Philosophical Fragments Of Your Ancient Name

From Mephistopheles to Mount Tabor, Popper to Wilber, it's the way of zazen you being here

At least take a peek before you pop out?

Philosophical Fragments Of Your Ancient Name opens with a peek into the cosmos as seen through the lens of modern science. Then we focus that lens on the global climate change movement. We'll sketch out its many dimensions. Next, we dig into the roles we play in secular society. We'll try to figure out why we need to do the things we do. We'll explore the roles religion plays in public life and end with a look at the nature of the gods we worship. The book pivots on one axiom: Consciousness, or mind, or intelligence is not a form of energy.

2 Excerpts. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

3.3 Our Social Brain

Between those inside a group and those outside of it is a set of rules or practices those inside the group have chosen or been forced to obey. The rules that bind a group bind the members of a group together in loyalty. In this bonding, conflicts occur most often on group perimeters. They escalate when perimeters are crossed.

When group memberships conflict I might need to identify with one group and disavow or disown another. This sounds like a simple decision made by exercising freewill. It's not. It's not easy to disavow a group we're committed to and enjoy being a member in. Loyalty to a group is a cultural expression of our parasympathetic nervous system. It's hardwired in our brain.

Group paranoia is a fear of something or someone outside a group perimeter which can pose a threat to the group. The parasympathetic nervous system has conjured up "the other," the stranger who lurks in the unknown. Identifying with a group puts a stamp of respectability on our paranoia of "the other," the stranger who exists outside of the group perimeter. Fear of "the other" arises because we feel that a stranger is fundamentally different from us. We are uncomfortable with strangers and feel we need to be on our guard around them. Since most strangers mean us no harm our reflex to or inbuilt paranoia is irrational. We are literally afraid of our own shadow.

Fortunately, we spend little time thinking about other people. The private "I" will always be a more popular pronoun than "you", the other, or the group "we." I is how independence transcends the pull of groupmind. I is a basic need, not a basic right. We need the security of a patch of space only we have the right to occupy.

Capitalism enshrines private space in the right to property ownership. Socialism has no concept of private space. All property is owned by the group, the collective. Neither paradigm is final. An economic system in which 1% of the population owns most of the globe is not worth preserving. Neither is a political system in which every person on the planet lives with the constant terror of instant nuclear annihilation.

Whatever disagreements exist between private and group rights, there's agreement that public spaces are spaces that civilized cultures keep safe. Despite thousands of years of continuous toil and sweat, of countless wars that made little sense, of economic paradigm after paradigm, the day has not yet come when all of us can enjoy our existential right to live freely, in peace and security. Since the mushroom cloud of nuclear death rose above the skies of Hiroshima, every person on the planet has had to live with the fear of instant annihilation.

Even if the globe was a unified biological group and nation groups no longer existed, paranoia of the other will still overrule reason. Humans will continue to massacre other humans in the name of mere abstractions because the other will always exist in the unknown, on the other side of our perimeter, as the projected source of innate fear of the unknown. We need to dig deeper into the brain to reach the source of our irrational behavior.END OF