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https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/55146996Speaker 0 (0s): Well, good afternoon, good evening to where you are. And I hope you find yourself
Speaker 1 (23s): In a state of bliss. I hope that you are enjoying your day. I hope you've got someone to love something to look forward to and something to do. If you've got those three things, life is looking pretty good right now. What we'll come back to the podcast. I've been thinking about you. I actually have a little a housekeeping to do today in that I got an awesome message from a good friend of mine.
And I think what we were speaking about as relevant and really got me thinking about different things. And I would like to share it with you. I like to share what he had written me and what I wrote back to him. So here we go. This one was to my amazing friend, Eby, who is one of the coolest people I've ever met on the planet. One of the most spiritual people I've ever met. And if you're listening to this buddy, I love you, man. Here's what he says. George listen to do a couple of the podcast today. And I really liked them. See that right off the bat.
You can tell he's a good guy that made me think the analogy of the locusts, the middle-class and minorities. They are the majority of people. We have ideas of swarming the people on top of the upper-class or the corrupt politicians in putting them in jail. I've always thought that the way you defeat a rich, powerful entity is to take their money away by not paying for their products. I have also been thinking about origins.
People saying, follow the money to fund the corruption, looking at everything's origin. Where did it come from? Where was it made? How was it made? Who made it with what material? Where did that material come from, et cetera then, is it worth it to pay for it? What ever it is. If people got together and boycott products on a mass scale, that would get way more attention than a couple of dead CEOs. It's hard to express revolutionary revolutionary ideas, the texts because of the very thing that you expressed in your podcast about Facebook.
So why don't want to kill anybody? And the fact that I want revolution makes me uncomfortable writing this because it is likely that someone or some entity is monitoring this particular communication via an algorithm it's possible red flags, types of words. Everything seems to be monitored these days. I know am a peon in the scope of global society, but I imagine if anyone was able to get any traction on transforming corporate industrial society, they would have their worst fear released.
By the way, besides that point, my kids asked me last year, what my greatest fear was and what superpower I would want. And my answer was at the most afraid of things that you cannot see, not so much ghosts, but germs, bacteria, and virus, things like that. The greatest superpower is the power to heal and not just a physical, but also the mental balance. Thanks for provoking. This thought George much love.
So there's a lot in there. Let me read you. guys' what, what I wrote back first off. Thank you brother. I said it before, and I'll say it again. You are one of the most spiritual people I've ever met on the topic of swarming locusts. Isn't it fascinating. I've been consumed lately with that type of language, the language of life. Imagine being alone in a field on a beautiful sunny day off in the distance of black cloud, 80 million locus traveling towards you at 12 miles per hour Is not really that different than an angry
Speaker 2 (4m 19s): Mob.
Speaker 1 (4m 22s): The locusts descend on the field, stripping flesh from bone, leaving a trail of famine, plague and devastation. You are really similar to a mob of angry people,
Speaker 2 (4m 33s): But yet that has only on a superficial understanding. Maybe
Speaker 1 (4m 39s): That's a swarm of locusts. That is the meek inheriting the earth, or maybe it's a call to action. Perhaps its a warning may be an omen, I guess it all depends on if you identify as the grasshopper or the grain I'm of the opinion that it is the spirit of the earth, communicating the concept of infinite possibility, arising from circumstances of fine attune on the topic of rebellion, the hammer brothers minority and middle-class or as I like to call them sledge in Jack, they clearly have the power to pummel, the rich and powerful and corrupt into a pink pasty pile of flesh and hair.
Ultimately that will get us nowhere. The truth is the people on top could rape and pillage and plunder the lower classes in perpetuity if they were not so greedy and so arrogant. If the elite were willing to sacrifice just one, just one of their own to the justice system. If they were willing to sacrifice one, just one of their own to a public execution, if they were willing to sacrifice one, just one to life in prison or some other form of justice, every seven, then the few could control the masses forever.
