ecosophia | JMG on the Dodcast

LOL @ Matthew Fox and dualist vs. non-dualist!

While his idea is tempting,isn't reality more an integration of the two? Square (dualist) and Compass (non-dualist), for instance comes to mind. But it's a difficult jump when we are so saturated with dualism in the modern MSM and educational systems. This leads us to think the opposite is the solution, rather than a balance. Everyone forgets about that "middle" pillar.

The Garden of Eden is all about the challenge of learning the union of the two. Both trees are in the garden and belong there and are thus what we think of as "good." The Tree of Knowledge is about the understanding of dualism and the Tree of Life that of Oneness. Neither can be understood without the other, but they have to be learned in proper order. It seems that the Lord of the Universe understands that we don't come to understanding without making all the mistakes first.

+Love and Light
AWH

Exactly. Binaries exist, but there's always a middle term. The reason I find Matthew Fox so silly is that he thinks dualism is bad, and then demonstrates a degree of dualist thinking that would have made a third-century Gnostic blush. It was an astonishing display of intellectual ineptness.

Matthew Fox was one of my first intros to liberal Christian theology. It was utterly horrible. The ironic thing is that your work has made me a better Christian than the liberal Christian theologians!

From my outsider's perspective, it would be hard to be a worse Christian than the liberal Christian theologians, unless you want to go all the way into overt atheism. Even then there are some who could give the atheists a run for their money.

I can't help but think of John Shelby Spong. I've read several of his books, and still can't figure out why his post-theism isn't just atheism. I've yet to figure out how his "ground of being" isn't just some natural force like gravity, much less why I'd call it "God" and want to reinvent Christianity around it. He could definitely give any atheist a run for his money. I've seldom encountered a more anti-Christian individual.

(Tangential comment) I took a class from Matthew Fox when he was teaching at Holy Names College in Oakland, CA (not for credit since I wasn't a regular student there). This was shortly after he had returned to teaching after having been silenced by the Pope for a year, and a couple of years before the same Pope forced him out of the Dominican Order. It was a survey class on Christian mystics of the Middle Ages, e.g. Meister Eckhardt, Dame Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila.

I'm not a Christian. I took the course because several of the writers we dipped into reading were women. Most organized religions do not have much of anything in the way of writings by female religious leaders and teachers who had respected positions in their own denominations (as opposed to those who left or were kicked out and founded their own sects). So I was curious about them and how they got along with the rest of the Church. The course introduced us to about eight mystics but only skimmed the surface of their teachings. Good enough for me since I was completely ignorant coming in.

Dr. Fox made passing reference to Creation Spirituality and Brian Swimme, but most of the students had already covered that in previous classes (I think). The RCC has a different take on the divine creation than Judaism does, so I don't have a dog in that fight. Fox was a bit shocked when I defended Philo of Alexandria against a disparaging remark he made in passing; not that I knew a heck of a lot about Philo, but I don't think our teacher was accustomed to having any students who had heard of Philo at all.

I guess there are some situations where binaries, and binaries alone are what one has. Either entropy exists or it doesn't. Either infinite growth is possible, or it isn't. I guess, then, the most productive strategy would be to recognize that as far as possible, go for a ternary in the middle, but where it isn't possible, go for the binaries. That in itself seems to me to be a middle ground between 'always go for binaries/extremes' and 'never go for binaries/extremes'.

"It exists" vs. "It doesn't exist" is certainly a workable principle when all one has to deal with is the universe of matter and energy in time and space. But there is also a realm beyond that universe, where there is no time and no space, no matter and no energy, which can be experienced directly, without any imtermediation of one's bodily senses or one's intellect. In that realm, as Iamblichus remarked apropos the Gods, one cannot say of something that it "is" or that it "is not." To do so, diminishes and falsifies everything in that realm. Yet since that realm can effect change in the universe of matter and energy, it is not a negligible thing for us mortals, whose awareness is almost always trapped (like prehistoric insects in amber) inside the world of matter and energy.

No, that title isn't a typo...I was amazed at the comparison to the current USA and the USSR toward its end. Right down to having our own Cherneko in office! Yet, the elites can't seem to realize how close they are to being tossed out of power, sent into exile, or worse. Willful ignorance? Or just plain stupidity?

I'll be talking about that in an upcoming post. Elites consistently behave this way; it's worth understanding why.

You said the convervatives are avoiding war because they are waiting to see how many of their enemies die from vaccination. I concur, but I also think many are getting a renewed hope in elections as Biden's numbers plummet. If the courts evicerate these mandates I think we'll be okay. People will wait for the next election or two. If the courts back the mandates I expect those dishonorably discharged veterans to go insurgent... And then we'll basically be praying for a miracle.

