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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeremy Lent
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October 20 - November 30, 2019
Separated now from the wilderness, agriculturalists saw the natural world as a mysterious place filled with cosmic power.
Spirts everywhere
While the ancient Egyptians didn't follow the path of human sacrifice, they held an equally powerful notion of cosmic order, called ma'at, which they believed translated directly into political and social order and could only be maintained by continuous attention.
Continuous attention
The Shang worldview envisaged an orderly cosmos, a rational universe that responded to the appropriate human actions.
Orderly cosmo. Everyone plays their part
Ma'at literally means “base,” as in the base of a throne, and it was understood by the Egyptians as the foundation of the entire world order. It governed every aspect of life but was continually being disturbed, and the combined efforts of humans and gods alike were required to preserve it. If these efforts failed, the dreaded alternative was isfet, or “lack”—a lack of order that manifested in disease, scarcity, violence, injustice, and death.
Egypt. Maat
The Shang were interested in the world of the ancestor spirits only insofar as it affected their own; they rarely, if ever, speculated on their own individual paths upon entering the spirit world. By contrast, the Egyptians viewed the afterlife as the most important sphere, with their current life merely a kind of dream preparing them for the next.
Differences between Egyptians and shang Chinese
The very foundation of beliefs about the cosmos was shaken during this time, resulting in a crisis of faith regarding whether ma'at could be maintained. During this epoch, people began to wonder whether their destiny was, in fact, driven by what Assmann calls “the inscrutable will of a hidden god.”
Random natural disasters caused the old believe system to fall. New monotheism was born.
But as always ideas wouldn't just die away. They will always coexists.
convulsive episode of Egyptian history sheds light on key conceptual difficulties that can arise when people are driven by their patterning instinct to attempt a more systematic representation of the universe.21 Traditional forager and agrarian worldviews don't try to systematize their myths into a comprehensive whole.
Conceptual difficulties being away from patterning instinct.monotheism is not natural."cognitive dissonance" between diversity and Unity
In a traditional polytheistic cosmology, there's no need for a worldview to be systematic. Each god may have unique powers that are not necessarily consistent with those of another god. However, once we conceive of a sole creative power in the universe, the gods that previously represented natural forces and creatures are no longer the source of divinity. They become mere recipients of the creative force of the one god; they are now just intermediaries between the one transcendent god and ordinary human beings.
the problem with monotheism
Perhaps it's because of this grinding insecurity felt by Mesopotamians, this sense that no amount of piety could secure your position in this world, and the next world didn't even bear thinking about, that their civilization went on to create some of the greatest innovations the world has ever seen. If you can't rely on the gods to do it for you, they seemed to believe, you may as well accomplish what you can on your own.
When you cannot understand the gods. Such revolutionary moment always exist in turmoils as that's when people realise the concept of gods doesn't work.
In contrast to Egyptian or Shang civilizations, where the centralized ruler was virtually indistinguishable from the gods, the insecure kings of Mesopotamia made no attempt to assert divinity. The most they could claim was to act as stewards of the gods, and everyone recognized they would be punished by military defeat if they failed to do their job well. This separation of the king from divinity led to a process of secularization, during which the political domain was gradually recognized as separate from the cosmological.
Separation from king to divinity. Politics is not linked to colsmology
A profoundly important, but little recognized, fact of early civilization is the close affinity between the religious and philosophical traditions of Greece and India as a result of their derivation from a common PIE source. These cultures shared many of the same gods, as well as common terms for weapons such as bow and arrow, and both even used the same term for a specific ritual known as the hecatomb, which involved the sacrifice of a hundred cows.
Greece and india. Same source from PIE
The PIE root word for king was *reg-, which led to the Sanskrit word raj as well as the Latin rex and English royal.
Root of reg and raj
Growing up in a world that seemed to him utterly divided between the peaceful ways of the cattle breeders and the violent incursions of nomadic raiders, Zoroaster generalized this split between good and bad into a chasm dividing the entire cosmos.
