I read your text with great interest, being myself a complete lover of the Western via positiva and particularly of Neoplatonicism and the Western enlightenment. I have tasted the wonderful delineation of your thinking and the really soft touch and refinement of it. I fully appreciate this, like a treat which is too rare is this world where simplistic ideas seem to be the only ones able to make the headlines.

I think it is nice that Andrew published you and gave you the opportunity to dialog with him. I almost envy you here because I never had this chance so far , but well… probably it is my Karmic journey here. The communication so far didn’t happen at all compared to what could have been. Complete Kosmical under-performance with Mister Andrew. Or maybe it is all that it was… God Knows.

In any case, I also have a program for the next step which differs ( maybe a bit, maybe not that much) from yours. yours is Recapitulation…. love it. I would have given my Soul for it a few years ago ( an this fact says much about European Sipritual Drive and the deep link and love between our two cultures) , but now it seems to me that it is not enough. Or maybe it is too much, too complex. You see, with the digitalization the world the capacity for attention of the human brian cannot catch anymore the complexity of refined thought. Thought like yours, like mine. We “feel ” that is “sounds” great and complex but… somehow… we don’t have time anymore for this. You are an expert in digitalization, in the virtual world. So maybe you reached the same compulsions as mine. There are two solutions out of this exponential bubble :

1. maybe the digital bubble will collapse and we will come back to simpler values including direct contact between humans. Recapitulation or a way backward ?

2. The second solution is more interesting. Somehow our capacity for conceptualization will evolve. I mean, under the pressure of the digitalized bubble it will become at the same time simpler while very refined. It will in a sense “transcend and include” complexity, it will go deeper and thus become powerful. Thinking, by simplifying itself while integrating complexity will get an impact, a real power ….

How is this possible ? well “ simply” by the power of “Enlightened Thinking”. The real schism is that there are much more modes of thinking that what is proposed up to date by our materialistic paradigm. And as you noticed, any powerfully creative human, whether artist or scientist or politician will have touched one day or another this wonderful power of Creative Thinking. `My tentative program” would go more under this direction, with cognition put to incandescence and reaching the level of certainty that only Enlightened Masters had in the past and still have at the moment. The door to the future is in the union of simplicity and refinement. In the union of Absolute Certainty and Complexity.

Some people have started to make this bridge. To paraphrase the immense ( although very little known, i have no clue why ) Franklin Merrell Wolff, there are there modes of cognition : sensation, formal thinking and thinking through Identification. The latter mode brings Absolute Certainty, the second mode corresponds to our delineate logical, scientific paradigm, and the former mode is more ancient : cognition through direct experience.

You already see that at the Renaissance, the two first modes of Cognition were re-united into one. Namely the scientific method succeeded to re-unite direct observation with logical Thinking, producing the single greatest sift of modern history.

In the next stage I believe, we humans will succeed to Unite the three modes altogether : Sensation, logical thinking and Cognition Through Identification. This will make the bridge between the Descenders and the Ascenders, between the via Positiva and the via Negativa.

In any case, it was a real delight to read you.
Keep in touch when you pass through Paris.

Love, Catherine ( the French scientist you met in the EN center last year in London)