[OK my shrew friends, this article is a bit off the beaten path here on Shrew Views—it is very long. So get a cup of coffee and settle in for a lengthy read (about 20 minutes). But it is worth it. The Lewis quotes I use in this article are from the full
Nuclear fission, not fusion. When we do figure out fusion, it may be the end of energy wars ... IF TPTB allow commoners to benefit too!
I came across a piece about consciousness studies, the documentary Rethinking Death , examining actual research going on about death, where some scientists had not only figured out that the old 4 minute rule of brain death after deoxygenation was completely wrong (by hours, not minutes apparently!) but that "the immortal head" was actually possible. They had managed to electronically revive a dead pig's head such that it continued to produce brain activity ... real Frankensteins! This research has been downplayed, according to the filmmakers, because of its appalling ramifications.
Fascinating article and so much to think about! His premonitions seem to be coming true. But there is a certain cold logic at work too, for example, after mandating vaccines for kids, it was only logical to find a way to mandate them for adults. But nobody seemed to care that much about kids (except Bobby Kennedy). These are great forces at work - the negative power is always out to destroy the good, the battle taking place both in the mind and in the outside world. I think that’s why I’ve always loved fairy tales, and this adult fairy tale looks great.
But it’s also striking that fairy tales are rarely read to kids any more. I read The Uses of Enchantment, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, by Bruno Bettelheim long ago (since i”m so old!) and felt he had an important message - that kids need to understand good versus evil in order to see reality.
As a result, (I think) of neglecting this aspect of children’s literature, it appears that most people, or the ones I observe
seem to see the world in a sort of haze, where everything is disconnected and floating. Moral relativism has been the fashion since the 60s.
Lately, morality and conviction seem to touch a nerve in the woke left, equating any such thought with the Christian far right, thereby banishing it.
But I’ve often felt that thinking itself is impossible without the parameters and ground that morality, ethics, right, wrong, good, evil, provide. How can one advance any argument based simply on ego and a myriad of disconnected details?
This all reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World describing the right brain (Master) and the left (Emissary). He decries post-modernism:
“With post-modernism, meaning drains away. Art becomes a game in which the emptiness of a wholly insubstantial world, in which there is nothing beyond the set of terms we have in vain used to ‘construct’ meaning, is allowed to speak for its own vacuity.” I just ordered his latest book, The Matter With Things.
He also included a great quote from Pascal: “All the miseries of man but prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, the miseries of a king that is dispossessed.”
Many thanks for writing this article - it keeps us aware of what is really going on and gives us plenty to worry about......
A relevant and disturbing article. We humans are truly a paradox. Two gifts we seem to have...The one ..an ability to analyse..results being ..a rushing forward with.. " " Science"..for eg.. discoveries in Physics, Medicine, Technology and generally " Advances" in " Knowledge "
The other being ..whats termed Conscience..a sense of Right and Wrong.. Interesting ..that the word includes science ...Con - Science ..Maybe we should all remember that in the grand scheme of things ...we are peanuts .certainly in terms of our existence ...and also ..there were some teachings given about this Duality ..I seem to remember ...but maybe it was .a childhood dream..
EXCELLENT. Ironically (or synchronous?) I just acquired this week used copies of "The Abolition of Man", "A Grief Observed", and "Screwtape Letters", and they are next up on my reading list. I can see why Tolkien and Lewis were fine friends. Having dumped TV (in 2014) my reading has increased exponentially, and so my mental health. I am an 'old un' (will be 65 soon) but knowing that I have so much yet to learn keeps me in The Game (reference A. Watts), and immensely curious. My very best to you, one shrew to another. And, I admire shrews, btw. I see them on occasion -- my cat will sometimes corner one, but does not kill, owing to its outsized courage. I practice catch and release.
Dr Hayen, CS Lewis was prophetic and a good student of human nature. You might also enjoy GK Chesterton as he writes also about man getting too clever for his own good and forgetting to heed wisdom from our past.
God damn! thank you for the leg work in putting that article together. I think the passages you quoted were excellent and very relatable to today's situation. Selling me on the books also !
i remember him saying it wasn't exactly christian. and he had some great quotes. he also really took me aback one time when discussing something about evolution. he said," oh ya. of course. throw a couple million years at it. changes everything". really stuck with me.
now of course, evolution is really starting to be questioned. as is the big bang. fascinating.
