Posted by Timothy Murray on Tue, 24 Jan 2023 14:23 | #

@GW

I am honored. Thank you.

It is the transit out of all that we as individuals and as a people have given to and taken from our enworldment, meaning everything that belongs to Time and Place and not to us, and functions in us without our attention, quite mechanically, robbing us of all the days of our life ... and towards all we are, which abides closer to us than the breath in our body, the most redolent truth of which was known to us and was with us before, and always will be so.

or, more succinctly…

everything that belongs to Time and Place and not to us,

“Who are we absent the baggage of time and place”  ?

This is The Ontological Project, is it not?

That is a profound question.  I am confident that there is an answer and that you can state a philosophical rendering of it.  #TeamBiological will chip in, as will #TeamTheological as will #TeamCultural…heck, even Al might have something to say (<ducks>)
but it will take a disciplined, philosophical* mind to get it right.  I hope that philosopher is you.

Michael Yon , who travels worldwide in his war journalism work, is able to see things that belong “belong to Time and Place and not to..,”  anybody. He has noted that Asian cultures have their blind spots , but can immediately see the things (Information Warfare in the form of adversts on a public bus) that Americans cannot. Stated differently, “Culture is both a way of seeing and of not seeing the world”.

It is a lot like negative space in a painting or architecture. Artists and Architects are keenly aware of it as it is  part of the project even though, it is not part of the subject**

So, let me chip in with a hypothesis on the answer…

“What is the negative space that binds us”? 

Once we see it, it will never be unseen.

Cordially,

t

*Philosophy is a science under the definition I have adopted as stated by Fr. Chad Ripperger.
**my apologies to artists and architects for the novice definition.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:26 | #

This is The Ontological Project, is it not?

Pretty damn close, I’d say.  Obviously, all the elements of the formulation are needed.  It’s already economically phrased, so it really wants filling out rather than thinning down.

It is interesting that a Catholic who has so few pretentions and so little need to impose his own worldview on another human being should also be so open to a secular meditation upon an entity which he himself may consider divine.

it will take a disciplined, philosophical* mind to get it right.

We do have Heidegger to explore, notwithstanding the difficulties of his thought.  Shouldn’t forget that.

I would never describe myself as a philosopher in any proper, scholastic sense.  Even in the intellectual wilderness that is nationalism I’m an outlier, so in the wilderness of the wilderness.  I’ll keep working of course, but I doubt many thinking nationalists are open to such a thorny and uncompromising message.  They all have their own ideas they want to advance.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:54 | #

It is interesting that a Catholic who has so few pretentions and so little need to impose his own worldview on another human being should also be so open to a secular meditation upon an entity which he himself may consider divine.

Let’s unpack this a bit, there is a lot here.

1.

so little need to impose his own worldview on another human being

People who do that annoy me; I hate being proselytized. The need to impose a worldview is a ‘tell’ that the imposer is faking it. 

2.

open to a secular meditation upon an entity which he himself may consider divine

If God is real then He should be able to withstand secular scrutiny.
Also, The Ancient Philosophers were able to derive God from the world around them (I cannot repeat their arguments out of hand and I am not familiar with the philosophical rebuttals of these arguments)

It may take time* but it is right and proper to know if my faith in God is based on and consistent with reality or not. For, if it is His created order then it should.
And, if God created Creation and (fallen) Creation has Order (Logos ) then it is right and good that we should study and learn about that order.
Its pattern recognition…it works in recognizing evil—the behaviour of the synagoge of Satan—and in recognizing good—Asha Logos is doing and Roger Scruton has done important work educating us how to see it.

3. Building on 2…expecting order, and I do, the concept of a thing unseen that unites peoples and nations is a fascinating topic. It will accord with Natural Law and hence, will not be at odds with Him and it will offer a bridge of communication between the teams, #teambiological, #teamcultural, #teamtheological**

* the theory of the steady-state universe took a while to collapse, and TENS is starting to look a bit wobbly, while Penrose looks for a Math that will rebut the philosophical precept that “something cannot come from nothing” but the genome is opening up new vistas..and some scientists do lie and misrepresent….

**E. Michael Jones has been spending time in Iran (Iraq?) working with Muslims to orient the world along the lines of Logos and , he seems very optimistic.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Wed, 25 Jan 2023 14:16 | #

The discipline of learning to see negative space has immense practical value .

By learning to see it you will be able to effortlessly align all the pictures on a wall simply by NOT looking at the pictures, but by looking at the spaces between them.  (Assuming rectangular picture frames, of course).
When all the rectangles surrounding the pictures are indeed rectangles, and of the same size , then they are aligned.
The rectangles surrounding the pictures are negative space*.

Tightening the above up a bit…

The task of aligning pictures on and within the bounds of a wall is not the task of aligning the pictures, but of properly organizing the negative space around them.

Abstracting the practical a bit….

the task of (what GW wants to accomplish) is not the task of (aligning the nations?) but of properly organizing the (whatevers) that compose the negative space around them

Now, it is probably true, that the above will not suit your needs, but it may start the process of reorienting thought to a model that does.

Cordially.

*experience artists will kick my ass on this definition…but for a truck driver, it will do

Negative Space in The Last Supper at 4:20 of this intensely anti-Catholic video  (and a very good move..thrilling detective work and plot)

Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 27 Jan 2023 21:42 | #

It is the transit out of all that we as individuals and as a people have given to and taken from our enworldment, meaning everything that belongs to Time and Place and not to us, and functions in us without our attention, quite mechanically, robbing us of all the days of our life ... and towards all we are, which abides closer to us than the breath in our body, the most redolent truth of which was known to us and was with us before, and always will be so.

That’s a quite beautiful statement, too.

I was thinking that perhaps 2 or 3 ‘buckets’ for filing away brainstorms on what ‘enworldment’ is—as materialists and theists will have quite different conception on what “our enworldment” is—will reduce the drudgery of having to rebut contributions from different prepositional frameworks.
“looks christian to me…off to that bucket it goes! now back to the reality” , says the materialist as he encounters a non-materialist idea.

Here is a rookies attempt at a candidate for the materialist bucket… putting on my materialist hat., escaping the context of our enworldment : our forbears and progeny, our place betwixt them, our duties toward them

Cordially,

*Chesterton , for example,  named “the shock of separation” , using the famous painting of the creation of Adam as the source.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:52 | #

Here is the escape route, Tim:

The vehicle is attention.  The abiding question is how to generate and direct it.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 15:27 | #

The annihilation looks like something from Ram Dass; I ventured down that road as a teenager and cannot revisit it.

Best of luck to you. 

Cordially

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 16:29 | #

Tim,

When philosophers talk about identity they do not speak of an exact or direct cognition of self because the brain only generates a representation of “the thing that is” in itself.  Hence definitions of identity use the word “same”.  Heidegger, for example, arrived at the formulation “the same as itself with itself”, meaning something “real” (ie, original) within could or does unconceal in presence or a relation of with-ness.  In my estimation, the stations of the Transit divide at appropriation, such that the individual moves away into another dynamic.  For some, that may lead to the brain’s processing identity not as “with” anything within but as the totality of what is without, of which the physical organism is itself truly a part. Division (or duality) recedes.

For our present purposes that is not an important event.  We are interested in the path of the ethnic group to destining.  But it behoves us to map the stations of the Transit as completely as we are able.  Why would one not seek to do that, after all?

Posted by Timothy Murray on Thu, 02 Feb 2023 14:57 | #

@GW

When philosophers talk about identity they do not speak of an exact or direct cognition of self because the brain only generates a representation of “the thing that is” in itself.

I agree with this, it is a rabbit hole, but our brains (minds?)  are often unreliable; we are, however, able to self-check ourselves with proper detachment and virtuous habits.

As an exercise, I will try to filter this through the thought process of St.Thomas Aquinas via Ripperger’s   book.

For some, that may lead to the brain’s processing identity not as “with” anything within but as the totality of what is without, of which the physical organism is itself truly a part. Division (or duality) recedes.

This is the part that I will not venture down again,this is the “transcendentalism” I was referring to.

BTW, Have you read or watched the late Joseph Campbell’s work on myth/etc?
IIRC he recounts some religions that attempt this.

cordially

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 02 Feb 2023 20:49 | #

It must be ten or twelve years since I commented on brain action at the most attenuated levels of being and cognition.  It isn’t something that matters tremendously to me.  But it follows the general form of action in respect to “I”, and so must fall within the purview of someone seeking to map the entirety.

My position, for what it’s worth, is that our unbroken sense of “I” ... our constant identification of the subject ... is an ascription process performed quite mechanically somewhere in the most ancient recesses of the brain.  It is a promiscuous thing, and will alight on whatever it finds.  It doesn’t care to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic.  It does not distinguish between what is high and what is low.  It has no preference for what was there yesterday or the day before.  It does not discriminate between waking and sleeping, or between states of mind.  It merely pronounces the word “I” over whatever is in view in a given moment.

The resultant entity “I”, of course, considers itself to be always there and as real as real can be.  “I” does not ordinarily interrogate itself on the matter of itself.  But it is not all there is.  Even without a deliberate exercise of the attention :

... there are happy accidents: rare neurological events when personality’s fractured world falls away, the mists part and Identity, the whole self, the sovereign process, unconceals itself to be known unto itself.

We must be clear that there is nothing essentialist or vitalist or pretentiously sacred in this moment, no res cogitans, nothing manufactured or imposed, nothing illusory in any way, nothing negative, nothing held back, nothing which can be added.  What “is there” is not reducible or divisible.  Because it has singularity it has unity, and because it has unity it has will.  But it has it not as a subject but as a process of consciousness.  Because it has consciousness it cannot blindly self-harm.  It cannot be other than it is, and it is, and always was, the same -  that which abides in light and nature.

The terms of this most human settlement do not change very much at the level of population.  They simply collect.  We can speak in the same way of permanence and impermanence, self-forgetting, unconcealment, nature, authenticity, unity, will, consciousness, and the good.  And this is not merely a framework derived intellectually for the purpose of constructing an identitarianism of the kind that we are seeing today from the European New Right.  Nothing can be constructed, nothing prescribed here and still be true.  No traditionalism however ancient, no cultural or historical focus however well-grounded, no Frankenstinian neo-paganism, no artful reproduction of the European character will lead to that truth.  For however much these things endear themselves to the aesthetic sensibility and the eye, yet they are never more than beautiful objects.  And beauty leads only to beauty, and does not escape the trap.  Beauty is finite.  But the human creativity which interests us, and which inhabits this process of unconcealment, is infinite.

