The concepts that connect and separates people is the power of an idea and the force of imagination.
We find ourselves using the power of our ideas when we discuss patriotism, political affiliations, and family loyalty. We instantly color our world with the force of our imagination and as we do we realize how different our ideas and imagination are. Those aspects of consciousness are highly individualized, but they can be influenced. We fail to see the importance of imagination even though it forms the world we experience as well as the mass world we experience. Imagination changes how we perceive ourselves. The combination of imagination and beliefs structure our subjective experience as well as our objective circumstances.
Thanks to imagination we feel we are part of a plan, but that plan is based on the ideas we have about that plan. Our history and our ideas about our history are formed by the ideas we have in our imagination and we then project them into the physical world. The battle we are experiencing with radical terrorists is a product of their efforts to squeeze their ideas of truth into a framework of beliefs that is too small, and this distorts and bends their beliefs into uncompromising dogmas.
We could say the rapid rise of radical fundamentalism is an over compensation for ideas that have existed in the Western world for centuries. The laws and standards set by the imagination of Westerners are unacceptable within the framework of the distorted beliefs of terrorists. Terrorists believe in an authoritarian religion that must rebel against scientific and religious intellectualism. Terrorist see the world in black and white, good and evil and those associations give the elastic world of Western ideas a foothold in their imagination as they attempt to accept literal interpretations of intuitive realities.
By accepting literal interpretations, the terrorists further limit the channels where their psychic abilities flow. The imagination is creative, so it is always seeking expression. Terrorists would rather believe in man’s sinful nature rather than the fact that every person is inherently good, and an individualized portion of the divine.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Saturday, November 14, 2015
The Cause Of Right
The Global crises we face today are unique in many ways, not only in their scope, complexity, and urgency, but also in that for the first time in human history each and every one of them is caused by humans. They are creations of our individual and collective behavior and can therefore be traced, in significant part to psychological origins: to our individual and collective beliefs, greed fear, fantasies, defenses and misperceptions. Our global problems are global symptoms, and the state of the world reflects the state of our minds.
Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. We live in a world filled with greed, fantasies, misperceptions and fear. We watch those thoughts become real, and we own them. We bring them into our mental laboratory and mix them with our beliefs. The mixture that results from brewing this concoction of thoughts creates perceptions that are hybrids of the truth. But we call them truths, nonetheless.
We like to mix fear with our religious beliefs as well as our political beliefs. We challenge God to take sides while we fantasize and defend how God will act. Collective religious beliefs seasoned with fear and greed are hybrids that are designed to promote power, not faith. Faith is buried under the umbrella of violence and hatred, and “in the name of God” becomes the victory cry. We tear the fabric of faith from God, and attach it to our human misperceptions then we kill to honor those misperceptions.
We like to say we live in a world of hatred and fear. A world where one religion tries to eradicate another in order to worship a just and noble God. Whatever we call that God becomes our war badge, and we use it show our allegiance to the cause of right. But our cause of right has no right. Our cause of right reflects our belief in the religion of fear, not the religion that knows that the cause of right is really self-inflicted torture.
Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. We live in a world filled with greed, fantasies, misperceptions and fear. We watch those thoughts become real, and we own them. We bring them into our mental laboratory and mix them with our beliefs. The mixture that results from brewing this concoction of thoughts creates perceptions that are hybrids of the truth. But we call them truths, nonetheless.
We like to mix fear with our religious beliefs as well as our political beliefs. We challenge God to take sides while we fantasize and defend how God will act. Collective religious beliefs seasoned with fear and greed are hybrids that are designed to promote power, not faith. Faith is buried under the umbrella of violence and hatred, and “in the name of God” becomes the victory cry. We tear the fabric of faith from God, and attach it to our human misperceptions then we kill to honor those misperceptions.
We like to say we live in a world of hatred and fear. A world where one religion tries to eradicate another in order to worship a just and noble God. Whatever we call that God becomes our war badge, and we use it show our allegiance to the cause of right. But our cause of right has no right. Our cause of right reflects our belief in the religion of fear, not the religion that knows that the cause of right is really self-inflicted torture.
Friday, November 6, 2015
The Caring Game
It is by caring about things that we infused the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and our goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives.
A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continuing interest in it. Insofar as he does care about certain things, this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about, together with his ordering of how important to him they are, effectively specifies his answer to the question of how we live.
Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton, wrote those thoughts in his 2004 book, The Reasons of Love. We all infuse the world with elements of importance. But we don’t consider some of the things we care about important because what we care about is overshadowed by the mass cares that are projected into our fragmented reality. We try to conduct our lives caring about what others care about, and, for the most part, we accept our position within that framework as one of the main goals in life.
When we allow the mass cares of our society to trump our own cares, we become pawns in a treacherous game. In that game, our emotions override our insight. We give up a portion of the self, and we allow others to tell what we care about.
We play this caring game in politics, in religion, in social circles, and we even play it within the self. We find the importance of others more appealing than our own importance, and we become desensitized by our lack of self-caring. We live to express the false cares that influence our decision making. We find ourselves electing politicians with hidden or ridiculous agendas, and religious leaders that prey on the fear and the unknown within the psyche.
We play this caring game to learn something about the self. We learn that we are more than one. We live to care and to recognize the duplicity that exists in that one.
A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continuing interest in it. Insofar as he does care about certain things, this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about, together with his ordering of how important to him they are, effectively specifies his answer to the question of how we live.
Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton, wrote those thoughts in his 2004 book, The Reasons of Love. We all infuse the world with elements of importance. But we don’t consider some of the things we care about important because what we care about is overshadowed by the mass cares that are projected into our fragmented reality. We try to conduct our lives caring about what others care about, and, for the most part, we accept our position within that framework as one of the main goals in life.
When we allow the mass cares of our society to trump our own cares, we become pawns in a treacherous game. In that game, our emotions override our insight. We give up a portion of the self, and we allow others to tell what we care about.
We play this caring game in politics, in religion, in social circles, and we even play it within the self. We find the importance of others more appealing than our own importance, and we become desensitized by our lack of self-caring. We live to express the false cares that influence our decision making. We find ourselves electing politicians with hidden or ridiculous agendas, and religious leaders that prey on the fear and the unknown within the psyche.
We play this caring game to learn something about the self. We learn that we are more than one. We live to care and to recognize the duplicity that exists in that one.
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