Every now and again I have these potentially outrageous ideas inside my head on the "state of the world". The following one is a bit of a record of one such thought that occurred to me whilst packing up after work one day.
It may or may not be true but its just an IDEA and I am not too bad at pure Idea really, all things considered.
So here goes.... you are about to travel the deep dark recesses of my global thinking patterns.
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During the "enlightenment" age of the mid 19th century, western civilisation moved from a culture of superstition and regulated unquestioned faith to a culture of reason and science.
The people who drove this movement had great argumentative skill and knowledge. Thinkers who made sense with their ideology and talent. It was a time for thinking and reasoned rational approaches as opposed to a time for blind obedience to pious superstitions.
Our culture rapidly adopted the dogma that all things have a reason and a motive in the physical realm and nothing that could not be explained empirically was worthy of as much respect as a measured fact.
The culture is changing again. I see the "west" (or more accurately perhaps...The North), seeking to reacquaint itself with less observable sets of "Laws" than what is physically apparent to the senses.
We are craving spiritual re-connection again with forces we cannot understand and nor are we choosing to understand them in quite the same way as we understand the "laws" of the physical world.
There is a large number of people in my demographic (white, middle-aged, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon-European heritage), seeking to think less about rational results and more about spiritual awareness. We want to BE IN the world again, not merely be on it or above it or outside of it. We want deep spiritual connections with everything again. We are seeing ourselves less and less as mere sojourners on this planet - as objective observers of the physical realm around us - to wanting instead, to become "at one" with the physical world. We seem to crave a kind of simpatico reciprocal system of natural union, a kind of soul-kinship to the natural world if you will.
Eastern cultures have always managed to combine both deep spiritual connections and rational application of physical laws to the world around them. They are quite happy to marry both of these apparently disparate thinking modes into a holistic pattern of everyday life.
Western cultures have never really successfully combined these two modes of application...spirituality and rationality....we are VERY good at boxing these things up into separate compartments...most often relegating spiritual things to a tiny box of superfluous importance to our daily existence.
None of what I have just said is empirical fact of course. I have not set out to make a study of what I have just stated with evidence to prove it in the affirmative. I have just stated what I believe is my gut feeling about what I understand to be happening generally in the culture in which I reside.
This blog post is the opposite way of disseminating "ethical and sound" information! At least from the standpoint of the last 200 + years! Nothing of what I have just said can be proven either way.
This very individual unproven and outspoken expression of my P.O.V. is now able to be given credence and potential for examination by those who happen to read it.
This is the new data verification of the age! Blogging, especially blogging about spiritual perspectives, is a "new" form of sermonizing I guess. A new way of feeding people's need for spiritual knowledge. It's also a platform for exegesis of the viewpoints, breeding collective memes that coherently join like-minded faith tribes together. Through the opinion and discussion of many P.O.V's, we will soon draw conclusions as to the validity of my statements or not.
We have moved from dismissing one individuals reasoning as un-empirical due to lack of data to adopting it as a possible theme for reasonable exploration and thought.
I "see" our world moving from setting rules according to observable principles to a world that is setting new rules that are not so observable and are much more individual in their expression and purpose. We are a people on the brink of a great spiritual and scientific change.
A "new" dogma is about to emerge and I believe it will combine both the principles and perhaps practices of very old faiths and superstitions repackaged under the principles of reason and thought through scientific research and data collection and lots and lots of rational debate. We are not just entering a technologically digital age... we are entering a new age of systematic spirituality as well.
For the moment I'm calling this new paradigm "Gaea Thinking". It will perhaps combine a series of belief systems from the "New Age" movement and scientific data collection to prove the empirical validity of these revised but essentially ancient Faith systems. It will be more fluid, more remote, less empirical, scattered, intense and very very irrational unless you happen to believe it of course! :)
I don't know
QYB (saluté Vlad)
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