On the scheme of the Ontological Transit we have moved out of the fallen domain that is coloured grey and into the domain of the real, coloured blue.  At the event of self-appropriation the possibilities for peoples and individuals bifurcate.  There are, after all, no whole societies of enlightened esoterics.  At this point we follow the path of peoples.  But we can note that the bridge over which they can never cross, but individuals can, albeit in extremely rare and controlled circumstances ... that bridge is marked by the cessation of the ascription process.  No one can set foot on the other side as “I” or I.

Posted by timothy murray on Thu, 02 Feb 2023 22:17 | #

That last sentence is pretty.

We* are close on some things…I do not have the heft to describe them in depth, but only post them as markers of possible intersection in our thinking**

Here are some that come to mind…

1.  Catholics have the (theological virtue??)  of ‘detachement’.  From my limited reading/listening its effects (not causes) are very much like what you describe.

2. On “moving into the domain of the Real’ is  Christianity
For, the eternal***  is more real than reality (what we experience qua humanity****).. C.S. Lewis describes this in the opening chapter of one of his short novels.

3. It is very interesting, and a presupposition that must be stated explicitly, that you, a materialist, and me, a theist, are both considering the same ‘transcendentals’ as essentials…and that spaghetti monsters are irrelevant grafitti.

I wish you well in your efforts.

Cordially

*If I may presume to speak for #teamtheological…
**yes, Al, the subset is very small…
*** Joseph Campbell first articulated (to me)  the differebce between ‘forever’ and ‘eternal’
**** atheists predictably scoff at the idea, but atheists are notable for their lack of imagination

Posted by timothy murray on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 12:53 | #

I am reading a Cultural Marxist review of E.M.Jones’ Logos Rising; in it are many of the terms that you use. Apparently Jones’  does too.

Its a fun read over coffee in the a.m.

Posted by timothy murray on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:20 | #

Here we go, from the above link:

  A century later, the political spectrum looks very different. Postmodern politics is best conceived as a struggle between those whose prime allegiance is to logos and those who believe in, practice and seek to establish the permanent hegemony of the performative sign.

.

Now,  the performative sign  needs tightening on my part. “narrative”, “midwits in mom jeans” and “lies”  or “deception” especially “self deception” come to mind. Notice that none are virtuous acts. But, is my initial assumption correct?

I will be ordering Logos Rising later this morning; this Jones guy has opened an interesting door; apparently Dr. Jones is fluent in this sort of stuff

Cordially

Posted by timothy murray on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:28 | #

Your man Hegel makes a showing too…

  Jones’ great advantage over his rival conservative commentators is that he knows this. He has not, like many, pretended to read Hegel; he has actually done so. He understands the workings of the dialectic, and as a result he has his opponents decisively upon the hip.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 18:29 | #

And of course, this rabbit hole would not be complete without Chris Langan’s perspective to add to it.

Whereas standard theology takes the existence of God as axiomatic and then attempts, often naively, to characterize the relationship between its assumed definition and a more or less concrete model of reality, logical theology explores a logical formulation of ultimate reality for any divine properties that might naturally reveal themselves; given that divine law (if it exists) would necessarily incorporate the laws of logic and mathematics on a basic level, it seeks evidence of divinity in the context of a reality-theoretic extension of logic, the CTMU. The implied convergence of theology, mathematics and science yields a reality-based theological framework with the strength and capacity to support realistic solutions to various real-world problems.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 20:26 | #

Not to be a smart-ass but….

It is the transit out of all that we as individuals and as a people have given to and taken from our enworldment, meaning everything that belongs to Time and Place and not to us, and functions in us without our attention, quite mechanically, robbing us of all the days of our life ... and towards all we are, which abides closer to us than the breath in our body, the most redolent truth of which was known to us and was with us before, and always will be so.

...is what we Catholics (and Mere-Christians*) call conversion.

Post-conversion, we enter into rites, sacraments, etc that seal and confirm us in our re-orientation.

Conversion is a reset of one’s ontology.

Believe it or not, but I do think that you, GW , as a materialist,  can pull off this reset in a non-Christian way. But! a way that does not contradict the Natural Law and a way that will, by necessity, coalesce with Logos.
To put it into E.Michael Jones way of thought* ...Logos Rising does not preclude previous steps in the journey back from original sin to harmony with the divine/natural order.
I.e. If Jones’ sees the Iranian ayatollahs as closer to God than the synagogue of the satan, then surely an honest materialist in post Henry the N’th** England can do the same***.

While I doubt that you will remain a materialist, I am confident that should you do so, you will have good fun on ‘The Greater Reset” (to coin a phrase, if I may)

*which I am only rudimently introduced to…
** 8th?
*** Asha Logos recent documentaries on the French Revolution leave me wondering how England escaped the mob. Was it because England was already modernist?

*C.S. Lewis “Mere Christianity” . It is what I called myself after I gave up on American Protestants (as Revilo P. Oliver did**) , but could not shake the existence of God (as Revilo P. Oliver did not, for, he , evidently, never believed in God).

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 11 Feb 2023 02:30 | #

  Perfectly correct, Timothy, as far as Prof. Oliver’s non - belief in (((God))) goes.

  RPO was a Classicist whose reverence for European antiquity with its natural Aryan hierarchy and its ethnically natural striving for individual excellence was deeply offended by imported ( to Rome ) Jewish egalitarianism as exemplified by the ” camel and eye of needle ” proto - Communism of your Hebrew Hero.

Anyway , here’s a Jewish artiste who underwent a temporary conversion to your absurd religion and whose lyrics purport to describe the imaginary transmogrification from Old Jew Covenant to New Jew Nonsense :

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZhMvLuoMaM

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 11 Feb 2023 02:55 | #

Also , Timothy , it may interest you to know that your Hebrew Hero’s racial cognates are still , after all these years , working assiduously to undermine Aryans.  But you knew that anyway.

https://religionnews.com/2022/06/20/lgbtq-pride-jews/

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 11 Feb 2023 04:14 | #

Timothy , you referenced the ” French Revolution ” .  Many well - educated people regarded the Scottish genius , Thomas Carlyle , as that sorry event’s finest chronicler .

Do read Carlyle’s account.

Interestingly , one of the West’s most read writers , Sir Walter Scott , authored a multi - volume history of the French Revolution in which he identified Jews as being essential catalysts to the proletarian carnage which old Jesus doubtless smirked about from his Daddy’s Celestial Penthouse.  Sadly , that tome is no longer in print.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Sun, 12 Feb 2023 20:07 | #

Hi Al

It looks intrigueing

When he had completed the first volume, Carlyle sent his only complete manuscript to Mill. While in Mill’s care the manuscript was destroyed, according to Mill by a careless household maid who mistook it for trash and used it as a firelighter.

and

Carlyle unfolds his history by often writing in present-tense first-person plural: as though he and the reader were observers, indeed almost participants, on the streets of Paris at the fall of the Bastille or the public execution of Louis XVI. This, naturally, involves the reader by simulating the history itself instead of solely recounting historical events.

Its in my Amazon cart. thanks for the heads up.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Sun, 12 Feb 2023 20:15 | #

Hi Al

Also , Timothy , it may interest you to know that your Hebrew Hero’s racial cognates are still , after all these years , working assiduously to undermine Aryans.  But you knew that anyway.

Yes, they are; yes I do.

Are Russians Aryans?
I assume Chinese are not Aryans (Tan covered some biological incompatibilities in white/chinese inter-breeding).

Clearly the Universal Plague of Mankind is not targeting Aryans alone.

E. Michael Jones raised a distinction I was not aware of…apparently there is a difference between “Jews” and “Hebrews” that Dr. Jones found important and that I am unaware of.

Still much to do…it will take some years to get up to speed, but its an intriguing rabbit hole.

Cordially,

Posted by Thorn on Sat, 18 Mar 2023 22:00 | #

GW, here’s a fascinating article I’m sure will interest you. It provides plenty food for thought. It may even help explain why you believe you lack a faith gene.

In 2002, Jason Padgett, a bodybuilder, was brutally assaulted at a nightclub.

What can his story tell us about consciousness?

Excerpt:

In Iain McGilChrist’s book, the Master and His Emissary, he hypothesizes that western civilization, ever since the time of the Greeks, has gradually started utilizing the left hemisphere more to understand the world.

This has enabled us to master nature but at a spiritual cost.

As a consequence of the preferential utilizatization of the left hemisphere, we’ve grown to project our egos onto the world

RTWT

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1635765909443813378.html

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 19 Mar 2023 01:03 | #

Thorn, many thanks for the link.  It’s difficult to respond, not least because there is a lot of contradiction in there, mixed up with the simply obvious and a real mish-mash of appeals to authority, some of which are technical and observational, some speculative claims.  All of it is put to service illustratively, which is not unusual with attempts to promote spirituality as a sign of “high” or more holistic, pre-modern conceptualisation.  But it is not the way the argument should proceed, which should be by development from foundation and not teleologically.

The sad truth is that we are nowhere near an account of how the brain constructs the world.  The two principal theories (physicalism and emergentism) are problematic, to say the least; and at this stage we are awaiting a breakthrough moment akin to Darwin’s sudden realisation on the chalk path in his garden at Down House.  We will probably be waiting a long time, and if and when it does come it will probably be from neurology rather than philosophy or psychology.

To return to the construct of pre-modern versus modern, there is something about it which bothers me.  I am not at all convinced that materialism and spirituality actually model what many people consider themselves to mean when they employ these terms.  Conversationally it might work well enough, and nationalists do talk about this quite a lot.  But materialism in its proper philosophical sense is not consonant with, or a parent of, materialism as a lifestyle; and spirituality as “I am here now” is likewise not dependent on exoteric faith or any of the desiderata of the spiritual tradition.  In my crazy Weltenschauung the spiritual is the material while we are in the esoteric domain.  Likewise, the modern me-thing is perfectly consonant with exoteric spirituality.  Esoteric-exoteric cuts across the standard distinctions and re-processes and refines all the terms.

As I noted above the line, it is practically impossible to put this thought into another man’s head, until - suddenly and mysteriously - it is there.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:53 | #

@Thorn…

In Iain McGilChrist’s book, the Master and His Emissary, he hypothesizes that western civilization, ever since the time of the Greeks, has gradually started utilizing the left hemisphere more to understand the world.

The Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral mind offers a similar thesis…the author used it to explain St. Paul’s road to Damascus moment. 

Furthermore, in a math book I have (Berlinski , The King Of Infinite Space…on Euclid)  is a similar statement…The Greeks Saw, We think…or something to that effect.

IIRC, that guy got hit over the head by a beer mug…I like that bar.

cordially.

Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 12 May 2023 14:16 | #

When philosophers talk about identity they do not speak of an exact or direct cognition of self because the brain only generates a representation of “the thing that is” in itself.

I am currently on my first pass read the Jone’s Logos Rising.
The book could be titled, “a History of Ontologies and Their Necessary Consequences’; it traces Ontology—man’s conception of reality—from pre-history to…welll, I am only have way through the book…

When you write the quoted text above, you are asserting something from Descartes…a form of Averonnism (?) .

I gabbed this last night….

From @EMichaelJones #LogosRising chpt8 Vico and the rediscovery of History….

“Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke were united in promoting the independent power of human reason and will.
Their writings are bold declarations of independence for the faculties—theological, philosophical, political and moral independence.
They are also secondarily blueprints for the instauration of new regimes based on exploiting the newfound powers of man”

These are the founding philosophers from which America sprang.

Their philosophy cannot stand, for it rejects #Logos in ‘practicle matters’ (my terminology)

America is powerless against #Logos and its (((enemies))).
American Conservativism is built on shitty philosophy.
The ‘Enlightenment’ is dead.

#Catholic

What all these guys do is reject Aristotle and the resulting Augustinian synthesis…
They also reject the Scholastic approach to Philosophy (Reading what the Scholastics did made my heart leap in affirmation).

It seems to me that your ontology commits the same mistake as theirs did.

There is another bifurcation, that Jone’s documents, that I don’t have access to at the moment…

The Islamists and the Neitzche placed “Will” , not “Being” as the defining essence of Allah/Man.

The center of the document that you posted is a species of “Will”  i.e.  “intent” and “lost intent”
The implications of this ‘centering’ are profound.

Its going to take me some years to ramp up on this…

cordially and best of luck to you.

t

Posted by Timothy Murray on Fri, 12 May 2023 15:00 | #

Related to my previous comment, on the matter of Revilo P. Oliver’s “the jew in the woodpile’ ...

As Kevin MacDonald and Tanstaafl taught us, the jews will create intellectual movements based on fraud and lies..
Boaz on race
Freud inverting the concept of the human soul
Neocons attempt to conquer the world

Why should philosophy be exempt?

I wonder if Neitzche’s madness was just such an act.

cordially

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:42 | #

McGilchrist on Sortocracy:

“...Belonging to a cohesive social group which one can trust and with which one can share one’s life, closeness to the natural world & communion with a divine realm however conceived…”

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 01 Mar 2024 23:34 | #

@ 27

What’s your point in posting that? Do you think anyone can learn from it?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:02 | #

Thanks James, I’ll have a look tomorrow.  Bit worried about “the divine realm”, which sounds like woo.  But, anyway, I’ll give it a try.

Thorn, the intersection of neurology, psychology, and ontology is interesting, and can offer solid points of departure into the latter.  Whether this does so I’ll get a view on tomorrow.  Did you listen?  Do you have a view of it now?

Posted by Thorn on Sat, 02 Mar 2024 11:52 | #

GW @29
What McGilchrist is talking about is the subject matter we learned as 6 to 9-year-olds from everyday living coupled with instruction received in Catholic Catechism class.

Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 02 Mar 2024 21:25 | #

Thorn, we may have learned much from the Thirty Years War but we have also forgotten much.  Probably the most important lesson that we’ve forgotten is what happens when a long period of centralization of narrative control, with the attendant amnesia about such simple and obvious truths, is disrupted by a technology that decentralizes that control.  And it wasn’t only the 20th century Catholics that attempted to protect their children from the 20th century’s centralization of narrative control.  My own raising involved watching an evangelist prance around on a revival meeting’s stage preaching Hellfire and Brimstone about TV to the point that my parents took the TV to the dump.  Yes, no doubt, an impotent gesture by an impotent redoubt.  But rest assured the Internet was not nearly so impotent prior to the events that I foresaw in 1982 coming to pass with the reaction to Donald Trump’s election.

So, now… my response to Gilchrist:

https://twitter.com/jabowery/status/1763644910261932165

Posted by Thorn on Sat, 02 Mar 2024 23:07 | #

“Probably the most important lesson that we’ve forgotten is what happens when a long period of centralization of narrative control, with the attendant amnesia about such simple and obvious truths, is disrupted by a technology that decentralizes that control.”

James, I agree with you; I believe what you said there is true. Moreover, I believe Dr. McGilchrist’s message is essentially true too. He stresses goodness, beauty and truth. Of course, those three values or qualities are under tremendous attack by the “anti-racists”. More specifically they regard anything of goodness and beauty created by Europeans as symbolic of “white supremacism” thus must be criticized and discredited to the max. We are witnessing the “anti-racists” cast everything representative of Western civ in the worst possible light.

Heather MacDonald latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, explains in detail how the attack is manifesting. https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164 

It’s infuriating to watch unfold bc we are - as you more than adequately understand - left powerless to fight back against the coalition of the government-MSM-tech-companies near monopoly on information and narrative control. Then there’s the intimidation tactics of the extremely anti-white DoJ along with most other law enforcement systems and apparatus ....

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 03 Mar 2024 17:42 | #

Well, I did my best.  But values as purpose?  Purpose implies design implies deity.  What can we actually show exists?  Only the organic and the inorganic in its singular, cold state of mechanics, from which the organic reflexively orients itself towards survival and continuity.  Of course such base functionality lacks the poetry of beauty, truth, goodness, love, and so forth; but all these actually root back into the discrimination for life.  Poetry is an after-thought in evolutionary terms.  Faith with it, if we are honest.

Posted by Thorn on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 01:59 | #

America’s Super-Elite Disconnect

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
MAR 3, 2024

“Last month came a fascinating new report from the institute of Scott Rasmussen, founder of the famed Rasmussen Reports polling center. Its aim was to, for the first time, quantitatively define the true ‘elite’ of society, which control most of our social narratives, politics, and general ‘orthodoxy’.”

The first-ever survey research defining the characteristics and beliefs of an Elite 1% who are the root cause of political dysfunction in America today.

RTWT

https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/americas-super-elite-disconnect

Posted by James Bowery on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 23:11 | #

GW: If one notices a pattern that seems to be converging on some future state of affairs, one can, of course, attribute that pattern to spurious correlation.  This is true even if that pattern is of ever increasing entropy/disorder since we may choose to deny things like mathematical laws (if not mathematics itself) of motion of individual particles that statistically explore an ever-larger portion of the state space.  If, on the other hand, we choose to listen to Brother Occam, we might find ourselves blessed with the second law of thermodynamics.  At that point we may choose to to classify as spurious correlations other convergences on some future state of affairs—especially those that contradict our hard-won laws.  Such spurious correlations (and their corresponding mathematical “laws”) are said to “not exist”—not because we cannot show they do exist, but because they are spurious—shear coincidence, etc.  Of course this is assuming we can even share the same observations aka phenomena as data.  Even if we can share that data we may end up arguing over their “existence” via “significance tests”, and on and on.

I’m probably one of the more adamant supporters of the idea that we should take seriously Brother Occam as supporting forward-time causation in the form of algorithmic information approximation of any given set of intersubjectively shared set of phenomena aka “observations” aka “data”.  Backward time causation?  Nothing prohibits it but our beliefs about which correlations are spurious and which are supported by our observations.  We may explain all kinds of time-reverse entropic patterns, from evolution of complex life forms to The International Jewish Conspiracy, evolving toward some future state of affairs and say those things serve that “purpose” without invoking “deity”; we can always claim those systems are not energetically closed, they are consistent with forward time causation hence the second law of thermodynamics is not violated. 

On the other hand, we may find some patterns to be difficult to explain away, except as “spurious correlations” aka “shear coincidences”.  Heaven help us if we choose to “have faith in” those correlations!  We’ll be exiled to that no-man’s land between what The Great Harvard University Evolutionary Theorist Stephen Jay Gould called “Non-overlapping magisteria” where The Great Evolutionary Theorist informs us that any belief that “race matters” and that “meaningful coincidence exists” is to be condemned as “pseudo-science” by one, and “sin”, by the other Magisteria!  Oh and there are very real consequences to the direction taken by “the blind watchmaker” of biological evolution since we’re now deprived of income and social status required to form families and reproduce!  But lest I be accused to perceiving a spurious correlation here—like mere power seeking—that rebels against an even higher order spurious correlation involving sexual love, I will satisfy myself with Sorting Proponents of Social Theories Into Governments That Test Them and wish you well—and may the best theory win!

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 06 Mar 2024 02:47 | #

Julius Evola was doubtless correct when he opined that ” the quality of a Race is something that goes beyond blood and that has a metabiological character . “

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 06 Mar 2024 02:54 | #

# 35 James , I will remain an atheist until Heaven bound (as there is a Scottish Calvinist belief in the Elect ) , but as someone who knows no Mathematica and little Theology , may I ask you to Fisk this for me ?

  https://www.johnlennox.org/

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 07 Mar 2024 03:26 | #

Al, I’m not sure what you just asked me to do but I will say that the quote at that site reminds me of something I’ve said perhaps even here at MR and perhaps even before Lennox said:

“Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.”

Of course, I’ve stated it in more “algorithmic” (ie: forward time causation) terms for the benefit of “transhumanist” folks obsessing over “AI” and “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” along the lines of “We’re either all philosophical zombies or that bag of hammers over there is conscious.”  I mean, even if you don’t believe the Universe is God hence it is meaningless to believe you are a creation aka creature, you must at least be able to understand that your thoughts, even if those of a zombie, are a subset of what some might call “physics”—and that should give one pause.  But I don’t expect it to matter much to them or anyone else for that matter.  Yammering at each other about such things is speaking a language that, say, “Nature and/or Nature’s God” doesn’t prefer.  I do, however, get rather perturbed when pigeonholed as an adherent of “scientism” when I speak of “testing social theories”—especially when I get lumped together with the likes of Locke.  I’m simply trying to accommodate those who can’t understand that our every decision is an act, if not leap, of faith by we creatures, er, critters of limited knowledge and intelligence.

Posted by Thorn on Thu, 07 Mar 2024 22:30 | #

The Japanese produced great art — for the Japanese

FROM The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson (1972):

Liberal dogma to the contrary, such popular goals as universal literacy are not necessarily conducive to great literature. The England of Shakespeare, apart from having a much smaller population, had a much higher illiteracy rate than present-day Britain. Nor does universal suffrage seem to raise the quality of artistic output. When Bach was Konzertmeister in Weimar and composing a new cantata every month, no one could vote. Some 220 years later in the Weimar Republic there were tens of millions of voters, but no Bachs.

