Healing the World Through Healing Yourself... 3 comments

21 Jun 2003 @ 11:53, by Max Sandor As modern science is progressing from simple enumerations and classifications towards an actual understanding of the structures underlying the phenomena of our world, more and more ancient and time-honored philosophical concepts are being validated. One of them is the recognition of the fractal nature of the Universe and all its life within. This concept, traditionally known as 'as above, so below', recognizes that the basic structures or geometries that we can find in the world have common templates after which they are shaped. Currently the mathematical fields of Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory are not yet evolved enough to allow a detailed classification of universal prototype patterns. In the meantime, one can map existing, traditional prototypal descriptions to research the underlying patterns. The probably most famous such pattern classification is the Chinese I-Ching, which is using an 8x8 matrix yielding 64 prototypal pattern. Unfortunately not much information about practical applications of this rather wide grid has survived the ages. Even less is known about the 240-element matrix of the Mayan Code of Tzolkin. In contrast, the ancient system of Ifa, which is using a 16 by 16 matrix, has an immense oral tradition consisting of more than 3,000 stories and verses. It is only about 50 years ago since the first of these have been written down and many of them are still passed on exclusively from teacher to student. One can only speculate about the exact origins of Ifa. Migrating from East-Africa, it settled and survived in present-day Nigeria at Africa's west coast. Brought across the shores to the Americas by West-African slaves, Ifa soon became integrated with the religion of the European settlers, Catholicism. While Candomble, Santeria, and Vodoun, are immediate descendents of the philosophy of Ifa, other religious systems such as Umbanda are using significant parts of it as well. The full extent of Africa's impact on today's world is difficult to estimate. While its artistic expressions such as Blues and 'Latin' rhythms are obvious, many other influences are not easily recognized. Ifa's precision allows for a concise analysis and synthesis of all prototype energies, whether for phenomena in nature as such or for the psychology of human beings. In this respect it clearly surpasses its modern corollary in psychology, the Extended Myer-Briggs classification of 256 personality types by orders of magnitude. With a tool like Ifa it now becomes possible to study the social interactions between human beings and groups thereof at an unprecedented level of detail. With such a knowledge it is now feasible to actively engineer and implement solutions of non-optimal social situations. Ifa also allows for an examination of the influence of individual persons on society at large and offers thus the means for healing aspects of entire population groups. Emerging paradigms in modern science seek to establish exactly this relationship and its theories are shape-shifting more and more towards the traditional views of Ifa as research is going on. Two brief examples to illustrate this trend: an informal study at the University of Ithaca, New York, demonstrated that the degree of interpersonal connectivity is about 6. This means that for every two humans on Earth, there are only 5 people who know each other in between these two. For example, if you know someone who knows someone who knows the President of Brazil, the connectivity degree would be 3. As another example, the so-called '100th Monkey Theory' has been validated over time in different environments and has led to the establishment of the theory of 'morphogenetic fields' by the American biologist Rupert Sheldrake (University of Chicago). This paradigm is based on the observation of the concurrent appearance of learned behavior patterns of animals in disconnected areas such as islands. It's implication is a simple as it is dramatic: it suffices to have only a limited number of people to learn a new pattern in order to impress a behavior pattern onto an entire population. If employed systematically and ethically, these paradigms lead to new ways of addressing the problems that humankind as a whole are facing today. Few pioneers, such as the Australian Rowland Barkley (see Prana issue xxx, "Environmental Exorcism"), have ever dared to work systematically at such tasks. Ifa connects these different paradigms in a comprehensive and comprehensable way. It is based on a strategy of determining and optimizing the basic pattern profiles of a person or an entire group. These profiles are based on polarities, similar to the Chinese Yin-Yang paradigm and the Indian 'gunas' system and their are several approaches to clean and empower these polarities. On an individual level, the person can remove unwanted patterns and strengthen desired ones. It should be noted that everybody is using these patterns intuitively. The difference consists of rising the existence of these pattern to the consciousness of the person and enabling their deliberate activation or deactivation. Experience shows that a combination of group and individual work is boosting the healing effects for both in a dramatic way. This is a result of the mutual empowerment through morphogenetic fields. In other words, an awareness of the overall social impact of one's own improvement is significantly magnifying one's very own empowerment in return. This is the secret of the effectiveness of group work as compared to individual work. With these insights, it now becomes possible to transcend even the small community within the framework of groupwork and to target global problems for individual and overall enlightenment. It is an impossible dream coming true: even a small group of dedicated of people can work towards changing society in a positive way.

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