it. So complete was the friars' success that only four
books in Maya script survived." For more on contemporary efforts to
protect Indigenous spiritual traditions, see the reference to the Consejo Interamericano Sobre La Espiritualidad Indigena (Interamerican Council on Indigenous Spirituality) in note 59 below.
Robert Jay
Lifton, Professor of psychiatry at Yale University, has shown the
devastating psychological effect of the Holocaust on people who
survived it.
See Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 1964 (check details). Also see Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, 1968 (check details).
See Michael O'Callaghan, Future Tapes: A Video Interview Of Buckminster Fuller, published on the Global Vision web site at www.global-vision.org/interview/bucky.html
For a
devastating critique of how alienated people are easy prey for media
manipulation (based on observations of Americans during the 1991 Gulf
War), see Noam Chomsky, Media Control, Verso, London and New York, 1991.
For more on this theme, see Consciousness Evolution and Planetary Survival
: The Psychological Roots Of Violence and Greed, Abstract of paper
presented at the Thirteenth International Transpersonal Conference On
the Theme of Spirituality, Ecology, and Native Wisdom. Killarney,
Ireland, June 1995. This paper may be found on the Global Vision web
site at www.global-vision.org/un/grof1.html. See also the International
Transpersonal Association (ITA) described in note 44 below.
The Book of Revelations,
the final section of the New Testament in the Bible; interestingly
enough, Calvin lobbied extensively to have this deleted from future
editions of the Bible on the grounds that it was too upsetting to his
bourgeois flock. He also destroyed the stained glass windows in all his
churches, so perhaps his real motive was fear of too much colour.
Founded by Stan
Grof and others, the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) is a
scientific and educational organisation with the following purposes:
(1) to provide an orientation that can reconcile the viewpoints of
various disciplines and formulate a comprehensive and integrated image
of human nature; (2) to facilitate the development of new paradigms
that will synthesise presently disparate approaches in education,
research, teaching, psychotherapy, spiritual practice, the arts and
media, socio-economic theory and other areas of human life and
knowledge; and (3) to promote scientific research, development, and
communication in all areas related to the transpersonal dimensions of
human nature. For more information, contact the ITA in Mill Valley,
California (tel: + 1 415 383 8779). Details on their excellent annual
conference may be found at
www.nbn.com/people/Transpersonal/itahome.html. The ITA can also put you
in touch with the Spiritual Emergency Network, a worldwide group of
psychotherapists specialising in a gentle, non-drug, transpersonal
approach to personal crisis.
The San Francisco Chronicle published this obituary of John Weir Perry on 3 November 1998:
John Weir Perry, a psychiatrist, author and expert ont the disorder
known as brief-reactive psychosis, died Thursday of cancer in his
Larkspur home. He was 84
Known as a radical thinker in the mental-health field, Dr.
Perry belived that schizophrenia had benefits and that the psychotic
state could lead to higher consciousness if allowed to run its course.
A native of Rhode Island and a graduate of Harvard University
and its medical school, Dr. Perry studied in Zurich with Carl Gustav
Jung and trained as a Jungian analyst. In 1960 he moved to San
Francisco where he practiced for more than 30 years.
He was an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University
of California at San Francisco and a lecturer at the Jung Institute in
San Francisco.
Dr. Perry wrote six books, including "The Far Side of
Madness," a 1974 work that described certain psychoses as visionary
states.
In the 1970s he founded Diabasis, a San Francisco residence for young
schizophrenics where therapy included painting, dance, massage,
meditation and conversation. Such treatment ususally worked better, he
said, than "the men in white who come rushing up and the whole
atmosphere becomes antagonistic."
He is survived by his children, Wendy Perry of Larskpur, Brian
Perry of Denver, Alice Garofalo of Seattle, Anne Weir of Portland,
Maine, and John Weir Ferguson Perry of Vermont.
A private memorial service will be held Sunday.
For a description of Perry's therapeutic facility at Diabasis, see John Weir Perry MD, The Far Side of Madness, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1974.
Jesse Watkins, A Ten-Day Voyage, quoted in Ronald D. Laing, MD: The Politics of Experience, Ballantine Books, New York, 1968.
William Irwin Thompson, (check details).
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber and Faber, London, 1939.
Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul, translated by W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, first published 1933, re-published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1961.
Impressionism, by the editors of Realités magazine, Paris.(check details).
