Final custody & existential vertigo
This is not a partisan post. Hardly political.
The government has promised information on final disposal of nuclear waste within a few weeks. This has been investigated and a decision has been delayed for a long time. But now it will be gone. The rubbish from Sweden's nuclear power project so far must be buried somewhere. And in a way.
But the fact that one should now be able to find an arrangement that should be safe, so that the radioactivity does not disappear into the groundwater, for a hundred thousand (!) years to come, gives me vertigo. Existential vertigo.
Normally, of course, if you investigated something for forty years & had various researchers connected to the problem, then you should be able to make a decision, right? Applies to almost anything! Build a ring road around Stockholm, demolish Slussen, move an entire small town (Kiruna), etc. Maybe the next or next generation will call us idiots. That it got bad. Like sailors exterminating the peevish drone for a hundred? years ago. But every time you need to act and dare to make decisions based on what you believe and want at the time. In normal cases, it is reasonable. In almost any other matter…
Imagine if humanity and the Swedes are still around in ten thousand years. The entire east coast is uninhabitable, people have to receive iodine intravenously, diseases... Because of a decision the ancestors made ten thousand years ago
I am completely ignorant of this. But they would probably rather spend a few billion on a solution that is not permanent instead. Wait with a decision at least one, two generations. Just in case…
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/kopparkapseln-kan-spricka-redan-om-100-ar
By the way, I wonder if they had a philosopher involved in the investigation? You talk about "philosophical practice", as a complement to psychotherapy, the existential. I do not know. But HERE, philosophical competence would really be needed, someone who can see beyond numbers and probability calculations.
“Yoga of Wonder”
"Yoga." I typed it into Google & got a lot of pictures. And maybe it's me who is getting sad and cranky, but I thought most of it radiated about the same as if I had googled gymnastics or fitness.
Surely yoga roughly means "getting in touch with God"? My experience with yoga is an evening course via NBV in the eighties. We stayed in a hall in a nursing home in the small Dala town where I grew up. "Hatha yoga" it was. And so I know there is a direction called “Gnana? yoga”, the yoga of thought. But it must be thoughts of a certain quality and with a certain discipline you can think... "Bhakti yoga", serving others, helpfulness.
In another post the other day, I hatched the expression "Wonder yoga". (It wasn't completely new, I remember I went and thought about it last winter too.) It strikes something in me. Awe, and by that I don't mean only, or primarily, an excited, grand feeling or experience. But something else. Or something that is also something else.
Soon I'm going home to watch the Friday finale of Idol. "Hang loose," says the presenter when it's between two participants at the end. To "hang loose" in relation to the answers to the big questions. It actually comes close to what I mean 🙂
Martinus meets resistance
Always refreshing, but only happens so rarely, when the Danish Martinus Thomsen's (1890-1981) esoteric system receives some qualified, interested, reasonably benevolent, resistance like this! (The episode becomes a kind of variant, with the same qualities, as The Nexus article from -82, I think.)
"Martinus Thomsen had a transformative spiritual experience in his thirties. He perceived strong divine light, and met a Christ figure. This led to him gaining something he called cosmic consciousness. He spent the rest of his life writing down what was revealed to him. The life work was named the Book of Life. The term Third Testament also appears.
We talk to Mikael Krall and Olav Johansson about the man and the work."
"Magical Thinking - about the greater reality" # 075 MARTINUS THOMSEN (2 hours 2 minutes)
Link to the podcast episode: https://bit.ly/3xk4VRL
An interview that stirs up thoughts in both the interviewers, it seems, and in me as the listener.
Of course, it's about faith, for me (even if I'm a coward? and barely deal with metaphysics anymore) and most people. But with the addition that maybe there are others for which the beliefs in this field (reincarnation, for example) are actually knowing, I don't know what is possible, but I feel I need to keep this open in any case.
Otherwise I became some sort of... I don't know what?... philosopher of dissatisfaction who takes every chance to cause trouble just because... Or who would be trapped in some belief of his own (either this that something metaphysical doesn't exist, or that in any case it's not possible to have self-experienced knowledge of this) ... And it would be a kind of prison, that with, o waste of energy.
Feel a great deal of sympathy for the approach that the big questions, which Martinus et al posted the text about, would in fact lack answers. At the same time, can't one's attitude accommodate that one also keeps life open, maybe it actually works in a certain way, and that others may have gained knowledge about this? It doesn't cost anything to keep this open, I think.
But what would it take? Must be a balancing act in the higher school that. Some kind of wonder yoga 😃
Life goes on
This picture was taken by my father thirty years ago. He was about the same age as I am today. Visiting from Dalarna, came by my work. I don't think he ever really understood what I was doing. And I was too young and confused to care, or to realize that I cared.
Now dad is gone. The year before E came. Dad's birthday was this weekend, the little guy's tomorrow. I have become a father myself. At least today I understand how nice he was, my father.
Thinking about this is like standing in a hellish existential crosshairs. Mysterious, sad, and feeling strangely happy all at the same time.
No wonder people became religious.