Zoroaster.dualidt.under conflicting scenario
Zoroaster claimed that Ahura Mazda had given him the clarity of vision to determine the path between Truth and Falsehood, and those who found themselves on the wrong side of his determination could expect no accommodation. All opponents were evil incarnate. In a disturbing passage, Zoroaster expresses his hardline policy, stating that each person “should show kindness to the follower of Truth, but should be evil to the follower of the Lie,” for the man “who is most good to the follower of the Lie is himself a follower of the Lie.”
Zoroaster . Good and evil
during the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people in the sixth century BCE, prominent Jewish thinkers were influenced by the core ideas of Zoroastrianism, including the conception of Ahura Mazda as a creator god and the cosmic struggle between good and evil. As we'll see later, some of the most important sections of the Old Testament were written during the Jewish exile in Babylon and likely inspired by Zoroastrian beliefs.
Zooaster.jewish
New ways of thinking sprang up, giving birth to a stunning range of disciplines that nowadays we take for granted. Philosophy, as we now conceive of it, emerged there. Concepts such as democracy and tragedy were developed. Logic was invented. The practice of systematic and empirical thinking that eventually led to modern science began there.
PLATO and greece
Greeks seem to have taken advantage of this tolerant environment, with merchants, mercenaries, and artists traveling widely, absorbing different cultural influences and bringing them back to their own city-states. Arising from this cultural mélange, the “Greek miracle” was really a marvel of convergence and emergence: a convergence of multiple worldviews, leading to the emergence of a synthesis of these views as a new, comprehensive system of thought.
Multicultural greece
Thales, the man considered to be the world's first philosopher, thought—like hunter-gatherers worldwide—that “all things are full of gods.” Another important shamanic borrowing was the notion of a spirit that travels outside the body, which would become a central theme in the development of Greek thought.
Shamanic.
Using this toolbox of abstraction, the Greeks created a radically new conception of the cosmos that was a function of humanity's own unique capacity for systematic reasoning. One by one, leading Presocratic thinkers pushed the envelope of abstraction further and further until it formed its own parallel universe quite apart from the empirical world of the senses. Abstraction itself was deified.
Greek abstraction.Purity.metaphysics
Mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own. The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair. But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that people can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.
Xanophanes the philosopher
One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought. Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind. All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.
Xenophane.Disembodied god
Democritus, only knowledge obtained through the intellect was legitimate. In one of the earliest recorded statements of a viewpoint that would establish the primacy of reason over the senses for millennia, he says: “Of knowledge there are two forms, one legitimate, one bastard. To the bastard belong all this group: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The other is legitimate, and separate from that.”18 One result of this emphasis on the power of the mind was an ever-increasing reliance on conclusions reached through the rigorous application of systematic thought.
Systematic thoughts only. As mind is all powerful. Birth of science. Empirical research.
Parmenides, showed how easy it is to become intoxicated by its power. He argued that nothing new could ever come into existence, since “it must either come from something, in which case it already existed, or from nothing, which is impossible, since nothing does not exist.” Using this logic, Parmenides concluded that everything is fixed and “change is impossible.”
wow Interesting. Parmenides. Logic
Plato's astounding achievement was to take the body-soul dualism of Pythagoras, combine it with the new concept of pure abstraction, and infuse all this with the mathematical sense of divine order in nature. By weaving together these different strands of thought, he would create a radically new, comprehensive cosmology that would serve as the underpinning for more than two thousand years of theological, philosophical, and mathematical speculation in the Western world.
PlATO cosmology
The body intrudes…into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth. We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.41
Phaedo. The mind mind mind..philosopher's primary occupation is to split soul and body. In search for purity
What is this pure knowledge attained by thought once it is freed of the senses? Socrates explains that when the soul is freed to look by itself, it perceives true reality composed of “the pure, the eternal, the immortal, the unchanging.” The soul can then “cease its wanderings,” and, through its contact with eternal truth, it too becomes eternal. This, he avers, is the soul's true nature, a condition called wisdom.
