Surfing
the Coming Tsunami of Future History
an App advertising a service
Mostly
for economic (or profit) reasons, there is an
interest in being able to predict the
future. There is even a discipline called:
futurists. From Wikipedia:
"Futurists or futurologists are
scientists and social scientists whose specialty
is futurology, or the attempt to systematically
explore predictions and possibilities about the
future and how they can emerge from the present,
whether that of human society in particular or
of life on Earth in general."
For the most part this
discipline/business works out of the common
shared social/scientific paradigm of the present
21st Century, which accepts or assumes that the
human being is only matter, and never
spirit. The same attitude is taken with
regard to life on the earth, and the evolution
of human societies, namely: that while many believe
in a God or Gods, there is, for just as many, no
reality to any active participation of any kind
of Divine Mystery in human
social/political/economic matters.
The founder of
this consulting service, me,
Joel
A. Wendt
knows for a fact
that spirit, the divine mystery, or whatever name
you want to use,
is very much involved in everything
going on on the Earth. All the same, for the
reader of this no beliefs
are required.
I am willing to consult with various
organizations, via electronic (Skype etc.)
meetings, and offer advice based upon
a perception/understanding of the spiritual
organism of Earth existence, and the
implications of those facts for appreciating the
nature of the coming future.
This App will give some introductory
material as to the basis for such an approach.
There will be no fees for this
service, as gifts of the spirit should be
free. As a
beneficiary for decades of such
gifts, it is really impossible to claim any
ownership
in the usual sense of so-called
"intellectual property".
This consultation activity is
directed (and for) groups, not individuals.
The advancement of social evolution
is mostly done by groups. It is
a "We-process", not an "I-process".
Let us examine that, and other preparatory ideas.
Generally
our understanding of human history is that there
exist various influences, from leaders, kings,
queens, scientists, legendary heroes and so
forth, - i.e. great figures of history, that
give direction to the course of history.
These leader types are distinguished from the
masses, whose place in the shape of events is
secondary, while great events such as wars,
inventions, and predictable social tendencies
give birth to the future. This is not the
case, although statistical analysis of trends
can be predictive to a degree. One way to
appreciate this is to seek to discover the
answer to this question: How does
human society actually work, evolve, become,
change and otherwise progress, or
devolve, as the case may be?
If the human being is not just
matter, but also spirit, how would we know
that? What does that actually
mean? What are my qualifications to say
what I do? Needless to say these are not
simple questions.
I am a spiritual social
scientist. This
link is to my introductory work on that type
of social science. I
wrote a book: The
Art of God: an actual theory of Everything,
where I took the "religious" question and put it
inside the scientific impulse as a theory, and
basically wrote this as a challenge to Big Bang
Cosmology, and Neo-Darwinian Evolution
(speciation), showing how our understanding of
the world is not really adequately explained by
the presently dominating ideas of scientific
materialism. I've written on science
itself, challenging its Ideas of the nature of
the Starry Firmament (The
Misconception of Cosmic Space as occurs in the
Ideas of Modern Astronomy);
on science's conceptions of Nature (Electricity
and the Spirit in Nature);
and science's studies of Consciousness and the
Brain (I
am not my brain - the map is not the territory;
and The
Idea of Mind).
The central defect of modern
science is the fact that it lacks a grounded
appreciation of the Nature of Mind, from the
inside. Modern Science is philosophically
weak. I wrote a number of essays on
thinking and thought (the mind from a scientific
point of view), collected under the title: Sacramental
Thinking. I have an Internet
bookstore, a website,
and over 270
videos on Youtube.
If you are wondering why I am not
famous, just consider that the whole weight of
scientific materialism is to deny the
spirit. No one whose religion is science
wants to have their belief system
challenged. For the so-called New
Atheists, this belief system is their addiction
and their blindness. You
can't see that for which you refuse to look.
I could go on, but instead lets just
take up some general ideas, and a few practical
examples.
The whole of human existence is
governed by the acts of a Cosmic Being, whose
basic nature is to Love. Because of this,
the central object of Love (spirit) is the
individual human being. The needs in any
given life of all the billions of immortal human
spirits is the basic causal impulse that
produces "history" as a secondary effect.
