Dawn, good article, I recently read somewhere, can’t recall it at the moment, that a significant number of people do not actually have internal conversations with themselves, if true then it could go someway to explaining the lack of critical thinking that has occurred over the last 4 years?
Thank you. I'd be interested to know more about that. How did they discover that so many people don't have internal dialogues? I agree that if that is the case, it would certainly go a long way to explaining the past 4 years!
Yeah I heard they also do not seem to be able to imagine music in their heads.
Some food for thought:
"I believe humanity's foray into fiction began with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and the insertion of meaningless symbols in between the subject and the seer. In short, back when people used pictographic alphabets, we were limited to discussing things we could actually see in the real world. The invention of phonemic alphabets like this one, which are comprised not of representative pictures but of meaningless letters, provides the opportunity to invent an endless stream of non-sense, the greatest of these being spelled with just a single capital letter."
That's an interesting view, Rob. It seems to suggest that people never had imagination before the invention of phonetic alphabets and I'm not convined that is the case or that there is any evidence for it.
I haven't watched the video, so I'm responding to the extract you have cited. The name Leonard Shlain is familiar, although I can't quite recall at the moment in what context.
Thank you for joining the workshop, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm not at all surprised about the methodology in those experiments and thank you for the link.
The main point I was making was to highlight the language used to coerce people into believing they had to continue even if what they were doing went against their conscience and to emphasise that we have the free will to choose what we do.
Yes, and it seems like COVID itself was a big shock to people to stop blindly trusting authority.
Things are changing, even if people still aren't fully conscious of it, their subconscious/body avoids the boosters etc ...
"As traumatic transformations go, the covid operation is up there with industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and for time compression it is out on its own."
"And as for the rabbit hole trope – well, I don't think we’re going down the rabbit hole at all. We’re climbing out of it into the light."
Yes! I call this the sequel to 1984. The party lost the trust of the masses. Look how they're trying to make us scared of war with China and Russia.... Meanwhile the oil and money still flows.
What a joke.
To use the Alice in Wonderland analogy, we were hallucinating in wonderland and now waking to real land which is much less insane.
P.S. I'm' remembering now another layer to the joke which I had when I was writing it, which is now that I'm old I'm still not as old as Rumi so I can still "take" him.
Hi Dawn, like most of my spiritual work at Substack, I try for a joke as the first level but then hope for a spiritual kicker afterward. I call these multiple layers the divine comedy. I’ve been fellow travelling with Rumi for many a decade and I’m learning a Muslim language in part because I’d like to slowly work my way into the spiritual aspects of Muslim culture. Rumi is so popular now—apparently there’s even a Rumi restaurant in Montreal?—that in my joke I playfully poked at that popularity. The jester persona in the joke would be best understood as at his funniest if he’s understood to be a ruffian or ignoramus who doesn’t understand that this is the great Rumi of a thousand years of spiritual fame but he sort of recognizes that everyone’s saying how great he is and he interprets everything on the purely physical level and gets jealous. I feel moderately confident that Rumi would appreciate the joke at that level, though it also works as a straight parable and not just a joke. Rumi would also know that rambunctious jokes in rambunctious times may attempt much by risking much. In other words there’s a danger that people would get the joke too well and mistake the character in my joke as an angry version of me. But there’s also a chance that people might not get the joke well enough. That it would fall flat for lack of power. Elaborations might be needed in both directions! To “take someone” in the bully-rich culture of my Massachusetts childhood meant to fight someone and win. But not with cunning: just sort of banging away like foolish the little working-class dimbos we were. People might not know that meaning of “take” if they’re not from a specific American culture, but I like to have backup meanings for everyone as much as possible in my jokes. I like to think that with each of my jokes I spend at least sixty years getting it right. So that’s the take joke and its first “entendre” so to speak is to deflate the spirit of sanctity that often accrues around the great ones and makes it hard for us to see that their I Am experience is literally no different from ours. That the fact of their being a great spiritual teacher doesn’t mean our own spiritual potential needs to suffer by contrast. We needn’t go through all the years of privation that Siddhartha endured to see the “short path” right here, right in us. I gave my wealth away and went to the street and lived in cardboard as a streetfighter to discover the truth that the I Am needn’t appear after seven years of privation but is barely seven seconds away. So yeah, the first meaning of the joke is “take” in that sense. A sort of iconoclasm I suppose. Always a useful little corrective to the complacency that can sometimes come when the pantheon of spiritual great ones is too firmly established, don’t you think? If a golden statue of the Buddha reminds me that I am the Buddha, how lovely. But if with its magnificence it overtowers my own I Am and occludes it in shadow (technically, if I let it do so), then I have allowed the pantheon of spiritual great ones to be too firmly established. And too firmly established where? Where else but in me…
I have many takes on Rumi, enough for a book entitled Taking Rumi, but the second-level ‘entendre’, unless it’s the third, is that now that I’m old I can “take” or endure or put up with or understand Rumi. But a third- or fifth-level entendre would be something like:
Thank you for that wonderful response. And for your explanation of 'take'.
