Monad

Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in his Monadologie. Monads are to the mental realm what atoms are to the physical. Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe, and are also entities of perception. The monads are "substantial forms of being" with the following properties: they are eternal, indecomposable, individual, subject to their own laws, un-interacting, and each reflecting the entire universe in a pre-established harmony (a historically important example of panpsychism). Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are merely phenomenal.
The ontological essence of a monad is its irreducible simplicity.

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Since we really do have knowledge of these supra-sensible realities, knowledge that we cannot possibly have obtained through any bodily experience, Plato argued, it follows that this knowledge must be a form of recollection and that our souls must have been acquainted with the Forms prior to our births.

Taking notes, excuse me please and feel free to say anything!



Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
Carrying on the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of universal harmony, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who with Isaac Newton was the co-inventor of calculus, developed an elegant grand philosophy based on the concept of an evolving unit of consciousness called the monad. Monads for Leibnitz are the most fundamental metaphysical points which have always existed and can never be destroyed.
Leibnitz felt that all matter is alive and animated throughout with monads. The monad is the principle of continuity between the physical and the psychological realms. The same principle that expresses itself within our minds is active in inanimate matter, in plants, and in animals. Thus the nature of the monad is best understood by studying the spiritual and psychic forces within ourselves.
Monads themselves vary in the amount of consciousness or clarity of their perceptions. Certain physical facts, such as the principle of least action, indicated to Leibnitz an intelligence within the most basic particles in creation. On the other hand, the findings of psychology have indicated that there are areas of the mind that are unconscious in their nature. In the lowest monads everything is obscure and confused, resembling sleep. While in humanity, consciousness attains a state of apperception -- a reflexive knowledge of the self.
Every monad discovers its nature from within itself. It is not determined from without; there are no windows through which anything can enter; all of its experience already exists within each monad.
Both organisms and inorganic bodies are composed of monads, or centers of force, but the organism contains a central monad or "soul" which is the guiding principle of the other monads within its body. Inorganic bodies are not centralized in this way, but consist of a mere mass or aggregation of monads. The higher the organism, the more well-ordered will be its system of monads.
Every monad has the power to represent the entire universe within itself. It is a world in miniature, a microcosm, a "living mirror of the universe." Yet each monad has its own unique point of view, with its own characteristic degree of clarity. The higher the monad, the more distinctly it perceives and expresses the world; the monads with which it is most closely associated constitute its own body, and these it represents most clearly. Leibnitz stated: [INDENT]Every body feels everything that occurs in the entire universe, so that anyone who sees all could read in each particular thing that which happens everywhere else and, besides all that has happened and will happen, perceiving in the present that which is remote in time and space.[/INDENT]The monads form a graduated progressive series from the lowest to the highest. There is a continuous line of infinitesimal gradation from the dullest piece of inorganic matter to god, the monad of all other monads -- just as the soul is the presiding monad over the other monads within the human body. There is a parallelism between mental and physical states here. The body is the material expression of the soul. However, while the body operates according to the deterministic laws of cause and effect, the soul acts according to the teleological principle of final causes towards its ultimate evolution. These two realms are in harmony with each other.

The Roots of Consciousness: History, The Age of Enlightenment

Electra, that's one of the best definitions of the monads that I've ever come across. Thanks.

Also, I believe that Leibnitz wanted to use the monads to invent a universal reasoning machine. A machine that would answer any question?

Too bad it already exists.

icegrass

Ha, Ha! Yeah, but who knows about it?

Nice photos by the way. It is freezing here in the NorthEast (and quite dark too) .

--Pythagorean

Monads.... why would we need anymore speculations from other egos when we have the TRUTH directly from Universal Mind

Starchild

Thanks.

Your comment Electra just proves how you belong to the group of people who, having read some of the Russells' books think they have understood the message and, in trying to show off how much they think they know, they talk so much and conceptualize so much

Starchild

I am very uncertain why you attempt to be antagonistic with me. In my experience, what APPEARS to be antithetical is in ultimately and always in service to the PRIMARY. There is a fundamental operating principle that requires this to function, in my experience...and that is LOVE (magnetism, the Law of Attraction), which I am not experiencing with you, Starchild, for WHATEVER reason.

