Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 67
"The withdrawal of philosophy into a 'professional' shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth."
-- Paul Feyerabend
A perfect example of how a Spiral Dynamics stage Orange ego-mind justifies and defends its atheist, rationalist paradigm:
Notice how the Amazing Atheist conflates mysticism with religion and fails to understand that Truth cannot be proven, symbolized, or communicated because a map is never the territory. He conflates actual Truth with linguistic or symbolic "truth".
It is indeed amazing how paradigm lock works.
This is a prime example of how closedmindedness and arrogance stymies any further inquiry or research into existential matters.
A more openminded person would wonder, "What could Hinduism be pointing to that I might be overlooking? Let me go research that."
Moral of the story is: don't become like this guy.
In the video below, US Apollo Astronaut and 6th man to walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, describes his samadhi experience in outer space.
"The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes... The knowledge came to me directly."
Edgar Mitchell later founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, devoted to the study of consciousness. As the website says, "The essential hypothesis underlying the noetic sciences is simply that consciousness matters."
The point of this post is to help you realize that when the scientific mind penetrates reality deeply enough, the field of science morphs into the field of spirituality. A traditional scientist is just someone whose understanding of the metaphysical structure of reality is so thin that he hasn't realized yet that he IS reality! Oh sure, he knows it intellectually, but not deeply enough, not personally enough that it's flowered into a full-blown spiritual experience.
Flying into outer space helps to put you in touch with your own universal nature. Which is one of the key reasons why human beings are so fascinated with space exploration and space travel: We want to be Cosmic! But the truth is, we already are Cosmic! We've always been Cosmic! You don't need to fly into outer space to realize this because in fact there is no difference between outer space and inner space. The vacuum of outer space is already here, right now, inside your head! You can fly to the edge of the galaxy and all you will ever find is consciousness. But for a mind thoroughly locked in the materialist paradigm it might take something like flying to the moon to realize its folly. A materialist mind needs an epic material revelation of spirit/oneness/consciousness to break through the lock. Something akin to an angel descending down from the clouds with choir music playing.
A traditional scientist is a dabbler in reality. Sure, he knows some formulas and he's read a lot of books, but it has not dawned on him yet that the nature of reality is pure, radical subjectivity. So he stands too far aloof from his subject matter. He actually believes that the thing he's studying is separate from himself. He likes to pretend that he is being "objective". How myopic!
P.S. For you moon-landing conspiracy theorists, this is the most compelling evidence that the moon-landing actually happened. But sadly, if you're a moon-landing conspiracy theorist, understanding spirituality will be way over your head.
Here's a really good example of how collective ego works:
Notice how your own organization (whichever groups you're a part of) operates under the same basic dynamics. What people misunderstand is that the content of the group's beliefs is largely irrelevant. This is not a Catholic problem, this is a collective ego problem. Collective ego is a meta-structure. Its primary concern is self-preservation, regardless of what "the self" happens to be. It could be a religious self, a political self, a scientific self, a rational self, a gender self, a social justice self, an environmentalist self, etc. The Catholic Church, as a living, evolving organism — like every organism — is in a constant battle to keep itself alive. Because of this it tends to be blind to its own "ecological footprint" — AKA, selfishness.
The root solution to problems like this is genuine transcendence of ego — by increasing consciousness. Consciousness needs to be increased both at the individual level and at the collective level. But the catch-22 is, the ego does not want to increase consciousness because that means the death of the ego. And hence we have this perpetual battle between "good" and "evil", selfless vs selfish. You can't be completely selfless, or you will die. And you can't be completely selfish, or you will also die. The trick is striking the right balance, which complex organisms like humans and corporations and churches find very challenging to do.
Most organisms error on the side of selfishness because it is safer and easier. This is reinforced with fear and craving. The fear and craving which rules the Catholic Church also rules you. Which is fundamentally why you are so selfish.
It would take enormous courage for the Catholic Church to say: "From now on, full transparency". That would be the equivalent of you showing up to school or work naked. It's the last thing you want to do.
A Correction: I want to make a correction to something I said in my Understanding Sameness vs Difference video. In that video I made a minor point about how Douglas Hofstadter said that all thinking boils down to analogy. This was a mischaracterization of his position. Rather, he says that analogy is the core of thinking, which is much more reasonable. My apologies for this oversight.
The only thing I would add to his excellent lecture above is that distinction is the other side of that coin. The core of thinking is both making analogies (seeing samenesses) and making distinctions (seeing differences). Both are crucial and work off each other, like the positive and negative ends of a battery.
Did you know that Sikhism is the 5th largest religion in the world?
Sikhism is larger than Judaism, yet most people have never heard of it.
Take a few minutes to read what Sikhism is about on the Sikhism Wikipedia page.
"In Sikhism, the concept of God is Waheguru, considered Nirankar (shapeless), akal (timeless), and Alakh Niranjan (invisible). The Sikh scripture begins with Ik Onkar, which refers to the 'formless one'."
Notice any similarities to Actualized.org?
"The bones connected by joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole. To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness comes all the many particulars."
— Heraclitus
Heraclitus understood Sameness vs Difference.
I found this obscure website devoted to the study of infinity. Really cool to see websites like this out there. The author (seen below) really gets it.
Read the long homepage text. It's got some profound insights there about the nature of reality.
Before you laugh at this child too much, just remember, you used to be this stupid too.
When a child like this is shown a video of himself doing these experiments once he's a few years older, he will deny that this is a video of the real him because in his mind there is no way that he could have been that stupid.
That's exactly how the ego-mind works. It always denies and disowns its own prior delusions and stupidities, because to admit them would introduce serious doubts about its present sense of reality.
To pull off a successful self-deception requires that you deny that self-deception is even a thing. Just to admit that self-deception is a serious possibility is already to half escape it.
Also, any deep insights the ego-mind has into the nature of reality are automatically backwards-rationalized as "obvious" and "self-evident" when in fact they weren't — they were significant and non-trivial discoveries. Which is why people these days are so naive about how science works. They think that discoveries like the orbiting Earth, the moons of Jupiter, germ theory, set theory, xrays, or heavier than air flight were obvious, "rational", and "scientific" when in fact they were considered pseudoscience.
This video was shot over 10 years ago yet look at how well it presaged current political trends.