david spooner

I spoke at the Thoreau Society Gathering on "The Individual and the State: the politics of Thoreau in our time"
my specific Address was:
METAMORPHOSES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
The text can be read on the EVENTS page of this Website.

the follow-up to THE INSECT-POPULATED MIND: HOW INSECTS HAVE INFLUENCED THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
is coming early 2012: FROM TADPOLE TO BUTTERFLY: HOW HUMANS DISCOVERED
THEIR NATURE WHEN THEY INVENTED LANGUAGE.

**************************************************************************

from BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION being the first chapter of FROM TADPOLE TO BUTTERFLY:

“anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
(Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations).


CHAPTER 1

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

“anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
(Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations).


The Scottish visionary Patrick Geddes lived for a time in the house once occupied by the prototype for Stevenson`s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He looked on it, so he told his biographer, as an imaginative if ambiguous commitment, positioning him strategically as it did for his raids on the University:
Long ago, I bought this fine old house in High Street and carry on the business. I am a burglar by profession too…That`s my secret! My diagrams are really skeleton keys, and to ever so many of my colleagues` departments of sciences, philosophies and what not, so I go round by day and burgle more universities than this one.
His method is not dissimilar from that of any thinker today ransacking all intellectual fields to gather the theoretical coordinates able to counteract that fearful paralysis diagnosed as mummification by Nabokov`s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading. This criminal and writer complained that his soul had “grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes,” and while he is in this pupal state he feels he is surrounded by “wretched spectres, not people,” semi-created outcasts on the lines of Apuleius` larvae or the unmade of William Blake.
So the spine of my book is fourfold metamorphic, and constitutes a journey inside an almost genetic helix. I shall be arguing that natural processes of transformation have their reflection in the greatest cultural achievements of the human species. And to follow the arguments of this book, there are a number of paradigms the reader needs to keep in mind:

 the processes of insect development: ovum, egg → larva, caterpillar → pupa, chrysalis → imago, fully grown insect.

 the structure of sonatas and symphonies: 1st movement, statement of themes (ovum) → 2nd , typically a slow movement (larva) → 3rd, scherzo, febrile pace (chrysalis) → 4th , finale, culmination (imago).

 the organic growth of the personality: infant (ovum) → child (caterpillar) → early adult (pupa) → mature adult (imago).

This is the story of how the world of insects has penetrated to the innermost reaches of human experience. It involves music, language and genetics. As in the world of physics, what we observe as the commonsensical world is only a fraction of reality. Quantum data is an even larger part of what is going on out there. The formulation of a theory that unifies the Einstein model and the small and often infinitesimal quantum atomic activity remains to be discovered for a fuller version of the real world.

This book aims to show how there is also a parallel quantum world of natural organic history, that of the insects, that also needs to be unified into a fuller evolutionary apprehension of their links with the great apes and thus with humans. By now a century and a half after Darwin`s publication of The origin of species, every schoolchild knows we are directly evolved from apes. But because of the limited state of genetics, embryology and morphology, he could not be expected to distinguish the equal and, perhaps even more significant, relation with the insects. However when evolutionary biology met embryology and genetics, it opened up an entirely new perspective on the profiles of species.

Richard Dawkins has spelt out the remarkable change over the past 25 years of research:
"Insects too have a segmented body plan. It was a ...triumph to show that the insect head contains ― again all jumbled up ― the first six segments of what, in their remote ancestors, would have been a train of modules just like the rest of the body. It was a triumph of late twentieth century embryology and genetics to show that insect segmentation, far from being independent of each other as I was taught, are actually mediated by parallel sets of genes, the so-called hox genes, which are recognizably similar in insects and vertebrates and many other animals, and that genes are even laid out in the correct serial order in the chromosomes! That is something none of my teachers would have dreamed of when I was an undergraduate learning, entirely separately, about insect and vertebrate segmentation. Animals of different phyla (for example, insects and vertebrates) are much more united than we ever used to think. And that, too, is because of shared ancestry. The hox plan was already sketched out in the grand ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical animals. All animals are much closer cousins to each other than we used to think."

The situation began to change some quarter century ago with the discovery of the homeobox set of genes, and after this, the main features of animal development were found through Drosophila merganogaster. Further research has shown how between 120,000 and 30, 000 year ago, “the effusive mass of tangled neurons took a significant new step that formed the essential patterns of thought and greatly increased human consciousness…” And the recent discovery of the spindle cells has thrown more light on the evolution of brain and consciousness . These cells appeared some 10-15 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans yet to be discovered, and rapidly increased 100,000 years ago. The spindle cells deal with high-level emotions and exist in the fronto-insular cortex.

At the same time remarkable advances have been made in understanding the nature of the brain stem, which has been inherited from amphibians and reptiles. The stem lying at the boundary of the brain and spinal cord largely controls our breathing, heart-beat, digestion and sexual drive, everything involuntary in our lives. As Neil Shubin writes: “the brain stem originally controlled breathing in fish; it has been jerry-rigged to work in mammals.” It is Shubin who has identified hiccups as the clue to our debt not only to amphibians in general, but specifically to tadpoles. The sudden closure of the tadpole`s glottis to prevent water entering the lungs is suggested as the ancestral experience that explains the advent of hiccups. Shubin`s Arctic researches into fossils produced the clues for our relationship to aspects of amphibian physiology. He discovered the transitional water-to-land creature, the Tiktaalik, “which is just as much a part of our history as the African hominids, such as Australopithecus afarensis, the famous `Lucy.` Seeing Lucy we can understand our history as highly advanced primates. Seeing Tiktaalik is seeing our history as fish.”

So our heritage is very mixed. I hope to show by the end of this book how it is even more mixed when you take into account the natural reflexes of the working of the human brain, and the duplicate structures in the great works of music and literature. From tadpole to butterfly.

© David Spooner
******************************************************************************************

David Spooner: biographical notes -
"I was born during the Second World War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s a mile from where Malcolm Lowry was born (New Brighton, Merseyside), and by coincidence was evacuated during the Second World War as an infant between 1941 and 1943 to a town one mile from the Lowry family home at Caldy, Wirral. In a word, Lowry brought creative magic to one`s native patch, even if his masterpiece and work of true genius, Under the Volcano is still seen by some as a bit "wibberlee-wobberlee" to use a favorite phrase of his. Nathaniel Hawthorne during his time as British Consul was also domiciled at New Brighton, while Melville famously chewed the literary cud with him when his ship put into port at Liverpool.
Growing up on the Wirral peninsula, within a short boat journey to Liverpool, one`s situation is defined by closeness to the pell-mell life of the big city without exactly being of it. You grow up a voyager to and from the great port. (Although it doesn`t appear in my published biographies, I was also one of the first members of the Beatles Cavern Club!)
Anyway in the course of time, I went to the University at Leeds in 1960. There I was awarded one of the original post-War firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by the poet Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. I studied theater and directed under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theater, Dublin, and also worked with Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theater-in-the-round. My doctorate was awarded by Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of Writers and the Spanish Civil War. I lectured at Kent University for 6 years, and for a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s. All my books have been published by American companies; interest from British publishers has been zero.

My fascination with lepidoptera spans 40 years now, and I am delighted to have been an advisor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly on the dunes at LA Airport. As a foreigner I am honored to have received the American Medal of Honor for Natural History, as well as the Congressional Medal for Excellence in Literature. Recently I was admitted to the American Hall of Fame.

I founded Borderline Press in 1975 which was designed to publish some of the remarkable contemporary Scottish writers, many of whom were finding
difficulty getting published at this time. This was an essential part of the lead-up to the movement for Scottish devolution which has been primarily stimulated by the creative writers. The writers published by Borderline - Tom Scott, J.F. Hendry (part of the New Apocalypse movement with Dylan Thomas in the 1940s), Walter Perrie - were ahead of their time. And for good measure I published a Collection of John Cornford killed fighting the Franco forces in Spain, whose poetry had been out of print for 40 years.

