Containers for comprehensible meaning in the future

Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors (Part #21)

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If religion, and now science, are societal undertakings located on some long-term knowledge development pathway, what kind of knowing will emerge in the future on that pathway, and to what will it be applied? Despite temporary aberrations, it might be argued that this pathway is characterized by progressive articulation of greater coherence and integration -- in which it is the nature of such 'integration' that is itself progressively reframed. The reframing must itself now integrate the recognition of loss of certainty, resulting from the work of Kurt Gödel on the possibilities of completeness in mathematics -- namely that for numerous reasons each perspective advanced fails to satisfy those holding other perspectives.

Implicit throughout the discussion above is the nature of future containers for higher orders of meaning that pose a challenge to comprehension. Religion has explicitly used metaphor to offer access to such levels of meaning -- and typically Asian, and notably Persian, cultures have freely used sexual metaphors to this end. It is clear that knowledge complexes like the I Ching are designed to serve as containers of this kind. The generative emergence of overtones ( http://www.overtonechanting.com/overtone.htm) through the techniques of Tibetan 'one voice chord' or Tantric overtone chanting (provide a metaphor of how improbable insights can emerge from a pattern of lower frequency intonation that thus serves as a container -- reminiscent of the role of resonance hybrids in chemistry ( see). But it is equally true that technologies like crop rotation, or the challenges of plasma containment in a magnetic bottle, offer powerful metaphors for exploration of the design challenges of such containers. Eastern-style sciences, as well as indigenous cultures, may have much to offer in this process.

Following the example of the Right Livelihood Award -- as the alternative Nobel Prize -- perhaps there is a case for the eastern world to establish an annual equivalent to the Nobel Prize to celebrate achievement in eastern-style science and alternative knowledge management. This could be extended to include indigenous cultures. Care would need to be taken to avoid simplistic romanticization of the other -- so often a characteristic of early sensitivity to the merits of the opposite pole of any polarity. East and West can only offer complementary styles of knowing that together hold a higher quality of knowing.

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