It’s the vision thing => it’s primarily a matter of seeing not of believing. Wisdom is primordial not modern science which is controlling knowledge. It’s not a matter of a leap of faith. To see is to find yourself already over the chasm.
It is evident that ignorance and stupidity are primordial. WIsdom takes effort, study, thinking and having the ability to accept that you are wrong.
Science and wisdom are bedfellows of knowlege and progress.
Faith is the mindkiller.
Steeped in readings about neuroscience and philosophies of consciousness, I’d be satisfied with what these readings had to offer if they could only answer the hard questions as effectively as a god experience has and does. No faith required. The hard questions that the sciences cannot answer are why are we here? and why this instead of something else? The God experience offers a sense of belonging which science cannot fathom.
Strange that you should be interested in posting here, considering your opinions, or is your abrasive attitude also not accepted elsewhere so that you think you have to troll people here?
The fact that people for thousands of years have been considering the mysteries of existence in similar ways, differing only in cultural nuances, seems to have eluded you. As has been said, science hasn’t brought us the answers we had hoped for fifty years ago but has brought even more questions. The mystery remains a mystery and is perhaps even a bigger mystery today than we had thought. I found the book by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, “The Science Delusion”, an eye opener that shows up how science hasn’t been able to keep its promises, despite having been very confident that it would.
On the other hand, the materialist mindset that science has enforced has deluded people into seeking materialistic answers to everything and even interpreting spiritual sources in that way, rendering them useless in that context. This is something that Bernado Kastrup has demonstrated in his many books, in particular in “Materialism is Baloney”, which also shows how inconsequent science has been in its attempts to unravel experience.
Perhaps you should read more rather than just putting your faith (it is faith) in science blindly. A perhaps you should try more to understand what people are talking about, for example in this thread, rather than spouting off some superficial statement of faith in your doctrine. In that way you are no better than militant evangelicals …
I agree with most of that. If wisdom is seeing the primary order of the universe then the sciences are indispensable. The faith that I find to be a mind killer is the blind kind which is motivated by fear.
I don’t think we want to get on an anti-science track here. I didn’t intend that and I don’t think you do either. The whole of my formal education was science-oriented. The scientific method and critical thought are habitual for me. The Genesis of humanity out of the so-called lower nature is something which perhaps can never be fully understood. At the center is an intra-cosmic mystery of how reason, consciousness and civilized order emerged from their absence in deep time. The “God” hypothesis doesn’t provide a scientific explanation. And the use of religious language doesn’t guarantee participation in the mystical experience you’re alluding to. What can I do to open this road for people instead of being an obstacle in their path?
I plan to read Kastrup’s book. I cannot escape the possibility that true moral significance is tied to one’s metaphysical vision. What one sees and does not see, what one takes as real or illusory, precedes how one approaches the moral challenges of life.
Skepticism is essential for scientific objectivity. But it’s not a safe haven from the social-political storms that surround us.
The climate has changed spiritually as well as environmentally. 20th century existentialism and Jungian psychology must be recontextualized to be relevant. The metaphysical context in which they were practiced has morphed. This time is as intellectually exciting as it is dark.
Again I invoke the image of Oswald Spengler and his “Decline of the West” and ask if the declining West with its Faustian technoscience won’t take the rest of human civilization and indeed the rich biodiversity of this planet with it.
I have that thick band from Oswald Spengler in German on my shelf, and now that I am back home, I’ll take some time to read it’s 1432 pages, although that will obviously take time. It is worth time remembering that he was an anti-democratic political author, as well as active as a writer in the fields of history, cultural history and cultural philosophy. Spengler is counted among the nationalist and anti-democratic "Conservative Revolution” but rejected National Socialism and especially its racial ideology. Nevertheless, he is often regarded as an intellectual forerunner of National Socialism.
In that way you hear the Trumpian claim that the West is lost (and only he can save it), which is the claim that all nationalist movements are making. The biggest problem as I see it, is the fact that today the political movements left of centre are making it easy for anti-democratic politics, by scaring conservatives, much like in the Weimarer Republic when the communists and the social democrats each declared the new republic and remained bitter enemies, enabling the anti-democratic forces in Germany to gain power and enable Hitler. The problem is that the left reject religion and the right reject spirituality, so there is a broad front marching against us.
Therefore, you are definitely right about 20th century existentialism and Jungian psychology having to be recontextualized to be relevant, but also the relevance of the mystics, who were using non-scientific and poetic language to describe the mystery of existence and the ineffability of God. I believe that Kastrup helps towards that in pointing out that this broad front is proposing a materialist description of reality, which doesn’t stand up to scrupulous enquiry. The truth is that it is all very much more mysterious than science would have us know.
