(July 20, 2024)
Things cannot interact without first having some sort of underlying connection to each other. These interactions can either harmonize with each other in a balanced way or not. The principle of harmonic connection is represented by the Druid Akkadian word lagu which was introduced into the Greek language as logos by Heraclitus around 500 BCE.
Logos represents the principle of spiritual interconnection and their subsequent working together in harmony. Powers of the same class are harmonized while powers of different classes can become attuned to each other.
The word is found throughout various runic texts with its most comprehensive treatment being found in the Codex Runicus - the Last Testament of the Druids, dating to 1190 CE.
The following is a list of translated lines containing the word"logos" found in the Codex Runicus:
No complete works of Heraclitus exist today. All we have are quotes found in later texts such as:
(Heraclitus, quoted in Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies 9.9.1.3-4) It is wise for those who listen not to me but to the Logos to agree that in Logos everything is one. (F10 in Waterfield, 2000)(July 20, 2024)
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus introduced the word logos into the Greek language within 30 years after the the Persian dominated Achaemenid Empire empire conquered his home city of Ephesus in 522 BCE.
Roman era Stoics believed attunement (logos) was one of the three characteristics of Divine mind along with nous (reasoning as the chaining together of facts) and ettistnun (knowledge of the facts). The dualist but still Stoic author Epictetus (c.50 – c.135 CE) and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) wrote these:
(Epictetus Discourses 2.8) God brings benefit but the good also brings benefit. I would seem therefore, that is where the true nature of God is to be found. There too will be that of the good. Then what is the nature of God? Flesh, in no way whatever. Land, in no way. Fame, in no way. He is nous (reasoning), ettistnun (knowledge), and logos (attunement). (Hard 2014)Logos being part of the Divine mind is what allowed the author of the Gospel of John to write this:
(John 1:1) In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God (Theos), and the Logos was God (Theos). Christian Biblical translators choose to translate "logos" as either “word” or “message.” This is completely wrong. First, using different words for the same underlying foreign word biases the translation. Second their word assignments do not match the word's usage in ancient texts.
The Apostle Paul used “logos” in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11 Here Christian translators incorrectly translate it as "message" deliberately changing the word assignment from what they used in John to hide its real meaning:
(1 Corinthians 12:7-11, NIV) 7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. 8 To one there is given through the Spirit a message (logos) of wisdom, to another a message (logos) of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, 10 to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.Substitute the word “attunement” for “message” to get a more accurate and spiritually meaningful translation.
From MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) by John Donne
(July 3, 2022) Emotional propagation is the bi-directional transmission feelings and perceptual biases by non-verbal means. This ranges from yawning to the tendency for groups to dress similarly because of a common perceptions of aesthetics. Emotional propagation bias has been scientifically demonstrated to occur in social networks by Christakis and Fowler (2009).
The evolutionary purpose of this sort of emotional propagation is group coordination via perceptual and emotional biasing. Evolution would have favored those groups which could non-verbally coordinate themselves better than other groups. In order for social animal groups to act coherently in the absence of language they must act from a common perceptual bias based upon non-verbal signals. For example, if the group needed to gather food then non-verbal signals had to be used to motivate the whole group. If the group needed to rest then yawns are propagated instead.
Christakis and Fowler (2009) consistently found that various emotional influences tend to pass as far as a friend of a friend of a friend (3 degrees of separation). They identified five social network properties:
A consequence of emotional propagation is the Law of Attraction which is also called the Law of Return. Whenever emotional biases are generated in a network they will circle around and come back to influence the original generator. The classic example of this is yawning. A person yawns causing nearby friends to yawn which in turn causes the first person to yawn more in a positive feedback loop. Eventually the group rests.
(July 3, 2022) We shape our network by subconsciously deciding who will be our cooperative associates, in other words, who will be in our "tribe." This subconscious decision is based upon a mix of genetics, culture, and life experiences. That we even have a social network is due to the evolutionary advantage which groups have over individuals (Christakis and Fowler 2009). More people means better security and greater group productivity due to economic specialization.
This group superiority seems obvious but it has also also demonstrated by mathematical analysis and computer simulation. These show that individuals who get a cooperative gene and so cooperate will out survive better and pass on that cooperative gene to future generations. Consequently, cooperative gene individuals become the most numerous in a population.
