A few of us know, from the very best science now available, that the lives of all us humans and all related life on earth, really is in serious danger in this century due to climate effects explained in the "Preface" file on the build-a-world.org site. (See the Six Challenges slide below.) The lead authors of the preface are the world's very top scientists on mass extinctions and ocean currents, though we have also reached out to the other top scientists as well.) Current global climate policies are mostly just making the dangers worse!
When I start my morning asking what my priorities are for the day, I am reminded that they will all amount to nothing if we all just die. Even "our souls in heaven", our traces in the noosphere of our solar system, will dissolve away if that entire noosphere dies. Yes, the cosmos we live in (depicted by the "dark matter" photograph of our universe attached) is much bigger than that, BUT WE HUMANS live as part of OUR solar system, and of the noosphere of our solar system.
TO SURVIVE WE NEED TO "CULTIVATE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS," and always remember who we really are and where we fit.
Traditional Buddhist and Shinto homes in Japan and elsewhere all maintain small shrines, where they meditate and try to remember who they are. My Bavarian grandmother did something similar with a statue of Jesus on the cross. And in truth, my grandson also benefits from an image of Maxwell's Laws hanging on their wall.
IN THAT SPIRIT, I really wish that the two images attached (fishtank and universe) could be combined into a long collage, which could be printed and used as a kind of shrine, an image we should all remember every day. An image of who we are. An image to support the kind of situational awareness, of the situation we are all part of. Each of us has different priorities and connections to specific people and life WITHIN that noosphere (as do brain cells within a brain), but we are all PART of that same large system, which is now at risk. To survive, we need BALANCE, attention and harmonization of all levels of our life from the toes (and the covids) to what is shown in these images.
I am especially grateful to the spiritual forces which led my parents to install a small fish tank in my bedroom when I was 3 years old, an image which helped encourage me both to learn more science and to be alert to our larger situation.
One aspect of what we see in the fishtank is that MOST LITTLE FISH DO NOT LIVE TO ADULTHOOD. Nature endows them (like us) with intelligence, instinct and soul which fight for life, which never give up, without which the species would not exist at all. But most do not make it, even so. They fight for life despite that -- with a higher probability of success if they achieve a higher level both of awareness and of positive will, growing step by step as best they can, learning balances and rebalances. It is up to US -- we, the people who make up the core of this noosphere -- to fight for our survival (and growth).
And what of our Father in Heaven, whom Yeshua often rightly refers to?
I have often connected to old cultures of the earth, where parents of humans (whose numbers work out better than little fish) do their very best,
with powerful love and intelligent guidance, to help their children or even children of their tribe or village. But they also respect certain rules or limits.
Children must learn some things themselves, lest they simply die off later taking others with them. Our Father in Heaven, like Jung's Spirit of the Deep,
can help us, and we are well advised to accept and respect that help, but it is up to us to forever do the best WE can, each of us as a function of our situation and potential for personal growth in contributing to the larger situation.
Work is needed in many areas... including support for networks, connections, software platforms, and institutions which support this work, including better focusing on this big picture and all that it requires of us.
The aquarium metaphor has SEVERAL important uses, to support the kind of full-person thinking we need to be effective here.
There is our solar system noosphere as a growing small fish. But there is also us, like me as a three year old, thinking "I have an aquarium," watching and taking care of it, even as my parents played a crucial role both in teaching me and in keeping it from crashing. And yes, the sustainability of life in our oceans is certainly also part it. Even the electricity to keep the pumps going. A fitting shrine, for a person or a family.
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Added two days later:
People on this list have cited many views about death and afterlife. The past two weeks have hit me hard on
that subject, as people like Queen Elizabeth, Gorbachev, Jean-Luc Goddard and my closest friend in the local Quaker Meetings...
all raised the Death Questions.
Because of strange circumstances, I have paid about equal attention for weeks to local Quakers, Episcopalians
(on George Washington land!), and inner circle Mormons. People tend to assume that these folks follow the Dante kind of picture, where everybody stays the same but goes to different places, different squares on the same gameboard.
