When the modern mind attempts to grapple with animistic concepts like “the sun is alive,” the first impulse is to dismiss them as a superstitious fancy. Thankfully, many of us recognize the culturally imperialistic tone of that dismissal. We may also be in touch with our own fundamental indigenous knowledge, however deeply buried it may be under layers of scientific education, that the sun is indeed alive. We want somehow to accept that without denying what science has taught us: that the sun is a burning ball of gas, a nuclear furnace, and couldn’t possibly be alive.
This is what I know: if I stand in the sun's light, and greet it like it is a great master, not with words, but by shining back at it with wonder and gratitude, everything in my experience changes. I feel awe and connection and support. I am lit. This is the world I wish to inhabit, whether or not the mainstream science reflects it in my lifetime: the sun is a being of energy and consciousness, interacting with me, a being of energy and consciousness.
When I take the time to be 'in' the sun, or to watch it rise through my kitchen window--bringing color to life in the crystals hanging there, I begin to feel the same way. It is magical.
C.S. lewis has interesting strands of animism scattered in his writings. In one of the Narnia books, the children characters discover they are talking to a retired star, Ramandu. One child says, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
If you haven't read Lewis' Space trilogy, I highly recommend it. It's an underrated epic of high theological speculation, carrying with it the fragrance of a science that might have been, and might still come to be.
If he's an avid reader (as I suspect he is) he should be able to read it. The whole trilogy though is very philosophical, particularly Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and not very plot-driven, which could prove a bit dull for a 10-year-old.
It's so bizarre that this work is relatively unknown, compared with the Narnia chronicles and e.g. The Screwtape Letters. I only came across it on a comment on something else last year (now I'm seeing it on comments on Substack articles right left and centre!). Having now read the first two parts I'm wondering if it was deliberately suppressed?! I second your recommendation!
I read the Space Trilogy last year and second the recommendation. I love the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet, where Ransom decides that "space" is the wrong word because it's not empty at all, it's radiant and alive with spirit. And of course That Hideous Strength is all too relevant now.
I like Wendell Berry's formulation. From a close reading of Genesis, he says that the formula for man-making described in the Bible is not body + soul = man, but rather dust + breath = soul. God fashioned the body out of dust or clay, breathed into it, and, as scripture says, "Man became a living soul."
The words “Part of me worries that Lewis was advocating soul-body dualism” made me smile at how heresy morphs through time and depends upon the audience and context.
Feb 5, 2023·edited Feb 5, 2023Liked by Charles Eisenstein
While the gravity-only (lambda-CDM) cosmogonic model seems to get a lot right it consistently fails to predict new observations, as is evident in the number of headlines about galaxies or stars being ‘too old’, ‘too hot’, ‘too large’ or ‘too energetic’, for example. Of course, things are as they are and the insistence that they exceed some requirement is really an admission that our theories are at least partly wrong.
This is no more evident than in the James Webb Space Telescope finding of galaxies being formed ‘too early’ in the young universe. The initial reaction to these findings was to question the data but now that these have withstood scrutiny it’s time for theorists to go back to the drawing board. Like the solar system in particular, the visible universe as a whole could have reached its current state far more quickly than gravity-driven models suggests.
I’m one of those people who has been waiting for decades to see the cosmological paradigm overturned and I’m not expecting anything major this side of Christmas but I do at least hope to see some significant change in my lifetime.
The funding and career structure of the contemporary academy is built as a fortress to protect existing paradigms, or equivalently a workhouse prison for the minds of scholars enlisted in the defense of those paradigms. Cosmology is very much not an exception. The result of course is a cosmology that has become encrusted with kludges and fudge factors invented to patch the holes in the existing theory.
I wrote an email years ago to physicist Brian Greene, of string theory fame, describing a paranormal experience I'd had many years ago. He didn't reply to my email. I didn't really expect him to. But I do wonder what he thought of what I wrote.
The experience was this: I dropped a gold earring catch as I was taking off my earrings before going to bed. I heard it hit the concrete step which led down to the basement apartment in which I lived at the time, but when I looked for it, it wasn't there. Nor was it anywhere near there, as far as I could tell. I didn't think all that much of it, and went to bed. The next day, I looked for it very thoroughly, and I still didn't find it. It was mystifying, but there wasn't anything to be done about it, so I put it out of my mind (though I wondered occasionally about it, I suppose.) Many months later, as I was standing in my apartment, I heard a startling, percussive sound, a click, and I simultaneously felt an energetic jolt, which made me involuntarily duck, and at the exact same moment the earring catch appeared on the doorstep, exactly where I'd expected it to be the night it'd disappeared.
