DGM HQ Alex in the
09.02
DGM HQ.
Alex in the back door c. 08.00.
Morning reading…
11.12 in response/s to an enquiry from a SSG member…
First Response.
Hyparxis. What does that mean? How about, as a way of getting into it, an Hyparchic Act?
And what on earth does that mean? I think of it as a creative act. In my field of endeavour, the act of music. This resonates for me. I know the experience of music coming to life under the fingers, out of nowhere, of sound becoming music, of music playing the musicians.
So, how do we recognize this? What are its characteristics?
Intention.
Play / spontaneity / improvisation.
Serious but not solemn.
In the moment while the act is unfolding, what’s happening is effortless, obvious.
The sense that something is going on here!
How could this have happened? followed by How could this not have happened?
Its influence spreads, and we may not know much about these for decades, if at all.
Technically, the creative act is non-causal. The conditions surrounding the event, or in which it takes places, most likely are a given. But not what takes places within it. Like, the theatre is a given, the performance is not.
Professional acts keep things moving in the world, but on a declining curve: they run out, go off course, atrophy.
Acts of mastery / mystery keep the process on course (intentional interventions and re-directions).
It is through creative acts that we connect to the creative future and enable it to enter our world and time-stream, here and now. JGB: With the gift of the creative energy… we can be connected to the hyparchic future.
The difficult point to remember, with us serious creatures that we are, doing important and earnest things to bring about the New World, is that the Creative Impulse so wishes to give itself away that it makes itself available to anyone who takes one step towards it, even a half-hearted step.
Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and give it ears.
Second Response.
The H word! The good news is, the experience is as simply, directly and immediately available as we are ourselves available. The bad news is, formal discussions and explanations of Hyparxis, as the kind of time associated with Will distinct from the times associated with Function and Being, tend to result in a glaze falling over my eyes.
The simplest and clearest description I have found by JGB is in a short contribution to Systematics in 1963…
HYPARXIS. The simplest approach to the third kind of time is to consider the requirements of free-will, and with it of ethics and responsibility. Successive time does not allow choice. Eternity presents us with the choice, but gives us no room to make it. A third degree of freedom is needed to pass from one line of time to another. This leads to the notion of a third kind of time connected in some way with the power to connect or to disconnect potential and actual.
To understand fully the importance of the third kind of time, that I have called hyparxis, we must observe that being itself has gradations. We ourselves can be aware of states when we are wholly controlled by casual influences, and other states when we cannot only entertain purposes, but deliberate and choose our actions with the aim of realizing them. I call this variable factor the ‘ableness-to-be’ present in different beings. It can be traced throughout all levels of existence from atoms through the simplest living forms up to man, and it is this factor that entitles us to look beyond man to the attainment of superhuman levels. Without this factor everything would be compelled to remain wholly determined by its own eternal pattern.
In my own reflections, it has seemed obvious to me that this Will Time has a close connection to Being; that our capacity to be and act hyparchically, as it were, is governed by our being; and to act effectively, by the level of our functional skill-set. In the larger literature, and discussions with Ken P and AGEB, this link (IMO critical link/connection) doesn’t seem to have been developed.
From Dr. Mike Grenfell…
I must say that in my discussions with KP and AGEB, I have had a sense that there is a very definite GC take on this work and that it is quite distinct from Bennett mainstream, so to speak… Key to this, for me, has been your work on the Tetrad - again, distinct from JGB's (although yours is kind of implied in his).
The tetrad speaks of me of different qualities of experiencing, doing and being. The tetrad of Musicianship has the four different qualities of musicianship - being itself has gradations - as…
Genius
Professional Master / Mystery
Working Player - Happy Gigster
Each of these characters experiences music differently; and experiences time differently. One aspect / example of this is the extent of their Present Moment of experiencing; and of the present moment in which they have the capacity to act. A good professional can commit themselves to a piece of work for one, to three, and at the top of the professional game, seven years. But it takes the qualities of the Master Musician to be able to undertake a piece of work with a duration of 21 years.
