Mod+ 274. DR. BERNARDO KASTRUP, WHY OUR CULTURE IS MATERIALISTIC

What about the psychological underpinnings that every day life dishes out, is there anybody that doesn't suffer psychological underpinnings?, is there any escape from this disorder? and whose to say a person who adopts a religion goes through any more of a detrimental psychological underpinning than a person who doesn't.

Anyway my argument is not to defend religion, I just thought that the revelation concerning end of days and the order of society that is predicted in the Bible and the Veda was comparable to today's society. But it's obviously not your flavour. I can respect that.

There are gradations of psychological understanding and development. Emerson once said that amateur thinkers often make the mistake assuming all men and their creeds are intellectually on equal ground. No, there are and have been substantial differences among men and creeds. Sure, the human psyche underpins all our human endeavors as we are all conscious beings. But we are not all at the same level of conscious awareness or intellectual knowledge and psychological development.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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There are gradations of psychological understanding and development. Emerson once said that amateur philosophers often make the mistake assuming all men and their creeds are intellectually on equal ground. No, there are and have been substantial differences among men and creeds. Sure, the human psyche underpins all our human endeavors as we are all conscious beings. But we are not all at the same level of conscious awareness or intellectual knowledge and psychological development.

My Best,
Bertha


So why assume that those of a religious affiliation are any less intellectual or knowledgeable, it simply doesn't follow.

Also as a fan of Jung I thought you might enjoy this quote.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.” Carl Jung
 
So why assume that those of a religious affiliation are any less intellectual or knowledgeable, it simply doesn't follow.

Religion is based on the human psyche. It is not the other way around i.e. the human psyche is not based on religion. That is the central problem I have with organized religions.

Also as a fan of Jung I thought you might enjoy this quote.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.” Carl Jung

"The gods never go away. They go underground and reappear somewhere else. Figuring out where they have gone, how they, like Proteus, have reincarnated in another form, is our first move toward healing. The ego has little control over this encounter, for where the gods wish to take us -- to profound love, or madness, or desire -- is beyond our limited powers."
~James Hollis, 'What Matters Most'

My Best,
Bertha
 
Religion is based on the human psyche. It is not the other way around i.e. the human psyche is not based on religion. That is the central problem I have with organized religions.

Is there anything not based in the human Psyche?



"The gods never go away. They go underground and reappear somewhere else. Figuring out where they have gone, how they, like Proteus, have reincarnated in another form, is our first move toward healing. The ego has little control over this encounter, for where the gods wish to take us -- to profound love, or madness, or desire -- is beyond our limited powers."
~James Hollis, 'What Matters Most'

Thanks for the extended text.

My Best,
Bertha
 
Is there anything not based in the human Psyche?
Good question! But many religions assume there is, as do materialists.

In addition, understanding that religion can be considered a "public myth" or an unconscious collective projection of the human psyche can help one not be indoctrinated into official public symbols (which for many can be bereft of personal meaning), but rather seek out one's individual private symbols and myths which are invariably far more numinous and personally relevant, as Carl Jung might say.

God is of the living, not of the dead.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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Spiritualism was founded by people who were interested in paranormal phenomena, mediumship and spiritual healing, who wanted protection under the first amendment in the US because they were being persecuted with false legal prosecutions by materialists, atheists, and pseudo-skeptics. Spiritualism is based on empirical evidence of repeatable phenomenon. When science studies the afterlife, it overlaps religion but that doesn't negate its empirical basis.

Some sects of Buddhism are also based on empirical evidence. Buddha taught what happens when you meditate. Much of which was known before his time and today is known as Himalayan yoga. Some Buddhists sects deify Buddha but not all of them do.

In the book Gunning For God, author and mathematician John Lennox applied the criterion for evidence and witnesses proposed by Hume (a philosopher who rejected miracles) and shows that by those criteria the evidence shows that the resurrection of Christ occurred. Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ is a journalist and his research into the authenticity of the Gospels transformed his life. He started out as an atheist skeptic but when he used his credentials as a reporter to get access to the world's leading historians, the results of his research made a Christian out of him.
 