I lost another earing catch, similarly, some months after the first one, though I was less sure what had happened to it. I knew it had gone missing, that's certain. I didn't have a clear idea where to search for it, as far as I can remember, though I do recall searching for it everywhere I could think of, including under the all-purpose kitchen/reading/writing table. Months later, it too reappeared with a click, on the green wool carpet underneath the table and chairs. I'd vacuumed that rug many times during the interval when it disappeared and reappeared, and if it'd been there all along, it undoubtedly would've been vacuumed up and gone into the garbage. I remember experiencing a similar cosmic click when it reappeared, but I don't recall it being as startling as it was the first time. It made me look under the table, though, for no apparent reason. (I'd been sitting at the table when the second click occurred.) Lo and behold, there it was!
I already believed back then (I was in my late twenties at the time) that there's more to the multiverse than we human beings can imagine, so I wasn't surprised by these occurrences. A question I wonder about is this: Would it be possible for someone who resolutely "believes" in a dead, materialistic universe even be able to have experiences like this? They can never experience cosmic love, divine reality, or any transcendent energy. They deny the reality of and block such energies from affecting them. But could they experience something as "physical" as this? It seems to me that their intensely materialistic minds would negate the possibility of such things ever happening to them.
Would it be possible for someone who resolutely "believes" in a dead, materialistic universe even be able to have experiences like this? They can never experience cosmic love, divine reality, or any transcendent energy. They deny the reality of and block such energies from affecting them.
>>
Exactly! They also push very different energies out from themselves into the world, which changes it into a less magical place.
I used to read philosophy a bit and there was this thought-experiment about a completely physics-driven human that wasn't actually conscious. They called them "zombies". It seems absurd, to me, on it's face. But later on, reflecting on the personalities and characters of these "scientists" and "philosophers" that I knew and read, and it occurred to me that many of them may well have "zombified" themselves - starved their own sentience - through their belief systems.
I don't know whether that was the intention but it's certainly the effect. Especially in physics I think this sort of thing is really holding us back. It was always somewhat like this. The new ideas have tended to come from outsiders but those can hardly get a look in now with huge institutions controlling the narrative and conservative peer review controlling both publication and funding.
By the way, even many insiders think that cosmology is a joke but few say so. Ex-Professor of astrophysics Mike Disney wrote a great piece demonstrating that our current cosmology is more folklore than science.
It seems clear that all of our insitutions, ideologies and paradigms are designed to protect themselves. Blinders and box like thinking are the name of the academic game. It is the obedient to group think who win the awards and higher up poitions, the degrees and social kudos. Codified rhetoric and dogma is enormously compelling for those who are terrified of uncertainty; which is the constant of existence. We become identified with our beliefs and so when those beliefs are threatened, whether scientific, religious, political, etc.; we defend them unto death because we personally feel our very identity is being challenged. We like to think science is somehow objective, but it is not.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, either, but after several years on the inside I have to say that if I were to set out to design a system specifically intended to retard intellectual progress I'd have a difficult time coming up with something more effective than what we have now.
I once had a GR theorist working in a black hole & cosmology group that the whole thing was just a mathematical game; no one really believed it. It was very cynical. He seemed to think it was funny.
That is really revealing. And it is not surprising that he would think it was funny. Cynicism is a kind of defense mechanism, so one doesn't have to face the tragedy of living in a way that counters what one knows to be true.
I left research because of that sort of thing. I have more than a few friends actively working on ways to subvert the existing structure of academia in the hope of addressing these sorts of issues. Let's hope someone succeeds because what we have is not fit for purpose
Apparently, it is scientifically proven (whatever that means) that the heart is influenced by the sun's electromaghetic field. I think the influence goes both directions.
I believe that we can absorb our sun's energy directly, and not only via the tanning reaction. I also believe that the saints who lived for years without eating physical food lived off the direct energy of our sun, as well as more esoteric energies.
My elders would laugh themselves silly that 'science' is now discovering that the sun is 'alive'. Life is always heading towards death and death is always headed back towards life. This is the natural cycle of existence. It isn't an either/or contradictory sort of thing. It is the miraculously complex and energetic dance of Spirit and matter; informing and responding; each to the other. Older cultures did not separate Spirit and matter and so did in fact literally see everything as alive within the larger cycles of life and death. For instance if my ancestors killed a deer, they made offerings and apologies to the spirit of that deer. This was a natural 'electromagnetic' loop if you will. A continual mobius strip of understanding our place within and relationship to, the cosmos. Science tries to pretend we can somehow be objective and detached observers of reality. This is just not possible, because we are part and parcel of that very reality. I do not see how we can NOT anthropomorphize without losing our essential humanity, empathy and feelings of deep connection with all that is. The sun, like everything around us, has a consciousness that we can connect directly with and thus have direct influence upon. Many traditions have taught this. It is both sad and hilarious when science re-invents the wheel to great fanfare and acclaim!