Creative Time
My beginning & end are not apart
I Am one instantaneous moment of presence
Time’s Cycle Eternity
Welcome the unexpected This is the first time
Time’s Arrow
One thing after another
Welcome the expected
The ways in which we experience time is governed by the degree of our development - our level of being.
My conversation with ES: two examples of the future reaching back and leading us towards it, in bold, refer to the Guitar Craft course in Sassoferrato, March 2010. Perhaps visit
OCG and scroll down to the final meeting for Saturday 27th. March, 2010…
23.44 Thanks were given to those who made this course possible; and many others not physically present. Many good words…
M: You can’t stop a good thing.
Tony: his sense at the Level 2.5 in Red Lion House (1986-89) of something new entering the world; and the same sense again last night.
J’s sense of a Presence at the Inaugural Meeting.
C’s angel in the ceiling of the dining room, at tea when he arrived here.
Michael T’s comment that, when GC began, there was the belief that music can change the world.
T’s Point of Seeing on the way to Seattle from Charlestown in 1990 with The LCG; and “bumping into an expanded present moment”.
B’s seeing of the Chalice.
The time frame of Guitar Craft, that is, Guitar Craft’s Present Moment, has often been suggested as 200 years. The beginning of this course came from a Point of Seeing almost 25 years ago, at the end of the first GC course. In a sense, then, the beginning of this course was 25 years ago, and this course has grown out of it. The future leant backwards and pulled us towards it.
My own overall impression of The OCG III performance: lots of older people behaving as if they were children. What if these were the Power Possessors of finance, politics and militaries around the world, in Seats of Power? Something would change.
The Orchestra might be seen as a special study in the self-organising properties of complex wholes. How does Intelligence act in and through many individuals, coming together as one? What if a high level of Creative or Conscious Intelligence needed to be born into this world, what kind of body would it need?
More from Dr. Mike, after I sent JGB’s Time…
… (possibly the most succinct and useful statement I have yet read from JGB) and your extensions.
Key phrases for me are:
‘Hyparxis-Freewill requires ethics and responsibilities’. (This is the point where fact recognises value.)
‘Being itself has gradations’. (you are correct – overlooked in conversation with KP and AGEB).
‘We can choose our actions with the aim of realising them’. (in acts of creativity, the ‘choice’ and realisation are often experientially co -terminus).
‘By the change from quantity to quality we mount the scale of existence’.
‘We move in hyparrxis by an act of Will’.
So, to combine you and him, we might say:
I
Levels of Being condition unity / integrity of Will
Levels of Being are expressed in terms of Functional Capacity.
Therefore, Functional Capacity can actualise Will and, with it, its unity and integrity.
Will is something that is essential but only actualised in terms of gradations of Being, expressed through Functionality.
II
Being allows for Decision-making in terms of Ableness ‘to be’.
Ableness ‘to be’ is proportional to participation in hyparchic acts.
Ableness ‘to be’ is proportional to Functional Capacity and vice versa.
Decision making is therefore proportional to Functional Capacity + Being.
III
Music is always available but not always actualised.
Actualised through Hyparxis – rightness – experienced as an act of identity / recognition between existence (Being) and essence (Will) – expressed through Functional Capacity.
Most acts/ events remain in potentia – are infinite. The decision is a choice of freedom – not to do anything but the ‘right thing’. Potentia is actualised.
Rightness is always available but not always actualised. Depends on levels of necessity / Will and the level of being to recognise it - and the Functional Capacity to actualise it.
When we do not do the ‘right thing’, it is because there is insufficient level of Being (inner togetherness) to recognise it and Functional Capacity to actualise it…
Therefore, can be improved by addressing functional issues.
IV
The source of rightness is the essential quality of rightness itself: governed by pattern and structure.
Ditto for Will.
Will = Rightness + Necessity.
Rightness / Will concerns ‘Being’ and ‘Function’.
‘Being’ and Function – here, the existential is the active element.
Necessity and Will – here, the essential is the active element.
V
Function-Being-Will are synonymous with Ableness-to-be.