I read that series last Autumn, on the recommendation of Mark Crispin Miller. More to it, it'd been on my "to read" list since high school, I just was never in the right place for it, I guess. My goodness, those books rocked my world - it feels like the Lord used them (specifically Perelandra) to rip me open and show me every false narrative I'd been living in. Like you, I am astounded at how almost prophetic That Hideous Strength seems to be.
Thank you for this post, very interesting. I so loved the Chronicles of Narnia when I was young. I just relistened to your interview on Germ.
I consider these times largely a spiritual evolution too. Just like personal evolution, it's messy, and all of our subconscious and hidden fears, pains, desires and psychological issues come up to the surface. I've been pondering the need for a "solution". Certainly our times are shouting for greater media literacy, greater self-awareness of how much are current culture & technology is distraction or brings meaning, and the need to form communities to care for our basic and relational needs. I think the area we need to psychologically evolve most is around power and helplessness, the source of the need to control and dominate. Issues around power and helplessness generally come from past traumatic experiences, the inability to tame our own instincts, or the more normal power issues stemming from beginning our human life in a helpless state, totally open and vulnerable to those around us.
All this interacts with our spiritual nature, which I perceive and experience is within our physical body and this earth, and also beyond this earthly manifestation. We have 8 billion people going through the same spiritual evolution, but at different stages. Imo, despite people being at different stages of maturation, the strength of humanity comes from our diversity, both physical diversity and the diversity of cultures and beliefs and ideas. I'm not sure if we're meant to have a clear cut solution with this kind of complexity. Maybe the drama continues, and the needle moves and evolves. Any solution or endpoint we can think of comes from our personality self. Really all of our experience, individual and collective is emerging from spiritual manifestation. Attachment to knowing an endpoint, and thinking that winning or losing looks like something, is always putting a concept around the non-conceptual manifestation. It's not that we don't engage in what our souls are moved towards, and especially using our behavior and actions as spiritual maturation. In this vein, I feel the most obvious manifestation of God, Being (whatever one wants to call the sacred) on this Earth is nature, and its palpable spiritual presence that doesn't have the distortion of personality. Maybe the drama on Earth is meant to continue, and there will be no place to land, no "solution". Just like personal enlightenment, no place to land, just the continual arising of consciousness, space, light, and qualities of being like love, strength, compassion, power. An exciting ride for sure!
My husband had ordered The C.S. Lewis Bible, which just arrived today, so your article was very timely. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul said "The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide." You can see the truth of this in the variety of writers who can see man's insanity, from C.S. Lewis to Rachel Carson to John the Apostle.
(note to Todd - in one of your comments to me you said "spoken like a true man" but I am in fact a woman. Not to worry, I took it as a compliment. I have often joked that I want my headstone to read "She thought like a man.")
Thank you so much for this article. It took me longer than 20 minutes to read because I just couldn't stop re-reading the quotes you provided. How terrifyingly accurate! The silly Left vs Right, the "educated" being the most indoctrinated, man's suicidal war with Nature it's self, all of it. Crazy.
But, is it crazy? How did he and other's from Wells to Cayce to Orwell see our future so clearly? I've begun to digest the notion that there truly is nothing new under the sun, that we may have done all this before and that those that can "tap in" to the ... call it universal consciousness are able to SEE. To know, to glean these past endeavors of mankind and their ultimate failures.
Do we destroy ourselves almost to the point of oblivion or does God do it for us? I know not.
I do know that this ride feels familiar and I do know that I'm a subversive, a rebel. It feels like this is a re-run to me. I've seen this show before and while thing's get truly dark, Nature, God always wins.
I just watched a video that was presenting a synopsis of the WEF/Schwab/Harari agenda...although I knew it all already, I was still appalled at how transparent they all have become...I feel exceptionally lousy today because of it. Seems like a synchronicity for me to see this video the same day my Lewis article comes out...Lewiis' NICE group in his novel That Hideous Strength is so much a model for the WEF...it is uncanny....AND eerie....are we living now the premonitions of Lewis, Huxley, Orwell, Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)...???
I have never used Twitter and don't intend yo do so. CS Lewis is more E F Forster than George Orwell . These sneaky attempts at rewriting history are tiresome to say the least
Nuclear fission, not fusion. When we do figure out fusion, it may be the end of energy wars ... IF TPTB allow commoners to benefit too!