But then something surprising happens. The selfish gene does not disappear. When a certain percentage of cooperative people is reached the selfish gene people start getting a free ride. The cooperative types end up doing all the work and taking most the risks (as in hunting). Due to the added risks, the cooperative types now start to die out and the population reverts to mostly selfish loners again. The population keeps cycling like this and never grows above a certain level.
The evolutionary solution was to impose an innate reward/punishment system with those rewards/punishments coming from perceived authorities and leaders. This is why most humans subconsciously recognize and blindly follow various authorities. This is why humans subconsciously define as "good" all cooperative traits and label as "bad" all selfish traits.
This enforcement benefit is seen in various other computer simulation studies including that shown in the figure on the left.
Consequently, we tend to associate with people we subconsciously see as fellow cooperators in a phenomenon called homophily. These are people who are “like us.” This is reflected in the old adage “birds of a feather flock together.” This phenomena makes those rare social connections between people of different subcultures important for any sort of cultural innovation.
Even with our tendency to group with similar people, we still subconsciously define just how many of those we will include in our group and at what level of intimacy. We also define how central we will be in our social network. In a study covering three thousand Americans the average American has four “close social contacts” with most having between two and six, half of whom were friends while the others were family members. The number of people who had no one to discuss important matters or to spend free time was 12% (page 18 of Christakis and Fowler 2009). People’s core network size does not vary with gender and tends to decrease with age. Those with a college degree have core networks twice as large as those who do not. The probability that two of your social contacts know each other is about 52% (this is called the transitivity level).
(July 3, 2022) Our network shapes us by our location within it from our birth order among our siblings to how central we are in the network . The more central we are, the more likely we will be influenced by events occurring elsewhere in the network (Christakis and Fowler 2009).
The structure of the network greatly affects how the people within it can make common decisions. The people in a ring network in which each person is connected only to their two neighbors is slower in coming to a decision than a similar ring network having some cross-connected connections. The more cross-connections the faster will be the tribal decision.
A network of randomly connected people having the same number of people and same average number and degree of interconnections is very much slower than the cross-connected ring network. In one experiment with 38 people the disorganized network took five times longer to reach a collective decision than those in a cross-connected ring network.
(July 3, 2022) Our tribal members affect us because we subconsciously copy them in order to be seen as belonging to the group of cooperators. Students with studious roommates become more studious, people with overweight friends tend to become overweight and so on. College students assigned a mildly depressed roommate tend to also become increasingly depressed over the next three months. These effects are strongest within the same gender for almost all traits except alcohol consumption in which women have the most influence over both men and other women.
This subconscious emotional copy tendency is responsible for epidemic (mass) hysterias. On January 30, 1962 a laughing epidemic started in a girl’s school in Tanzania. By March 18 ninety-five of the 159 were affected and the school was forced to close and the pupils went home to their villages. Ten days later laughing attacks broke out in one of those villages fifty-five miles away where it affected 217 people. Some of the students went to another school and 48 out of 154 students there caught it, forcing that school to close in mid-June. Another outbreak occurred in another one of these girl’s villages on June 18. This outbreak started with her immediate family and spread to two nearby boy’s schools forcing them to close. After a few months the epidemic petered out. The victims described feeling restless and fearful despite their laughter.
A review of reported cases of epidemic hysteria between 1973 and 1993 found that 50% took place in schools, 40% in small towns and factories, and 10% in other settings. The outbreaks usually involved at least thirty people but often involved hundreds. Most outbreaks lasted less than two weeks but 20% lasted more than a month. The following passage describes such an epidemic among New York bridge employees:
Another, more recent case occurred in 1990 among the Triborough Bridge toll employees in New York City. On February 16, workers began to complain of headaches, abdominal discomfort, dizziness, and throat and chest pain. More workers came down with the same symptoms over the next several days, with some of the ill workers noting what they described as a “sweetness” in the air. Symptoms were reported when workers were inside or near a toll booth, but they would subside soon after the worker left the booths. The outbreak ended on February 22, when some of the workers’ superiors sat with them at the tolls. By that time thirty-four workers had become ill enough to go to the hospital, and many others shared their symptoms…. It forced 44 percent of the female workers to go to the hospital, almost twice the proportion of male workers with debilitating symptoms (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 44).The mind abhors a vacuum so people are motivated to assign a cause or blame for various events even in the absence of hard evidence. The authors go on to say:
In a bygone era, demons and witchcraft were often seen as causes of these symptoms, but today toxic chemicals and environmental contamination are the triggers subjects usually identify (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 41).
