Some great videos on spiritual/psychological topics

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This one is foundational. It's about the story of Buddha, his early origins, and how he tried many different approaches to life. Basically the ones represented by the various Greek philosophies of the classical Athenian period. There was hedonism, trying to reach happiness by sating all the hungers and lusts and just living to have fun. Then there was asceticism, the denial of all those same impulses. Neither one got him to wisdom or happiness. Then he met a Mendicant, a wise man, who has given up owning things and satisfying or denying the appetities. And now basically he moves into an Eastern version of Stoicism, but with a few differences.

This is where I encountered a lot of the ideas I discussed when I was posting so feverishly about the differences between the Masculine and the Feminine way—aka the male and female gaze. Females are human beings, males are human doings, they have to accomplish things to become a male. Always pursuing something—the prey animal, the carreer, later the career goals, the girlfriend, the wife, the better house, the better car, more money etc. I'm actually mixing a couple of different ideas together here, but they're very close to each other. I realized in that little mini-series of posts that the masculine way is genre fiction, where you need a highly active and assertive protagonist who squares off against opponents and must complete the hero's journey in order to accomplish his goals. And the feminine way, simply being, is literary fiction. No forward drive, no goals, just drifting or immersed in suspenstion. It's the difference between the Western approach to life and the Eastern—the Yang and the Yin.

He gives great tips in this video about how to approach the way of Being, to get in touch with the unconscious more, to open up to intuition, inspiration, the quiet inner voices, the inner muse, etc.

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Wow. This is perfect.

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One of the really good ones. Well ok, they're all really good. A couple of years ago I watched a bunch of these, I don't remember how many now. And my computer no longer shows me which ones I've watched, it's apparently cleared that memory. Or it's because I was on a different computer then, I'm not sure. Maybe I kept track in Evernote of where I was. But it wouldn't be a terrible idea to watch the whole thing again. Pretty sure I made it up into the teens.

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My approach to this is to offer somebody either a decent, properly tuned-up car, or a pile of car parts dumped in their driveway. All the ones needed to build the car. Plus a case of oil and a can of gas. Honestly, which would you rather have? I mean, according to the radical materialist's own argument, a car is just a bunch of parts. Personally I'll take the car, so I can just start it up and drive away. It's going to take him a long time to assemble all those parts properly so they actually function as a car. And that's if he can figure it all out—it's like the world's most impossible jigsaw puzzle. I doubt he'd be able to do it without highly specialized knowledge and the tools used in an automotive assembly line. And if he wants, I'll have all those dumped in his yard too.

Oh, and if we're talking a living thing, let's say an animal, not only do all the atoms need to be arranged into very specific molecules and those into tissues and those into the right organs, and those assembled properly to form a body, but there needs to be blood and bile and all kinds of other liquids, and it all needs to be healthy and functioning, and then it needs to also be alive and consciously aware. I'd like to see him take a pile of atoms and do all that.

From the above video—the path to God is through Unknowing (the Cloud of Unknowing as I've heard it called in Christian mysticism). Because God is utterly beyond all knowing. You can't approach Him through any Names or Knowledge, only by negative means.

Well, this sounds a lot like "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao," and various statements about Buddhism and Emptiness.

It also sounds like a description of the unconscious or some aspect of it projected out into the Cosmos. Which by the way is the only way we can know anything in the unconscious—it can't be experienced directly, only through projection.

Here's some scientific evidence showing that meditation, prayer and faith create real, measurable changes in brain activity, which in turn create the religious experience:

• What religion does to your brain @ MedicalNewsToday

Some people seem to feel that this diminishes or obliterates religious claims altogether. But then, I subscribe to the idea that religion has always been internal (though experienced as external, as the contents of the unconscious always are), and that the divine is some aspect of the unconscious. Ergo it's no less real now, produced in a lab through magnetic stimulation, than it's ever been. Either way it's the transcendent experience and produces profound changes in a person's outlook and mentality and life. I've experienced what I believe to be small doses of it, and nobody can tell me they were just an illusion or that they weren't real (whatever that means). I think the only thing damaged by this new evidence is a very literalist/materialist set of ideas—ie the exoteric conception of religion.

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Holy Crap! I also already bought this one:

• The Neoplatonic Imagination with Angela Voss

I vaguely remember buying them both, and I think I only barely started to read them. I have a tendency to buy mass quantities of books as resources so I can read them at my leisure.

The synopsis (the beginning of it—it's ridiculously long):

These three lectures are an introduction to one of the most important schools of philosophy in the ancient world, the followers of Plato (c.348-428 BCE) who are now called the Neoplatonists. Writing from roughly 100 to 500 CE, these philosophers offered interpretations of Plato’s ideas from varying perspectives but always focussing on the nature of the human soul, and its relationship with the cosmos and with the One, the supreme, divine ground of being which gives rise to all that is. Each lecture is devoted to a different personality and viewpoint – Plotinus’ contemplative approach, Iamblichus’ ritual approach, and the visionary mysticism of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. These three mystical ‘ways’ of attaining divine knowledge—which are ultimately one—are important because they provide the raw material as it were for the underlying philosophy of the Western esoteric traditions. These hidden and initiatory undercurrents to exoteric monotheism have given rise to the practices of alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah and natural magic which were developed in the Renaissance period where they enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with Christianity. [...]

