Scott,
The question is how to take it from there. How do we transition from this goal and object oriented paradigm, to one where we do see reality in terms of the feedback loops running through everything?
I grew up in a farm family, mostly race horses and a side order of dairy cattle, as my father was a cattle auctioneer. As fifth of six kids, there wasn’t much opportunity to get things my way. I just had to put up, shut up and keep busy. Yet after becoming adapted to just being part of the process, the obvious task was simply to learn it as best as possible, not try to compete for the trinkets held out as goals to be attained.
In doing so I came to better understand this illusion of human culture. For one thing, as mobile organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception and so order it as a sequence of events, past to future. While the event reality is that change turns future to past. There is just this physical existence we refer to as the present and its changing configuration creates this effect of time.
Though the basis of our social connectivity is stories, so we have a very narrative paradigm. Everything becomes about where we are going, than the process, not only of getting there, but producing these goals in the first place.
Several of the effects are religion and money. That we are all expected to follow the same storyline, to the same result, be it heaven, or the bottom line.
Yet money is a medium which enables society and the economy to function, so when we treat it as the signal to extract from the noise of the economy and society, more has to be constantly added and ways found to store what has been extracted. Leaving the entire world in thrall to this tool, that has become a god.
The fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. That our philosophers haven’t recognized the serious difference between the absolute and the ideal shows just how limited our efforts at understanding really are.
If we better understand time as an effect, we could all appreciate there is no one universal flow of time. Each cell in our bodies is its own clock and we are at our healthiest when they are all balancing out to the rhythms most suited to the energies flowing through us. Be it slowed down, as with meditation, or speeded up, as in sports.
It is when we insist everyone march to the beat of the same drummer that the crowd gets out of control and many get run over, as the goals given can never satisfy the energies built up. The fact is that those in positions of power are simply more adept at climbing those greasy poles of bureaucratic hierarchy, than any vision of what to do, if they actually get to the top. They are little more than foam at the top of a wave.
So how does one pass these lessons and many others on to others, or at least find those of a similar inclination, when so much of public life is geared to monetizing the value out of everything?
I suppose when the bubbles of frenzied speculation do burst, those still alive, aware and thinking might be looking for other ways to model the world.
To nature, humanity is just one more wave of energy, cresting, it would seem.
