Thanks for this Ali. I really, really appreciate it when you get into culture from movies to tv shows to games. This is a good one! It made me think of recent quote that I've been holding from Ian McGilchrist:
“I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of loved can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1300). The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert."
Seems like the nihilism of the cult fails to see this asymmetry, and like that is exactly what Rust gets a glimpse of.
"More subtly, a 'flat circle' cosmos is common among secular humanists, atheists, Stoics, materialists and species of secular Buddhists, for whom the self is as an 'illusion', 'a bag of neurons' a 'machine' or a 'computer', love and compassion as mere 'survival mechanisms', and the world a realm of 'chaos' we imperfectly order."
*****
Now there's a paragraph to digest for several weeks.
So the flat world is basically substance ontology, whereas the multidimensional world is relational ontology. Yup. That sounds about right. But no one can fathom to its fullest depths the world of relationality. That's why it is beautiful.
One can certainly be a non-theist and a secularist and be wide awake to the vast, heartful openness of the relational domain. Myself? I know almost nothing, and yet I'm alive in a relational kosmos.
Thanks for this Ali. I really, really appreciate it when you get into culture from movies to tv shows to games. This is a good one! It made me think of recent quote that I've been holding from Ian McGilchrist:
“I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of loved can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1300). The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert."
Seems like the nihilism of the cult fails to see this asymmetry, and like that is exactly what Rust gets a glimpse of.
"More subtly, a 'flat circle' cosmos is common among secular humanists, atheists, Stoics, materialists and species of secular Buddhists, for whom the self is as an 'illusion', 'a bag of neurons' a 'machine' or a 'computer', love and compassion as mere 'survival mechanisms', and the world a realm of 'chaos' we imperfectly order."
*****
Now there's a paragraph to digest for several weeks.
So the flat world is basically substance ontology, whereas the multidimensional world is relational ontology. Yup. That sounds about right. But no one can fathom to its fullest depths the world of relationality. That's why it is beautiful.
One can certainly be a non-theist and a secularist and be wide awake to the vast, heartful openness of the relational domain. Myself? I know almost nothing, and yet I'm alive in a relational kosmos.
Deep ponderings, thanks. As a big fan of that first True Detective season and orthodox christian myself, you gave me lots to think about.