Idealist vision for 2050?

[SanteriSatama]

I have personally walked and participated in ceremony in the geoglyph shown in the article. It was a very memorable experience because a group of poisonous centipedes began crawling calmly over my bare feet and I camly let them do it until they departed on another adventure. Later, my companions asked if I had known that they were poisonous? I said "No." They said, "Good thing!"

And the centipedes that crawled over you were asked by their companions: "Did you know that big dude is poisonous?". "Yes." They said. "Good thing!"

[David_Sundaram]

David,

I can relate to Seth's vision. I have not read Gebser but what I grok intuitively of his analysis is that the 'coming' is an integration or melding of the Magical, Mythical and Mental into something new.

Learning from mistakes, indeed the necessity of error, has long been recognized as the very basis of the scientific method and 'null hypothesis'. Ideas must be possibly wrong to be scientific and, of course, most are.

I suspect that we will not jump to love/joy but first pass through great difficulties in which healing will be the perceived priority. After the healing, then the love/joy until a whole new set of challenges emerge. ))

We have 'parallel' views, I think, You do 'get' that I think it is most likely that 'we' (meaning humanity, for the most part at least) will not get through the "great difficulties" you mention, don't you? At best there will be a horrendously drastic 'culling' (as in chemo-cancer elimination), not a 'healing' in the standard sense, in my view.

[Lou Gold]

Those risings were without written language, as far as we know...

Same in Acre State Brazil where there are geoglyphs galore. There's debate though as to whether the locals performed the deforestation as it's a huge area with evidence only of small populations. More likely climate change played a big role in the process.

I have personally walked and participated in ceremony in the geoglyph shown in the article. It was a very memorable experience because a group of poisonous centipedes began crawling calmly over my bare feet and I camly let them do it until they departed on another adventure. Later, my companions asked if I had known that they were poisonous? I said "No." They said, "Good thing!"

More Acre geoglyphs here.

[SanteriSatama]

More Acre geoglyphs here.

Pärssinen


"Radiocarbon dating conducted on the construction show that the earliest ones were built some 2.000 years ago, and the civilization hit an abrupt decline, virtually disappearing some 700 years ago, possibly due to diseases carried by Europeans."

I was just wondering when it started there.

Parallel civilization, not just "mysterious" in the sense of "nothing to say". But I have not yet found much info of locals being asked about the civilization of their ancestors, and what linguistic archeology and hermeneutics could tell us. Have you asked, in some way or other?

[Lou Gold]

David,

You do 'get' that I think it is most likely that 'we' (meaning humanity, for the most part at least) will not get through the "great difficulties" you mention, don't you?

Well, I honestly don't know if the survivors will be few, most or none but my activist nature requires that I think there might be at least some. Right now, I feel that the priority is to truly acknowledge the crisis and move into action without either thinking we will return to something great or go forward into something super, which would be the old fight between conserving and progressing, which is no longer working. Welcome to a collapsing center, which is also part of the dynamic process you describe. There is no return to 'normal' in climate or policy, at least for the foreseeable future where leaders get elected every few years and CEOs face quarterly reports.

I find myself agreeing with Roy Scranton that we must Say Goodbye to Normal, which ends with:

The next 20 years will be a period of deep uncertainty and tremendous risk, no matter what. We don’t get to choose what challenges we’ll face, but we do get to decide how we face them. The first thing we need to do is let go of the idea that life will ever be normal again — elsewhere, I’ve called this “learning how to die.” Beyond that, we need stop living through social media and start connecting with the people around us, since those are the people we’ll need to depend on the next time disaster strikes. And disaster will strike, you can be sure of that, so we must begin preparing today for the next shock to the social order, and the next, and the next.

None of this will matter, though, if our preparations don’t include imagining a new way of life beyond this one, after the end of fossil-fueled capitalism: not a new normal, but a new ethos adapted to the chaotic world we’ve created.

Now, back to the theme. I really want to emphasize that I'm not inviting an argument over climate details or politics. I'm inviting a discussion of the metaphysical vision. What is the story or collection of stories that might carry the healing beyond being merely an endless war against the symptoms?

[Lou Gold]

More Acre geoglyphs here.

Pärssinen


"Radiocarbon dating conducted on the construction show that the earliest ones were built some 2.000 years ago, and the civilization hit an abrupt decline, virtually disappearing some 700 years ago, possibly due to diseases carried by Europeans."

