Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're asking maybe the
biggest question there is where do we fit in and
the whole cosmic scheme of things. I mean, are you
just here, you know, an accident, a blip in the
universe that doesn't care, which is kind of the standard
materialist line you hear a lot, yeah, Or is there
something more, something necessary about us being here?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's the heart of it, isn't it that paradox? We've
been digging into sources that really push back against that
idea of cosmic meaninglessness. We're looking at modern science saying basically, nope,
you're temporary, enjoy the ride till the heat death, versus
these really powerful ancient spiritual paths. Specifically, we're diving into
her meticism and Jewish mystical Kabbalah. They argue something pretty
(00:41):
radical that humans aren't accidents at all. Well, terms like
cosmic caretakers, where even co creators get used essential to
reality itself.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
It's a total clash of worldviews. Science often tells us
big bang, random evolution, that's the story, but then these
traditions they insist, no, no, you are the key, You're
the solution to the puzzle of the universe. So our
mission today is to figure out the thinking behind that claim.
Why did they reject what we might call the modern
fallacy of insignificance. Okay, so to get a handle on
(01:09):
this cosmic job idea, we need the backstory, the origin stories.
Let's start way back in antiquity. There were these two
really influential but totally different takes on how things began.
First up, the hermetic view, the caretaker philosophy.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Right, so in the hermetic texts, like the Poemondres, you
have the universal mind kakahalda news creating humanity in its
own image, like a reflection. But crucially, the physical universe,
the world we actually see and touch, that was made
by someone else, a second new a craftsman or a demiurge.
(01:44):
And this craftsman used this formless primordial stuff described as
grim darkness. It's interesting some people see parallels there with
modern ideas about dark matter. Anyway, this craftsman shape the
physical world from that darkness. Beautiful yes, but also fixed yeah. Material.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And the texts are really clear, aren't they That humanity
coming here to Earth wasn't a punishment, It wasn't a
fall from grace in the usual sense. It was a choice,
a conscious decision. Man saw this beautiful reflection of the
divine and the material world, and out of love, essentially
chose to descend to inhabit it, and Earth in turn
sort of recognized the divine sparkan man and wanted.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
That connection exactly. The key takeaway is responsibility. Man willingly
took on this immense, divinely given role by coming here.
It wasn't being accidentally thrown into the world, as some
later philosophers put it. It was a deliberate leap, a
conscious embracing of this caretaker role.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Okay, conscious leap. That sounds noble. But if that's the case,
why does so much of modern life feel like the opposite,
Like we're trapped, not caretakers. It feels like that other
ancient view nacissism, maybe resonates more with our modern cynicism.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Sometimes it absolutely does. The Gnostics were around at the
same time as the Hermeticists, but their view of creation
was bleak. They called it an entirely disastrous affair. They
also believe a secondary god, a demiurge, created the material world,
but their demiurge wasn't just a craftsman They basically called
him an idiot, sometimes even identified him with the god
of the Old Testament, Jehovah. The implication was clear. The
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material world itself is fundamentally flawed. It's evil. It's a
prison designed to trap the divine spark within us.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Right, So, if the world is a trap, the goal
isn't to care for it, it's to escape.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Wake up, realize where you are, find that spark of
divinity inside you, and get out of the whole material mess.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
And you can really see how that idea the world
is trap, yeah, has kind of seeped into Western thought,
haven't you this modern gnostic.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Feeling, Oh definitely, it's everywhere, that underlying sense of helplessness
that the systems rigged against you, or the feeling that
reality isn't quite real, you know, like in The Matrix
or the Truman Show. There's this suspicion that hidden forces
are pulling the strings. Even serious philosophy like Martin Heideger
talking about humans being thrown into existence, it taps into
(04:03):
that same gnostic.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Vein and that worldview, that gnostic sensibility. It directly feeds
that fallacy of insignificance. We started with. If the world
is a flawed trap run by an idiot God or
vast impersonal forces. Well, then what difference can I possibly make?
But the Hermeticists, and even more so the Komalists will
get to They just flatly refuse that. They said, no,
you're here for a reason. You have work to do
(04:26):
and the universe needs you to do.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
It, which brings us straight to Lurianic Kabbala. This is
a school of Jewish mysticism that really crystallized with Isaac
Luria back in the sixteenth century, and it offers perhaps
the most detailed blueprint for why we're necessary. The central
concept is tikun. It means repair.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Okay, so if gnosticism diagnosed the problem a botched creation,
Kabbala comes in with this like ultimate cosmic repair manual.
