Eternal Verities?

“So far as reality means experienceable reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation.” -William James

As you now no doubt have realised, “truth” is in crisis in these days of “the New Normal”, such that people question whether there is any such thing as “truth” at all. The crisis of truth is a prominent feature of the kaliyuga, of Nietzsche’s “two centuries of nihilism”, and of the madness of William Blake’s demon god and Zoa named “Urizen” described in his Prophetic Books, of the postmodern “end of the Master Narrative” and so on. This crisis of truth is what informs my friend Chris Kutarna’s recent TED talk as cited in a previous comment.

It is, however, a crucial question whether we are facing the end of truth as such, or whether we are witnessing and experiencing a restructuration or metamorphosis of truth and the implicit corollary of that — what we understand as “human nature”.

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Bonnitta Roy: Some Else Has Noticed

Bonnitta Roy on the Anthropocene and consciousness mutation. Sounds like someone whose work should be followed.

Breakdown of Perspective Consciousness Revisited

The physicist and science writer Paul Halpern tweeted this morning the cover of a book by Isaac Newton on Optics that was in the library of Werner Heisenberg. It’s quite fascinating because of the graphic that was included on the cover of Newton’s book on optics shows Dürer’s grid — a device invented by Albrecht Dürer to train the eye to perceive perspectivally. This device is of great interest because it illustrates exactly, in a very objective and concrete way, what is called “a point of view” as having once been an actual physical instrument to deliberately focus perception in a particular way and direction that became a metaphor for logic and thinking in general — the rational and logic ordering and arranging of space as a ratio of spaces and as a system of objects. Beginning in the Renaissance, the onus and emphasis shifted to the eye as the principal sense and organ of knowing and intellectual mastery.