This was Salvador Dali's answer to the question "What is the artistic medium of the future?", in a film (possibly Le Mystère Dali by Robert Desharnes, shot on location at Dali's house in Cadaquès, Spain, in 1969).
For an
in-depth, systematic, and authoritative overview of the feasibility of
attaining a sustainable civilisation in the 21st century, see Beyond The Limits:
Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, by
Donella H. & Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, Chelsea Green
Publishing Company, Post Mills, Vermont, USA: 1993. Based on World 3,
the most advanced systems dynamics computer simulation of global trends
available, they summarise the situation in 1993 as follows:
"1. Human use of many essential resources and generation
of many pollutants have already surpassed rates that are physically
sustainable. Without significant reductions in material and energy
flows, there will be in the coming decades an uncontrolled decline in
per capita food output, energy use and industrial production.
2. This decline is not inevitable. To avoid it two changes
are necessary. The first is a comprehensive revision of policies and
practices that perpetuate growth in material consumption and in
population. A second is a rapid, drastic increase in the efficiency
with which materials are used.
3. A sustainable society is still technically and
economically possible. It could be much more desirable than a society
that tries to solve its problems by constant expansion. The transition
to a sustainable society requires a careful balance between long-term
and short term goals, and an emphasis on sufficiency, equity, and
quality of life rather than on quantity of output. It requires more
than productivity and more than technology; it also requires maturity,
compassion, and wisdom."
See also the Human Development Report 1997, published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New York. See also Agenda 21:
this is the historical blueprint for the sustainable development of our
planet which was agreed by 112 Governments at the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) - the Earth Summit -
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This 250-page document provides a global
consensus on 2,500 recommended actions for governments, local
authorities, NGOs, the private sector and the media to undertake in
order to conserve the Earth's resources for future generations. It may
be obtained from the United Nations and is also published on the World
Wide Web at www.un.org/dpcsd/dsd/csd.htm .
Rescue Mission : Planet Earth, an
excellent illustrated summary of Agenda 21 for young people has also
been produced (in 19 languages) by Peace Child International, The White
House, Buntingford, SG9 9AH, UK (tel: + 44 (0) 176 327 4459, fax: + 44
(0) 176 327 4460; web site: www.oneworld.org/peacechild. Authored by
teenagers from around the world, this is an excellent teaching tool for
classroom use. The Rescue Mission
organisation which sprang from the book has since produced a
Sustainability Indicator pack for secondary level teachers and students
to measure the indicators of progress towards sustainability within
their own village, town or city, in order to facilitate the
implementation of Agenda 21 at the local community level.
See also Paul Hawken, The Next Economy. (New York: Random House, 1983) and The Ecology of Commerce (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). See also Hazel Henderson, Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare Berrett-Koehler Pub, 1996, ISBN: 1881052907. See also David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Berrett-Koehler / Kumarian Press, 1996, ISBN: 1887208011. See also Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Plume, Penguin, New York, 1993. See also Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher, Blond & Briggs Ltd, London, 1973. See also James Robertson, The Sane Alternative. River Basin Press, 1980. See also Lester R. Brown, Building A Sustainable Society, WW Norton, New York, 1981. See also R.Buckminster Fuller, Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects For Humanity, Bantam Books, Inc., New York, 1969.
For an excellent interdisciplinary view of the opportunity for widespread social transformation, see Changing Images of Man,
Policy Research Report no. 4, Center for the Study of Social Policy,
Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, 1974. This seminal paper,
commissioned by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, was co-authored by
Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin, Willis Harman, Arthur Hastings, O. W.
Markley, Floyd Matson, Brendan O'Regan, and Leslie Schneider.
In terms of the personal aspects of social transformation, one book
which provides an early overview of thinking on this subject in the USA
is Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy:
Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980's, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London, 1981. Regarding personal responsibility for future
generations, see for example: Theodore Roszak, Person / Planet : the Creative Disintergration of Industrial Society, Doubleday, 1979, ISBN: 0385000820; Ecopsychology:
Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, by Theodore Roszak (Editor),
Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner (Editor), Sierra Club Books, 1995, ISBN:
0871564068; and Joanna R. Macy, Dharma and Development, in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest Of Essays In Buddhism and Ecology, Alan Hunt Badiner ed., Parallax Press, Berkeley, 1990.