And we're not just talking about patching things up. This
sounds more like cleaning up after a universe sh sattering catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
That's a pretty good way to put it. The Cobbalistic
creation story is dramatic. It starts with the Einesoft, the absolute, limitless,
divine source, infinite God. To even make room for a
creation separate from itself, the Einesoft had to perform a contraction,
a withdrawal that's called simpsom. It created a conceptual void.
Then the divine light, the creative energy, started flowing into
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this void, filling ten vessels the suffer off think of
them like divine archetypes or containers. But the light, the
energy was just too intense. The vessels couldn't handle it,
and they shattered. Cobblists call it the breaking of the vessels,
or as you put it, the big spill.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Wow. So the universe literally started.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Broken from the get go in this view, yes, and
we are living in the consequences amidst the debris. When
those vessels shattered, the pieces, the shards called cleapoth or husks,
fell down into what they called citra octra the other side.
This isn't quite our physical universe, but more like a
realm of darkness, separation, and imbalance that interpenetrates our reality.
(05:59):
Think of the claypoth as, I don't know, spiritual anti matter,
psychic toxins, and crucially, these shards trapped sparks of the
original divine light.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
The netsot zim okay got it so evil, suffering, conflict, confusion,
all of that stuff isn't just random bad luck. It's
the direct result of these trapped divine sparks and the
broken cosmic structure, which means humanity's job description just got serious.
We're the cosmic repair crew.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
That's exactly it. Our fundamental purpose, the reason we exist
is tickn repair. Our job is to find and liberate
those trapped divine sparks nets Zim from the shards clipoth
through conscious intentional actions in the world. Every time you
act with awareness, with intention for good, every time you
choose meaning over just you know, base impulse, you're potentially
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liberating a spark.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
That is a lot. That's a staggering responsibility. If we
manage this ticun we're not just fixing the mess, we're
actually finishing the job, completing creation.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Precisely. By performing tikon, humanity active participates in restoring the
shattered vessels, gathering the sparks, and unifying God's own polarized
aspects like judgment and mercy, and the result, according to Luria,
isn't just fixing the original creation. It actually makes the
completed creation even better, more integrated than it was before
the shattering. This led thinkers like Nikos Kazensaki's to provocatively
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suggest that through this work, humanity essentially becomes the savior
of God. We help God become fully manifest.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Okay, wait, Savior of God. That sounds maybe impossibly grand.
Does this mean we all have to be Massias or something?
But you're saying the relevance for you listening right now
is actually much more.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Grounded, absolutely grounded. Gershma Skoullam, the great scholar of Kabbalah,
emphasized this redemption isn't solely about waiting for some future event.
It's achieved through quote your actions and mine right now.
The repair work is individual. It's often hidden in the
most ordinary parts of life, paying attention while you drive,
being truly present with your family, doing your work conscientiously.
(08:00):
If there's conscious intension behind it, that mundane act is
the cosmic repair work, it is tikkun.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Right. So if our big cosmic job is this repair
work tikkun, and we do it using our consciousness, we
need to understand how that consciousness actually works. How are
we equipped to handle this, this double reality living in
the broken world of shars while also connecting to the
divine source. We're trying to restore the sources call us
a dweller on two worlds.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Right, Yes, that theme runs deep, this sense of living
simultaneously in the mundane and the meaningful, the physical and
the spiritual. You see it reflected all over culture. The
sources mention the romantic writers like Eta Hoffman. His characters
are often torn, you know, between the sensible, everyday world
and this other magical, significant reality bubbling just beneath the surface.
(08:49):
And it's not just high art. Think about comic books
like Adam Strange. He's an archaeologist just doing his job
on Earth. Then bang sapped by a Zeta beam to
the planet Ran, where he's this great hero, and he
gets yanked back to Earth, and his whole focus is
getting back to Ran, back to that heroic, meaningful life.
It's that constant pull between two worlds.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
It makes perfect sense then that if we're constantly navigating
these two different realities, the immediate physical stuff and the
deeper eternal meaning, our brains would have to be wired
for it somehow. Yeah, and this leads us into some
really fascinating modern neuroscience, particularly Ian Mcgilchris's work on the
two brain hemispheres.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Mcgilchris model is incredibly relevant here. He argues quite compellingly
that the two hemispheres of our brain don't just do
different tasks, they offer two fundamentally different ways of experiencing
reality itself opposed ways. The left hemisphere, he calls it,
the emissary. Its job is to analyze, to break things
down into parts, into details, what's some mystics called granulation.
