Credo che la geoingegneria non troverà mai applicazione su vasta scala, anche se qualcuna tra le principali nazioni potrà fare forse tentativi circoscritti. Ma potremmo ripristinare gli ecosistemi per altre vie.
Tempo fa mi sono imbattuto in uno dei libri di Robert Monroe sulle sue esperienze extracorporee e vi ho trovato il resoconto di una sua sorprendente esperienza nel futuro (non è insolito che si sperimentino esperienze spirituali del genere, anche se durante le NDE, ad esempio, si tratta in genere di visioni): in esso veniva descritto come gli umani fossero passati a un nuovo livello di coscienza che gli permetteva anche di modificare la materia, e usavano quel potere proprio per porre rimedio ai danni prodotti al nostro pianeta. Da lettore di Aurobindo, non ho potuto evitare di pensare a questi nuovi umani come a quelli da lui preannunciati. Questo avverrà realmente? Esiste già, da una prospettiva in cui il tempo non ha significato? Non lo so, e comunque non basta a confortarmi il pensiero che tra mille e più anni si realizzerà qualcosa che ora è inimmaginabile. A mio avviso l'umanità dovrebbe già aver sofferto abbastanza ed essere pronta fin da subito a un cambiamento di coscienza collettivo. Ma è evidente che ciò non avverrà senza ulteriore sofferenza ed eventi tragici - quelli che peraltro lo stesso Monroe ha visto, ma di cui ha preferito non lasciare resoconti, sperando che non si avverassero.
Marco, when Federica refers to the vertical path to dealing with these environmental issues, perhaps a concrete example will help.
What is your view, for example, on the idea that the Earth is a living and sentient being, with its own intentional first-person perspective just as we have ours? Of course, that doesn't mean the Earth is thinking in verbal concepts and analyzing the warming of its body, but simply that the metamorphoses of its bodies have some integral relationship with its higher-order soul and spiritual existence.
That doesn't mean humanity has no relevance for the Earth organism's metamorphoses, either. On the contrary, humanity is like the brain of this organism and is becoming increasingly responsible for stewarding its psychic and bodily rhythms. Yet would you agree this can only be done properly from a place of deep spiritual insight into the higher-order intentions through which the Earth's state of being unfolds?
Otherwise, it is as if we are a doctor confronted with a patient who has a high temperature and our first response, instead of doing diagnostic tests and conversing with the patient to resonate with their inner state of being, is to dose them up with whatever medications we can find based on myopic knowledge that some of these medications were correlated with lowering temperatures in the past, even though we have no deep insight as to why there is a temperature to begin with.
So how would you say the spiritual informs your scientific understanding in these domains of inquiry? For example in this essay you mention the reasons for climate change, the course of human evolution for millions of years, tipping points in complex physical systems, and the likely outcomes of a 3 degree warming by 2080. Does spiritual knowledge of the human subtle organization, the Earth subtle organization, and the strucutre of the higher supra-rational spaces play into any of these conclusions? If so, I am curious to hear how. Or if that's the subject of an upcoming installment, then I will simply wait.
It isn’t about knowing the “structure” of the subtle organizations or supra-rational spaces, but that of seeing from it, connecting with the whole as an archetypal manifestation of a deeper will-force and which isn’t separate from us. Once one enters into that cognitive space, the impossible appears as entirely possible, and even inevitably in the natural order of things.
Ok, but there are many people who feel they have connected with the whole and are seeing from it. There are the theosophists, the anthroposophists, the martinists, the aurobindans, the tibetan buddhists, and so on. All of them recognize the existence of the supra-rational spaces. Some of them may say the Divine Will reveals to them from this higher cognitive space that actually the climate won't increase by 3 degrees but soon it will begin cooling again and we are headed for a new ice age.
What can we look for to evaluate which claim to higher revelation can be relied upon? Is there anything akin to the scientific method for the supersensible? Do any details of the supersensible make a practical difference to the Earthly stream of becoming? Or must we simply see which claims match up with the secular climate models and predictions?