Each biography is cherished in all its
details. As we are immortal, we also then
have what the ancient East called: karma.
Karma is about Justice. Justice and
Love are the guiding principles underlying human
civilization. There is an afterlife,
and much of that afterlife is also about Justice
and Love.
A primary proof of all this is
found in those sciences that reveal the
evolution of consciousness.
Our present day conceptions of history, and the
causal elements leading from one civilization to
another, are in error precisely because we have
yet to notice the evidence that human
consciousness evolves. The inner nature of
the human being of today is not at all like the
inner nature of the human being during the Dark
Ages, and that Dark Ages consciousness is unlike
the one during Ancient Greece, and that ancient
Greek consciousness is unlike the one during
Ancient Egypt, and Egyptian consciousness unlike
that during Ancient India. Owen Barfield,
one of the seminal thinkers on the evolution of
consciousness, in his book Saving the
Appearances: a Study in Idolatry, calls this
modern tendency to the view that consciousness
is unchanging throughout history (and
evolution): the assumption.
Once you set aside this "assumption" all the
evidence turns out otherwise.
See also: Speaker's
Meaning, and Worlds
Apart, by Owen
Barfield. Barfield was an "Inkling",
and a friend for years of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S.
Lewis, and Charles Williams. Barfield is a
master of the knowledge of the
evolution of consciousness, a fact essential to
not only understanding our present and future,
but perhaps more crucially our past
The deeper into the past we go, the less the
soul and spiritual life of ancient peoples -
their inwardness - is like ours.
Understanding this will change your view of the
world, down to its bedrock. Barfield works
here as a philologist - a scientist of
language. Support for this work in the
field of Art is found here: Art
and Human Consciousness, by
Gottfried Richter. Additional support is
here in the history of science - including the
coming future of physics, Man
or Matter, by Ernst Lehrs,
as well as Catching
the Light, the entwined history of light and
the mind, by Arthur Zajonc.
Human history is designed by Love
so that individual consciousness can evolve.
This is the primary principle that must be seen
and understood, for everything that is to unfold
in the future reflects this fundamental nature
of reality. As human nature evolves, under
the influence of Love and Justice, changes arise
in the human being, which coming changes can be
understood. However, given human freedom,
nothing is really "fixed". Human choices
determine, and appreciating what drives those
choices from inside of human consciousness then
grants us access to appreciating the coming
dynamics of what we call history. A kind
of war from the inside of human consciousness is
spilling over into the directions being take by
modern history. People can either help
this unfolding, which will benefit all of
humanity, or people can oppose or try to
manipulate this unfolding for their own personal
agendas.
It is not the sense observable
outer physical evolution of the world that is
central, but rather the inner, invisible,
aspects. It is the invisible within us -
thinking - that learns to see the invisible
everywhere else. I wrote an App for
that journey, for individuals: The Rising of the
Sun in the Mind.
This is in point of fact an apt
characterization of what is going on in the
present. The main problem is that without
a spiritual social science, those who want to
benefit humanity, or guide us collectively into
the future in a positive way, will make all
manner of errors of thought, many of which can
(and are already) causing great harm. Let
me give an example:
Politicians tend to be driven by an
Ideology. An ideology is a set of ideas -
a product of mental activity. It does not
exist in the sense world, but only in the
mind. The wealthy that back many
politicians tend to be driven by greed and a
lust for power. Many religious folk as
well want to bend the future for their
conceptions of what this future should
become. Each has its own characteristic
"Ideology". Our present day society
in America has been driven by several political
ideologies, such as the War on Poverty; the War
on Drugs; and the War against Terrorism.
All these ideological points of view were based
upon a completely incorrect apprehension of
human nature, and how societies unfold. An
Ideology basically says: this is how the future
shall be, given that those creating the ideology
want the future to be that Way. The
incorrect perception of human nature, and of how
society actually grows, develops, and otherwise
might mature, leads then to the complete
failures of these Wars. Instead of
being effective, in each case they just caused
more harm.