For more on Guy Debord and the Situationist International, see Elisabeth Sussman, (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: the Situationist International, 1957-1972, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 1989. See also A Situation, published on the Global Vision web site at www.global-vision.org/art/si.html
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 6th. century B.C.E.; translated from the Mandarin by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Wildwood House Ltd., London, 1972.
See The Emergent Paradigm, by Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy, Center for the Study of Social Policy, SRI International, Menlo Park, 1979. See also Changing Images of Man,
Policy Research Report no. 4, Center for the Study of Social Policy,
Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, 1974. This seminal
interdisciplinary paper, commissioned by the Charles F. Kettering
Foundation, was co-authored by Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin, Willis
Harman, Arthur Hastings, O. W. Markley, Floyd Matson, Brendan O'Regan,
and Leslie Schneider.
Complete details about the Global Vision Project
may be found on the Global Vision web site at www.global-vision.org.
For background information on the project, see also Michael
O'Callaghan, Global Strategy,
NGO Position Paper for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable
Development (CSD), Second Session, May 16 -28, 1994, published on the
Global Vision web site at www.global-vision.org/un/strategy/index.html.
See The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries,
W.Y. Evans-Wentz, with a new introduction by Terrence McKenna; Library
of the Mystic Arts, Citadel Press, published by Carol Publishing Group,
1990. (Originally published in Oxford, 1911.)
Although
psychedelic substances were outlawed by international treaties in the
1950's and 60's, anthropological and ethno-botanical research indicates
that traditional use and knowledge of psychotropic plants is part of a
cultural legacy that has been handed on through indigenous cultures
since Palaeolithic times. Ethno-botanical knowledge is the speciality
of healers in tribal societies. As Stanislav Grof points out, "in the
history of Chinese medicine, reports about psychedelic plant substances
go back at least 3,500 years. Traditional cultures, especially the
oldest hunting-and-gathering cultures, have made known to modern
science the extensive psychedelic pharmacopoeia which they themselves
use for ritual and medicinal purposes." For an excellent botanical
catalogue, see: Plants of the Gods: Their
Sacred, Healing And Hallucinogenic Powers; Richard Evans Schultes and
Albert Hoffman; Healing Arts Press, Rochester, Vermont, 1992.
In this regard, CISEI - Consejo Interamericano Sobre La Espiritualidad Indigena
(the Interamerican Council on Indigenous Spirituality) organised a
Conference on Spirituality and Sacred Plants in conjunction with the
11th International Congress of Traditional Medicine at Quetzaltenango,
Guatemala, October 1997. For information, contact Marina Villalobos,
Co-ordinator, CISEI, Eucaliptos 74 Col, Balcones de Santa Maria, C.P.
58090, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico (tel: + 43 23 60 00, fax: + 43 23 60
06, e-mail: lobos@mail.giga.com ).
The following examples should convince the sceptical reader of the
universality of psychedelic tradition. Different varieties of Psilocybe
mushrooms, (including Psilocibe mexicana and cubensis) are known in the
pre-Columbian cultures of central America as Teonanacatl or "flesh of
the Gods"; the Liberty Cap (Psilocybe semilanceata) is common on lawns,
pastures and roadsides from late summer to late autumn in Europe. Other
varieties of Psilocybe (cyanescens and crobulus) are also found in
Europe. The similar Paneolus mushrooms are found from Europe to Asia.
Hemp (especially the varieties Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica),
and its extracts marijuana, hashish and bhang, have traditionally been
used in the Middle East, Africa, India, China, Tibet, North and South
America and the Caribbean, and is now widely used - and increasingy
de-criminalised - around the world since the 1950s as its recreational
and medical uses are being gradually acknowledged. The fly agaric
mushroom (Amanita Muscaria) is used by the Ojibway people in North
America, by Siberian shamans of the Samoyed, Koryak, Ostiak and
Chukchee tribes, and also in Scandinavia. The Peyote cactus (Lophophora
williamsii) is used in healing rituals by the Huicholes of Northern
Mexico and in the United States by members of the Native American
Church. The ergot-rye fungus (Claviceps purpurea) is thought to have
been the secret ingredient of the ritual elixir used for two millennia
by initiates of the cult at Eleusis in Ancient Greece. Certain seed
varieties of the Ololiuqui or morning glory flower (Turbina corymbosa)
are used in Hawai'i. The tropical rain forest vine Ayahuasca or Yagé
(Liana Banisteriopsis Caapi), is used by shamans of many tribes in
Equador, Peru, Brazil, Columbia and Venezuela, as are the pschedelic
snuffs cohoba (made from the sap of Virola theiodora or Virola
cuspidata) and epená (from Virola calophylla and Virola theiodora),
along with the seeds of Adenanthera peregrina, and the Peruvian San
Pedro cactus (Trichocerus pachanoi). In the Congo basin and other parts
of equatorial Africa, the shrub eboga (Tabernanthe eboga) is widely
used. In the twentieth century, science has provided us with the plant
extracts LSD (derived from the ergot rye fungus), Mescaline (from the
Peyote cactus), and Psilocybin (from the mushrooms of the same name).