I’m usually not interested in higher revelations of others (unless I intimately feel/know them to be true,) let alone passively rely on them. While, it is the collective state of consciousness that will determine whether secular predictions will become true or will be overruled. Not the other way around.
Isn't this exactly what the materialist does? Reject any higher revealed wisdom, even if it can be logically reasoned through and harmonized with the accessible facts of experience, because it doesn't fit with what they 'feel/know' from default sensory intuition, and rely passively on intellectual models instead. These models simply follow the transformation of perceptual frames, which is really the transformation of our intellectual *thinking states*, and then extroplate that data indefinitely into the past and future even though the collective state of consciousness has changed radically and will continue to. It is the same with all the associated models of how climate change will affect the environment and the economy.
All of this is thoroughly explored through the phenomenology of cognition, such as the essays you dismissed before. We can only be safe from passive reliance on external authorities, secular or religious, when we become intimately familiar with our own cognitive structure, and yes this means we have to take an active interest in the details. Then we come to know how exactly intellectual models come into existence and what sort of value we can place on them (which is not zero, because they certainly have some value), where they fit into the bigger spiritual context. We come to know how our intellectual thinking states rest atop a whole subconscious iceberg of assumptions, preferences, habits, and deeper influences that can be lucidly known.
To be clear, I am not trying to debate climate change, its causes, or where it is headed. Just trying to point out that we won't make very much progress analyzing the issue with the same intellectual hubris as the materialistic culture that developed industrial society for endless profit in the first place.
Marco, supposing there’s agreement that, from the perspective of a post-material worldview, reality at its core is of ideal nature, and the material world - including the climatic events Earth manifests in time - is the densest layer of a unitary whole (as above, so below) only transduced in the heavily aliased “ideational byproduct” that the human physical five senses of today are able to record, a question has arisen from this reading. In your prefiguration of material solutions to the present human crisis, I notice that the reference to the suprasensible, conscious alignment of being that would constitute, in primal and crucial sense, a way out of the present crisis, is left out. What is the purpose with this take? Do you agree that it’s only when we become the change we want to see in the world, first and foremost in our consciousness, through active development of our suprasensible (thinking and feeling) faculties - individually and collectively - that we gain a chance to apprehend the higher orders of being, hence to orient our future deeds towards the good, through conscious moral action in the world, not when man merely attempts to impact the physical layers of reality through rational-logical devices, elaborated by the intellect, if the latter remains unaware of its depth structure?
If you ask me, I love jigsaw puzzles, but I personally don’t find them to provide a viable analogy for reality. So I wouldn’t judge even if I had the entire game to look at.
Marco, thanks for the references. I find your work outstanding, and especially the brave professional choices and quest for meaningfulness lying in its background. Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, the same point I made about the macrocosm of reality is applicable to the microcosm of our own human individuality. The puzzle metaphor misses the mark here. In the same way that reality evolves as an interconnected whole, wherein the material layer amounts to a stupefying panorama of collapsed and precipitated symbols, so in the microcosm of our individuality it’s impossible to be truly post-material by horizontally composing a puzzle picture where material pieces are juxtaposed to spiritual ones (un colpo al cerchio, un colpo alla botte). Rather, the only path is vertical. It starts from within our own thinking-feeling being, so that each and every element of our activity has eventually a chance to harmonize with the higher order designs. To squeeze that into a visual metaphor: a Sierpinski triangle, rather than a puzzle. By the way, in your piece on technological delusions, you seem to choose the same approach of *complementing* the outward material technological progress with the psychological, existential and spiritual perspective. We cannot *only* have a technological perspective, you say. We need to complement it with the spiritual. But again, the smorgasbord approach - while it has the merit of questioning materialism - only leads to an illusion of holistic understanding, as long as one has not made the free choice to engage the self-transformation of one’s entire being, starting from the augmentation of one's conscious cognitive potential. That the world - the universe - is on the same side as our spiritual being starts to become an experience then, rather than a conceptual add-on.