I came across a piece about consciousness studies, the documentary Rethinking Death , examining actual research going on about death, where some scientists had not only figured out that the old 4 minute rule of brain death after deoxygenation was completely wrong (by hours, not minutes apparently!) but that "the immortal head" was actually possible. They had managed to electronically revive a dead pig's head such that it continued to produce brain activity ... real Frankensteins! This research has been downplayed, according to the filmmakers, because of its appalling ramifications.
Fascinating article and so much to think about! His premonitions seem to be coming true. But there is a certain cold logic at work too, for example, after mandating vaccines for kids, it was only logical to find a way to mandate them for adults. But nobody seemed to care that much about kids (except Bobby Kennedy). These are great forces at work - the negative power is always out to destroy the good, the battle taking place both in the mind and in the outside world. I think that’s why I’ve always loved fairy tales, and this adult fairy tale looks great.
But it’s also striking that fairy tales are rarely read to kids any more. I read The Uses of Enchantment, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, by Bruno Bettelheim long ago (since i”m so old!) and felt he had an important message - that kids need to understand good versus evil in order to see reality.
As a result, (I think) of neglecting this aspect of children’s literature, it appears that most people, or the ones I observe
seem to see the world in a sort of haze, where everything is disconnected and floating. Moral relativism has been the fashion since the 60s.
Lately, morality and conviction seem to touch a nerve in the woke left, equating any such thought with the Christian far right, thereby banishing it.
But I’ve often felt that thinking itself is impossible without the parameters and ground that morality, ethics, right, wrong, good, evil, provide. How can one advance any argument based simply on ego and a myriad of disconnected details?
This all reminds me of Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World describing the right brain (Master) and the left (Emissary). He decries post-modernism:
“With post-modernism, meaning drains away. Art becomes a game in which the emptiness of a wholly insubstantial world, in which there is nothing beyond the set of terms we have in vain used to ‘construct’ meaning, is allowed to speak for its own vacuity.” I just ordered his latest book, The Matter With Things.
He also included a great quote from Pascal: “All the miseries of man but prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, the miseries of a king that is dispossessed.”
Many thanks for writing this article - it keeps us aware of what is really going on and gives us plenty to worry about......
Despite the idea that so and so was in fact a sincere person who initially had idealistic and caring motives .the outcomes are the proof .
.Behind, a hidden message, namely, a simply formulated and relatively well known piece of Wisdom ..
" Power corrupts ..and absolute power ..corrupts absolutely"
A relevant and disturbing article. We humans are truly a paradox. Two gifts we seem to have...The one ..an ability to analyse..results being ..a rushing forward with.. " " Science"..for eg.. discoveries in Physics, Medicine, Technology and generally " Advances" in " Knowledge "
The other being ..whats termed Conscience..a sense of Right and Wrong.. Interesting ..that the word includes science ...Con - Science ..Maybe we should all remember that in the grand scheme of things ...we are peanuts .certainly in terms of our existence ...and also ..there were some teachings given about this Duality ..I seem to remember ...but maybe it was .a childhood dream..
Tried
EXCELLENT. Ironically (or synchronous?) I just acquired this week used copies of "The Abolition of Man", "A Grief Observed", and "Screwtape Letters", and they are next up on my reading list. I can see why Tolkien and Lewis were fine friends. Having dumped TV (in 2014) my reading has increased exponentially, and so my mental health. I am an 'old un' (will be 65 soon) but knowing that I have so much yet to learn keeps me in The Game (reference A. Watts), and immensely curious. My very best to you, one shrew to another. And, I admire shrews, btw. I see them on occasion -- my cat will sometimes corner one, but does not kill, owing to its outsized courage. I practice catch and release.
Dr Hayen, CS Lewis was prophetic and a good student of human nature. You might also enjoy GK Chesterton as he writes also about man getting too clever for his own good and forgetting to heed wisdom from our past.
