J J Kripal on 'Flipping' Out of Materialism

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Well Expressed John, U are a Guide/Friend in/to Edges of Imagination,Thank U!

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Thank you, Michael. Love-warriors of the world unite!

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And Herr Goethe was right about more things than most modern scientists are willing to give him credit for. He might not have phrased it as they might have, but …

And so, John, not a Ghostbuster, but a Gunkbuster … keep up the good work.

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Thanks, Ed. Now, how wierd are we???

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We’re, dear John, not weird at all.

These almost-realities, these not-quite-rights are part and parcel of everyday existence … but most often we don’t recognize them, and when we do, they are not what we would like them to be at all. So we slough them off, don’t acknowledge them, explain them away, or just ignore them … but they never leave us go.

It’s like a wise man wrote, which I read recently read:

What’s involved is not an extraordinary version of ordinary experience, rather it’s an extraordinarily ordinary experience. In fact it’s so ordinary (and therefore rare) as to become extraordinary.

Yet it happens almost all the time. I like that you dream it, John; I wish I could do that. Instead, I encounter this every day in my waking life.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no paranormal/extrasensory/supernatural/supernormal/preternatural abilities at all (I’m one of those “unsensitives” or, perhaps better, “insensitives” who just make life difficult for others. A group of friends and I once went to an assessment center organized by the Stanford Research Institute regarding “remote viewing”. I was sorted out after the first assessment exercise. Though it took a couple of rounds, no one from the group was left either. But, the mere fact that it took a couple of rounds to get us all out indicates, at least to me, that these abilities are much more widespread than is generally acknowledged. In the end, most people end up denying that they are having such experiences at all. That’s not good. We would do well to acknowledge how extraordinary ordinary life is.

We’ve got the Goethes and the Steiners and the Jameses and Bergsons and the Collingwoods and the Mannings, and the Batesons and the Kelleys and who knows who else on our side, as opposed to those who names will be easily forgotten (the Dennetts, the Dawkinses, the Churchlands, and their friends). I think Kripal does an excellent job of bringing in precisely the “right” witnesses: scientists, technologists, physicians … who should know better but who can’t.

There is much more cross-fertilization going on in these various – but obviously related and interpenetrating – threads than I think we generally realize. But we all can’t approach it as nor get access to it in the same way. I’m still not completely clear on what you are hashing out in the Generations threads, but much – not all – of it resonates with what notions I’ve been wrestling with for some time now. I’m enjoying following the flow of ideas without being directly involved myself, for I wouldn’t want to interrupt that flow at the moment , otherwise we’ d just get bogged down in a morass of hair-splitting that would be more than counterproductive.

OK, as the Germans say (literally translated): “Long talk, short sense”; that is, “a lot of words, very little meaning”, how do we get more people to openly admit they’ve had these kinds of experiences, and how do we get them to recognize that this is the everyday and anything else is just ignoring the reality of it all?

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Thank U Curmudgeon Friend with a “Heart of A Lotus” with Earth Colors!

Lotuses

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James said, " The true opposite of belief…are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief." All of the sources that you mentioned are allies in creating a more vibrant and coherent ‘we’ space. While we can’t make cooperation on a global scale happen, we can stop penalizing people for speaking up, throwing rocks at them, and chasing them out of the village. The trauma of such abuse is pretty universal in our top heavy cognitive culture. I have been vigilant here at trying to keep the conversation open to differences that make a difference. A community of the competent who have flipped is to be cultivated and protected. I have seen many communities fall apart when these odd episodes are reported. Tricksters are among us.

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Yes, yes, and yes. LOL

I had been wrestling with Wendt’s application of Aristotelian causal thought to the historical development of the ‘international’ system since reading his article. The arrow of time lends an ‘efficient’ aspect to even the ‘formal’ and ‘material’ (let alone ‘final’), doesn’t it? Then it hit me that that was the point Wendt was/is trying to address.

The humaniverse is inherently teleological.

Humaniverse” => that intersubjective sub-domain of the universe which exists by virtue of human sentience or consciousness; that “dimension” of abstraction and symbolism in which frameworks for the interpretation of meaning reside
“inherently” => of a piece with
“teleological” => connective of vision/ideas with results/institutions, not only ‘cause-and-effect’, but also ‘cause is effect’

Now, add the possibility that “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and…

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a99038_synchronicity02

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This is going to sound way more curmudgeony than it is intended, but …

Not having read Wendt (and consequently not having thought about what he might be specifically saying), my first question is, “Is this an actual subdomain, or is it an analytical construct to help us better understand the actuality of the universe itself?” (I’m old school and there is simply “the universe”, which, as its name implies, is simply all that is … divisions confuse me.)

My follow-on question is, then, “Is there something special/different/unique about human sentience or consciousness, as opposed to non-human sentience or consciousness?”

