I really enjoyed this, and found it thought provoking. It even features a soundtrack by Phillip Glass, who I had forgotten went to the University of Chicago (he entered an accelerated program at age 15).
Here is my take: taking global civilization to the next step, sustainable peace, requires a solution to dogmatism. Dogmatism, in turn, as a result of fear and following rigidity, requires a solution to emotionally impoverished childhoods. We need, as humans, to develop a way to give people who grew up miserable to in effect recreate on a more positive footing their foundational sense of life and its possibilities.
Nothing else will work, in my view. All rigid people–myself included–deal in ideas. But our attraction to one set of ideas relative to another depends entirely on the water in which we swim, which is to say our core emotional reality, our “presets”, our hidden emotional assumptions which color invisibly, often if not usually if not invariably, our reality.
What we take to be true, in other words, about “life”, has much to do with how safe we felt when we were two years old. No amount of talking can alter this reality. No talk therapy has a hope of liberating a truly liberal, truly open spirit, and within talk therapy I would include the work of all philosophers of the human condition.
With one exception: perhaps religion, and perhaps uniquely a religion based on love, like Christianity, MAY allow this frozen energy release. This is perhaps the most important contribution of Christianity, particularly. It is not a religion you are born into, when it is taken seriously, but one you are born AGAIN into. This is a powerful metaphor, and seemingly one which feels quite literal to many people.
Religion, in this sense, is a sort of EFFECTIVE psychotherapy, and has served as such in countless cases across the past several thousand years.
But for this transformation to work, one needs to be much more open, and much less cynical than most of us are. Very few people trained in the scientific method, bred to share the core assumptions which animate most professional scientists, are going to be ABLE to adopt a belief system like that of Christianity.
What remains, then, is slow steady progress, of the sort which I have been working at for many years.
I continue to believe Neurofeedback is our best hope. It is helping me. It is a slow, slow process. I am recreating myself from the foundation up. I am letting my manias slowly diminish and fade.
And I do think psychedelics may well play a role for many too. I would like to see a world where most people take them at an appropriate time. For me, that time is not yet.
And I continue to dream of my church. It will take charisma, patience, and long persistence, but there is a strong need. I simply have to emerge more fully into my own personhood and sense of agency.
I do feel agony sometimes, but it doesn’t break me. And one day I hope that it will be of immense value. There is very little anyone can suffer which I cannot relate to on some level. Every suffering is personal, but much of it simply has to do with being human, with our nervous systems, being subject to the countless shocks and betrayals which are occasioned by being social beings, by existing in networks which are often hostile in ways which are silly and logical at the same time. Everyone is protecting themselves. Everyone is doing what makes sense to them, even if it is also true that if everyone on the planet stopped at the same time being mean and stupid at the same time, we would all instantly be sustainably happier.
A few thoughts. I am continuing my emerging habit of fasting from 6pm Friday to some time after 6am Sunday. It’s a nice practice, not just physically, but emotionally.
I am trying to burrow into and feel safe with my core self. I am using all the tools I have been able to gather thus far, and making slow progress.