A more optimistic way to look at it, is that science is waking up to the truth, and doing its best to frame that truth in its own vocabulary.
Not only indigenous and traditional people, but any child knows the sun is alive. The modern mind is alienated from that knowledge, to its great loss. The scientific framing of the proposition that the sun is alive helps the modern mind relax its guard, so the person can return to connection to life.
Hehehe, that's amazing... I was just having a conversation of gratitude and wonder for the pumpkin Sun helped me grow and put into a delicious pie I was eating. The moment of connection was palpable and joyous, if only so momentary.
Then I came to read your article, Charles.
Thanks for YOUR volition to express your truths and findings!
Feb 5, 2023·edited Feb 5, 2023Liked by Charles Eisenstein
I'm looking forward to reading this more carefully. In the meantime, I just wanted to tell you that a concept with a life of its own was birthed in your comment thread on I Like to Fight. In a comment that you and 105 others liked, I wrote "I love this. I think that's what we need, a world that places children at the center, surrounded by women, surrounded by men. Tonic masculinity." Jay Rollins wrote, "Stealing that," to which I said, "please!" Six weeks later he wrote, "Me and the boys ran with it!" And did they ever. At this point there's one article I wrote (unknowingly) simultaneously with seven magnificent male writers. I'll be adding my perspective to their work soon. As I wrote to them, in an odd little flip, I had the momentary pleasure of conception while they did the long, hard labor of birthing the concept and nurturing it into maturity.
There's too much (and still growing) to put in links here, but do a Substack search and see what Jay and I co-parented. I think this makes you a concept grandpa, Charles ;-)
LOL, well I am getting close to grandpa age. I am happy to hear what became of the conversation. Keep me posted, maybe I can contribute further at some point.
I'm reading my way through these. There is some terrific writing here. And to think it would have passed me by if you hadn't shared in these comments. I'm glad I *sometimes at least) read comments!
Sorry they've unleashed the sex-bots on you. But now you know you've made it--Russell Brand's YouTube was an infestation, I've never seen them on Sub before. In any case, I published my Substack with links to all the Tonic Masculinity posts, ending with the fond hope you add your perspective: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity-and-the-mad-hatter.
What is authentically masculine is a subject that I find vital as an elder and grandfather. I am as disgusted at the feminization of men, glorifying the so-called beta types and gays and trans, as I am at the over-sexed hyper masculine images. Like DJT and Putin.
How does an elder male pass on an authentic image of masculinity to his three grandsons? I am an initiate in the Mankind Project (New Warrior) and I genuinely like my lodge brothers there. But they too are struggling with this and tipping over into male feminization, something I despise. Wokeness.
The one word that keeps coming up in my meditations is "fierce." Not unloving, but tough love.
As for how mature men and women relate today, I have no f****** idea.
Excellent post.Thanks. I wrote a little bit about this. It fascinates me that we are electromagnetic living beings in an electromagnetic universe. The sun is very active of late.
According to Suspicious Observers ' producer Ben, the sun is just exiting it's solar maximum in an eleven year cycle. That might be what you are observing
Yeah. The pole shift is going to make the next century exciting.
The intent there was that the 11 year cycle is actually noticeable on the scale of a human lifespan. All of the bigger cycles are only known to us because we research their effects on the planet.
I need to brush up on my knowledge. How exciting is the next solar max going to be? It makes me want to print every PDF on my computer onto archival paper.
Many years ago, I came across the ideas of the electric universe, and while I think they sometimes throw the baby out with the bathwater, the biological analogies intrinsic in the model advanced by Arp, Alfven, Peratt, et al. were immediately apparent to me, and threw the cosmos and our place within it into an entirely new light. Precisely as you say, if we see the cosmos as fundamentally alive, it follows that the Earth is too. As are all the things on it. We can furthermore dispense with such dull questions as 'are animals conscious?' (of course they are) or 'where is the dividing line between conscious and unconscious?' (there isn't one). There are ethical implications that emerge directly from this.
Once, late at night over drinks at a conference, a senior colleague asked me whether I thought there was life out there - a common question in our field. I told him of course, because everything we see out there is alive. He had no idea how to respond to that ... it was a perspective so wholly foreign to his mechanical conception of reality that it just threw him for a loop.
