"This is how a human being can change:
There's a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need to devour."

But the diversity of histories seems almost overwhelming, each human race living in a different temporal order and swimming in a different stream of history that we call a "tradition".


Before giving an indication of his proof, notice that very considerable sophistication involved in the use of inequalities here. Archimedes knew, what so many people to this day do not, that π does not equal 22/7, and made no claim to have discovered the exact value. If we take his best estimate as the average of his two bounds we obtain 3.1418, an error of about 0.0002.
Ancient Maya discovered two fundamental ideas in mathematics: positional value and the concept of zero. This feat was accomplished by only one other great culture of antiquity, the Hindu. But they did it 300 years or so after the Maya.
These two elements, positional value and zero, might be considered simple and basic concepts nowadays. In fact, they are, and that is precisely what set them apart as a distinct stroke of genius. Greek and Romans, with all the force of their spirit and all the strength of their institutions, did not manage to find these principles. Just try to write down a large number using the Roman notation to see how important are the notions of positional value and zero.
The Maya system is based on the number 20, not on the number 10 as our own. This means that the Maya counted from zero to nineteen before they had to move to the next order, instead of using 10 digits, from zero to nine, as we do. Perhaps they employed fingers and toes to keep the count.
In a decimal system the positional value is met as soon as we reach beyond number nine. A one followed by a zero is a ten. In the Maya system, a one followed by a zero equals twenty.
Our numeric system employs ten symbols to represent each one of the digits. Maya numerals were written with only three symbols: a dot for one; a line, which is a five, and the glyph of a sea shell to represent zero...
The basic unit for the Maya calendar is the day, or kin. The second order of 20 days was called uinal. In a perfect vigesimal numeric system, third order should contain 400 days (20 x 20 x 1); but at this point Maya priests introduced a variant for calendar computation purposes. The third order, or tun, was made by 18 uinals, or 360 kins. This came closer to the duration of the solar year....
In fact, the Babylonians have given their base 60 to us. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. There are also 360 degrees in a circle (6 x 60), and a single degree can be broken down still further. There are 60 minutes in a degree, and 60 seconds in one of these minutes. (There is no connection between angle minutes & seconds and time minutes & seconds.)

"But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers became transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal Principles, of which our current law of gravity has become one.
"The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning "mind."
"Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.
"What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.
"But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced...
[Plato] and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
"The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
"And yet, Phædrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists....
"Lightning hits!
"Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric....

And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.
"One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching that horizon. It's a geometer’s line...completely flat, steady and known. Perhaps it's the original line that gave rise to Euclid’s understanding of lineness; a reference line from which was derived the original calculations of the first astronomers that charted the stars.
"Phædrus knew, with the same mathematical assurance Poincaré had felt when he resolved the Fuchsian equations, that this Greek aretê was the missing piece that completed the pattern, but he read on now for completion.
"The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing—using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
....
The Appearances cling to something which is independent of them and which, like Ideas, is unchanging. The "something" that Appearances cling to he named "substance." And at that moment, and not until that moment, our modern scientific understanding of reality was born.
"Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."
"And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus remembered, or one error of sentence completeness, or three misplaced modifiers, or...it went on and on. Any of these was sufficient to inform a student that he did not know rhetoric. After all, that’s what rhetoric is, isn't it? Of course there's "empty rhetoric," that is, rhetoric that has emotional appeal without proper subservience to dialectical truth, but we don't want any of that, do we? That would make us like those liars and cheats and defilers of ancient Greece, the Sophists—remember them? We'll learn the Truth in our other academic courses, and then learn a little rhetoric so that we can write it nicely and impress our bosses who will advance us to higher positions.
"Forms and mannerisms—hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row "readers," mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A’s while those who possess the real aretê sit silently in back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.
"And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: "What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha."
"Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic, Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric, Aristotelian laughter...ha-ha, ha-ha.
"And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done....
This primacy of the rhetorical or grammatical over analytics is apparently what the Sophists acknowledged, but that which Plato denied.