Interesting. To achieve eternity
The core of Plato's worldview, known as the theory of Forms, is that for everything existing in the material world, there exists an ideal form of that thing in another dimension, the immutable world of Ideas.
Dualism
Plato's theory of Forms relies ultimately on generalization. Identifying true reality requires ignoring the particular differences between things and focusing on what they have in common as a category. It is remarkable how precisely his theory of Forms maps onto an essential element of the human patterning instinct: the rule-making function of the PFC.
Connection between The theory of form, generalisation and PFC and patterning instinct
In this constellation of ideas that would become endemic throughout Western civilization, the human capacity for abstract thought is linked with the soul, which, in turn, is linked with truth, and truth with immortality. The body, as part of the changeable material world, is associated with sensory appetite, ignorance, and death.
Interesting. The soul and the body representations
The creator god imposed order through a benevolent impulse, the desire “that all things should be good.” With this creation myth, Plato adds the characteristic of goodness to the soul-eternity-truth-mathematics thought constellation. It's not just that the universe is constructed according to eternal principles of mathematical order; the harmonious and symmetrical construction of the cosmos is also the ultimate good.
Soul. eternity. good. maths. constellation
The self that is identical to universal reality, however, is not the daily self that most of us are aware of: the self that goes to work, gets hungry, eats dinner, and feels happy or sad. It's a self that can only be discerned by looking deeply inside, piercing through all the layers of daily life. It might be difficult to do, but discovering this eternal, unchanging self is seen as the ultimate goal of human existence, allowing a person to merge with divinity.
the self. Not the desire self
A basic summary of this comprehensive view of the cosmos might go as follows: There is an eternal, unchanging reality beyond the world of change. Our souls are continually born and reborn into the world of change as creatures and humans as part of an endless cycle of reincarnation. We humans, by following the discipline of Yoga, are able to realize the unchanging, eternal reality within ourselves.
Reincarnation.yoga
You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. As a man abandons worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within.
Socrates
we see powerful evidence of the shared linguistic and conceptual sources of the Greek and Indian systems of thought. After more than a millennium of separation, both traditions still shared a vision of the liberating insight arising from renunciation of the senses.
The connection between linguitic and Conceptual
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates describes a chariot with two winged horses: a noble horse, representing the soul, wants to fly up to heaven; the other horse, “of ignoble breed,” representing the bodily appetites, aims for the ground. The charioteer, the human reasoning faculty, inevitably experiences “a great deal of trouble” driving his chariot.
Phaedrus
This distinction points to key elements that differentiate the Indian system of thought from that of the Greeks. The Indian system offers a systematic vision of how the different parts of the human experience can be integrated, and it promises that harmonious integration is, in fact, possible, whereas Plato's chariot suggests that conflicting drives are an inevitable part of the human experience.
Indian - integration.greek -split
The divergent horses of body and soul pulling the Greek chariot are driven by the divine faculty of reason, described by Aristotle as “in the highest sense, a man's self.” The Katha chariot, however, has two occupants: the reasoning faculty is merely a charioteer in the service of the ultimate lord, atman. This encapsulates a crucial difference between the two systems regarding the role of reason in attaining liberation.
Wow.the actual difference
The natural focus of their attention became those areas where reason excelled: searching for general properties of the natural world or for systematic laws of logic. This led the Greeks to launch some of the great Western traditions such as geometry, analytical philosophy, and empirical thinking. The Indians, however, saw the intellect as merely a stepping stone on the way to true knowledge. The yogic system was founded on the core identity of atman and Brahman: within the self lies the entire universe. Therefore, the natural object of attention within Yoga became atman, concealed beneath the
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Wow.different seed different fruit
There are far-reaching implications to this split between the Greek and Vedic traditions. When the Greek philosophers identified reason, a uniquely human faculty, as the link to divinity, this meant that other living creatures, lacking reason, missed out on divinity. This dichotomy between humans and the rest of the natural world went on to become a central theme of Western thought. In the Vedic tradition, by contrast, reason was merely a tool in the service of true divinity. This permitted the rest of the natural world also to partake in divinity, whether or not they possessed the faculty of
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West
For the Greeks, the ultimate Truth attained by reason is to be found above the world, separate from the world, in a dimension of eternal abstraction. In the Indian cosmos, dualism took a different form: the source of meaning is both above material things and hidden deep within them, and is glimpsed by piercing through both the reasoning faculty and the senses.
