Beautiful, Gien.

Thanks, Ali, for sparking this moving thread.

Love to all,
Gregg

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Gien Wong
Sent: Wednesday, August 4, 2021 10:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Touching Story

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This writing was moving. Thanks for sharing, Alexis!
It reminded me of when my own mother was dying of Lymphoma and the whole journey of letting go of a loved one, and how she also made recordings for us to watch in posterity when she was gone. And this year, I'm older than my mother was when she died. It only reinforces the relativity of these terms "parent" and "child". The parent usually dies before the child, succumbing to the disease of the aged, and the child generally grows to be an elder one day. So we could think of all people as just children, some young ones, other older.

I've always felt there is a normative dysfunction in society, that is heightened when a loved one dies. We seem to begin life with a burning curiosity about our existence, but is slowly withered away and by the time we are young children, we have often lost touch with the sacred feelings that naturally accompany our birth. A positive feedback behavioral loop ensues, with parents who have lost touch with the sacred, conditioning their children into the same banal, mundane perspective of reality. Wonder is educated out of our children, replaced by uninspired, rote learning. Science, Technology and engineering replace our natural propensity for wonder about our fundamental existence, distracting it with "artificial" magic. In reality, the source is the same, but we set up a dichotomy between natural and "human-made". If our society had done a good job retaining wonder in our children, I don't feel it would be possible for us to harm each other, alienate each other and the world as much as we do today. We have slayed the natural philosopher born into every child. The price of suppressing that wonder is the world we live in. It is only through such systemic and widespread alienation that a calamity such as our current climate crisis can emerge. The co-occurence of the breakdown of civil society through rampant polarization, and the breakdown of natural ecosystems is a sign that our alienation is peaking.

Subsequently, the Anthropocene is a time of deep reflection and collective soul-searching of how we as a species are now reaping what we have collectively sown over the course of human history. Out of that collective reflection, we have a real opportunity to pivot our culture, a singularity in human cultural evolution. Culture is a collective, overlapping network of self-and-other hub-and-spoke nodes, with each subjective, individual pole at the center. Each of us interact with a 3rd party repository of cultural knowledge, but "I" experience it necessarily from my own subjective perspective in life. I acknowledge other consciousnesses exist, but my thoughts and feelings are the only one I can DIRECTLY experience. I have no direct access to other private worlds. The same is true for each one of us. We all live within culture, implicitly understanding this asymmetrical symmetry as a given. Though it is a living paradox, still we pragmatically assume an ontology of a subject living in an objective world in our day-to-day life. Most of us are not so anthropocentric as to believe that we construct our entire reality. The whole subject/object dualism seems like an  outdated construct not up to the task of describing the phenomenology we each encounter and share in life. In the history of astronomy, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus and Galileo signaled a shift from one perspective (geocentric) to another (heliocentric). Yet, as Gregg's iQuad coin shows, there are two equally valid perspectives, the individual-centric and culture-centric, and we seem to switch between them seamlessly. Indeed, it may not be so much as switching exclusively as being grounded always in the individual-centric, whilst culture is a social construct. We can never escape seeing out of our own two eyes, or hearing from our own two ears. We sense sensates that we integrate into a social construct called "Gregg" or "Alexis" and we impute their existence in a felt experience.

At the time of the death of loved ones, and at the time of our own death, individual-centric experience may become hyper-salient. Cultural activity may become much less relevant and fade into background irrelevance as we begin to experience the body dying and letting go. Now, we focus our attention on what is immediately, subjectively at hand.  Our birth is a great mystery, our life is a great mystery and our death is a great mystery. Retaining a sense of wonder through all stages  seems to be a healthy part of being human. If we can look upon every single human being with wonder and awe, that reality may produce each of us as a marvelous and temporary expression of itself, how much less self-inflicted pain there would be in the world.
Wishing you WELLth
Gien
Future Ancestor

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On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 10:42 PM Alexis Kenny <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
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________________________________
All,

My mother sent me this article / story:

http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=8939<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.dailygood.org_more.php-3Fn-3D8939&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=FCzylmOWpF1W24oMB3r4jySlqaSIkY_q5Noo9P-Sv24&s=imUOLNSsjUAvrLckqkLeispow_2h3otjHbMOUz7K1VE&e=>

Themes within this piece have been previously discussed / shared in this space (topics more experiential, emotional, relational, ect.), and so I thought it fitting to repost here. Points not necessarily "novel," yet definitely worth (re)visiting.

Warmly,

Ali

--
Alexis (Ali) Kenny, PsyD, LP
Staff Psychologist
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