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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Editor's Essay

an ‘Earthrise’ View of Civilization:
an unauthorized biography

 

 

return to "History" main-page

 

 

The photo on the lower right, “Earthrise,” was taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve, 1968 as they circumnavigated the Moon. It’s been called the “most influential photograph” of history.

 

a ‘total field’ perception

Editor's prefatory comment:

In his lectures, Krishnamurti often makes reference to glimpsing the “total field’ of truth.

"I say, you will never find truth through the gradual change of [experience] - only through immediate perception, immediate discernment, lies the whole of wisdom.”

Why is this "immediacy," this "totality" important? Adrian reminded me of the following:

There’s a well known Sufi story from the 12th century about a group of blind people trying to figure out what an elephant is. One person would feel the ear and say it’s like a velvet carpet; another would feel the trunk and say no, it’s a hollow pipe; yet another would feel the leg and say it’s a pillar - but no one has the vantage point to see the whole elephant. The totality of experience is never accessible. In the words of the apostle Paul, “we know in part” (I Cor 13:9). Somewhere there exists a whole elephant, but even the rigorously applied scientific method, the burdens and standards of proof in law and the rules of evidence in court, are limited by human fallibility.

A “total field” perception is important because, even at our best perspicacity, we never see more than a tiny fraction of the Sufi elephant. This is a problem because the greatest truths cannot be discerned in a piecemeal, gradualistic manner. We need to catch a glimpse of the “total field.” This is a high-altitude view, an “Earthrise perspective.” Mystical experiences offer this, and it’s why they’re so valuable. 

 

 

Let’s say you’re out driving, you’re looking for a certain building. You don’t have the street number, but you know it’s on Main Street, and you’re sure it’s north of where you are.

it just has to be there

You say you’ll recognize it when you see it, so you methodically drive up Main visually inspecting each building as you drive by. You’re careful in the search and sometimes you think you see it, but then realize you’re in error, and so you keep moving because what you’re looking for just has to be there.

as they say in Pittsburgh, 'you can't get there from here'

But what if someone told you that what you’re looking for is not on Main Street at all; moreover, it’s south of where you started. In fact, what you want is in the opposite direction on Central Avenue.

We all make mistakes from time to time concerning our work or achieving goals, but these errors, we say, are just temporary setbacks. We insist that hard work will eventually take us to where we want to go.

But what if our problem is not just simple error but that of fundamental direction in life? In this case, small errors will never cease, and, despite sedulous effort, the end result will be total failure.

All this becomes parable concerning a fundamental misdirection of our civilization.

 

the errant metaparadigm produces scores of other errors

Augros and Stanciu: “But a mistake in world view [that is, metaparadigm] is much more grave than a false hypothesis [in science]. An error in a particular conclusion within one science is a [relatively] minor evil... But the worst of all is an error in world view [that is, the errant metaparadigm] because it influences the methods of all sciences as well as the attitudes and expectations in the arts, politics, religion, and every other phase of culture.

"A mistake in world view is necessarily an architectonic error, producing scores of other errors… [The invisible, subtle, but far-reaching, influences of the metaparadigm] set up the assumptions about the mind, the body, and the universe with which we begin; pose the questions we ask; determine the interpretation we give these facts; and direct our reaction to these interpretations and conclusions.”

it's the most dangerous and far-reaching error because it leads our assumptions, expectations, interpretations, and conclusions

 
 

When we study Homer and the Greek epics, inevitably, an instructor will comment, “People are the same today as when Troy was besieged. Nothing has changed. Our gadgets and gizmos, true, are more sophisticated, but these are so often used to oppress others. The human heart of darkness, in essence, has not altered one whit in many thousands of years of recorded history.”

Why have we made no real progress despite millennia of sorrowful lessons? Why, even today, do we continue to suffer war, brutality, violence, and military invasions?

What is the errant metaparadigm that justifies all this and keeps civilization on planet Earth in dysfunctional mode?

What is the dreary old "same thinking," as Einstein observed, that imprisons us in "our problems"?

Let us look at various aspects of civilization, in no particular order, but with a view toward uncovering an underlying "wrong direction," an errant metaphysical assumption.

a strange and uneasy confluence between 'art as visual propaganda’ and a modern tech-marvel of 1955

Though I was a tiny boy, I still recall the exciting day in 1955 when Dad lugged into the old farmhouse our new television set. Now we could watch Howdy Doody, Red Skelton, Roy Rogers, Lucy, and Superman with the best of them.

And what a wonder it was! Pictures floating through the air? - who knew of such wizardry? But the heavy cathode-ray tubes of the big-box tv were the outgrowth of many years of immense scientific achievement: Sir William Crookes in the 1870s, J.J. Thompson in the 1890s, and others who contributed to cathode-ray tube development.

Well, we had really entered the 20th century now with our access to Lassie and Gunsmoke.

But wait. What’s this forbidding artwork superintending the festivities? High on the wall, like a silent Greek chorus, two religious icons stand sentinel, and with disapproving visage.

In the writing “30 Art Masterpieces of the Ancient World” we learned of the life’s work of Professor Diana K. McDonald. You’ll want to read it for yourself, but, essentially, all of the artwork, she says, was created as “visual propaganda” in service to the power-and-control schemes of bloody dictators. None of it was produced as “art for art’s sake”, but all of it served some military-political-oppression plan and intent.

The “16 savior gods” of history, widely dispersed among an array of ancient civilizations, along with supporting cast of “queens of heaven”, were designed to control conquered populations via fear-and-guilt. You can read about it for yourself. But what are the implications and what does this really say about us?

None of this artwork, propping up a diseased cosmogony, could affect us in the least unless we ourselves accepted the underlying metaphysical foundation: “I am incomplete. I need salvation. I'm no good. I need a total make-over. I am not enough. I am a broken machine.”

philosophers and physicists debate ‘what is time?’

As mentioned, we’ll be meandering through this subject, like an “art crawl” though a downtown exhibition, with no particular ordering in mind. The eclecticism will help reveal the ubiquity of the problem before us.

Now, here’s a good one coming to mind. What is time? Ever since Einstein rudely overturned Newton’s idea of time as something fixed and absolute we’ve been in a quandary trying to envision the ineluctable “spacetime.”

Einstein said it’s not just space anymore and it’s not just time, they’re of a piece now, connected. It’s spacetime.

Einstein joke:

Einstein's girlfriend: "I want two things from you, space and time."

Einstein: "What's the other thing?"

 

That’s funny. But what is time, anyway? Depends on who you ask and, as usual, on the underlying metaparadigm driving the viewpoint.

But, here's the point of all this.

For all of our high-tech advancement, as Carl Jung observed, most of us are still quite primitive in mental orientation, cultishly burdened, still running around in loin-clothes, brandishing spears and doing rain dances.

more than drinking the koolaid

The long reach of cultism encompasses much more than crackpot churches. The root idea of cult offers the sense of "cut." This core concept of "cut" leads us to images of refinement and refashioning and, by extension, development, control, pattern, order, and system.

Cultism as systemization finds a ready home in religion and philosophy which seek to regulate and redistill the patterning and ordering of ideas. However, in a larger sense, the spirit of cultism extends to every facet of society. We find it scheming and sedulously at work in politics, academia, family, corporations, entertainment, science, artistry – anywhere power might be gained by capturing credulous and fear-based minds.

See the “cultism” page for a full discussion.

 

 

 

Editor's note:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's last word: