Notes
[Notebook: TURKEY]
[Sunday 15 June 2003 - Saturday 22 June 2003]
Sunday 15 June 2003
[page 322]
Monday 16 June 2003
Taoist quote on anthropocentrism, Needham II, page 56: Needham
East meets west TAO == GOD
One of the most important feelings from a survival point of view may be 'esprit de corps', our ability to form a committed team to achieve certain goals. The way that football and professional team sports in general now work shows that it takes very little time for an experienced team player to fit into a new team.
[page 323]
What we would like to say is that a global religion would be the esprit de corps of the whole human race, so that we all play together, within the rules of the global game to make the earth heavenly for one another. Superposed on the struggle for existence we need to have devotion to pleasuring one another in every reasonable way, while earning a living through giving pleasure. In my own trade, building, I find myself working in the wild environment in order to create an environment in which people can live comfortable, insulated from the extremes of the wild environment.
We can say that 'spirit' manifests itself through the behaviour of 'matter'. The problem observing the matter is to understand what it is saying, an identical problem to listening to the speaker of an unfamiliar language (eg genetic) and trying to understand what the speaker means (is talking about).
Tuesday 17 June 2003
It is interesting to note that many of the monks, gurus and other sages who advise us on religious matters and how to live our lives, have often taken considerable trouble to avoid the realities of life by being wealthy, childless or reclusive. In other words, insofar as their findings have any empirical basis, it is a limited and selective empiricism, not at all the full gamut of life's potential experiences. It may be that their theories are only able to deal with a carefully edited picture of reality, and so that they have accepted and promoted the edited picture through reluctance to depart from a well established (and naturally self serving) pattern. One likes the comfort of old ideas, but part of the comfort of science is that if we are guided by a broad view of the word, we will come to a better understanding of the divinity that created us.
The personal site is in effect this book, a log of the
[page 324]
experiences, feelings and enlightenments that have carried me from the narrow world of Catholicism to a glimpse of a truly divine Universe, a real Universe with work and aches and pains as well as joy and ecstasy. The whole plan of science is ecstasy, to stand outside our individual selves in order to get a reliable feeling for the whole system of which each of us is both a tiny part and a whole world in ourselves.
Agatha: The Hollow chapter 5: Meccano vs Lego. 'narrow but deeply loving' (page 111 in Lansdown Collection) high pressure = high stress-energy. Christie
Agatha and her servants. WORK = SERVICE. While we are at work we just do what we are paid to do with fair average efficiency and a minimum of fuss. Negotiation, of course, is always necessary to avoid exploitation. As humans, employer and employee are exactly equal, and we should expect our share of the income that the employment of the employee brings to the employer. The worst possible terms of employment are slavery, the best, partnership.
Religion, we wish, could take the same path as medicine and become evidence based. The root of this is statistics trying to see whether the data differ from the infinite flat space of the Cantor Universe, where every permutation has equal value. Insofar as the world deviates from the equiprobability, we expect to find some advantage (loading of the dice) in certain ordered sequences of actions rather than others.
Why does selfishness (seem) to lead to dehumanization? Because it is a force moving toward slavery, ie inequality, broken symmetry. Perfect symmetry maximized entropy (?) ie maximizes possibilities ie the unloaded die.
As a builder, one dare not raise something into place until a foolproof and failsafe method has been devised to
[page 325]
do it. Otherwise one risks 'accidents' (errors) and consequent loss.
. . .
Agatha Christie page 135: 'To Hercule Poirot there was only one thing more fascinating than the study of human beings, and that was the pursuit of truth, ie HISTORY.
Wednesday 18 June 2003
Needham page 63 note c: '. . . one should not overlook the very ancient component of human thought, the belief that magical power could be obtained over objects and processes by a knowledge of their 'true names''.
We can say that this is still true, only that 'true names' are given meaning by mathematical models that often transcend anything that can be clearly expressed in natural language.
