The Primal Imperatives and the Physical System

Let’s return to the subject of an earlier series of posts on what neurologists call “the four Fs” — the four primal drives or imperatives of fight or flight, feeding and, well, sexual reproduction, also referred to as “the basic instincts”. These are often associated with the so-called “Lizard Brain” — our evolutionary reptilian legacy and inheritance. And again we note here the recurrence of that odd tetrad of affects. This is not unexpected given that the physical system (spacetime) in which these primal imperatives must work themselves out is itself a four-dimensional or fourfold structure of two times (past and future) and two spaces (inner and outer).

Advertisement

The Dance of Shiva: A Reinterpretation

Reflecting further on this notion of the “four cities” introduced in the previous post, I was led back to a reconsideration of the Dance of Shiva, the representation of which has intrigued and enchanted generations.

Dance of the Nataraj

How Many Cities Are There?

Yesterday’s post about the two Global Brains as akin to a “tale of two cities” led me to ponder how many such “cities” there could conceivably be, or have been conceived as such. Oddly enough, there appear to be four.

We have, as mentioned, the “City of Man”, that being now constituted and consolidated as “the Anthropocene” as our “new within”, and the Global Brain conceived as the technologically mediated and interlinked milieu. This “City of Man” represents Blake’s Urizenic mode of consciousness or what Jean Gebser also calls “the mental-rational” structure of consciousness. This is the “Anthropos” of the Anthropocene.