Fannie and I arrived in Taiwan on January 15 returning to her home for the Chinese New Year Celebration. The airport was abuzz with people returning to their ancestral homes for this important holiday. We were met by my wife’s younger brother, who drove us from the airport to his Taipei home on a very busy freeway where we settled in for the start of our 3-week stay. We dinned out that first weekend in several fine restaurants not seeing any masks worn. Four days later we drove to Hsinchu 50 miles to the southwest to stay with Fannie’s older sister and family. We went to dinner in a new high-rise shopping center packed for the holiday, some were beginning to wear masks, as was our family. When we returned for our departing dinner, the shopping center was full again but most now were wearing masks.
We were worried about our flight back to the U.S. Would we be allowed to fly to Tokyo? Would Los Angeles allow us to fly from Japan? If we got on the flight to LA and it took off, our worries of getting back home were for the most part over. Every passenger wore masks to Tokyo and to LA, maybe half to Dallas, and only us to Fargo. We brought home several boxes of masks as we watched the Covid-19 spread around the globe. The location and number of cases placed on a world map reminded us of a child with measles. This is a ‘global pandemic’ and the World is now in survival mode. Taiwan was prepared, quickly responded, and avoided the big crisis now infecting the US and many other countries – our family is safe for now…
Colin Wilson suggests that we can remember everything that has ever happened to us. However, since our survival depends on focusing attention on the Bengal Tiger at the edge of the forest ready to pounce on us, our minds have had to specialize in order to avoid being eaten. However, today I am in our warm home, surrounded by a 6-foot wooden fence, with headphones on listening to Random Access Memories while making an effort to accessing my memories. I am mindful of the global crisis and the game-changing meaning Wilson attaches to this event. This is interesting: the World is in the midst of a ‘crisis’ which will allow a test of Wilson’s thesis that “crises drive expanding consciousness”. An issue for us, how to measure the increase in consciousness or what Maslow calls ‘peak-experience’ occurring in ‘self-actualization’ as a result of this pandemic crisis. Of course, the world and we need to survive to test this hypothesis. In these blog entries, an attempt to experience the Covid-19 crisis is presented, followed by several other videos presenting ideas addressing aspects of consciousness, which as we view them, we need to reflect on how the Corvid-19 crisis is increasing consciousness. We begin with Wilson’s proposal that an answer lies in crisis. Take notes in order to respond in the reply area at the end.
Colin Wilson on Freedom suggests that the answer lies in crisis
I was quite surprised when this Colin Wilson clip popped into view. Our Covid-19 crisis is the first really ‘global crisis’ allowing for this thesis to be tested. WWII was global but not global like Covid-19 is today – not threatening everyone, young-old, male-female, Chinese-American existence.
Coronavirus Pandemic | FRONTLINE Premiered Apr 21, 2020
Coronavirus: America’s Reckoning
How the coronavirus pandemic is changing the world | Fareed Zakaria Apr 13, 2020
The Green Man – Cheetham says we are unable to see Him
Tom Cheetham – Spiritual Imagination in the Work of Henry Corbin, CG Jung and James Hillman
Ibn’ Arabi – ‘Alone with the Alone’: Henry Corbin
One of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Tehran. (Iran) Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great work: “Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi “is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind.
Terence McKenna – The Third Eye Exists
Herbert Marcuse Interview about One Dimensional Man (1964) The last question that Marcuse is asked is, “What is the role of the academic scholar in addressing the one-dimensionality of man?” My ears perked up, as Herbert is talking to me – interesting, I have work to do!
Rick Roderick on Marcuse – One-Dimensional Man
Slavoj Žižek – What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009
Zizek is at his best! At minute 23 he tells a joke about not just “dusting the balls” of capitalist like Trump but we should “cut their balls off” with this act’s only awareness being their voices rising an octave.
I have been watching these clips for some years now, letting them ‘seep’ into my unconscious. I have thought to pull from each performance an ‘essence’ but then that would be interfering with your experience in ‘sensing’ their importance to what is now unfolding in the World. I sense The Philosophy of Sense8 suggests a way through our current crisis, however, understanding and implementing such a strategy is a challenge.
The mathematical challenges to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life are very thought-provoking. At the end of the ‘Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’ video below, the interviewer Peter Robinson asks his guests scientists David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer about the contributions of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. The two Davids disparage Marx and applaud Freud – but Meyer nails the question by saying all three thinkers made important contributions to the issue of consciousness under discussion. He begins saying “It is good to group their ideas together. Darwinism has become the foundation of a ‘world view’ and we need to look at the questions these three addressed: Darwin tells us where we came from, Marx offers a utopian vision of the future, Freud tells us what to do about our guilt. Between the three of these great materialistic thinkers of the 19th – 20th Century they form the basis of a comprehensive world view. They answer all the questions that Judeo-Christian thought addresses.” What intrigued me is that “the complexity of the cell, the building block of life, is increasing as the Universe expands. Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy
The Covid-19 pandemic crisis presented here is speaking to us – leave a reply below as to what you are earing. Then it is time for the movie, Contagion 2011 Pandemic Movie.