Monad To Man

In interviews with today's major figures in evolutionary biology--including Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, and John Maynard Smith--Ruse offers an unparalleled account of evolutionary theory, from popular books to museums to the most complex theorizing, at a time when its status as science is under greater scrutiny than ever before.

Presents some of the new capabilities that Monad puts into the hands of system administrators and power users, and is the perfect complement to existing Monad documentation.

Written in thirteen days in 1564 by the renowned Elizabethan magus, Dr. John Dee, The Hieroglyphic Monad explains his discovery of the monas, or unity, underlying the universe as expressed in a hieroglyph, or symbol. Dee called The Hieroglyphic Monad a "magical parable" based on the Doctrine of Correspondences which lies at the heart of all magical practice and is the key to the hermetic quest. Through careful meditation and study of the glyph, its secrets may be slowly revealed.

Overview of the doctrine of septenary chains of worlds in the Solar Kosmos. A Master of Wisdom explains the struggle of Monadic Consciousness passing through seven man-bearing planets. At the dawn of a new Solar Manvantara progressed entities from the previous manvantara are born in the First Race of the First Round ahead of the Elementals, and remain as latent (inactive) spiritual force in the aura of the nascent world of the new manvantara until the stage of human evolution is reached. They will have then to accept to the last drop in the bitter cup of retribution. The passage of human races in-between planets being critical, requires the presence of a Dhyani-Chohan. Gautama is the fifth leader and spiritual teacher in this round on this planet, and the fourth who became Buddha. The one who will appear at the close of the Seventh Root-Race, before the occupation of the next higher planet by humanity, will again be a Dhyani-Chohan. At the beginning of each round, it is the duty of the First Race to choose fit recipients among its sons as vessels to contain the whole stock of knowledge to be divided among future races and generations until the close of that round. Every round on the descending arc is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the previous round, a grosser and more material copy, supervised and guided by special “Builders” and “Watchers.” Rounds and their role in the serial evolution of nascent material nature is explained cosmologically and anthropologically. Earth, as we know her now, had no existence before the Fourth Round. In the First Round our planet was fiery, cool, and radiant, like its ethereal men and animals; luminous, more dense and heavy during the Second; watery, during the Third. But the Elements have been since reversed: none were then as they are today. In the course of the rounds, Earth is being progressively spiritualised. She will reach her true ultimate form, corresponding inversely to that of man, after the Seventh Round at the close of the manvantara. There is a predestined moment in the geological life of our globe, as in past and future chronicles of races and nations, when effects will once again reconcile with causes, and the original balance restored. Genesis’ six days of creation meant six periods of evolution plus a seventh, that of culmination of perfection (not of rest), and correspond to our Seven Rounds and Races. Man was on earth in this round from the very beginning, having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three rounds. His inner constitution reflects the evolution of the first Three Root-Races. His Fifth Principle, Manas, was quickened at the close of the Third Race. That of the animals, remains inactive, paralysed. Though the human embryo has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, it contains in itself the totality of all kingdoms of nature. Intellect and materiality always precede intelligence and spirituality. Physical intelligence is but the mask of spiritual intelligence. There is a spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, and an animal evolution, from the highest to the lowest, as well as a physical development from the simple and homogeneous, up to the more complex and heterogeneous. Mind moves matter. Without mind, the Divine Monad has no hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where there is no tree or branch to receive and harbour it. The evolution of the human body is governed by terrestrial forces; that of the thinking man, by spiritual forces. Every form on earth, every atom in Space, strives to follow the model placed for it in the Ideal Man. Molecularly constituted matter is not man’s grossest aspect. The vulgar and vile middle principle is the most offensive and sole stumbling block to progress. The Angels doomed to embodied existence are still in chains of flesh, under the darkness of ignorance. They remain unrecognised and unthanked in the injustice of the human heart until the “Great Day” that will come after the Seventh Round in post-manvantaric Nirvana. Then, the Dhyani-Buddhas and the Planetary Spirits, who laboured for long kalpas without condition or any hope for reward, will have their rest. “The chief object of our struggles and initiations is to achieve this union while yet on this earth. Those who will be successful have nothing to fear during the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds,” says a Master of Wisdom. Round 1 builds sthula-sharira. Round 2 forms linga-sharira. Round 3 breathes prana. Round 4 arouses kama. Round 5 uplifts manas. Round 6 activates buddhi. Round 7 merges the human monad into Atman, the Divine Monad. Appendix A. Esoterically, Manu Vaivasvata, the Progenitor of our Fifth Race, is one of forty-nine that emanated from the Root-Manu. Exoterically, he figures as seventh because this round, though the fourth, is in the preseptenary Manvantara, and the round itself is in its seventh stage of materiality or physicality. Manu Vaivasvata, though seventh in the order given, is the primitive Root-Manu of the fourth Human Wave while our Vaivasvata was but one of the seven Minor Manus, who preside over the Seven Races of our planet. Appendix B. Duration of each Planetary Round in this Minor Manvantara. Duration of humanity in this Round, on each Planet. Duration of human life-waves in this Round, on Planet Earth. Appendix C. Genesis’ three Adams untangled: Adam 1 is Kadmon or the “Heavenly Man” made “in the image and likeness of god,” i.e., Second Logos. Adam 2 was neither in the image nor in the likeness of god before he “ate the forbidden fruit,” i.e., the mindless, hence sinless, First Root-Race. Adam 3 is the Third Root-Race that separated, whose eyes opened outwardly and acquired knowledge of good and evil. The Jewish Kabbalists dwarfed the duration of each terrestrial round by six zeros. Allusions to the septenary constitution of earth and man, and to the Seven Rounds and Races, abound in the New as in the Old Testament. The Seven Sabbaths are seven pralayas, between seven manvantaras, or what we call rounds. More allusions about meat offerings to the Lord, the woman in purple and scarlet, the mystery of the woman and the beast, and other instances of farcical worship unpicked.