And from this comes the question – and believe me, I am not picking nits – "What is it about human sentience or consciousness that makes it, I’m assuming, a unique version (?) of sentience or consciousness?

And I ask precisely because

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Good questions, all. As always, “curmudgeon” away; I’m just throwing spaghetti again. :smile:

The “humaniverse” is my own shorthand, inspired by Wendt and Carroll Quigley, who noted that humans operate in space-time and in a “fifth” dimension he called “abstraction”. (Quigley treats time as a fourth, which I understand is not quite how things are currently understood). I probably should have said “…which exists among humans by virtue of…”, which sidesteps for now whether and how it may or may not be ‘unique’. Right now, we’re the only ones we know who ‘do art’ would be another (weak) way to present the concept.

Is this an actual (physical) subdomain, or is it an analytical (psychological) construct to help us better understand the actuality of the universe itself? Or “somewhere in between”? The answer might still be yes to all…

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Damn the spaghetti! Full speed ahead!

Fair enough. Like I said, I haven’t read Wendt (nor Quigley, for that matter), so I am in no position to say anything about anything they think or say. However, …

The notion of “abstraction” as a “fifth dimension” (besides the Moon being in the 7th House, and Jupiter being aligned with Mars) is catchy (if that’s the right word), because Aryeh Kaplan, in his Sepher Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, which is his own translation and commentary on the ancient Kabbalistic text of the same name, tells us that Gen 1 (which is the basis text of which the Sepher Yetzirah is the commentary) that we exist in a five-dimensional universe. I have long wondered what that means.

Somewhere post-Arthur Young and the Mereon Matrix and Meru, Sir Geoffrey and I pondered on what it means to envision/understand/conceptualize/grok (?) four dimensions, and both of us without much success, so the challenge, for me at least, to get just what it is that Quigley and Kaplan may be talking about is pushing me to my limits, I fear. OK, maybe I just naturally tend to make things more complicated than they really are, but “abstraction” as a “fifth dimension” strikes me – post-Gebserianarily or post-Einsteinianarily (i.e., “time” may or may not be 4D) – as not all that convincing.

Stan Tenen, from the Meru Foundation, has demonstrated that the Sepher Yetzirah exhibits the same letter-level coding as Gen 1. This is, in a word, spooky, if not unnerving. It means, on the one hand, that Kaplan may be “right” (or at least accurate in his observations), and, on the other, that a more intense consciousness than our (mere) human variety may be involved in the composition. This would be significant if only in light of the fact that both texts – Gen 1 and the Sepher Yetzirah – seem to be talking about consciousness itself. Given that – as far as we know – only we humans are (even potentially) capable of “grokking” this is cause for concern; that is, for serious consideration of what it is we’re even talking about.

For this reason, I am always interested in anyone who starts talking about these things in a coherent manner. (There are enough marginal thinkers who are not contributing significantly or seriously to the discussion.) This isn’t necessarily a “project” of mine (though maybe it should be), but sometimes I read/hear things that snap my attention around to possible resolutionary approaches.

Your commentary on Wendt piqued my interest for this very reason, that’s all.

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I am Feeling & Pondering on both your transmissions & I Hope this lands in a respectful way,Sitting on The Dock of the Bay seemed to vibe with what I am listening too?

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:rofl: Love it!

"When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it. But the historian must deal with history by rational processes. Accordingly, he must be aware of the processes and difficulties to which we have referred when we try to deal with continua rationally. For history deals with changes in society. And all changes, occurring in time, involve continua. Both society and culture are, even if static, concerned with continua. Indeed, a society is a continuum of continua in five dimensions.
“When we say that a society or a civilization exists in five dimensions, we are referring to the fact that it exists in the three dimensions of space, the fourth dimension of time, and the fifth dimension of abstraction. All of these are easy to understand except the last… It is clear that every culture consists of concrete objects like clothes and weapons, of less tangible objects like emotions and feelings, and of quite abstract things like ideas.”

The Evolution of Civilizations, Carroll Quigley (2nd ed., Indianapolis, IN, 1979), p. 99

It’s not a problem-free conception, that’s for sure. The above comes after a long discussion of what he calls “continua” where the (rational) drawing of boundaries is problematic (e.g. Zeno’s paradox or the colors of the rainbow, etc.). Then suddenly he seems to be speaking of “dimensions” as if the separations are meaningful. We cannot (in our current form at any rate) really experience “length” without “depth”, and probably not “space” without some kind of sequence. In the end, numbering dimensions is probably less useful than stressing the connections among them.
And there is where I see the point - for the human cultural and political worlds that Quigley and Wendt are primarily concerned about in their respective work, the physical and the psychological are simply part of the same… place. We cannot (in our current form at any rate) really experience one without the other.
Now, Wendt goes from there (Why a World State is Inevitable is the article in question, by the way) to stress that a certain logic of political development is involved that combines what Quigley defined as “non-rational… actors” in history and identifiable “rational processes” (i.e. the influence of ‘self-organizing’ historical systems on the options and decisions of those actors). The materialist cries foul (or at least levels charges of historicism as Popper did) at any such hint of a notion of ‘independent’ “forces”. But it may be one thing to talk about the interactions of atoms and another to talk of the interactions of ideas. Or not if we are “walking quantum wave functions”…

