There is so much going on in the world, and changes are happening so quickly that most of us can barely keep track of it all. My own thinking has evolved considerably since my last run of frequent postings; there are lot’s of developments that bring us cause for hope, and so many more that are absolutely depressing.

I strongly recommend the C-Realm Podcast if you are looking to keep track of the real debate as it rages across cyberspace. The C-Realm host, KMO, tackles a number of issues that are pressing ever deeper into the collective intelligence as we move closer to whatever it is we are moving closer to: peak oil induced collapse? a technological singularity? a horticultural awakening? corporate fascism?

These are all topics that should be a major part of the current presidential debates. Few of us who follow things closely are surprised that they are not, but also ashamed that the level of public discourse continues to degenerate in the cesspool of corporate news speak.

A concept that has recently caught my attention as of late is coincidentia oppositorum, Latin for the coincidence of opposites. An ancient idea of mystics through varying traditions and disciplines, the underlying idea is well described in this article, from which the following has be excerpted:

…certain philosophers, including Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhardt and G.W.F. Hegel have held that presumed polarities in thought do not exclude one another but are actually necessary conditions for the assertion of their opposites. In the 20th century the physicist Neils Bohr commented that superficial truths are those whose opposites are false, but that “deep truths” are such that their opposites or apparent contradictories are true as well. The psychologist Carl Jung concluded that the “Self” is a coincidentia oppositorum, and that each individual must strive to integrate opposing tendencies (anima and animus, persona and shadow) within his or her own psyche.

 

The spiritual and mystical comprehension of the concept, it is believed, can lead to states of transcendental awareness. Though I lay no claims to such experience, it seems that the concept itself embodies so fully the state of the world as we currently find it: a government intent on colluding with corporate entities to bankrupt the extant shell of a dying republic, and a social movement of concerned citizens insisting on local control and local production; emergent communities of collaborationist, open source micro-producers exist side by side with mega-corporations rapidly patenting and commidifying anything and everything they can get their hands on, from water to genetic DNA.

Is this war, or is it a barely comprehensible dialectic playing itself out in the fields of the human mind? Or is it both?