Hubris - Quareness Series 187th "Lecture".

Hubris (overweening pride and arrogance) is an interesting condition driving humans to pursue paths/projects potentially leading to self-destruction...as can be seen in the downfall of ancient Greece. Our more recent past too would seem to have been afflicted with quite a tsunami of hubris in action with an increasing institutionalising of values. It can seem that we're widely morphing into some sort of anesthetised/impotent/solitary survival mode in a world turned into a hospital ward. It's been quite predictable that such disturbance would come to be experienced by those who are largely deprived of any autonomous ability to cope with nature, with our neighbours and our dreams, and who are technically maintained within carefully controlled environmental, social and symbolic systems.

Thinking that our planet and its information are less relevant than human ingenuity could be a dangerous error. With the benefit of hindsight we might notice that most "taboo" systems of earlier cultures most often reflected knowledge taken from nature and modified by human experience over time...as our forbears tried to articulate and preserve natural balances in a given area or within a given group of people. However, this sensitivity to natural balances is apparently now being actively suppressed through our modern believing in science and technology as capable of solving all problems. Evolution is today largely defined less in terms of planetary than technological process? 

When our natural environment was altered beyond the point where it could routinely be personally observed, the definitions of knowledge itself began to change...being no longer based on direct experience. Such knowings began to depend on industrial, scientific and technological "proof". A growing mass of "expert" interpretation/opinion (from specialists of every hue) disseminated by the media became our source for what nature is, what we are, how we relate to the cosmos, what we need for survival and happiness, and what are the appropriate ways to organise our existence. Small wonder then that we began (and continue) to doubt the evidence of our own experience...not valid until science says it is. Indeed many (most?) of us also have come to feel removed from participation in the larger issues which shape our lives...maybe because we are in fact so removed.

It has been pointed out somewhere that one of the primary means of immobilising people politically these days is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything of significance can be believed but nothing of such can be known. And people may be more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth (as opposed to only believe the truth) is to face the fear of no longer being able to evade responsibility. In fact moving from belief to knowledge can help move us from irresponsibility to responsibility and from helplessness and hopelessness to action ...in order to become individually empowered and confident in our own rational powers.

Our individual understanding is based on recognition of the fact that in each moment we choose to interpret what we perceive in precisely the way we choose to interpret it i.e. knowing that no one else is responsible for my state of psychic being. I am absolutely accountable to my own self for the psychic reality I construct in each moment. Indeed it seems that life is perpetually inviting each of us to see and act upon this constantly changing but ever-present opening to a greater wholeness, and the choice is ours alone to make.

Respecting our source/Creator entails using our intelligence as well and as often as we can. And doing so with clarity and coherence means each of us activating our thinking process so that it's going the way we want it to ...because that's why it was given to us and is there to help us through the evolutionary reality in which we are embedded. In effect such intelligently balanced personal investment in a natural evolution can be our medicine, protection and self-defence against the "attractions" of dehumanisation. Of course we cannot really avoid many of our daily fears and doubts and insecurities nor their impact on all we're connected to and care about...in truth we use our intelligence to create those effects. Here we see the reality that we can never stop using our intelligence but importantly we need to accept that we're better off taking personal responsibilty to be as clear as we can about using it in the way originally designed for us.

Betwixt stimulus and response lies space

For freedom and the power to choose,

Nourishing growth and intelligence.

Space for words and no words

To mingle with their shadows,

Patiently waiting to be harvested.

Twixt stimulus and response resides

The possible transformational power

To change the way we think and feel.

Sean.

Dean of Quareness.

July, 2023.

As we continue to separate ourselves from direct experience of the planet, the hierarchy of techno-scientism advances ...potentially creating major existential problems for a healthy human society.