For more on the use of psychedelic plants in traditional cultures, see: Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery:
Dimensions Of Consciousness And New Perspectives In Psychotherapy And
Inner Exploration, (Appendix A), State University of New York Press,
Albany, 1988; Terrence McKenna, Plan, Plant, Planet, in Whole Earth Review, number 64, POINT, Sausalito, California, Fall 1989; and L.E. Luna, The Concept of Plants as Teachers Amongst Four Mestizo Shamans of Iquitos,
Northeastern Peru, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 11, 1984. For an
account of the medicinal use of Psilocybin mushrooms by a Mexican
curandera, see: Alvaro Estrada, Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants, Ross-Erikson Inc, Santa Barbara, California, 1981. See also: Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987. Also: Louis Eduardo Luna, Vegetalismo,
available from the author c/o Swedish School of Economy, Helsinki,
Finland. For a thought-provoking and very humorous re-visioning of
history focusing on the cultural decline of psychoactive plant
traditions, listen to: Terrence McKenna, History Ends in Green:
Gaia, psychedelics, and the archaic revival, a boxed set of audio tapes
recorded at the Esalen Institute; Mystic Fire Audio, New York, 1992
(which can be purchased by online mailorder from the Mystic Fire Video website at www.mysticfire.com.
In this connection, see also the web site of the International
Transpersonal Association (ITA), in Mill Valley, California at
www.nbn.com/people/Transpersonal/itahome.html.
For an excellent article on the issue of legalisation, see "Shopping for a Drugs Policy:
Britain's Labour government wants to do a better job of tackling the
problems of illegal drugs. How about legalising them?" in The Economist
magazine, August 16th, 1997, which states "Prohibition has failed. Over
60% of British 20-22 year olds say they have used an illegal drug,
almost half of them in the past three months... Why not try a new
approach, if only as an experiment?." The article goes on to say:
Any debate on drugs law should start with a fundamental question: why
are drugs illegal in the first place? The usual answer is that illegal
drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. The facts, though, do not
really bear this out. The danger varies widely from drug to drug. The
least risky is cannabis, which has never been shown to have killed
anybody (indeed it is widely canvassed for its medical properties). The
most dangerous are opiates (ie. heroin and methadone), which kill about
1.5% of their users each year, according to London's Institute for the
Study of Drug Dependence. Tobacco kills 0.9% of its users each year and
alcohol 0.5%. Ecstasy, [ie. a "euphoriant" with mild psychedelic
properties - ed.] about which there has been huge controversy, kills
0.0002% of its users each year. A motorbike journey is three times more
likely to kill you as taking a tablet of street ecstasy and -
astoundingly - flying on a civil airliner is one-and-a-half times as
dangerous as dropping an "e".
Diodorus Siculus, World History,
Vol V:31, Edited by C.H. Oldfather, R.M. Geer, F.R. Walton, C.L.
Sherman and C. B. Welles, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass,
1933-1967.
The location of
many (but not all) of these megalithic monuments may be found in the
excellently detailed maps published by the Director at the Ordinance
Survey Office, Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland.
See Martin Brennan, The Stars and the Stones:
Ancient Art and Astronomy in Ireland (Thames and Hudson, London, 1983),
which contains detailed drawings of the petroglyphs and a very good
examination of their astronomical references based on field
observations in situ during the relevant astronomical alignments. See
also Martin Byrne's excellent Solas Atlantis website at http://gofree.indigo.ie/~ogma
which contains alot of detailed information and pictures of Irish
megalithic monuments. According to him, the oldest cairn discovered as
of 1999 (on a hill called Croughan in the Ox Mountains in County Sligo,
on the West Coast of Ireland) has been dated to 5,800 BC. A huge
neolithic complex was recently discovered on Benbulben and Kings
Mountain, but has not been explored yet.
