Our generation inhabits a different world from that in which our grand-parents were born and raised, at the beginning of the 20th century. Now we live in a global sci-tech community in which it is no longer necessary for ninety percent of the population to sacrifice their full development in order to produce enough to survive.
The basic split, however, that between rural and urban society, still holds. That occurred around WWI. In the 1920 census for the first time there were more people classified as living in urban areas in the US, as opposed to rural areas. This happened in France at the same time, and a generation earlier in Britain and Germany. This was the big change, ending at least 6,000 years of agricultural-based societies, otherwise known as civilization, based on class domination: nobles, army, and peasants.
We at last have the ability to produce the necessary goods of life in quantities adequate for all humans to develop as complete, mature human beings. We have ended, as John Maynard Keynes observed a hundred years ago, humanity’s eternal problem: scarcity. At least potentially. We lack distributive justice. And we will have that or live enslaved.
A change of worldview is necessary, because, as odd as it may sound, a worldview is behind the existential threats to a sustainable, livable planet. That is, the Modern worldview, stating that only matter and physical forces exist. This belief is likely to lead to nihilistic implications in which exploitation is the natural result. If everything is just stuff, what is the reason not to use it any way we want?
And now a new factor has entered the picture: the entire system, unstable from its beginnings in revolutionary wars and the ending of the traditional world, is in danger of collapsing. Worse still, it has long been rotten and the recent economic and populist stresses assure that the majority of the world’s people (and living beings) will not lament its passing. However, this raises a bit of a challenge for those Earthlings who would like to survive and live in a relatively stable, sustainable world.
That is the game. Not all are interested in playing! At mydelululife, and for the Companions, the game is to see that the dominating scientific-materialist worldview is replaced by a more accurate holistic, ‘consciousness precedes matter’ worldview. The Companions in Constructing a Life, and in the forthcoming My Delulu Life and The Land Beyond Thought are involved with attuning humans more closely to the vibrations of the cosmos, which is ruled by – which is – consciousness that creates worlds as a way to distinguish the differences it notices.
But to switch from scientific materialism – which is commonsense realism with powerful tools – to a holist perception has never been done. Maybe a few ‘enlightened beings’ have done so. But they are certainly rarities. We could say they are forerunners of what all of us will perceive in the course of healthy human development. So this little delulu is meant to form a bridge from commonsense realism to a holistic, consciousness-comes-first perspective.
We will have to be ‘bi-worldview’ for a while. I can’t see abandoning the material model any time soon, or even demoting it to a subordinate position. Commonsense realism is in a position analogous to Newtonian physics, which still is valid for technical material problems, although it does not account for all of reality. Parts of reality that are becoming more important every day.
Another bloguette: in a way the blogue has become my life. As I’ve said, this writing project requires me to initiate some ascetic practices, which I MUST not defile. The blog will be both an outlet for exploring mental experiences, and an anchor, or a sponsor in AA terms, to keep me on the strait path. If I have to face my readers the next day – even if there aren’t any, actually – I cannot do so having violated the conditions of the blogue – and expect them (or me) to care about the ‘experiment’ any more. People have survived far more difficult things than doing without their little vices and so will I. People have followed sublime visions that brightened the darkest day and so will I. We all must pass through life one way or another.
Generations of men are like the leaves. In winter, winds blow them to earth,
but when spring comes, the budding wood grows more.
And so with men–one generation grows, another dies away. (Iliad 6.181-5)
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