Wow! How to explain this...Walker wrote: ↑Tue Oct 04, 2022 8:27 amHave you read Eric Hoffer's thoughts about nature? If not, you would enjoy them.iambiguous wrote: ↑Mon Oct 03, 2022 8:44 pm Instead, what I have come to focus on is how nature itself, while "blessing" some of the people some of the time, can also make life a living hell for others. Just ask the folks in parts of Florida these days. Or the folks who have suffered a great loss as a result of the covid pandemic. Hurricanes and viruses are nature in a nutshell.
I contribute to a thread here -- viewtopic.php?f=20&t=28015&start=900 -- revolving around quotes. I bring the "great minds" I quote over on my ILP thread here.
I rotate through ten authors. Most of the quotes come from the Goodreads book site. And, as I run out of quotes from one, I add another.
Well, the next one on my list is Eric Hoffer.
Doesn't have much to do with magic and electro-magnetism, I suspect, but it shows how "spooky" things -- coincidences -- can pop up in your life and get you to supposing all sorts of things.
In fact, I recall many years ago I was watching a TV program that featured James Randi exposing what he construed to be skilled magicians passing themselves off as the "real deal". I believe one of them was Uri Gellar. Geller addresses the audience. He asked viewers to go through their house. He told them that they would find something truly out of the ordinary. Something that always worked but now did not. Something that never worked but now did. So, my daughter and I go from room to room. Nothing. But while in the bathroom there was suddenly an explosion of flashing lights outside the house. Fire engines and ambulances and cop cars. And that had never happened in all the years we lived there.
It turned out a house had caught on fire and nearly burned to the ground.
Does that count, Mr. Gellar?
There are just weird things happening in the world. And, after all, the very existence of existence itself is nothing short of mind-boggling. It's not just how to explain it, but how to even go about explaining it.
Only from my frame of mind, those such as Pagans tend to focus on Nature only when it is bountiful and aesthetically beautiful. Mother Nature. The emphasis, for example, on Native Americans and Aboriginals and their own "spiritual" attachment "to the land".
Going all the way back to those communities who practiced animal and human sacrifices in order to please or to appease the Gods of Nature.
But: the main reason they did that was because nature could also be brutally savage.
From my frame of mind, this "spiritual" component revolves more around a psychological defense mechanism. Being able to ground your "soul" in something you are able to anchor I to. Something that reconfigures the individual as an "utterly tiny and insignificant speck of existence" in the staggering vastness of all there is given the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless and purposeless existence into "somehow" being "at one" with the universe.
Or with God. Or with the Goddess.
Unless of course I'm wrong.