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I love our rich conversation, Guy! So many threads, so intricate the weaving.

Synchronicity 1, my college boyfriend was a piano player and Chick Corea was his hero. Started to listen to this joyful duet, looking forward to finishing it with the rest of the playlist later. And OMG that photo. I'll be restacking this to make sure that shows up in Notes!

Ah, so the cult you were raised in was a 'spirit rescue' church. I remember someone sending me a message that, for a couple thousand or so, I could rescue spirits trapped on earth. I remember thinking how many living children could be rescued for less, and that it was the best scam ever. Did you have independent verification of the boy who died in a car crash?

On Don Cupitt's 5 Great Questions of Life, I start my book, A House for the Soul in the Land Beyond Faith, with the Big Questions. His Q1: Why are we here? has six assumptions that should be questioned first: Does purpose exist? Does it exist independent of our perception of it? Who are we? What's my true relationship to you? Where is here? Does here exist?

I think the fourth of those is the one to start with. Is my relationship to you and everyone else hierarchical or equal? My one and only dogma is that it's equal. The dogma of every imperial religion is that it's hierarchical. This is the 'radical' spirituality that goes back to the root.

Does Buddhism have the same hierarchy? Historical war texts say, "One thousand perished but only four people died." So the same regard for the 'other' being animals was true.

I actually find Buddhism to be the most 'superior' of the religions because it's based on the idea someone else understands something you don't, something too mysterious to put into words that you wouldn't 'get' anyway from your deluded little inferior mindset. It can't be challenged because there's no basis. I find gurus and yogis insufferably smug. Who is Stone to say those other yogis get stuck after 7-10 yrs of study? Who gets to tell him where he's stuck ... on himself?

Thank you for the link to me! I'm in conversation with a Hasidic Rabbi on my YT thread and I believe the Talmud quote about the 3-yr old girl is taken out of context. I'll be writing about that more.

Did you first send me to Build Babylon Back Better or someone else? I'm eager to watch it.

Love the Pascal quote and your application of it to economics is apt. As Yuval says, 'Money is the most successful story ever told.' As I say in my book, we endlessly debate the existence of God but accept the existence of money as real without a second thought.

Synchronicity 2: I also have The Tao of Abundance and his story at the end--of coming down from the mountain to a busful of people who were incredibly beautiful to him--has stuck with me always.

Thank you for this!

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Hola Tereza, I seem to be stumbling along in my essay inspired in part by your comments. I realised when I re-read this that you have slightly misperceived my childhood. I wasn't in any 'real' way *raised* in the 'Spiritualist Church' *cult*. At the age of 16 my parents joined it. I have no idea how. I left home at 18 and so really less than 2 years of experience there. The 'real' cult, as my eldest sister called it, was of the family which by inference and with greater understanding of malignant narcissism, was the cult of the devouring mother. For me the Spiritualist Church does not even come close to cult-like experience! I may include this idea in the essay that is still fleshing itself out.

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Ah. I think it was in response to A Course in Miracles that you mentioned a cult your parents had been part of. And that was what made you distrustful of anything that you saw as 'New Age.' In any case, as I said to someone on another site who wanted to talk to me about 'A Course in Brainwashing,' I think something that you never give money to, make money from, or even participate with other people, doesn't fit the definition of a cult. But I don't know anything about the Spiritualist Church other than someone sending me a solicitation to help 'save trapped souls.' Best wishes on your essay journey!

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Hola, Tereza. Buenos días.

You comments have been beautifully percolating and I realise that once again I will be exploring aspects of them beyond a comment. So... I will create an entire essay or incorporate some of the key (to me) inspirations and associations your comments have inspired. For some reason your Buddhism Stone comments helped me a lot.

And thank you for commenting on the music and that Chick Corea synchronicity is lovely. Did you watch the youtube version? In it Corea is plucking on the piano strings with his fingers at the beginning, linking the piece to its roots.

Thank you again for reading and commenting.

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I did watch on YT! I love the thrumming Chick does with hitting the key and moving on the string at the same time. And Hiromi has such a beautiful "take that!" smile.

Yay! I look forward to the percolated coffee ;-)

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I will reply a bit later. This is a busy time in a best of ways. And this weekend a day long koan meditation retreat.

Love the synchronicities and yes there is a powerful warp and weft that we are partaking in in some mysterious way.

I'll be considering your ideas in the next day or two. And thank you for restacking.

All the best.

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Yes, absolute truth is a delusion.

Neuroscience shows that what we see is a combination of our senses and what we expect to see.

The prediction part of the brain colors what we sense. Meditation and body work help connect to simple reality and reduce the errant predictions that the subconscious tries to use for efficiency.

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” - Robert Anton Wilson

As for UFOs, it's just another new religion, IMHO

"Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur examines UFOs and a wide variety of “paranormal” phenomena from a rather unique angle. Although Harpur never fully defines the daimonic—“the daimonic that can be defined is not the true daimonic,” as Lao-Tse would say—it seems to exist both inside us and outside us. Like the Greek daemon and unlike the Christian demon, it takes both good/healing and bad/terrifying forms, depending on our commitment to rationalistic ego states.

In a sense, the daimonic is like the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, inside us as a part of our total self that the ego wishes to deny, outside us in all the other humans who ever existed and in the dreams, myths, and arts of all the world. But Harpur follows Irish poet (and Golden Dawn alumnus) W. B. Yeats as often as he follows Jung, and traces some of his ideas back to Giordano Bruno and the alchemical/hermetic mystics of the Renaissance. The daimonic is just a bit more personalized and individualized than Jung’s species unconscious.

Harpur’s major thesis is that unless we recognize the daimonic (make friends with it, Jung would say) it takes increasingly malignant and terrifying forms. For instance, the Greys of UFO abduction lore, he says, are deliberately mirroring our ego-centered and “scientistic” age—showing no emotions of the humans they experiment upon, just as the ideal science student feels no emotion and has no concern with the emotions of the animal being tortured in his laboratory."

Despite dealing with many subjects common to conspiracy theories, this book does not quite fit into that category. We are the conspirators, so to speak. We have repressed the most creative part of ourselves and now it is escaping in terrifying forms."

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Hola, Rob.

Great comment., thank you. And you have given me more manifestations of Tao as path to sniff around. And endlessness of a curiosity to delight in. I am especially grateful for the neuroscience information. I have been only sniffing its edges so far and so confirmation from it, even if it is *just* a science is important.

All the best.

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Iain McGilchrist is great about how the left and right brain works.

But my recent amazing read is The Experience Machine by Andy Clark.

His point is great, the intelligence of the body as a prediction machine.

In the subconscious and body, it's about predicting the best way to handle processes.

In the conscious mind, it's about determining what to do to live and prevent death.

Now I understand why Gurdjieff and Casteneda were big on facing your death.

If we face death by predicting a future fairy tale, let's say from prophets and books, that's a huge prediction error.

If we face death honestly, that we may be gone after it, then we keep this prediction machine in the "Goldilocks zone" where curiosity and openness run the show, instead of a predetermined future.

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