(adjective) Dictionary ! Accomplishing eternalism would would mean knowing the meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. (Alice Chirico et al., “Effectiveness of Immersive Videos in Inducing Awe,” Scientific Reports 7, 1218 (2017).) Agonizing over whether you are ordinary or special—or feeling smug about one or the other—can be resolved by choosing to be noble instead. In wonder, there is no external purpose; but a minute later, it occurred to me to use the example here. Understanding gained from wonder is nebulous, especially initially. The spiritual gift of faith is exhibited by one with a strong and unshakeable confidence in God, His Word, and His promises. The cycle of the butterfly in and of itself holds spiritual symbolism and insight for us. But they were wrong. Concerning relationships one may have with stances: basic attitudes toward meaningness. The continuum gambit tries to eliminate ambiguity using numbers on a scale. In a well-practiced task, you know what to look for where, because you know what the things you see mean. That is the cost of freedom. Maskelyne’s colleague Charles Hutton correctly conjectured from this that implied our planet has a metallic core—metals such as iron being much denser than rock. It does have subtle doing components: attention and suspension. However, nearly all aim at single-pointed focus for a particular purpose. Your Guardian Angel can help you learn what these angel signs mean so you can continue to grow spiritually. “At the Mountains of Meaningness” (2015) is about peak experiences and experiences on literal peaks; about vastness; about the wonder, inspiration, and insight found there; and about the nebulosity of perception, concepts, and action. During a wonder walk I took with Patch, he pointed out an … Fluidity addresses the atomization of culture, society, and self with ships that sail the sea of meaning: collaborative, improvised, intimate, and playful. Why is Wonder Important? Wonder is a natural way of being. Ideologies deliberately create and sustain that illusion. Gambling, religion, and addiction: a personal story. Noticing wonder requires knowing what it is like: the associated thoughts, feelings, and (in)actions. The circumstances conducive for awe may also produce wonder. They are often joyful, but inevitably also sometimes queasy. That there is no specific method for producing wonder may contribute to the misleading and counterproductive sense of specialness around it. Science – Searching for Truth. There is no end to the things that can awaken our wonder, from the majesty of the night sky to the smell of lilacs in the spring to the turning of the leaves in the fall. That was revealed as delusional during the early 20th century. Most glorious of all, it enhances sensuousness, that elixir that keep us forever young in spirit! 1.1. O Star of Wonder, Star of Night, Star with Royal Beauty bright, Westward leading, Still proceeding, Guide us to Thy perfect Light. Five confused attitudes to life purpose, as an introduction to meaningness. No such system is possible. Wistful certainty is a ploy for reinforcing eternalism based on the thought that there must exist whatever it takes to make eternalism seem to work. Over the past century, systems of meaning gradually disintegrated, and a series of new modes of meaningness developed. There is a better alternative to both! It’s not esoteric or special. Familiar meanings are suspended because they’re obviously irrelevant, but you cannot bring conceptual attention to bear, so you are incurious. This points the way into the more active textures of the complete stance. Freeing ourselves from theism is only a first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaningness. Wonder is the most receptive, least active texture, so it’s harder to apply deliberately than the others. This was a spectacular confirmation of Newtonian gravitation. The method for resolving confusion about meaning through accepting nebulosity is not a general dialectic, or logic for resolving all false oppositions. It wrongly rejects higher purposes—but those too are not ultimate. The spider web/cosmic web analogy was spurious and unproductive (other than for its use here). 297-314. Recognizing that meaning is both nebulous and patterned resolves this false dichotomy. I’ll pass along a bit of what I learned, with citations in case they inspire you to follow up. Menu. Recall that wonder is heightened agendaless attention plus suspension of interpretation. In this case, wonder lasted perhaps three seconds. (Luke 21:11) In these last days, it is going to take these “Signs and Wonders” to help draw the unbelievers to Jesus. The thrill of discovery, the enchantment with our world and our universe motivate us to peer into the unknown, and wonder what’s out there. It mobilizes emotions of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-righteous anger. Kids experience the life-changing awe and wonder of God’s Word. These were just present, as-they-were—because my heightened attention was agendaless. Nihilism seemed the only alternative. Simultaneously, the new one is fascinating, so it draws your attention to its intricate details; but you don’t yet know what to attend to, so it is agendaless. In fact, the line they laid out does repeatedly veer hundreds of feet off from straight east-west.12 And not at random…. Religiosity is the confused, eternalistic view that the sacred and profane can be clearly separated. The confused stances are defenses against the anxiety of nebulosity. But it turned out that there was meaning in it after all. A practice of replacing confused, dysfunctional patterns of thinking and feeling about meaning with accurate ones. There is, as a matter of objective fact, no meaningful connection between dust specks and galaxies. In the face of undeserved suffering, is difficult not to fall into the stance that most things are God’s will, but not the horrible bits. What is the meaning of an extra-marital affair—or any relationship? Alma; Alma has Latin roots and is a popular Celtic name. Nihilism requires unusual intelligence, courage, and grit. Reasonable respectability: the sheep's stance to social authority. It emits a cool calming peace, gives us a boost of positive mental energy that improves concentration and clarifies our mind, and creates a balance that clears the path to spiritual growth. Fixed meanings are claustrophobic. A complete summary overview of all the dimensions of meaningness, with all the common stances one can take to them. A monist eternalist might say I had a profound revelation of the unity of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm; “as above, so below.” A physics crank might invent some theory about how the cosmic web is causally similar to a spider’s. To save each other from nihilism, we support each other in not-seeing nebulosity. Wondering meaning. Political eternalism is the belief that some system of government can provide an unquestionable foundation for meaning. Victim-think is a strategy for denying all responsibility—on the part of individuals and social groups. It