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John William Strutt winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics was a president of the SPR.
J. J. Thomson winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics was was a member of the Governing Council of the SPR for 34 years.
Carl Jung observed examples of ESP during his treatment of patients, he also found empirical evidence of astrology and believed it was caused by synchronicity.
William Crookes inventor of the cathode ray tube was a president of the SPR.
Oiver Lodge a physicist and mathematician, developed of wireless telegraphy was a president of the SPR.
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers
 
I was amused by Max's response to Bernardo. Follow his argument to its logical conclusion, the only way to be spiritual would be give up everything. In which case, the most spiritual people on earth would be those who have nothing. In a sense, that's true: the psychological sense of not being attached to anything. In that sense, one could be a very rich person and still be poor in spirit, or a very poor person and still be materialistic.

Whatever, Bernardo's lifestyle appears to be quite modest and he's no longer very attached to things he doesn't feel he needs. Doubtless if some misfortune befell him and he became materially much worse off, he'd find some way to get by--as, I hope, would I--but what merit is there in possessing so little that life becomes a struggle for existence?

There are those in several traditions who do give up everything and become wandering mendicants focussed primarily on the overtly spiritual. Are they thus freed from attachment? Maybe some are, but not a few still experience spiritual dissatisfaction, and that's the key word, really. I won't say that Benardo has achieved spiritual satisfaction, if only because I don't know him well enough, but it seems plain to me that's what he's after; and he's on a path that is more likely to achieve it than are out-and-out materialists on the one hand, and ascetics on the other.

His seems to me to be a middle way, a balance between the spiritual and the secular which also has noble tradition, e.g. in some forms of Sufism, where it's recognised that asceticism has its own pitfalls: it might work for some, but for many, it won't. There's nothing wrong with having secular aims and aspirations or being a contributor to commercial enterprise, and balancing that with a rich inner life. Ethical commercial enterprise isn't a dirty word: through it, one can contribute to the general well-being of society as well as supporting one's own inner needs.

Here in Britain, most working-age people are de facto engaged in such activity, because a portion of our income (national insurance) is taken to fund the National Health Service, and, indeed, the rest of our taxes contribute to the common weal. It's fashionable these days for people to rant on about the evils of big business, and surely such evils do exist, but by the same token, business can do quite a lot of good simply by being engaged in productive activity--paying wages and supplying goods, not all of which are luxuries.

The capitalist framework has much to commend it, but like anything else, it's subject to abuse, sometimes egregious. Through law, we attempt to limit that abuse, though often after the horse has bolted. Ah well, our societies are imperfect, but I really can't think of anything better than capitalism for promoting the equitable distribution of wealth (and spirituality!).

At its best, it harnesses the energies of secular drives and leaves something over that can be used at public and personal discretion. It's still possible for most people to operate within it in an ethical and spiritually satisfying way--can that be said for other systems, such as Communism? Much less so, I would opine. Instead of constantly criticising it, we should be helping curb its excesses, and that's what Bernardo, in his own small way, seems to me to be doing: more power to his elbow, I say.
 
but what merit is there in possessing so little that life becomes a struggle for existence?

There are those in several traditions who do give up everything and become wandering mendicants focussed primarily on the overtly spiritual. Are they thus freed from attachment?
That's the point about the Buddha's middle way - between indulgence and asceticism.
 
There is a family owned chain of grocery stores in the area where I live...