I too have no heroes that I hold up on pedestals. The reason for citing the words of sages like Rumi or Lao Tsu etc, is to demonstrate that I'm not espousing something new although the wisdom they share has largely been lost, especially in the West. My purpose is to help people understand their own 'I am' and recognise how the world 'works' so they can learn what they can do about the way it seems to be at the moment.
Excellent. My wife leads I Am meditation sessions and I’m like: “if you need me to open your show I got like six spiritual jokes ready to go. I also do well with nothing jokes.”
She just keeps her face composed and sails past me into the meditation zoom studio thing and as she’s closing the door I’m like: “I figured out why the chicken crossed the street…” But she closes the door. Sheesh. What’s a guy gotta do around here to make a chicken joke?
Dawn, good article, I recently read somewhere, can’t recall it at the moment, that a significant number of people do not actually have internal conversations with themselves, if true then it could go someway to explaining the lack of critical thinking that has occurred over the last 4 years?
Thank you. I'd be interested to know more about that. How did they discover that so many people don't have internal dialogues? I agree that if that is the case, it would certainly go a long way to explaining the past 4 years!
I will try and find it Dawn, I read it a few weeks ago though , my laptop history may bring it up.
That would be really appreciated. Thanks Steve.
Yeah I heard they also do not seem to be able to imagine music in their heads.
Some food for thought:
"I believe humanity's foray into fiction began with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and the insertion of meaningless symbols in between the subject and the seer. In short, back when people used pictographic alphabets, we were limited to discussing things we could actually see in the real world. The invention of phonemic alphabets like this one, which are comprised not of representative pictures but of meaningless letters, provides the opportunity to invent an endless stream of non-sense, the greatest of these being spelled with just a single capital letter."
Alphabet vs the goddess lecture by Leonard Shlain
https://robc137.substack.com/p/alphabet-vs-the-goddess
That's an interesting view, Rob. It seems to suggest that people never had imagination before the invention of phonetic alphabets and I'm not convined that is the case or that there is any evidence for it.
I haven't watched the video, so I'm responding to the extract you have cited. The name Leonard Shlain is familiar, although I can't quite recall at the moment in what context.
Great presentation!
Fyi, the milgram and other experiments had bad methods and assumptions just like germ theory....
Here's a post I did with some issues and an interesting update from a commenter.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/the-milgram-experiment-and-how-we
Thank you for joining the workshop, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm not at all surprised about the methodology in those experiments and thank you for the link.
The main point I was making was to highlight the language used to coerce people into believing they had to continue even if what they were doing went against their conscience and to emphasise that we have the free will to choose what we do.
Yes, and it seems like COVID itself was a big shock to people to stop blindly trusting authority.
Things are changing, even if people still aren't fully conscious of it, their subconscious/body avoids the boosters etc ...
"As traumatic transformations go, the covid operation is up there with industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and for time compression it is out on its own."
https://realleft.substack.com/p/no-conspiracies-please-were-reality
"And as for the rabbit hole trope – well, I don't think we’re going down the rabbit hole at all. We’re climbing out of it into the light."
Yes! I call this the sequel to 1984. The party lost the trust of the masses. Look how they're trying to make us scared of war with China and Russia.... Meanwhile the oil and money still flows.