Everywhere we see the harm of
fundamentalist ideologies. Everywhere.
Without a spiritual social science
humanity will continue to misread its own
nature, its own potential destiny, and tend to
de-evolution, not evolution. The stakes
are that high.
Social Darwinism continues to
flourish, albeit less obviously than
previously. The rich and the powerful tend
to believe they have arrived at their "status"
through their own forces of will. This is
a lie they tell themselves. Most wealth
and power is inherited, and the newly rich from
out of the culture of the changes in technology
compound the situation by believing that if they
make a billion dollars this means they are a
genius about anything that happens to attract
their fancy. Bill Gates, for example, is
basically clueless in how he applies his new
wealth to the world because he is clueless as to
what is going in that world. He mistakes
his karma - the influence of Love and Justice on
his biography, for a license to think whatever
comes to his mind. This is one of the big
dangers of the new technological wealth, in that
success there tends to rob the individual of any
humility in the face of the underlying (and
obvious) mysteries of existence.
As with George Soros, we can
applaud Bill Gates for seeking to use wealth in
progressive ways. Just as we can be
distressed by the negative Ways offered by the
Koch brothers and others seeking to rule our
public life via their wealth. Nonetheless,
in each case, lacking a spiritual understanding,
these efforts to induce a result in the social
will simply cause more distress and social ills.
In a certain sense a profound
illusion had taken over the general
consciousness of humanity, which illusion might
be called: the Enchantment of
humanity by an excessive reliance on abstract
reasoning/thinking.
That itself is a far too abstract way of
expressing this fact. There are important
nuances. Let us go deeper ...
From
Wikipedia: "Collective
unconscious, a term
coined by Carl Jung, refers to structures of the
unconscious mind which are shared among beings
of the same species. According to Jung, the
human collective unconscious is populated by
instincts and by archetypes: universal symbols
such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the
Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, and
many more." There are
a lot of debates in the so-called sciences of
the brain, and the sciences of consciousness,
many suggesting that Jung was in error.
That said, to the extant so many thinkers do not
recognize the spiritual nature of the human
being, they will fail to grasp the
essential. The core assumption is that the
material brain is the cause of consciousness,
self-consciousness, the unconscious and so
forth. This is untenable when examined in
the light of a scientific introspection of the
own mind (see multiple links above for details,
particularly Sacramental
Thinking).
Every living human being has a
brain, which means actually that they have a
mind, and engage regularly in the acts of
thinking, and in the production of
thoughts. Again: For details of how to
explore your own consciousness, available in App
form for a smart phone, go here: The Rising of
the Sun in the Mind: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/risingsunapp.html
Once we recognize the evolution of
consciousness, we can begin to see that these
changes in the mind (inner life) have a very
strong influence on history - an influence that
arises from the collective deep inside of human
nature and generates vast and sweeping changes
in civilizations. The last great change
began around 1400-1500, and is called by those
who do this kind of "science", the
onlooker-separation. Prior to that time,
people in general felt themselves less as
individuals and more as members of communities,
and families. When we go even further
back, human beings felt even more united with
(and less separate from) Nature Herself.
In effect in more recent time, the wise guidance
of humanity pushed us out of our prior
connectedness, and forced us to be more and more
individualized. Instead of being part of,
or participants with, in the most recent stages
of the evolution of consciousness we became
"onlookers" - observers.
For example, prior to this change
there was no perspective in painting. The
writer Michael Dorris writes in his book The
Broken Cord, that in Lakota Sioux one can only
say: We hit us, not I hit you. The ancient
Greeks didn't see a "blue" ocean. Once we
start to look at the real details, the
assumption that how we are today, inwardly, we
have always been - that assumption fails.
It is as "onlookers" then that
natural philosophy, later to become natural
science, arises. This Copernican
Revolution led, over time, to a rejection by
many natural scientists of there being any
reality to religious thought. No
gods. No spirit. This was
purposeful. The Genius of History meant
for human beings to loose their connection to
the spirit, and as a consequence, their
dependence upon Gods and Goddesses.