I then lit out on my own as a writer, and only emerged fully as a writer in my 50s after the years of preparation, although some of my work had appeared in journals before that. Indeed my writings as a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the work of perhaps the greatest literary journal of all time - the Partisan Review of the 1930s and 1940s, the epoch of Irving Howe and colleagues in their pomp. (It has been much remarked on that many of the recent British Labour Government`s ministers are ex-Stalinists, or offspring of Communist Party members and supporters,
including the new Labour leader Ed Miliband, which is why the UK has recently resembled the defunct Soviet state. Indeed where today in any country is a Minister of the intellectual and artistic stature of André Malraux?). All writing of value redefines the nature of freedom.

Independent scholarship is an enterprise I`ve never regretted, despite the inevitable material ups and downs. Far too much writing is hide-or celebrity-bound, institution-bound, and tho I`ve reached pensionable age lacking a pension, I never hung "my hat on a pension" in Louis MacNeice`s words. Books today are being misused as obscurantist power tools whereas "the beginning of wisdom," as in Sartor Resartus,` is "to look fixedly on clothes til they become transparent" One of the most remarkable tellers of insect tales is Aesop, rumoured to have once been a slave. Adopting the beady eye of the insect allows the critical perspective.

For now, I have recently finished a translation of the Nobel prize winner and Swiss writer Carl Spitteler`s novel, Imago. This is the first English translation since it was published exactly 100 years ago. This attracted both Freud and Jung at the time of its publication, and Freud named the first psychoanalytical journal after it. However Spitteler`s concept goes against the grain of the psychoanalytical sense of repression and "complex." The full translation is to be found on the Events page of this site.I am now translating, for the first time since its appearance in 1889, a remarkable sequence of butterfly poems in Schmetterlinge, largely the product of his sightings while walking the Alps.

I am an associate member of the Welsh Academy, and member of the Thoreau, Nabokov and Benjamin Constant Societies, together with honorary membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz. I also have membership of the International Diplomatic Academy and Académie Européenne d`Informatization, and am on the Board of the London Diplomatic Academy.

My main theme as an author has been insects in relation to literature and philosophy, following a 30 year study of butterflies. My four main books on this theme have been published only in the States, between 1995 and 2005. These were not actually influenced by Vladimir Nabokov`s great work in this subject, but the result of my own work recording the creatures mainly in Scotland. Indeed in 2006, I was fortunate enough to record the first Small Skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) to appear in Scotland for over 150 years. This was a rare day indeed for an inveterate lepidopteral fieldworker, and was acknowledged as a notable natural history event.

The central conclusion of my thinking has been that we humans are not only related to the great apes by reason of biological history, but also indirectly to insects. The insect relation is more difficult to grasp, because it has to take in metaphysics and aesthetics. This brief resumé is not the place to trace in detail what is embedded in my books, though it is the place to emphasize that natural selection needs to be supplemented by the entomological process of mimesis, something that Darwin`s co-founder of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, delved into. I say "co-founder" almost from rote, but as the New York Times writer and polymath Arnold Brackman showed in his book A Delicate Arrangement, there is plenty of evidence that after receiving papers from Wallace solving the problem that had obsessed Darwin for 20 years on the mechanism of the divergence of species, Darwin played for time in 1858 while he incorporated Wallace`s key findings into his Origin of Species. We would be referring to WALLACE`s Theory of Evolution rather than Darwin`s had not Wallace been intimidated by the position of Darwin and his Wedgwood relations in the British Establishment at the height of imperial power.

The ability of insects to imitate a leaf, as in the jagged Comma butterfly, or to present itself altogether as something other than an insect, as with the Buff-tip moth, is the same process of mimesis which is at the heart of all the arts, and more significantly, of the evolution of language. There is no dispute about natural selection, but the process of mimesis is far more significant because it feeds into all the creative arts which ultimately define the human. And beyond this, there are the key philological nodes.

