THE INTEGRITY PAPERS Genre Group   &     NUC       ceptualinstitute.com
      On wednesday September 24, 1997 I had an interesting serendipitous meeting with Richard Morley while I attended the New England Complex Systems Institute's 1st  International Conference on Complex Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire.  Actually, he detained me after the day's activities, intently inquiring who I was, since I had appeared at the proceedings quite the rebel interloper, against the standard mantra of Complexity theorists many of whom are of Nobel status.    Apparently I had caught someone's attention and there was need to gauge if I were troublesome to their immediate plans or not.  There are many agendas in any given situation and not all of them innocent or high-mindedly academic.   Concepts like complexity are being applied and evaluated in real-time human systems world wide -- with vested interests involved.   But I'll leave that for another telling.
       One of the more engaging moments of Morley's and my conversation was when he suggested that if I really wanted to disseminate my ideas in a broad way, finding an audience which would pick up on my concepts and be more open to subtle influence, that I should consider writing a science fiction work, incorporating my ceptualizations. The immediate thorn would be removed, my ideas would have fertile soil, and with a little bit of good luck there would be a nice bank account to satisfy the needs of my growing family.   Quite the plum.
        First, I'm not a fictive person.    That's why I am all the more appreciative of a well spun tale or a lyrical and meaning filled poem.  I honor and respect those skills.   Second, I am tuned to the insights of sci-fi writers.  No stone or dimension or perspective is left unexplored.  Someone, somewhere, as yet or if not now, then soon, would have written these perceptions and relations that I fervently convey in my writings.  I couldn't think of any at that moment, but I felt confident in the knowledge that it had been done.  Dan Quinn's "Ishmael" is a poignant and clear anthem that covers at least one of the ceptings my writings treat, so there must be others, to fill the spectrum.  So I deferred,  notwithstanding the benefits it hinted at.
       Half a year after that midnight conversation, late into February 1998, I was browsing a used book sale and spotted Frank Herbert's "God Emperor of Dune".  I had read "Dune", loved the movie version, hadn't thought of it in years and was about to go on vacation.  This was apparently a sequel.  I snapped it up, read a few chapters and was so delighted with a passage on page 55 of 358 that I put it up on the website before I left.  You will find it as the first quote, following. 
       It is now March 11th, and I share this with all of you as I send this ephemeral message to Morley.  Laced delicately within a story of interesting consequence (in the sense that Star Trek's Spock might have intoned it) are salted the scattered seeds of insight and import.  Comprehensions and understandings gifted like single flutters of a bird's wing, there, but swamped blended enmeshed in the flow of other massive events and procedures.  Capturable if you have the stamina to hold for the flash of an instant in the milieu and gather in their momentous delicacy and thematic robustness.  Sweep the ideas out of the midst of the onrush and know that you can apply the ideas to your own life -- and world around you -- not just to the fantasy of a word-woven enchantment in your hands in front of your eyes.      This is a marvelous book.  And it was already done, my dear Morley, by one of our premier science-fiction authors.  Many of the Integrity concepts are there, and they've impacted a whole generation since being published in 1981!
       So. What now can be my role in all of this?   Quite simple actually.  Clarify the concepts, extend their reach.  Know that every age presents a conceptual environment which each life can experience and participate in -- and recognize that which our companions are capable of recognizing too.   And so, together, give voice to ceptualizings perceptions and realities which are the tenor and fabric of our world.
        Alternative expressions of being.    In this case, an ahnkh, a mirror, better polished than we've ever had before.                                                                                                     March 11th 1998

 

FRANK   HERBERT

. . . on systems, complexity, infinity, eternity

 

These delicious tidbits are taken from Herbert's  Sci-Fi novel "God Emperor of Dune",
New York, Berkley Books, 1981.

 

        p55.

        "For what do you hunger, Lord?" Moneo ventured.
        "For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions.  Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?"
        "You have said it many times, Lord.   It is the ability to change your mind."
        "Change, yes.  And do you know what I mean by long-term??
        "For you, it must be measured in millennia, Lord."
        "Moneo, even my thousands of years are but a puny blip against Infinity."
        "But your perspective must be different from mine, Lord."
        "In the view of Infinity, any defined long-term is short-term."
        "Then are there no rules at all, Lord?"  Moneo's voice conveyed a faint hint of hysteria.
                           Leto smiled to ease the man's tensions.   "Perhaps one."

 

        p123.

        "Words can carry any burden we wish.   All that's required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build."       

        p192.

        "I have set up a pattern in it, a pattern of patterns."
        "So you say."
        "Information is frozen in patterns, Duncan.  We can use one pattern to solve another pattern.  Flow patterns
             are the hardest to recognize and understand."

        p197

        Moneo started to shrug and thought better of it.  His lips trembled.
        "Time can also be a place, Moneo," Leto said. "Everything depends upon where you are standing, on where
             you look or what you hear.  The measure of it is found in consciousness itself."

 

        pp202-203

        "Each cycle is a reaction to the preceding cycle. If you think about the shape (of the current cycle) you will
             know the shape of the next cycle."

        "The psyche?"
        "That reflexive awareness which tells us how very alive we can become.  You know it very well, Hwi.  It is
             that sense which tells you how to be true to yourself."

        "Eventually, travel comes to mean freedom."

