Rene Descartes
Preface
This blog relates to the Lacan / Lycan blog.
I unintentionally did the blogs backwards, possibly because this is retrospective.
While Lacan heralds the next era (Postmodernism) after the Age of Reason and can easily be understood as a counterpoise to it, Descartes can be understood to be the foundation upon which the Age of Reason was built. Although it draws from previous sources (eg; Aristotle) who lived during the Age of Faith or whatever other name we ascribe to ‘Christian Europe / Islamic East’ both of which are Abrahamic religions and both of which superceded the previous civilisations which had a common religion; as archeological evidence has verified, for example Egyptian artefacts discovered in Mayan temples and that the Tibetan Buddhist and Indigenous American Medicine Wheels portray the same blueprint (my own research), has given rise to understanding cultural assimilation of the pre-industrial Americas and beyond. While this deserves further research and development, that is not what this blog is for. This blog is about Descartes.
“I think, therefore I am” Descartes
You probably heard that quote before.
What you didn’t know is the context and his own reply to it, which is perhaps more important.
Descartes context is to ask “What do we know for sure?”
It is usually framed alongside the cultural background as an attempt to answer “is God real?” which Descartes did ask in his writings, but his question simultaneously takes us outside of and beyond the Religious context into the purity of thought associated with Age of Reason consciousness.
Unfortunately for us we are currently going fast toward the Age of Sansara (Delusion and Confusion). It is not the information superhighway we had hoped for, it is the disinformation super-sidetrack, a multidimensional maze of wasting our time and attention.
As a spiritist I often ask the question;
“If no form of energy ceases, it transmutes;
then is the self-aware part of you, a form of energy?”
That’s the best advice I have for navigating the Aquarian Age and our socio-cultural, interpersonal, mental-emotional evolutions.
Unfortunately I encounter many hominids who do not and can not actively ‘think’ in the way which Descartes intended his use of the word. A great shock was a revelation that half of all people are less than average intelligence. I would put the book ‘Straight and Crooked Thinking’ by Robert Thouless and ‘The Games People Play’ by Dr Eric Berne on your reading list.
Descartes response to his own assertion “I think therefore I am” was to produce and answer a short series of six logical questions relating to establishing ‘What do we know for sure?’ each aimed at a different area of our experiences of existing.
Modernism answers with depressive humour “death and taxes”.
Terrible joke is a sign of the times.
The Cards
An exploration of studying Tarot.
[TBC]