I was very bemused when I received an email from Episcopalians citing BCP (Book of Common Prayer):
==============================
Reader: Give to the departed eternal rest.
People: Let light perpetual shine upon them.
Reader: We praise you for your saints who have
entered into joy;
People: May we also come to share in your
People: Let light perpetual shine upon them.
Reader: We praise you for your saints who have
entered into joy;
People: May we also come to share in your
==============================
NOTICE! Some folks have "eternal rest", they say, while others ... join the folks who continue work, like the guy whose funeral I attended today (fitting the photo attached).
This does fit the heretical model described at https://www.werbos.com/
like collections of brain cells... SOME grow in connection and activity, while others may fade like old memories, like the images you see in the Disney cartoon "Coco," which should not be underestimated. We have a choice... many choices.
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FOR THE NEUROSCIENTIST WANTING A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THIS, I POSTED:
Yesterday I posted images of noosphere and cosmos, and six challenges, which I wish we all could keep coming back to EVERY morning, as we start the day.
I did not expect to say more the next day, because things lower in the structure might detract from what needs to be fundamental and invariant,
and also because some of you might have important thoughts.
However -- I did receive some papers yesterday on the amygdala and other brain structures, related to my own personal efforts deep in this larger world, important enough to pass on, at least for those of you interested in the mammal brain.
The "spirit of the deep", represented or reflected in the photo of dark matter connecting the galaxies of our cosmos, is of course much bigger than us, and bigger than our entire solar system and noosphere. BUT IT IS REFLECTED IN A WAY (like reflections shown in many Escher prints) in the deep structures of mammal brains. For us humans, "sanity" entails thoughts or connections in our neocortex (and the neocortex of our noosphere) which accurately articulate the more permanent, deep but nonverbal sources of primary affect -- a type of "qi" or "psychic energy" or charisma, modulated backpropagation -- which drive our brains (and our souls within the noosphere).
So what ARE those deep structures within our mammal brains, and how do they connect to practical science and technology of the brain, like the papers they showed me yesterday? The brain image I sent you yesterday was used in Werbos and Davis (https://www.frontiersin.org/
But Karl Pribram and I had much deeper discussions of these structures. I know more about climate now than I do about those deep structures, but I do remember something...
Crudely speaking, there are FOUR crucial deep brain structures important here -- hypothalamus (U1?), epithalamus (U2?), amygdala (lambda1?)
and mammillary bodies (lambda2? or U3?). THE FOUR GREAT FEARS in my attachments are reflected, TO SOME DEGREE), in amygdala, which Pribram saw as the primary center or destination.integrator of primary fears in the brain. But where are great hopes? The mammillary bodies have a role in primary love and hope. (Again, I apologize I have not integrated a review of what is really known about this.)
Even lower mammals have a challenge in their neocortex to represent or articulate WHAT THEY HOPE FOR AND WHAT THEY FEAR, even when they do not articulate things in words. Pribram noted we must be careful in reading Freud (as in Pribram's book on Freud published by Gill) because even Freud might switch from discussing the nonverbal ariculations in neocortex with the verbal articulations, two ways to define "ego".
But these issues of balancing survival and growth, hope and fear, are reflected deep in our brains, and at all levels of life, even for our noosphere itself.
THERE IS ANOTHER REFLECTION HERE (like a pun!):
ONE of the four great fears threatening the existence of the human species is listed as "misuse of biotech" on the six challenges slide.
That deserves more than just one part of one line! If Secretary General Guterres ever succeeds in setting up an intelligently structured Office of Existential Threats in the UN, I have been stressing that misuse of biotechs demands an entire division in that office! (That is why I cc the covid list here, as they have sent information important to that possibility.)
Direct brain stimulation (DBS, electronic or chemical or optogenetic) APPLIED to any of these deep brain structures is one of the important sources of existential threat to our species in itself. It can convert humans into robots, in effect, as depicted in some sad scenes in some of the Star Wars movies.
"Fear the amygdala!" (OK, that's a joke. But a serious one.)
One of my last acts at NSF was to attend a major interagency conference organized by
https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/
Best of luck....
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