Given the astronomical subject matter of this essay, I hope you'll forgive me for linking an astronomically-themed piece I wrote recently:
The argument is somewhat orthogonal to the one presented here, nevertheless I think that you might enjoy it, and perhaps the readers of this blog might as well.
OMG, this was very exciting for me to read Charles. I wrote something about this awhile back but you've taken it like a hundred steps further. We chose the same video too! I've got some authors to look up and read now from your post. I see so clearly now how a gravity model is a dualistic underlying narrative (only pulls inward, so only has one-sided influence), while an electromagnet model has the built in polarity that one also finds, for example, in Projective Geometry. Yes, the Sun is alive, we are INSIDE of the Sun and Earth is one of the Sun's most vital organs!! Here's my old post: https://open.substack.com/pub/briang/p/sun-atmosphere-and-breathing?utm_source=direct&r=kpu97&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Yes YES Yes, thank you for sharing this incredible perspective, and for always inviting us to see beyond the shallow wells of reality that we have been sold.
A few here may interested in knowing that Alice Bailey wrote the following in 1925, about the sun. Her words indicate that the Sun is the "God" of this solar system. Presently many believe this is true and that before too much longer, it seems this will be very common knowledge world wide.
--
"(1) Agni, the Lord of Fire, rules over all the fire elementals and devas on the three planes of human evolution, the physical, the astral, and the mental, and rules over them not only on this planet, called the Earth, but on the three planes in all parts of the system. p65
(2) Agni, the sum-total of the Gods. He is Vishnu and the Sun in His glory; He is the fire of matter and the fire of mind blended and fused; He is the intelligence which throbs in every atom; He is the Mind that actuates the system; He is the fire of substance and the substance of fire; He is the Flame and that which the Flame destroys. p602
(3) All potentiality lies in the vitalising, energising power of Agni, and in His ability to stimulate. He is life itself, and the driving force of evolution, of psychic development and of consciousness. p606."
According to some esoteric teachings we are all ultimately micro aspects of the macro sun - Agni - tiny fragments of what we are destined to become. Millions are ready now to begin realizing that - after many lifetimes & the future for humanity is much brighter than most imagine. Benevolent Teachers like Charles Eisenstein are doing the important work by helping many expand their consciousness.
"This time can be seen as a time when we are experiencing the birth pains of new civilization... "
I'm going thru the audiobook, Braiding Sweetgrass and currently on the chapter about leaning grammer from her indigenous language were everything is a verb (living) versus a noun (thing).
She gives an example of a single apple is like a living being in that language.
Do you feel an apple and/or the Sun is a living being? Our language may be preventing us from thinking this way.
This is what I know: if I stand in the sun's light, and greet it like it is a great master, not with words, but by shining back at it with wonder and gratitude, everything in my experience changes. I feel awe and connection and support. I am lit. This is the world I wish to inhabit, whether or not the mainstream science reflects it in my lifetime: the sun is a being of energy and consciousness, interacting with me, a being of energy and consciousness.
When I take the time to be 'in' the sun, or to watch it rise through my kitchen window--bringing color to life in the crystals hanging there, I begin to feel the same way. It is magical.
Bare feet in the grass.
This is beautiful - thank you!
Lit is what this is all about. Serve life.
C.S. lewis has interesting strands of animism scattered in his writings. In one of the Narnia books, the children characters discover they are talking to a retired star, Ramandu. One child says, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
Fantastic quote.
If you haven't read Lewis' Space trilogy, I highly recommend it. It's an underrated epic of high theological speculation, carrying with it the fragrance of a science that might have been, and might still come to be.
Thanks for the tip. I'll get it for Cary. He is only 10, but is quite an avid reader and I think he'll get a lot from it.
If he's an avid reader (as I suspect he is) he should be able to read it. The whole trilogy though is very philosophical, particularly Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and not very plot-driven, which could prove a bit dull for a 10-year-old.
Yes, I remember now reading those books as a teenager. I enjoyed them but did not find them gripping.
They're not page turners, to be sure. I don't think I would have enjoyed them nearly as much if I'd read them when I was young.
It's so bizarre that this work is relatively unknown, compared with the Narnia chronicles and e.g. The Screwtape Letters. I only came across it on a comment on something else last year (now I'm seeing it on comments on Substack articles right left and centre!). Having now read the first two parts I'm wondering if it was deliberately suppressed?! I second your recommendation!