God damn! thank you for the leg work in putting that article together. I think the passages you quoted were excellent and very relatable to today's situation. Selling me on the books also !
i remember him saying it wasn't exactly christian. and he had some great quotes. he also really took me aback one time when discussing something about evolution. he said," oh ya. of course. throw a couple million years at it. changes everything". really stuck with me.
now of course, evolution is really starting to be questioned. as is the big bang. fascinating.
peace
ok. time to read some lewis. a religious guy who used to work for me recommended it years ago but i forgot. great article.
peace
I read that series last Autumn, on the recommendation of Mark Crispin Miller. More to it, it'd been on my "to read" list since high school, I just was never in the right place for it, I guess. My goodness, those books rocked my world - it feels like the Lord used them (specifically Perelandra) to rip me open and show me every false narrative I'd been living in. Like you, I am astounded at how almost prophetic That Hideous Strength seems to be.
Thank you for this post, very interesting. I so loved the Chronicles of Narnia when I was young. I just relistened to your interview on Germ.
I consider these times largely a spiritual evolution too. Just like personal evolution, it's messy, and all of our subconscious and hidden fears, pains, desires and psychological issues come up to the surface. I've been pondering the need for a "solution". Certainly our times are shouting for greater media literacy, greater self-awareness of how much are current culture & technology is distraction or brings meaning, and the need to form communities to care for our basic and relational needs. I think the area we need to psychologically evolve most is around power and helplessness, the source of the need to control and dominate. Issues around power and helplessness generally come from past traumatic experiences, the inability to tame our own instincts, or the more normal power issues stemming from beginning our human life in a helpless state, totally open and vulnerable to those around us.
All this interacts with our spiritual nature, which I perceive and experience is within our physical body and this earth, and also beyond this earthly manifestation. We have 8 billion people going through the same spiritual evolution, but at different stages. Imo, despite people being at different stages of maturation, the strength of humanity comes from our diversity, both physical diversity and the diversity of cultures and beliefs and ideas. I'm not sure if we're meant to have a clear cut solution with this kind of complexity. Maybe the drama continues, and the needle moves and evolves. Any solution or endpoint we can think of comes from our personality self. Really all of our experience, individual and collective is emerging from spiritual manifestation. Attachment to knowing an endpoint, and thinking that winning or losing looks like something, is always putting a concept around the non-conceptual manifestation. It's not that we don't engage in what our souls are moved towards, and especially using our behavior and actions as spiritual maturation. In this vein, I feel the most obvious manifestation of God, Being (whatever one wants to call the sacred) on this Earth is nature, and its palpable spiritual presence that doesn't have the distortion of personality. Maybe the drama on Earth is meant to continue, and there will be no place to land, no "solution". Just like personal enlightenment, no place to land, just the continual arising of consciousness, space, light, and qualities of being like love, strength, compassion, power. An exciting ride for sure!
My husband had ordered The C.S. Lewis Bible, which just arrived today, so your article was very timely. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul said "The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide." You can see the truth of this in the variety of writers who can see man's insanity, from C.S. Lewis to Rachel Carson to John the Apostle.
(note to Todd - in one of your comments to me you said "spoken like a true man" but I am in fact a woman. Not to worry, I took it as a compliment. I have often joked that I want my headstone to read "She thought like a man.")
Wow, Todd.
Thank you so much for this article. It took me longer than 20 minutes to read because I just couldn't stop re-reading the quotes you provided. How terrifyingly accurate! The silly Left vs Right, the "educated" being the most indoctrinated, man's suicidal war with Nature it's self, all of it. Crazy.
But, is it crazy? How did he and other's from Wells to Cayce to Orwell see our future so clearly? I've begun to digest the notion that there truly is nothing new under the sun, that we may have done all this before and that those that can "tap in" to the ... call it universal consciousness are able to SEE. To know, to glean these past endeavors of mankind and their ultimate failures.
Do we destroy ourselves almost to the point of oblivion or does God do it for us? I know not.
I do know that this ride feels familiar and I do know that I'm a subversive, a rebel. It feels like this is a re-run to me. I've seen this show before and while thing's get truly dark, Nature, God always wins.
Blessings!
I just watched a video that was presenting a synopsis of the WEF/Schwab/Harari agenda...although I knew it all already, I was still appalled at how transparent they all have become...I feel exceptionally lousy today because of it. Seems like a synchronicity for me to see this video the same day my Lewis article comes out...Lewiis' NICE group in his novel That Hideous Strength is so much a model for the WEF...it is uncanny....AND eerie....are we living now the premonitions of Lewis, Huxley, Orwell, Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)...???
I have never used Twitter and don't intend yo do so. CS Lewis is more E F Forster than George Orwell . These sneaky attempts at rewriting history are tiresome to say the least