Apologies in advance, but against my better judgement sometimes, I feel impelled to indicate how repulsive certain holier-than-thou religious blog posts make me feel. How many blows on their noggins does it require to wake up to the message that we should be, above all, entered into an era of social and spiritual tolerance by now? Above all we should be respectful of individualized spiritual pathways…
University life, in America, actually used to be about rampant curiosity once. And the opposite sex. Not too much at all really, about jobs or money. Parents didn’t know this. Bless their forever selfless hearts…
Close your eyes, figuratively. If I ask you to picture the word green, do you imagine this or perhaps this, or something closer to this? How does your typical green image differ from mine or that of your daughter or a business colleague who lives in Costa Rica? Assuming we could develop a statistical norm for what speakers of American English generally mean by the word (and some studies have tackled this question), it only opens the door to further more interesting psycholinguistic puzzles. For example: has the concept ‘green’ changed subtly since the days of Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, or William the Conqueror? Do children conceive ‘green’ differently than senior citizens (perhaps even the same individual at different ages)? How does this compare with a Brazilian person who is thinking of verde? Or a Mongolian pondering ногоон?
First day of 10th grade Geometry class, true story, teacher walked up and down the aisles handing out the textbooks to everyone. Eccentric guy, liked him right away. As chance unfolded my copy was partially ripped in the binding. He noted this a moment and looked at me, and I read his thought somewhat: “Oh well, thus crumbleth thy cookie.” And then he moved on. But directly he’d gotten two desks away he turned and rethought things. Made eye contact and said “Actually, Why suffer?” Then he trundled off to the back closet and got a brand new book to replace it. Little did I know this question would morph into a lifelong philosophical riddle touching all areas of my life. And everyone else’s.
This piece is a follow-on to a short story posted a few days ago here, and it will make less sense if you have not read the other. It described some inner experiences upon ingesting mescalin half a century ago. That piece was a work of fiction, although obviously possessing a strong autobiographical content. Here, however, I am trying to reason some specific points. What is imagined and what is not, and how do we know?
Suppose you were confused or just plain curious as to the reality of human free will. Where would be a reasonable starting point to look into this topic? And where would likely be a clusterfuck waste of your precious time?
There is a subtle distancing effect which our numerous online devices and other technologies foist upon our minds regarding the world of everyday objects. Left unchecked, we develop a disregard and disinterest in things and their nature, reflected in the disposable stance many ‘movers and shakers’ adopt towards articles of utility. But imagine if the surrounding world of objects could be reunited with their rightful depths of significance, qualities, and history! Suppose you had to think ONLY about a piece of chalk, to take a mundane example, for 10 full minutes. How difficult would it be, and what could be recovered?
There is a country with exceedingly fuzzy borders we all traverse and meander about each night between definitely awake and definitely not awake. Dream state consciousness researchers call this fluctuating interim the hypnogogic condition. But there is also hypogogia: the transition phase between not yet awake and awake every morning. An equally evasive experience, but easier to empirically study on one’s own, I find. Whoever explores this persistently can more easily catch pictures of how altered consciousness looks, because the mental energy is increasing and refreshed in the mornings as opposed to night times. It is a matter of building technique…
I want to open a space in your imagination concerning the Gospel of Mark. A vessel of considerations for a different way to think about what concepts like ‘revelation’, ‘salvation’, and the entire idea of religious striving means. I hold that the usual and widespread way of looking at these sorts of things are extrememly unfortunate and guarantee confusion. We’ve been sold a bogus conceptual framework by the ‘experts’, the theologians, evangelical pastors and institutions espousing church dogmas. Often but not always this falseness has been inadvertant. The remedy for this must be individual and entirely reject anything smacking of received authority.
Lots of intellectuals presume they ‘know’ it is impossible to deconstruct the received wisdom about how Darwinism, the natural worldview, and science are intertwined. Truth is, it requires patient dedication and a wide-ranging inquiry. But it is not really rocket science. The big obstacle is not the intellectual immensity of the endeavor, but the scalding ridicule and heresy indictments you will have to endure from the orthodoxy police if you ever speak up about it. I first wrote this in 2015. Before this blog took a sort of — poetic — turn.
I originally worked on this essay seven years ago. I decided to re-blog it because, still timely, it represents my roots in some ways at the very beginning of SWR (along with a second essay which I will re-blog next month), and has been seen by few if any current readers… There is a legend regarding Da Vinci’s Last Supper which I quite like:
Each one of the twelve apostles embodies the perfecting and expressing of a single different one of the twelve virtues. Achieving divine initiation is said to consist of perfecting the cultivation of all twelve within one’s being or soul, harmoniously, over the course of many lifetimes. Which is exemplified by Christ.
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