Could be. You need to read That Hideous Strength - it belongs alongside 1984 and Brave New World.
I read the Space Trilogy last year and second the recommendation. I love the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet, where Ransom decides that "space" is the wrong word because it's not empty at all, it's radiant and alive with spirit. And of course That Hideous Strength is all too relevant now.
Yes Peralandria was an amazing read. CS Lewis describing dirrerent possibilities fro an sacred planet ♉
This reminds me of C.S. Lewis's quote (paraphrasing) "You do not have a soul. You ARE a soul. You have a body."
Part of me worries that Lewis was advocating soul-body dualism.
I am theorizing that soul is a pattern which flows through realms both physical and spiritual.
I like Wendell Berry's formulation. From a close reading of Genesis, he says that the formula for man-making described in the Bible is not body + soul = man, but rather dust + breath = soul. God fashioned the body out of dust or clay, breathed into it, and, as scripture says, "Man became a living soul."
Yes! that is why the eternal state for the individual presented in the Bible is an eternal physical body as Jesus is now after his resurrection.
“Fetch me my feathers and amber” Gary Snyder.
The words “Part of me worries that Lewis was advocating soul-body dualism” made me smile at how heresy morphs through time and depends upon the audience and context.
Haha, so true
While the gravity-only (lambda-CDM) cosmogonic model seems to get a lot right it consistently fails to predict new observations, as is evident in the number of headlines about galaxies or stars being ‘too old’, ‘too hot’, ‘too large’ or ‘too energetic’, for example. Of course, things are as they are and the insistence that they exceed some requirement is really an admission that our theories are at least partly wrong.
This is no more evident than in the James Webb Space Telescope finding of galaxies being formed ‘too early’ in the young universe. The initial reaction to these findings was to question the data but now that these have withstood scrutiny it’s time for theorists to go back to the drawing board. Like the solar system in particular, the visible universe as a whole could have reached its current state far more quickly than gravity-driven models suggests.
I’m one of those people who has been waiting for decades to see the cosmological paradigm overturned and I’m not expecting anything major this side of Christmas but I do at least hope to see some significant change in my lifetime.
The funding and career structure of the contemporary academy is built as a fortress to protect existing paradigms, or equivalently a workhouse prison for the minds of scholars enlisted in the defense of those paradigms. Cosmology is very much not an exception. The result of course is a cosmology that has become encrusted with kludges and fudge factors invented to patch the holes in the existing theory.
I wrote an email years ago to physicist Brian Greene, of string theory fame, describing a paranormal experience I'd had many years ago. He didn't reply to my email. I didn't really expect him to. But I do wonder what he thought of what I wrote.
The experience was this: I dropped a gold earring catch as I was taking off my earrings before going to bed. I heard it hit the concrete step which led down to the basement apartment in which I lived at the time, but when I looked for it, it wasn't there. Nor was it anywhere near there, as far as I could tell. I didn't think all that much of it, and went to bed. The next day, I looked for it very thoroughly, and I still didn't find it. It was mystifying, but there wasn't anything to be done about it, so I put it out of my mind (though I wondered occasionally about it, I suppose.) Many months later, as I was standing in my apartment, I heard a startling, percussive sound, a click, and I simultaneously felt an energetic jolt, which made me involuntarily duck, and at the exact same moment the earring catch appeared on the doorstep, exactly where I'd expected it to be the night it'd disappeared.
I lost another earing catch, similarly, some months after the first one, though I was less sure what had happened to it. I knew it had gone missing, that's certain. I didn't have a clear idea where to search for it, as far as I can remember, though I do recall searching for it everywhere I could think of, including under the all-purpose kitchen/reading/writing table. Months later, it too reappeared with a click, on the green wool carpet underneath the table and chairs. I'd vacuumed that rug many times during the interval when it disappeared and reappeared, and if it'd been there all along, it undoubtedly would've been vacuumed up and gone into the garbage. I remember experiencing a similar cosmic click when it reappeared, but I don't recall it being as startling as it was the first time. It made me look under the table, though, for no apparent reason. (I'd been sitting at the table when the second click occurred.) Lo and behold, there it was!
I already believed back then (I was in my late twenties at the time) that there's more to the multiverse than we human beings can imagine, so I wasn't surprised by these occurrences. A question I wonder about is this: Would it be possible for someone who resolutely "believes" in a dead, materialistic universe even be able to have experiences like this? They can never experience cosmic love, divine reality, or any transcendent energy. They deny the reality of and block such energies from affecting them. But could they experience something as "physical" as this? It seems to me that their intensely materialistic minds would negate the possibility of such things ever happening to them.
