Cosmos Café: On the Human Species' Ultimate Potential [2018-01-30]

By the way, I liked the bird image for yourself, Doug, but not the crabs in the pail. I tried it out and it made me very crabby. I had to lie down on the floor to make sense of it and it made me kind of sick to my stomach. I rejected it for myself and went with a different metaphor. I grabbed the purple balloons.

Please note, some people embody metaphors! It is wise to be aware that some metaphors conceal unintended consequences. The best of all possible worlds is to allow others to generate their own metaphors.

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The Human Possibility would be a good name for a podcast. Just a thought. :thinking:

Tagline: Bring forth (that which is within you)—or DIE.

(No offense to gods or demons intended or, I hope, unintended.)

Symbiopoetics and biometaphorical diversity are also great ideas to play with.

Thank you, John, for the probiotic paradox-sharing!

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Excellent, brother Marco, I like that a lot. It makes my tummy feel good.

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There’s an old saying among Kabbalists: our feelings tell us what to think.

We also do well to recall that Gebser called the viscera the spiritual organ of the magic structure of consciousness (along with the labyrinthine ear) and the heart the spiritual organ of the mythical structure. Once again, John, you remind us of the current necessity to reawaken the efficient forms of both these structures.

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Some useful distinctions I gather from Kripal’s Secret Body that are richly suggestive.

"The empirical imaginal names those moments when the dreaming or waking vision corresponds closely but not exactly to something in the objective, historical world. There is a realist impulse here. It is a super-sense for detecting and responding to historical events in the physical world and is of immense adaptive and survival advantage. The “veridical hallucination” of Meyers and his colleagues, for empirically telepathic communications, falls into this type…it seems to work like a camera: it sees and then projects to a visionary what is happening at some distance along the space time continuum. Little or no interpretation is needed, the visionary knows instantly what the vision is about. The vision is about what it says it is about…There need be only one world or order of being in play here.

The symbolic imaginal works very differently. This expression names those moments in which the dream or waking vision is experienced as mediating some other world or hidden reality. Here the content of the dream or vision can be quite baroque, bizarre or fantastic. The sense is that these images and narratives are functioning as ciphers of some other form of mind or dimension of the real. The human imagination is not so much clairvoyant as it is an organ of revelation: it is not clearly seeing in any one- to- one fashion. Rather, the imagination is intuiting or sensing something Other and then translating or picturing what it has known to a human psyche, but always in code. Note that there are at least two worlds or orders of being at play here-the subjective material world of the person and the “other” occulted world being mediated or translated." p.236

Our work on Maps of Time and Maps of Intuition and Alternate Ways of Knowing is an attempt to work with both kinds of Imaginal and they clearly overlap in actual practice. I do believe, these Imaginal capacities, are in everyone but takes a different kind of practice/training ( meditation, prayer, drawing, dancing, trance states, clean language, etc) to bring forth so great an object! As Emily Dickinson said, you have to tell the truth, but tell it slant. Mind has mountains, says, Hopkins. The poets get there first.

It would be hoped that a Psychology of the near future would work out these dimensions and stop getting stuck in the shallow end of the pool. This is not for the timid but will require great fortitude. There are, I am well aware, many who are called, but few who are chosen.

Jesus, when he asks his disciples, " Who is it that they say I am? Know ye who I am? " is not being rhetorical. I dont think Jesus knew who he was. He was a great performance artist and a supreme poet!The Father and I are one was the metaphor he grappled with, which ultimately blew everyone’s fuse. He was running a lot of juice through his system and those around him and I think, as does Kripal, that he was operating out of a taboo homoerotic twin dynamic. He was split between dimensions, and he looked directly into that vast abyss. That is why the Catholic Church still refuses to let women become priests! They wish to preserve this occult homoerotic mysticism. Without that occult element the whole cosmic show collapses.

You are your own metaphor.I hope we can develop these notions in our next conversation around Irreducible Mind.

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You can say that again … or as many times as you want, before we realize what is really being said.

Heh, heh, heh … and I think he knew precisely who he was, but we are hesitant to admit what it is that. This is one of those scenes in the NT that just drives fundamentalists insane (Catholics for one reason, Evangelicals for another). Mt 16. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is; Peter, oddly enough, informs the other that he is “the Christ” and Jesus blesses him, but he admonishes all them not to tell anyone else who he is. But when Jesus says that he will be delivered and slain, Peter intervenes vociferously to which Jesus replies (KJV): “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Funny that one minute he is to receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and in the next minute he’s Satan. I agree with Suares (The Cipher of Genesis and, even more to the point, The Second Coming of Reb YHSHWH): Jesus knew, Peter suspected, but Peter couldn’t accept it. The rest of the disciples appear not to have got it. I think more people are like the disciples than, say, Mary (Magdalen) (who got it right off), or others whose understanding has been suppressed all these millennia.

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Doug @Douggins, I came across this podcast, it’s Episode 1 of “Levar Burton Reads” : https://art19.com/shows/b8dbdce1-2c32-42d2-ad58-6956a0c6b31c/embed?playlist_type=playlist# - the one called “Kin” by Bruce McAllister. It is a story about potential, and very interesting considering the remarks that Burton makes about the story after reading it. You might call it a “strange kind of bird”…

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I’ve been meaning to get back to your post @Geoffreyjen_Edwards:
Perfect words from a man (Lavar Burton) who has carved his niche. I listened to this episode when it first aired…no memory of the closing remarks, but he seems to fuse the two definitions together.

“…focused on fulfilling potential (destiny)… encumbered to decide, define, discover what it is we are supposed to do (our gift)…once discovered, a clearing away of obstacles of achieving full potential.”

So once our “latent ability” is discovered, we make efforts to ensure it is possible. The pathways forged by possibilities are endless and novel.

With this exercise (Ultimate Human Potential thoughts), I wished to define or partly discover a collective understanding before forging ahead with the possibilities achievable if we remove obstacles (personal, social, psychological, political). I had a vague sense of the collective potential initially and this discussion, while fruitful, did not lead me closer to understanding our full humanness. But I know that I am able to recognize those that are on their way, open to any possibilities that arise. I think a certain laughter is proof. You, Ed, and John all have the deep laugh. Lavar has the laugh too (@31:45 in Episode 1–a perfect one!). I am working on my laugh and hope to spread it like an incurable disease to put everyone at ease, so they can do as they please (or to fulfill destinies).

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A deep laugh happens because you are aware that you have become a paradox. It is actually the god in the gut who recognizes that and the recognition flows in an upsurge past the cognitive blockade and circulates through out the social system. When the tears come to the eyes at the end of a laugh you know the system is giving you a great blessing. A deep laugh at least once a day is the best antidote to suffering. You may also lift the spirits of someone in close proximity. It is indeed contagious.

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"Whether it’s someone with a computer or a guy strumming a guitar, it’s always an algorithmic process,” Kaczmarek says.
I beg to differ! I am not a guy, but I do play and have composed for guitar, and that has had pretty much zero to do with algorithms. I think there is a fundamental confusion going on here. Like saying that a dance is really jiggling algorithms, or a walk is really made up of inches, not experience. Of course it’s made of inches! But that’s not what a walk IS. This way of viewing things seems so weird to me. A cake is not: the taste of flour, plus egg, plus butter…it’s “cake” a new thing, and the cake experience is a new thing too, it’s not “really” the ingredients, even though fully realized cakeness can’t exist without them.

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