Ed, I welcome your input. I get more from one of your posts (this goes for others here as well) than I ever did from thread pages of drivel, memes, and entrenched opinions elsewhere on the internet. Especially when I’m thinking out loud. I count feedback as a privilege.
I think I understand where Wendt was trying to go. I’m still assessing whether he made his case; it may boil down to semantics in the end. But then again it may be about connections - like the ones that brought Kripal, Wendt, and Quigley together in my head (and Tenen is yet another name that has been on a very long list for a very long time :cry:) - that ultimately link vision and results.

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From TJ’s dream May 2 from the Generations 3

I put the fading daylight to my left and move forward across a wide field toward a line of woods beyond which I know there to be a dirt road. I do not choose to look behind me toward the sound of crackling flames. Their glow casts a greasy dark shadow across shifting, gathering clouds overhead.

It is the malevolent serpent of hatred there, cold and coiled in the sky.

I am now conscious of a fourth-wall break in the dreamscape; I am trailed by children in a Virginia field in another century, but my mind echoes with thoughts: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Rwanda, the Pakistan-India border, Tibet, the Rohingya of Myanmar…

The prophet-sage inhales. I feel… power. I address the snake.
“Only those who imbibe your venom are vulnerable. We will survive. You are mortal.”

A cold, reptilian visage turns toward me, but I sense great fear. I have locked eyes with Tiamat, the dragon of chaos herself… but it is Marduk speaking.
“Yes. You are mortal.”

And when a fourth wall break in the dreamscape-

Where does that fourth wall break come from?

Could that come from the fifth?

Charles Taylor examines two different semantic logics-

"The first aims to characterize a self standing, independent reality. We explore the external world by generating descriptions which can be clearly verified by checking them against independent self-standing realities, sometimes it is generated by sophisticated theories about underlying mechanisms.

With the second, we explore the world of meanings ( which is not simply an "inner “world) by probing it through expressions-articulations, which then pan out or fail to convince and are replaced by other probes…this second zone is the site of attempts to define the shape of significance.” p.252 The Language Animal

Wendt advances that most dilemmas around agency, subjectivity and freedom are produced by an outdated metaphysical world, that of Newtonian classical physics.

" For Wendt, there is no such problem once we adopt a quantum mechnaical worldview and see human beings as biological organisms that are both classical and quantum in nature and function. Yes, of course, our bodies are classical objects, but our forms of consciousness are not. Mind and social life are quantum mechanical phenomena, not classical objects in three dimensional space. They work like quantum mechanical phenomena, not like classical objects in three-dimensional space. A wave function is a potential reality, not an actual one. It is by definition " plural", " “paradoxical” and “multiple”. Mind is an expression of the quantum wave function, matter is an expression of its collapse as a particle… We are walking wave functions." p.115 Kripal The Flip
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So, TJ, have you flipped yet?

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Flipped out, no doubt. :grin:

[Edit: Ah, maybe I should clarify “made his [Wendt] case”? - I specifically refer to the inevitability of the world-state as derived from ‘final cause’ or even a combination of ‘causes’. Simple extrapolation of present trends based on past experience - especially giving things another century or so - strengthen the probability that he is right.
I haven’t even begun to give serious enough thought, beyond appreciating its elegance, to his overall approach to consciousness.]

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I went uptown to the grand old reading room at 42nd street library to read his book. Unfortunately, I can’t check it out. I have no room in my apartment for more books so I have to use the library but I am going to break my rule and purchase this one. After years of tortured study I feel that I am starting to get quantum mechanics. That is a great compliment, that Wendt can make this accessible to a non-physicist like myself. And he isn’t a physicist. But his brother is. Mind boggling!

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That’s what makes it all the more fun to ruminate on. :grimacing: The larger quote you provided does help contextualize the notion, however.

“Place”, yes; maybe “state” as well. When physicists speak of dimensions, I get the feeling they mean the term spatially. Tenen (following Young) talks about dimensions being situated 90 deg. from each other, and when I’m trying to imagine what is 90 deg. from Cartesian space, the mental machinery starts grinding, and trying to imagine what is 90 deg. from that generally generates observable wafts of smoke. But I do appreciate the added impetus for pondering about it all.

Well, I think it is becoming increasingly clear that the materialists are simply going to have to get over themselves.

BTW, what is the source for the Wendt article?

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John submitted it in “Generations III”:

It’s quite absorbing for someone pondering ‘how we see history’ questions (can you tell? LOL).

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A%20Box%20of%20Darknes

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