As I argue in Insect-Populated Mind, the Greek origin of the word soul, psukhe, imitates the sound of breathing. It also means mind and breath of life. And Barry Powell has pointed to the root of mimesis in the Greek discovery of the atomic theory of matter translated into a theory of language where "graphemes represent the `atoms` of spoken language." The failure of contemporary Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins to integrate the significance of the arts and philology into evolutionary theory has led to the present futile impasse in thinking. The attempt to rescue the situation thru the invention of "memes" is banal and desperate.

A propos Nabokov, I do believe he owed far more to Ouspensky (the pre-Gurdjieff Ouspensky) than ever he admitted. Passages in Speak Memory where Nabokov writes so magnificently on mimicry in nature echo almost exactly Ouspensky`s: "In order to form an insect exactly like a leaf of the plant on which it lives, not one, but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands,
of repeated accidents would have been necessary." As Nabokov famously writes: "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored
holes are generously thrown in. `Natural selection`, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous...mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator`s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
Here he echoes Ouspensky`s contemporary Evreinov who advocated the theatricality of nature. As the great playwright dramatizes the nature of the human, so nature itself is a great theatre. When Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert at the GECCO conference(July 2007) made their obeisances to natural selection and emphasized the utilitarian (medical and electronic) advances possible through an understanding of mimicry in nature, they also intended to dismiss any more fully rounded expositions of evolutionary processes. A huge apparatus has been called into being in biology, genetics, zoology, which intends the phrase "natural selection" to be as discussion-suppression as subscription to the correctness of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" used to be for confirming the complete loyalty of the communist or socialist. The puritan tradition with its moralising absolutism is a great enemy of nuanced intellectual progress, and constitutes as great a threat
to democracy as religious fundamentalism.
**************************************************
*******************************************************
***************************************************************************
COMMA
Withered leaf
it seemed I found
the very one I`d younger seen
a masquerading mound

parchment crack
in crumpled brack,
a flicker of white
punctuates flight.

Your barbs on quite some different leaf
clasped me while thumbing literary sheaf -
"Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me."

You, comma, our breathing space in artifice
subterfuge in nature`s kiss
deceptive always close or far,
obstructing as you must
perfections of the copula.

(from my Creatures of Air)
A comma is both a butterfly with leaf-like eaten-away wings, as well of course as a grammatical weapon
***************************************************************************

Hyatt Carter says the following in his new book Some Little Night Musings(January 2011 from authorhouse and available from Amazon):

THE HUMAN-INSECT CONNECTION:
"The emphasis that science has placed on our close “family” connection with the higher apes, a connection that becomes apparent when you visit the primate section of any zoo, can obscure the closer connection we have with insects on a developmental level or in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

I first became aware of this connection through the writings of David Spooner. One of Spooner’s main contentions is that the “primate connection has caused mainstream evolutionary theory to miss the all-round interrelationship of human development to entomology, and that this relation is enshrined in the greatest of the higher art forms and religion. There is a crucial oblique relationship between metamorphic insects and humans, a connection transmitted through the great works of music and literature, and through many of the paradigms of world religions.”

A friend with whom I aired this idea suggested that such a claim could be made only on the grounds of poetic license. There is surely something “poetic” about all this, agreed, but I believe it goes beyond poetic license.

Words with “psyche” as a component, such as psychology, express in their meanings an evocation of butterflies and an etymology that traces back to the Greek word ψυχή which signifies soul, yes, but also butterfly. If I am not mistaken, it’s the only word in Greek that does mean butterfly. The butterfly is an ancient and enduring symbol of the soul that finds cross-cultural expression in all forms of art. Twentieth-century Hispanic literature gives an almost sacerdotal role not only to butterflies, but other insects and other animals, such as frogs, that enjoy metamorphosis in their development.

There’s another etymological link between “pueblo” and “populus,” derived from the ancient Greek “papaillo,” meaning to flutter: the root of the French word for butterfly: “papillon.”