The food industry is a good example of how our economic system is dysfunctional. The grocery stores are as bad a drug pushers because of they way the stores are organized to make money off of unhealthy foods. There is an obesity epidemic, people are dying, and the food industry deserves a lot of blame for pushing junk. Bad nutrition science deserves a lot of the blame too. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to buy junk food, just that it shouldn't be in your face at the checkout lines and in special displays in the front of the store or advertised everywhere. I don't mean the government should pass new laws, (every new law is a new opportunity for the government to kill someone) just that people should find ways to make a living that don't harm other people. Materialism, lacking recognition of the afterlife, doesn't really help to justify this kind of ethic and Darwinism is easily appropriated to justify selfishness.
 
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Carl Jung was an honorary member of the SPR.

My Best,
Bertha



Carl Jung was an honorary member of the SPR.

My Best,
Bertha

Carl Jung also said


All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief – I know that he exists (Sands 1955, p. 6)
 
...
From transcript:
" I personally grant validity to Darwinian Evolution. I think it makes sense. I think the evidence supports it. And there is sufficient evidence out there, not only in the fossil record but in genetic studies..."

and

"They conflate that with another notion for which there is exactly zero evidence. And that is the notion that the mutations at the root of the entire process, the genetic mutations which are quantum events, that they too are random in the sense that they do not have any pattern. They do not reflect any trend, any goal, any telos. We do not know that."
...


Neo-Darwinism and the modern synthesis have been shown to be false by mainstream scientists. Mutations are not random, genetic change is not gradual, and acquired characteristics can be inherited by several mechanisms.



The following article is based on the lecture:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/expphysiol.2012.071134/full

Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology

Denis Noble

Article first published online: 17 MAY 2013
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In this article, I will show that all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved.
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Summary of the Modern Synthesis

The central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis that are relevant to this article are fourfold (see also the summary by Koonin, 2011).

First, genetic change is random.
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Second, genetic change is gradual. Since random events are best thought of as arising from microscopic stochasticity, it will generally be the case that many such events would have to accumulate to generate a major change in genome and phenotype.
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Third, following genetic change, natural selection leads to particular gene variants (alleles) increasing in frequency within the population.
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Fourth, the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible.
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All these assumptions have been disproved in various ways and to varying degrees, and it is also important to note that a substantial proportion of the experimental work that has revealed these breaks has come from within molecular biology itself. Molecular biology can now be seen to have systematically deconstructed its own dogmas.
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Are mutations random?

All careful studies of mutagenesis find statistically significant non-random patterns of change, and genome sequence studies confirm distinct biases in location of different mobile genetic elements’
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Is genetic change gradual?

It was the Nobel Prize-winner Barbara McClintock who introduced the idea that the genome is ‘an organ of the cell’ (McClintock, 1984). She won her prize for physiology or medicine in 1983 over 40 years after she had made the ground-breaking discovery of chromosome transposition (now called mobile genetic elements).
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Nature 2001 report (International Human Genome Mapping Consortium, 2001) compared protein-template regions for several classes of proteins from yeast, nematode worms, Drosophila, mice and humans. In the case of transcription factors (Figure 45 of the Nature report) and chromatin-binding proteins (Figure 42 of the Nature report) the evidence shows that whole domains up to hundreds of amino acids in length have been amplified and shifted around among different genetic loci in the genome.
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A genome consists largely of semi-stable genetic elements that may be rearranged or even moved around in the genome thus modifying the information content of DNA.’ The central dogma of the 1950s, as a general principle of biology, has therefore been progressively undermined until it has become useless as support for the Modern Synthesis (Werner, 2005; Mattick, 2007; Shapiro, 2009) or indeed as an accurate description of what happens in cells. As Mattick (2012) says, ‘the belief that the soma and germ line do not communicate is patently incorrect.’
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Horizontal transfer of DNA is ubiquitous in the prokaryote world, but also far from absent amongst eukaryotes (Shapiro, 2011). Other forms of mobile DNA include plasmids, viruses and group II introns, which are all prokaryotic elements. To these we can add group I introns and inteins (Raghavan & Minnick, 2009), multiple classes of transposons (Curcio & Derbyshire, 2003), multiple classes of retrotransposons (Volff & Brosius, 2007) and various forms of genomic DNA derived from reverse transcription (Baertsch et al. 2008). One of the major developments of Darwin's concept of a ‘tree of life’ is that the analogy should be more that of a ‘network of life’ (Doolittle, 1999; Woese & Goldenfeld, 2009). As with other breaks from the Modern Synthesis, that synthesis emerges as only part of the evolutionary story.
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The inheritance of acquired characteristics