The best thing for us both to do is to remain completely away from eachother until this comes to some kind of resolution for you.

I don't have any problem--but you seem to--

Best Regards--

Electra

XX

Is the problem always somebody else's?
Do you really think any of the philosophers of the past come any close to Dr. Russell?
Look at the complexity of Leibnitz speculations and look at the simplicity of God's Message instead
Best regards to you,

Starchild

No starchild

The problem is not always somebody's elses. Only in this particular instance. I do not appreciate your lack of simple manners with me, as you are hellbent on character attacks rather than a genuine sharing or learning experience.

If you want to share Dr. Russell's teachings in this thread, be my guest.

Perhaps it is always good to look at different teachings from different points of view, for the simple fact we are all different and so learn and absorb things in different ways.

Even perhaps I myself was getting to Dr. Russell's teachings before you barged in here with your rotten eggs and tomatoes, carried over from my previous interactions with you.

If there was any lack of clarity in my previous post to you, then let me make it more clear: I don't like you too swell, and am therefore not listening at this time.

It is something a little manners could change quite quickly. The choice is yours and the problem.

Was it not you who said that you get your knowledge from very deep revelations directly from your Higher Self?.... and that if you did not experience it like that, then it wasn't true? ...as if it was that easy to connect consciously to our Higher Self. And you go around picking up other ego's speculations and putting them up here as if they were great revelations when all it requires is a bit of discernment. You can compare philosophers of the past to each other, but we don't need them in this forum: we already have the best philosophers in Lao and Walter Russell.
And their philosophy is very simple: As God says: "Great art is simple"

And, oh boy, have you shown your true colors!

Starchild
And, oh boy, have you shown your true colors!

Starchild,

As far as I know, it is not against the rules of this board to post things that interest me. It is not against higher self to read and learn what others have said from a scholarly approach. I thought the same as you when I arrived here (regarding WR), but since have changed my mind. Reading the great writings of other philosophers is teaching me many things that I ENJOY.

And what true colors? There is nothing wrong with saying here is the limit.

Besides, I thought you said you gave up trying to save the world? What concern is it of yours what I am doing or if it is even true that I fit into some imagined category of a type of person you have deemed me to be?

For clarifiction, yes discipline is more important than knowledge to me. That does not mean I don't like reading and learning. I have always read and shared things on boards. That does not mean I am proposing them to be truths, but rather am exploring.

The whole issue originated from our conversation about your assertation of the matrix and the existence of evil reptilian ETs. I never took issue with you, or the fact that you state this to be TRUTH. I only said at that time that was not my experience so far.

Since that point, things began to spiral downward. I am sorry you viewed this as some kind of challenge. I stated plainly and clearly I was not challenging you, but challenging myself. This I continue to do, with or without your approval.

And I never called them 'evil reptilian ET's' - I said they were ET of the negative polarity who had the ability to change their shape which they did in order to terrify humans.
Look, I really dislike to debate or conceptualize, so yes, let it stop here.

RE-IMAGINING
CASTORIADIS'S PSYCHIC
MONAD
Karl E. Smith

ABSTRACT
(Excerpts)

Castoriadis portrays the psyche in its originary state as a 'psychic monad' - an infantile psyche that experiences itself as omnipotent, omnipresent, undifferentiated and sufficient unto itself. According to Castoriadis, this totality is fragmented in a 'triadic phase' through the experience of desire, which brings to the fore the encounter with the Other. In contrast, Marcel Gauchet rejects the concept of the psychic monad, arguing that the informed psyche enters the world with a primordial openness to being formed and transformed. Psychic tension does not arise from the immersion of the closed monad in a hostile world, but from within the psyche itself, for the psyche must form itself and be formed by the world.


