You all might find this book has some wonderful bits and pieces of info in it.
I started reading it a few weeks ago, in between a few others....
"The Flip" Epiphanies of Mind, and the future of Knowledge
by Jeffrey John Kripal
"The astonishing successes of science and the unreasonable ability of abstract mathematics to model and mirror the furthest reaches and cosmic history of matter, I suggest, are the best evidence for our own secret nature.
Human science works because human nature is cosmic.
Part of how the flip works involves the dramatic and powerful ways that the event communicates meaning to the individual, often through baroque or fantastic imagery (think of the wild imagery of a near-death journey to “another world” or of a life-changing psychedelic “trip”).
Conventionally, these images and narratives have been interpreted in entirely subjectivist or hallucinatory ways as fundamentally meaningless—that is, as possessing no real connection to the real world.
That is a serious mistake, I will explain, and one that is easily avoidable once we distinguish between conventional and symbolic forms of communication and representation.
Finally, I explore some of the moral, social, and political implications of the flip.
Not the what or the how of the flip now, but the where to and the what for.
The single big idea here is that once one makes the flip and begins to understand that consciousness is fundamental, is a primitive of the physics and mathematics of the universe, it becomes more than apparent that every local religious ego or political identity, every local story, is historically relative, built on and constructed out of this deeper-minded matter or conscious cosmos.
One can still affirm and nurture all of those local relative identities after the flip as intimate expressions of consciousness (and so one can also continue to act from within a particular story and its script, if one so chooses), but one will no longer make the dangerous mistake of privileging one’s own inherited story and script over every other.
One will recognize that there are many stories, many ways of enacting a form of reality, and that each of these do different things well (and other things poorly). It really matters, then, which story one lives in (depending on what one wants to do well), but no story, however “sacred” or “scientific,” can or ever will be absolute and speak for all of human experience and human potential, much less all of earthly or cosmic life. This is not a curse. This is a promise, a gift, and a preservation.
As in biological evolution, so, too, in human culture and consciousness: Pluralism and diversity are precious goods that enable life to survive, flourish, and experiment, like an artist at work.
The flip, in short, relativizes and affirms each and every culture, community, and religion, even as it cosmicizes and—I dare say—spiritualizes shared humanity.
The flip results in a new cosmic comparative perspective that reorients us within an immeasurably larger vision of who we are as a species of the cosmos and what we might yet become.
The future of knowledge, it turns out, is also the future of us.[...]
The Flip is an intervention into our present fraught political moment—fraught because we appear to have lost any sense of the cosmic human and have shrunk ourselves down to this or that minuscule religious, nationalist, secular, ethnic, or genetic ego.
We are shrinking into oblivion.
We have it all exactly upside down.
We have forgotten, or not yet realized, our own secret giant grandeur.
And so we suffer.
May you not suffer like this any longer.
May the present “you” not survive this little book.
May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways."
Kripal, Jeffrey John . The Flip Bellevue Literary Press. Kindle Edition.
mandelabiblechanges.com
gumshoenews.com
www.gonomad.com