Religion itself became very abstract, more and
more losing the profound feelings that our
ancestors had. Faith disappears as an act
of trust in the Divine, and the modern religious
substitute "beliefs" and doctrines. We had
to be isolated in the own ego, in order for that
ego (or "I") to come awake to itself. The
English word: "self-consciousness" did not exist
until about 250 to 300 years ago.
As a consequence, most of us assume
an isolation, at least from each other, that had
to be true in the past. This was not the
case, and in the absence of the missing
connectedness, we moderns are then driven, by
this "absence", to seek deeper association and
connection. We had such association and
connection once before - during what Barfield
called: original participation. The
further we go back in the evolution of
consciousness, the less individual we are, but
at the same time the more our inwardness is
connected to the inwardness of the world.
From this connection of our inwardness to the
World's Inwardness, we get all the legends and
myths of gods and goddesses and demons, and
nature spirits. It was our ancestors
actual experience to "know" directly these
"beings" that today are invisible to our
physical senses (but not to an awake thinking).
Yes, natural sciences doubts this,
and assuming our ancestors had the same
consciousness we moderns do, science decides
they were idiots and all their stories are made
up. This is not true.
This belief in the false nature of
our ancestors' Ways of seeing, resulting in
modern materialism (all is matter, there is no
spirit), ... this great mask placed over the
reality our ancestors once naturally shared as
communities: that is a major aspect of the Enchantment.
This Enchantment
(of humanity by an excess of reliance on
abstract reasoning/thinking) has been a gift,
necessary for our individuality to become free
of the Gods and Goddesses. The question
then becomes: Once free, what
course do we choose next?
This next is a short sketch of the
situation, leaving aside a lot of details.
Just keep in mind the old saying: God is in the
Details.
The early stages of the Epoch of
the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul (another
name for our present - the time of the
onlooker-separation) saw the end of the
aristocracies of blood, to be replaced, at
least outwardly, by Western style democratically
ruled Nation States, although behind the scenes
the aristocracies of blood were often succeeded
by, and incorporated into, aristocracies of
wealth. Even the very ancient Third Epoch
rooted theocracy of Tibet (a previous stage in
the evolution of consciousness) was not to
continue, and was unseated by the Chinese in
1949, scattering that culture all over the
world. The needs of the Epoch of the
Consciousness Soul were not to be denied. and
such events as the Chinese invasion of Tibet
merely a tool to pry loose from its mountain
vastnesses a well simmered stew pot of wisdom
that the world’s cultures needed to be able to
imbibe.
Likewise with the business
Corporation. It is one "type" of a natural
organism in our social ecology, and it serves
many purposes, for the Divine Mystery - "the
Universe", in modern non-religious parlance,
multi-tasks on a level we can hardly
imagine. There are other "types" in the
social ecology, such as institutional religions,
educational institutions, political parties and
so forth. The general social phenomenology
of the business Corporation is repeated
elsewhere, and can serve as a meaningful
instance/example.
Originally a corporation was a
social form for doing business. The needs
of the blossoming so-called market forces, as
the embryonic Economic Life emerged more
strongly in the 17th and 18th Centuries,
invented stock companies, which were in the
beginning strictly regulated by the instinctive
Rights Sphere. But as wealth accumulated
in corporations and in the families that sought
to rule them (think of the Rothschilds in
banking, the Rockefellers in oil and banking and
so forth), the influence of wealth on this
instinctive Rights Life (post the rulership of
aristocrats of blood) led to the corporation
becoming more and more unregulated. In
spite of the profound efforts of human beings to
try to rule themselves (following the American
and French Revolutions), instead of a
functioning Democracy we ended up with a mostly
hidden Oligarchy of the Wealthy Elites ( the 1%
of the 1% ).
