blazingstar wrote:
I like Fnord's outline, but do have a deep spiritual underpinning to what I do. However, I am not suggesting that anyone else should have a spiritual underpinning. Just that I do.
Your screen name does give that away, ie. in that as far as I understand it it's a name for that sort of central sun that Dion Fortune wrote about in Cosmic Doctrine and it's the really big star out of the 8 in the tarot key by that name. I spent about three years deep-diving through books and I'm just short of five years into BOTA and AMORC.
I had an extra paragraph in that last post you quoted that I deleted before posting. Below are a handful of approaches I see in progress and I'm sure this list is far from being all-inclusive, there are probably several dozen worth noting just that these are the ones I've been paying attention to:
1) Sam Harris trying to establish a moral philosophy in the objective by way of his Moral Landscape. I think Jordan Peterson is supportive of his endeavor and has been trying to help him comb through it for oversights to see where it can be strengthened.
2) Bret and Eric Weinstein have been pushing the idea of looking to game theory for understanding the situations we find ourselves in politically and economically (Bret has often suggested that most of the really big abstract problems we have break down into a handful of relatively canonical game-theoretical problems) and they'd both like to see our culture take a stab at retraining capitalism, retraining liberal democracy, etc. to have more thorough mechanisms for rewarding real work and progress while even better prosecuting and punishing fraudulent activity.
3) The University of Virginia doctors, in association with IANDS, Institute of Noetic Sciences, and all of the people in the particular network of medical researchers who are trying to establish the solidity of the NDE, past-life memories in children, and you also have Dean Radin writing somewhat prolifically about what he sees as the actual metaphysic behind a lot of things that have classically been in this domain of - what I could loosely call - conscious universe, panpsychism, and trying to see if useful teleology can be pulled in from that.
I think all three are necessary, just that I really have strong doubts that the third approach will give us society-wide solutions with respect to laws or ways to rebind culture. It will give us a green-light perhaps to get even more into meditation, probably more people will consider the value of magical practices (right now most people who enter that still come at it from the 'its all psychological' approach and only slowly realize there's something more), and I think what that will be good for is giving our culture at the individual human level higher resilience. Right now our culture looks like one big raw nerve, that's probably an artifact of social media but nonetheless it's propagating and empowering cultural neurosis in a massive scale - we need tools to inoculate ourselves against that and tools of private cultivation are every bit as good as any other. As for the first two approaches I think they could be incredibly useful just that they need to be put to use and to some extent, for as brilliant as I think Bret and Eric are, they do need to bring a lot of what seems like high philosophy down to concrete action and examples - the sorts of things that get people really thinking that what they're talking about is possible.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
21 Sep 2018, 11:39 am
