“Two voyages,” says Lorimer, “two modes of perception, which should coexist in a state of mutual respect. The rational and the intuitive are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.”
My neighbours have a newish baby. Every night I hear the little thing crying, screaming and every night it is left to ‘self soothe’. It doesn’t seem to be working. I suspect the ‘intuitive’ of the mother must be screaming too, but presumably is being suppressed by the ‘rational’ or at least, what we are told is the rational. The pain for both must be unbearable and who knows what is being set up.
And so it is, perhaps, with Covid. It would explain a lot.
Essential insight: the equal status in human life of reason and intuition. We inhabit, in the over-prosperous West, a fatal disbalance towards ‘reason’ only, with the equally-real intuitive faculty rubbished from toddler-indoctrination on as delusional frippery. In such a critical social misalignment, the reinstatement of intuitive awareness, as an equal partner, is a vital health-restoration project.
But then, I guess I would say that, with my proclivities, and being a long-time partner of a complementary-medicine healer who, amongst her several modes of work, offers shamanic soul-retrieval, drum and rattle and all, for patients who suffer the common problem in our time of loss of crucial parts of the whole soul.
It’s also a fact that, when well understood and well-practised, intuitive, gestaltic information-getting/insight-getting, with its associated function of practical, everyday, realworld ‘happy-coincidence’ magic (sic!), is as potent - I would say, more potent - than the technocratic, logic (all too often chop-logic) -based mode of thinking. Look where that’s got us right now…
The ultimate fact, though, is that both forms of awareness should be absolutely equal in their status. God forbid that we should ever abandon the truly wonderful real scientific method (as opposed to goco-scientism-riddled authoritarian technocracy). Just recover it’s siamese-twin to full health, that’s all. Tom Campbell’s work is one good pathfinder; as is Russell Targ’s; and there are plenty of others, to taste.
My wife and I obediently left our baby daughter to cry piteously for at least two nights (I forget how many nights it was, and I’ve mislaid the notebook in which I recorded such things), but there was no sign of the heartless procedure “working”, so we gave in, and did the natural thing that we should have done all along (a bit like a minority of subjects in the Milgram obedience experiments), and let her sleep with us. We never regretted it.
As for the book: I haven’t got around to reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) yet, so I can’t take on another book on the same subject, but I’ll make a note of it.
(Double take.) I see it’s by David Lorimer. I’ve got two of his other books: Whole in One: The Near-death Experience and the Ethic of Interconnectedness (1997) and Thinking Beyond the Brain: A Wider Science of Consciousness (2001). I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t read either of them yet.
The number that has been done on co-sleeping and many other aspects of ‘alternative’ child rearing is an absolute disgrace. What makes matters worse is that I suspect those responsible know the truth.
Which reminds me, Rhis - we didn’t even let our dog cry it out. The breeder said it would cry for a week or two and to ignore it. First night he cried, so out I went, gave him a play, a cuddle and he fell asleep on my foot. The second night was exactly the same as the first. After that, nothing, slept through and was fine.
Incidentally, besides humans, are there any other mammals that leave their young in distress? I doubt it.
The OffGuardian article quotes this passage from the book, and it’s worth re-quoting:
Over the past few months we have witnessed a new episode of Inquisition and the implicit creation of an online Index of Prohibited Material. There has been a steep rise in censorship by social media companies of views at variance with mainstream narratives: dissident content is summarily removed. Heretical and subversive views are not tolerated, open debate is stifled in favor of officially sanctioned orthodoxy, whistle-blowers are abused and demonized. Manipulated by fear and on a flimsy pretext of security, we are in danger of abjectly surrendering the very freedom of thought and expression that our ancestors fought so courageously to secure in the eighteenth century and which constitutes the essence of our Enlightenment legacy…
It does sound good… I’m afraid I don’t read Edward Curtin articles as they put my teeth on edge.
McGilchrist is sitting on my ereader waiting it’s turn.
The Cosmos Loka sutta says that we all conceive AND perceive a cosmos but not the cosmos. In other words there’s a sensing mind and a making sense mind and they work together to create something that’s not quite the same as the creation of the next guy along.
I had the impression McGilchrist is exploring this in rather a lot more detail.
Yes, that fits well with the Campbell Big Theory Of Everything: each Individuated Unit Of Consciousness (aka immortal soul) gets an individually-tailored information-stream rendered by the rendering function of the Larger Consciousness System (aka Big Mind, the Great Spirit, God, etc.), which each soul (human, dog, squirrel, whatever life-form it’s ensouling this time round) interprets as it’s immediate environs on the universe-sized holodeck where we come for each packet of free-will-mediated life-experience; each re-incarnation.
No two individual information-streams are exactly alike, but all fit together harmoniously, as a result of the previously-evolved rule-set of the holodeck (aka the ‘laws’ of physics, chemistry, etc.)
Tom doesn’t call it a holodeck; he says ‘physical-material reality, which is entirely virtual’ so that he can then answer the old question: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears, does it make a sound?’ with the explanation: ‘If no IUOC is looking, and thus demanding an information-feed from the rendering function, then - there is no tree; there is no forest; the LCS doesn’t waste its computing power on rendering stuff to which no IUOC is giving attention.’
He likens it to the online computer game ‘No Man’s Sky’, in which all the scenery and everything is all calculated on the fly, just when the players demand it.
It’s me who calls it a ‘holodeck’ because it was such a memorable idea from ‘Startrek’; just that in that story - of course - it WAS all done with techie-techie computers. In the Big TOE, it’s simply a direct capability of Big Mind: no actual physical stuff needed, just each of us interpreting our inf-streams as the surrounding physical world.
And if we go to give it a kick, to ‘prove’, like Doctor Johnson, that it really is physically, solidly, unyieldingly present - well then, we get an information-stream which we interpret as something solid and resistant, even toe-stubbing painful; even though it’s just as virtual in reality as all the rest, all just our personal interpretation of an information stream, just as the image on this computer that you’re looking at is actually a field of light-and-colour-coded pixels - which we interpret as a print document: Maya!
My cat often comes into the bed with me, on really cold nights.
Herricka is demi sauvage (half wild). She’s now coming up to 11 years old.
In her younger years I never let her sleep on the bed covers, let alone in the bed. I’ve relented a bit on this just recently. On really cold nights she makes her way under the bed covers and let’s out a long purrr. She stretches her claws, which are like razor blades.
I live in a pile that’s more than 300 years old, and pre-dates the French Revolution.
Never seen a mouse or a rat here.
Herricka earns her keep, despite her claws being a bit problematic at times (I have the marks to prove it).
I recently finally got a copy of Bart de Ligt’s ‘The Conquest of Violence‘. I did make a start, but things got in the way; things like Covid. 
Life,eh…