Corporations (again as a living
social form) then became multinational ... that
is they became more and more emancipated from
any restraints by the Nation States. All
this driven from within by the cold and
calculating use of the abstract cause and effect
reasoning/thinking of the intellect alone, led
by the influence in the soul of the dark side of
human nature (one of the crucial to understand
details of modern consciousness). Whereas
in the early years of corporate development, the
individual ego forces of the heads of most
corporate hierarchies were able to guide the
corporation, eventually the inward nature of
this social form began to develop an amorphous
and ego-less - independent of moral
leadership - corporate culture. If you
entered into this hierarchical form, the inner
social forces began to drive the individual
toward conformance and obedience to the emerging
dominance of particular corporate cultures
(Ways). These social forces sought to
separate the individual ego from being able to
apply the influence of the conscience to all
significant business decisions (see the movies:
Margin Call and Too Big to Fail).
At the same time, smaller more
intimate corporations do not succumb so easily
to this loss of an ego presence at the tops of
their inner hierarchy. This change in the
corporation we are describing comes most often
as an effect of scale, or a kind of excess of
growth - a kind of inner social cancer as the
corporate culture (Way) outgrows its principle
leaders' ability to control.
As this tendency develops, the
individual members of the upper hierarchies of
the large institutional corporate world also
become easily replaceable and interchangeable,
and the “culture” itself begins to rule free of
any human interference. Imagine, for
example, a Zen Temple with no living teachers,
only the doctrine and the perpetuation of the
doctrine starts to matter. Or the
situation with the Catholic Church, where the
Church itself is more valued than following its
spiritual leader, Christ. What is true of
the business corporation is then also true of
many institutional religions - as social forms
become dominated by their Way of Beliefs in the
absence of living teachers. Like a cancer,
this growing independent corporate culture frees
itself of the human forces of warmth - it is a
cold social disease, ruled by the untamed
intellect - thought without heart. This
culture is a social environment which values the
cold and calculated intellect above all else
(again, thought without heart), and also becomes
a kind of social growth medium in which
sociopathic and certain aspergers personality
types easily succeed, because of the absence of
conscience and empathy in their soul life
(inwardness/consciousness). This then
eventually produces types of corporate cultures
(Ways) as seems to live in, and dominate, such
as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, and
Halliburton. The individual no longer
truly decides, ... only the conscienceless
ego-less corporate “culture” rules.
We might go so far as to suggest
that while these cancerous corporate cultures,
individually exclude human ego forces,
collectively their ego could be what certain
religious traditions call: the Father of
Lies. Truth doesn't matter. Only
profit does.
Everywhere we see the dark empty
soul of these ego-free spirit-free corporate
cultures, which Eisenhower observed in his
farewell address in 1960, and called
collectively, because of the ease of their
cooperation and similar goals: the
military-industrial complex. Eisenhower,
also in the same speech, noticed the loss of
moral sanity in the Universities as well, due to
his observations of their succumbing to the
influence of money over ideas (stones over
bread).
The influence of this Enchantment
on social life is seeking to leave behind a
social-form “body” without a heart - a body that
can survive the social chaos which is falling
upon us even now, during the birth of the Third
Millennium. Through the growing number of
"trade agreements", Nation States are
simultaneously losing any power and social
control they may previously have held, over
these multinational more and more half-dead
social forms of distinct corporate cultural
entities - purely cruel and cold in outlook and
influence, and capable of surviving well into
the Third Millennium, by acquiring private
armies, and creating their own intelligence
networks and individual versions of “foreign
policy”.
Simultaneously there emerges
socially the NGO, the non-governmental
organization. What the Father of Lies
wants to leave behind in the Third Millennium
has a counter-pole where the selflessness and
conscience living in the NGO creates an
alternative and warmer social order. At
the level of the social commons vast changes are
also in play. The cold untamed intellect
wars in the human soul with the forces of the
heart.
That this slow moving social-spasm
of dynamic historical changes occurs at the same
time as what we are calling Climate Change, is
not an accident. Weather and moral life
are linked, in part because the separation that
we fancy exists, between any discrete object of
perception and any other, is not real.
Everything is spiritually interconnected -
everything. I am not arguing a causal
connection - the matter is more one of
appreciating the harmonies of "wholeness" and
all its implications.
Today we have a great deal of fear
of the future. Climate change, loss of
water sources, out of control disease vectors,
the denaturing of food supplies, ... a long long
list of horrors being visited on humanity, by
humanity.