I believe people have always dimly discerned something of fundamental significance in the metamorphosis of insects and in the behavior of social insects such as bees and ants.

In metamorphosis, there’s a saltation, or a transcendence, that provides a metaphor that resonates with the soul, with the butterflies adding an aesthetic dimension that expresses the becoming of beauty.

And so I suppose what convinces me is the cumulative effect of this extensive network of interconnected meanings, one that I could keep extending, but the above examples should give a sense of the general direction.

Perhaps it would be better to claim less generality and speak not of all insects, but only those that express the fourfold cycle of complete metamorphosis. These are designated as holometabolous and this group of insects are four in number:

1. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths),

2. Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps

3. Coleoptera (beetles), and

4. Diptera (flies).

If the idea of developmental levels that Piaget discovered in children can be generalized to describe the growth or expansion of consciousness in adults, both individually and collectively, then two complementary processes seem to be at work: within the limits of any level, incremental growth becomes possible as the landscape of that level is explored and mapped; but the shift to a new and higher level requires a saltation, transcendence, metanoia, satori.

In our individual quests for growth, we begin as caterpillars, devouring what books, gurus, and teachers have to offer. But a deep understanding, when things start to fall into place, comes only with a chrysalitic phase wherein our slumbering dogmas are liquefied so that the imaginal cells of the new system can bring forth the butterfly of transformation.

Developmental processes, such as evolution, are impelled by at least two types of change that may be characterized as vertical and horizontal. The horizontal line is the gradual advance, step by small meandering step, sanctioned by those of a Darwinian persuasion, whereas sudden spikes give evidence of a vertical exuberance.

And so Newton’s metamorphosis of scientific thought kept scientists busy for centuries with highly interesting incremental work, whereupon Einstein comes along to invite us all to ride with him on a beam of light up to a new level. Celeritas!

Metamorphosis, a significant evolutionary breakthrough if ever there was one, exemplifies this vertical strategy and, in the case of the butterfly, does so beautifully.

In light of all this, perhaps I should sign off as —

Gregor Samsa"
***************************************************************************

OTHER WORK IN PROGRESS
In the wake of the French Revolution, the German writer Novalis posed a number of issues about language and consciousness that still await answers. One contemporary saw Novalis as a bird of paradise “without feet, condemned to hover evermore in the air.” The writer Margaret Fuller wrote in letters, “I wish to talk about such an uncommon person, - about Novalis!...the good Novalis, most enlightened, yet most pure; every link of his experience framed – no beaten – from the tried gold.” Novalis had realised that the mental GROWTH of the individual was the key to the value of their insights. So he was doubtful as to the virtue of the academic mind. Such an orderly trained intellect “goes in swiftly – but also comes out swiftly –He soon reaches the second stage – but there he usually remains. He finds the final steps difficult and, once he has attained a certain level of mastery, can seldom bring himself to revert to the condition of a beginner.”
Now what may these stages of intellectual progress be that Novalis is referring to, and why should this academic mentality need to return to “the foul rag and bone shop” of the mind before proceeding to the third stage? For Novalis, it is ordinary people who are best equipped to tackle the higher echelons of development. The “confused,” as he calls them, ““penetrate slowly, they learn to work with difficulty, but then they become masters and teachers for ever... Confusedness indicates superfluity of strength and powers, but lack the sense of proportion. Precision – and true sense of proportion, but scanty strength and power. That is why the confused man is so perfectable (sic) compared with the trained man who so soon finishes as a Pedagogue.”
Consider the following 4 language elements in their interrelationship. They reveal a tale of insect evolution, running in allegorical parallel to human intellectual and spiritual maturation. This is the metaphor that is humanity, and it coincides with the “peculiar property of language” which as Novalis says in his Monologue, “is concerned only with itself.” But neither he nor his predecessor Fichte can reveal it in detail as the “truly scientific” original language. But not only was language when fully revealed Delphi itself, the route to self-knowledge, but also “the dynamic element in the physical realm.” Language appears to be a mere utility. We use it as common coinage for every conversation. And in the world of politics and economics as Novalis shrewdly notes, “where there are many words, there must also be much activity – as with the flow of money.” This is on the same cultural lines as Keynes` percept that capital is generated by animal spirits in human action. But at root language is far more than these things.
If one can distinguish its inner structure, there appears an entire natural philosophy, elements of which were prceived by Norman O. Brown in his intellectual brainbuster, Love`s Body. So ovum, the egg from which all develops appertains to the child`s mind, which I shall argue is not a tabula rasa. The next stage is larva which means mask or ghost. It is also a caterpillar, the idea being that it `masks` its final form, be it bee or butterfly. It also signifies `person` in Latin. Whence larvatus, possessed by a larva and meaning `personality.` When Descartes finally announced himself to the public, he wrote `larvatus prodeo.` On its way to complete realisation, a larva next morphs into a pupa related to the word `pupil`, awaiting transformation into an adult, parallel to the insect pupa awaiting metamorphosis into the imago. The imago or perfected insect is the culmination and real deal in this metamorphic world. It is not merely an `image,` and although in human life it often disconcertingly appears as an eidolon (as Helen of Troy was described) concealing and inspiring a more profound message. Most commonly it is represented in ancient Greece by a butterfly.
Could this helix of growth not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world? As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason, “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master before Marx shortcircuited the process. Certain `animal` structures inhere to the mind. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, sensed before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world.
It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures. It is that as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”
Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth, and one I would argue via the insect. So we dangle between ape and insect.
***************************************************************************
The first item here is from the crucial correspondence between the Nobel prize-winning scientist Wolfgang Pauli and Jung - crucial because nowhere else do we have such a detailed account of the dreams of a pioneering scientist and the comments from one of the two greatest psychoanalysts:
Let`s remember the epoch-making (cf. also epoché pace Husserl) correspondence of Pauli and Jung in this general connection:

