Dangerous Spirituality

Thurman’s spirituality was grounded not only in the beauties of the black experience, but grounded as well in the terrors of the black experience, as only someone living in Florida and Georgia could know them in 1915 and 1920 and 1930. At the same time, it was a spirituality that says: “And knowing all that, I also know that all human beings are one.”

This kind of strange combination of spiritual truth with hard political social truth led one young man in the 1930s to say this about Howard Thurman: “I’m disappointed in him. We thought we had found our Moses. And he turns out to be a mystic.” That’s the spirituality that gets people all riled up.

Source: Dangerous Spirituality | On Being

Why life is not a thing but a restless manner of being

Russell sees the emergence of life rooted in the same principles that govern the emergence of galaxies, planets and tornados. Life, he argues, is not a freak occurrence but a unified part of a sweeping physical narrative, ‘merely one more part of the continuum of energy flow in the expanding Universe’.

Source: Why life is not a thing but a restless manner of bei…

Your Baby Knows More About Metaphysics Than You

The baby knows that existence is a paradox, both coincidental and inevitable, that everything is mostly nothing and the difference between everything and nothing is functionally negligible. The baby knows that the difference between everybody and nobody is nobody. The baby knows that nobody is nobody. The baby also knows that nobody is everybody and that if nobody is everybody then everybody must be nobody, too. The baby knows that everybody is everybody and by way of, or as an extension to that, the baby knows that everything is everything. Everything is everything is the grand unified equation. E = E. That’s the formula. The baby is working off these figures.

The baby, like many a great philosopher, is highly dubious of object permanence, or even objectivity for that matter. The baby is born of love consciousness, and is therefore love consciousness actualized and realized. We all are. Sometimes, or even often times, we simply don’t realize it. We all are the baby and the baby is us. Nobody knows this more deeply than the baby. The baby knows love deeply because it is close to its own temporal root; any human transgression is a forgetting of the love at our root. It’s hard for a baby to forget the love at its root because that love was some mere months ago, hella recent, so that’s where the myth of childlike innocence finds its a priori, solidifying it as one of the more bulletproof myths of human thought.

Source: Your Baby Knows More About Metaphysics Than You | VICE | United States

http://j.mp/UQWy5b

Luigi Fantappié and the physics of life

It was based on the following hypothesis:

“If life draws its nourishment from syntropy, then the systems which support vital processes, such as the autonomic nervous system, must show pre stimuli activations. If this is true, the parameters of the autonomic nervous system, such as the heart rate and skin conductance, should react before stimuli.”

Vannini’s experiments show that heart rate reacts before the onset of stimuli, that these pre stimuli activations are strong and easy to replicate and that heart rate values change significantly in advance to emotional stimuli, suggesting that syntropy is perceived in the form of emotions.

via Frontiers Magazine | Luigi Fantappié and the physics of life.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Universal Progressive Evolution

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955), a Jesuit priest trained as a paleontologist and geologist, was one of the most prominent thinkers who tried to reconcile evolutionary theory, religion, and the meaning of life. In his magnum opus,The Phenomenon of Man,  he sets forth a sweeping account of cosmic unfolding.

While Teilhard’s philosophy is notoriously complex, the key notion is that cosmic evolution is directional or teleological. Evolution brings about an increasing complexity of consciousness, leading from an unconscious geosphere, to a semi-conscious biosphere, and eventually to conscious sphere of mind. The arrival of human beings on the cosmic scene is particularly important, signaling that evolution is becoming conscious of itself. As the process continues, the human ability to accumulate and transmit ideas increases along with the depth and complexity of those ideas. This will lead to the emergence of what Teilhard calls the “noosphere,” a thinking layer containing the collective consciousness of humanity which will envelope the earth. (Some contemporary commentators view the World Wide Web as a partial fulfillment of Teilhard’s prophecy.)

via h+ Media | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Universal Progressive Evolution.

Golden Ratio Also Relates To Space-Time And Biology

The Golden Ratio, found in everything from the curve of an elephant’s tusk to the destructive beauty of Hurricane Katrina, is said to represent a “cosmic constant.”

A research team from the Universities of Witwatersrand and Pretoria have released a study suggesting that this cosmic constant – designated by the Greek symbol ∅ (letter Phi) with a mathematical value of about 1.618 – relates to the topology of space-time, as well as a biological species constant. The results of this study were published online in the South African Journal of Science.

Jan Boeyens, a former Wits University Professor and now at the Centre for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and Professor Francis Thackeray, a paleontologist at Wits University’s Evolutionary Studies Institute, have a shared interest in the expression of the Golden Ratio. Such expressions can be seen in items as diverse as the spiral structure of the cochlea ear-bone in a 2-million-year-old fossil hominin from the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa; the logarithmic spirals of inter-stellar galaxies, the structure of DNA, the growth of many plants, and even in the Periodic Table of the elements.

via Golden Ratio Also Relates To Space-Time And Biology – Science News – redOrbit.

10 Reasons Why Our Universe Is A Virtual Reality

Quantum realism isn’t The Matrix, where the other world making ours was also physical. Nor is it a brain-in-a-vat idea, as this virtuality was in play long before humans came along. Nor is it that a phantom other world modifies ours—our physical world is the phantom. In physical realism, the quantum world is impossible, but in quantum realism the physical world is impossible—unless it is a virtual reality—as these examples demonstrate.

via 10 Reasons Why Our Universe Is A Virtual Reality – Listverse.

6 Signs You May Be an Infinite Player

“What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.” ~ James P. Carse In his book Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse demonstrates a way of looking at the world that is truly unique. He breaks human reality down to at least two different games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, even at the expense of play itself. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing play, for the sake of play itself. While there are endless finite games chess, football, war, romance, politics, religion there is only one infinite game: the game of life.

Finite players play to win, and are often superficially rewarded for their play. Infinite players play to continue playing, and are often cosmically rewarded for their play. “It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.”

via Fractal Enlightenment | 6 Signs You May Be an Infinite Player.