In recent correspondence between a musician pal and AGEB, this from AGEB…
Visual arts – eternity.
Literature – time.
Music – hyparxis.
I think you guys are so into hyparxis it is so close you cannot see it.
On the DuVersity site there are some
Musings On Hyparxis and a link to the Parabola review of
A GYMNASIUM OF BELIEFS IN HIGHER INTELLIGENCE (opens pdf) The following is a superb description by the reviewer of what I understand as characteristics of the Creative Act…
Characteristics of higher intelligence, Blake says, are what the poet Keats called “negative capacity,” or the ability to hold together two things that are opposites, without rejecting one or the other. Other characteristics are tolerance of mystery, the ability to practice concentrated attention, willingness to follow the scent of the infinite, and contentment with not reaching conclusions or having set explanations. He states that “beliefs are the antithesis of higher intelligence.” The goal of higher intelligence, he contends, is to embrace the whole, and it is this ability that is at the heart of great art. The cultivation of higher intelligence is offered as an alternative to the type of intelligence that has created our current, untenable dilemmas. Blake contends that myths and metaphors are the stuff of higher intelligence.
He makes a sharp distinction between the reflexive self-consciousness that constitutes our sense of self, which he considers a social construct, and what he calls primordial or higher intelligence. The sense of identity we think of as ego, or self, blocks the awareness of higher intelligence, he says, and as long as you are centered in your own sense of identity, you are excluded from any gleam of higher intelligence. Consideration of the whole is a violation of “common sense” and is nonsensical from the everyday point of view. This non-linear, non-conceptual, non-judgmental awareness does not come naturally to most people and it must be trained; it requires practice and must be nurtured. He says that any experience from an individual perspective is necessarily limited and can only offer a partial view of the situation, and that personal opinion is highly prejudiced and is basically another form of superstition. In this light, to believe in anything is a gamble.
Higher intelligence encompasses all views and all approaches, according to Blake. It is based on acceptance or integration without rejection. It is a grand mosaic. Each perspective provides a facet or a glimpse of the truth, and to take any of these for the whole of the truth is the height of folly. One must give up on “being right.” Higher intelligence is a cure for the “right” virus that has infected our mental streams.
Blake talks about intelligence as the ability to “change in relation to change.” It is always in process, a moving target, and it is just this acceptance of change that sets the stage for creativity. This is the intelligence at work, when we feel the forces of inspiration, when there is something coming to us from outside the box. When consciousness can shift its focus from the individual habituation of the consensual trance of everydayness, there is an opening to higher intelligence. He lays out a diagram of intelligence going from what he calls Automatism up to the Witness. The steps along the way are marked by the development of intentionality, which is a necessary condition for the transcendental ego. As the transcendental ego develops, the person becomes the witness and gains impartiality and objectivity. Each step up the ladder of intelligence is an awakening that opens consciousness to a new perspective, a new way of seeing that is radically different, with a different orientation.
One of the paradoxes of higher intelligence is that as long as you are looking for it, you can never find it. Any effort toward acquiring it only blocks it further from your sight. Higher intelligence doesn’t operate conceptually; rather than being analytic, higher intelligence is synthetic, it is “intimacy with experience,” without intrusion of reason or analysis. It is experience seen from the perspective of wholeness, not looking outward, but seeking inwardly.
So, no authority claimed for any of my contributions, and a discussion ongoing.
11.15 Morning street I…
II...
DGM SoundWorld II…
… where dear old Mr. Stormy is continuing to troll through 1981 Japan with his Crim pals.
Kitchen meeting with an important comment: the large KCCC cup I…
II...
… is excellent and fitting for comforting drinks, suggests David, such as hot chocolate, cappucini, even soups.
17.29 An e-flurrying day, and organizing data files.
The Minx has called, more than once today, to let me know that WillyFred wants me home.
Soon off, via Wilton. Farewell, DGM street! I…
II...
20.38 Bredonborough.
Mr. Romain is well and Romain’s Emporium as welcoming as ever.
The Minx and WillyFred are both waiting to be adored.