On the topic of revolutionary ideas, nothing will work. All ideas of rooting out corruption by changing people's patterns will fail, be it money, race, education, and corruption,
Speaker 2 (6m 17s): Calamity. The
Speaker 1 (6m 19s): People that we hate, the chains of poverty, the greedy politicians, the corrupt CEOs, or the fact that absolute power corrupts,
Speaker 2 (6m 31s): The criminals, the rapists, the murderers that's me. And you know,
Speaker 1 (6m 43s): And you, my friend, all of these things are manifestations of our organism and we could no more get rid of them. Then we could drink the ocean through a straw. It's both heart wrenching
Speaker 2 (6m 57s): In the rating or the NSA or the three letter agencies,
Speaker 1 (7m 7s): The platforms, anyone monitoring calls. These are the monsters under the bed, Peter pan, the wizard of Oz
Speaker 2 (7m 17s): I to
Speaker 1 (7m 18s): Fear the invisible. We are protected by something we can't see from something we don't understand culture and chaos, the greatest superpowers to heal, not just the physical, but also the mental that my friend is one of the most profound quotes I've ever heard.
Speaker 2 (7m 35s): I think you for provoking that thought sincerely, George
Speaker 1 (7m 42s): Pretty powerful, right? It's so awesome to get, to have some conversations or some texts or some emails or a phone call or a FaceTime from people that you care about or people that care about the world. And I want it to reflect a little bit more on some of these thoughts that ed had. If you didn't hear the part about the locust it's in a previous podcast, you should talk. I had previously talked about it, but it just got me thinking about forces of nature and what we can learn from forces of nature to be at a tornado or a tidal wave or some locusts or a plague.
I don't think it's that far of a stretch to understand that that's the world trying to talk to you and me,
Speaker 2 (8m 38s): These cataclysms, these days,
Speaker 1 (8m 40s): Forces of natures, these animals Spirit's they are an attempt
Speaker 2 (8m 49s): To come in.
Speaker 1 (8m 50s): Kate directly to the individual is the planet and the individual communicating, what lessons can you learn from this? What am I trying to teach you by showing you this level of devastation? Well, maybe they're trying to show us Maybe the planet is trying to reach out to us as a community and to be the planet is screaming out to us. Nothing lasts, nothing lasts. Yeah. You know, I was building a sandcastle with my daughter couple of weekends ago and as I'm building it, we're talking and we were building the stack and we're trying to build a little bridge and here comes the water to wash it right over it.
And it didn't completely evaporated, but if he visceral it enough just enough so we could build it back in and the water came again. Right over the top. And then pretty soon that as the tide was rising, more water came until there was no sand castle left. I thought to myself, what a great metaphor for life. Some people say, well, that's a pretty sad George now. I don't think so. I think that it's the world communicating to you and me that while you're here, don't focus on building up on a monolith or don't focus on hoarding.
Don't focus on creating a life of stockpile, focus on creating a life of beauty. I'm not saying you shouldn't work hard. I mean, you definitely should. And you should sacrifice. If you want to have more later, you should work as hard as you can now so that you don't have to later.
Speaker 2 (10m 42s): <inaudible>
Speaker 1 (11m 3s): What I really believe in this same lesson is
Speaker 2 (11m 9s): That
Speaker 1 (11m 12s): All of the level of communication is, is very poor. Our ability to truly understand what someone is telling us is an issue. Most of the time, we're so busy thinking about what we want to say. We're not even listening.
Speaker 2 (11m 31s): <inaudible> something else
Speaker 1 (11m 54s): That I believe the world is trying to communicate through mass events, via plagues or plagues or disasters or a natural phenomenon. I think that this is part of a way of solving the problem of how to keep a society from stagnating. It's the hardest thing in the world to do. I mean, you might have a social system that would've been a long smoothly for centuries, but if it lacks the element of novelty of progressivism, it's dead.
