This Week:
Over the last three weeks we considered the principle in general terms, as well as seeing how it related to past and present situations. This week we turn to what we imagine the future has in store.
Behind, or perhaps more accurately “copresent” with this effort we are always trying to amplify our vision of how we can turn the principles into a dynamic and permanent meditation. That is to say, into a practice applicable at every moment of our lives. In that way we go on shaping a style of, or way of, engaging with life.
General Considerations and Personal Reflections:
Here are some personal reflections. I offer them in the spirit of dialogue and exchange, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about, and experiences with, this principle.
In previous weeks I’ve focused on the meaning of day and night, etc as opposites, and on the meaning of overcoming contradiction. So far during my attempts at this weeks meditation my thoughts have drifted quite far a field — as they tend to. Continuing further along this path it seemed to me that besides being opposites, day and night, the seasons, etc are, each one, also moments in a cycle (whether its the Earths rotation on its axis, or moments in the orbit around the sun, etc). And I realized that one of the very basic illusions that condition my thinking is, what Silo sometimes called the illusion of “static naturalism”. That is the belief that what is at this moment always has been, and always will be (it’s static), and that’s how things are (naturally).
Those who understand the “I” as the central illusion of consciousness might also understand static naturalism as the equivalent of that illusion on a social level (or vice versa).
I am old enough to recall life during the cold war, how the USSR appeared not only as a great superpower but a impenetrable monolith, (some believed it was the greatest in terms of military and economic potential — people believe all kinds of shit). It was one of the two great empires (evil or not) that divided the world into West and East. I remember even after Gorbachev announced his policy of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) how so many political leaders and pundits in the West said it was all just a trick to get us (the good guys, the West) to drop our guard. Later of course they shamelessly denied this and all jumped on the bandwagon. Suddenly it was common to hear those same “experts” explaining how “we all knew that that the Soviet Union was about to come apart.”