What are the Three Spheres by Mark Stahlman, President, CSDL
- Overview: A History of History of Civilizations
- Overview: The Lost Cause
- East: China Retrieves Chi & Leapfrogs the West
- East: India & Japan: Reconfiguration of the East
- West: Disenchantment of the West
- West: Natural Law
- Digital: Digital Sphere Retrieves Alchemy
- Digital: Post Humanity?
0:00 What is the Three Spheres series about?
3:37 What does this session cover?
6:27 Have we ever been here before?
11:41 Do historians understand the 20th century?
13:47 What did Oswald Spangler think?
17:00 What did Arnold Toynbee think?
21:16 What did Carroll Quigley think?
23:28 What did Sam Huntington think?
26:24 What does Marshall McLuhan have to offer?
28:31 Is this Technological determinism?
34:42 Who was Romano Guardini?
37:20 How would you summarize this session?
40:55 What is the range of questions posed by audience?
48:17 What have technological transitions looked like in the past?
57:15 Is the East better suited to handle the current technological change than the West?
1:10:27 What are the four causes?
1:19:37 What does optimal society look like under digital conditions?
1:25:11 What is coming up in the remaining seven sessions of the course?
More on Session 2
Session 3 description
Session 4 Description
Session 5 Description
Session 6 Description
Session 7 Description
Session 8 Description
References for all sessions
The climate crisis is only a symptom of unrestricted and unregulated economic and technological growth – Andrew Nikiforuk https://www.youtube.com/embed/p2ePYyMvodU?autoplay=1
Mark paraphrase: Images and television inevitably highlight visual contrasts, therefore polarity, therefore good guys vs. bad guys and us vs. them. Very easy to get into polarity and forget the essence of souls in the human experience: awareness, cultivating virtues, service to self and to others.
Mark paraphrase: Do Nature and God give us our laws? Or do all laws come only from human beings?
We are returning to, remembering, natural laws serve us better than man’s laws in regard to personal virtue and spirituality.
Mark paraphrase: If the West is to revalue values, then the content is likely to be a retrieval of “The Virtues.”
The method is likely to be dialogue (including dyads, triads and milling exercises) to support individuals to access and incorporate “virtues” each according to their own internal lights.
“Language” above includes both higher mathematics, computer coding and architecture as expressions of ego power.
If your society and culture skew towards being dominated by the more subtle Chi, by the Tao, your society and culture will also skew towards:
– recursive (lemniscate) thinking,
– right hemisphere dominance (what Nature planned),
– oral transmission of knowledge,
– feminine values of personal connection, cooperation and collaboration,
In the above, “oral transmission” includes music, song and social dancing.
NOTE ~ Either one of these dominance pattens can corrupt. Neither is exempt from corruption.
My takeaway: If your society and culture skew towards domination by language, it will also skew towards:
– linear-sequential thinking,
– left hemisphere domination (ego-dominated),
– male-hierarchy-patriarchal domination, and
– the primitive values of the fearful survival-based ego.
Mark paraphrase: “information” has no good stable definition. Why? It obfuscates the meaning of “form” and divorces it from the soul and centers it in the mind and left hemisphere. Nothing alive. All dead. All observable and accessible to left hemisphere.
“information” takes us away, points us away from the essential fact of soul in the human experience.
“information” points us to the mind, to language, to only left-brain simalcrums of soul. In this way Western society, and culture built on teh Enlightenment, becomes more souless each day
Going deeper, our disowned, suppressed unconscious shadow is reflected back to us. In the reflection we perceive its fearful-shameful, untouchable exile nature. Perhaps the most honest, direct imagery ever for this is Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the innocent Frankenstein monster turned into a literal monster by how he was treated by other people. In this way, the isolated (left brain dominated) conscious self, keeps moving away from its own essence, the soul (awareness).