Retrospective 2024-47

This is a retrospective of week 47, 2024 (2024-11-18–2024-11-24).

This week I have started reading the following books by Steve Taylor:

• Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds (2012) by Steve Taylor
• Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World (2018) by Steve Taylor
• DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World (2023) by Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor writes (my emphais in italics):

Why do we find it impossible to live in harmony with each other, with the natural world, or even with our own selves? Why is human history an endless, depressing saga of warfare, conflict, and oppression? Why do we seem impelled to destroy our environment, and hence ourselves as a species?

—Steve Taylor, Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds

We have lost the sense of being part of the world and the sense of the aliveness and “is-ness” of the world around us.

—Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

To a large extent environmental abuse is an inevitable consequence of our “sleep” state. …because we can’t sense the aliveness and sacredness of the natural world we don’t feel respect for it, and don’t feel a responsibility to take care of it. …we feel that the natural world is “other” to us; we can’t empathize with it, and so don’t have any qualms about abusing it.

—Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

With their strong desire for power, it’s inevitable that hyper-disconnected people feel attracted to politics… Their ruthlessness and lack of empathy make it relatively easy for them to attain political power. As a result, the governments…are often made up of “dark triad” personalities with psychopathic and narcissistic traits.

—Steve Taylor, DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World

The people who rise into the highest positions of power are often precisely the kind of people who should not be entrusted with power. … A large proportion of the brutality and suffering which has filled human history – including warfare, oppression, injustice and even modern-day environmental destruction – is due to the actions of these hyper-disconnected people.

—Steve Taylor, DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World

Without connection, it is impossible for us to live in harmony with our own selves, with one another, and with the world itself.

—Steve Taylor, DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World

I have also watched the following videos with Steve Taylor:

• Spiritual Science – Dr Steve Taylor, PhD, The Weekend University (Jun 30, 2019)
• Spiritual Awakening with Steve Taylor, New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove (Dec 29, 2019)
• The Illusion of Time, Steve Taylor: EP 375, Connecting with Coincidence (Nov 18, 2024)

Steve Taylor says (my emphasis in italics):

I think it’s a lot better to explore consciousness, to experience it, in order to understand it, than to try to describe it.

—Steve Taylor https://youtu.be/ucPpz0lI6ew?t=2367

I think the crisis of the modern world is a crisis of disconnection or separation. And you can see in science, in the mindset of scientific materialism, which is fundamentally based on separation, the idea that everything is broken down into units, and all these units are distinct and separate, and living beings are just biological machines who live in separation to one another. But as soon as you start to move beyond that, then you do start to uncover patterns, you start to feel more empathically connected to other human beings, and other living beings. You feel more empathically connected to the whole earth, the whole cosmos. And I’ve always thought that synchronicity is a part of that that, once you transcend separation you enter into this kind of ocean of connectedness, and then you start to discover more connections, and to experience more connections.

—Steve Taylor https://youtu.be/vmCIZMu5ElM?t=1485