Great story, thanks.
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Would it be possible for someone who resolutely "believes" in a dead, materialistic universe even be able to have experiences like this? They can never experience cosmic love, divine reality, or any transcendent energy. They deny the reality of and block such energies from affecting them.
>>
Exactly! They also push very different energies out from themselves into the world, which changes it into a less magical place.
I used to read philosophy a bit and there was this thought-experiment about a completely physics-driven human that wasn't actually conscious. They called them "zombies". It seems absurd, to me, on it's face. But later on, reflecting on the personalities and characters of these "scientists" and "philosophers" that I knew and read, and it occurred to me that many of them may well have "zombified" themselves - starved their own sentience - through their belief systems.
PS I just commented on your terrific piece on Tonic Masculinity. So much there.
Thank you!
I don't know whether that was the intention but it's certainly the effect. Especially in physics I think this sort of thing is really holding us back. It was always somewhat like this. The new ideas have tended to come from outsiders but those can hardly get a look in now with huge institutions controlling the narrative and conservative peer review controlling both publication and funding.
By the way, even many insiders think that cosmology is a joke but few say so. Ex-Professor of astrophysics Mike Disney wrote a great piece demonstrating that our current cosmology is more folklore than science.
Do you have a link to that, Neil? Sounds interesting. Also brings to mind Lee Smolin's critique.
Here it is, Charles. Enjoy.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/modern-cosmology-science-or-folktale
It seems clear that all of our insitutions, ideologies and paradigms are designed to protect themselves. Blinders and box like thinking are the name of the academic game. It is the obedient to group think who win the awards and higher up poitions, the degrees and social kudos. Codified rhetoric and dogma is enormously compelling for those who are terrified of uncertainty; which is the constant of existence. We become identified with our beliefs and so when those beliefs are threatened, whether scientific, religious, political, etc.; we defend them unto death because we personally feel our very identity is being challenged. We like to think science is somehow objective, but it is not.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, either, but after several years on the inside I have to say that if I were to set out to design a system specifically intended to retard intellectual progress I'd have a difficult time coming up with something more effective than what we have now.
I once had a GR theorist working in a black hole & cosmology group that the whole thing was just a mathematical game; no one really believed it. It was very cynical. He seemed to think it was funny.
That is really revealing. And it is not surprising that he would think it was funny. Cynicism is a kind of defense mechanism, so one doesn't have to face the tragedy of living in a way that counters what one knows to be true.
This is very true, and if I had that interaction today it wouldn't have shocked me. At the time I was more idealistic.
I left research because of that sort of thing. I have more than a few friends actively working on ways to subvert the existing structure of academia in the hope of addressing these sorts of issues. Let's hope someone succeeds because what we have is not fit for purpose
Sort of like the American two party system. If only there were a way to subvert and destroy it.
There does seem to be an emerging countertrend -- on Google or YouTube, search under "spacetime is doomed"
I tell the sun that I love it directly to it and I feel the love returned to me ten fold. It is most definitely alive.
Apparently, it is scientifically proven (whatever that means) that the heart is influenced by the sun's electromaghetic field. I think the influence goes both directions.
I believe that we can absorb our sun's energy directly, and not only via the tanning reaction. I also believe that the saints who lived for years without eating physical food lived off the direct energy of our sun, as well as more esoteric energies.
My elders would laugh themselves silly that 'science' is now discovering that the sun is 'alive'. Life is always heading towards death and death is always headed back towards life. This is the natural cycle of existence. It isn't an either/or contradictory sort of thing. It is the miraculously complex and energetic dance of Spirit and matter; informing and responding; each to the other. Older cultures did not separate Spirit and matter and so did in fact literally see everything as alive within the larger cycles of life and death. For instance if my ancestors killed a deer, they made offerings and apologies to the spirit of that deer. This was a natural 'electromagnetic' loop if you will. A continual mobius strip of understanding our place within and relationship to, the cosmos. Science tries to pretend we can somehow be objective and detached observers of reality. This is just not possible, because we are part and parcel of that very reality. I do not see how we can NOT anthropomorphize without losing our essential humanity, empathy and feelings of deep connection with all that is. The sun, like everything around us, has a consciousness that we can connect directly with and thus have direct influence upon. Many traditions have taught this. It is both sad and hilarious when science re-invents the wheel to great fanfare and acclaim!
A more optimistic way to look at it, is that science is waking up to the truth, and doing its best to frame that truth in its own vocabulary.
