Einstein and the Cosmic Man

[Greta]

You are disappointed with public conversation but are you part of the problem or the solution?

I am not interested in playing "who is more moral". You lost that one battle miserably after you refused to admit that Trump's "pussy" grabbing was wrong.

You are content to argue empiricism and support science thinking that somehow it is beneficial for the psychologically fallen human condition. That just makes you part of the problem.

Everyone who discusses anything with you at some stage becomes frustrated with your obsession with engaging in pissing contests. You seem unable to switch it off.

Just once, why not try making a post that does not desperately imply that you are morally superior? You might even make some friends.

[Arising_uk]

It sounds good but anyone who has done some serious inner work has experienced resistance and how it reveals itself through hypocrisy. ...

Just excuses.

Western Buddhism doesn't value the necessity of grace for the human psych to become normal. ...

'Western Buddhism' is a nonsense.

Also, my interest is in establishing the complimentary relationship of science and religion essential if humanity is to survive technology. ...

So you say but I think your doomsaying is just the standard fare of the creation theist who are more than likely to blow things up against those it believes are the unbelievers.

Buddhism doesn't invite the quality of pondering necessary to to understand the relationship. ...

Actually, if you wish, it gives you the method and morals to behave when using technology.

Meditation is insufficient.

It is, you also have to believe the four noble truths and follow the eight-fold path.

[Belinda]

Nick_A, enlightened souls are recognised by the fruits that they bear. Your brand of spirituality, however much it benefits Nick and Friends ,is exclusive and divisive.

Your trouble is that as a collectivist you do not respect individuality. The "good" people are those who are content to provide their function as atoms of the great beast. In contrast I admire the individuals whose search for and dedication to truth annoys the Great Beast so are considered divisive. I am fortunate that there is an ancestor of mind who was an incredible individual so appreciate the value of individuality, Naturally this attitude attracts condemnation.

That is a good attitude, Nick. However your search for truth is unbalanced and you need to put more reason into it. Reason is available to all and is not confined to mystics.The use of reason will not spoil your individuality but will enhance it.

[Nick_A]

Nick_A, enlightened souls are recognised by the fruits that they bear. Your brand of spirituality, however much it benefits Nick and Friends ,is exclusive and divisive.

Your trouble is that as a collectivist you do not respect individuality. The "good" people are those who are content to provide their function as atoms of the great beast. In contrast I admire the individuals whose search for and dedication to truth annoys the Great Beast so are considered divisive. I am fortunate that there is an ancestor of mind who was an incredible individual so appreciate the value of individuality, Naturally this attitude attracts condemnation.

That is a good attitude, Nick. However your search for truth is unbalanced and you need to put more reason into it. Reason is available to all and is not confined to mystics.The use of reason will not spoil your individuality but will enhance it.

What IYO would be a balanced search for truth?

[Nick_A]

Arising

It is, you also have to believe the four noble truths and follow the eight-fold path.

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
1. Right Understanding (Samma ditthi)
2. Right Thought (Samma sankappa)
3. Right Speech (Samma vaca)
4. Right Action (Samma kammanta)
5. Right Livelihood (Samma ajiva)
6. Right Effort (Samma vayama)
7. Right Mindfulness (Samma sati)
8. Right Concentration (Samma Samadhi

Why don’t you believe? Why have you avoided indoctrination into right belief and insist on expressing wrong thoughts, wrong speech and so on?

[Nick_A]

Greta

Just once, why not try making a post that does not desperately imply that you are morally superior? You might even make some friends

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Wisdom begins with recognition of our slavery to the human condition and the futility of secularism, regardless of the form it takes, to cope with it.. It is intolerable for the secular mind. Recognition of the dynamics of the human condition doesn't make me morally superior. It just makes me realistic. Einstein understood the potential for people to become human rather than continuing in psychological slavery to the Great Beast. Of course he was rejected. Doubting the superiority of the beast is a capital offense.

[Belinda]

Nick_A wrote:

What IYO would be a balanced search for truth?

While I respect the mystic's special insight, there is also understanding of the fine arts, music,and literature. Also the scepticism that arms the scientist and the philosopher against false conclusions.

Reason includes scepticism because often we are tempted by our own prejudices and passions to overlook what unwittingly testifies at least to probabilities. As Greta implied you stand upon your own perceived righteousness and that is how you are unbalanced.
I may be utterly mistaken but I trust that my own scepticism will stop me becoming conceited!

[Nick_A]

Nick_A wrote:

What IYO would be a balanced search for truth?

While I respect the mystic's special insight, there is also understanding of the fine arts, music,and literature. Also the scepticism that arms the scientist and the philosopher against false conclusions.

Reason includes scepticism because often we are tempted by our own prejudices and passions to overlook what unwittingly testifies at least to probabilities. As Greta implied you stand upon your own perceived righteousness and that is how you are unbalanced.
I may be utterly mistaken but I trust that my own scepticism will stop me becoming conceited!