Great drama, which usually incorporates great poetry, is the rarest form of great art. Art critics and historians have been at some loss to explain why great plays have appeared so infrequently in history and then only in clusters — fifth-century (B.C.) Athens, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, seventeenth-century Spain and France. The answer may be that conditions for great drama are only ripe when artist and audience are in biological as well as linguistic rapport. Such rapport, unfortunately, is bound to be short-lived because the era of great drama is usually accompanied by large-scale economic and material advances which tend to soften national character, sharpen class divisions and attract extraneous racial and cultural elements from abroad. To the great playwright a heterogeneous or divided audience is no audience at all.

Not only high art but all art seems to stagnate in an environment of brawling minorities, diverse religions, clashing traditions, and contrasting habits. This is probably why, in spite of their vast wealth and power, such world cities as Alexandria and Antioch in ancient times and New York City and Rio de Janeiro in modern times have produced nothing that can compare to the art of municipalities a fraction of their size. The artist needs an audience which understands him — an audience of his own people. The artist needs an audience to write up to, paint up to, and compose up to — an aristocracy of his own people. These seem to be the two sine qua nons of great art. Whenever they are absent great art is absent.

How else can the timeless art of the “benighted” Middle Ages and the already dated art of the “advanced” twentieth century be explained? Why is it that all the cultural resources of a dernier cri superpower like the United Stales cannot produce one single musical work that can compare with a minor composition of Mozart? Why is it that perhaps the greatest contribution to twentieth-century English literature has been made not by the English, Americans, Australians, or Canadians, but by the Irish — the most nationalistic, most tribal, most religious and most racially minded of all present-day English-speaking people? Modern England may have had its D.H. Lawrence and the United States its Faulkner, but only Ireland in this century has assembled such a formidable literary array as Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Paul Vincent Carroll, Joyce Carey, and James Stephens. If, as current opinion holds, liberal democracy, internationalism, and cultural pluralism enrich the soil of art, then these Irish artists bloomed in a very unlikely garden.

See pp. 242-243

https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/2024/03/decadence-in-art-and-its-causes/

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:26 | #

James, the valedictory questions you have raised require one to be mindful of the likely impossibility of communication between those whose world contains the emotionalised mysteries of deity and those whose cognition in that respect is simple and for whom the factic world is conspicuous.  There is too much emphasis on the latter folk as lacking in some respect, such that they are godless or a-theist, or suffer from doubt or disbelief.  Faith would be better addressed not from the supposition that it is the “first position” ... the default ... but from the perception that it is developmentally late and supplementary to Mind.  Hence I attempted to situate and explain it in my chart of causalities.  That’s probably as far as someone like me, with the disposition of mental faculties with which I was born, can go.  I can acknowledge faith in the grand scheme of things.  But I can’t operate in its grand scheme, and I don’t think that the folk whose scheme that is can do anything by themselves to close the gap.  In the end, if communication is desired both parties have to accept the fissure and deal with it by agreeing not to deal with it.  True, that will still require limitation to “what we can actually show exists.”  But that’s the deal.  It cannot be otherwise.

On the question of the general basis for decision, does any sentient creature but Religious Man require faith to select a preponderance of evolutionary adaptive choices over maladaptive ones?  Obviously not.  Neither do we.  On the contrary, we are the heirs to aeons of selection, and possess an innate and sublime, reflexive wisdom to light our way.  The sufficiency of this has been robustly demonstrated.  We should find it possible to agree on that.  Further, we should find it possible to approach to a certain point of adjacency in regard to what, ultimately, deity is.  As Exodus 3:14 has it “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM” for which one might read “I am that I am, and not another.”  Or, as the OP puts it:

... all we are, which abides closer to us than the breath in our body, the most redolent truth of which was known to us and was with us before, and always will be so.

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 03:43 | #

Thank you , James . That will suffice to content my limited mind , theologically speaking.

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 04:56 | #

  Apropos , the , it is to be hoped , waning of Woke vegan culture , my wife dined at her Oxbridge College High Table last evening only to find a heavily and happily, meat - based offering .

As the Fellows left High Table to adjourn to their post - prandial coffee and cognac , the College chef was standing at the door and was rewarded by many handshakes and thumbs up.

Trying to change Oxbridge is , thankfully, difficult .

  Hugh Trevor Roper ,  Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History ( Merton College ? ) moved to the other place as Master of Peterhouse , the oldest and , at that time, the most conservative Cambridge college with a view to modernising it .

In Trevor - Roper’s biography , he encapsulates his term as Master of Peterhouse as ” Seven Wasted Years.”

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 05:41 | #

  Oxbridge is an abstruse and convoluted culture bur this American Classicist , an erstwhile guest at Magdalen College , Oxford’s High Table , grasps the essentials :

  https://www.jrbooksonline.com/faem/oliver/rpo011.htm

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 09:26 | #

Thorn, was Wilmot Robertson never told about Hardy, Huxley, Orwell, Waugh, Woodhouse, Greene, Wells, Kipling, Woolfe, Chesterton ...?

Posted by Thorn on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:16 | #

GW, I think Wilmot Robertson was telling his readers that multi-culturalism and-or multi-racial populations create a culture in which measurably reduces the creation of great works of art.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 14:42 | #

Joyce’s Portrait and his two modernist offerings aside, what greatness issued from the pens of the other Irish novelists?  I can accept Joyce and, in the canon of poetic greatness, Yeats of the widening gyre.  But none of the rest are of that order.

Down the years I have toyed once or twice with developing a hot-house theory for determining the material necessities for artistic heft.  If one considers the Dutch masters of the Northern Renaissance, for example, which of them would have emerged without the others; and would any ever have emerged at all without the patronage of wealthy and ambitious men?  Likewise the Pre-Raphaelites such as Holman Hunt.  Likewise the Impressionists.  Etcetera.  But I think this is a different question to the one that Robertson was addressing, which is that important art requires a deep moral and cultural wealth (Heidegger talked about “world” and “earth” in this respect).  This line of thought would cut the modernist era from consideration, particularly in the visual arts and architecture, but in the written word too; and that would set us upon the path to an understanding which is much more historically rounded than Robertson’s, as well as one that doesn’t perform anything so egregious as dragging in multiracialism to support a preconceived prejudice.  I do feel that what he is saying does not need to be said.  We all know its costs.  But the real source of the 20th century’s cultural poverty must be sought before the Fin du Siecle and the demise of Romanticism.

Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 08 Mar 2024 16:02 | #

GW: Re #40’s invocation of “I am” as a point of contact, on the way toward our ultimate philosophical conflict that we have, hopefully, reduced to the interpretation of a single word, “purpose”.

Before, in what follows, another word “pagan”, as in Melvin Gorham’s 1962 “The Pagan Bible”, gets me into hot water and distracts us, let me emphasize the taxonomy he sets forth between “Pagan religions”  and “Metropolitan religions”, although of correct etymology (the “paganus” meant rural) has two layers of poisonous connotation, ancient and contemporary—both of metropolitan origin. 

1) If you haven’t noticed, Christian rural whites in the US are now so disgusted with the metropolitan areas that they are no longer volunteering for military service as historically they did.  They’d prefer a Thirty Years War to kill the urban areas and start over from scratch, if only they could find an organizing principle that could avoid that slow grind that would make the Ukraine war look like a picnic.

2) In 1962, the word “pagan” had not yet become appropriated by the metropolitan religions of neopaganism typically taking the form of Jewish feminists trying to round up the Boomers that threatened to produce a genuine revival of the genuine “old time religion” in the wake of Holocaustianity deep-sixing “the faith of our fathers”.  They were so successful in this that portraying rural white men as gay in motion pictures (Brokeback Mountain) and TV series (Nashville) has become de rigueur as shibboleth to demonstrate one’s bona fides to The Great and The Good.

Now, with that out of the way, suffer me the following extensive excerpts from “The Pagan Bible” by Melvin Gorham in which one might recall the notions of “Being” and that of “Time”, as primordial, leading directly musical qualia as the primordial exemplar of “purpose”:

We face the temptation to take the easy way and conclude simply that statistics showing broad acceptance of a concept indicate its wide appeal to innate predilection. But that sort of lazy, indifferent rationalization does not fully satisfy for we recognize it as merely a dogma of an other aggregation of unexamined concepts, a present day cultural pressure. Then, as we consider pressures, subtly distorted bases of appeal, and other factors that would affect statistical evidence, we find a major factor that would invalidate the significance of any religious statistics.

Known religious history is not the religious history of man, but only of a particular type of man, an incomplete man, one who is dependent on others for his motivating forces, or essential purpose being, as well as his physical sustenance. Let us clarify that statement by what appears to be a valid analogy. Some plant life takes its nourishment directly from the sun, earth, and water; and although it may feed on other life or the remains of other life, it is not dependent on it. Most animal life must feed on other life or its remains. Some men appear to create motive force, or purpose, from an unknown source or by an unknown process within their beings as green plants appear to make food from sunlight.

But in the process we talk of as forming civilizations most men’s purpose being appears to take on the sort of total dependence on other men’s purpose for its nourishment that animal life shows in its dependence on green plants. This purpose dependence in men is manifest by the evolvement of metropolitan centers. We do not call the metropolitan center “metropolitan” because of its size, but because it supplies, or promises to supply, this “purpose nourishment” to those who must have it.

Thus regardless of size, it is distinguished from the “village” where individuals may live together but still derive their purpose nourishment, not exclusively from “a people” but to a great extent from the universe outside man, on which all men are basically dependent for survival, and on which all are ultimately dependent for basic concepts and motivating force. It is to this distinction between the sources of men’s purpose nourishment that, to some extent, we owe the word “pagan” as originally used to designate a religion.

When metropolitan Rome accepted Christianity, it called those who had not done so “villagers” or “pagans.” This original coloring of the word “pagan” is one that we wish to add to the coloring we have already given to the name of our religion. We need words to talk of the source of motivating force, or purpose nourishment, and we are ready to show our unequivocal preference in purpose nourishment by making the name of our religion carry the significance that was originally attached to it in this respect.

For lack of a better word we wish to use the word metropolitan to signify the opposite of pagan when talking of the source of purpose nourishment, even though there be no geographical fix for the metropolis, and even though the metropolitan people be nomad or scattered. Thus, by our definition: metropolitan religions have their roots strongly or exclusively in the body of religious concepts carried forward in the history and language of a people.

Pagan religions are built less on word concepts than they are upon the innate mental patterns that make concepts from the perceptions of individuals looking freshly at the natural universe. If (1) this distinction were complete rather than partial, and if (2) we had sufficient knowledge of pagan religions, we might well have a basis for evaluating the statistical preponderance of concepts formed by innate predilections. But such is not the case.