See The. Hon. Desmond Guinness and Jaqueline O'Brien, Great Irish Houses and Castles, George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Ltd., London, 1992.
This was the inspiration for Global Vision's initiative to develop a computer simulation programme called Sustainable City,
designed to enable any town or city to model its metabolism and
footprint. Details may be found on the Global Vision web site at
www.global-vision.org/city/index.html. The ecological footprint - the
impact of a city on the surrounding ecosystem - has since been defined
by a member of this project's advisory committee, the environmental
economist William E. Rees, Professor of Community and Regional Planning
at the University of British Columbia, as follows:
"The ecological footprint is the corresponding
area of productive land and aquatic ecosystems required to produce the
resources used, and to assimilate the wastes produced, by a defined
population at a specified material standard of living, wherever on
Earth that land may be located."
Another one of this project's advisors, Sustainable London
Trust Co-Founder Herbert Girardet, has calculated that the footprint of
London - with 12 percent of Britain's population covering 170,000
hectares - comes to some 21 million hectares. This is about 125 times
the surface area of the city itself, equivalent to the entire
productive land in the UK! This demonstrates how contemporary urban
civilisation requires a global footprint to supply its current levels
of resource consumption, which are clearly not sustainable. In his
excellent paper: Revisiting Carrying Capacity:
Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability (in Population and Environment:
a Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 17, Number 2, January
1996, Copyright © 1996 Human Sciences Press Inc.), William Rees
explains (quoted with permission of the author):
-
"Since many forms of natural income (resource and service flows) are
produced by terrestrial ecosystems and associated water bodies, it
should be possible to estimate the area of land/water required by a
defined population at a given level of technology. The sum of such
calculations for all significant categories of consumption would give
us a conservative area-based estimate of the natural capital
requirements for that population.
A simple mental exercise serves to illustrate the ecological
reality behind this approach. Imagine what would happen to any modern
human settlement or urban region, as defined by its political
boundaries or the area of built-up land, if it were enclosed in a glass
or plastic hemisphere completely closed to natural flows. Clearly the
city would cease to function and its inhabitants would perish within a
few days. The population and economy contained by the capsule would
have been cut off from both vital resources and essential waste sinks,
leaving it to starve and suffocate at the same time. In other words,
the ecosystems contained within our imaginary human terrarium would
have insufficient carrying capacity to service the ecological load
imposed by the contained population.
This mental model illustrates the simple fact that as a result of high population densities, the enormous increase in per capita
energy and material consumption made possible by (and required by)
technology, and universally increasing dependencies on trade, the ecological locations of human settlements no longer co-incide with their geographic locations.
Twentieth century cities and industrial regions are dependent for
survival on a vast and increasingly global hinterland of ecologically
productive landscapes. It seems that in purely ecological terms, modern
settlements have become the human equivalent of cattle feedlots!
Cities necessarily appropriate the ecological output and life
support functions of distant regions all over the world through
commercial trade and the natural biogeochemical cycles of energy and
material. Indeed, the annual flows of natural income required by any
defined population can be called its appropriated carrying capacity.
Since for every material flow there must be a corresponding
land/ecosystem source or sink, the total area of land/water required to
sustain these flows on a continuous basis is the true ecological footprint of the referent population on the Earth."
Rees' ecological footprint analysis of his home city of Vancouver,
Canada, indicates that city appropriates the productive output of an
land area nearly 174 times larger that its political area to support
its present consumer lifestyle. Other researchers found that the
aggregate consumption of wood, paper, fibre and food by the inhabitants
of 29 cities in the Baltic Sea drainage basin appropriates an area 200
times larger than the cities themselves. Rees estimates that the
footprint of the Netherlands appropriates between 100,000 sq.
kilometres and 140,000 square kilometres of agricultural land, mostly
in the third world, for food production alone. He goes on to say:
-
"This 'imported land' is five to seven times larger than
the area of Holland's domestic arable land... It is worth remembering
that Holland, like Japan, is often held up as an economic success story
and an example for the developing world to follow. Despite small size,
few natural resources, and relatively large populations, both Holland
and Japan enjoy high material standards and positive current accounts
and trade balances as measured in monetary terms. However, our analysis
of physical flows shows that these and most other so-called "advanced"
economies are running massive, unaccounted ecological deficits with the
rest of the planet... Even if their land area were twice as productive
as world averages, many European countries would still run a deficit
more than three times larger than domestic natural income. These data
emphasise that (most developed countries) are over-populated in
ecological terms - they could not maintain themselves at current
material standards if forced by changing circumstances to live on their
remaining endowments of domestic natural capital. This is hardly a good
model for the rest of the world to follow!"