I dare say the aunt and the bees have smoothly working systems, but they do not change. This element of novelty is what makes the difference between men and the animals. Man sees a future in the present. There is a vision of what could be done with the materials of what he has a dog sees the present as a present and nothing else. The fact that we can see a future and imagine a future, the novelty is what makes us great and is also the tragedy, right?
You can't have comedy without tragedy. You can't have life without death. You can't have love without loss. I've been reading quite a bit from an older philosopher, Alfred, North Whitehead. And I got to tell you, it's stunning to me to read what has been written in the past. In some ways, when you read what's written in the past, it flashes a light.
It illuminates a pathway to the future. My grandpa used to tell me if you want a new idea to read a really old book. And I want to read a little bit or talk, we'll talk and read a little bit about from this current book that I'm reading now from Alfred North Whitehead and this particular passage, he was going to talk about Play-Doh in the laws. One of the works of his old age. So here we go.
Let me look here. Let me show you a passage in Plato. He Rose peering along his shelves and finally chose a volume in the Loeb edition, opening it to chapter 50. One of the tomatoes, the translation was amended here and there by his own pen. He spoke of it. This translator turns this into substance, but it means nature or more exactly growth or the process of growth. Yes. Now here Play-Doh is speaking of the receptacle, the idea is vast and a little vague.
He went on through two or three pages summarizing as he read until he read chapter 54. And now here you see, he reduces the idea to commonplace to geometry, but it wasn't that often his method to take the infinite, which he alone was capable of tackling and reduce it to a finite form, which average mortals, the educated man of ancient Athens, as you once said, could understand this relationship between the infinite and the finite is what I was coming to.
Our minds are finite. And yet even in these circumstances of finitude, we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite. And the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of that. Infinitude I wish I could convey this sense. I have of the infinity of the possibilities that confront humanity, the limitless variations of choice, the possibility of novel and untried combinations, the happy turns of experiment, the endless horizons opening out as long as we experiment, as long as we keep this possibility of progressiveness, we and our societies are alive.
Speaker 2 (16m 14s): So when we lose them, both we do
Speaker 1 (16m 19s): And our societies are dead, no matter how externally active we, and they may be no matter how materially prosperous they are and we may appear, and nothing is easier to lose than this element of novelty. It is the living principal and thought
Speaker 2 (16m 39s): With which
Speaker 1 (16m 41s): Keeps all alive. How much validity do you get in the sense of oneness, which we sometimes have that sense of our individuality being merged into the all one is anxious not to talk moonshine about this. The more, if like me, he is neither a meta physician nor a psychologist. And yet I know that those moments are so memorable. The sense of it. So strong that years later 10, perhaps one can reach back into it as if it were only yesterday or today and create out of it.
Something living in new mysticism said, Whitehead leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience. Something that will save it or at least save the memory of it. Words don't convey it, except feebly. We are aware of having been in communication with infinitude and we know that No finite form. We can get it
Speaker 2 (17m 44s): So I can convey it. How deep is that right.
Speaker 1 (17m 53s): In a world of finite resources, the possibilities are infinite. How about his idea of how about his idea of that sense of oneness that we have some times, you know what I mean by that, for me, that sense of oneness is like the height of a psychedelic experience. That height of being given information without a linguistic pathway, that height of, of euphoric ecstasy, but not, not ecstasy in the sense of, of overwhelming happiness, but ecstasy in the sense of fear and all that sense of ecstasy.
The sense of ecstasy that scares you to the point where you are seeing something that you shouldn't see the sacred, the divine. When I say ecstasy, that's what I mean. It's those moments at the height of your psychedelic experience, it's the height of, of ecstasy at which you can't, when words fail, that's when you reach. And that's when your dad is when you are truly communicating on a spiritual level.
And those are the times that while it's happening to you in those times, it seems like days or hours, but it's truly, maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or maybe it's an hour. But at that time, when there is no time, its the time when you can live a thousand lives and it's those times that you try and reach back to the, to bring something back in those times, that's how you make the world better.