Not only indigenous and traditional people, but any child knows the sun is alive. The modern mind is alienated from that knowledge, to its great loss. The scientific framing of the proposition that the sun is alive helps the modern mind relax its guard, so the person can return to connection to life.
Thank you for your comment. I really liked this interview. Hard-hitting on the science perspective of Yale's Journey of the Universe.
Lakota Wisdom on the Universe with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
https://youtu.be/mjeJtyyGW04
Hehehe, that's amazing... I was just having a conversation of gratitude and wonder for the pumpkin Sun helped me grow and put into a delicious pie I was eating. The moment of connection was palpable and joyous, if only so momentary.
Then I came to read your article, Charles.
Thanks for YOUR volition to express your truths and findings!
I'm looking forward to reading this more carefully. In the meantime, I just wanted to tell you that a concept with a life of its own was birthed in your comment thread on I Like to Fight. In a comment that you and 105 others liked, I wrote "I love this. I think that's what we need, a world that places children at the center, surrounded by women, surrounded by men. Tonic masculinity." Jay Rollins wrote, "Stealing that," to which I said, "please!" Six weeks later he wrote, "Me and the boys ran with it!" And did they ever. At this point there's one article I wrote (unknowingly) simultaneously with seven magnificent male writers. I'll be adding my perspective to their work soon. As I wrote to them, in an odd little flip, I had the momentary pleasure of conception while they did the long, hard labor of birthing the concept and nurturing it into maturity.
There's too much (and still growing) to put in links here, but do a Substack search and see what Jay and I co-parented. I think this makes you a concept grandpa, Charles ;-)
LOL, well I am getting close to grandpa age. I am happy to hear what became of the conversation. Keep me posted, maybe I can contribute further at some point.
Haha. With a 10-yr-old still, you have some catching up to do to me, whose 30-yr-old daughter just got married, you young whippersnapper!
Here's the first generation so far on Tonic Masculinity, in chronological order:
https://www.wonderlandrules.com/p/tate-modern
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity-and-feminine-wiles
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/sacred-masculine
https://ponerology.substack.com/p/what-is-a-man
https://luctalks.substack.com/p/what-is-tonic-masculinity
https://markbisone.substack.com/p/in-from-the-cold
https://radicalamerican.substack.com/p/tonic-intersectionality
https://dochammer.substack.com/p/the-hearth-and-the-wild-wood
https://www.wonderlandrules.com/p/dogs-and-democracy
They've invited me into the convo, so I'll be posting my 2nd gen in response soon.
I'm reading my way through these. There is some terrific writing here. And to think it would have passed me by if you hadn't shared in these comments. I'm glad I *sometimes at least) read comments!
Sorry they've unleashed the sex-bots on you. But now you know you've made it--Russell Brand's YouTube was an infestation, I've never seen them on Sub before. In any case, I published my Substack with links to all the Tonic Masculinity posts, ending with the fond hope you add your perspective: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity-and-the-mad-hatter.
Love the title. Will read avidly.
Thanks!
I also have a 26-year-old, 24-year-old, and 18-year-old.
What is authentically masculine is a subject that I find vital as an elder and grandfather. I am as disgusted at the feminization of men, glorifying the so-called beta types and gays and trans, as I am at the over-sexed hyper masculine images. Like DJT and Putin.
How does an elder male pass on an authentic image of masculinity to his three grandsons? I am an initiate in the Mankind Project (New Warrior) and I genuinely like my lodge brothers there. But they too are struggling with this and tipping over into male feminization, something I despise. Wokeness.
The one word that keeps coming up in my meditations is "fierce." Not unloving, but tough love.
As for how mature men and women relate today, I have no f****** idea.
Thanks for subscribing to me, Jerry! I look forward to your thoughts on my new one, which I think I posted just after you subscribed: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/tonic-masculinity-and-the-mad-hatter
You are very beautiful. How's that for a traditional male observation? I will read your blog.
Lol. A great ring too it.
You are a spectacular science mortality explorer.'
At the age of 94, I too am seeking universal information about lifes' splendor magnificence
and incomprehensibility. Thank you so much for being a member of the seeking population
still here and breathing! much love D,
Congratulations on being 94! May you find and live what you seek. xx
Excellent post.Thanks. I wrote a little bit about this. It fascinates me that we are electromagnetic living beings in an electromagnetic universe. The sun is very active of late.
https://open.substack.com/pub/kwnorton/p/is-the-universe-hostile-to-computers?r=boqs0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I don't know about the universe, but I hate computers.