Federica, I wonder wherefrom you have the impression of a “smorgasbord approach” or read of a "horizontal puzzle composition." Nowhere do I feel of having done that. Complementing is not an exercise of addition. So, I can’t relate to this and, thereby, answer to your objection.
It’s the dichotomy that appears between a statement of holistic understanding from the first-person perspective, and an elaboration that snaps back into third-person view, as it balances out the spiritual-psychological and the rational-material perspectives one against the other, as two puzzle pieces to fit into one another. But the wholeness of truth can’t emerge from holding the two pieces from the side and “complementing” the one with the other. They inevitably remain a nicely composed, very well balanced, smorgasbord of views. That is, there are eyes that hold those views from a seamless vantage point in the background. In this way, the first person-perspective can consist of a tag on an idea *about* perspective, held from a third-person perspective.
I hesitate to further elaborate, firstly because the phenomenology of human cognition has been already put in incomparably better concepts and words than I could ever come up with - by known as well as unknown thinkers, for example in the previously mentioned series of [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QVoo5wcdUgaz_wgqssrHokNEhzYaXjIHoY4tH-XjmZg/edit] phenomenological essays[/url] - which btw do not make use of any religious concept - and secondly because grasping it depends on the willingness to freely do whatever it cognitively takes to know the truth from within, including bringing the inquiry to the inside of one’s own cognitive activity, not experienced as a place for the boiling down of ideal contents, but as a force that can itself be observed, educated, sensitized and grown in consciousness. However, if one is satisfied within the 'homeyness' of a certain worldview and feels that progress is basically a matter of filling the boxes of the various life problems with thoughts, aligning groups of essays in a logical ensemble, then there can’t be any interest in setting sail for the progressive discovery of truth by learning to dive into the sea of consciousness from the pinhole of one’s own cognition.
Credo che la geoingegneria non troverà mai applicazione su vasta scala, anche se qualcuna tra le principali nazioni potrà fare forse tentativi circoscritti. Ma potremmo ripristinare gli ecosistemi per altre vie.
Tempo fa mi sono imbattuto in uno dei libri di Robert Monroe sulle sue esperienze extracorporee e vi ho trovato il resoconto di una sua sorprendente esperienza nel futuro (non è insolito che si sperimentino esperienze spirituali del genere, anche se durante le NDE, ad esempio, si tratta in genere di visioni): in esso veniva descritto come gli umani fossero passati a un nuovo livello di coscienza che gli permetteva anche di modificare la materia, e usavano quel potere proprio per porre rimedio ai danni prodotti al nostro pianeta. Da lettore di Aurobindo, non ho potuto evitare di pensare a questi nuovi umani come a quelli da lui preannunciati. Questo avverrà realmente? Esiste già, da una prospettiva in cui il tempo non ha significato? Non lo so, e comunque non basta a confortarmi il pensiero che tra mille e più anni si realizzerà qualcosa che ora è inimmaginabile. A mio avviso l'umanità dovrebbe già aver sofferto abbastanza ed essere pronta fin da subito a un cambiamento di coscienza collettivo. Ma è evidente che ciò non avverrà senza ulteriore sofferenza ed eventi tragici - quelli che peraltro lo stesso Monroe ha visto, ma di cui ha preferito non lasciare resoconti, sperando che non si avverassero.
Marco, when Federica refers to the vertical path to dealing with these environmental issues, perhaps a concrete example will help.
What is your view, for example, on the idea that the Earth is a living and sentient being, with its own intentional first-person perspective just as we have ours? Of course, that doesn't mean the Earth is thinking in verbal concepts and analyzing the warming of its body, but simply that the metamorphoses of its bodies have some integral relationship with its higher-order soul and spiritual existence.
That doesn't mean humanity has no relevance for the Earth organism's metamorphoses, either. On the contrary, humanity is like the brain of this organism and is becoming increasingly responsible for stewarding its psychic and bodily rhythms. Yet would you agree this can only be done properly from a place of deep spiritual insight into the higher-order intentions through which the Earth's state of being unfolds?