Most agree with you. The search for truth is described as judgment from an acquired perspective. The secular mindset has forgotten what it means to impartially “know thyself” or what it means “to see.” This situation prevents a balanced search for truth. How many today even will understand what Simone is referring to much less be capable of it?

."Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." ~Simone Weil

Collectively we lack the quality of conscious attention necessary to “see” rather than judge. Obviously the attitudes necessary to begin to see requires an “attitude” and capacity for impartiality many will think to be righteous. My advantage is the willingness to admit the problem rather than denying it in favor of wishful imagination

[Greta]

Greta

Just once, why not try making a post that does not desperately imply that you are morally superior? You might even make some friends

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Wisdom begins with recognition of our slavery to the human condition and the futility of secularism ...

What is it that you are claiming to be "secularism"? As far as I can tell it includes all religions and all sciences.

Do you have an example in history of a time when humanity was operating as you believe it should be?

It is intolerable for the secular mind.

Stop making such simplistic and childish claims. I note that this thing you call secularism - which is actually collectivism - is intolerable to you. You like to think you are more than the mindless chattel of humanity around you. You like to think that, of the hundred billion people who have lived and died, they were just fools and you and your ideas represent the next generation of human advancement.

In truth, you are just one more tiny expression of something much larger than you - the body of humanity - which you owe everything but just spit in its face like a rebellious teen.

Recognition of the dynamics of the human condition doesn't make me morally superior. It just makes me realistic. Einstein understood the potential for people to become human rather than continuing in psychological slavery to the Great Beast. Of course he was rejected. Doubting the superiority of the beast is a capital offense.

In other words:

"It is not egotistical for me to posit myself as superior to almost all other people, I'm just facing the reality of my obvious superiority which you, foolish Greta, refuse to acknowledge".

If I try to work past your morass of hangups - if I aim to comprehend the nub of what you would be are saying if not for your emotional noise - then basically your complaint is about sacrificing your individuality for the collective, and your refusal to bend to that collective, which you melodramatically dub "The Great Beast".

Basically you claim that we defer to "Caesar" too much. Many probably do, sure. They are called "conservatives", and they tend to promote stability and stagnation, the former undermined by progressives, who also alleviate the latter.

Now ... in case you haven't noticed, Nicholas, these days "Caesar" is armed with high tech intel with more networks and contacts than your suburb has had hot dinners, huge stores of weaponised technology including AI drones that can destroy things safely across the world if need be. Today, you either give to Caesar or Caesar crushes you.

As I have said here before, human society as a whole is doing to vulnerable individuals what humans did to other species. What goes around, comes around so there's no point complaining.

Perhaps we would be better served by reflecting about how thoughtlessly we have abused other organisms, not to mention other peoples? Perhaps, as we feel the sting of society's exploitation of us, we might imagine how indigenous people and different species felt as we meted out that very same treatment to them?

Where does that leave us? Exactly like everyone else - with our own particular beefs about certain aspects of society. Everyone seems to have their own pet hates about this edifice that both sustains and exploits us, and there's no reason to believe that your focus on new age spirituality or my focus on nature are any more important than the concerns of the other seven billion malcontents

Life is complex and no doubt every person with a complaint has a point. Maybe not a sense of priority, but beneath whatever noise people make, there's always some substance to a person's grievances, whether they reflect real circumstances or fears.

N.B. It is possible to remain quietly and determinedly individual without additional display behaviour and chest beating.

[Nick_A]

Krista Tippett’s interview of Jacob Needleman refers to ideas you reject. That is OK. I know most here will also reject them but there may be some lurkers who are intrigued in these odd ideas being expressed here and by those like Einstein and Simone Weil and can delve deeper into the source of these ideas. So even though you have no interest I will post this excerpt for those who may have an interest into the meaning of America and this strange word conscience which Einstein also used.

Freedom to become a cosmic man requires help and secularism will do what it can to deny this help since it threatens secular superiority maintained through indoctrination. This means that those interested in acquiring a more human perspective suggested by Einstein must go underground and find those with a similar interest since dominant secularism is against them.

The question is asked what freedom is for since we are free to do this and that? Who remembers anymore? How do those desiring inner freedom find the help necessary to acquire it and the quality of conscience necessary to feel when it is genuine when so much is opposed to it? Who knows? It’s not your concern Greta. You re only concerned with Donald Trump. You believe that a progressive education and science will lead to inner freedom and conscience. It cannot and you have no idea why. You are not alone. Most agree with you that freedom is found in your remote. IMO this assures that the goals of America will completely devolve into the glorification of materialism and the battle over “rights”. The result of course will be the destruction of America from the inside.

Consider this excerpt from the Inner Work of Democracy:


https://onbeing.org/programs/jacob-need ... democracy/

MS. TIPPETT: Let’s talk about some more of these American ideas. I mean the very idea of freedom itself, I think you believe we have a sort of superficial understanding of that.

MR. NEEDLEMAN: Absolutely. It’s become so trivialized, freedom. It’s wonderful to be able to go where I want and do what I want and buy what I want, buy and buy, and get and get, and talk and talk, and I have no constraints. We certainly need external liberty. God knows, that’s one of the most precious things this country has to offer the masses of humanity who have come here. I don’t mean to put that down in any way. Without that, without that, the rest is just academic.
But without the inner meaning of freedom and liberty, we have to ask, “Well, what is this freedom for?” It’s not just a freedom to get a big house and a big car and a lot of goods. So inner freedom is an idea that has gone out of our conversation. Inner freedom means inwardly to be free from these egoistic, selfish cravings, which make our life turn around into chaos. It’s an interior freedom, which maybe you can say is mystical or certainly spiritual, but without that dimension to the idea of freedom, the idea of freedom becomes purely external and eventually selfish.

MS. TIPPETT: But is there a place within our democratic structures or elsewhere in our common life to cultivate that kind of inner freedom?

MR. NEEDLEMAN: There is. And the point is really that we are free to search. We have the liberty to gather together in communities, to study, to work, to find our own relationship to the spirit of conscience, which is what makes a human being really a moral and free human being.
Thomas Paine and others have made a very important distinction between government and society. Government protects society. Society is the realm where people relate to each other in subtle, aesthetic, ethical, sensitive, spiritual ways. It can’t be legislated. It’s where the real inner moral life of human beings takes place. Government is an external armor, an external structure which allows that and protects society.
So the great purpose of America is to provide a place where people can search to become fully human in themselves. Now, we have a strong military, we have a strong Constitution. We have all — with all the warts and all the things wrong with us, it’s still possible to say that America is the guardian of the possibility of human beings to search for conscience.

MS. TIPPETT: What did the Founders mean when they used the word “conscience”?

MR. NEEDLEMAN: For the Founders and for all spiritual teachings — and by “founders,” by the way, I want to broaden the founders to include people who came later, including such people, of course, as Lincoln and also — one people may find strange — Frederick Douglass and people like that who spoke very powerfully of conscience. Conscience is an absolute power within the human psyche to intuit real values of good and evil and right and wrong. We are born with that capacity. It’s not just socially conditioned into us. This is what the great traditions teach. This is what I think. But it is covered over by a lot of the egoism and chaos of our unfree inner life………………………………...

[Greta]

What I see in your post is a denial of nature, the nature from which this human meta-reality that so occupies your thoughts emerged.

Where is the love and joy and curiosity and humour and lightness of being? You make life sound like a dreary trudge towards some holy grail of morality. Isn't life terrible enough without making it more so?

Inner meaning is as simple as Spinoza's conception, appreciating that the atoms of which we are comprised were forged in the core of giant stars in the process of turning themselves inside out and that we are are part of this incredible edifice, not an insignificant outsider. That's not miles from Einstein's perspective.

It is possible to simply appreciate that we are ultimately all one without adopting a posture about it, or embarking on a crusade. If we have any depth, it will pass to others wordlessly and intuitively via regular communication, without needing to preach or posture. If we aren't all that deep, then our interactions won't leave much of a mark, or leave a negative one. Not that that matters because, as I say, each individual doesn't need to be deep because we are all ultimately "one" as well as "many".

This is the reality of living in a eusocial society, which those unfamiliar with naturalism and Taylorism will find confusing. It leads to much esoteric and impractical (but not necessarily worthless) intellectual queries as people agonise pointlessly over natural processes, eg. humans beings being usurped by their collectives in basically the same way as they usurped other animals. So it goes.

[Arising_uk]

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
...
Why don’t you believe? Why have you avoided indoctrination into right belief and insist on expressing wrong thoughts, wrong speech and so on?

Because I'm not a Buddhist?

You don't believe in the Eightfold Path you follow it and you follow it because you believe in the Four Noble Truths. The Path is to get you to Nirvana which I don't believe in. However by an' large I do keep to the path as do I act as a Christian in many matters.

You say you are a theist who believes in your 'God', you have no excuse and your 'God' will brook none.

