/tag/gravity

6 quotes tagged 'gravity'

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)
366

Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the comparison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case1. This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravitational attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. Therefore, since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism. Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,” thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits. Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of magnetism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effective because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure.\r\n \r\n1 A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief History of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967).


The Magic Mountain
Author: Thomas Mann
Publisher: Vintage (1996)
303

Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it—to abdicate, that is, inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of involving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hypocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut goût of the grave. And thus too with the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs the movement toward light;


The Fourth Way
Author: P.D. Ouspensky
Publisher: Vintage (1971)
271

There is an expression in the system, 'to create moon in oneself. Let us talk about what it may mean. It is a symbolical expression, and symbols in the form of diagrams or symbolical expressions are used for very definite purposes. A symbol expresses many ideas at once. If it meant only one idea, the answer would be simple; but a symbol is used to avoid long descriptions and to put many ideas into one sentence. How to decipher a diagram or symbolical expression? In order to decipher a symbol, it is necessary to know the order of ideas included in it. \r\n\r\nNow, if we ask what it may mean to create moon in oneself, we must first ask ourselves, what is the moon's function in relation to organic life? The moon balances organic life—all external movements are balanced by the moon. What will happen if this function of the moon disappears? Will it be beneficial to an individual man or the opposite? We must realize that all this refers to being. What are the features of our being? The chief feature of our being is that we are many. If we want to work on our being, make it correspond more to our aim, we must try to become one. But this is a very far aim. \r\n\r\nWhat does it mean to become one? The first step, which is still very far, is to create a permanent centre of gravity. This is what creating moon in oneself means. The moon is a permanent centre of gravity which balances our physical life, but in ourselves we do not have such a balance, so, when we create this balance or centre of gravity in ourselves we do not need the moon. But first we must decide what the absence of permanent 'I' means. We have been told about many features of this, but they must be established definitely by observation, and in order to come nearer to the idea of creating moon in oneself we must distinguish what is important and what is unimportant. Then we must begin to struggle against the features which prevent us becoming one. We must struggle with imagination, negative emotions and self-will. Before this struggle can be successful, we must realize that the worst possible kind of imagination, from the point of view of obtaining a centre of gravity, is the belief that one can do anything by oneself. After that, we must find the negative emotions which prevent us doing what is suggested in connection with the system. For it is necessary to realize that self-will can only be broken by doing what one is told. It cannot be broken by what one decides oneself, for then it will still be self-will. \r\n\r\nLet me repeat. Work on being is always struggle—against what you like doing or dislike doing. Say you like roller-skating and you are told to remember yourself. Then you must struggle against your desire to go roller-skating. What is there more innocent than roller-skating? But you must struggle against it all the same. Every day and every hour there are things we cannot do, but there are also things we can do. So we must look at a day and see what we can do but do not do. There can be no rule 'You must remember yourself'. If you are told to do or not to do something, and you do not try, it means you do not want anything, you do not want to work. You have sufficient knowledge. Now it is necessary to push work on being. We always try to escape from doing what is suggested.


97

Q. When do we cease to be under the law of accident? A. When we develop will. To be completely free from the law of accident is very far, but there are different stages between complete freedom and our present position. In ordinary conditions accident is opposed to plan. A man who in one or another case acts according to plan escapes in these actions from the law of accident. But actions conforming to plan are impossible in ordinary life except in conditions where the combination of accidental happenings chances to coincide with the plan. The reasons why it is impossible to fulfil a plan in life are, first of all,the absence of unity and constancy in man himself, and the new lines which continually enter man's line of actions and cross it. This can be easily verified if a man tries to follow a plan in anything that does not happen or is opposed to the general trend of momentums operating in his life; for instance, if a man tries to remember himself, to struggle with habits, to observe himself, and so on. He will see that his plan is not being fulfilled and the result is quite different from what he intended, or that everything stops altogether and even the initial impulse and the understanding of the necessity and usefulness of these attempts vanishes. But if he continues to study himself, to make efforts, to work, he will see that his relation to the law of accident gradually changes. Our being subject to the law of accident is a definite fact that cannot be changed completely. Such as we are we will always be under a certain possibility of accident. Yet little by little we can make accidental happenings less possible. The theory of accidents is very simple. They happen only when the place is empty; if the place is occupied, they cannot happen. Occupied by what? By conscious actions. If you cannot produce a conscious action, at least it must be filled by intentional actions. So when work and everything connected with it becomes in truth the centre of gravity of man's life, he becomes practically free from the law of accident.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
256

As though a Copernican revolution has taken place within the psyche, consciousness faces inward and becomes aware of the self, about which the ego revolves in a perpetual paradox of identity and nonidentity.  The psychological process of assimilating the unconscious into our present-day consciousness begins at this point, and the consequent shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self signalizes the latest stage in the evolution of human consciousness.


16

Even today we can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.  Yet even this is a false formulation, since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and self-evident thing.  But fixation in unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing.  There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction.  One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea.  The ascent toward consciousness is the 'unnatural' thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens.  The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man's conscious development.