The last few nights have not been spent in reading or contemplation, but in football. My team from New England, the Patriots, pulled out a fast one, and my adopted team, The Packers, barely hung on to win after a huge early lead. Instead of thinking for myself, I let the players do it for me, and it was fun, except that it leaves something of a vacuum afterwards - what, after all, have I accomplished?
Well - for one thing, I kept up with the national conversation. The front page news being repetitive and political, where else can I go to but football? It could also lead to scintillating insights into our culture - except that this has been done ad nauseum by social scientists since, oh, nineteen aught one, or approximately the age of the dinosaurs. Ah, yes, we are a competitive lot - but so are the nations of soccer. We like rules, we like bread and circuses, we take sides; in effect, we are so much like everybody else that it is hardly worth the mention. Our ball is oblong, theirs' is round, and that's about the size of it, or so my trickster side tells me.
Almost surprisingly, then, we might conclude that we are all fundamentally the same, and such I found often enough, again surprisingly, with life with rain forest Indians. In the differences that do exist, their is still something to gleam, however. In reading about the Inca at the time of the Spanish conquest, the conquistadors were surprised with how quickly the population gave up resistance after their king-god was captured and then killed. Women, for instance, gave up restraint and allowed themselves to be had by the men as if in a trance. With my own exploits, I found that certain fundamental outlooks - not on the family/nurturing level, which was very recognizable to me - made the people appear almost hypnotized, hemmed in by cultural beliefs that I considered unnecessary. For instance, at a little food party we had with some, one man became enraged because we had given food to a woman before him. This was an assault on his dignity. They also would not trade their spears for anything; blowguns, yes, but never spears. Why we never knew, but it was a big deal that to us made no sense. We understand better why Muslims destroy images of holy people and prophets, as strange as that might seem, but what of this obsession with woman and burquas?
As with football, learned papers have been written about the reasons for such odd behavior, but we know that our normal behavior often seems odd to others. That's anthro 101. In the bigger picture, we might even say that ALL of us are doing things that seem perfectly rational, but really are not necessary for the basics of survival. In essence, we all live in something of a dream state, not even understanding that what we consider to be ourselves are social constructs.
In yesterdays blog, I fumbled around with the barely visible (to me) idea that "good and bad," or in old fashioned religious parlance, "sin," was not what we thought it was - that is, a rebuke from a supernatural judge. Rather, sin is a dream state, a system of beliefs that keeps us from viewing the real world, which is at bottom a spiritual whole. So I revisit original sin. Where once I saw it as this separation from God, which it is, I can also envision it in this concept of systems, or premises of belief. In the Bible, we learn with consternation that knowledge is the fruit of "evil." With this, we are forced to backtrack to redefine evil, and find that is not naughty behavior, but a vision of the world as a discrete entity filled with other discrete entities, one thing or person having little or nothing to do with another. Here, even spirit (wholeness) has been separated as well, as something "sacred" rather than profane. Original sin, then, is the beginning of the first great rift, the false premise that underscores human thought. We can see something of many false premises in other's, but can only conjecture many of our own by another premise - that we are all, at the core, the same. The scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries did not believe this, and thought to set Western culture apart from the 'primitives' of the world. And yet, in their own way, our intellectual mavens today do much the same. We are, as it turns out, all still lost in a dream of false premises.
The question returns again and again, however - how did this first happen? Where was the real "garden of Eden" and why must it have played out so? This also leads to something that, to me, is a little spooky: that we have all self-selected for this world of human "sin." That is, that we are all here because we have bought into the first wrong premise, the forbidden fruit, and as such, our world and all its laws run accordingly, the truth of Reality hidden from us because we have decided not to see it. We are, then, One in more than a mystical senses, but also One in choice. We also are all left to struggle out of our choice, pressed on not only by logical inconsistencies but inevitable suffering and death. It seems that we have created this deadly game just as surely as we have created football.