Ecological deficits are a measure of the entropic load and
resultant 'disordering' being imposed on the ecosphere by so-called
advanced countries as the unaccounted cost of maintaining and further
expanding their wealthy consumer economies. This massive entropic
imbalance invokes what might be called the first axiom of ecological
footprint analysis: On a finite planet, not all countries or regions
can be net importers of carrying capacity. This, in turn, has serious
implications for global development trends.
The current objective of international development is to raise
the developing world to present first world materials standards. To
achieve this objective, the Brundtland Commission argued for 'more
rapid economic growth in both industrial and developing countries' and
suggested that 'a five to ten-fold increase in world industrial output
can be anticipated by the time world population stabilises some time in
the next century.' (WCED, 1987).
Let us examine this prospect using ecological footprint
analysis. If just the present [ie. January 1996 - ed.] world population
of 5.8 billion people were to live at current North American ecological
standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the
total productive land requirement would be 26 billion hectares
(assuming present technologies). However, there are only just over 13
billion hectares of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are
ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person).
In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate
the increased ecological load of people alive today. If the population
were to stabilise at between 10 and 11 billion sometime in the next
century, five additional Earths would be needed, all else being equal -
and this just to maintain the present rate of ecological decline (Rees
and Weinberger, 1994).
While this may seem to be an astonishing result, empirical
evidence suggests that five phantom planets is, in fact, a considerable
underestimate (keep in mind that our footprint estimates are
conservative). Global and regional-scale ecological change in the form
of atmospheric change, ozone depletion, soil loss, ground water
depletion, deforestation, fisheries collapse, loss of biodiversity,
etc., is accelerating. This is direct evidence that aggregate
consumption exceeds natural income in certain critical categories and
that the carrying capacity of this one Earth is being steadily eroded.
In short, the ecological footprint of the present world
population/economy already exceeds the total productive land area (or
ecological space) available on Earth.
This situation is, of course, largely attributable to
consumption by that wealthy quarter of the world's population who use
75% of global resources. The WCED's 'five to ten-fold increase in
industrial output' was deemed necessary to address this obvious
inequity while accommodating a much larger population. However, since
the world is already ecologically full, sustainable growth on this
scale using present technology would require five to ten additional
planets."
D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, Viking Penguin, New York, 1931.
A similar vision of the city is captured in the wonderful time-lapse film Organism,
by Hilary Harris (1975), in which footage of New York City shot over a
period of months is compressed into twenty minutes of screen-time. The
resulting compression of information reveals all kinds of urban
environmental patterns of which one is usually quite unconscious, only
because they fall outside the limits of one's normal attention-span.
Skyscrapers construct themselves from parking lots before your eyes;
traffic pulses through the streets like the blood cells in your
capillaries; lights in office building windows flicker on and off like
neurones in some vast brain. The true nature of the city becomes
visible: a giant self-organising system. Organism won the Blue Ribbon
award at the American Film Festival in 1976, and is distributed by
Phoenix Films, New York. Karen Cooper of the New York Film Forum said
it "leaves one with the sensation of wholeness, of having witnessed a
coherent satisfying universe." It must have been an inspiration for
that other time-lapse extravaganza, Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi, for which Hilary Harris shot many of the New York scenes.
The Song of Amergin, (check details).
Gregory Bateson, Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilisation,
a paper presented at a conference he convened in association with the
Mayor of New York City in October 1970 called "Restructuring the
Ecology of a Great City" sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Reprinted in Steps To An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972
For a brilliant
scientific exposé of the self-organising principle at work from the
macrocosmic organisation of galactic super-clusters down to the
subatomic level, see Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe:
Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of
Evolution, Pergamon, New York, 1980 (re-issued by Pergamon Press 1980,
ISBN: 0080243126).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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