PS: To be scrupulously fair, not all Al’s (‘The Dark Man’) output is daft stuff. This piece seems pretty spot on to me: The Truth About Ray Epps? – The Duran
Weird, innit, how threads wander away from their original headline
Yes, I can only say apologies for that.
My internet connection is not good, and the power here keeps going out (2am on New Year’s morning the power cut out until 9am).
The notifications on this board most times don’t work for me as well, which makes it all a bit difficult for me to follow things.
On that subject, what’s happened to PP, our notional host? I’m a bit worried about him.
Getting back to psi, etc, I really find this an interesting subject. Gawd knows I’ve gone on about it myself a lot over the last few years.
What is reality?
GKH, over to you…
I reckon that Pontius has become so turned off by what he sees as the incorrigible irrationality that some of us display about - supposedly - cut-and-dried, established fact that he’s lost patience with us. That strikes me as a real shame. But the brute fact seems to be that there is no real consensus about AGW, with a growing chorus of non-write-offable voices beginning to doubt it publicly; so we have to reflect that. The arguments - and dissident facts - put up by the dissenters simply can’t be written off as mere moonshine. In the end open-minded scepticism, the bedrock of the true scientific method, still rules.
I wish P would come back, though. I miss his generous-souled presence. We’re poorer for lack of it.
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And Rob: according to Tom Campbell’s Big Theory Of Everything, aka ‘My Big TOE’, (which I really rate, as I think must be clear by now) everything that we sense about us as the ‘real’ physical universe is actually a virtual-reality holodeck, deliberately created and maintained by Big Mind, which we immortal souls, running our body-and-ego avatars, visit in repeated incarnations (‘experience packets’, as Tom calls them), to do the crucial, vital work of lowering entropy and growing towards love (two faces of the one true-silver/mithril coin, btw).*
This on behalf of Big Mind - ‘The Larger Consciousness System’ in Tom’s neutral, scientific language - of which all we individual souls are indissoluble parts: simple fully-attached pseudopods!
This work is of paramount importance to Big Mind, its Great Purpose, because it’s a ceaseless necessity, in order to keep back the eternally-threatening return of high entropy into Big Mind’s/our existence, as the utterly structureless, meaningless ‘white-noise’ chaos that, in true yin/yang fashion, lives eternally in opposing tension with the opposite tendency: to form creative, organised structures and an ongoing evolutionary process, full of transcendental meaning and value. This judgementally-neutral description, favouring neither yin nor yang, strikes me as a great resolution of the old Manichean question: does fundamentally-incorrigible evil exist, as an opposite pole to goodness? Or is it all an ultimately-harmonious, morally-innocent unity? Clearly, according to the ‘Big TOE’ description, it’s the latter.
That basic description strikes me as a) tallying closely with what we’ve observed of reality’s basic nature; and b) tallying pretty well also with the core perceptions of most (all?) of the world’s long-standing religio-ethical traditions.
It’s a meticulously-scientific physicist’s contribution to the religious exploring of reality that we - hom-sap - have been doing since time out of mind; and a splendid insight too, I think.
*‘Mithril/true-silver’: The Elvish/Dwarfish ultimately-precious metal: Tolkien’s conception, mentioned in ‘TLOTR’
I recently discovered Claude Lecouteux who was a professor of mediaeval literature and taught at the Sorbonne. Demons And Spirits Of The Land is where I figured I’d start (he was rather prolific).
In the foreword to this book a colleague of his makes this statement (which I hope I don’t mistype).
It is not the “sleep of reason” that produces monsters – to the contrary, there are monsters everywhere that the sacred manifests itself**, and we have no choice but to partially suspend our reason in order to admit this fact and take consequent action. Boyer, R. in Lecouteux, C. tr. Graham, J.E. (1995) Demons And Spirits Of The Land, Inner Traditions, Rochester Vermont, p. x
That phrase “sleep of reason” always brings to mind Goya’s fantastic/phantasmagoric etching.
I was struck by the thought, reading the paragraph quoted above, that it is fear of the monsters that breeds ‘reason’, in fact. Explanations make the world less terrifying, but they blind us to what might really be there as you say @RhisiartGwilym. Pagan beliefs were supplanted, or absorbed into, religion, but that has been supplanted by ‘science’ . . . except that the dogmatic attitude has survived good and strong. This might be why the ‘woke’ get so fiercely aggressive when confronted by science deniers, the Graham Hancocks of this world, etc. If their cultic belief in orthodox archaeology, cosmology, pronouns, or vaccines is threatened they react as though their actual ‘self’ is threatened. Not that there is any such thing.
** By sacred I am fairly sure they, Boyer as well as Lecouteux, are following Durkheim, Eliade, Levi Strauss et al in stressing that the liminal zone between sacred and profane is what matters. Cultures draw the line between these binaries in different ways… yet they all draw that line somewhere. And that is the key thing. So C21 folks view their mobile phones as mundane while an Amazonian family who shun modern life might regard the same object as belonging in the monstrous world of magic and mystery. And who is to say that they are wrong??
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It’s a continuum, isn’t it? Accommodating both the sacred and the profane. All inextricably bound up with what’s happening in the minds of the beholders; very different mental landscapes between natural-living communities and modern techie-swallowed ones.
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Yes. Excellent summary Rhis.
In Mahayana they refer to śūnyatā (Pali: suññatā) - all things being devoid of meaning/empty. But if I try and explain it, assuming that I have understood it - which I continually doubt - we will end up in a bad place. And in any case “it” will have changed by the time I even start to explain. If I could.
Breaking things down (using binaries or whatever) helps us approximate reality and negotiate our way through it - but these words and categories (etc) never capture it. Because of course “it” is changing all of the time (annica). All cultures do this, but cultures draw the lines in different places. This makes monoculture (e.g. startrektechietechie/technocracy) highly suspect: it’s a power play.
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