Tuesday 9 October 2007

EPISTEMO-BIOGRAPHICAL CORRELATIONS

MANDALA OF THE TWO REALMS:WOMB AND DIAMOND MANDALAS





















































What am I doing here?


What has led the researcher here?

Can the lens of critical exploration be turned on the researcher himself, so that, just as the artists' psychosocial worlds are explored, those of the researcher are also examined?

The artists are creating cognitive worlds through the development of metaphysical conceptions in imaginative terms.

These creations demonstrate particular ontological,epistemological and social implications.Along similar lines, the researcher is creating a universe of cognitive possibilities through his work on the artists.


Can both cognitive universes illuminate each other?Can the efforts of the artists and that of the reseacher studying their work throw light on each other?Is such mutual illumination not the very purpose of research,in the first place?

Not necessarily.


Research is more often understood as a one way illumination with the researcher's efforts throwing light on the subject studied. It is less often perceived as capable of facilitating understanding of the research project as an aspect of the life of the researcher themselves.

Less often studied is the potential of the research project for facilitating an understanding of the life of the researcher as a primary hermeneutic project within which the academic research project is a secondary phenomenon.The academic project is a secondary phenomenon demonstrating the directions taken by particular imperatives and orientations within the larger project.

Why has the researcher chosen this project?What combination of choice and circumstance has contributed to their entry into this effort? Could the answers to these questions throw light on the manner in which they frame and investigate their subject? The manner in which the subject is framed and examined is of course crucial to whatever understanding emerges from the investigation.That being the case,could a study of the factors external to the explicit boundaries constituted by the public face of the research project but which shape the project contribute to a better understading og the immediate goals of the project?


My use of the metaphor of light in this context also evokes questions that help clarify the issues at stake. In terms of relationships between the extra-academic context of research and the academic structures in relation to or in terms of which research takes place.

In speaking of the extra academic and the academic contexts in relation to mutual or one sided "illumination" what are the implications of this metaphor evocative of casting light from a source onto another? It suggests a projection outward from a source onto an recipient of what has been cast from the source. In other words an effect moving outward from a source to a target. How accurate is this metaphor here? To what degree ism it helpful in suggesting what could actually take place oin relation to these two existential universes?

Perhaps a more helpful metaphor could be one that evokes, not so much the movement of something from a source to a target, even if such movement occurs mutually, from target to a source and from the erstwhile target to the source that had earlier impacted it, but a metaphor that suggests something more of the simultaneously temporal and atemporal, linear and nonlinear conjunctions and correlations that emerge in the relationship between the academic structures of research and their informing extra academic contexts. A dynamism evoked, perhaps, by a geometric form that suggests such a complex interplay, possibly the diagram of interlaced triangles that emerges in both Hindu and Hermetic thought.

In both traditions, it stands for the interpenetration of different modes of being. In Hermeticism, as a pentagram,it resents the interpenetration of spirit and matter. In Hinduism, as a Yantra,it evokes the interpenetration of masculine and feminine forces in the constitution of being. The central idea is that of interpenetration, where one aspect of being does not demonstrate a fundamental separation from the other without being identical with it.

In this context, the metaphor of illumination remains helpful, but with a recognition of its limitations as suggesting a linearity that might not be sufficiently accurate in its evocation of the relationships between the academic structure of research and the larger extra academic context that informs research.








Above:Images of Mandala of the Two Realms:Womb and Diamond Mandalas from http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/mandala1.shtml

More on womb and diamond mandalas

http://www.brh.co.jp/en/experience/journal/48/research_3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_of_the_Two_Realms






























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