[Nick_A]

Greta I don’t deny human nature. I have only come to admit its ever changing reality. I have nothing against being happy but a true lover of wisdom comes to see that we are always changing regardless of our imagined free will. One day we cure and then kill on the next. A minority come to question why this is so and what does it mean. They verify what Plato wrote:

"Man - a being in search of meaning." - Plato

You can talk about joy and happiness all you like but in reality it is ever changing. We are never the same

Where Plato defines man as a being in search of meaning, you define man as a being in search of pleasure. For some being absorbed in pleasure is insufficient to satisfy the need for meaning so become open to what those in search of pleasure will avoid like poison. Simone explains

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams." ~ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

In short, as Plato’s cave allegory suggests we live in a dream. Some, and Simone is an extreme example, are willing to sacrifice the pleasures of imagination for the joys experienced through opening to reality

None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes. -Johann von Goethe

You are with the majority who seek to tolerate hypocrisy for the sake of pleasure. Don’t worry, be happy, and let it go at that. Forget about it and just pass the mustard. You don’t realize that you are not inwardly free and what would be possible if you were. That is your way and I accept it. I respect and support the minority who admit the human condition and have remembered that in our essence we are beings in search of meaning and the search is even worth sacrificing pleasure for. Awakening to the experience of reality is an unpleasant shock. It makes one question their life which is why unless a person really needs this awakening, it is better just to stay lost in dreams.

Matthew 13:45-46King James Version (KJV)
45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:
46 Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

How many are willing to sacrifice the pleasures of lesser pearls for the pearl of great price – awakening to reality especially since the world is against them? Is striving to awaken in order to acquire the conscious perspective Einstein describes as that of the cosmic man? You say no. Don't worry, just be happy. it is your way.

[Nick_A]

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH
...
Why don’t you believe? Why have you avoided indoctrination into right belief and insist on expressing wrong thoughts, wrong speech and so on?

Because I'm not a Buddhist?

You don't believe in the Eightfold Path you follow it and you follow it because you believe in the Four Noble Truths. The Path is to get you to Nirvana which I don't believe in. However by an' large I do keep to the path as do I act as a Christian in many matters.

You say you are a theist who believes in your 'God', you have no excuse and your 'God' will brook none.

OK, so you are a theist. You believe in the four Noble Truths so blindly follow the Eightfold Path accept when you don't want to. You sound perfectly normal to me.

[Greta]

Greta I don’t deny human nature. I have only come to admit its ever changing reality. I have nothing against being happy but a true lover of wisdom comes to see that we are always changing regardless of our imagined free will. One day we cure and then kill on the next. A minority come to question why this is so and what does it mean. They verify what Plato wrote:

"Man - a being in search of meaning." - Plato

You can talk about joy and happiness all you like but in reality it is ever changing. We are never the same

That makes clear that happiness will only be possible for the adaptable and the immovable. The rest will simply always be hurt and disappointed with inevitable change, just as every parent feels at times when seeing the "world turn to hell" along with the shiftless next generation. And those shiftless rebels grow to be tut-tutting parents seeing their world "turn to hell" - and so on.

It's not easy to maintain high spirits as you watch everything you knew and love be replaced by something more functional, rational, inelegant and uninviting. Rationalism, the creeping virus of control that infects all things, stripping away the beauty, complexity and soulfulness and replacing it with sensible and economically responsible brutish straight lines comprises of plastic, glass and steel. And every job you have, over time, will lose its perks. They are rationalised away - all those things that made the work worthwhile - creative and innovative opportunities.

Meanwhile, the greater edifice prospers, bloated on dashed dreams of its underlings just as humans bloated themselves on other animals.

In short, as Plato’s cave allegory suggests we live in a dream. Some, and Simone is an extreme example, are willing to sacrifice the pleasures of imagination for the joys experienced through opening to reality

Not too many doubt that we live in a dream. We simply cannot comprehend actual reality and instead construct one from available components of reality. In truth, we aren't hominids tapping on keyboards at each other, we are tiny ripples within a long streak winding its way through space like a temporal snake at approximately two million kms per hour.

You are with the majority who seek to tolerate hypocrisy for the sake of pleasure. Don’t worry, be happy, and let it go at that. Forget about it and just pass the mustard. You don’t realize that you are not inwardly free and what would be possible if you were. That is your way and I accept it.

Am I? I thought I disliked hypocrisy as much as any other. Meanwhile, I note your lack of judgement for your hero, Trump, who is a blatant hypocrite - the man of the people

I respect and support the minority who admit the human condition and have remembered that in our essence we are beings in search of meaning and the search is even worth sacrificing pleasure for. Awakening to the experience of reality is an unpleasant shock. It makes one question their life which is why unless a person really needs this awakening, it is better just to stay lost in dreams.

Actual reality is quite a shock when we are lost in abstractions. Suddenly we find in a brutal way that biology is temporal and the world we knew is gone, replaced by a physically helpless one consumed with nausea and pain.

At that point a person no doubt forms particular views about reality. No doubt they have different priorities to those of their former, everyday selves, safely away from the veil.

So you can yammer on about how awake you are and how asleep the rest of the world is but, failing sudden death, at some stage we will all experience the moment when we know how we will die and see the unknown of death ahead. I suggest that that time will be rather a wakeup call for each of us unless we've been suffering long enough to seek death's (assumed) respite.