By Michael Murphy, Ed.D.
I’m back.
Watching and being stimulated by another YouTube video with Thomas Campbell. Slowly getting the foundation of the My Big Toe epistemology. Understanding things in terms of “the rule set.” Speaking of which:
1. I chickened out in reading and following the cosmic signs that day in December, 1975 on the train from Freiburg, when I sought to retrace my steps rather than move forward on destiny’s path. All the elements were there; the compassionate universe had provided me with youth, health, time, enough money to live and travel for a year, and a kindly young woman sitting across from me in the train compartment. That moment still stands, and will forever stand, as a destiny unrealized. Instead, I turned back and faced the wind and all it carried, again fated to learn the hard way.
2. But to my credit I was in Freiburg in the first place to do honor to my mentor Martin Heidegger and to strive to see what he had seen. That was a good impulse, one which I can now follow, hopefully with more confidence and freedom. Go see Tom Campbell? Yogananda’s place in Virginia? Sadhguru’s in Tennessee? Lie (semi) naked on the grass and become one with the earth? When one back on the path late, one might not be able to travel as far, but one can still travel.
3. There is a sad point at which we stop believing, and therefore discovering, that the apparently impossible may in fact be possible. Like that moment when, age 1, we slowly discovered that we could pull ourselves erect by holding on to the corner of the coffee table. Then, we learned to toddle, then speak, then read, all activities of which we had no idea we were capable before we accomplished them. We were blissfully ignorant of the rule set, and so we were able and willing to explore and learn out of a pure sense of ignorance.
4. But then, later, the limits of the rule set were explained to us and we began to accept the limits of the possible; for example, we learned that we cannot fly, that we cannot breathe underwater, that we cannot transport ourselves to other planets without fossil-fueled explosions and great steel shields. This rule set is extracted from Western dualistic thinking, which has given us the supposed benefits of technology and as made a select few all-too-comfortable and wealthy but also has subjected most of us too a life of tedium, bereft of the grand human opportunity for unlimited exploration and expansion, i.e. self-actualization.
5. At this point in humanity’s evolution we are both able and required to question the limits of the rule-set, to recognize that the Western techno-capitalistic project has atrophied into an enormous epistemological edifice, a tottering artifact of Foucault’s archeological power/knowledge dig. A lot of crap has been built, a lot of money has been made, and the desire for repetition of the same requires the submission – and/or the elimination – of the masses. And in the meantime it requires that the masses believe that very little is possible.
6. Now, in a grand final gesture, the Boomer’s need to retrieve their idealism and belief in the possibility of the highly improbable to question and break free of the fetters we so reluctantly and hesitatingly accepted in our youth. We need to step out into the light and speak the truth of the demise of the Western dualistic-capitalistic model and again believe that the love we take is, in fact, precisely equal to the love we make.
7. To do this we don’t necessarily need to know what we don’t know, we just need to do a thorough job of suspending judgment about the adequacy of what we do know, like any good scientist. Perhaps wormholes are comprised of undiluted love, and they will provide faster than light transport to yonder galaxies. Who knows? If we but follow the signs, we will, someday, find out.
8. Back in the proverbial day of Woodstock and hippie-driven optimism we had drugs as a medium for understanding the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. You got high, and you discovered that you were in fact an indivisible element in an infinitely evolving universe. We discovered soon enough, though, that drugs are not a necessary or sufficient medium for actualizing that most global understanding. The drug experience in the end was constrained by its limitations to an individual experiencing subject and, as we saw, it had its limitations, and all of our benevolent impulses toward sharing were hijacked by the egocentricity secondary to substance dependence. Drugs, we learned, were not necessarily a sufficient medium for limitless sharing. Today’s generation has the internet and, perhaps, the limitless potential of the internet of things (IOT) for sharing and therefore for the surrender of self-organized ownership and, indeed, self-organized ontology. Today’s generation can actualize that which we could only conceptualize.
9. The mind-body problem and its onerous consequences will be resolved by the realization of a shared awareness, a conscious psycho-physicality that understands that spirit is an empirical phenomenon. We will share, and we will ultimately be able to measure the actuality of our sharing as a manifestation of common consciousness. We Boomers may not live to see it, but at least we can hand off the possibility of possibility to our children. But in order to do so, both we and they must first win the great epistemological battle that looms before us. As when we first struggled to pull ourselves up by the corner of the coffee table, we must again be willing to suspend our beliefs about what is possible. Only then will we stand.
