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Don’t you just LOVE Bernardo. He’s a scientist who has arrived at the end of the Materialist road. Before him spins the limitless gaping universe, its mysteries. And he steps off. Looks back, laughs, and waves to us to join him.

Thank-you Bill, I enjoyed this essay. I also count the members of this group my friends. These are strange times and yet we find strangers become fast friends when we find common ground. It is wonderful that we can turn to our friends for such rich discussion and, while references to teachers/gurus happen, we often find the most illuminating gems coming from these 2D Zoom rectangles.

Walter

David, you always give me much to ponder. I minored in philosophy as an undergraduate. But I often reached the limits of my intelligence in that field just as I did in math (calculus). I remember spending over an hour bogged down in a single page of Kant.
I did appreciate Hegel, and I understand how Marx used his concepts. In a way I can see the duality of “thesis” (the physical plane) and “antithesis” (the spiritual plane) being “synthesized” in nonduality.
Rupert believes that it would change the world if we could overcome the faulty materialist western viewpoint. I don’t know, but it seems like too great a sea change to imagine.
My brother is a Sufi and thinks we’re at the end of the Kali Yuga. Great disruption will be followed by a new golden age (I think). But as I mentioned to Matt, I hope to just give myself up to this nondual reality, recognize more beauty around me. I give up on changing the world, except to the extent that changing myself affects/effects that (since I am the world).
I am realizing that this group is part of my path and growth. It’s my sangha. I appreciate you all!
Peace and love,
Bill

Bill, I enjoyed your essay. I think your insights are excellent. I was raised in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, as propounded by Marx and Lenin (building on Georg W.F. Hegel). It is a fine philosophy to express clearly how we naturally view the world when our essential consciousness is suppressed or overlooked. But nothing in it inspires one to real progress toward the peace and happiness that is missing so long as full consciousness is not part of our life. The lack of any spiritual content is in my view the reason that the lofty goals of socialism (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his work”) and communism (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) have never been achieved by any known society or revolution. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs .)

Compelling point about how the humanities have a materialist view as well as the “hard” sciences.

To restate your explanations for its presence: “Part of this comes from a Marxist (or old leftwing) bias (“religion is the opiate of the masses”), and part of it is that the industrial and tech revolutions forced the Humanities to compete with the sciences for credibility and money.”

I agree with both those reasons and I’d like to take that solid platform to speculate about a third.

In the humanities I experienced in undergrad, I believe, a student not adhering to materialism stirs many feelings of guilt!

There is no doubt that gross material inequity in the world is, and has been, a scourge. But speaking of non-materialist thinking is in no way condoning gross material inequity. Yet I feel that there is a thought in the humanities which says “religion and superstitious non-materalist pseudoscience (to speak of your two reasons sited above), has historically supported gross inequality. And should therefore be shunned.”

This is, of course, is not the case for any mildly sensitive study of the core concepts presented in the perennial philosophy shared by many cultures, or non-duality as we may present it.

If this over-clocked thought exists in the humanities, I’d like to ask this question. Could its origins be in a “personal” guilt trip and not in the true heartbreak accompanying thousands of years of inequity? Could we be using our personal sense of guilt to ignore the behemoth of transpersonal guilt waiting to be processed by the collective unconscious? A guilt which can only be processed when we begin dropping our sense of being a separate individual me…

True heartbreak over historic inequity would be my suggestion to the humanities. A heartbreak which is far vaster than the pain of the individual’s guilt. One that is best expressed in transpersonal non-materialist non-dual phrasing.

To clarify what I think the problem here is…
Non-duality so reveals the core mechanism of guilt, that its presence in the humanities threatens a defense mechanism: the compartmentalized suppression of a deluge of transpersonal collective-consciousness guilt… into the simple everyday guilt of the “me.”

Processing transpersonal guilt, via realizing one’s all too real connection to the entire consciousness of humanity (a non-materialist realization), would turn academic departments into therapy retreats overnight. The profit-based gears of these institutions would grind to a halt within a semester!

These are my initial written thoughts on the subject. Extremely hard to language this in the sensitive guilt trip environment of the humanities, paradoxically enough.

I like this. It is a good reflection of the significant part of what happens in our meetings.

Thanks for all the thoughts David! I also responded to you over email.

The fact, to me of course, remains that the ether explains far more than atomism and viruses have never been shown to, in isolation from all other cell culture mediums, cause disease.

And clearly… a medical profession which prioritizes an unproven viral theory over the abundantly proven apocalypse of environmental toxicology…. is a profit based death cult.

https://checkout.terrainthefilm.com/offers/7WEA8cxn/checkout

An open response to Matt Sena: nondualsharing.com/1916