Discuss: Silence Like Scouring Sand

It’s not the silence that has made one square inch a sacred place. It’s Gordon’s (and our) AWARENESS OF and REVERENCE FOR that silence. That sacredness which fully involves our minds and hearts will be the ultimate salvation of the universe.

Terry,

While our awareness of the sacred will facilitate our own salvation, the emancipation from our egos will come only when we acknowledge that the Earth is sacred independently of our recognition, our comprehension or our actions.

Only then, in selfless ritual relationship with the Earth and its power centers and silent spots, will we in truth assist the awakening of the Earth and the enhancement of the Uni-verse (the one song of which each of us are but notes).

While the symphony might be a bit less harmonic in our absence or our continued ignorance, surely the Universe will manage with or without us and is hardly in need of salvation. It is we who need those silent moments and places on Earth to discover our holiness and realize our salvation.

Let sacredness be in our own backyards. I hesitate to limit sacredness to unspoiled places as it allows us to continue to devalue all the other places. Our landfills and urban streams, our strip malls and highways need to be sacred ground too if less inspiring more in need of our attention.

Steven Earl Salmony,

What a long-winded, inappropriate and self-delusional apologia for science, the idolotry of modern humanity.

The scientific method, as defined since Cartesian dualism rendered “reality” into two distinct realms, requires the objectification of the natural world. In spite of this, earnest scientific inquiry has occasionally revealed the inherent inconsistencies of scientific conceit, which is based of necessity on unquestioned and unquestionable “axioms” and “rules” of logic (which is presumed to be the highest function of the mind).

Every one of the current global crises (including the loss of silent space) can be traced to a blind adherence to the objectification required by the scientic paradigm. A paradigm, as our conceptual atmosphere, cannot be challenged by its internal logic - and hence is not challenged when there is no other acknowledged method of understanding the world.

The “specious illusions borne of ideological/cultural bias” that you condemn would no doubt include the indigenous cosmologies that allowed humanity to live sustainably for millions of years prior to our mass conversion to the religion of science, and to honor the Earth’s silent and sacred places.

While honest enquirers into truth within the scientific establishment are using their findings to challenge that very establishment, humanity as a whole regards science - as do you - as the sole arbiter of reality.

And to this we owe our impending demise.

Dear Robert Riversong,

Hopefully, we can have further discussion about our evidently different ways of viewing the world. 

Your comments are valued even though we happen to see things diffently.  For the sake of open and sensible discussion, please note that my comments to which you have responded so forcefully are nowhere to be found in the thread.

Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point is the post again what I reported. 

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Thanks to Scott Walker and everyone else for what is being communicated in the Orion Blog. At least to me, this work is vital.

Scott, you are an honorable fellow. You neither hide nor are you willing to hide from empirical evidence. We need your example displayed in the actions of many other leaders who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate openly certain understandings about what is real and true to them. The science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth is a case in point.

So far as I can tell, your work is helping people to see more clearly as it is the wondrous world we inhabit and to more deeply appreciate the miraculous beings that humans are.

Of course, your reporting is occasionally off-putting precisely because the message from science that you bring us is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.

Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. If today’s leaders intend to provide a good enough future for our children, then nothing other than productive adaptation to the requirements of reality will do. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine, human-driven, global challenges to overcome.

Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, leadership has responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, just as you are doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By willfully avoiding scientific evidence, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God’s gifts to humanity as well as threatening the wellbeing of our children, life as we know it and Earth.

Remaining electively mute in the face of good science related to the human overpopulation of Earth, the reckless dissipation of natural resources and the wanton degradation of the environment cannot be allowed to prevail. Even though reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what our culture validates as real and true, still the evidence has to be carefully examined…. and not ignored. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is too often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, much of the scientific evidence found in the Orion Blog presents many too many leaders and opinion makers in our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.

It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally “produce” illusions of the world as it is. Some research seems to disturb us in basic ways because this scientific evidence comes into conflict with certain ideologically/culturally derived notions that are adamantly held by leaders about what it means to be human and about the “placement” of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the ‘pedestal’ from which human beings prefer to hubristically look upon other living creatures and nature. We humans may introject biased and empiricially unsupportable cultural transmissions that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real. For a long time certain illusory memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for the human family to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.

Scott, with your leadership and assistance, perhaps we will come to more fully appreciate the difference between specious illusions borne of ideological/cultural bias and evidence derived from the careful, skillful and rigorous deployment of science.

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Robert, at this moment I will not try to better express my ideas about how human beings are challenged in their efforts to see that which is somehow real, but that will come in my next posting in this thread.

As you have pointed out, I can be long-winded. That is so. But to describe my report as inappropriate and self-delusional seems not quite right. Please explain.

Comments are welcome from the Orion community.

Sincerely,

Steve

This is beautifully written and very thorough. I was deeply touched to see someone expressing the “extinction of silence” as I have written about this before, using that same phrase.

When I was younger I lived many years in very wild and remote areas, Australia and other places. And when I returned to “civilization” I was constantly aware of the loss of silence; I still am. I also am aware of what silence can do for the human spirit. I don’t believe that we can live without it, not and fully experience who we are. Silence, like Nature, has a pervasive and automatic way of healing and soothing.

I find it alarming that many people have never known true silence. And many are very uncomfortable with even moderate silence, and must constantly run a TV, Radio, Music, or talking on the phone.

Silence immediately invites intimacy, not only with others, but more importantly with ourselves and Life.

I often wonder what physiological and physical changes will occur in the brain, ear, etc. from our current state of constant noise, which is a relatively new thing in the span of human existence.

Thank you, Kathleen, for such an important article. It did me good to read it, because it made me realize that there are others in the world that “see” and care. Also, beautiful writing.

Thank you,
Robin Easton
http://www.nakedineden.com

Wow, what a great article. I can only say thank you. Thank you for bringing out into the forum such an important issue, perhaps as important if not more important than clean water. We should all walk with quieter footsteps in everything we do.

I live in Washington DC/ Northern Virginia area and if anybody would like to further discuss the issue as it relates to this part of the country feel free to email me. .

I have to believe that there is at least one square inch of quiet somewhere on the east coast.

An eye opening, I mean ear opening article.  I personally think us enlightned people should kill about half the people on earth so it would be easlier to find that beautiful square inch or more humanly we should buy a Bose noise canceling earphones.  As far as the animals that need silence; they got that way by adapting to the conditions they found themselfs in, they’ll adapt or die out, like 95 percent of the creatures that have lived on earth. 
Come on people wake up and listen to reality.