(09:47):
It favors logic, sequence, abstraction, and a kind of detached
mechanical control over the world. Its mode is what Mcgilchris
terms immediacy perception, focusing on the bare fax needed for survival,
for manipulation.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Okay, the emissary focused analytical pieces, but that doesn't sound
like the mode we'd use for cosmic repair. For seeing
the whole picture, that must be the right hemisphere the master.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
That's exactly Migilchris's point. The right hemisphere is the master
because it sees the whole. It perceives reality as a unified,
interconnected gestalt. It deals with context, with the implicit, with
the living quality of things. It relates to the world reciprocally,
not just trying to control it. Its mode is meaning perception.
It grasps beauty, significance, purpose, the overall pattern it's the
(10:32):
source of empathy, intuition, spirituality, and that cosmic repair job
to Kuhn, fundamentally requires what Nicholas of Cusa called the
coincidentia oppositorum, the union of these opposites. We need both
hemispheres working together, but with the right hemisphere leading.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
So it's not enough to just be conscious, like say
in animals conscious. Our task, as these dwellers on two
worlds is conscious participation. We have to understand both the
pieces and the whole, the immediate and the meaningful, and
then actively consciously choose to bring them together, to synthesize
them exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And this is where things get really wild, because this
ancient spiritual mandate finds this incredible, almost spooky echo. In
twentieth central physics, specifically, John Archbold Wheeler, a giant of physics,
proposed what he called the participatory anthropic principle or PP.
Wheeler suggested, based on quantum mechanics, that the universe fundamentally
(11:25):
requires conscious absormers like us to even come into being
in the definite state we observe the universe is the
way it is because we are here to see it.
He pointed to experiments like the delayed choice thought experiment.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Right, that's the one that seems to break our normal
idea of cause and effect, isn't it the experiment that
suggests that how we choose to measure a particle of
light now today seems to retroactively determine whether that particle
behaved as a wave or a particle billions of years
ago when it left some distant quasar.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Precisely, our observation now apparently influences the past reality of
that light. It's staggering. Deeler's coclusion was radical. He said,
we are participators in bringing into being not only the
near and here, but also the far away and long ago.
Think about how perfectly that mirrors the Kabbalistic idea of takun.
By consciously focusing our attention, by investing the world with
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meaning and value through our inner life, we are in
a sense Wheeler perhaps didn't intend, but which resonates deeply,
literally completing the universe, grounding its existence. Reality needs our
meaningful awareness to become fully real. Hashtag ta tag out
tag outro. So when you put all these pieces together, hermeticism, kabbla,
Migilchrist Wheeler, you get this absolutely profound shift away from
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the spandard modern narrative. It's a powerful rejection of that
materialist view of humanity as just you know, a meaningless accident,
or worse, just a rapacious species, as some thinkers like
John Gray might put it destined to fade away. Instead,
these sources insist that human consciousness isn't just some random
epiphenomenon it introduces, as thinkers like Ernest Casser or Julian
Huxley argued, a genuinely new dimension of reality. Our creative
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meaning making capacity is why we're essential.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
So our consciousness, our ability to perceive meaning, isn't just
a nice feature. It's potentially the most powerful force against entropy,
against the universe just running down into cold, meaningless uniformity.
We're not just supposed to drift along. We're actually built
and maybe even obligated to strive to connect to repair
those broken pieces through our attention. The core lesson woven
(13:25):
through all these complex ideas seems almost deceptively simple. In
the end, we just have to focus on doing the
good that we know, using that consciousness.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well, and that leaves us and leaves you with a
really challenging but maybe inspiring final thought to consider. Thinkers
like Rudolf Steiner took this participatory idea very literally. He
suggested that the actual physical form the Earth will take
in the future is being shaped right now by the
quality of the thoughts human beings are thinking. If that
kind of inner work, what some call hurtzw heartwork, is
really about transmuting the physical world into some new spiritual substance,
(13:58):
then consider this, What specific cosmic weight, what responsibility does
the quality of your very next conscious thought actually carry?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
That definitely puts scrolling through social media in a different light.
Doesn't it a much higher stakes game? We hope exploring
this idea of cosmic necessity has giving you something profound
to think about. That's all the time we have for
this deep dive.