In the first place the old body of religious concepts carries on to some extent even in pagan religions, or else the pagan religions take on some of the coloring of metropolitan religious concepts when an attempt is made to articulate them in the language of “a people.” In the second place our knowledge of pagan religions is very limited. Statistically the evidence is stacked heavily in favor of metropolitan religions.

Our whole religious history is the history of metropolitan religions. Only the purpose hungry people make religious histories, and jealously guard the “body of purpose” accumulated over the ages. The religious history of the pagans largely disappears. Thus all religious statistics that we could gather would be meaningless as regards the innate appeal of concepts. The statistically wide acceptance of metropolitan religions is no indication that they satisfy man’s search for a purpose of the universe.

It merely means that they are pursued and grasped at by the purpose hungry, not because they appear to represent the purpose of the universe, but because they appear to represent the universal purpose of men. The greater the metropolis, the more it impresses the purpose hungry that its purpose is universal purpose. Therefore the greater the civilization, the less meaningful its religious statistics become as evidence that its concepts are acceptable to innate predilections. Thus the statistics regarding the spread and dominance of metropolitan religions can only be considered as evidence of efficacious methods for their spread and dominance.

Recognizing this, our major purpose in looking at metropolitan religions unmistakably becomes that of appraising the motivating forces of people who press in upon us. But we have previously decided that their efficacy alone is a sufficient reason for looking at these religions and studying the aggregations of concepts that motivate peoples as masses. If we can discover some significant patterns of reality, that men of perception have injected into the aggregation of religious concepts from time to time, it will be a reward above and beyond what was necessary to justify our study efforts.
We do not forget that we hypothesized the existence of the world outside our selfs in the beginning. If it be not real there are no other selfs. We know that “I am” is a reality. But can we know that any other self is a reality? We know that we can create a machine that can ratiocinate faster and more accurately than man, that can react to stimuli in the same manner that man does. Presumably, if we became sufficiently skilled craftsmen, we could make a machine that would duplicate man’s appearance and behavior so accurately that it would be objectively indistinguishable from man.

But we cannot conceive that any mechanical ingenuity which we might express in it, would endow it with that something which we know as consciousness. We recognize that there are men who are color blind. A mechanical device could translate different colors, red and blue for instance, into identifiable patterns of gray, so that red could always be identified as red and blue as blue by the color blind, but the lack of incapacity to distinguish would not cure the color blindness-only the functional disability resulting from it.

The effect of light waves passing through the eye, into the retina, along the nerves to the brain, where they are compared with stored images, actions decided upon and directed, all this can be mechanical; but the awareness of red and blue as such is something other than function. Just as there are men who are color blind, it is not inconceivable that there are men who have no consciousness, whatsoever; but, if so, we would have to think of them as different from men like ourselves.

We would consider them as a strange breed of man-like robots, objectively indistinguishable, and indistinguishable by any functional test, but still different, and different in the most significant manner possible. We know that there are differences in intensity and quality of consciousness; but we know that only within our selfs, by comparing one conscious experience of self to another, in our own consciousness. Any relation, whatsoever, to any functional test that could be devised would have no significance. This is knowledge, gained by ourselves from the study of our own consciousness, and we can only assume that what is true for us is true for others that appear to be like us.

From the fact that the intensity and quality of consciousness within one self varies from time to time, it seems probable that the intensity and quality of consciousness varies from individual to individual. However, we persist in believing that those who disclaim the existence of consciousness, entirely, are speaking from an overwhelming will to be consistent in a pattern of logic, a pattern based on an assumption that matter is the only reality; that they are ignoring the empirical data regarding the self that is supplied to them by their own beings.

In other words, we cannot know, but we persist in believing that, although some seem to come very close, there are no man-like beings in the world as we perceive it that are complete robots. We also believe that no thing which appears to have life and will is a mechanical robot. Many religions of the Western world dogmatically assert that everything was created for man’s benefit, and that man alone of the animals has a soul. In these religions, the concept of soul is merely a dogmatically distorted concept of consciousness as a spiritual entity in a man-god drama.

Many persons, who are trying to sluff off obviously invalid concepts, have exchanged the Christian concept of soul for perceivable consciousness. But because the Christian religion claims that man alone has a soul, they then are simply left with an unexamined belief that man alone, among living things, has consciousness. A very prevalent idea that man thinks with words also contributes to the belief that man alone has consciousness, for only man has words. It is obvious that some men do at times, and perhaps most of the time, think with words, as it can be clearly seen that their invalid conclusions result from invalid concepts which are contained in the words they use.

We can even observe, by studying our selfs, that it is possible to have conscious being, to a very great extent, exclusively in words, or in mathematical concepts, or hypothesized concepts of the universe, or in other self-created worlds. But we also know, from the same source, that it is possible to have conscious being in the world that appears to be material and does not respond directly to our will. Objectively it appears that men all have some conscious being in the material world. It appears that other animals do not have words or any other discipline for maintaining self-created worlds and therefore have conscious being in the material world to a greater extent than man does. Conscious being is very much alike in both the material and the self-created worlds.

Thus we assume that all living things have consciousness and that this consciousness is similar, in its essential characteristics, to our own. Our assumption that there are other selfs, similar to our self, then, should be able to include all living things. This assumption may help to save our tentative replacement of “I am” with other selfs, in the comprehensive master test-pattern, from a distortion it might have if we limited our concept of selfs to men-selfs. We do not want to forget that it is the total universe with which we are seeking to establish an understandable relationship.

The greater body of kinship our selfs can properly find, the greater will be the scope of our test for validity. We do not want to limit our kinship to man, for we recognize that we have a valid claim to brotherhood with every living cell in every form of life on earth. We have one more question before we look for the source of our innate knowledge: What are the possible channels of this innate knowledge? We sometimes feel we can perceive one consciousness, or perhaps subconsciousness, that permeates all men, and perhaps all living things.

However, the preponderance of our awarenesses indicates that our own consciousness, along with our subconscious self, is limited to a single perspective point so strongly that a point, having a definable position in time and space, may, for the purpose of discussion, be considered as identified with our living selfs, and this point in past generations has been carried forward from living organism to living organism with the fertilized ovum. The analytical religions of the East consider consciousness as identified with the breath, and consider it a detachable entity, coexistent with everything that breathes. It is assumed to take up residence in the living thing with its first breath, and depart with the last.

In the West this Eastern concept of consciousness is often distortedly pressured into conformity with the dogmatic Western religions’ concept of a soul, as an entity in a hypothecated god-man drama, but in the East the soul is conceived as existing in all living things, and so approaches more nearly our assumption of consciousness in all living things. When a pattern that identifies consciousness with a living cell and one that identifies consciousness with breath are expanded to mesh with the total pattern of the universe, a significant difference appears, but in the present considerations they are substantially compatible.

Like the West, the East also posits the evolution of consciousness from its being in simpler forms of life to man. In the East the soul is conceived as inhabiting different bodies from simpler to more complex life without reference to physical consanguinity. In the West the consciousness is considered as coexistent, or identified, with an unbroken physical heredity. We are concerned with the patterns in consciousness with which the individual is born. We want to separate the innate patterns from all patterns that can be identified as learned. Whether the innate patterns came into our world of consciousness identified with the breath or the cell does not, at this point, concern us, so long as we can assume that the innate patterns exist.

In the West we base this assumption on continuity of cellular life. The conceptual language of the West is the one we have chosen for our use so we will talk of what is inherent in the cell. The evidence Western science has considered indicates that man’s behavior depends on learning to a much greater extent than that of other animals, and this learning buries his innate patterns, or instincts. But Western science conceives that man is of the animal kingdom, and that the universal characteristics of the animal kingdom are essentially valid for him. We have no quarrel with this thinking. We, therefore, assume that man has instincts.

Instincts can be interpreted as nothing other than inherited memories. After recognizing that a faculty for inherited memories does exist we become concerned with the extent of these memories. Observations indicate that those things most vital to survival constitute the strongest inherited memories. But, in theory at least, anything and everything could be remembered. This memory could go back anywhere in the unbroken chain of existence. Man could remember the experience of his monkey-like ancestors, or his fish-like ancestors, or his one-celled ancestors floating in the primordial ooze. Perhaps he could even remember the beginning of organic life-and before.

A great wealth of knowledge had to be existent in, or identified with, the spermatozoa and the ovum to enable these single cells by growth and cell division, to design and become the intricate physical organism, including the brain with its inherited memories. Obviously if all memory and knowledge inherent in self should reach the level of consciousness, an objective appearance of madness would be the inescapable result. Even if that knowledge were fully organized and comprehensible to self, it would have to come at a speed that would be incompatible with normal existence if the self were to consciously assimilate it all in one lifetime.

But just as the need and opportunity for the human baby to suckle the breast, or the beaver to build a dam, or the salmon to go upstream for spawning, open up the stored memory related to the circumstance, so presumably, the scientists’s, philosopher’s, lover of beauty’s, and self searcher’s need and search for the origin and meaning of existence may -if the thought patterns afford a vehicle through which the innate self can express its being -call forth the specific memory that holds the answer. Theoretically it must be there. The only question is: can it be brought to the level of consciousness where we can grasp and recognize it?

Unless we believe that the self may be able to call forth from its own being a concept of the universe more comprehensive and valid than that of any of the major religions we have considered, we waste our time in dwelling on religious concepts. And unless, when a valid concept is found by one individual, its validity can be corroborated by others, we waste our time discussing religion on any basis other than the pragmatic. That we proceed is evidence that we believe both in the ability of self to find a fully satisfying total concept and the ability of other selfs to perceive its validity. In the language of the East, which identifies self with breath, we are turning now to what the self knew before this life.

In the language of the West, which identifies self with an unbroken chain of life that began with the first living cell, we are turning now to the knowledge inherent in the cell: that knowledge by which it designed and controls the human organism, and that knowledge which gave it purpose and will when it was the first cell floating in the primordial ooze. Because our physical. bodies are constructed by that cell, and because all our innate consciousness is its consciousness, we believe that all the knowledge which it has is also ours, and can be brought to waking consciousness by focusing our attention intently and undistortedly on what the self knows.

PART II Concept.

Concepts of Knowing and Sources of Knowledge.

THE SIX DISCIPLINES OF MAN’S BEING

In accordance with the concepts of the Western world, we have been assuming the reality of the material universe and the reality of self. Now that the time has come to present, for the corroboration or rejection of other selfs, the comprehensive master test pattern which we perceive, we must temporarily suspend these assumptions. In our pattern, the material universe has a place, and self has a place, but the pattern begins with neither.