Otherwise, it is as if we are a doctor confronted with a patient who has a high temperature and our first response, instead of doing diagnostic tests and conversing with the patient to resonate with their inner state of being, is to dose them up with whatever medications we can find based on myopic knowledge that some of these medications were correlated with lowering temperatures in the past, even though we have no deep insight as to why there is a temperature to begin with.
Yes, quite so. There must be a convergence between the mental/technological and spiritual. That's what was (more or less implicitly) meant.
So how would you say the spiritual informs your scientific understanding in these domains of inquiry? For example in this essay you mention the reasons for climate change, the course of human evolution for millions of years, tipping points in complex physical systems, and the likely outcomes of a 3 degree warming by 2080. Does spiritual knowledge of the human subtle organization, the Earth subtle organization, and the strucutre of the higher supra-rational spaces play into any of these conclusions? If so, I am curious to hear how. Or if that's the subject of an upcoming installment, then I will simply wait.
It isn’t about knowing the “structure” of the subtle organizations or supra-rational spaces, but that of seeing from it, connecting with the whole as an archetypal manifestation of a deeper will-force and which isn’t separate from us. Once one enters into that cognitive space, the impossible appears as entirely possible, and even inevitably in the natural order of things.
Ok, but there are many people who feel they have connected with the whole and are seeing from it. There are the theosophists, the anthroposophists, the martinists, the aurobindans, the tibetan buddhists, and so on. All of them recognize the existence of the supra-rational spaces. Some of them may say the Divine Will reveals to them from this higher cognitive space that actually the climate won't increase by 3 degrees but soon it will begin cooling again and we are headed for a new ice age.
What can we look for to evaluate which claim to higher revelation can be relied upon? Is there anything akin to the scientific method for the supersensible? Do any details of the supersensible make a practical difference to the Earthly stream of becoming? Or must we simply see which claims match up with the secular climate models and predictions?
I’m usually not interested in higher revelations of others (unless I intimately feel/know them to be true,) let alone passively rely on them. While, it is the collective state of consciousness that will determine whether secular predictions will become true or will be overruled. Not the other way around.
Isn't this exactly what the materialist does? Reject any higher revealed wisdom, even if it can be logically reasoned through and harmonized with the accessible facts of experience, because it doesn't fit with what they 'feel/know' from default sensory intuition, and rely passively on intellectual models instead. These models simply follow the transformation of perceptual frames, which is really the transformation of our intellectual *thinking states*, and then extroplate that data indefinitely into the past and future even though the collective state of consciousness has changed radically and will continue to. It is the same with all the associated models of how climate change will affect the environment and the economy.
All of this is thoroughly explored through the phenomenology of cognition, such as the essays you dismissed before. We can only be safe from passive reliance on external authorities, secular or religious, when we become intimately familiar with our own cognitive structure, and yes this means we have to take an active interest in the details. Then we come to know how exactly intellectual models come into existence and what sort of value we can place on them (which is not zero, because they certainly have some value), where they fit into the bigger spiritual context. We come to know how our intellectual thinking states rest atop a whole subconscious iceberg of assumptions, preferences, habits, and deeper influences that can be lucidly known.
To be clear, I am not trying to debate climate change, its causes, or where it is headed. Just trying to point out that we won't make very much progress analyzing the issue with the same intellectual hubris as the materialistic culture that developed industrial society for endless profit in the first place.
Marco, supposing there’s agreement that, from the perspective of a post-material worldview, reality at its core is of ideal nature, and the material world - including the climatic events Earth manifests in time - is the densest layer of a unitary whole (as above, so below) only transduced in the heavily aliased “ideational byproduct” that the human physical five senses of today are able to record, a question has arisen from this reading. In your prefiguration of material solutions to the present human crisis, I notice that the reference to the suprasensible, conscious alignment of being that would constitute, in primal and crucial sense, a way out of the present crisis, is left out. What is the purpose with this take? Do you agree that it’s only when we become the change we want to see in the world, first and foremost in our consciousness, through active development of our suprasensible (thinking and feeling) faculties - individually and collectively - that we gain a chance to apprehend the higher orders of being, hence to orient our future deeds towards the good, through conscious moral action in the world, not when man merely attempts to impact the physical layers of reality through rational-logical devices, elaborated by the intellect, if the latter remains unaware of its depth structure?