What a joke.
To use the Alice in Wonderland analogy, we were hallucinating in wonderland and now waking to real land which is much less insane.
I’m a little older but I’m pretty sure I could take Rumi.
Would you elaborate on what you mean please?
And I like how you gave the joke a like and only then did you ask me to elaborate. An act of faith!
P.S. I'm' remembering now another layer to the joke which I had when I was writing it, which is now that I'm old I'm still not as old as Rumi so I can still "take" him.
Hi Dawn, like most of my spiritual work at Substack, I try for a joke as the first level but then hope for a spiritual kicker afterward. I call these multiple layers the divine comedy. I’ve been fellow travelling with Rumi for many a decade and I’m learning a Muslim language in part because I’d like to slowly work my way into the spiritual aspects of Muslim culture. Rumi is so popular now—apparently there’s even a Rumi restaurant in Montreal?—that in my joke I playfully poked at that popularity. The jester persona in the joke would be best understood as at his funniest if he’s understood to be a ruffian or ignoramus who doesn’t understand that this is the great Rumi of a thousand years of spiritual fame but he sort of recognizes that everyone’s saying how great he is and he interprets everything on the purely physical level and gets jealous. I feel moderately confident that Rumi would appreciate the joke at that level, though it also works as a straight parable and not just a joke. Rumi would also know that rambunctious jokes in rambunctious times may attempt much by risking much. In other words there’s a danger that people would get the joke too well and mistake the character in my joke as an angry version of me. But there’s also a chance that people might not get the joke well enough. That it would fall flat for lack of power. Elaborations might be needed in both directions! To “take someone” in the bully-rich culture of my Massachusetts childhood meant to fight someone and win. But not with cunning: just sort of banging away like foolish the little working-class dimbos we were. People might not know that meaning of “take” if they’re not from a specific American culture, but I like to have backup meanings for everyone as much as possible in my jokes. I like to think that with each of my jokes I spend at least sixty years getting it right. So that’s the take joke and its first “entendre” so to speak is to deflate the spirit of sanctity that often accrues around the great ones and makes it hard for us to see that their I Am experience is literally no different from ours. That the fact of their being a great spiritual teacher doesn’t mean our own spiritual potential needs to suffer by contrast. We needn’t go through all the years of privation that Siddhartha endured to see the “short path” right here, right in us. I gave my wealth away and went to the street and lived in cardboard as a streetfighter to discover the truth that the I Am needn’t appear after seven years of privation but is barely seven seconds away. So yeah, the first meaning of the joke is “take” in that sense. A sort of iconoclasm I suppose. Always a useful little corrective to the complacency that can sometimes come when the pantheon of spiritual great ones is too firmly established, don’t you think? If a golden statue of the Buddha reminds me that I am the Buddha, how lovely. But if with its magnificence it overtowers my own I Am and occludes it in shadow (technically, if I let it do so), then I have allowed the pantheon of spiritual great ones to be too firmly established. And too firmly established where? Where else but in me…
I have many takes on Rumi, enough for a book entitled Taking Rumi, but the second-level ‘entendre’, unless it’s the third, is that now that I’m old I can “take” or endure or put up with or understand Rumi. But a third- or fifth-level entendre would be something like:
The Rumi that can be taken is not the true Rumi.
Selah.
That was brief for you, Dave.
Thank you for that wonderful response. And for your explanation of 'take'.
I too have no heroes that I hold up on pedestals. The reason for citing the words of sages like Rumi or Lao Tsu etc, is to demonstrate that I'm not espousing something new although the wisdom they share has largely been lost, especially in the West. My purpose is to help people understand their own 'I am' and recognise how the world 'works' so they can learn what they can do about the way it seems to be at the moment.
Excellent. My wife leads I Am meditation sessions and I’m like: “if you need me to open your show I got like six spiritual jokes ready to go. I also do well with nothing jokes.”
She just keeps her face composed and sails past me into the meditation zoom studio thing and as she’s closing the door I’m like: “I figured out why the chicken crossed the street…” But she closes the door. Sheesh. What’s a guy gotta do around here to make a chicken joke?