Thus while the psyche is a foritself, which entails the need and capacity to create a world of its own, it is also already being-for- and being-with-others - at least to the extent that the other is always already required to provide the materials and conditions for the formation of the psyche as self. Thus whereas Castoriadis refers to socialization (and sublimation) 4 as an act of violence upon the psychic monad, forcing it to conform (at least to some extent) to the world of others, Gauchet's reinterpretation suggests that the structuring process need not be seen as violent - at least not in the sense of an imposition of something that is wholly resisted - for (some degree of) instauration of the world of the other is also a fundamental necessity for the psyche.5 In other words, instead of a primordial tendency towards monadic closure, the psyche experiences a primordial tension between openness and closedness (2002: 10). In short, the psyche wants it both ways, from the beginning.6


The multidimensional, polylogical magma of psychic representations, affects and intentions are created by the radical imaginary appropriating elements from the social imaginary through cognitive processes that remain opaque. The horse and ground analogy is useful again: although the exact processes by which the psyche is both ground and drive remain opaque, the galloping leaves prints, tracks, indentations - shifting metaphors: it leaves inscriptions, institutions, structures, forms that irreversibly alter the psychic flux from the unformed chaos of its originary state. 'The psyche is a forming, which exists in and through what it forms and how it forms, it is . . . formation and imagination' (1987: 283).


From this perspective, it appears that sublimation/socialization is intrinsically a violent imposition upon an entity that remains hostile - or at least resistant - to the process (1987: 301). One of the implications of this 'violence hypothesis' is the suggestion that the relationship between the individual and society is intrinsically hostile - as is the relationship between self and other. While these relationships are intrinsically problematic, nothing in his argument explains why they are necessarily hostile or violent, alien or oppressive. Given that the psyche must be formed, must be socialized by its own processes of sublimating the social-historical, we must also allow that the relationship between the individual and society, between self and other, is also embraced, desired, nurtured, etc.


As Gauchet (2002: 7-8) puts it, the subject is 'characterized by constitutive polarities'. It is 'caught up in a permanent instituting process'. It 'exists only through the openness to the question of its being'. We constantly fluctuate 'between being-everything and being-nothing' - not primarily at a philosophical or existential level, but 'even at the level of moods: between excitement and depression, euphoria and anguish'. Constituted around acute contradictions even 'in the most ordinary moments of everyday life', we live strung 'between two equally impossible and "mad" poles'. In Castoriadis's psychic monad hypothesis, this polarity appears as an almost pathological wound violently inflicted upon an essential unity. It is a wound that can only be healed - if at all - through some form of reintegration.

Gauchet's reinterpretation of the originary psyche indicates that it is not the tension or contradiction that is pathological, but rather the refusal to accept this tension as constitutive of being human. From this perspective, socialization should not be seen as an intrinsically violent imposition of the social imaginary upon the singular psyche, but a mutual interaction between irreducible and inextricable forces.







http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/83/1/5.pdf

4. The Mundane Nature of Conventional Reasoning

23 So far as logical reasoning [or philosophical speculation] based on cognitive perception is concerned, it is an established tenet that one can reflect on existence only within the confines of thesis and antithesis.

24 Therefore any attempt whatsoever to define an object-of-experience (visaya) by means of thought, is an affirmation of a "reality" (pramana) inherently negated by its own logical antithesis.

25 If thought is incapable [of positing ultimate reality], then what valid knowledge (pramana) can there be?

26 Hence, the conventional means of reasoning normal to worldly individuals does not apply to the Path of Yoga.

101 Insofar as the psychic monad (manas) is agitated [with cognitive-construction], one remains caught up in the mortal world. If one practices the authentic way [of meditation]

102 then one should neither abide in agitation nor in thoughtless non-agitation (acala, unmoving), any more so than in any other state.

103 This Middle Path wherein there is no appearance (abhasa, shining forth) is what the Blissful Ones describe as Enlightened-mind.

Dharma Fellowship: Library - The Cultivation of Enlightened Mind

Well a lot of things are not what they appear to be, including my conversation here with you.

God Bless.

XX