Session 1 – Plotinus and the Neoplatonic Cosmos
In this lecture we will introduce the most well-known of neoplatonists, Plotinus. His Enneads are a manifesto for a contemplative yet intensely intellectual path to transcendence and union with the divine.

Plotinus was also one of the first philosophers to exalt the power of the imagination to its role of mediator between heaven and earth.

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I wanted to look into how Neoplatonism has affected Christianity, because I know it has, to a large extent. Did a search on Amazon, and the first book I ran across is this one:

• From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith by Louis Markos

Then I noticed the banner across the top that said I bought this book in 2022. Awesome! In some ways this makes up for the expensive books I've been buying lately—sort of. I mean, because I already bought it, it's already on my Kindle. Lol!

After looking pretty deeply into the books that showed up on the first page under Neoplatonism, I settled on this one:

• Neoplatonism (Ancient Philosophies) 1st edition by Pauliina Remes

Wow, most of them are also stupidly expensive! Probably textbooks, or just specialty books on some pretty esoteric subjects. And the people interested in these subjects (Romanticism and Neoplatonism) are doubtless willing to pay out the ass for really good content. I guess I'm one of them. I could get the Kindle for $28 (with my credits applied), the paperback runs $52. I'd greatly prefer to have it in paperback, so much easier to mark it up and flip through to find what you're looking for. I'll see if I can find one used somewhere else at a better price. I'll pay the $52 if I have to I guess. Or get the Kindle, I don't know. Time will tell. I'm not doing this until after payday.

All the other ones I looked at were either extremely technical with a focus on mathematics and logic, or academic, or were mainly interested in it from a historical perspective. Only this one takes a relaxed humanistic approach, relates in a nice conversational way, as narrative, which is how the brain actually processes things, and is interested in it as a philosophy of life (rather than from a technical or academic standpoint). Like all of the ancient Greek philosophies, it wasn't intended to be about academic argumentation or debate or endless theorizing, it was intended to help people live their lives better—to achieve eudaemonia, and of course transcendence, as any spiritual practice is.

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I'm posting this one here because it deals with right-brain thinking, which is generally considered spiritual or religious (or parts of it just humanistic or warm and fuzzy).

Basically, to encapsulate the video, you can't use science, math, pure logic, or an algorithm to solve any of the important problems of life as a human being (or an animal for that matter), because they're not simple or binary, they're relational. Relevance matters, at every stage, and can't be determined by an algorithm or pure logic. This is why AI can't do the things we can do except insofar as we've programmed our own ideas into them (not as ideas of course, but as rules). And then they're really just doing very poor imitations of what we do all the time in a heartbeat.

You can't live your life in a left-brain way (through calculation, computation, pure logic etc). Even if you think of yourself as mostly left-brained, you wouldn't be able to live that way. Your right hemisphere is doing its part all the time or you wouldn't be able to make the simplest decisions, and you make thousands of them every day.

Here's that book he mentioned near the end:

• Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground by James Filler

Here's the synopsis:

This book argues that Western philosophy's traditional understanding of Being as substance is incorrect, and demonstrates that Being is fundamentally Relationality. To make that argument, the book examines the history of Western philosophy's evolving conception of being, and shows how this tradition has been dominated by an Aristotelian understanding of substance and his corresponding understanding of relation. First, the book establishes that the original concept of Being in ancient Western philosophy was relational, and traces this relational understanding of Being through the Neoplatonists. Then, it follows the substantial understanding of Being through Aristotle and the Scholastics to reach its crisis in Descartes. Finally, the book demonstrates that Heidegger represents a recovery of the original, relational understanding of Being.
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Another ridiculously expensive book, but there's no way I would want to wade through this one. It sounds like a very dry read, all scientific/philosophical research. No thanks! I think the synopsis plus what he says in the video is enough. I do want to find a good book on Platonism and Neoplatonism though, maybe situated in the context of the other philosophies of the time, that goes into all the depth that's missing from the videos.

Oddly enough, something Vervaeke said in the video two posts back explains a problem I've been having for some time—the difficulty in characterizing my self-characters. It happens cvery time a character is supposed to be me in some way, they end up kind of blank and personality-less. Vervarke said something to the effect that if you have a problem and you're trying to solve it, thinking in first person, it's hard. Often you can't do it. But as soon as somebody else has the problem and you get to give advice, suddenly you've got all the answers. It's as simple as a shift from first person conceptualizing to third person.

It made me remember the thing from my first Poetry thread, a video I posted where they said Romantic and Lyrical poets (practically the same animal) discoverd that it doesn't work to write from your own point of view (unless you're Walt Whitman, but even he made up a romanticised version of himself, a persona to stand in for him in the poems). It's always a better idea to write about a third-person character, and see them from the outside rather than the inside.

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This one's much more simple and to the point, without the complicating elements of cognitive science to confuse things (as much as I liked that asepct of Vervaeke's video).

Unfortunatley I'm super sleepy today, and fell asleep for chunks of both videos lol.

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Following on the heels of the previous video, John Vervaeke and some esteemed colleagues discuss Neoplatonism and how it relates to contemporary cutting-edge science, of a type called 4E science. I don't even know what that is, but I'm primed to find out. I'm watching this in sections because it's really long.