old age fundamentalism

[Guest guest]

Suzanne, Toni, all,

Suzanne I'm sorry for my aggressive and judgmental post about your

friends. What I wished to say could have been rendered without giving

offense.

***

You wrote:

> Her (Alice ) books is called the Destiny of Nations; all nations

not just America...Her work is vast and offers a template; a system of

thought from which people can make meaning of life, just as astrology

does and the teachings of all religions and philosophers, including

Jung.

Personally, I put a lot of stock in the frameworks via which we create

meaning and develop our own awareness. My heretical prejudice formulates

that there are varieties of autopoiesis fit to the tasks of growth, and

spirituality is just one of the variants!

***

Once again on our table here are ideas which lend themselves to challenges

of communicating what is, as Toni would have it, true for each of us

individually, and the differences that exist in extrapolating from those

'local' truths (and facts!) to their wider ramifications.

Certain ways of experiencing and looking at the world and one's

consciousness in the world (and cosmos,) REQUIRE specific conceptions to

be universal and, in doing so, these conceptions are applied to others

irrespective of what any other might differently feel/think/believe.

Example. Astrology does not make sense in its given terms if its phenomena

ONLY APPLY to people who believe in astrology.

Jung built a psychological framework out of trying to generalize from the

different experience and behaviors of people. Yet, he never excepted

anybody from his framework. So, it would be true for Jung that it is not

possible for someone to say " I possess neither Self or Ego. " The Analytic

Psychology only makes sense as a set of generalizations about the psyche

found in each and every person.

This is to point in the direction of frameworks which require their

generalizations to apply, *whether they are actually partly or wholly true

or not*, to everyone.

***

I asked a very devout friend of mine once, whether (her) Jewish God was

also the same God of the Christians and Muslims. Besides that she had

never considered this question, and after glossing for her the shared

suppositions of the Abrahamic religions, she reflected and offered that

the One God only makes sense if this One God is the God of all; per force

is the God of every atom and every point and field of space.

She also was honest enough to admit that this required a troubling

judgment, that this God was also the God of those who rejected the very

existence of one God.

I'm not arguing here for and against the existence of 'a' or any God. I'm

trying to structure examples that make clear how necessary it is for

concrete assumptions/suppositions/propositions ne truths, to be ramified

as universal ideas.

Yet it is also true enough (!) that people, each and every one, could

scarcely operate (their awareness) without assuming, at least at the gross

everyday level, that certain aspects of human workings are universal.

And we know how this plays out too: from the workings of our own

consciousness we make assumptions about the same workings occurring in

other people's consciousness.

Anybody can ask themselves, hopefully deploying negative capability in

doing so, which of their ideas about other people, the world, the cosmos,

implicate those same ideas to be *necessarily* universal. This

consideration is 'beneath' the move to later ascertain whether or not

those same ideas actually are true-for-everyone.

Finally, in good () ian fashion, we might come to understand

that at a minimum each and every experience is true in itself, and thus

earns some sort of account. Certainly, Jung, himself a ian via his

own variant on radical empiricism, proceeds from wanting to fit such

accounts in a general (and presumptively true) psychological structure.

***

If we draw this kind of consideration to its largest scale, then we could

make a tentative and partial account of the variety of religious,

spiritual, cognitive experiences. Then it might be possible to begin to

smartly frame an inquiry, (ie. figure out how to go about it,) about what

is actually universally true.

As for science, it seems patently obvious that something north of 99.9% of

all truth, much of it being the kind we enjoy everyday, is not in any way

scientific. I have used in presentations the example of grocery shopping

to exemplify how non commensurate is science to everyday truth-making.

(If somebody were to tell me that the best truth is scientific truth, I

would find this silly and would next point out the obvious.)

At the same time, the qualities of generalizations we might make to

understand universal human phenomena earn some relation to veracity. The

pithy form of this is: what is real is necessarily true. The implicit

paradox was well expressed by Rumi, " What is important is not essential;

what is essential is not important. " This noted, it is a very

tough-minded koan-like statement.

We drill from pinch-me truth to for-me-alone to not possibly absolute to

tentative-and-likely-to-be-replaced to heck-if-I-know to

knwoing-oneself-is-ignorant. <|;-)

***

My sense of fundamentalism, no matter where it is encountered, is that it

is dependent on propositions held to be universally true and, at the same

time, fundamentalists are no longer interested in either the comprehensive

critical ramifications of those propositions, or, in what the aptly named

devil's advocate has to say! To me, by virtue of my prejudices, the

fundamentalist's lack of concern for demonstration or evidence is

carelessness; is: not really caring. Ending up in the Shadow, then the

insight given by 'the brighter the light, the darker is the dark' becomes

clear.

***

It seems to me that fitting Obama into a cosmic framework is one thing,

but it's another thing to do so without being aware of how projective

identification works. In other words, to do so without allowing for

certain contents of this 'fitting' to be aspects of the personal " wish. "

ung understood such wishes often reflected collective ideas, and, that

great men and great women provided the charismatic stickiness that is the

glue to the 'fly' of the wish. Moth and candle work here to.

***

Several years ago somebody asked me about the moving target of my own

personal beliefs, " What is for you spirituality? "

I replied that 'spirituality was the sum effectiveness of my prejudices in

connecting me with the Real. " I would not wish my belief system on anyone

else. Still, it is far from scientific in the main and it is wholehearted.

One thing I'm mindful of these days, (oddly the result of my study of

proto-music,) is that as you step back in time, eventually, all the bright

ideas disappear completely. This happens somewhere between 50-100,000

years ago.

Glory arose.

regards,

A man

dreamed one night that he had to leave for a far away city where he was

supposed to dig for treasure under the city wall. When he woke up, he

decided to embark on the long journey to that city to seek his fortune.

Time passed in the distant city and one night a guard addressed him,ask-

ing why he was spending so much time searching around the wall. When

he told the guard about his dream, the guard laughed and retorted that he,

too, had had a dream, in which he had been instructed to go to the man’s

hometown and seek his fortune in the man’s hearth. The guard advised

the man to stop following his dreams and return home. The man thanked

him, did so, and found the treasure, not unexpectedly, in his own hearth.

(told by Stefan Einhorn, A Concealed God)