The pattern is composed of six progressive disciplines, each resting on all that have gone before. The material universe is completed in the third discipline, and self as we know it begins in the fourth discipline. The pattern of the first disciplines must have priority and form a foundation for the latter disciplines. But a concept of any pattern, whatsoever, for the first two of these disciplines is, for the most part, wholly foreign to Western civilization. So we must try to point out one that can be perceived in reality if we are to continue our discussion.

We assemble all our concepts from knowledge, basic knowledge, like that of the awareness of red, the awareness of time, the awareness of space, and the awareness of pattern preferences. The significance of each bit of knowledge is based on its place in the arrangement of the total pattern. This basic knowledge, including the innate preference for certain patterns, is assumed in all beings like ourselves. The basic knowledge that makes up the discipline patterns prior to the material universe is in the self for example, the concepts of time and space -but the realities that form this knowledge must be conceived as having existence prior to the material universe and prior to self as the Western world knows it.

Also, the most uncontestable reality, the consciousness of “I am,” must be conceived as existing prior to the material universe and prior to self as the Western world knows it. This is no more mysticism than conceiving that red, which we know only as an awareness in self, existed prior to self. The Western world posits red as a reality outside of self and, because that posited reality is seen as part of a pattern, our concept of the material universe, the postulate seems to be supported. We are now going to enlarge the pattern to include both consciousness and matter.

Like the one we now have, our new pattern has to begin with something which we, our selfs, know but which existed before there was a self as the West knows self. In our pat-tern we are positing that this something existed, not only prior to this self, but prior to the material universe. Our pattern begins with what we will tentatively call the consciousness “I am” as it is perceived in self, but which we will posit as existing prior to self as it is known in the West and prior to the material universe. The difference between this first self, or conscious “I am,” and that of self as it is known in the West is not of quality and capacity but of discipline.

We do not posit the consciousness “I am” as the first part of the pattern on the basis of the simple logic that, since our awareness of it is our most unquestionable knowledge, it should therefore be first. We posit “I am” as first because we have become aware of it as first in the pattern, and are trying to describe that pattern of which we are aware. The pattern must be seen as a whole before the self can either reject it or have the affinity for it that is its only test of validity. It cannot be measured by any frame of reference because it is, of itself, the ultimate frame of reference or it is nothing. Therefore all judgment should be reserved until the whole is perceived.

Western science has attempted to determine that of which the self is aware, when there is no stimulation of the body’s senses. This experiment is performed by isolating subjects in a room that is sound proof and light proof, and attempting, in every way, to completely eliminate sensory stimulation. Temperature is controlled to the point of least awareness and touch eliminated as much as possible by enveloping the subjects’ bodies in fluffy padding. The subjects have described spontaneous awarenesses of colors and patterns that have no significance to their rational minds.

The Eastern religious men attempt the same experiment by long periods or disciplining the self to block off and reject awarenesses that come through physical senses. They describe spontaneous awarenesses that they claim have significance to their religious minds. Concepts of time, space, matter (as a posited non-self reality), and matter !as perceived through bodily senses when relation to self does not enter into the perception) are of the essence of the pattern that concerns us. But to return to being before the formation of the pattern, so as to see its original purpose, we must suspend these concepts. With them suspended, we must tentatively conceive and exist in a state of no physical sensation, no physical being, and no universe.

This state may be attained at will, and with little ill effect by intensive self training, but continued conscious perception of it is a nullification of the disciplines of being, and detracts from man’s purpose of being man. We therefore advocate that it be consciously attained only for purposes of gaining sufficient understanding of why and how the self and the universe were created, for the purpose of orienting man’s objectives, or for the purpose of tapping the source of new creative energy-never to escape from man’s field of decision and action. With that word of caution, we leave each to his own method of examining his innate knowledge and concern ourselves with the pattern that we postulate he will find formed by that knowledge.

We see the self, which is distinguished from the material or non-self, as a disciplined and restricted entity of the consciousness “I am.” The consideration of whether the whole is greater than the part, whether this self is part of the consciousness “I am,” or the consciousness “I am” is part of this self, does not enter here. These patterns of thought about whole and part belong to the patterns of the material universe, and we are now entering a concept prior to the material universe.

That, from which both the material universe and this self are evolved, we conceive as being that in self which knows “I am” prior to any restriction, or discipline, of its being. The comprehensive master pattern is the orderly, self-imposition, of six disciplines upon “I am.” We want to point out that the consciousness “I am” is a continuing entity in the sense that all organic life is a continuing entity. Western science assumes that all organic life began from one cell and all life that now exists is the result of that one cell’s division. In the same way we assume that the consciousness “I am” was originally one and what we perceive as our self, and what we perceive as the material universe, is the result of discipline and division.

So far, we have seen the consciousness “I am” and self as substantially identical, because we have not developed concepts for, and words to talk of the consciousness “I am” when it is not self as simply distinguished from the material, or non-self. The relation between the consciousness “I am” and this self as conceived in the West is not the same as the relationship between protoplasm and man’s body but there is a very rough similarity that can illustrate our need for a new word. We need a name for the original undisciplined and unrestricted “I am.”

The word “god” in common language implies an omniscient and omnipotent spirit. He is conceived as having foreknowledge of the consequence of his acts, as if the universes were created from a perfect blueprint in the mind of god. This concept is not what we 144 wish. We have considered “primordial self” and found in it many advantages. However we feel that the word “god” should be used in the sense of “creator of the universe” and we will so use it to name the original undisciplined and unrestricted “I am.” But we do not wish, by giving the original “I am” this title, to endow it with any qualities not known by our selfs in the here and now.

Billions of years of experience cannot be comprehended as one moment of waking consciousness but all the experience of god prior to man is fully comprehensible to man. That statement is not to be taken as dogma of what god as hazily conceived in the West really is, but as a promise that only perceivable realities will be pointed out and designated by the word, “god,” as we use it.

Before the study of science convinced Western man that his self was, in some unexplained manner, a product of the preexisting physical universe, the dogma of Judaeo-Christianity had convinced him that he was a soul created by a great, magician-like god having incomprehensible powers. He, therefore, has been precluded from asking himself what he was before there was a universe. Western man knows that he was very recently a single cell, but because of the “brain block” created by the Judaeo-Christian culture he never even asks himself how it feels to be a single cell. Certainly then he does not ask what he was before the self was identified with a cell.

As a concession to this blocked avenue of introspection we will try to describe our concept of the original “I am” or god by talking about what, if anything, could remain of the self after death of the physical body. We do not wish by this to imply that death is not, or is, the end of self. This contemplation of death is for the purpose of understanding the first discipline of being. We are not now attempting to understand death, but to understand “I am” as it was before the creation of the universe. If at the time the body no longer responds to the will of self, the conscious self still exists, and remembers life in the universe as a man, either in fullness, or as an emotional melody, or as a direction of will, it may seek to perpetuate its being. But stripped of its material environment, that self would probably be a rather meager and malformed embryo. It might wish to recapture for itself a place in the universe.

But, if it had retained some of the widely accepted concepts of the universe, we could only think of it as a helpless and hopeless “lost soul.” If at the time the body no longer responds to the will of self, the conscious self still exists, but cannot perceive the universe, and does not remember it in any fashion, then lit would seem even more helpless and hopeless. But then the self would experience or be, “I am,” or god, as he was the beginning of the first discipline. This primordial I am is a dim awareness that wills its being, but knows no time, no space and no universe. If at this time there truly are not, and have never been, time, space, universe, and self, then “I am” is the concept which we want to present of god as he was before the first discipline.

But this approach is evolved from the Western concepts of self and the universe and is therefore colored by the Western concepts. We therefore simply say that “I am” is one in god and self but the perspective of self has restrictions, or will guiding and form-determining conditions, that do not exist in the perspective of god. These self-imposed and self-accepted restrictions, these selected memories retained as will-guiding conditions of being, are the six disciplines of our pattern.

THE FIRST DISCIPLINE

The first discipline is concerned with the willful and formalized departure of god from absolute reality into relative being. Absolute reality cannot be discussed or described in any words or conceived in terms of any other reality, for words and concepts are all relative and finite; but it can be known, of itself, absolutely. This absolute omniscience is alike in god, and man, and the worm.

The nearest approximation of this, which Western man comprehends when expressed in words, is the knowledge that nothingness I and infinity are one absolute reality, differing only by an assumption of being. All awareness is predicated on the assumption that absolute reality can be factored. This is not an absolute truth; it is an assumption of being. It begins as an uncontrolled pulse of assumption, vacillating between nothingness and infinity. The first discipline is god’s formalization of his choice of finite being. This choice can be known, for it permeates all being. The willed “I am,” injected into the reality that everything and nothing are different aspects of one absolute, creates an awareness of being.

The side of the pulse which says “I am” is pleasurable awareness, and the side which says “I am not” is painful awareness. “I feel and know, therefore I am.” Pleasure. “What am I? Nothing:’ Pain.  “But I feel joy when I conceive being. If I feel, I am something. Even the pain I feel at the thought that I am nothing is an awareness which convinces me that I am.” Pleasure. “All illusion. All this is sophistry without reality.” Pain. “But to create what was not, even though only an illusion, is something.” Pleasure. Such thoughts are familiar to all of us. Such are the thoughts of god before the beginning. Except as decreed by self-discipline there is no beginning, no end, and only one consciousness. God and self are separated into different perspectives only by discipline. The pulse of infinity and nothingness, the two perspectives of one reality, is the pattern concept upon which all creation rests.

In it are potential consciousness, potential thought, and all potential awareness. Joy of being is the prime mover of creation: the perspective of consciousness that perceives “I am” and finds joy in that perception. What is the awareness by which “I am” perceives “I am”? What is the color, or taste, or touch, or feel of this basic awareness? Is “I am” light or darkness? Is it sound or silence? Is it hot or cold? Is it sweet or bitter to the taste? Is it form to the touch, or formless to the touch like the faint fragrant breezes before the morning’s awakening? The perception of “I am” is none of these, but all of these. The basic awareness of being bears roughly the same relation to man’s sensations as the first one-celled ancestor in the primordial ooze bears to all organic life.

It is the undeveloped essence and the grandfather of all sensations. We can rationalize the existence of this basic awareness but perhaps the worm, and surely the one-celled glob of green scum floating in the ooze, can still remember. The memory is also in us if we dare awaken it. Many times man has brought this remembered knowledge to consciousness and written down the thought in words with great art of expression, but others have seen only what the words said in the language of a people, and not the reality indicated by the art of the perceiver.

A perceiver wrote of the first discipline of creation: “In the beginning God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light and God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And it was the morning and the evening of the first day:’ But the unperceiving, reading the words said, “God is light and a power of evil dwells in the darkness.” Or they thought that god was a mighty magician who could speak and have the universe appear full-blown from out of nothing. So the art of the perceiver became, not an aid, but a stumbling block to understanding.