"Dear Mr. Jung - "I was once at a meeting where someone was talking
about the oracle of the I CHING. It struck me that the one consulting the oracle has to `draw` three times, whereas the result of the draw depends on the divisibility of a quantity by four. This reminded me vividly of the {medieval} `world-clock vision,` in which the motif of the permeation of the 3 and the 4 was the main source of the feeling of harmony..."

Now 3fold tends to relate to female experience, 4fold to male: there is much more on this in my The Insect Populated Mind, though as Paulus Ryanto has pointed out in his brilliant thesis on Husserl, "The knowledge of the world cannot stop at a mathematical formula of it." Which is to say that the dialectic of 3 and 4 is only a key to opening a deeper understanding of how humans function and not a dryasdust abstraction on which we settle.

Pauli continues, "I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time. [These layers] are particularly often represented by wave or oscillation symbols (which still remain to be explained). The relationship to these images is strongly affective and connected with a feeling that could be described as a mixture of fear and awe. (You will perhaps say that the curves are an IMAGO DEI.)"

Now, I would suggest that these oscillations are the abstract diagramatic of an intimation of the lepidoptera (psyche in Greek = butterfly) that lay behind the processes involved in setting up these quasi-psychological connections. Indeed I would even suggest that there is here a suggestion - no more – that an ambiguity in IMAGO is etymological, both the perfected flying insect and the image. Let us recall that the Gaelic word for butterfly is dealbhan-dé meaning the `fire of God`).

Pauli seems to be suggesting some sort of insect rhythm when in another letter to Jung discussing problems of the relation of physics to psyche, he raises his "phobia about wasps". He writes that "I recognized that behind it lurked the fear of a sort of ecstatic state in which the contents of the unconscious (autonomous part systems) might burst forth, contents which, because of their strangeness, would not be capable of being assimilated by the conscious and might thus have a shattering effect on it."

Here Pauli has reached the limits of physics, an apprehension of a potential mental nuclear explosion so to speak.
THE LIFE SCIENCES AND BEYOND THAT EXTERNAL ORGANIC LIFE BECKONS!!

©