I was just wondering when it started there.

Parallel civilization, not just "mysterious" in the sense of "nothing to say". But I have not yet found much info of locals being asked about the civilization of their ancestors, and what linguistic archeology and hermeneutics could tell us. Have you asked, in some way or other?

I know no indigenous people who claim to be linked ancestrally to the ones who created the geoglyphs but my knowledge of the anthropological research is weak. The eco-region itself has been transitional, moving toward savanna at times and toward forest at other times depending on climate. The Europeans brought a plague of diseases AND there was a parallel global cooling. The forests began to expand and local populations were no longer present to slash and burn. There was a complex interaction that may be hard to pin down causally.

[SanteriSatama]

What is the story or collection of stories that might carry the healing beyond being merely an endless war against the symptoms?

Contrary to the quote, big and qualitatively new part of storytelling is this social media. Gebser classifies the mythical as 2-dimensional, and lo and behold these flat 2D screens where we contact mentally and share our stories:

Gebser symbolizes the "two-dimensional" mythical structure by the circle and cyclical time, based on man's discovery of the rhythmic recurrence of natural events and of his inner reflections on his experience of those events. "...[W]hereas the distinguishing characteristic of the magic structure was the emergent awareness of nature, the essential characteristic of the mythical structure is the emergent awareness of soul."[11] In the mythical structure events, objects and persons are woven together in stories. Mythologies give coherence to consciousness.[7] An important element in myth is polarity; the etymology of myth itself implies both speaking (mouth, mythos) and silence (mute, myein).[12] Gebser explains that polarity makes myth particularly foreign to the mental consciousness structure: "Only when we acknowledge both meanings of the root can we discern the fundamental nature of the mythical structure. Only when taken together as an elemental ambivalence, and not a rational contradiction, are they constitutive for the mythical structure."[13] "Only a mental world requires laws; the mythical world, secure in the polarity, neither knows nor needs them."[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebs ... _structure

TPTB mental attempts to maintain social media the 'rational structure' denial of mythical and other structures has a fat chance of succeeding. This plane is absolutely bursting with highly conscious memes etc. mythical imagery. The question for social media etc. screen world is, how magical can this get/be? And/or, can this bring some magic back to so called IRL?

[Lou Gold]

What is the story or collection of stories that might carry the healing beyond being merely an endless war against the symptoms?

Contrary to the quote, big and qualitatively new part of storytelling is this social media. Gebser classifies the mythical as 2-dimensional, and lo and behold these flat 2D screens where we contact mentally and share our stories:

Gebser symbolizes the "two-dimensional" mythical structure by the circle and cyclical time, based on man's discovery of the rhythmic recurrence of natural events and of his inner reflections on his experience of those events. "...[W]hereas the distinguishing characteristic of the magic structure was the emergent awareness of nature, the essential characteristic of the mythical structure is the emergent awareness of soul."[11] In the mythical structure events, objects and persons are woven together in stories. Mythologies give coherence to consciousness.[7] An important element in myth is polarity; the etymology of myth itself implies both speaking (mouth, mythos) and silence (mute, myein).[12] Gebser explains that polarity makes myth particularly foreign to the mental consciousness structure: "Only when we acknowledge both meanings of the root can we discern the fundamental nature of the mythical structure. Only when taken together as an elemental ambivalence, and not a rational contradiction, are they constitutive for the mythical structure."[13] "Only a mental world requires laws; the mythical world, secure in the polarity, neither knows nor needs them."[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebs ... _structure

TPTB mental attempts to maintain social media the 'rational structure' denial of mythical and other structures has a fat chance of succeeding. This plane is absolutely bursting with highly conscious memes etc. mythical imagery. The question for social media etc. screen world is, how magical can this get/be? And/or, can this bring some magic back to so called IRL?

I have two confessions: 1) I have a love-hate relationship with social media that has expanded and intensified due to being pinned down by the pandemic and 2) I comprehended little of the above as it's above my paygrade. Can you boil down the story to what I can tell to a 5 year old?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Guys, recent comments have strayed too far from keeping the discussion primarily focused on metaphysics, and so have been deleted.

[Lou Gold]

Guys, recent comments have strayed too far from keeping the discussion primarily focused on metaphysics, and so have been deleted.

Understood as predictable and quite an endorsement for central censoring authority. I'm not challenging, just highlighting that it is what it is.