So, is dialectical reason a fraud and a usurper and a delusion?  The short answer is -- yes. The example of Descartes proves decisively that speech -- grammatical, articulating speech -- precedes and subsumes thinking itself. Dialectics or logic, as something divorced from grammatical speech, is an abstraction -- a castle in the air. Analytics is but one specialised branch of grammatical speech that also includes -- epics, lyrics, and dramatics.  Dialectical reason, which divides reality into subject and object (mind and body) categories, is rooted in an historical error that assumed the indicative form of speech (in the form "it is...") paramount.  It cannot account, by its omissions, for our full reality. It is a narrowly perspectival logic, fully that which Blake called "single vision".

the hare can never surpass the tortoise....
This process of ascent and descent of time is not described by dialectical reason. But it is described by enantiodromia -- reversal of fortune at the extremity of action, (or, why the road to hell is often paved with good intentions).

I and I
centers, pivoting centers....
Consequently, the various "spheres" (or modules) actually form a seamless whole, and the modular boundaries are simply conventional, definitional, intellectual, and abstract. It is important to bear this in mind, for each is nonetheless informed by the "modern ethos", which is dialectical reason, and if this Second Wave civilisation is presently dying -- and its passing away is attended by many apparent negatives of turbulence, crisis, chaos, confusion, or seeming madness and absurdity -- it is because its particular mental-logical structure of consciousness, expressed in the form of dialectical thinking (or "Universal Reason"), is itself breaking down as it now exceeds and transgresses the limits of its possibilities and its spectrum of applicability. It has become, in other words, "deficient", in Gebser's assessment also. Yet, this remains the form of thinking that is still taught in our schools and universities.

The most certain indicator that this mental structure is decaying, and that dialectical reason is collapsing, is the proliferation of perverse outcomes and unintended consequences. A whole industry of "crisis management" has arisen simply to handle the blowback effects, perverse outcomes, unintended consequences, and multiple crises that have been engendered in the breakdown of dialectical rationality itself, applying (of course!) -- dialectical thinking. "Crisis management" is therefore tautology and is itself a perverse outcome, which is just as likely structurally to contribute as much to the present mayhem as it presumes to resolve. In fact, we are witnessing this very "crisis management" in action today applied to the present market meltdown. But in effect "crisis management" is simply a public relations slogan. It gives the impression that, really, someone with "smarts" is in charge and has things well in hand and under control. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The present crisis is simply one aspect of a continuing crisis of long-standing that has been lurching forward from decade to decade, and since the First World War at least. It is the breakdown of dialectical rationality itself in its failure to account for all of our experience and reality.

This, more than any other factor, is what it means for a civilisation to die. It simply fails to respond adequately to new circumstances. It's structure of consciousness is deficient. And, more specifically, this is what Toffler means by the "dying" of Second Wave civilisation. The terms "post-industrial", "post-modern", "post-ideological" all amount to a post-mortem.
...
We owe the term "enantiodromia" to the depth psychologist Carl Jung. He, in turn, owed its meaning to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who Rosenstock-Huessy once called "The Greek Buddha". In general, it specifies "the coincidence of opposites", or rather the polarity and even identity of presumed opposites. It negates dualism. More specifically (and as I have elaborated upon this in past posts) enantiodromia means reversal of fortune at the extremity of action and at limit. One and the same process reverts into its own contrary when pressed beyond its effective and applicable limit or "Nemesis" point. This is, in effect, a recovery of the old Greek consciousness of hubris, or transgression of limit.

Dialectical reason does not actually disappear in this paradigm, but is dethroned. It becomes a special instance of thinking only, not the essence of consciousness, and one applicable only to a limited range of circumstances and problems. The new consciousness sees that dialectical rationality, pushed to its extremity and beyond the limits of its possibilities, becomes indistinguishable from insanity and madness, and ends in absurdity. This is the current state of affairs, one observed in all sorts of issues. This is the ethos, however yet unarticulated, that informs the manifestations of the new.
justice......