One should never judge looking only at one piece of the puzzle. Where could the other pieces possible be? ;)
If you ask me, I love jigsaw puzzles, but I personally don’t find them to provide a viable analogy for reality. So I wouldn’t judge even if I had the entire game to look at.
Maybe you might like to take a look at some other pieces of the puzzle. For example, that I'm not that techno-freak I might appear, can be read here:
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/technological-delusions
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/towards-the-soul-centered-worldview
As to the environmental issue I suggest reading the "age of light" I wrote about here: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/its-time-for-civilization-collapse-b99
Moreover, the next post will be about the notion of Nature from a more spiritual perspective Stay tuned...
Marco, thanks for the references. I find your work outstanding, and especially the brave professional choices and quest for meaningfulness lying in its background. Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, the same point I made about the macrocosm of reality is applicable to the microcosm of our own human individuality. The puzzle metaphor misses the mark here. In the same way that reality evolves as an interconnected whole, wherein the material layer amounts to a stupefying panorama of collapsed and precipitated symbols, so in the microcosm of our individuality it’s impossible to be truly post-material by horizontally composing a puzzle picture where material pieces are juxtaposed to spiritual ones (un colpo al cerchio, un colpo alla botte). Rather, the only path is vertical. It starts from within our own thinking-feeling being, so that each and every element of our activity has eventually a chance to harmonize with the higher order designs. To squeeze that into a visual metaphor: a Sierpinski triangle, rather than a puzzle. By the way, in your piece on technological delusions, you seem to choose the same approach of *complementing* the outward material technological progress with the psychological, existential and spiritual perspective. We cannot *only* have a technological perspective, you say. We need to complement it with the spiritual. But again, the smorgasbord approach - while it has the merit of questioning materialism - only leads to an illusion of holistic understanding, as long as one has not made the free choice to engage the self-transformation of one’s entire being, starting from the augmentation of one's conscious cognitive potential. That the world - the universe - is on the same side as our spiritual being starts to become an experience then, rather than a conceptual add-on.
Federica, I wonder wherefrom you have the impression of a “smorgasbord approach” or read of a "horizontal puzzle composition." Nowhere do I feel of having done that. Complementing is not an exercise of addition. So, I can’t relate to this and, thereby, answer to your objection.
It’s the dichotomy that appears between a statement of holistic understanding from the first-person perspective, and an elaboration that snaps back into third-person view, as it balances out the spiritual-psychological and the rational-material perspectives one against the other, as two puzzle pieces to fit into one another. But the wholeness of truth can’t emerge from holding the two pieces from the side and “complementing” the one with the other. They inevitably remain a nicely composed, very well balanced, smorgasbord of views. That is, there are eyes that hold those views from a seamless vantage point in the background. In this way, the first person-perspective can consist of a tag on an idea *about* perspective, held from a third-person perspective.
I hesitate to further elaborate, firstly because the phenomenology of human cognition has been already put in incomparably better concepts and words than I could ever come up with - by known as well as unknown thinkers, for example in the previously mentioned series of [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QVoo5wcdUgaz_wgqssrHokNEhzYaXjIHoY4tH-XjmZg/edit] phenomenological essays[/url] - which btw do not make use of any religious concept - and secondly because grasping it depends on the willingness to freely do whatever it cognitively takes to know the truth from within, including bringing the inquiry to the inside of one’s own cognitive activity, not experienced as a place for the boiling down of ideal contents, but as a force that can itself be observed, educated, sensitized and grown in consciousness. However, if one is satisfied within the 'homeyness' of a certain worldview and feels that progress is basically a matter of filling the boxes of the various life problems with thoughts, aligning groups of essays in a logical ensemble, then there can’t be any interest in setting sail for the progressive discovery of truth by learning to dive into the sea of consciousness from the pinhole of one’s own cognition.
In anycase, I look forward to reading your next post on Nature from a more spiritual perspective!