is attractive to think that we each have a unique, transcendent, ultimate purpose in life. Here I’ll cover feelings typical of wonder; then we’ll do thinking in the next section. I borrowed “complete,” as a term for stances that allow both nebulosity and pattern, from Dzogchen. It took two years to mark the boundary across 233 miles. Cultural atomization—the widespread loss of conceptual coherence—has made serious intellectual work much more difficult in the twenty-teens. An influential psychological study found that it consists of perceiving overwhelmingness plus incomprehensibility.1 It can be experienced as either ecstatic or terrifying, depending on whether the vastness, the overwhelmingness, seems threatening. It can be harmful, but also inspires great art. They have nothing in common with the large-scale structure of the universe, apart from a purely coincidental and superficial visual similarity. Mystification uses thoughts as a weapon against authentic thinking. Wonder is the feeling of accepting contact with nebulosity. Taken as an epistemology, logic is a wrong-way reduction: it turns difficult problems of practical reasoning into impossible feats of deduction. A schematic overview of stances regarding the meaningness of the self: non-self, True Self, and intermittently continuing. The key aspects of a stance toward meaning, and how to use them effectively. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources. The color of calmness and clarity. And the reply, ⚒︎ A malign modern myth of meaningness: cognitive “science”, ⚒︎ Cold comfort: the false promise of nihilism, 190-proof nihilism: intoxicating intellectual idiocy, ⚒︎ Enjoying the dance of nebulosity and pattern, ⚒︎ The complete stance’s critique of monism, ⚒︎ Antidotes to fixating mundane purposes, Meaningness and Time: past, present, future, A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything, Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures, ⚒︎ The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism, Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self, Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise, Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism, Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution, Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism, Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness, Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern. Eternalism is hard to overcome because we normally see meanings, as if they were objectively given.3 We see vomit on the sidewalk as revolting, a smile as flirtatious, a bit of fluff on the carpet as meaningless. “Habitual interpretation” is the usually-automatic, unthinking, barely noticed, nearly-instantaneous perceptual process that assigns meanings to phenomena, or dismisses them as meaningless. Playfulness, which recognizes the mingled pattern and nebulosity of meaning, is a characteristic texture of activity in the complete stance. As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act. Creation is the characteristic activity of the complete stance; its densest texture. Eternalism, not supernaturalism, is the root cause of religion's harmfulness. All stances have thinking, feeling, and activity aspects, which pervade their textures. girdled in modesty: clouds below, rocks above, Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion, Joy, Awe, Gratitude and Compassion: Common Ground in a Will-to-Openness, Openness to Experience and Awe in Response to Nature and Music, Effectiveness of Immersive Videos in Inducing Awe, Immersive experience of awe increases the scope of visuospatial attention: A VR study, Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder, Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable, Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning, Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating, Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism, Eternalism as the only salvation from nihilism, ⚒︎ How space aliens make everything meaningful, Nutrition offers its resignation. Examples of people with the gift of faith are those listed in Hebrews chapter 11. A schematic overview of stances toward social authority. The “Reopening the senses” section of “Hunting the Shadow” (2017) is about “liberated perception,” which is “discovered through precision,” “in nature, and through art, and especially art that is about perception in nature.”. ‘Explore the wonders of coral reefs, mangrove communities, and seagrass beds while identifying the marine organisms that live there.’. On the other hand, wonder is not a subjective experience;10 it’s not something that just happens to you, like awe. The Religious Right and New Age Left both promoted time-distorting meta-myths—imaginary past golden ages and implausible future utopias—to hide their defects. That is what gives peak experiences their transformational power.2. Meaning and meaninglessness, pattern and nebulosity all obviously exist—yet we resist recognizing and admitting this. I stopped and just looked, enjoying their brilliance, for perhaps a second or less. The first such study showed people a series of outer space images, played them Sigur Rós’ Hoppípolla, “a song with qualities known to evoke awe,” and asked them how they felt about them. It differs from admiration, in not being necessarily accompanied with love, esteem or approbation, nor directed to persons. The delusion that we are, or can be, totally responsible for reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles. Newton’s theory of gravitation had been thoroughly confirmed as applying to planets. Meaningfulness and meaninglessness were equally irrelevant. Wonder is the feeling of accepting contact with nebulosity. It’s deluded to think we mostly understand issues of meaning (ethics, purpose, value, politics). Nihilism is mistaken and harmful, but its insights into what’s wrong with eternalism are accurate and useful. Your Guardian Angel can help you learn what these angel signs mean so you can continue to grow spiritually. The fundamental method for resolving problems of meaning: by finding nebulosity, pattern, and their inseparable relationship. Wonder may involve intricate conceptual thinking (or not). Wonderstone Properties. Eternalism promises complete control over life—but that is an impossible fantasy. Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others. They attributed this to imprecision in the instruments, which they corrected by taking multiple measurements and averaging. In the wake of the psychology replication crisis, I suspect this would no longer count as “science.”. Suspending interpretation means allowing meaningness: neither imposing nor opposing meaning; leaving it alone as it is, not messing with it. “Archipelago” is a political model in which everyone can choose what social system to live in. There is no middle way between them. 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Dismiss it as a personal story attention to imaginary futures that may never exist inability to even started.
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