The world. Smart people get beyond it. You can choose when to do that. I don’t think, for myself, it happened until my middle 40’s. Then suddenly, because experience and maturation somehow found each other and carried me forward, I began to think like this. Before, I was in a sense a true believer for all the psychedelic experiences and political activism, and so forth and so on. I hadn’t yet understood that culture was a vehicle that could only be ridden so far, and then beyond that lies the great and to-be-defined unknown of ones own individuality. Many people never get beyond the neoteny of imposed conventionalism. Its insidious that, in middle life, circumstances tend to deliver us money --either our parents die or our professional activities finally pay off. That money is usually the final nail in the coffin for ever evolving beyond cultural convention. Why should we? At last we’ve achieved the fruits of our labors; the good life; the comfortable dream -- but it’s the dream of anesthesia. ----------- For instance, our culture is awash in claims of all sorts: religious claims, the thousand various religious offerings on the market; then it moves over into medical claims, dietary claims, claims of superior sources of knowledge: I can read the dead-sea scrolls, you can’t. She’s talking to the space people, you can’t. This guy is accessing past lives, you can’t. There are all these whisperings and intimations of special connection and uniqueness. If you are passive in the face of this, I think you’re intellectual arteries will fill up with mental cholesterol and eventually you’ll have the equivalent of a coronary thrombosis on an intellectual level. It’s very important to hone intuition and logical razors so that reasonable questions can be asked. It may break the mirrored surface of We’re all in it together; the illusion of community maintained by nobody ever criticizing anybody else. https://youtube/watch?v=UZqx0rNMyt0
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 23:35:38 +0000
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