In 1998, the great contributor to the development of the Modern Synthesis, John Maynard Smith, made a very significant and even prophetic admission when he wrote ‘it [Lamarckism] is not so obviously false as is sometimes made out’ (Maynard Smith, 1998), a statement that is all the more important from being made by someone working within the Modern Synthesis framework.
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So why, given his extraordinary (but completely correct) admission, did Maynard Smith not revise his view of the mechanisms of evolution? The reason he gave in 1999 was that ‘it is hard to conceive of a mechanism whereby it could occur; this is a problem’ (Maynard Smith, 1999).

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But the evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics has now moved right into the zoological domain. All the remaining examples I shall quote here are on multicellular organisms, including mammals, and they refer to pioneering work done in the last 7 years.

Anway et al. (2006a,b) demonstrated that an endocrine disruptor, vinclozolin (an anti-androgenic compound), can induce transgenerational disease states or abnormalities that are inherited for at least four generations in rats.
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An alternative approach to determining how the organism as a whole may influence the genome and whether such influences can be transmitted transgenerationally is to study cross-species clones, e.g. by inserting the nucleus of one species into the fertilized but enucleated egg cell of another species. Following the gene-centric view of the Modern Synthesis, the result should be an organism determined by the species from which the genome was taken. In the great majority of cases, this does not happen. Incompatibility between the egg cytoplasm and the transferred nuclear genome usually results in development freezing or completely failing at an early stage. That fact already tells us how important the egg cell expression patterns are. The genome does not succeed in completely dictating development regardless of the cytoplasmic state. Moreover, in the only case where this process has resulted in a full adult, the results also do not support the prediction. Sun et al. (2005) performed this experiment using the nucleus of a carp inserted into the fertilized but enucleated egg cell of a goldfish. The adult has some of the characteristics of the goldfish. In particular, the number of vertebrae is closer to that of the goldfish than to that of a carp.
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Epigenetic effects can even be transmitted independently of the germ line. Weaver and co-workers showed this phenomenon in rat colonies, where stroking and licking behaviour by adults towards their young results in epigenetic marking of the relevant genes in the hippocampus that predispose the young to showing the same behaviour when they become adults (Weaver et al. 2004; Weaver, 2009).
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Molecular mechanisms

The results I have described so far establish the existence of transgenerational non-Mendelian inheritance. This section describes recent studies that demonstrate the molecular biological mechanisms and that the transmission can be robust for many generations.
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Rechavi et al. (2011) worked on Caenorhabditis elegans and the non-Mendelian inheritance of the worm's response to viral infection. This is achieved by the infection inducing the formation of an RNA silencer. They crossed worms with this response with worms that do not have it and followed the generations until they obtained worms that did not have the DNA required to produce the silencing RNA but which nevertheless had inherited the acquired resistance. The mechanism is that transmission of RNA occurs through the germ line and is then amplified by using RNA polymerase. The inheritance of the acquired characteristic is robust for over 100 generations.
...



 
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Regarding the exchange between Max and Bernardo, I find it amusing that one alter of MAL should feel the need to troll another, more intelligent alter of MAL. All of this to somehow provide a better understanding of itself. :)

If you keep stepping back and moving around to take different perspectives on things, eventually you find one that makes you laugh. I think I will stay here on this one. :D
 
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Carl Jung also said


All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief – I know that he exists (Sands 1955, p. 6)
Yes he did!