Summary
What a difference from the Greeks and Indians! For them, reality was nowhere to be found in the material world. For the Taoists, reality informed everything around them, no matter how lowly. The Tao didn't exist in an abstract Idea of wood, as Plato was suggesting. It wasn't concealed within the wood, as the Indians conceived atman. Instead, it quite simply was the wood. “You must not expect to find the Tao in any particular place,” Master Zhuang explained to his companion. “There is no thing that escapes its presence!”
Reality is here. Not in some other world
The most ancient Chinese symbol for qi denotes vapor arising from rice cooking. We can imagine early Chinese thinkers noticing steam rising from the pot, smelling the rice essence, and associating it with their own breath that seemed to contain their life's essence. At death, breath no longer emanated from the nostrils. A certain energetic life force seemed to leave the body. This force, whether in its manifestation as wind, the vapors of cooked food, or a person's spirit, seemed to be common to all things. That commonality was their qi.
Interesting .qi
In the traditional Chinese creation myth, the universe was originally an unformed mass of qi that became differentiated. The lighter, more ethereal qi wafted up to form the heavens, while the denser qi congealed as the earth. Between these extremes, certain forms of qi self-organized with an undulating type of harmony to generate life.
Concept of qi
Some of the earliest Chinese thinkers, trying to understand how to flourish in a world where everything was continually changing, identified certain principles within this system of change, which they compiled into one of the great classics of Chinese culture, The Book of Changes or I Ching.
Yi jing
As an ancient commentator on the I Ching, Wangbi, observed: “We do not see Heaven command the four seasons, and yet they never swerve from their course. So also we do not see the sage ordering the people about, and yet they obey and spontaneously serve him.”
Interesting. A natural top down system
Conceiving of the entire universe as a single organism has implications for how people choose to live their lives. In ancient Greece, where reason was deified, the primary objective of a philosopher was the cultivation of the intellect. In ancient India, the goal of Yoga was to shed the illusory layers of consciousness until a person could arrive at his own inner truth. In ancient China, where cosmic harmony was seen as the way of the universe, the ultimate intention of the sage was to learn from nature's ways and live according to those same harmonious principles.
Cosmology and behabior and meaning
The ancient Greeks viewed the human body as a tomb in which the soul is imprisoned. The Upanishads gave the promise of immortality to those who renounced the illusory world of maya. The Taoists, on the other hand, put their attention into how to live in this world rather than prepare for another one.
That's why chinese care for longevity.
But funny enough how the Taoist spend so much time doing rituals trying to get rid of the "negative" or "yin"
How can you do nothing and yet leave nothing undone? Modern scholars have pointed out that instead of translating wu-wei as non-action, it's more accurate to view it as effortless action, the kind of activity that avoids “going against the grain of things.”
Wu wei explanation
wei or purposive action. One classical text explains that if you tried using a fire to dry up a well, or forced water uphill to irrigate a mountainside, that would be acting contrary to nature and thus would be yu-wei: acting with a definite purpose in mind. When we act in harmony with the way things naturally are, when we “go with the flow,” we attain wu-wei.
Yu wei
The ancient Taoists, of course, had no idea about the PFC and its function in the human brain. If they had, they might have seen it as the ultimate source of disharmony. The Tao Te Ching views civilization as a decline from the original state of nature when humans lived in harmony with the Tao. And it identifies the analytical part of the mind—the same part that's responsible for building civilization—as the culprit for the loss of the Tao. “Eliminate learning,” it declares, “so as to have no worries.”
Interesting. Taoism and its oppose against reason. Control. And planning.
