A New New Beginning...?

Another year rolled by. Another symbolic opportunity to reflect, reassess, remember, rethink. OR do none of that.

I am pretty calm about there being no “meaning”, or rather “meaning” is the wrong perspective, the wrong question, the wrong word. There is still plenty to consider and think about in the world, but assigning meaning is essentially assigning worth. And figuring out “worth” of any thing or person requires adopting a host of preconceptions and premises, often without even knowing it.

Not that there aren’t preferences and opinions. I may be fooling myself and talking in circles to myself, in that, how can I think some ways of doing and thinking are better or worse but still think I am not applying value to that. As I write it, I guess we can debate ways of doing things, but any value is tentative or provisional, in that we are just doing the best we can since there is no galactic rule book we can follow..

Yeah, that is it…I am more at peace with the uncertainty of it all.

I am not a rigorous thinker but in trying to figure things out I feel my current world view is this accepting, I still can’t do embrace of, uncertainty. And part of that I credit to my late discovery of Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom where he outlines how people having trouble dealing with uncertainty (which is a side effect, or maybe and inherent part of Freedom).

Fleeing freedom/uncertainty people dive into the arms of authoritarianism and anything that promises “certainty”. This is why our current melding of religion and authoritarianism meshes so easily. The theology is actually secondary to the certainy of the religion, like political philosophy is secondary to confidence of authoritarians.

Of course why the rich power brokers full of security and confidence go for all that is a whole 'nuther can of crazy worms.

Anyway, those of the kind of thoughts bouncing around my noggin this blog anniversary

And I finish with a quote from another one of my inspirations, Terry Prachett..

“But is all this true?” Said Brutha.
Didactylos shrugged. “Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends toward guesswork.”
“You mean you don’t know it’s true?” Said Brutha
I think it might be,” said Didactylos. “I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.” Pg 187

And another quote from another of my sources

Reporter: Professor Habito, what is the meaning of life?
Ruben Habito: …There is no “meaning of life” apart from living it, breath by breath, moment by moment, one day at a time, grateful for the mystery, the miracle, the wonder of it all.
Ruben Habito: By Excellence Reporter on July 16, 2015

https://excellencereporter.com/2015/07/16/ruben-habito-on-the-meaning-of-life/

Words to Remember

Came across these words in two differfent podcasts, Collective Effervescence and Absorption

On Straight White American Jesus they used Collective Effervescence to describe the unifying feeling people have in a church where people are swept up in the ecstasy of the moment.

And Absorption I heard on I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist in a discussion about why some people go all in for with the pentacostal features and others don't.

Google Definitions

Absorption is a disposition or personality trait in which a person becomes absorbed in their mental imagery, particularly fantasy.[1] This trait thus correlates highly with a fantasy prone personality. The original research on absorption was by American psychologist Auke Telleg

Collective effervescence (CE) is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action.