You must first off find a way to get to that position. Nature is a good way to do it. The relationship between the infinite in the finite, That's what we are living in. Our bodies are finite, but this world is infinite or love is infinite. The possibilities are infinite.
Speaker 2 (20m 46s): <inaudible>
Speaker 1 (21m 17s): Let me continue a little bit more in this dialogue music I ventured may come nearer than words sometimes during a good performance of the very greatest music. One has a sense that he is in the presence of infinitude somewhat similar to what the composer must have felt when he was having to choose between one concept and another in the hope of expressing it, the definite concepts are there in tones or phrases, but all around them, hover the infinitude is a possibility.
The other ways in which the vastness I'd had been expressed out of this effort to save the mystical experience said Whitehead in the hopes of creating a form, which will preserve the experience for ourselves and possibly for others comes clarification in a thought or perhaps in the art form. And that clarification is then turned into some form of action, mysticism clarification action.
I have never put it in that form before, but that is the order in which I would state it. Let me restate that for you guys. Mysticism clarification action. He said that a static quality appeared in the Buddhist religion as evidenced by the history of India and China, that their rate of advanced retarded or stopped. And that since the year 1800 BC very little change had come to China until modern times except minor ones in small living arrangements, he was illustrating how subtle a possession dynamic thought is and how easy it is to lose the death of dynamic thought.
Doesn't that kind of sound like the death of creativity or the inability to think critically, Not that there is ever been real truth. However, it seems in this world of contradiction and abstraction that we are moving further and further away from anything that could be considered the truth
Speaker 2 (23m 46s): From anything that could be considered true enough.
Speaker 1 (23m 52s): I believe that for every new technology that we get, something is taken away from us. If you get a chance to go back and check out the last series I did on the medieval internet, where we get into how today's society is becoming more and more Yeah
Speaker 2 (24m 7s): Or like the feudal system of the dark ages. So strange to think about
Speaker 1 (24m 15s): How's such a liberating technology as the internet could retard our motion for Liberty
Speaker 2 (24m 21s): In the future. Additionally, The
Speaker 1 (24m 28s): Dark ages gave way to the printing press,
Speaker 2 (24m 32s): Which was at the time was like the internet.
Speaker 1 (24m 39s): However, looking back on that today, this amazing piece of technology, the printing press is in fact, what could be possibly
Speaker 2 (24m 52s): The
Speaker 1 (24m 52s): Reason for our narrow thinking. And if that's true, if things run in cycles and we are moving in somewhat of a dark age, could it would, it should have not be the same as the printing press have. The dark ages is very similar to the internet of our age. And while at the time people saw the printing press as an opportunity to
Speaker 2 (25m 16s): Move
Speaker 1 (25m 19s): Wisdom, to move words, to move the truth to the masses so much was like
Speaker 2 (25m 23s): Lost so much
Speaker 1 (25m 27s): Information on the scale and so much information
Speaker 2 (25m 31s): Gone. And isn't that the truth with the internet,
Speaker 1 (25m 37s): This object that this powerful form, this means,
Speaker 2 (25m 44s): Right?
Speaker 1 (25m 44s): This idea of freedom for the individual,
Speaker 2 (25m 47s): What is causing us to lose our humanity?
Speaker 1 (25m 57s): Let me try and shine a shine, a light on that. Allow me to read you another passage or a few of the passages to try to give you the insight quite a while back. I said you were speaking of the death of truth, which results when men attempt to codify it into some dogma or institution, which they hope will conserve it for posterity, even Plato in his old age at least seems unwilling to let his ideal society take its chances.