Another perceiver translated the basic awareness into terms of heat and cold, and said, of the first discipline, “In the beginning was the unknowable, and of himself, he made two opposing forces, the frost and fire gods.” But the unperceiving said “There is but one God.” And the cry, “One God,” became the shibboleth for a mob, and a war cry for destroying all who would not join the mob and proclaim the shibboleth. So the art of another perceiver perished. “In the beginning the infinite willed the end of infinity, and divided his being into two opposing finites,” a perceiver might say.

But the unperceiving would cry: “Blasphemy! God is infinite. The man declares that there is no more god.” When we attempt to understand the universe of god in the first discipline, we must unless we have given special discipline to our senses as is the practice of Hindu mystics, substitute for the basic awareness one with which we are more familiar. According to our special inclinations some of us find it easier to substitute for the prototype, light and darkness. Others prefer colors, taste, smell, touch, sound, et cetera.

He who can best imagine an awareness of being in a consciousness that knows no time, space, or universe, as a mathematical abstract, let him think mathematical abstracts until he discovers their meaning. He who can do better with conceived awarenesses of heat and cold, let him find for himself a universe of fire and frost gods which exists beyond time, space, and matter. He who would substitute light and darkness for the basic awareness of being, let him not try to look upon a magician conjuring up a universe, but search his own consciousness for what would have been the dawn of his awareness “I am,” if the first reality were not the pulse of everything and nothing, but the more familiar pulse of light and darkness.

All are but examples aimed at guiding consciousness to a change of perspective. If the awareness indicated by the word, sight, be used in its simplest form as an example, then, in the consciousness of god before the beginning, there was the conceptual awareness of light and darkness. God willed, “I am light,” and the concept of light was pleasure. But the knowledge that absolute reality contains both sides of the pulse beat, instead of only one, said, “I am not light,” and the concept of not light was pain to the will to be light. Then god willed, “I am darkness,” and the concept of darkness was pleasure.

But the knowledge that absolute reality contains both sides of the pulse beat instead of only one said, “I am not darkness,” and the concept of not darkness was pain to the will to be darkness. God then discovered that he was not the will to be light nor the will to be darkness, not yet the will to be pleasure nor the will to be pain, but simply the will to be. The concepts or awarenesses of light, darkness pleasure, pain, are all alike part of the awareness “I am.” All intensify the perception of being but they offer no criterion for “I am.” But as light can be conceived and be, only if darkness be conceived and be, so “I am” can be conceived and be, only if “I am not” be conceived and be.

The perception of this principle led god into seeking to conceive a universe, or pattern of concepts, in which “I am” could be separated from, and contrasted to “I am not,” as we who benefit by past disciplines perceive that light and darkness, pleasure and pain can be separated and contrasted. God sought a concept by which he could abdicate absolute being in favor of relative being. So god conceived, and willed, a universe in which his being was not absolute. The first universe, or pattern of concepts for finite being, was the conception of “I am” as having finite extension in time. In this universe, “I am” and “I am not” were a pulse of time-limited awarenesses, which as a pulse intensify the awareness “I am.”

The free will of god arbitrarily assumed the perspective, or created the universe, in which time exists, and imposed upon his further being the conceptual discipline that “there shall be no more absolute and eternal; all existence shall be finite in a concept of time.” The first discipline of creation is that consciousness shall call good and have its being only in a finite universe conceived as time. The thought that does not call it good is banished from the consciousness of god. The first discipline of being provides a fully satisfying universe. Within the concept of time, all awareness has its existence.

The awareness of light exists because its duration is limited by darkness. The awareness is dependent on its segregated existence. God does not call the light as distinguished from the darkness good, but all awareness produced by adherence to the concept of limited being, good. The concept of time constitutes the first universe, or comprehensive frame of reference, for all finite being, and all being within the universe must be conceived as finite. There can be no awareness except the awareness of finite being. We have seen that the story of creation, as written by some perceivers, favors light and darkness as illustrative of the first “day” of creation. The awareness of cold and heat seems more illustrative to others, and the first “state” of creation is portrayed as the era of frost and fire gods.

The choice depends on the way of life of the perceiver. The medium through which we find our path to perception of the first “discipline” of creation is not important, but it is important that we perceive it, and know that it is, of itself, good and very good. To the Western world, the sensation of sound has special virtue as a path to perceiving the first discipline of creation, because many men have cultivated the habit of listening to music with complete disregard of all concepts except that of the universe of time. Consciousness and music become one.

The musical composer “hearing” his composition for the first time, in its uninstrumented conception in his consciousness, is living in a simulated universe that, except for man’s perspective, might be that occupied by god in the first stage of creation. In the music, which he is conceiving, there is the all-permeating awareness of being as “sound” in a universe of time. However, countless billions of years of “musical composition” lie between the god perspective of consciousness in the beginning of creation, and consciousness as it is in the man-perspective of the musical composer. God’s first “musical compositions” were single “notes.” He was concerned with creating the most joyful pulse of the awareness prototype. He joyed in the varying emotional effects produced by the interval of timing.

The scientist studying the number of vibrations in a note of music, or the number of vibrations in a colored light, and perceiving each vibration so completely that he conceptionally becomes it, lives its life and dies its death, in slow motion as it were, through the composite temperament of a scientists and of an artist, approaches god’s perspective in the first stage of creation. But the scientist seldom holds this perspective save for a brief moment. His man-made discipline as a scientist tends to keep his artist’s temperament from his “serious” work, by demanding that he detach his “emotion” from his “reason.” Also he, usually, has not admitted the existence of consciousness into his equations.

But in addition to these walls of man-made disciplines, which he has called good, he has five other disciplines called good by god, which guard him from reverting wholly to first stratum existence. First stratum existence is good, and living in it could be wholly satisfying subjectively, but viewed as a man by men he would be hopelessly insane. From the perspective of god, we would also have to condemn him for not finding good the five other disciplines of creation. Man, the worm, and the single cell of green scum in the slime, each has abilities fitting to his needs. The single cell is closer to the original perspective of god; it has one undivided sensation, and an all-engrossing interest in the first four disciplines of being.

Man is protected from a complete, and excessively engrossing, perception of the first discipline of creation by having his perceptions channeled through limiting sense organs. By observation and analysis we have concluded that ears and eyes are organs for perceiving vibrations of different frequencies, but we do not perceive through our sensory organs that all sensations are different “frequencies” of the one basic awareness. Our sense organs break sensation into sharply differentiated categories by leaving wide intervals of “frequencies” that we do not perceive at all. Also the “frequency” of our own beings played against the “frequencies” god conceived in the first discipline of creation brings about a super-heterodyne effect that causes us to perceive “frequencies” peculiar to man.

But foremost among the devices god has incorporated into our perspectives, or beings, to bring about a peculiar joy by guarding us from full sensory perception of the oneness of creation, is an accelerated time perspective as compared to the time perspective of god. As a result of this great acceleration we do not hear the “melodies” god originally composed. We hear those “melodies” as single “notes.” And we compose not “melodies” but “medleys” of the first discipline god’s “melodies.” Despite the separation resulting from the disciplines, consciousness is one, and purpose and joy are one. God and man are different only in perspective. In the first stage of creation god composed “notes,” “melodies,” and “medleys” that are to the compositions of man like the waters of the seas to a single drop.

But, in the accelerated perspective of man, the musician can still compose as freely and joyously as god in the first dawn of creation. In so doing he is living, to the extent that he forgets the universe of man, in the universe of the first discipline. When we hear melody after melody with joy, and perceive the limitless possibilities for intensifying emotions by the frequencies of notes and the frequency of those frequencies, our consciousness joins the consciousness of god in proclaiming the first discipline of creation to be good and very good.

 

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 09 Mar 2024 12:04 | #

James,

On the metropolis and the rural, I wrote two essays on Man and technology in 2022, the second of which dealt with urbanisation, among other things.  This chart traced the history before and since, and looked only to a darkening of the human future:

So it’s understood that there are large issues here; and to be honest I don’t think many nationalists would be unaware of some or most of them.

When we hear melody after melody with joy, and perceive the limitless possibilities for intensifying emotions by the frequencies of notes and the frequency of those frequencies, our consciousness joins the consciousness of god in proclaiming the first discipline of creation to be good and very good.

Given that truth and meaning and good flow from, and belong to, the Mind’s informational nature, which itself flows from the organism’s reflexive and evolutionary struggle to be, on what evidential basis can we assume that information exists in the universe independent of the human Mind?  The answer to this question cannot be that “the universe is Mind” or “the universe is organism”, because that is an assertion without evidence which can, therefore, be dismissed without evidence.

This is the basic argument from evidence.  The closest I can take it to the faith assertion is that deity also belongs to Mind, and is an anthropomorphic projection onto the universal cold state of mechanics.  Parts 1, 3 and 4 of my Out of Foundation series, which you have disparaged as, of course, you are entitled to do, all develop this materialist thesis.  Unlike some materialist offerings, it does not dismiss or disdain the all too human will to find this universal mind, but seeks to incorporate and explain it.  But the thesis recoils from faith’s own objects and assertions, finding that one assertion is only supported by another.  Hence for a faith-led thinker purpose has the purpose of “proving” ex nihilo that All is design, All is deity.  Function, however, has no corresponding ulterior motive.  It cannot leap forward to some desired end.  It has no desire.  It is too parsimonious.  It can only “be” the working-out of what is there.

Setting aside the chemistry of the first moment of the universe, we can explain via this parsimony all but two of the great existential questions.  We cannot yet explain the first spark of organic life.  But we can explain everything afterwards.  We cannot yet explain how Mind reifies World.  But we can explain the condition of Man which, again, comes after; and which itself is not entirely dependent on what went before.  Even I can explain the Fall(s) as, first, the inescapable, determining mechanics of the informational Mind and, second, the endemic and always unnoticed claiming of us by absence and mechanicity.  I am not sure what Gorham is explaining, to be honest.  There are a lot of words to take us back to deity.

There is plenty that is functional which we can talk about.  If you subsequently take it and fit it to a narrative of purpose, well, that is your prerogative.  You have a foot in both camps, or I hope you do.  But I have no possibility of a footing in the camp of purpose.  My consciousness cannot join the consciousness of god-as-projection.  But it can transit ontologically, that is to say towards the functional characteristics of spiritual and ethnic awareness.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:17 | #

Setting aside the chemistry of the first moment of the universe ... we can explain via this parsimony all but two of the great existential questions.  We cannot yet explain the first spark of organic life.  But we can explain everything afterwards.  We cannot yet explain how Mind reifies World.  But we can explain the condition of Man which, again, comes after; and which itself is not entirely dependent on what went before.

