Mikko Virtanen (.fi) wrote:
> Okay, I understand you. It [astrology] isn’t meaningless for people who use it and
> use it in extent so huge scale that their lives are actually controlled
> by it because of sole belief alone. Of course these things matter, but I
> believe this only matters sociologically. Not that it wouldn’t matter
> for those people, though.. that is subjectively.
Play wrote:
This is what we all do. We believe things to such a degree that they become part of the structure of our consciousness. Some pick only logic and materialism, a lot, actually. I have pity for those people. There is no room in their lives for the unexpected, magical or transcendental. They must feel constantly disconnected.
It’s easy to write off astrology as delusion. In fact, that’s probably accurate in some instances. However, it is no less delusional than someone who believes that life is only made up of what we can prove scientifically and it doesn’t come with that arrogance.
I believe that there is no right or wrong way to think, we get to choose how we think and it will, to some extent, define the world around us. Right now the majority of people in the west, the dominant power on this planet are materialists. The result of this set of beliefs is technology at the price of destruction on a mass scale. I could give a rat’s ass whether mysticism is ‘true’ or not. The fact is that people who believe in it and follow it treat each other and the world around them with respect and care and they create meaning in their lives. That’s value.
-end mail–
Relativism is destroying reality. As Theodore Sturgeon put it “We say ‘On the other hand…’, we say ‘However…’”. It’s easy not to believe anything when we know so much. Sifting through beliefs, trying to decide which are right and which are wrong, which ones we should believe in, is an impossible task. We think “There are no right beliefs”. What we’re left with is a meaningless world in which we suffocate on information, most of it poison. People don’t mean what they say anymore. Look at the news. Politicians use words like ‘liberate’ to decribe invasions. We now have to “endure freedom”. No one says “Hey! Wait a minute, that doesn’t make any sense.” We just absorb it and generate some kind of explanation of how one could view the the situation that way.
B..U..L..L..S..H..I..T
That spells bullshit. “Ok”, you say, “What can I do about it?” I will tell you. Believe. Believe something, anything as long as it comes from you. Humans have remarkable facilities for synthesizing information. Take what you know and perform some alchemy with it. Don’t just be a passive information transferring agent. Start swimming in the sea of information. Start re-arranging, being active. Or limit yourself to taking in only what information you are capable of processing without surrendering your powers of observation and intuition. Don’t let yourself be overloaded and give up. Think, damnit.
