Retrospective 2024-19

This is a retrospective of week 19, 2024 (2024-05-06–2024-05-12).

This week I’ve continued reading Biology Revisioned by Willis Harman and Elisabet Sahtouris. It’s a book which arrived last week. Harman and Sahtouris write:

The self-forming characteristics of living beings…require a re-examination of the metaphysical assumptions that tend to underlie all of Western science.
–Willis Harman & Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned

…a cosmology in which all living things are assumed to be assembled by accident from fundamentally nonliving parts…is neither adequate nor satisfying. It is a worldview that…flies in the face of the obvious: that machinery does not grow on trees.
–Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned, p. 11

…our scientific vision of both nature and human institutions as mechanisms, and our efforts to “engineer” human society into this mold as political and economic machinery, has blinded us to the nature of the living system we are. …we have a marvelous science for developing technology, but not yet a good science for developing healthy, ecologically sound and sustainable human living systems.
–Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned, p. 13

…understanding comes not solely from being detached, objective, analytical, and coldly clinical, but also from cooperating with or identifying with the observed and experiencing it subjectively.
–Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned, p. 20

We simply have to recognize that modern science…defined reality in a very limited way, abstracting it as a particular physical world experienced through a few counted physical (biological) senses, ignoring all other aspects of experience… These limits were set to make things appear to be as understandable as the mechanisms we were inventing at the time science was founded…
–Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned, pp. 174–75

I’ve also listened to interviews with Iain McGilchrist and Christopher Bache (my emphasis in italics):

The bit of our cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent… Most of everything we know is extraordinarily fertile in a way that our abstracted thinking can’t be, because it’s always got to simplify. It’s always got to state this in preference to that. Whereas in the unconscious realm nothing has to be sacrificed in that way because things are drawn together. And I believe our intuitions are much richer than reasoning on the basis of them. So we need to reason on the basis of them, we need to validate them or not… but we shouldn’t too quickly collapse our intuitions, because our intuitions are able to hold a number of strands that to our expressive intellect seem to be contrary to one another, but they’re not, they fulfill one another importantly. … Now of course the intuition can be wrong, but so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=1150

When you don’t know something, you make up something that fits in with your theory, and you…disattend to things that you don’t want to know.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=2024

Everything is modeled on the machine but, if you think about it, there is nothing in the entire cosmos that is at all like a machine except for the few machines we’ve made…
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=2586

Actually, the whole administrative mind, which is now the only mind that has control, is an expression of the left hemisphere’s simplified procedural way of thinking. And it stultifies imagination, it gets in the way of creativity, it slows us down, it’s hugely costly, and it vilifies all kinds of people who don’t fit into the slots, the categories that it’s developed.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=2637

I think increasingly that values are the thing we should be thinking about. … And I’d even go so far as to say, … I believe that life … is about the ability to respond to a cosmos that is in itself beautiful, good, and true.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=2708

I believe that everything is relational … and that nothing is just a thing on its own. It only is what it is because of all the things that its context and with which it is in relation. And that’s something the right hemisphere understands… The left hemisphere takes things out of context, abstracts them, generalizes them, and isolates them, and loses their living uniqueness.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?t=3840

Consciousness is the stuff universe is made of, and matter is a manifestation of consciousness in a particular way. It is, if you like, a phase of consciousness… in the sense that physicists say that water has phases…
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/gN09qnHhPKA?feature=shared&t=3983

Here’s the thing, I think we either grow up or we lose the planet.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/dUtraaptNKg?t=4935

…what you experience is always going to be a reflection of the seed that you brought into the experience.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/dUtraaptNKg?t=5593

…when we merge our intention and work together, this has an energy that flows outward beyond the boundaries of the group.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/dUtraaptNKg?t=6307

Emelie Cajsdotter, *Det sjunger i gräset*.

Den här veckan läste jag även färdigt Det sjunger i gräset av Emelie Cajsdotter. Detta är Emelie Cajdsotters tredje och senaste bok. Jag har läst samtliga av hennes böcker.

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply