for - rapid whole system change - need for something that will create a new form of altruism - Ronald Wright - transition - requires an experience of re-awakening transition - need for a new religion? Deep Humanity?

comment 10 July 2024 - Deep Humanity is our attempt at this. It is not a religion, however. It is humanity, but in the deepest sense, so it is accessible to anyone in our species. Our tagline has been - Rekindling wonder in an age of crisis - However, this morning an adjacency occurred:

adjacency - between - familiarity - wonder - adjacency relationship - Familiarity hides wonder - Richard Dawkins said: - There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, - a sedative of ordinariness - which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. - For those of us not gifted in poetry, - it is at least worth while from time to time - making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. - What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? - We can't actually fly to another planet. - But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world - by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. - That is, when a type of experience becomes familiar through repeated sensory episodes, - we lose the feeling of wonder we had when we initially experienced it - It's much like visiting a place for the very first time. We are struck with a sense of wonder because everything is unpredictable, in a safe way. We have no idea what's around the next corner. It's a surprise. - However, once we live there, and have traced that route hundreds of times, we have transformed that first magical experience into mundane experience. - So it is with everything that makes us human, with all the foundational things about reality that we learned from the moment we were born. - They have all become jaded. We've forgotten the awe of those first experiences in this reality: - our first experience of our basic senses - our first breath of air, instead of amniotic fluid - our first integration of multiple sensory experiences into a cohesive whole - the birth of objectification - the very first application of objectification to form the object we called mOTHER - the Most significant OTHER - our first encounter with the integration of multiple sensory stimuli associated with each object we construct - our first encounter with auditory human, speech symbols - our first experience with object continuity - how objects still exist even if they disappear from view momentarily - do we remember freaking out when mOTHER disappeared from view momentarily? - our first ability to communicate with mOTHER through speech symbols - our first encounter with ability to control our bodies through our own volition - our first encounter with gravity, the pull towards the ground - our first encounter with a large bright sphere suspended in the sky - our first encounter with perspective, how objects change size in our field of view as they get nearer or farer - etc... - What's missing now, is that we have repeated all these experiences so many times, that the feeling of awe no longer emerges with life - To generate awe, the repertoire of existing experiences is insufficient - now we have to create NEW experiences, we have to create novelty - Mortality Salience can help jolt us out of this fixation on novelty, and remind us of the sacred that is already here all the time - For, what happens at the time of death? All the constructions we have taken for granted in life disappear all at once, or perhaps some before others - Hence, we begin to re-experience them as relative, as constructions, and not absolutes - All living organisms have their own unique umwelt - These umwelts are all expressions of the sacred, sensing itself in different ways

• What is required is a kind of awakening, or re-awakening
• When religions do their job, it gives us a framework to engage in a shared sense of the sacred, of wonder in the mundane
• In a sense, Deep Humanity is identifying that most vital commonality in all religions and seeing all their diverse intersectionalities in simply being deeply human
• We awakened once, when we were born into the world
  • then we fell asleep through the dream of familiarity
• Now, we have to collectively re-awaken to the wonder we all experienced in that initial awakening experience as newborns