So we have this *environmental* change: "here, now you have the possibility to slay all life" and the mere fact of that possibility being on the table starts a bunch of ratchets in society. Kings do what they always did, but now that results in nuclear arsenals not sword arsenals
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And this is because of an environmental change: the Bomb changes the rules of the game, and once that rule change is made, the players continue towards their own biologically preprogrammed instinctual goals.
Everybody wants a better life for their kids. But with a Bomb in play?
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The very fact of the presence of the nuclear bomb channels those basic biological drives into building them! It's like punching a hole in the bottom of a bucket and being surprised that the water flows out: gravity is a son of a bitch. You can't fight it, not as a water molecule.
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In fact inventing the nuclear bomb reshaped the nature of our plane of existence. It changed the world topology from a steady state circular world, to one with an extremely intense teleology: biological competition now drives towards a preprogrammed extinction event.
MAD world.
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Now let's get back to this point about individual spiritual practice.
The individual meditator now exists in a world with a hole in it. The energy continues to drain into Ultratech warfare rather than fixing planetary systems and space exploration.
Meditation doesn't fix that.
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And I want to show you that distinction again.
Meditation as an individual practice does not contain within it any mechanism to reshape the world we are in at a "topological" level. You can be as nice to people as you like, but there's still a nuke bomb and a competition ratchet
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Ah, you say, "but if we all meditate, the competition ratchet will go away."
To which my response is simple: that's as much a re-engineering of this plane of existence as the invention of the bomb was, for sure.
And you can just about see the outline of it: a cure for war.
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*So* many people get therapy and meditate that the entire fabric of society changes, to the point where we de-escalate all conflicts, feed the hungry, educate the people, and war as a principle dies.
Then we uproot the nuke.
But THIS IS NOWHERE IN PREVIOUS SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS.
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I just don't know of a single source for this idea of rearchitecting the fabric of reality at that level by collective spiritual effort. Lots of traditions have Divinely Ordained Laws of one sort or another, more honoured in the breach of course.
But this kind of wholesale fix?
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Even in Mahayana Buddhism or Islam, the collective Will of the People does not dictate the fate of the world.
Individuals become enlightened through their efforts, but it's not like this place becomes automatic enlightenment for everybody. Islam still has an End of Days concept.
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This argument is so obvious to anyone not trapped in the reality distortion field of such movements, most people don’t even bother with personal spiritual work. It’s obvious that, whatever its benefits, it won’t help you plug various shared bucket holes.
Ie you have a better chance of having an impact on nuclear risk or climate change if you simply work directly on them, and only deal with inner work enough that inner problems don’t cripple you. Most impactful people barely grow past adolescent levels spiritually and that’s fine.
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