Do we create the mountain in order to have something to climb? Does the courage and endurance it takes to climb such a mountain add up to the reason that we want to create such a mountain in the first place? That is, is there really a purpose behind it all, beyond winning a Super Bowl of sorts? Looks like it's time again to stop watching games. FK
Well - for one thing, I kept up with the national conversation. The front page news being repetitive and political, where else can I go to but football? It could also lead to scintillating insights into our culture - except that this has been done ad nauseum by social scientists since, oh, nineteen aught one, or approximately the age of the dinosaurs. Ah, yes, we are a competitive lot - but so are the nations of soccer. We like rules, we like bread and circuses, we take sides; in effect, we are so much like everybody else that it is hardly worth the mention. Our ball is oblong, theirs' is round, and that's about the size of it, or so my trickster side tells me.
Almost surprisingly, then, we might conclude that we are all fundamentally the same, and such I found often enough, again surprisingly, with life with rain forest Indians. In the differences that do exist, their is still something to gleam, however. In reading about the Inca at the time of the Spanish conquest, the conquistadors were surprised with how quickly the population gave up resistance after their king-god was captured and then killed. Women, for instance, gave up restraint and allowed themselves to be had by the men as if in a trance. With my own exploits, I found that certain fundamental outlooks - not on the family/nurturing level, which was very recognizable to me - made the people appear almost hypnotized, hemmed in by cultural beliefs that I considered unnecessary. For instance, at a little food party we had with some, one man became enraged because we had given food to a woman before him. This was an assault on his dignity. They also would not trade their spears for anything; blowguns, yes, but never spears. Why we never knew, but it was a big deal that to us made no sense. We understand better why Muslims destroy images of holy people and prophets, as strange as that might seem, but what of this obsession with woman and burquas?
As with football, learned papers have been written about the reasons for such odd behavior, but we know that our normal behavior often seems odd to others. That's anthro 101. In the bigger picture, we might even say that ALL of us are doing things that seem perfectly rational, but really are not necessary for the basics of survival. In essence, we all live in something of a dream state, not even understanding that what we consider to be ourselves are social constructs.
In yesterdays blog, I fumbled around with the barely visible (to me) idea that "good and bad," or in old fashioned religious parlance, "sin," was not what we thought it was - that is, a rebuke from a supernatural judge. Rather, sin is a dream state, a system of beliefs that keeps us from viewing the real world, which is at bottom a spiritual whole. So I revisit original sin. Where once I saw it as this separation from God, which it is, I can also envision it in this concept of systems, or premises of belief. In the Bible, we learn with consternation that knowledge is the fruit of "evil." With this, we are forced to backtrack to redefine evil, and find that is not naughty behavior, but a vision of the world as a discrete entity filled with other discrete entities, one thing or person having little or nothing to do with another. Here, even spirit (wholeness) has been separated as well, as something "sacred" rather than profane. Original sin, then, is the beginning of the first great rift, the false premise that underscores human thought. We can see something of many false premises in other's, but can only conjecture many of our own by another premise - that we are all, at the core, the same. The scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries did not believe this, and thought to set Western culture apart from the 'primitives' of the world. And yet, in their own way, our intellectual mavens today do much the same. We are, as it turns out, all still lost in a dream of false premises.
The question returns again and again, however - how did this first happen? Where was the real "garden of Eden" and why must it have played out so? This also leads to something that, to me, is a little spooky: that we have all self-selected for this world of human "sin." That is, that we are all here because we have bought into the first wrong premise, the forbidden fruit, and as such, our world and all its laws run accordingly, the truth of Reality hidden from us because we have decided not to see it. We are, then, One in more than a mystical senses, but also One in choice. We also are all left to struggle out of our choice, pressed on not only by logical inconsistencies but inevitable suffering and death. It seems that we have created this deadly game just as surely as we have created football.
Do we create the mountain in order to have something to climb? Does the courage and endurance it takes to climb such a mountain add up to the reason that we want to create such a mountain in the first place? That is, is there really a purpose behind it all, beyond winning a Super Bowl of sorts? Looks like it's time again to stop watching games. FK
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