Max Kappeler’s Teaching Moments
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DIVINE CYBERNETICS: THE SELF-OPERATING UNIVERSE
(Edited excerpts: Man: The Thinker—or the Thought?)
Max Kappeler
It is generally assumed that man thinks and that thinking originates in the brain. But is man the primary creator of thoughts? Can mankind claim intelligence exclusively? Was not evolution, prior to the appearance of man and the brain, led and impelled by a goal-directed intelligence? To whom or what can this pre-human intelligence be attributed?
Prime-information
The religionist believes this creative intelligence to be God. Some cyberneticians and biologists call this intelligence proto-information or prime-information. A non-human, intelligent, self-operating, goal-directed Principle has to be assumed, to which human intelligence and human thinking are subjugated in the hierarchical structure of Being. Such a view demands a completely new attitude of consciousness.
The idea inspires thought
Professor Max Born, Nobel prizewinner for physics, said: “I believe that science is an institution that progresses irresistibly, and that it is useless for a few people to try to force the development into another direction.” The physicist-philosopher Professor C. F. von Weizsäcker (Hamburg) puts it this way: “We all know that we don’t know where science is leading us.” We now rightly see that we should not speak so much of ‘inventions’ as of ‘discoveries.’
The German philosopher Heidegger asks: “Why do we think exactly this, and not something else?” He answers: “We do not arrive at thoughts. They come to us.”
Einstein put it like this: “There is no logical way to the discovery of these elementary laws. There is only the way of intuition.” In Science and Health Mary Baker Eddy reveals how mankind is led, step by step, into a new form of awareness, into a consciousness of being inspired and guided not by men’s minds, but by the one divine Mind. With divine Mind as the ‘thinker,’ our thoughts will re-echo the unifying divine information of this one Mind, showing forth an integral world.
History of Cybernetics
(Edited excerpts: From The Physical, Through the Mental, To the Spiritual)
Joel Jessen
The term cybernetics comes from the Greek kybernetes, meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder—the same root word as government. This term was coined by Norbert Wiener (1948) to denote “teleological mechanisms.” The study of teleological systems (from the Greek tele-, telos for end, goal, or purpose) in machines, with self-correcting feedback.
Divine Cybernetics
Max Kappeler, building on the concept of cybernetics, coined the term divine cybernetics to illustrate the self-operating, self-organizing, self-regulating, error-preventing, and error correcting divine system of God. He presented this subject for the first time, in English, during his 1969 summer school in Braunwald, Switzerland.
Kappeler spoke of divine cybernetics as the self-steering action of the laws of God—the “divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love” (S&H 107:2). The divine self-steering action of God operates to bring out the plan of divine Love in our lives.
The Model of Being: a model of divine cybernetics
(Elaborated text based on: The Four Levels of Spiritual Consciousness, p. 4, “Chart”)
Max Kappeler
Today, as we enter the 7th 1000-year period of the age of Love, mankind is becoming aware of a new form of consciousness—a consciousness of the oneness of Being and its self-operation. The Model of Being symbolizes this age of divine oneness, divine cybernetics, in one diagram (one page), using only the symbols of:
- 7 synonymous terms for God: Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love
- 4-fold operation of God: Word, Christ, Christianity, Science
- 4 levels of spiritual consciousness: Science itself, divine Science, absolute Christian Science, Christian Science