Social network scientists have theorized an evolutionary purpose for this sort of subconscious emotional propagation. This same reasoning is valid when applied to the evolutionary purpose for conscious experiences:
Early humans had to rely on one another for survival. Their interactions with the physical environment (weather, landscape, predators) were modulated or affected by their interactions with their social environment. Humans bonded with others in order to face the world more effectively, and mechanisms evolved to support this bonding, most obviously verbal communication but also emotional mimicry. The development of emotions in humans, the display of emotions, and the ability to read the emotions of others helped coordinate group activity by three means: Facilitating interpersonal bonds, synchronizing behavior, and communicating information…Emotions may be a quicker way to convey information about the environment and its relative safety or danger than other forms of communication, and it seems emotions preceded language. What emotions lack in specificity compared to oral language, they may make up for in speed (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 36).This evolutionary advantage idea is supported by studies of yawning in chimps and bonobos. Yawning is best propagated within kinship groups and close friends when it is started by a high ranking social member (Demuru and Palagi 2012). Yawning is the social group rest signal.
(July 3, 2022) More than just our friends affect us, our friend’s friend’s friends affect us. Our tendency to imitate is strong enough that an emotional influence will propagate through the network and even work its way back to the originator in a feedback effect. This phenomena is called the Law of Attraction or the Law of Return.
Some influences depend upon amplification from a number of people. The classic example is Stanley Milgram’s 1968 New York sidewalk experiment. If one person looked up at a window for one minute 4% of passers-by stopped and looked up and 42% looked up but kept walking. If fifteen people looked up then 40% stopped and looked and 86% looked up but kept walking. If five people were used instead of fifteen the result was almost as strong.
In a sampling of about 12,000 people from Framingham, Massachusetts in the year 2000, researchers found that happy people were clustered together and were separated from unhappy people who also clustered among themselves (Christakis. & Fowler 2009 p 50). The unhappy people existed in the more peripheral regions of this city’s social network indicating they were more disconnected.
The initial impetus for this clustering would seem to be the homophily effect because happiness does have a large genetic component. In comparisons with identical twins the general feeling of happiness was found to be 50% genetic, 10% due to personal circumstances (education, income level, marital status, etc.), and 40% due to other things such as one’s own habits of mind and social network situation (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005).
(July 3, 2022) Because of the Law of Attraction effect, emotional influences injected into the emotional propagation network continue to reverberate around for some time even if the originator dies or moves away. The stickiness of emotions in networks has not been well researched yet although those cultural based emotions used for defining the tribe seem to be more sticky than others. These include such things as "proper" behavior and who or what is identified as the "proper" authorities.
The persistence of emotional effects in the network is similar too but not quite the same as the idea of karma in the Buddhist religion and grace in the Christian Catholic religion. Both concepts are defined in dualist, judgemental terms. If a person does "good" things so that the person has more good than bad karma or grace then that person will be reincarnated in a better earthly position (Buddhist) or gain everlasting life and go to heaven (Catholic).
In contract, the emotions in the Law of Attraction only become good or evil depending on the standard used to define those terms. Killing someone in a war to protect yourself, nation or family is considered to be good while killing someone on a local street is considered to be bad. Emotions in and of themselves are neither good or bad.
(July 3, 2022) Law of Attraction is also described by the observation of Synchronicity by psychiatrist Carl Jung.
The word “synchronicity” was defined by pioneer Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as the meaningful coincidence of two or more events. He first mentioned it in his 1930 memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the Chinese “I Ching”, or “Book of Changes.” Jung was seeking to explain the workings of “I Ching,” which he first came across during the early 1920's in an English translation by James Legge (1882). I-Ching means "Classic of Changes" and it is an ancient Chinese text explaining a number based divination scheme. Its earliest part dates to about 900 BCE
Jung fully developed the synchronicity idea in his 1952 essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” Yet Jung's explanation of synchronicity is seriously flawed.
Jung did not accept the idea of a separate realm of consciousness nor did he know about the concept of imprecise probabilities (two dimensions of uncertainty instead of one) which underlies quantum mechanics. Consequently, he tried to explain synchronicity in terms of quantum mechanics because it was something new and crazy. He called the inherent probabilistic causality of quantum mechanics "acausal." This is how Jung introduced the concept in his essay:
The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation.