Friday, October 28, 2022
4:20 a.m. So let’s look some more at Egypt. I glanced through my photos from 2019 yesterday – only a few of them, not all, by any means – and it did bring it back, a bit.
Looking back at Wednesday’s conversation, I am struck with the idea of things being portals. After discussion with others, we hared off into the question of whether the Egyptians were trying to prevent soul and spirit from disconnecting after death, and I know we will want to come back to that, but let’s look at things being portals. And don’t think I don’t feel the prompting, here. Presence, receptivity, clarity: Over to you.
It is the presumption that things are no more than the sum of qualities that can be measured that is the problem the West faces. And, ironically but inevitably, the West taught this fallacy to the rest of the world, and now sees it reflected to itself in daily life.
If I have the history right – and I realize, probably I have only a stripped-down version of it – it was Galileo who began the study of objects and forces as only the qualities that could be measured. If he was weighing an object, or observing its momentum or whatever, he did not consider its color or smell, for instance, as relevant.
You can make a much more careful statement than that, and it will aid the discussion.
All right. Galileo stripped away consideration of any qualities he considered metaphysical, let’s put it that way. He didn’t care what aspects the object may have been born under, nor what were the traditional affinities of iron, say, to various systems. It’s hard to put into specifics, because I don’t know the specifics, but medieval knowledge has all sorts of categories that made sense to them originally, and/or were legacies of hermetic studies, and/or were superstitions that has accreted over time. That is, it was a mess, and .Galileo showed his contemporaries how to cut clean through it. He opened the way for modern science, in that sense.
It was not a one-man show, but yes, that is the sense of it. The Renaissance thought it was stepping out of the rubble of medieval superstition and setting out to see what the world was really like.
Just like you and your friends, and equally justly. Only, every new start is flawed, because it necessarily discards as untrue some things that are true, and makes assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that seem obvious but are nonetheless misreadings.
Such missteps cannot be avoided, so should be regarded as just part of the process of discovery. If the fact leads explorers to retain a certain sense of humility in the face of the incomprehensibility of everything [that is, our inability to ever understand totality], so much the better.
You will remember, we said that every new approach will consist of:
- Discarding what now seems wrong
- Re-examining things the established view had discarded
- Fitting together anything that now seems to fit, some of which will seem scientific, some superstitious, some tentative (that is, provisionally believed because it seems to follow, with or without supporting evidence).
Ideally, you will cast your net widely, leaving systematization for a later time, perhaps for a later generation, because it is the insight that changes things. It is the new viewpoint that is the critical factor, not the specifics of what is viewed.
I think of Wade Davis, I’m pretty sure the name is, a scientist who in Brazil or somewhere experienced the spirit of plants communicating with him, after he used ayahuasca or some psychoactive substance with the natives. I have his book upstairs somewhere. If I find it easily, I will cite it when I transcribe this. The Serpent and the Rainbow? Something like that. I reviewed it for the newspaper in the 1980s.
[Didn’t find the book, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis_(anthropologist)]
And he is an example of what is needed, a scientist with credentials who is willing to explore what his peers might dismiss in advance as obvious nonsense. We say, “what is needed”: This should make it obvious that this is what is being provided, all over the world, all over various disciplines. Life provides for itself what it needs.
Because the process of exploration and discovery proceeds in this non-inerrant manner – that is, by a combination of hits and errors – clues will be found everywhere, and the question becomes, how do you fit them together. You understand the gist of this?
I think so. You are saying ten people can look at the same pool of facts and each draw different conclusions as to what is relevant or irrelevant, and what is accurate or distorted or false, and therefore what sense is to be made of the pieces selected as real and relevant.
Yes. And, considering that each of you will begin from a biased position – necessarily – how likely is it that any ten people will come to agreement? Much more likely, they will agree on a certain amount and will agree to disagree on the rest. Nor will the agreed-upon area be necessarily the same for all. Some may agree on A to E, but not F, and then G to J, say, while others may agree on A to C, not D, then E to J, etc. Enough to work together, but never unanimity, which anyway would not be a good thing.
And right here, for instance, is one such belief to be challenged: the belief that there is a “the” truth. That was materialist science’s hope and its faith: Examine facts closely and you will be able to see what really is, and how it relates, and even how it may be expressed mathematically. The idea that there may be no truth other than viewpoint is the equivalent of that anarchist’s dream of throwing a bomb into pure mathematics.
So, things as portals –.
We haven’t wandered. What is psychometry, “scientifically” considered, but superstition. But – it works, and so is a fact, and so falls into the category of things to be investigated. But science cannot take psychometry seriously unless it postulates that matter can somehow store memories.
Not necessarily. It can provide access to memories.
From the point of view of materialist science, so much the worse! Now you have suggested that matter has properties that cannot be measured except in psychological effect. And this means that all the discarded lore about the psychological properties of various stones must be re-examined more sympathetically. And it’s worse than that, for them: It means they themselves are not the experts but the uninstructed, and they nee to humble themselves enough to accept as teachers those they had presumed were superstitious or were charlatans.
But there is another side to it. Take the natives who have used psychoactive plants all these centuries and have accepted a view of the situation. They, too, need to adjust their views. It isn’t that the truth has changed. (What “the” truth?) It is that the new civilization will include their knowledge and beliefs, but will change it, too, just as it will accept materialist knowledge and beliefs, but will change that as well. It isn’t a matter of accepting any one, nor of rejecting everything and beginning anew. It is a matter of casting the net widely and re-examining what is caught in the mesh.
So, when you accept the possibility of psychometry, you look at the record: What has been recorded about it? When did the idea come up in modern times, who has studied it, with what results, etc. [For a jaundiced precis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal).] But anyone else’s conclusions are your initiating queries. You aren’t out to imitate their mindset, but to look at these fishes among other fishes you (but not they) may have caught in other casts. Wade Davis did not draw the same conclusions from his psychoactive-substance-enabled contact with plant spirits that his fellow experiencers did, nor could he have done, nor should he have done. Your bias is your gift to the world. Don’t abandon it, refine it.
Things as portals will necessarily mean different things to you than they ever have to anyone who ever lived, because who ever embodied just your exact bias?
To be continued, I take it?
Yes. Call this one “Things as portals,” if you wish, but a better title might be, “Exploration and bias.”
Yes, I agree. Very well, our thanks as always.