THE BOOMERS’S PARTING GIFT
I’m back.
Watching and being stimulated by another YouTube video with Thomas Campbell. Slowly getting the foundation of the My Big Toe epistemology. Understanding things in terms of “the rule set.” Speaking of which:
1. I chickened out in reading and following the cosmic signs that day in December, 1975 on the train from Freiburg, when I sought to retrace my steps rather than move forward on destiny’s path. All the elements were there; the compassionate universe had provided me with youth, health, time, enough money to live and travel for a year, and a kindly young woman sitting across from me in the train compartment. That moment still stands, and will forever stand, as a destiny unrealized. Instead, I turned back and faced the wind and all it carried, again fated to learn the hard way.
2. But to my credit I was in Freiburg in the first place to do honor to my mentor Martin Heidegger and to strive to see what he had seen. That was a good impulse, one which I can now follow, hopefully with more confidence and freedom. Go see Tom Campbell? Yogananda’s place in Virginia? Sadhguru’s in Tennessee? Lie (semi) naked on the grass and become one with the earth? When one back on the path late, one might not be able to travel as far, but one can still travel.
3. There is a sad point at which we stop believing, and therefore discovering, that the apparently impossible may in fact be possible. Like that moment when, age 1, we slowly discovered that we could pull ourselves erect by holding on to the corner of the coffee table. Then, we learned to toddle, then speak, then read, all activities of which we had no idea we were capable before we accomplished them. We were blissfully ignorant of the rule set, and so we were able and willing to explore and learn out of a pure sense of ignorance.
4. But then, later, the limits of the rule set were explained to us and we began to accept the limits of the possible; for example, we learned that we cannot fly, that we cannot breathe underwater, that we cannot transport ourselves to other planets without fossil-fueled explosions and great steel shields. This rule set is extracted from Western dualistic thinking, which has given us the supposed benefits of technology and as made a select few all-too-comfortable and wealthy but also has subjected most of us too a life of tedium, bereft of the grand human opportunity for unlimited exploration and expansion, i.e. self-actualization.
5. At this point in humanity’s evolution we are both able and required to question the limits of the rule-set, to recognize that the Western techno-capitalistic project has atrophied into an enormous epistemological edifice, a tottering artifact of Foucault’s archeological power/knowledge dig. A lot of crap has been built, a lot of money has been made, and the desire for repetition of the same requires the submission – and/or the elimination – of the masses. And in the meantime it requires that the masses believe that very little is possible.
6. Now, in a grand final gesture, the Boomer’s need to retrieve their idealism and belief in the possibility of the highly improbable to question and break free of the fetters we so reluctantly and hesitatingly accepted in our youth. We need to step out into the light and speak the truth of the demise of the Western dualistic-capitalistic model and again believe that the love we take is, in fact, precisely equal to the love we make.
7. To do this we don’t necessarily need to know what we don’t know, we just need to do a thorough job of suspending judgment about the adequacy of what we do know, like any good scientist. Perhaps wormholes are comprised of undiluted love, and they will provide faster than light transport to yonder galaxies. Who knows? If we but follow the signs, we will, someday, find out.
8. Back in the proverbial day of Woodstock and hippie-driven optimism we had drugs as a medium for understanding the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. You got high, and you discovered that you were in fact an indivisible element in an infinitely evolving universe. We discovered soon enough, though, that drugs are not a necessary or sufficient medium for actualizing that most global understanding. The drug experience in the end was constrained by its limitations to an individual experiencing subject and, as we saw, it had its limitations, and all of our benevolent impulses toward sharing were hijacked by the egocentricity secondary to substance dependence. Drugs, we learned, were not necessarily a sufficient medium for limitless sharing. Today’s generation has the internet and, perhaps, the limitless potential of the internet of things (IOT) for sharing and therefore for the surrender of self-organized ownership and, indeed, self-organized ontology. Today’s generation can actualize that which we could only conceptualize.
9. The mind-body problem and its onerous consequences will be resolved by the realization of a shared awareness, a conscious psycho-physicality that understands that spirit is an empirical phenomenon. We will share, and we will ultimately be able to measure the actuality of our sharing as a manifestation of common consciousness. We Boomers may not live to see it, but at least we can hand off the possibility of possibility to our children. But in order to do so, both we and they must first win the great epistemological battle that looms before us. As when we first struggled to pull ourselves up by the corner of the coffee table, we must again be willing to suspend our beliefs about what is possible. Only then will we stand.