        "A wise man of my ancestry ... observed that wealth is a tool of freedom.  But the pursuit of wealth is the
             way to slavery."

        p204

        "Until (then) ... We will have tested ourselves by then with a profound experience shared by all.   We will
             have learned that a thing which can happen on one planet can happen on any planet."
        "So much pain and death," she whispered.
        "Don't you understand about death?" he asked.  "You must understand.  The species must understand.  All
             life must understand."
        "Help me, Lord," she whispered.
        "It is the most profound experience of any creature," he said.  "Short of death come the things which risk and
             mirror it -- life-threatening diseases, injuries and accidents . . . childbirth for a woman . . . and once it was
              combat for males."
        "But your Fish Speakers are . . ."
        "They teach about survival," he said.
        Her eyes went wide with understanding.   "The survivors.  Of course."  . . . .
       

        p205

        "Always recognize the accuracy of Folk Wisdom," he said.

       
        "The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats.  Good administrators
                make immediate choices."
        "Acceptable choices?"
        "They can usually be made to work."

        "(good administrators) depend on verbal orders.  They never lie about what they've done if their verbal
             orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of
             verbal orders.  Often the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong.  Bad
             administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections."

       p225-6

       Again, Moneo wrestled with things he could only feel and not express.
       Watching Moneo, Leto felt the flow of an observational awareness, a thought process which occurred so
            rarely but with such vivid amplification when it did occur, that Leto did not stir lest he cause a ripple in the
             flow.
       The primate thinks and by thinking, survives.  Beneath his thinking is a thing which came with his
           cells.  It is the current of human concerns for the species.  Sometimes they cover it up, wall it off ...
          He knows there is a cellular awareness.  It is what I find when I scan the Golden Path.  This is
          humanity and both of us agree:  it must endure!

       The words will work for him in their usual ways.  Moneo may never glimpse the transcendental
             potential of his words . . .

        . . ."Throughout our history," Leto said, "the most potent use of words has been to round out some
           transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in
           such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: "this is what I meant."

        p236-7

        "Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep
             desire for absolutes.  The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or
            even {dreadful thought}, educational."

        p264

        Siona took one more slow turn, looking outward.
        Leto knew the innermost sensation of what she saw.  Except for that insignificant blurred blip of his tower's
             base there was not the slightest lift to the horizon  -- flat, everywhere flat.

        . . .  "The ocean without water," she whispered.
        Again she turned  and examined the entire horizon.
        There was no wind and, Leto knew, without wind, the silence ate at the human soul.  Siona was feeling the
             loss of all reference points.  She was abandoned in dangerous space.

        p265

        "Natura non facit saltus," he said.     . . .  "Nature makes no leaps."

        p279

        "I don't understand you at all ," she said.
        "Yet you are committed to doing just that."
        "Am I?"
        "How else can you give me something of value in exchange for what I give you?"
        "What do you give me?"  All of the bitterness was there and a hint of the spice from her dried food.
        "I give you this opportunity to be alone with me, to share with me, and you spend this time without concern.
           You waste it."  . . .
        . . "What happens if I don't learn your damned lesson?"
        "You'll probably die," he said.

        p281

        She spoke sleepily, "You rumble inside."
        "The fire never goes out completely."
        This interested her.   . . .   "Fire?"
        "Every living thing has a fire within it, some slow, some very fast."

        p290

       The Duncans sometimes ask if I understand the exotic ideas of our past?  And if I understand them,
         why can't I explain them?  Knowledge, the Duncans believe, resides only in particulars.  I try to
         tell them that all words are plastic.  Word images begin to distort in the instance of utterance.  Ideas
         imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression.  This is the very essence of 
         the meaning within the word exotic.  See how it begins to distort?  Translation squirms in the 
         presence of  the exotic.  The Galach which I speak here imposes itself.  It is an outside frame of
         reference, a particular system.  Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators.  Adopt
         a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change.  Does it serve any
         purpose for me to tell the Duncans that there are no languages for some?  Ahhh!  But the Duncans
         believe that all languages are mine.

        p342

        "What will happen today?" Moneo demanded.  . . .
        . . .   "A seed blown in the wind could become tomorrow's willow tree," Leto said.
        "You know our future!  Why won't you share it?"   Moneo was close to hysteria ... refusing anything his
             immediate senses did not report.
        Leto turned to glare at the majordomo ... "Take charge of your own existence, Moneo!" ...
        "Look upward, Moneo!"
        Involuntarily, Moneo obeyed, peering into the cloudless sky where morning light was increasing.
        "What is it, Lord?"    
        "There's no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo.  Only an open sky full of changes.  Welcome it. 
              Every sense you possess is an instrument for relating to change.  Does that tell you nothing?"

        p354

        "It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That is the way it always is with
           humans."

        "Anything is possible in a magic universe."

        "Now you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this?  I wish only to increase it."

        p355

        "If you want immortality, then deny form.  Whatever has form has mortality.  Beyond form is the formless, 
          the immortal." 

                                                    Siona said, "I am different, but still I am. . . ."

 

Ceptual Institute - integritydot.jpeg (6802 bytes)        THE INTEGRITY PAPERS  (LINKS TO CEPTUAL READINGS)

     hubNGC7027b.jpg (2489 bytes)             Ceptual Institute - bigoort.jpeg (38054 bytes)        GENRE WORKS (OTHER WRITERS)
            POETICS
     Ceptual Institute - hubhourglsside.jpg (1703 bytes)        MINDWAYS (LINKS TO GLOBAL THINKERS)
     Ceptual Institute - solarwindearth.jpeg (14615 bytes)             Ceptual Institute - cloopt.jpg (6361 bytes)         "NON-FRACTAL COMPLEXITY"  (order the Videotape)

| HOME |