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