We are it, the vast and awesome universe. We are small creatures with capacious imagination and growing intellect and, unfortunately, residual primitive fears and hostilities we have to overcome before we can truly claim our largest cosmopolitan heritage as citizens of a cosmos. The brain may be wider than the sky but the heart of too many of us remains a few sizes too small.
So I should clarify the cosmic/humanist philosophy I was celebrating in that last post. We're not insignificantly minuscule by birth, but neither are we vested with importance by pedigree. We bear tremendous potential. That means we have it in us to do something on a cosmic scale. Or not.
”We are the custodians of life's meaning," so far as we can tell. That's quite a responsibility. It's not yet an achievement. "If we crave some cosmic purpose then let us find ourselves a worthy goal,” was Carl's anti-authoritarian instruction at the end of "A Universe Not Made For Us."Do something, humanity, don't just (as WJ always said) "lie back." Don't rest on some falsely-imagined lineage of inherent essential grandiosity conferred by divine descent. "This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication." (Pragmatism VIII) Respect. Don't emulate.
In A&P we're surveying 'isms tangential to atheism, some on my view salutary--humanism, naturalism, pragmatism--and others decidedly not--parochialism, racism, sexism, nationalism, geo-centrism, chauvinism.
The docile passivity of waiting for meaning and purpose and importance to rain down from heaven or some more proximal potentate is beneath us. That reeks of authoritarianism. We can do better. Or so we'll see.
We are birthed out of entropy. Our conscious experiences are slivers of an infinite bank of potentialities which are forming out of an infinite soup of chaos. We create this microcosm of ours, it does not create us.
ReplyDeleteWhen you strip back every reactionary aspect of our psyches, the parts we develop as we react to events in our lives, you get to the core of existence. A pure conscious core which permeates all potentiality. This core can be likened to the unconscious mind, which secretly dictates all action and experience, which the conscious mind only filters in order to create experience.
With this knowledge there are two paths one can take. To "lie back," to not act, is to allow your unconscious processes to project a reality of its own. It creates its own patterns out of random information. However, one can also act to manipulate this reality through conscious action. Become your own God. Your unconscious is still in control, but an illusion of conscious control gives a person a sense of power over their microcosm.
Neither path is any more important or moral than the other, don't allow anyone to tell you what you should and should not be doing with your individual reality, for it is yours and only yours. Subjective experience cannot be shared.