This philosophical interpretation is based on philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson's views on nature, with paraphrased text of the narration by Philosophize This (Steven West)
Human beings have always been at war over relatively trivial differences in beliefs, all competing for cultural hegemony. This can be easily observed just by clicking on any Youtube video dealing with controversial topics like politics and religion. We never run out of ways to create conflict when we ourselves barely understand the true complexity of life. It almost seems like humans thrive off of conflict. Why?
There are many reasons for this. Feelings of inadequacy, setting off on the wrong path in life, a lack of inner peace, unhealthy lifestyle habits and so on can absolutely contribute to people's capricious behavior and disdain towards each other. One other cause may be related to how we adopt narratives about the world beginning from a young age, imbued into us by our surroundings.
These cultural narratives compete against other narratives in a ceaseless war of subculture vs subculture. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, this never ending conflict remains because we have been using the wrong method to analyze the world. We put too much emphasis on old ideas, and not enough on new ideas. We attach ourselves to concepts and those concepts become part of our identity.
Humans limit their scope of reality by using cultural and historical abstractions to make sense of the world while ignoring or constraining their own intuition. Our society teaches us to memorize and recite ideas and narratives that others created for us, both in past and present. By absorbing these narratives (think for example conservative values, liberal values, left wing values, religious values, green values and so on), we are forfeiting our ability to think independently, allotting the responsibility to others.
Could it be that we've been trained to act this way? (More on that further in this post). Funny enough, this way of thinking that involves mindlessly following others is step 1 to authoritarian thinking, a system of government which a large portion of people are fervidly against. :p
Each and every part of the universe is connected to each and every other part of it, so maybe we could connect spiritually to "oversoul" that permeates every aspect of life, but how? According to Emerson the answer is an intense, intentional, judgment-free relationship with the nature world. Go outside and travel far and wide and explore the depths of nature, and pay it a special kind of attention, devoid of distractions.
But observing nature undistracted is not enough, you must free yourself of pre-existing judgment. Remove the thought of all historical narratives you may have held about it, unlearning all of it to view nature with a more mature lens. We understand our relationship with nature through a filter, a filter which has been cultivated and engrained in us over the years and years we've been alive. A filter we began to see the world through before we became mature, and for many the damage has been done.
The best approach to connect with this "oversoul" is to experience nature completely undistracted, and without an old narrative attached to it. A new narrative will emerge, one with much greater meaning. This could be the key that allows you us experience a worldview more in line with the true permeation of reality, and less in line with society and its fictional narratives.
You begin to realize how small all these petty disagreements are, and how preventable all of this pointless conflict is, how we are harming each other for the most banal reasons, and perhaps even how lost we ourselves are when we believe the cause of all our problems are related to other people and develop a sense of self righteous indignation and nihilistic dread. I believe inner happiness can be achieved even in an imperfect society, and part of how one can reach this state is through spirituality and the acquisition of skills and responsibility.
We tend to take for granted how mesmerizing nature is. Take for instance stars in the night sky. Imagine these stars were to only appear to us once every 15,000 years? Experiencing the phenomenon of stars for the first time would cause a social uproar. There would be wild theories as to what it signifies, some would think it's a sign of God's return. These stars are available every night so we don't pay them any mind.
It could be that maybe when you first saw stars as a child you were mesmerized, but that feeling disappears with familiarity and exposure. We live in a world where we're so familiar with nature that we hardly consider it special. Natural landscapes just fade into the background of our minds, as something to marvel in once in a while only to neglect all over again as we continue perpetuating the same daily routine as yesterday, and the day prior.
We owe a lot to nature, it provides us with almost everything we depend upon day to day. However nature consists of contrasting forces. It can be relaxing and serene one day, and capricious and cataclysmic the next. This contrasting duality closely resembles the life experience of life as a sentient beings - a balance with extremes on both ends.
Nature also does not judge those who are deemed by society as "immoral". Storm clouds don't hover over the heads of "bad people" and there is no real "karma". There is no balancing act that puts "bad people" in their place. This is a defense and a coping mechanism we have made up to feel better in the face of wickedness, because we feel we must balance pain to move through it quicker.
It is only ourselves who cast moral judgment, as a mechanism to prevent harm. But judgment of evil can often go too far and give rise to its own harms as a result of excess. We build our own rules of right and wrong and judge those who choose not to live by our standards, leading to a unique host of negative outcomes. How ironic is it that we believe in harming those who betray our moral values?
Once we reconnect with the natural world, we may begin to realize that we are all in this together, and despite our differences we are more alike than we are not because we are all human. This can create a deeper understanding for others, even those much different from us who deviate from our moral standards.
We can study nature in two ways; analytical, which is concerned with a scientific material understanding, and intuitive, which gives access to the transcendent, immaterial aspects of the universe that flow through the material. A true teacher would know history and science, but would be aware of the limitations of both.
"Science can help us break things down to their core, weigh things, measure things, but you can't weight and measure a moral or spiritual lesson given to you by nature. You can't isolate substances and dissect them down to their most minute detail while at the same time understanding how they fit into the unified process of nature, and that is something that comes through intuition." - Philosophize This! (Paraphrased)
Science asks "what" and "how", but not "why".
People are so concerned with science they often take spirituality for granted. By spirituality I don't necessarily mean a literal spirit. I'm referring to a deeply introspective, emotional, intuitive based connection with something rather than a purely analytical one. We forget neglect or hinder our spirituality, something we cultivate not just through religion but through spending time in nature, meditating, reading spiritual texts, using psychedelics (responsibly and in moderation), and so on.
It is something we are all capable of, but we neglect this side of consciousness so much that it's no wonder we often feel lost in this world, depressed, and fall down paths of cynicism, pessimism, and nihilism.
Books (Education) pose a unique threat to a thinking person because a person can endlessly learn but fail to create anything meaningful using to knowledge they spent all that time acquiring. Education can be harmful when it only leads to the mindless recitation of 'facts', that makes it so you don't have to ever think for yourself and interpret those 'facts' and establish new perspectives and connections.
Many of us have essentially lost touch with our visionary side. We fall down the trap of thinking knowledge automatically makes someone intelligent, when we don't place equal value on the ability to develop new ways of thinking from that knowledge.
Ask the average person what they wish to do after they retire, and a common answer is to travel the world. But it is interesting that we choose to spend our time and money to travel far and wide just to bask in the the cultural contributions of others, without the thought of using those experiences to create new meanings and interpretations of those experiences to contribute to our own culture.
The way we educate people from grade school onwards could be where a large chunk of the problem stems from. We don't teach children how to be introspective, but instead we teach them empty facts without attaching much meaning to those facts. We tell students to sit still in a classroom for hours, and memorize information, and memorize contributions to society made by people in history. But reading does little to a person if it fails to stimulate creative thinking.
We can feel this information if we truly allow ourselves to, and explore new meanings in text. (I recommend learning about post structuralism by Derrida, which I may write a full blog post about later.)
"Society has given us a narrative and with it the narrow parameters for which we navigate the world, society has given us not only the building blocks for every thought we will ever think, but every thought you we will ever possibly think." - Philosophize This!
"Sure there are thoughts outside of what we think but we won't think about them because of the culturally ingrained limitations placed on us since birth by society. "
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