Possibly it is true because he had seen the disaster to Athens, but isn't the difficulty with all such attempts that the sum of existence is larger than any system. However, large,
Speaker 2 (26m 43s): The, for a pattern
Speaker 1 (26m 44s): Of existence said he is a natural and very common wish that our experience should have some meaning, some order, and it should make sense. The hypothesis of science are the same. The pattern may not represent anything more than our conception of our lives as we would like to believe them to be or our hypothesis of a scientific process. But it steadies us.
I may have spoken to you before about the static civilization of China. A time came when things seem to change. If you want to know why re Confucius, and if you want to understand Confucius, read John Dewey. And if you want to understand John Dewey read Confucius, Confucius wanted to get rid of the silly ideas. The simple facts ought to suffice for you. Don't waste time asking questions about the ultimate seas under these facts, mind you, I greatly admire what John do we have made possible.
And in the development of your Western universities, I am speaking hear about the consequences of the doctrines of pragmatism. Thus, the Chinese discovered the magnetic needle iron placed in certain positions would cause a pointer to aim North. Now that Confucius would say ought to be enough for you, the fact suffices, but when the magnetic compass is brought westward into Europe, what happens immediately?
The silly questions begin to be asked. Why what makes the needle point North and straight away, all sorts of fruitful consequences insure as that mathematics, which had been Well NY useless for 2000 years is pressed into the service. And so on. Now these are just these superfluous questions which pragmatism would ignore, or of course he smiled as he said it. If you say in print that the individual should be listened to, and that these silly questions ought to be asked, you will instantly be pestered with letters from 3000 idiots whose questions are silly.
But the point is he resumed that the silly question is the first intimation of some totally novel development. Suppose we admitted this principal in the sphere of morals. What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happened to like the immorality is what they dislike. But the silly question as applied to morals would open the way to a discovery of the few ultimacy was behind all systems of morals, a region in which very little has yet been done.
Here's another passage. I think that speaks to the heart of it. What I was speaking about earlier about the printing press, taking away our ability to see some things clearly, quote, writing only brings out comparatively superficial experience. This man has had it a relatively short time, shall we say about 4,000 years, the worst in the form of chipping pieces of stone for the decrees and boasts of monarchs.
Then on papaya Iris for only about 3000 years or less have men written down their thoughts. Let us say from Homer's time now, for ages before that you had immense quantities of human experience, accumulating and men's bodies, the body itself was, and still is an immense experience. The sheer harmony of its properly functioning organs gives us a flood of unconscious enjoyment.
It is quiet in articulate and does it need to be articulate But in bulk and perhaps insignificance it far outweighs the scope of the written word that by comparison is mostly trivial. Even with the very greatest master's of the written word. Dante one is left aware of how a pale this statement is in comparison with the experience itself goes, can only suggest that the misery and horror have the Gretchen tragedy Dante's Inferno can only to be a shadow of what he imagined or the murder of Agamemnon in the agony, which came before it in, after what perhaps the written word can do is recall to us our own experiences or give us intimations of experiences, which we are likely to have.
Okay. So if you stopped there and just think of for a minute, right? When you read a story and when I read a story, we can imagine in that story in our own minds and if you have there. So I talked about the story, or if you and I wrote a report on a story we read, and we were asked to give a vivid details of that story that were not in the story that you and I would write down to different accounts at the point, I really want to drive home and give us some more examples of is the way we consume our information changes the way we see that information, the way we consume.
And Pre the way we consume our information. It changes the experience of the situation. Does that kind of make sense? Let me read another passage. I would rather hear a performance with heart and it said I then an impeccable technique and mine, you said Whitehead, the same holds for personalities. They make their effect more buy what they are than by anything they say, even when you are using words affectively, they gave a great deal from the physical presence of the speaker.
Warmth accent emphasis are emanations from body and spirit. Of course, the very best writing is an attempt to convey in printed words. Some of those overtones, which are sounded by the voice and emanated from the physical personality. This to me is why to this day. I remember William hung. Remember that guy from American idol that saying she banged by Ricky Martin or whoever that guy is, the living LA Vida loca guy.