"Tieszen’s Simply Gödel is a remarkable achievement—a handy guide with the impact of a philosophical tome. It’s all here: elegantly lucid discussions of Kurt Gödel’s epochal discoveries, a sympathetic account of the eccentric genius’s life, focused discussions of his encounters with his astonished peers, and a visionary peek into the future of mathematics, philosophy, and the on-rushing specter of robots with minds. A compact masterpiece, brimming with fresh revelations." —Rudy Rucker, author of Infinity and the Mind Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was born in Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic) and grew up in an ethnic German family. As a student, he excelled in languages and mathematics, mastering university-level math while still in high school. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna at the age of 24 and, a year later, published the pioneering theorems on which his fame rests. In 1939, with the rise of Nazism, Gödel and his wife settled in the U.S., where he continued his groundbreaking work at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton and became a close friend of Albert Einstein’s. In Simply Gödel, Richard Tieszen traces Gödel’s life and career, from his early years in tumultuous, culturally rich Vienna to his many brilliant achievements as a member of IAS, as well as his repeated battles with mental illness. In discussing Gödel’s ideas, Tieszen not only provides an accessible explanation of the incompleteness theorems, but explores some of his lesser-known writings, including his thoughts on time travel and his proof of the existence of God. With clarity and sympathy, Simply Gödel brings to life Gödel’s fascinating personal and intellectual journey and conveys the lasting impact of his work on our modern world.

The Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works representing his later philosophy. It is a short text which sketches in some 90 paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads. In it, he offers a new solution to mind and matter interaction by means of a pre-established harmony expressed as the 'Best of all possible worlds' form of optimism.