If we look at the area that Spengler covers in this book of 1432 pages (in German) not counting the appendix, it becomes clear that, even if he doesn’t get everything right (in retrospect), it is still worth consideration with the future in mind. However, this study is in itself a subject that would go beyond the scope of a topic on wholeness. Should we start a topic dealing with the subject matter of the book, drawing comparative literature to form an opinion about our current time?
What do you think?
Although I suppose I would disagree with Spengler on many of the particulars, Western Civilization does appear to be in decline. What does that mean for my own individuation and that of the people I love? In other words, what are the spiritual implications? It’s a huge topic. That last question says to me that it would be an appropriate topic for the religion and spirituality forum.
In the abstract it’s the problem of wholeness and impermanence. As we pass through life we are transformed by it. Our life circumstances are the crucibles of our souls.
Matthew 18:3 ►
New International Version
And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Many Christians do not seem to understand that Christianity requires a change in consciousness. The consciousness of a child is like beginners mind. Life is a gift experienced in the newness of the here and now present. In this state of consciousness it is easy to live in the presence of the Tao/Logos.
Plato’s Socrates describes holistic medicine @ 2400 years ago:
It seems like I spent most of my life trying to be somebody else. Authenticity has come hard for me. It’s kind of a default mode after everything I ever try to do fails.
I wouldn’t say that everything fails, but in a mixed-up world, we tend to get pushed into areas where we are encouraged to follow some ideals, but it turns out that these ideals are only a façade, and when you enter the competitive area, you see that those ideals actually get in the way. You either have the choice of throwing ideals to the wind or leaving that competition.
It’s the same in relationships. You start out with a dream that doesn’t take the run of time into consideration, and after a while, you notice that an edginess comes into a relationship. People grow older, become set in their ways, stops being creative, fail to spruce life up and suddenly people notice a break in communication.
For a long time, I thought that I was the failure, but I’ve come to see that the society we’ve built fails to follow through on the ideals it was built on. As a child I was free as a bird, and school either inspired me, or lost me. Everything was a game, work was a game, I just had to learn the rules. Even the army was a game – a bit rough and tumble, but a game. Until it wasn’t.
Suddenly the question arises, who am I? Why does everybody want something from me that I am not? Why do I play their games? The answer is simple, because I can’t exist on my own. I was just glad that all I did meant that I had a reasonable pension, and my wife and I managed to find harmony. I have disengaged partly, and come to peoples aid when they need me, but I have time now to follow the clues to who I am …
Bob–
Yes well I see that you too are on a journey towards authenticity. But I didn’t connect my last post up with the theme of wholeness explicitly. I learned the theme of authenticity from the existential philosophers during my undergraduate college years.
The thrust of my post was that I didn’t find authenticity directly by aiming at it. Rather I found it, to the degree that I have found it, by failing in my efforts to be inauthentic. Of course I didn’t consciously set out to be inauthentic either. But on reflection that seems like what I did.
No one can tell you who you are. You must discover that for yourself. Yet others can give you important clues as you have said. In any case, while it seems obvious that one cannot hope to approach wholeness without authenticity, can the relationship between the two be elucidated?
The concept of wholeness may seem too vague to pin down usefully. Whatever our potential is as a human being it will be limited by the environment and circumstances in which we must make choices.
With every choice we open up one door to realizing our potential and close another one. According to this view wholeness would mean being able to realize potential in every direction without choice. That, of course, is impossible. Therefore wholeness is unattainable. What do you think of this picture?
Forgive my twisted revesive, retroactive mind, just got up and was drawn by the simile. If indeed that is a reflection of the first felled back rays of the sun
Wholeness appears duplicitous primarily, it conveys a simultanious immediate circle of love and the abysmal depth that makes reality into an effort set for titans.
Sorry Bob, for being compelled.
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We talk of feeling fragmented, but I think you, my friend, really know better what that is like.
I think that this is really the answer, not trying to be authentic enables the basic you to emerge. I had many ideas of what I was, mostly suggested through interaction with others, but a few through flights of fantasy, and it was when I finally gave them up that I felt released.
I still envision wholeness as being in my environment, or rather a part of my environment, with which I interact and influence, as much as I am myself influenced. I think that wholeness is attainable when I have accepted or even welcomed this and stop seeing myself as separate, as an individual, distinct from everything else.
However, I know how I am susceptible to the thought of being separate, and so it seems like it is an on/off situation.
So then life is a process where if we endeavor to be what we are not because we cannot live up to our ideal, we are purified to become what we truly are.
Well I guess so, but then, which really is better , to talk of it descriptively, analyzing it through simile, sequentially, or take the leap unbrazen by the depth and swim in the nihilistic fray, untypically, wade into it as when pushed into the déep, as if forced to learn to swim?
There is no resemblance between the functional derivation of resembling family traits as it goes between feeling and knowing.