II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

2. Perennial Wisdome: An AnthropoCosmic Code

Walton, Michael. Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: AMS Press, 2010. Science historians lately agree that (search Kevin Chang) metaphysical, alchemical expressions ought to rightly be appreciated as a luminous distant mirror of an abiding natural wisdom. A Renaissance scholar affirms in such rudiments a perennial affinity of micro human, as female/male complements, with macro universe, as repeatedly mirrored in an analogous substantial nature. The Sybilline Oracles, Hermentism, and so on, each find an informative Logos at work flowing from divinity to materiality, via the great code – Monad, Dyad, Triad. Centuries forget, obscure, deny, might we at last remember, as time runs short, this one image of who we and thee, child and parent, are and can be?

Wang, Robin. Dong Zhongshu’s Transformation of Yin-Yang Theory and Contesting of Gender Identity. Philosophy East & West. 55/2, 2005. Reviewed more in Part VI, Gender Complements, the article offers succinct insights into this universal icon.

Wang, Robin. Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, philosopher of Asian Pacific Studies, at this late hour, offers a most cogent and corrective appreciation of this esteemed phenomenal wisdom. As an existant, greater reality via such bicameral balance, it can appear on earth as a palliative complement to the material, yang-only thingness of western civilization and mindset. Chapters that span cosmology and principled essences to cultural mores and social policy show how, when properly harmonized, yin, yang and Tao can provide salutary, sustaining guidance. See also, from the quote, The Huainanzi, edited by John Major, Sarah, Queen, et al (Columbia University Press, 2010).

As Joseph Needham says, yinyang ideas “were the most ultimate principles of which the ancient Chinese could conceive.” The Huainanzi, a synthetic work of the early Han Dynasty (200 B.C.E.) presents the human condition in a similar way: “Heaven as father, Earth as mother, yin and yang as warp, the four seasons as weft.” These common (micro = macro) views show that yinyang places human flourishing within a rich and deep context involving the interrelatedness of the cosmos and human beings. (5) This view of yinyang is frequently used to characterize the Chinese worldview as a whole, in a way that situates it in contrast to Western thought: the Chinese focuses on interconnection, immanence, and cyclical changes, whereas Western philosophers emphasize dualism, transcendence, and eternal principles. (5)

Yinyang thought has been a kind of complexity thinking, in which the whole is perceived through multiple interactions. Any given existence is a complex system such that parts are arranged and their relations make its structure. Biological and organic processes, rather than the more abstract disciplines of physics or mathematics, were the favored conceptual sou8rces for Chinese understanding of the world. This contrasts the analysis of the universe through geometrical logic and mathematical order more familiar in the West. This weight on biology prompted Zhang Xianglong, a contemporary Chinese scholar, to promote the idea that Chinese thinking at a fundamental level is gendered, and that biological interaction between male and female is the ultimate model for Chinese philosophical speculation. (14)

Wang, Robin. Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained: A Construction of the Confucian Metaphysics. Journal of the History of Ideas. 66/3, 2005. A study of the 11th century sage whose thought and writings form a basis for current Neo-Confucianism. As the essence of Chinese wisdom, a gender complementarity is seen to arise from and embody original and sustaining energies. Human persons are its highest exemplification and as such are a prime phenomenon of this dynamic cosmic creation.

The universe, as Zhou Dunyi envisioned it, consists in a series of grand correlations through yinjing and yangdong interactions. Humanity is the central focus of these correlations where the yinyang interactions have brought forth a cultivated human being participating consciously in the extension of the cosmic order established from wuji/taiji. (323) Human morality mirrors the basic pattern of order emergent in the universe. (323)

Weber, Rene, ed. Dialogues with Scientists and Sages. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Pithy, insightful essays by or conversations with David Bohm, Bede Griffiths, Stephen Hawking, the Dalai Lama, Ilya Prigogine and others.