Ibn Arabi is the only scholar who was able to formulate a unique cosmological model that is capable of explaining our observations as well as many phenomena in physics and cosmology, and even solve some perplexing modern and historical riddles in science and philosophy such as the EPR paradox and Zeno paradoxes of motion. Moreover, the Single Monad Model explains for the first time in history the importance of the “week” as a basic unit of space and time together. This prodigious theory is based on the notion of the intertwining days where Ibn Arabi shows that at every instance of time there is indeed one full week of creation that takes place in the globe. Since its publication in 2008, this book has triggered an overwhelming response, and I hope this expanded edition will help promote further Ibn Arabi's wisdom that is still buried in his multitudes of books and treatises.Ibn 'Arabî is one of the most prominent figures in Islamic history, especially in relation to Sufism and Islamic philosophy and theology. In this book, we want to explore his cosmology and in particular his view of time in that cosmological context, comparing his approaches to the relevant conclusions and principles of modern physics whenever possible. We shall see that Ibn 'Arabî had a unique and comprehensive view of time which has never been discussed by any other philosopher or scientist, before or even after Ibn 'Arabî. In the final two chapters, we shall discuss some of the ways his novel view of time and cosmology may be used to build a complete model of the cosmos that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks and paradoxes in the current cosmological models of modern physics. As we discuss in the opening chapter, there is no doubt that time is one of the most important issues in physics, cosmology, philosophy and theology, and hundreds of books and articles have been published in these fields. However, none of these studies have fully developed Ibn 'Arabî's unique view of time in its cosmological dimensions, although his conception of time is indeed central to understanding, for example, his controversial theory of the 'oneness of being'. One possible reason for this relative neglect is the difficult symbolic language he usually used. Also, he didn't discuss this subject at length in any single place in his extant works--not even in chapters 59, 291 and 390 of the Futûhât whose titles relate directly to time--so we must piece together his overall cosmological understanding of time from his scattered treatments in many works and different contexts within his magnum opus, the Futûhât, and other books. Therefore this book may be considered the first comprehensive attempt to set forth all the relevant dimensions of time in Ibn 'Arabî's wider cosmology and cosmogony. To start with, Ibn 'Arabî considers time to be a product of our human 'imagination', without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence. We need this imagined conception of 'time' to chronologically arrange events and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects, but for Ibn 'Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed. Thus Ibn 'Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, and he explains that they both originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains that this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous. Ibn 'Arabî also gives a precise definition--drawing on the specific usage of the Qur'an and earlier Arab conceptions of time--of the day, daytime and night, showing how these definitions are related to the relative motions of the celestial orbs (including the earth), where every orb has its own 'day', and those days are normally measured by our normal observable day that we count on the earth.

The intricate forms of living things bespeak design, and thus a creator: nearly 150 years after Darwin's theory of natural selection called this argument into question, we still speak of life in terms of design--the function of the eye, the purpose of the webbed foot, the design of the fins. Why is the "argument from design" so tenacious, and does Darwinism--itself still evolving after all these years--necessarily undo it? The definitive work on these contentious questions, Darwin and Design surveys the argument from design from its introduction by the Greeks, through the coming of Darwinism, down to the present day. In clear, non-technical language Michael Ruse, a well-known authority on the history and philosophy of Darwinism, offers a full and fair assessment of the status of the argument from design in light of both the advances of modern evolutionary biology and the thinking of today's philosophers--with special attention given to the supporters and critics of "intelligent design." The first comprehensive history and exposition of Western thought about design in the natural world, this important work suggests directions for our thinking as we move into the twenty-first century. A thoroughgoing guide to a perennially controversial issue, the book makes its own substantial contribution to the ongoing debate about the relationship between science and religion, and between evolution and its religious critics. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction 1. Two Thousand Years of Design 2. Paley and Kant Fight Back 3. Sowing the Seeds of Evolution 4. A Plurality of Problems 5. Charles Darwin 6. A Subject Too Profound 7. Darwinian against Darwinian 8. The Century of Evolutionism 9. Adaptation in Action 10. Theory and Test 11. Formalism Redux 12. From Function to Design 13. Design as Metaphor 14. Natural Theology Evolves 15. Turning Back the Clock Sources and Suggested Reading Illustration Credits Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: Ruse examines the concept of 'design' in nature, explaining why it still remains a strong influence despite the scientific revolution, and historically, how it dominated Western thought from ancient Greece (Plato) to the advent and predominance of Christianity...A rich and compelling book. --J. S. Schwartz, Choice Reviews of this book: Anyone who is interested in the 'science wars' controversy or the history of evolutionary thought will find this book fascinating and rewarding. The prose is masterfill--relaxed, colloquial, rich in information, and suffused with flashes of malicious wit and delicious historical tidbits. --Matt Cartmill, Reports of the National Center for Science Education Reviews of this book: To anyone interested in the evolution of evolution, I recommend this book. --John Tyler Bonner, Natural History Reviews of this book: This has to be the best of Ruse's many books, and it is hard to imagine how a better one could be written on this subject. With an understanding erudition spiced with good-natured wit and occasional sly ribaldry, Ruse moves easily and assuredly among biology, philosophy, history, and theology. --Robert T. Pennock, Science Reviews of this book: Michael Ruse's latest book, Darwin and Design, is an intellectual history of the design argument and its Darwinian solution...His story is a fascinating one, enlivened especially by his accounts of various imaginative attempts before Darwin to solve the design problem without recourse to a deity. --Daniel W. McShea, American Scientist