Once I realized how inevitable the decline was, and how much of it I'll likely see before I die (assuming I get the Biblical threescore and ten or fourscore years), I decided to change my investment strategy and retirement planning. Rather than investing ten to twenty percent of my income into stocks, bonds, etc., I've begun downscaling my lifestyle, learning skills like intensive farming, sewing, canning, herbalism, basic medical skills, etc. And then teaching some of this stuff to my family and friends, and trying to be more engaged with them. My goal now is to live very simply and be prepared, through planning and having a good network of family and friends, to survive whatever comes our way.

Hello North Americans,

There’s a total eclipse of the moon tonight that’s supposed to last about 8 hours; the longest lunar eclipse since 1440. Enjoy! Totality is at 0400 EST and will last about 8 hours.

—Princess Cutekitten

I would just love to hear your take on the future of Australia and the Pacific. There are wisperings in the media that the govt wants to increase immigration by 5 million over the next 5 years, you know for the 'covid recovery'. A disaster for a population of only 23 million.

I'll consider it, but keep in mind that I've never been there, and I imagine you're good and tired of clueless Americans pontificating about things they don't know much about -- there are, after all, no shortage of those!

You might not have been here, but I'd guess that you'd have more of a clue than anyone in the country right now. We could use a wise eye, if even from the outside.

John--

Your discussion of Faustian spirituality struck a chord with me, illuminating some key issues I've been having for a long time. That said, and understanding that we're not talking about acquiring superpowers in the physical plane, isn't the entire point of a spiritual path to better oneself and transcend one's present condition, including the standard human shortcomings?

--David BTL

That's a very Faustian way of thinking about it -- and that's fine, you know. Faustian culture is one way to be human, one of the options our species is exploring, and those of us who are part of a Faustian culture or one of its pseudomorphoses are taking part in that grand experiment. As Wittgenstein pointed out, there's no "outside" viewpoint, no Archimedean stance from which we can judge a culture; you judge it from within, or you judge it from some other culture's equally partial and biased viewpoint.

I’m keeping an eye on this.. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/OPEC-Pumped-Less-Oil-Than-Agreed-In-October.html

As Jesus makes it clear that calling yourself a follower of Christ or a Christian doesn't make you a Christian, he also makes it clear that "those who are not against us, are for us."

I count many lovely non-Christians in this latter category (our host included), and in my view these are far more Christian in spirit, and that is what counts in the end, not what they call themselves. The "anti-Christ" is specifically something that pretends to be Christian and is not. Religious leaders telling their followers to take the fox or consider themselves sinner comes to mind. It's all about what you do, not what you say.

One surprise that many Orthodox representatives to ecumenical and inter religious movements came to discover through their work is that we Orthodox have far more in common with say, Orthodox Judaism, Ismaili Islam and certain forms of Buddhism, Native faiths or Paganism than Catholic or Protestant varieties of Christianity. An ethical Atheist is far preferable to fake Christianity.

I like the photograph.

Off topic but extremely interesting!

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/19/lets-go-brandon-white-house-build-back-better/

Yes, the White House is trying to co-opt the "Let´s go, Brandon" slogan?!

Tidlösa, Sweden

Referring back to comments I've made here and elsewhere about working frontline healthcare during the wtf aids thing --- poppers --- why the basics worked, hahahahaha

check out fauci at corbettreport dot com with RFK Jr. up now - poppers - hahahahahahaha

coboarts

Good morning from the UK. An open question for anyone.

When do you think the peak of Faustian civilisation was? By what measures or values can we judge the vitality or worth of a civilisation?

That's an interesting question. I'm tempted to say the mid-20th century, possibly symbolized by Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. The Faustian worldview is about conquering nature and eventually spreading out into space. That probably represents the peak effort to achieve that, and some impressive stuff was indeed done. It's been all downhill from there, IMHO.

On the other hand, I think new inventions peaked in the 19th century, so perhaps sometime during that century was the real peak of Faustian civilization.

Edited 2021-11-20 17:50 (UTC)

From its own perspective, probably circa 1930-1990 or so, when a lot of new inventions made it possible to split the atom, fly in the air, send men to the Moon, and so on. Also, large scale social engineering of society became possible for the first time. (Or so we like to think.)

When I say "from its own perspective", I´m really looking at it from a kind of semi-outside perspective, since (of course) Faustians would argue that we still haven´t finished expanding!

More objectively? Difficult to say. The West ruled the world during the latter half of the 19th century, but started losing this control during the 20th, although the end game is presumably now...