Weber: Does that lead to the charge of anthropomorphism and ultimately to skepticism about our knowledge? Bohm: You can overcome that problem only if you accept the premise that in some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe. Weber: That is the missing link, the step that’s needed? Bohm: Yes. All our experience is a clue to reality because we are reality. (152)

Weber: Are we moving towards a spiritualization of physics? Griffiths: Science itself is rediscovering the sacred and awesome reality of the universe. We’re getting back to the old idea of the microcosm and macrocosm - that the cosmos is reflecting itself in us, this vision that was lost in the Renaissance, when the split took place between the human person as an observer, separated from a material universe outside himself. (164)

Weiming, Tu. An “Anthropocosmic” Perspective on Creativity. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences. 2/5, 2010. The Harvard University scholar (search) is a leading expositor of Confucian wisdom in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. In so doing, he has availed this once and future iconic image to represent the organic relation of divine heaven, home Earth, and our human abidance. By virtue of this familial unity, a valuable sense of reciprocal harmony and balance can guide our personal, social, and ecological lives. In this paper, a significant aspect is added whereof intelligent persons can also be appreciated as temporal co-creators going forward to a better future.

The Harvard University scholar (search) is a leading expositor of Confucian wisdom in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. In so doing, he has availed this once and future iconic image to represent the organic relation of divine heaven, home Earth, and our human abidance. By virtue of this familial unity, a valuable sense of reciprocal harmony and balance can guide our personal, social, and ecological lives. In this paper, a significant aspect is added whereof intelligent persons can also be appreciated as temporal co-creators going forward to a better future.

Weiming, Tu. Confucianism. Sharma, Arvind, ed. Our Religions.. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. By an exposition of vital Chinese teachings, person's life journey is seen to proceed from a relational, familial context toward an affirmation of selfhood. This view is properly “anthropocosmic” whereby the active individual is immersed in and supported by a matrix of culture, community, nature and Heaven. In contrast to Western anomie, the self is conceived as a “center of relationships" whence co-creative human beings are the “filial children of Heaven and Earth.” (See also William Chittick in Bicameral World Religions)

Weiming, Tu. The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity. New Delhi: Center for Studies in Civilization, 2010. We enter this volume as a recent complication of essays by the esteemed Harvard University historian and philosopher of Chinese and Confucian studies. In regard traditional Asian wisdom bespeaks of an organic “anthropocosmic” trinity of heaven, earth, and person. Into the 21st century,its once and future relevance for social and ecological guidance is paramount, Tu Weiming is a most lucid expositor of this wellspring for the West. And as example of our current noosphere, the work is available through Amazon.com at nominal cost.

Wheatley, Paul. The Pivot of the Four Quarters. Chicago: Aldine, 1971. A study of the “cosmo-magical symbolism” that informed ancient cities from China to India, Greece, Egypt and on to Mesoamerica. By this deep relation, “microcosmic” human life was accorded with “macrocosmic” and Divine significance.

Wilber, Ken. The Great Chain of Being. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 33/3, 1993. A succinct article on the subject. With initial reference to Arthur Lovejoy’s classic work of this title, Wilber cites a scale of spiritual growth as the ordinate structural frame for Eastern and Western systems from Vedanta Hinduism to Judaic-Christian-Muslim traditions. From this syncretic meld can be defined a perennial philosophy of essential truth. And if we have an “eye of the mind” to see, Wilber advises it can be recovered again in the self-organized evolutionary “holoarchy” of complex systems.

Zhou, Tian. Anthropocosmic: Discovering the Top Secret. CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016. A Chinese social scientist posts this latest grace of perennial wisdom, which is available in Chinese on Amazon.com. If one looks inside, the work naturally opens with an embellished Yin/Yang Tao image. And something may be gained in translation, for the title phrase well conveys its ultimate significance.

Zukav, Gary. The Seat of the Soul. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. In a wider, eclectic compass, an entrance to Zukav’s many writings, lately with Linda Francis, about the mystic realms of multisensory, higher dimensional evolution as human beings may awaken to a living, sensate universe.

No understanding of evolution is adequate that does not have at its core that we are on a journey toward authentic power, and that authentic empowerment is the ogal of our evolutionary process and the purpose of our being. (27)

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