Look, I don't even remember his name, but I remember that kid's name is Cause. When we see something where someone puts their heart into their performance, whether they're a really good or they're not really good, you can see the heart, you can see them putting up the performance and that kind of a performance is much more memorable than any myriad of boy bands that didn't make it right. Those were manufactured. All this manufactured sound that's being put in front of us to make money for certain types of people and contracts.
That's the manufacturing consent. That's the impeccable technique without any heart behind it. And while there is a recipe there, that recipe is an imitation of the real thing. One part that I really enjoy in investigating and, and spending my time thinking about
Speaker 2 (34m 37s): That is why,
Speaker 1 (34m 40s): Why is it that this performance that was not very good is so much more memorable than a group of young people who are very talented and sound really good. However, they just don't have the ability to trigger an emotion That takes us full circle to the idea of our language.
It takes us full circle to communicating in a more effective and efficient way. It's almost indescribable. And I fear what I fear the internet is doing to us is making it impossible for us to see those communications, just like the printing press with its linear print gave us linear thinking. The internet is giving these Even more tightly controlled ideas.
The internet is limitless and its ability to limit our thinking. It seems to me that words are clumsy. There is an adequate, and there are very, it's very difficult to explain certain experiences or emotions, and that's why we have poetry. And also what explains,
Speaker 2 (36m 17s): Right?
Speaker 1 (36m 19s): I think that also explains ore goes to the point of us losing our ability to see things and communicate one with the printing press. And now with the internet, if you think about the Iliad and at the time of the Greeks
Speaker 2 (36m 36s): Pike, quite
Speaker 1 (36m 37s): Possibly the smartest man in the Western world was Plato. And they wrote in verse, they use poetry, but that is what poetry is at its best. It comes somewhere near capturing in a net of words,
Speaker 2 (36m 59s): Those powerful,
Speaker 1 (37m 4s): The Knesset moments, the, the one's of happiness pain. And it was moving moments in life. What do you see your child being born,
Speaker 2 (37m 17s): Or you see
Speaker 1 (37m 17s): The body of your child
Speaker 2 (37m 19s): For us?
Speaker 1 (37m 24s): All right, after all the words are only sounds a word as a sound and the relationship between that sound and an experience is very artificial. It's a very arbitrary, Let me see if I can read another passage and, and Maybe
Speaker 2 (37m 53s): Some things up here,
Speaker 1 (37m 55s): Quote, I said a while ago, that words could not safely be treated as entities or ideas detached from their contexts. They acquire their true meanings from the momentum of the passage as the beauty of a star is not only in its color and brightness, but also gains from the grand juror of its surrounding immensities
Speaker 2 (38m 20s): Quote
Speaker 1 (38m 21s): A four. I think we take in quite as much through our sense of hearing as by our sense of sight, perhaps more mind you, I don't mean to compare our dependency on the two sentences for we are more dependent on site. We have mobility, but I think we respond more to a solemn sounds to music or to a great bell. It establishes the emotion almost instantaneously. And we think about it only later, Oregon music, much more easily conveys a devotional attitude than visual objects, your national Anthem, which I hear frequently over the radio does not fortunately Lind itself to being shouted by mobs in unison, but it admiringly serves its purpose and hearing it.
I am more moved in. I am buy the site of your flag. The point I am trying to make is that with the sense of sight, the idea communicate the emotion. Whereas with sound, the emotion, communicate the idea, which is more direct and therefor more powerful. I mean, I just read that again. The point I'm trying to make is that with the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas the sound, whereas with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
Well there you have it. My friends hope you enjoy today's show. I hope that you choose to deliver the spoken word to the people you love. I hope you choose to go out and spend some time in nature and listen to what she's telling you. I hope you choose to sit quietly under a tree and take in the beauty that is all around you. And I hope you'd choose to become a beautiful person and spread some Aloha around the world.
Love you guys Aloha.