Such is the terrible Abraxas.
He is the mightiest manifest being, and in him creation becomes frightened of itself.
He is the revealed protest of creation against the Pleroma and its nothingness.
He is the terror of the son, which he feels against his mother.
He is the love of the mother for her son.
He is the delight of earth and the cruelty of heaven.
Man becomes paralyzed before his face.
Before him exist neither question nor answer.
He is the life of creation.
He is the activity of differentiation. 
He is the love of man.
He is the speech of man.
He is both the radiance and the dark shadow of man.
He is deceitful reality.

The heavenly gods appear in spirituality, the earth gods appear in sexuality. Spirituality receives and comprehends. It is feminine and therefore we call it MATER COELESTIS, the heavenly mother. Sexuality generates and creates. It is masculine and therefore we call it PHALLOS, the earthly father. The sexuality of man is more earthly, while the sexuality of woman is more heavenly. The spirituality of man is more heavenly, for it moves in the direction of the greater. On the other hand, the spirituality of woman is more earthly, for it moves in the direction of the smaller.
Deceitful and devilish is the spirituality of the man who goes toward the smaller. Deceitful and devilish is the spirituality of the woman who goes toward the greater. Each is to go to its own place.
Man and woman become a devil to each other when they do not separate their spiritual paths, for the nature of created beings is always of the nature of differentiation.
The sexuality of man goes to that which is earthly; the sexuality on woman goes to that which is spiritual. Man and woman become a devil to each other if they do not discriminate between their two forms of sexuality.
Man shall know that which is smaller, woman that which is greater. Man shall separate himself from spirituality and from sexuality alike. He shall call spirituality mother, and he shall enthrone her between heaven and earth. He shall name sexuality phallos, and shall place it between himself and the earth, for the mother and the phallos are super-human demons and manifestations of the world of the gods. They are more effective for us than the gods, because they are nearer to our own being. When you cannot distinguish between yourselves on the one hand, and sexuality and spirituality on the other, and when you cannot regard these two as being above and beside yourself, then you become victimized by them
Man is weak, therefore community is indispensable; if it is not the community in the sign of the mother, then it is in the sign of the phallus. Not to have community consists of suffering and sickness. Community brings with itself fragmentation and dissolution. Differentiation leads to solitude. Solitude is contrary to community. Because of the weakness of man's will, as opposed to the gods and demons and their inescapable law, there is need for community.
For this reason, there shall be as much community as necessary, not for the sake of men, but for the sake of the gods. The gods force you into a community. As much community as they force upon you is necessary, but more than that is evil.
In solitude let there be squandering of abundance.
For community is the depth, while solitude is the height.
The true order in community purifies and preserves.
The true order in solitude purifies and increases.
Community gives us warmth, while solitude gives us the light.

The serpent is an earthly soul, half demonic, a spirit, and related to the spirits of the dead. Like the spirits of the dead, the serpent also enters various terrestrial objects. The serpent also induces fear of itself in the hearts of men, and enkindles desire in the same. The serpent is of a generally feminine character and seeks forever the company of the dead. It is associated with the dead who are earthbound, who have not found the way by which to cross over to the state of solitude. The serpent is a whore and she consorts with the devil and with evil spirits; she is a tyrant and a tormenting spirit, always tempting people to keep the worst kind of company.

The white bird is the semi-heavenly soul of man. It lives with the mother and occasionally descends from the mother's abode. The bird is masculine and is called effective thought. The bird is chaste and solitary, a messenger of the mother. It flies high above the earth. It commands solitude. It brings messages from the distance, from those who have gone before, those who are perfected. It carries our words up to the mother. The mother intercedes and warns, but she has no power against the gods. She is a vehicle of the sun.
The serpent descends into the deep and with her cunning she either paralyzes or stimulates the phallic demon. The serpent brings up from the deep the very cunning thoughts of the earthly one, thoughts that crawl through all openings and become saturated with desire. Although the serpent does not want to be, she is nevertheless useful to us. The serpent eludes our grasp, we pursue her and she shows us the way, which, with our limited human wit, we could not find.