Depending on the culture, the poet, the dreamer, the shaman, or the religious mystic sometimes retains the capacity to regressto the mind of the three-year-old and thus retrieve early nonverbal creative powers from domination by the leftbrain rational prose. These literally visionary individuals help us to understand more fully our tenuous place in the universe.
Loevinger asks us to focus on three sequential adult stages: the conformist, the conscientious, and the autonomous. In Loevinger’s conformist stages, morality is evaluated in terms of concrete externals rather than in terms of emotions. You love a woman if you give her an engagement ring. You can be trusted to have a child when you have a valid marriage license. You were admirable if you enlisted in the United States Marines in January 1942. Russiais “the Evil Empire,” and the American
flag is emblazoned with colors that don’t
run. Most laws and most religious
dogma work at this level. So do the
minds of a lot of devout patriots in all of
the world’s nations. If you are not with
us, you are against us.
As individuals mature, they reach
Loevinger’s conscientious stage. Love
means you put your mate’s needs above
your own lust. You can be trusted to
have children when you are able to care
for them properly. You learn to entertain
the possibility that a man might still have
been admirable if in 1942 he preferred
jail as a conscientious objector to killing
other human beings. You value
ecumenical religious services, andsometimes you support the United Nations over your own country’s interests. You learn to differentiate your emotions and master Piagetian formal operations. Loevinger believes, and I agree, that
some, but not most, adults evolve further into what she calls the autonomous stage. By autonomous she means trusting others to be autonomous. Rather than giving the hungry a fish, you teach them how to catch fish themselves. Defining love becomes more difficult than just the
My religion is the soul, the heart, in charge of the head and flesh.
Regarding my inactivity on Facebook now, I must avoid enabling with chatter those addicted to head and flesh in charge, and continue the work of preparing myself to help the occasional soul that is dying to be rid of the addiction.
In the historically unlikely event that an individual is dying for such help, they can subscribe to the daily update from this blog, study the blog and the materials that it points to, painstakingly accumulated over the years, and contact me directly.
For millennia, theologians, largely
male, have suggested that spirituality was about basic intellectual questions like “Who am I? Why am I here? What happens to me when I die? How can I please my God?” These dry, cognitive
questions are about patriarchal gods and “me.” In the last century, however, cultural anthropologists (such as Margaret Mead), ethologists (such asJane Goodall), and neuroscientists (such as Andrew Newberg) have been more likely to suggest that spirituality reflects limbic questions about love, community,
positive emotions, and the feeling of “being one with the universe.”
Over the last two thousand years literate humans “forgot” how to think with the brain with which they were born. The more humankind learned to think rationally, the more estranged they became from their innate emotional spirituality. Since the Enlightenment, this divorce between emotion and reason has become complete for many in the West. As I have already noted, until the penetration of neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and ethology into the culture over the past fifty years, the positive emotions were virtually abandoned as a focus for respectable scientific research.
While the cultural memes of compassionate religions spread throughout the globe, the simultaneous spread of literacy overthe last two thousand years made possible the gradual evolution of science at the expense of spirituality.
In a China torn to pieces by tribal
strife, Kong Qiu (551–479 BCE)—whose name in the West is Confucius—worked out the moral principles of the New Testament 500 years before Christ and 2,500 years before Schweitzer and Gandhi. The “Way” of Confucius led neither to Heaven nor to Yahweh’s favor,but rather to a “condition of transcendent
goodness.
In Armstrong’s words, “The Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural…. If the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly andexplained—with great courtesy—that this was not an appropriate question.”22 What mattered to Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Isaiah was not what you believed but how you behaved. Show me, don’t tell me. “God” was the experience of loving compassion, not an all-powerful, judgmental, and often angry patriarch.
Your life is the profound opposite, the profound antidote potential, to the status quo or you are part of the problem, not hope for a better world. Status quo lives or anything close their to is destroying everything decent quickly.
Practically 100% of my posting in the future will be on my blog, not on Facebook, Facebook being irresistible temptation for people to vent without actually becoming more of a soul, becoming more of a soul the only Revolution, the only hope, the only joy.
You cannot do both, join a religion, or join the divine. One or the other.
Hear me. The conservatives have no opposition party. Democrats just another party of selfishness. Fundamental otherishness would be the opposition. It has never been tried or seriously considered. Not since Jesus proposed it, and was killed for it.
George vaillant, spiritual Evolution. modern neuroscience has
also allowed us to appreciate that we have more than one brain. If there.... are important differences between ideas and emotions, there are differences in the parts of the brain most important to their appreciation. If there are important differences between lyrics and music, there are differences in the parts of thebrain important to their creation. To oversimplify, the left-brain hemisphere specializes in details and articulates and understands ideas, words, and component parts. The right brain specializes in inarticulate music, visual images, and wholes (gestalts). The limbic brain specializes in emotion. Cognitive ideas can be expressed in
words and controlled voluntarily, and for their expression ideas are powerfully dependent on the Homo sapiens’ cerebral hemispheres—the neocortex. Emotional feelings are equally dependent on our more mammalian subcortical brain—the limbic system and the hypothalamus.
The best of us have been and remain cancer. The exceptions prove the rule. My dad, and to a... degree my mom, are among the most good people I've ever known personally. My dad the most good. We were malignant cancer. We bore no malice toward the rest of creation, we had positive feelings. We religiously consumed thousands of times more than our share, thousands of times more than is sustainable. The body functions, the body is healthy, because every cell devotes each nano second to the well-being of the body. My god, we did the opposite with few exceptions. The exceptions prove the rule. America is based on this madness, Western civilization, capitalism, materialISM. Since it's inception but accelerating greatly in the last 70 years or so. America is based on this cancer. Of course it is dying. It is painful when cancer dies, but it is not necessarily bad. Somewhere in the future the surviving cells, the surviving humanoids, they have an opportunity to begin a new.
