The Alchemical Marriage of Holism and Horizontalism
Cory Panshin on October 10, 2014 in Dance of the Visions, Emerging Visions | No Comments »I’ve spent the last five years at this blog laying out a theory of human history as determined by a succession of visions of the nature of existence. But although I have no doubts about the reality of that sequence, I’m still struggling to identify the underlying mechanisms.
I’ve most recently been developing what I think is a plausible scenario for how the earliest visions arose out of the changes in brain organization that first made us human. But that scenario can’t explain why those initial visions should have failed and been replaced by others — or why those others then failed and were replaced in turn, following an amazingly consistent pattern of events.
I’m therefore trying out a new hypothesis which assumes that the mechanisms behind the visions operate on two different levels. On the intellectual level, each vision is elaborated out of a limited set of fundamental premises — comparable to the rules of grammar or the axioms of mathematics — that is believed to explain an entire area of human experience. This produces a tightly woven logical structure which gives each vision a high degree of coherence and enables it to remain intact over an extended period of time.
However, any system that narrowly based can only provide a partial picture of reality. Newborn visions may dazzle us with their ability to tap into areas of experience that have previously been neglected, but as visions age they get stale and over-familiar and start to reveal gaps and weak spots. This is one reason why new visions become necessary.