Tidlösa, Sweden

I think you may have touched on this topic in "The King in Orange" or perhaps some other book, but Spengler´s perspective made me understand one thing that always baffled me. Why didn´t the Romans reach America? I´m sure the Romans could have reached America if they wanted to. Same with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. The Polynesians reached Easter Island and Hawaii with less "sophisticated" boats, didn´t they?

The reason could be that they didn´t have the Faustian impulse of infinite expansion in space. Progress to the Romans meant that the Roman Empire dominates most of the *known* world, presumably forever after, and that´s that. They simply didn´t have the weird idea that they have to cross the ocean "because the ocean´s there".

While there were material reasons for the overseas expansion of Europe during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, this doesn´t really disprove the Faustian impulse. Maybe it´s ultimately material. Or maybe they work in tandem.

Tidlösa, Sweden

Perhaps it was in part the overstitching of their forces? By the end of the 200s, the Empire was too large for a single emperor to rule. Even the two halves that were established required a senior and junior emperor to govern them. Even that arrangement didn't work too well. They might not have had a worldview that wanted infinite expansion and progress but they certainly wanted resources as much as anyone else does. If they had discovered the Americas during the height of their power, I can imagine they'd have invaded for gold, slaves, and other resources just as the Faustian Europeans did.

Another interesting thing to consider: if the Chinese hadn't abandoned their ambitious program of maritime exploration in the latter half of the 15th century, their fleets would have arrived in European ports around, or perhaps before, the Europeans' Age of Discovery. Whether they'd have kept up exploring and made it to the Americas, I don't know. Maybe an expensive naval war would have broken out and neither would have found the Americas.

One thing that struck me when listening to the podcast is how Russian Cosmism illuminates the "religious" aspect of the Western Idea of Progress, since Cosmism in some peculiar fashion is both religion, science (or at least science fiction) and politics at the same time. There are still Cosmists in Russia and they seem to be just another New Religious Movement!

Since I´m a kind of "moderate Faustian" (for lack of a better word - or is it realistic high modernist? Or low modernist perhaps?), I´m all for the idea that a dualism between Faustian and non-Faustian, or between dualism and monism, is...unproductive. Perhaps the Faustian impulse could be harnessed to expand technologies that may actually help people here on Earth in their day-to-day activities, rather than all those dreams about space conquest and what not? (The latest is that NASA wants to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon and then on Mars!)

As a child and teenager, and later too, I simply took it for granted that *of course* we must have space conquest because how else could we leave Earth when the sun becomes a red giant? Your essays "The Next Ten Billion Years" and "An Afternoon in Early Autumn" made me *really* understand deep time and how religious (in the most negative sense of the term) that red giant stuff really is. Even ten million years (an insanely long time) is less than a single day on the Great Year proposed in the latter essay. Whoa! It´s also a very long time for humans to actually come up with technology that really could "build back better"...

Some links about Cosmism.

https://ashtarbookblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/knocking-on-door-of-progress.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m9_3eB2tdI&t=769s

The second link is to the documentary mentioned in the blog post. I know you don´t do videos, but somebody else might perhaps be interested.

Tidlösa, Sweden

None of the major cultures are entirely good or entirely bad, so hopefully some of the better aspects of Faustian culture and its achievements can be passed along to the cultures that will succeed it. It'd be nice to see the Faustian impulse harnessed to create sustainable medical practices, energy, etc., that could survive the Age of Decline. Have you read JMG's book "The Ecotechnic Future"? Maybe, if some folks with moderate Faustian tendencies realize what is in store for the longterm, they can be a very helpful part of the dissensus process. I'm guessing that, when the Faustian culture was first born, settling into space wasn't the universally envisioned end goal. Perhaps some can redirect their vision and impulse toward something more realistic and helpful?

Maybe this is more of a Magic Monday question, but what is the relation between astrological ages and various civilizations? Faustian civilization emerged during the Age of Pisces, but this age began already during the heyday of the Semitic and Graeco-Roman civilizations. And if I recall correctly, both tamanous and sobornost will emerge during the Age of Aquarius. What is the Piscean trait of Faustian civ? Is it the attempt to break free from earth-bound matter by transforming it? Russian Cosmism could work as a model here, again: instead of a "resurrection body" through divine grace, we get a resurrection body through technology!

Tidlösa, Sweden

Really enjoyed this, thank you.

If I remember correctly actually the Visigoths were promised some land and they were move around and lied to a few times, they camped outside a few time and move around Italy, before finally they decided to attack Rome.

JMG on the Dodcast

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