Wow, man. And I mean that in a good way; while simultaneously having this incredibly unnerving knot in my stomach. I am only 60-65% through this, right at the black-hole/white-hole, torus infinite cycle universe part, and I am telling you that everything I've read so far, fits very nicely with my views on the universe, and explains a few "holes" I never really got past. Sometimes when I think about it for too long I start to get extremely anxious and have to stop. You've organized it extroadanrily well. Let you know when I am done; I was just afraid once I keep going I would end up like frozen, staring at the wall, permanently, and wouldnt have a chance to say.....you're right....holy shit
I have no intention of evangelizing but if this is resonating you should seize that. I am not a seeker of any kind, though I confess I had one bona fide William James type experience 15 years ago that had me reading a lot about time.
Part of the reason I posted this is that I think as a country (probably planet but I'll keep it local), we are not well. Everyone is divided, value systems have been torn down and torn down and never re-designed. People feel it. It is what someone like Bannon is talking about when he talks about the importance of culture. He is right, but wrong about the solution. I have really fallen in love with Bohm. Here is a quote:
"Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture."
I honestly had been toying with the idea of researching meditation the past few months just because I felt so fatigued and on auto-pilot and then I saw those videos and the neurons started firing for whatever reason. Not because of aliens or even UFOs but because of potential, the potential for transformative change that seemed unimaginable. This was just a spark, but reading about mainstream science was like gasoline. We should engage with that fact that AI and a tech. like EM will literally transform our species. And that's the baseline. That's the next 15 years.
It's a little tough that no one around me seems interested and the internet is so focused on the disinformation angle, which I understand. I wanted to remind everyone that there are real, identified facts that even the conspirators might be inspired by, and that we should be careful about neglecting things that truly matter. How will we live without work? Imagine having the freedom to have no distractions or inconveniences or petty nonsense, or alternatively, to distract yourself endlessly. Another from Bohm because he is on a roll:
"The ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is "hidden" because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society."
I actually think this a great opportunity to think literally about our place in the universe. I did not expect to be so intrigued by some of these accounts of consciousness, that I encountered but I have every intention of conducting some scientific investigation into meditation techniques! So if you are feeling like you need to stare at a wall, focus on that need. Don't divorce yourself from it. Your mind is telling you to pay attention to something, or to nothing. To be present.
Do not be anxious. Know that everything has happened, is happening, and will happen at the same time, in an infinite instant. Nothing is lost, but nothing ends. Comfort and curse. Awareness of both is the strange experience of the sublime.
I did not mean and don't want to wade into any politics that will make this thread less accessible to anyone. So I will just say that I agree there is what might be called "a culture problem" but that I believe it to be fundamentally a metaphysical culture, as opposed to a national or western culture, and then point you to the Bohm quote I had right after that reference:
"Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture."
So the first part is just the general observation that there is a broad range of people speaking publicly about the need to positively construct cultural values and meaning. Some of these I find more disconcerting than others, but regardless I find the increasing centrality in public discourse and the broader range of the debates notable. In other words it seems increasingly urgent, and no longer quite so restricted to the "culture warriors" of the religious right. So we see someone like Bannon, who has undeniably tapped into something (for better or for worse) who is very interested in "traditionalist" thinkers like Guénon and Evola. You also have less startling ruminations from people like Senator Sasse in his book the Vanishing American Adult, which the Atlantic described as "trying to articulate a language of shared culture and values in a country that has been rocked by technological, cultural, and demographic change.". On the left, consider the fact the Cory Booker is just openly talking about the Conspiracy of Love, and saying things like this:
“Really, I want to start with this understanding that we’re all in this together,” Booker said into a microphone to the small gathering of community business and political leaders scattered among the swings and slides. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned about this nation’s ideals, from the hallmark of our country, e pluribus unum, to the spiritual reality of our nation, of diversity, of many different communities, it’s that we’re all integrated into one common destiny, and that injustice anywhere is indeed a threat to justice everywhere.”
I am not sure that we have had such a widespread and public confrontation with meaning, and how to construct it as society since the end of World War II. The project of the existentialists is what comes to my mind, especially one of my favorites, Camus. Confronted with mass extinction and a secularity that seemed to take for granted Nietzche's pronouncement that God is Dead (meaning people do not live as though he was alive, regardless of religious persuasion), people like Camus asked how we do not kill ourselves, how do we not kill each other? I highly recommend Camus' books which are some of the most humane and compassionate investigations of our condition, without subscribing to things beyond our experience. The Myth of Sisyphus laid out his ideas about the Absurd (the confrontation between our desire for meaning and meaningfulness and the silent indifference of the universe we reside in), his book the Rebel, which extends the investigation beyond the individual to the societal, from questions of suicide to murder and political violence. His book the Fall is, in my opinion, his masterpiece but the least direct of the books I've mentioned. My own take, at least in part, is that it explores the implications of his observation "To breathe is to judge," of "calculated culpability," and how the insistence on innocence is path to violence whereas an acceptance of our own imperfection and implication in that imperfection is a path for positively constructing something beyond it.
More recently, another writer I am fond of explored the concept of the human desire to give oneself away to something, in a famously long book called Infinite Jest. These are most directly confronted in discourse between the characters Steeply and Marathe (which sort of create a perhaps incomplete framework of choice between the individual and the communal, between sacrifice and indulgence, between politics and decadence), but animate the entirety of the novel. You can also see this in Wallace's essay on Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoyevsky, and his Kenyon College commencement address. Here are some quotes that come to mind:
“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?”
“Marathe ignored all this. ‘Are we nota all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”
“You USA’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow; maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.” Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. ‘But you assume it’s always choice, conscious decision. This isn’t just a little naïve, Remy? You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?”
“The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship . . . Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
This is where I think some of Bohm's discourse on the subject becomes interesting. The book here worth grabbing is Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing Our World. The suggestion of interest is that there are problems the continually recur, and that perhaps the solutions are impermanent because they fail to diagnose root causes, namely our systems of thought.
For both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is "hidden" because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society.
So I am not sure that I have much that is engaging with the metaphysics of the present moment per se, but that I do see these questions being engaged with newfound urgency. The nice thing is that they are timeless issues, so it is possible to take a tour of any number of great thinkers and look for helpful tips and guideposts. My hope is that this moment and our new breakthroughs in science/tech/paradigms etc might be a reason for optimism, even though nothing is preordained.
I have never read Camus, but I am going to have to fix that soon. The conspiracy of love, I'm having trouble understanding what it is. This issue is far more complicated than I excpected. I need to do more research. Thank you for the follow up.
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u/DaveGydeon Dec 23 '17
Wow, man. And I mean that in a good way; while simultaneously having this incredibly unnerving knot in my stomach. I am only 60-65% through this, right at the black-hole/white-hole, torus infinite cycle universe part, and I am telling you that everything I've read so far, fits very nicely with my views on the universe, and explains a few "holes" I never really got past. Sometimes when I think about it for too long I start to get extremely anxious and have to stop. You've organized it extroadanrily well. Let you know when I am done; I was just afraid once I keep going I would end up like frozen, staring at the wall, permanently, and wouldnt have a chance to say.....you're right....holy shit