The Image of the Human

This is the moment to wake up to the idea the world we live in is drastically dysfunctional? Why?  There was some sort of gestalt with the beginning of the scientific-economic era that redefined the human being to be a skin encapsulated ego, a singular atom disconnected in space.  We were emancipated supposedly from the moral and mythical universe of all the irrational ages that preceded the modern age of reason.  Walter A. Weisskopf helps here.   He writes:

"During the ascendency of economics, theology and philosophy declined in importance.  Assumptions about human nature in economics were incidental byproducts of what was supposed to be empirical and logical truth.  The very question of what a human is cannot be and is not answered by any segmented discipline such as economics but only by a philosophy which encompasses the totality of experience.  This philosophy of life has been destroyed by modem life.  He goes on:  nevertheless the history of economic thought abounds with statements and  implicit assumptions which put together present an image of man."  In other words the earlier theorists (such as Adam Smith) looked at the values that they felt would make the system work and wrote that these are human nature.  The author explains that there was a great need for moral justification of this new system and it came from a variety of sources.  What were once vices were now turned into virtues.  He writes:  "money-making for its own sake, the taking of interest, buying cheap and selling dear, exploiting the fluctuations of supply ad demand for one's own advantage - all these and other activities which form the daily routine of economics life in the modern were considered morally reprehensible throughout Western civilization until the advent of capitalism."  The market would act as an "invisible hand" so that private vices would become public benefits. 

It is much more complex obviously, but what emerged was a new image of the human being. 

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley wrote the famous book The Perennial Philosophy in 1945.  He writes that the Perennial Philosophy  is   "the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being- the thing is immemorial and universal."    To say that Huxley was erudite is an understatement but what is important is that he was practical.   He was a seeker of wisdom (that is what philosophy is) and sought to help others through his writings

I am reading an article about Huxley's view of the importance of art.  The essay by Dana Sawyer is very articulate about Huxley's philosophy and metaphysics.  He wasn't hesitant to challenge the limitations of materialism and positivism.   Huxley pointed out repeatedly that we need not look beyond the physical world to find phenomena that science cannot quantify.   Love and beauty for example.  Sawyer articulates several ideas from Huxley that inform the truth and the purpose of this blog. 

 I quote him  "...in the west we have assumed axiomatically that ultimate truth is a product of thinking and can be grasped directly by the rational mind via a system of ideas.  Truth is the province of thinkers and so philosophers can get directly at it.  Huxley considered this an epistemological error. In his system, the mind can only grasp an intellectual analogue of Truth, and this differs as much from the direct experience of Brahman, the Absolute truth, as a cake recipe differs from a cake..."   Brahman in Huxley's context is (the manifest source of spiritual energy, the ground of all being) 

You could say that the West separated being and thinking.  Unfortunately, many of us identify with our thought processes.     Descartes's famous "I think therefore I am"  (French: "Je pense donc je suis")  plays a part in this. 

Huxley offers a different metaphysic that rediscovers Being.     Here is a quote:

Our essential Nature is usually overshadowed

By the activity of the mind...

When the mind has settled,

we are established in our essential nature

which is unbounded consciousness.  

     -Yoga Sutras of Patajali