According to Suspicious Observers ' producer Ben, the sun is just exiting it's solar maximum in an eleven year cycle. That might be what you are observing
No it is a bit more than just the eleven year cycle. Plus add in the Earth's poles are shifting. This seems to be part of a longer cycle.
Yeah. The pole shift is going to make the next century exciting.
The intent there was that the 11 year cycle is actually noticeable on the scale of a human lifespan. All of the bigger cycles are only known to us because we research their effects on the planet.
We've entered the solar minimum, but we're in the 100 year Grand Solar Maximum.
I need to brush up on my knowledge. How exciting is the next solar max going to be? It makes me want to print every PDF on my computer onto archival paper.
I guess we'll find out in about 9 or 10 years. If we're still around.
Many years ago, I came across the ideas of the electric universe, and while I think they sometimes throw the baby out with the bathwater, the biological analogies intrinsic in the model advanced by Arp, Alfven, Peratt, et al. were immediately apparent to me, and threw the cosmos and our place within it into an entirely new light. Precisely as you say, if we see the cosmos as fundamentally alive, it follows that the Earth is too. As are all the things on it. We can furthermore dispense with such dull questions as 'are animals conscious?' (of course they are) or 'where is the dividing line between conscious and unconscious?' (there isn't one). There are ethical implications that emerge directly from this.
Once, late at night over drinks at a conference, a senior colleague asked me whether I thought there was life out there - a common question in our field. I told him of course, because everything we see out there is alive. He had no idea how to respond to that ... it was a perspective so wholly foreign to his mechanical conception of reality that it just threw him for a loop.
Given the astronomical subject matter of this essay, I hope you'll forgive me for linking an astronomically-themed piece I wrote recently:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/metempsychotic-dragons-in-the-cosmic
The argument is somewhat orthogonal to the one presented here, nevertheless I think that you might enjoy it, and perhaps the readers of this blog might as well.
So much to ponder here. Thank you. And there is much more than physics as to why Francis called them "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon."
I used to be a pure materialist, but I'm coming around to this idea.
OMG, this was very exciting for me to read Charles. I wrote something about this awhile back but you've taken it like a hundred steps further. We chose the same video too! I've got some authors to look up and read now from your post. I see so clearly now how a gravity model is a dualistic underlying narrative (only pulls inward, so only has one-sided influence), while an electromagnet model has the built in polarity that one also finds, for example, in Projective Geometry. Yes, the Sun is alive, we are INSIDE of the Sun and Earth is one of the Sun's most vital organs!! Here's my old post: https://open.substack.com/pub/briang/p/sun-atmosphere-and-breathing?utm_source=direct&r=kpu97&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Never mind, it's a different but very similar video. Yours is better!
Yes YES Yes, thank you for sharing this incredible perspective, and for always inviting us to see beyond the shallow wells of reality that we have been sold.
A few here may interested in knowing that Alice Bailey wrote the following in 1925, about the sun. Her words indicate that the Sun is the "God" of this solar system. Presently many believe this is true and that before too much longer, it seems this will be very common knowledge world wide.
--
"(1) Agni, the Lord of Fire, rules over all the fire elementals and devas on the three planes of human evolution, the physical, the astral, and the mental, and rules over them not only on this planet, called the Earth, but on the three planes in all parts of the system. p65
(2) Agni, the sum-total of the Gods. He is Vishnu and the Sun in His glory; He is the fire of matter and the fire of mind blended and fused; He is the intelligence which throbs in every atom; He is the Mind that actuates the system; He is the fire of substance and the substance of fire; He is the Flame and that which the Flame destroys. p602
(3) All potentiality lies in the vitalising, energising power of Agni, and in His ability to stimulate. He is life itself, and the driving force of evolution, of psychic development and of consciousness. p606."
===
Alice Bailey, Treatise on Cosmic Fire, (1925) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey
According to some esoteric teachings we are all ultimately micro aspects of the macro sun - Agni - tiny fragments of what we are destined to become. Millions are ready now to begin realizing that - after many lifetimes & the future for humanity is much brighter than most imagine. Benevolent Teachers like Charles Eisenstein are doing the important work by helping many expand their consciousness.
"This time can be seen as a time when we are experiencing the birth pains of new civilization... "
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Creme
I'm going thru the audiobook, Braiding Sweetgrass and currently on the chapter about leaning grammer from her indigenous language were everything is a verb (living) versus a noun (thing).
She gives an example of a single apple is like a living being in that language.
Do you feel an apple and/or the Sun is a living being? Our language may be preventing us from thinking this way.
We are all electromagnetic living beings. Legends of ice and fire. Evolution. Serve the song.