Now this is just introductory
material. There can be a lot more, but
that basically depends on the context of the
situation where I am being asked to
consult. So if one kind of organization
wants a consultation, then what I have to say
needs to be based in a kind of relationship to
the why I am being asked, and what can be
appreciated about the community that asks
me. I don't consult for individuals.
Individuals get my The
Rising of the Sun in the Mind App.
Groups get something else, ... something more
personal where I take the time and trouble to
ask questions of those wanting consultation.
In some instances, questions might
involve "politics". Many people, who are
paying attention, realize that a lot of social
ills can be solved, except for the fact of the
lack of the required political will.
Governments do not seem to favor their own
people. Rather they favor wealth, and a
market place of favors by which those in power
in one sphere of our social life, trade access
and influence with those in other spheres of the
social organism. I've written in
detail about how these matters work in the
United States of America:
"The tendency to concentrate
wealth has been with us since Pharaohs, Kings,
Queens and so forth. The Founding Fathers
of America were an elite. They
participated in slavery, and the near genocide
of the Native peoples that were already living
here when the Europeans came. The Old
World aristocracies of blood became, around the
time of the founding of America, replaced with
aristocracies of wealth. The New World is
meant to be New.
For details go here: Uncommon
Sense: the Degeneration, and the Redemption,
of Political Life in America.
("Why play by the rules, when the
game is already fixed?")
Then there is this: Economic
and Social Rebellion ("a
money debt owed bankers is merely a number ...
while what lives in the hearts of a People is a
spiritual currency of infinitely greater value").
And, this: the
grandmother war (why
we need to no longer Consent).
With the increasing effect of the return of the
Divine Feminine, social processes are changing
everywhere. We can choose to fight the
currents and waves of history, or to learn to
see them, and then surf them into the future."
I am retired and if asked to
"consult" then that time and trouble needs to
have value. The reason it needs to have a
value is because the group or community needs to
be committed enough to bother to pay attention
to our dialogue. Otherwise any
collective of folks has put nothing at
risk. They've got to put something on the
scale of meaning, as it were, which is basically
time. You first demonstrate to me how much
you are willing to value the meaning of the
conversation(s) we are going to have by
demonstrating you have read something in
preparation.
Further, I don't do
individuals. Only groups, and only groups
of at least three and no more than five.
So we make a date (exchange some e-mails:
hermit@tiac.net) to talk via Skype or some other
electronic means (I'm too old to like traveling
anymore). Some representative of your
group talks to me, and we work out a time
Let us consider a possible scenario
...
A company gets in contact with me,
and we agree to 10 hours of conversation over
three or four days, with a limit of only five
people in the dialogue loop to contain my having
to engage too many people at the same
time. We have then set up a kind of
academic-like seminar.
The electronic connection is made,
and I see the circle of interested parties
sitting around a semi-circular table, facing my
screen. I ask them to introduce
themselves, and as they do so each should
identify their "position" in the group (if
relevant), and provide background material on
their education, religious affiliation and so
forth as necessary. In addition they are
to name for me what materials of mine, which
they have read - carefully read.
Everyone does the first two easily, but when it
comes to the third, they perhaps don't have much
to say, except maybe that they scanned this or
that text.
So I then say: this is like a bunch
of freshman college students coming to their
first class, not having acquainted themselves at
all with any of the texts listed in the
previously provided syllabus. This failure
on their part then requires that I am constantly
forced, in answer to questions, to refer them to
texts they should have read. They didn't
have to read all of them, but could have divided
up among themselves, various different texts and
come prepared. Its their time.
I will give it to them. I will also not
try to do more than the most basic precis of the
materials they have not studied. If that
is not satisfactory, we can discuss for a while,
and during this first one or two hours, they
will find that to go further they must
study. They have gone back to school, in a
complex field with which they are not at all
familiar. I will try to guide their
further inquiries, but at the same time, if they
want to waste all of our valuable time together,
by not being prepared, that's on them.