Are you saying “this parsimony” need not explain what physicists’s call their “one free miracle”: How there is something rather than nothing (the ultimate “existential” question)?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 04:38 | #

Whatever I say or do not say, particle physicists are working towards an answer to the question of the respective and asymmetrical volumes of matter and anti-matter in the universe: 

In other words, you can start with a completely symmetric Universe, one that obeys all the known laws of physics and that spontaneously creates matter-and-antimatter only in equal-and-opposite pairs, and wind up with an excess of matter over antimatter in the end. We have multiple possible pathways to success, but it’s very likely that nature only needed one of them to give us our Universe.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/01/05/how-did-the-matter-in-our-universe-arise-from-nothing/

... but it would be absurd and completely lacking in intellectual integrity for me to proffer an “answer” to this today, as it would for you or any non-specialist.  Further, as a non-faithist I can’t do that anyway; and have to accept that we are not yet living in an age when all questions are answered and all mysteries resolved.

As a non particle physicist, there is one mystery which we can definitely and properly address, and it is the mystery of be-ing or presence (or Being and Time).  It, and not the question of genesis, is the real and esoteric but by no means mystical core of the religious quest.  Of course I can’t do much alone.  When I took Daniel on almost a decade ago it was on the basis that he would help to turn MR into a centre of high impact nationalist thinking, and not just off-piste journalism.  Within that I hoped that I would be able to operate freely, and not write article after article about our general racial travails, as I had to do before.  I had made two prior attempts to create such a centre outside MR, and neither got anywhere.  Daniel’s attempt, if indeed he made one, also did not develop.  So I am stuck by myself speaking what obviously sounds very like existential gobbledegook to a few good souls!  I would very much like you to stay involved with the ontological quest here.  But it can’t be a Christian project, or at least one that is standard-exoteric in form (such as Gorham’s project or that any other 1960s guru).  It shouldn’t be a test of faith, but perhaps it just is; and in the end the faithful will feel obliged to depart.  If that is your decision, then I am very sorry about that and, of course, wish you well.

Posted by Thorn on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 11:25 | #

“Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator. It is strange that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.”—John Lennox

Once the stiff-necked person who claims to lack the “faith gene” comes to the point where he realizes man’s intellectual capacity is very limited (that he is a finite being living in an infinite universe) he then can take the next step and acknowledge something cannot arise from nothing; ergo the next logical step is to submit to the idea there is indeed a Creator.

Of course, GW is by definition a man of faith. He has strong faith in the theory that man will ultimately explain how the universe - sans a Creator - came into existence.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 12:45 | #

Lennox is unwittingly abusing the hard problem of consciousness, Thorn, by which he employs the Judaic deity to force together “the organism’s biochemical structure and interaction – an agglomeration of things dead in themselves” with “the light-seeker sapience” as it appears in this passage:

... life-essence emerging unseen from difference elaborating as ever greater difference; and from confine, therefore, and the reflex, impulsion and movement which elaboration entails; and in what, broadly speaking, Martin Heidegger called sorge (care or concern), Frank Salter called interest, and we might call the sole imperative of the will to continuity; and, thereby, in the qualities of ownership and instinct which imbue that will; and in the procreativity which it imbues, and in the discrimination and opportunism which arrive with the light-seeker, sapience; and thence increase, inter-dependency, and belonging; and, ineluctably, death but also, triumphally, death’s deferment.  For all of this characterises the essential struggle, and all of this stands in absolute opposition to that cold state of mechanics which the ontological investigation of the universe logically must uncover.

Doubtless, unless and until the hard problem is solved Christians will sally forth with their emotionally-driven assertions.  They do not wonder that, in reality, they are forced back onto the most absolutist ground, because so much has been brought into the light since Descartes.  They forget that only a couple of centuries ago there were those of their number who held that Genesis must be literally true, and the universe was held to be only 4,500 years old.  The sublime European capacity for knowledge has taken so much away, which evinces that it will only continue to do so.  Expectations based on that completely established trend are not “faith”.  You are expressing faith, and I urge you to recognise its defining characteristics and not impute it to others in whom no such characteristics are displayed.

Posted by Thorn on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 13:33 | #

”You are expressing faith, and I urge you to recognise its defining characteristics and not impute it to others in whom no such characteristics are displayed.”

But, GW, according to this edited definition of faith, you clearly demonstrate and display some of its essential characteristics.

faith
noun
1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something:
“this restores one’s faith in politicians”

2. a strongly held belief or theory:

You are a man of faith, GW. Own it!

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 18:49 | #

GW: #50

As a non particle physicist, there is one mystery which we can definitely and properly address, and it is the mystery of be-ing or presence (or Being and Time).

GW: #48:

I am not sure what Gorham is explaining, to be honest.

Being and Time.

GW: #48:

There are a lot of words to take us back to deity.

Back to aboriginal Being and Time.  In terms of word count, barely a Tweet compared to Heidegger who, one might say, was no “60’s Guru” mainly because he wrote to a different audience in a different time; one in which Holocaustianity did not threaten to throw a vast population of nubile Boomer girls into the slavering Jaws of the likes of Spielberg.

If there is going to be a point of contact between my “faith gene” and your lack thereof with regards to Being and Time, it is most likely to come from the perspective of a PhD in particle physics turned Algorithmic Information Theory “guru” as expressed in his 2010 paper “A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)” which is about “observer localization theory” as a necessary component of any ToE.  We must dispense with Langan’s approach in finding this point of contact since the CTMU necessarily entails a notion of “utility” that is aboriginal (ie: prior to Man or even life), which implies “purpose” inhabiting the core of Reality, as the unification of objective and subjective phenomena.

There is a problem with that 2010 paper, however, since it is in a language so alien to your own that it may better serve us to go to a subsequent philosophy paper based on that 2010 paper:

The Substrate-Prior of Consciousness

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 20:09 | #

James, the holocaust industry got into gear with the TV adaptation of Herman Wouk’s Winds of War, broadcast in 1983.  That’s twenty-one years after Melvin Gorham’s plainly amateurish material was published.

This:

The first discipline of creation is that consciousness shall call good and have its being only in a finite universe conceived as time. The thought that does not call it good is banished from the consciousness of god. The first discipline of being provides a fully satisfying universe. Within the concept of time, all awareness has its existence.

... is windy, back-to-front verbiage full of category errors.  What, pray, is “the concept of time”?  I am somewhat shocked that by way of argument you offer such obviously undisciplined and wayward thinking.  Surely you are better than this?  Well, perhaps you agree because you then throw in a make-believe AI “conundrum”, the make-believe element being that the being of a running programme and the being of a human are indistinguishable from one another, and not just to a third party but to the human subject of the experiment.  The answer to the conundrum is that the human can kill the programmer and cut up his computer hard drive.  If the “consciousness” can choose that course, then what remains must be authentically human, capable of creativity and instinctual Salterian interest, whereby he alone is aware that a running programme, however much it models similitude, is only a line of noughts and ones, and does not merit Heideggerian care for being.  In another context we might call such thinking racially aware.

What your reification of all this strangeness tells me is that the essential component in consciousness which is its vertical range (as modelled in the Ontological Transit) plays no obvious part in your thinking.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 20:12 | #

Thorn, faith is not a product of experience.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 20:45 | #

GW #55:

you then throw in a make-believe AI “conundrum”, the make-believe element being that the being of a running programme and the being of a human are indistinguishable ... to the human subject of the experiment.  The answer to the conundrum is that the human can kill the programmer and cut up his computer hard drive.

Why could not, in principle, a brain in a vat, with nothing but electrode implants to send stimuli and receive responses, under the control of a sufficiently powerful machine algorithm simulating “the phenomenal world”, create the impression in that brain that one was fully embodied as “the human subject of the experiment”?

How would such a human subject “kill the programmer and cut up his computer hard drive”?

Why could not, in principle, that brain in a vat be replaced by another sufficiently powerful machine algorithm which would be connected to the analogous electrodes in communication with the prior “sufficiently powerful machine algorithm simulating “the phenomenal world”“?

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:54 | #

You don’t need AI programmes or brains in vats to establish the principle.  If you recall, James, some while ago we spoke on these threads about the capacity of the sleeping brain to dream worlds the reality of which is totally believed by the sleeper.  We can dream anything and believe anything.  Dreaming is believing, so to speak.  But that is a state of auto-suggestibility and will-lessness, hence mechanicity.  It is not waking consciousness even in its ordinarily fallen condition, in which human experience, function and capacity is still embodied, and the capacity to perceive and select for adaptiveness in every circumstance still active.  It is most certainly not the further estate of presence-to-being by exercise of the attention.  The point here is that by the vertical structure of consciousness the sleeper may dream that he is a very clever computer programme, but the present Man needs must appropriate and affirm his truth, which takes him out of the illusory and so ends all arguments based upon that.  Free in the real, he cannot be touched by the programmer or the programme or the machine, and may dispose of all three.

What your guy with the algorithm is really doing is constructing a theoretical world of constraints which would be falsified by the layered nature of consciousness.  Another idea - that of deity - is possible to find only through the higher layer.  Looking for it in a constrained and mechanical disposition is pointless.  It is not there.  It is not in sleep or in ordinary waking consciousness because it becomes an object of those states.  Hence it is not in the exoteric church.  It is not in the ordinary expression of faith.  It is something more.  Perhaps a good look at Holman Hunt’s two figures will explain that better than I do.

Posted by Al Ross on Mon, 11 Mar 2024 03:56 | #

Thorn , One of John Lennox’s proofs of miracles goes like this :

  ” I am in a hotel room and when I leave my room there is my $500 in a drawer . I return after dinner and check the drawer . The cash is there. Next day I add $500 to the original sum and go out for lunch. I return , only to find $500 missing from the drawer .  Now which Law has been broken ?  The Law (s) of Nature or the Law of Arithmetic “?

Posted by Thorn on Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:23 | #

Al @ 59

“Now which Law has been broken ?  The Law (s) of Nature or the Law of Arithmetic “?”

Okay, I’ll bite.

Answer: Neither.

He neglected to exercise common sense. I.e., he foolishly left a substantial amount of cash in an unguarded, unsecured, location not taking into account he lives in a world crawling with opportunistic thieves.

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 16 Mar 2024 03:28 | #

Lennox’s obvious point was that, without proof , it was impossible to determine the cause of his financial loss and that your answer is non - Christian.

  There may be security cameras to record the Second Coming , unless a ” miracle” , or non - White security guards render them inoperable.