Sunday, December 24, 2017
So where are we in your syllabus?
We are still in the process of tying together concepts that have become so widely disassociated in your lives as to remove the center Yeats was talking about. * [See below]
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. That is what happens when a civilization’s central stabilizing tenets lose their ability to compel people’s belief. (We don’t mean “compel” by force; no one can compel belief, only external pretense at belief.)
Given that no “the” truth can be found by 3D minds conditioned by 3D circumstances, no society can be founded on “the” truth. Finding things that are true enough will do, must do, because that is the best that can be done. The question isn’t whether a society’s beliefs are the truth; it is whether its truths hold together.
But you aren’t saying that a society based entirely upon consistent lies and errors is more viable than one that is less consistent but closer to reality.
Way too many assumptions and definitions there. but it does remind us to go a little bit slow.
All societies may be said to be based somewhat upon errors, whether or not upon lies as well. Yet, all societies will be based upon some values, conscious or unconsciously held, so in effect every society will be based upon at least some potential truths. Nazi Germany, which is in your mind, still drew upon powerful constructive beliefs held by the German people.
And perverted them.
It did, but that isn’t the point. Beliefs in one’s duty to the state and to the society around one; willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the greater whole; pride in race and culture; defiance of fate and circumstance – all these values were there to be exploited. It is not the fault of the people that they were no match for the malevolent manipulation that called forth the dark side of those same values.
I might have argued against you, in my youth, but I have spent my adult life watching the same process turn my own country into the dark counter-figure of what it was before the coup of November, 1963.
Yes, but the issue is much deeper than you know, certainly deeper than they know who attribute motives and causes to ideology and politics. America’s sins come from the very defects of its qualities; people can only hijack what is there to be hijacked. And they can’t do that until a people’s grip on their central myth has been loosened. Until then, they may be misgoverned and cheated and lied to and manipulated, but the unifying myth will hold things together. Only when the myth decays or is shattered, as with Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, may a social order based on certain shared perceptions and beliefs be destroyed.
Yet this is still speaking on a superficial abstract level. Countries, societies, civilizations, do not fall or fundamentally transmute themselves merely from internal causes however serious. The fundamental transformation of human society won’t happen uniformly, and its effects will appear very different in different societies, for the impact of any given present moment’s circumstances always interact with that society’s past. That is what is there to be interacted with!
I have seen us at a point between two ways of seeing the world at least since reading [in the 1970s] Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, describing the transition from the medieval mind to the mind of what is called modern times. And, there is Toynbee’s Study of History. And Bob Monroe’s description of “the gathering.”
As we say, it has taken time for the concept to broaden, deepen, and transform your conscious mindset and your underlying assumptions. The process is that of loosening the existing web of beliefs so that it may be tightened again in a new configuration.
Let’s see if I can put it into words. This ties into the globalization of culture.
Geography, linguistic differences, all the barriers that have kept human societies divided, no longer do so. There is no getting away from anybody else any more. The internet, radio, TV, a thousand forms of inadvertent cultural exchange are continually battering at the walls dividing human societies. The process shakes old certainties,. draws members of one society to aspects of other societies. So, it loosens the net of any one given civilization. Old beliefs no longer exist in isolation, and so there is a continuous below-conscious-level counter-pressure undermining them. The new global civilization will self-construct, and that will be the retightening of the net.
Not that the new society will embody “the” truth, nor that everything it will believe will be truer than everything it rejects. But it will again embody a set of truths, of values, capable of playing a constructive co-creating role with us in the non-3D world. And if you don’t realize that that means, with your own beyond-3D self, we have been wasting our time!
Societies rest upon shared beliefs about what is real, because values are chosen in light of those beliefs, and a society orders itself around those values. It rests not upon conscious choice – that would be a very fragile and tentative support – but upon conclusions that seem to follow inescapably from the accepted premises. So, if you can help a society see deeper constructive truths, you will have a far more profound (if hidden) effect than those who manipulate daily situations, overtly or covertly.
I get the feeling that what you want to say this time hasn’t yet been said clearly.
The difficulty is less in expressing truths than in expressing relationships between truths. We are trying to show you how to read negative space. As you like to quote from Kerouac.
“What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled, either.” So –?
So, explorations in effect redefine negative space. This work does have an effect. It’s just that the effect is delayed. By your measurement, decades go by and nothing moves. But the transformation of civilization does not take place on human-life schedules, nor at human-life pace. Much of what appears to you to be chaos is merely counterpoint seen too close up. Each of you is working alone, yet you are working together with others and with forces that are far beyond you.
But have you made your point?
Remember, words are to inspire exploration by resonances they set up. They are not hammers to nail things down. Therefore it makes less difference than you might think where we stop and resume.
– – – –
* [The very well known poem by W.B. Yeats:]
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?