The basic problem, as it were, is
that most people live within the
Enchantment. We are then
required to "tease" their minds away from the
confining assumptions of the Enchantment - in
effect help them free themselves. Rudolf
Steiner, one of my teachers, had this to say in
the last sentence of the original preface of his
book: The Philosophy of Freedom (sometimes also
called: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity): "One
must be able to confront an idea, and experience
it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage."
An "idea", in this sense, is a kind of
non-physical Spiritual Being that appears to the
contemplative mind, when that mind finds its Way
to the right degree of individual moral
tranquility.
By the Way, Western Civilization is
failing. More precisely it is dying into a
new becoming, a kind of extraordinary social
metamorphosis, civilization being "living" and
all that. A major component is the fading
away of the patriarchal influences that appear
in the impulse to "dominion over" and their
gradual replacement with a modern maternalistic
influence, aptly described by the terms
"communion with". Such are the tides
affecting the social future, the Third
Millennium, and the ongoing current phase of the
evolution of consciousness, which will dominate
at least the next 1000 years.
Want to play a conscious role in
this process? If you do, I'd like to
help. The dialogue, when correctly
approached, is not about me giving
lectures. It is more like a modern version
of a Socratic social intercourse. My
skilled contribution is in asking those present
good questions. Or, helping them find good
questions. They create the answers, not
me. All we have done is stepped away from
the Enchantment, and into a deeper
social/spiritual contextual reality.
Where useful I may direct a group to other
resources and individuals, who can add their own
distinctive point of view to the whole
idea-stew.
Consider this "Enchantment" from
another quarter. Who gets enchanted
by life? Children. So also humanity,
which is presently child-like in a spiritual
sense. As we wake into our ever and ever
greater intellectual prowess, that very prowess
enchants us. The on-looker separation is
also about the child-like spiritual nature of
the human mind, that begins to discover the real
potential of the adventure of reason. We,
in this adventure, are not at any kind of
end. Rather we are very much just "In the
Beginning".
You see, the world always has been
an intentional poem, crafted by a master of the
Art of the Word. A song, that each mind
can learn to hear, and then become able to act
as an artistic co-participate in that World's
own future creation.
And, the world does have a lot of
problems. Fixing them is a We-process,
however, not an I-process. That's why this
App is directed at groups. A
principle danger is the potential to lose
hope. Many social problems seem
huge. At the same time, many hands make
light work is the wise saying. Inwardly,
as individuals and as a group, we fight the
temptation to lose hope. To see beyond the
obvious dread, to the living potential of the
human spirit to surmount ever and ever again all
adversity. This the Genius of History has
taught. Even in the most dire times, we
persevere. We hold to each other and never
give up. For a beautiful (and funny) look
at this question of fear and hope, watch the
movie Tomorrowland.
While not commercially or critically successful,
it had the audacity to try to portray the
"idea", that intelligent and wise people could
collectively use "hope" to overcome the darker
whispers of fear. Recall above: the cold
and cruel untempered intellect wars in our
inwardness with the warm thinking of the
heart. It is the former that breeds fear,
while the later gives birth to hope. See
the movie for the meaning of this phrase, in
case you don't recognize it: "Which wolf would
you choose to feed?"
The
Mystery of the Primal Paradox
The
Social-Political World - the arena where
human biographies unfold - is simultaneously
imperfect and perfect. From the point
of view of Love this World is perfect, for
each single biography is one note in a
melody of biographies involving the same
individuality - multiple incarnations often
spread out over great eons of time.
Love, existing in Eternity, is able to
oversee all the details and has countless
helpers for this Art. From the point
of view of the individual, whose biographies
are experienced in linear time, the world is
imperfect. We see the world as
imperfect as an aspect of our yet
unfinished, and often wounded, nature.
This "fractured and incomplete seeing" then
is necessary to our choices in life.
So we will be aware of the suffering of
others, for example, and feel called to
alleviate that suffering. Or we will
feel our own suffering, and seek to heal
that as well. Even the differing
ideas, religions, and other points of view,
all belong to those who hold to them.
The individualized world of concepts held by
each is necessary for each. We don't
need to think the same, or feel the same, or
believe the same.