But he never became part of an organized religion. He believed in the immediacy of one's personal mythological symbols. Not myths and symbols adopted thousands of years ago.

My Best,
Bertha
 
Yes he did!

But he never became part of an organized religion. He believed in the immediacy of one's personal mythological symbols. Not myths and symbols adopted thousands of years ago.

My Best,
Bertha

It doesn't matter, because firstly I don't really take Carl Jung as the highest authority, He believed in God, that's enough for me, I am not here to convince you of adopting a religion, I don't even have one myself, But your tone when you call them myths and symbols, isn't doing them justice in my opinion, I view them as frameworks with timeless piece's of wisdom contained in almost every religion I have encountered, and to just degenerate them to myths and symbols by primitive peoples sounds as immature as any people I encounter on atheistic Facebook groups.

But you are after all entitled to your opinion and I to mine, I just don't see it your way.
 
It doesn't matter, because firstly I don't really take Carl Jung as the highest authority, He believed in God, that's enough for me, I am not here to convince you of adopting a religion, I don't even have one myself, But your tone when you call them myths and symbols, isn't doing them justice in my opinion, I view them as frameworks with timeless piece's of wisdom contained in almost every religion I have encountered, and to just degenerate them to myths and symbols by primitive peoples sounds as immature as any people I encounter on atheistic Facebook groups.

But you are after all entitled to your opinion and I to mine, I just don't see it your way.
Well I did state that my current philosophical "spiritual" position was primarily Jungian. And psychoanalytical theory based on Jung's work is steeped in symbols and myths and what Carl Jung and other psychologists like him discovered regarding the human unconscious. So yes,
that is my perspective right now at the moment, and no you need not agree with me. I can respect that.

However I don't think "myths and symbols" are immature nor is it similar to the Skeptical militant atheism taking place right now, which is censoring, and defaming the biographies of parapsychologists and other scientists. Nor does it consider as some Skeptics do, psychology as some kind of pseudo-science. So I do think your comparison is a bit unfair in this regard.

Jung had the highest respect for eastern religions, and even christianity come to think of it. He even wrote an intro to a translation of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm. He just didn't adopt any of the organized religions has his own. He did borrow a number of ideas though.

My Best,
Bertha
 
Well I did state that my current philosophical "spiritual" position was primarily Jungian. And psychoanalytical theory based on Jung's work is steeped in symbols and myths and what Carl Jung and other psychologists like him discovered regarding the human unconscious. So yes,
that is my perspective right now at the moment, and no you need not agree with me. I can respect that.

However I don't think "myths and symbols" are immature nor is it similar to the Skeptical militant atheism taking place right now, which is censoring, and defaming the biographies of parapsychologists and other scientists. Nor does it consider as some Skeptics do, psychology as some kind of pseudo-science. So I do think your comparison is a bit unfair in this regard.

Jung had the highest respect for eastern religions, and even christianity come to think of it. He even wrote an intro to a translation of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm. He just didn't adopt any of the organized religions has his own. He did borrow a number of ideas though.

My Best,
Bertha


Exactly Bertha, And there we have it, I was merely doing the same thing, I was simply borrowing an idea in relation to the end of times that you mentioned, you brought up The Hindus, which is Vedic philosophy, as well as the Bible, I was simply pointing out that the Vedic philosophy concerning the degeneration of society from being more spiritual to more materialistic as time progresses seems to correspond to actual events I observe within todays society.

That's all
 
Exactly Bertha, And there we have it, I was merely doing the same thing, I was simply borrowing an idea in relation to the end of times that you mentioned, you brought up The Hindus, which is Vedic philosophy, as well as the Bible, I was simply pointing out that the Vedic philosophy concerning the degeneration of society from being more spiritual to more materialistic as time progresses seems to correspond to actual events I observe within todays society.

That's all
Ah then - our exchange was based on a misunderstanding. My apologies! Amusing if you think about it. heh

My Best,
Bertha
 
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