What a pleasant nature you have, especially considering you live in the clouds, way up in your ivory tower where you can look upon the Savages like me and even consider communicating with one.
“Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy.” Neil deGrasse Tyson was right of course with this statement. As he went on to say, “Imagine how different the world would be…” Of course, when you are steeped in the history of Philosophy, it could be that this blocks your attempts to reach out. It could be that you lose contact and with that, the ability to empathize. I consider this to be a huge problem, and yes, there are enough people so wired up to social media that they can’t think, but there are a lot of people who are wired up to other people. They think a lot, but they act on that thinking interacting with people. They try too, to reach those who are on a different level of thinking, distant from their everyday lives. It would be presumptuous to think that these people are “non-thinkers”.
We didn’t “come into” this world, we came out of it. We are nature, we are biology. That may be a new discovery in your view, but it was always a part of the collective unconscious, as many illustrative mythologies teach us. Therefore this “region of being” obviously has to be taken into account.
Of course, we have been taught from an early age the wisdom of our heritage. How else would someone make their first steps in the world? However, the only way we see this clearly is, as far as I have experienced, is to quieten the endless monologue in our minds and be. To be free from thought inasmuch as we let it go, and do not latch on or cling to it. This allows us to see things for themselves and not as we have been taught to see them. The beginner’s mind helps us overcome prejudice or preconceptions, but it doesn’t wipe the slate clean. Quite simply stated, by humility, we can rediscover the things we’ve been taught and reassess them.
“A click; the room was darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the Master’s head, there were the Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as John had heard them wail, confessing their sins before Jesus on the Cross, before the eagle image of Pookong. The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet, stripped off their upper garments and, with knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans.
“But why do they laugh?” asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.
“Why?” The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. “Why? But because it’s so extraordinarily funny.” (Brave New World 11.54-6)
This “broadly grinning face” was around when the great catastrophes of the twentieth century took place and was there when the sexual revolution started and sounded the entrance of decadence and nihilism.
We can of course attempt at desensitizing ourselves to human suffering, especially voluntary suffering, and sneer at it at a distance, but life shows us that we can’t have mountains without valleys, we can’t have hot without cold, or long without short, or sweet without bitter. And the dilemma of the human being is that he is both mind and body, with thought that transcends nature, but also an animal that remains a part of nature.
I don’t accept all these wild theories and mad abstractions, “the brain thinks” and so forth. Life Is not experienced at such strange theoretical remove.
I eschew answering the rest of what you put down, since I think you are dogmatically, so to say, insistent in speaking in the terms of an abstract fantasy which excludes communication concerning direct reality as one finds it based on your answers so far. One lives, indeed, in such a “key idea” as is half present in the average way of speaking, but one can also see that it is vacant. That is when one thinks. You describe the “meaning” already when you write the story you here outline in all the fantastic array of bosh verbiage “the brain thinks” “survival mechanisms” “psychosomatic illness” “basic instincts”. Did anyone speak in such terms even one hundred years ago, will they in thirty thousand? There is your “meaning”, so, it’s already in the appearance of anything for a human.
Strange that you abstain from reacting to what I have written on the basis that it is abstract fantasy, whereas I have the feeling that I am confronted with reality in a direct way far more than you are. Reviewing the history of philosophy is, after all, the review of a region of human thought, but not its fullness. If you shun the stories that try to find and convey meaning in a life of suffering, it is you who is insistent in speaking in terms of abstract thought.
Something happens, then it becomes “experience” when we repeatedly catch it, when we explain it through some notion, and make a predication of the something. For instance, we call something “psychosomatic illness” and bring it into many spheres of thought and doing that were unavailable in form ages and places and won’t be there in the future. Such things change, and, on occasion, are deliberately changed.
So the discovery of psychosomatics is something that you regard as ephemeral, although the same experiences were explained by use of the words “Spirits” or “Demons” in the past. Just because the vocabulary changes, it doesn’t mean that the experience is null and void or will pass.
You conflate meaning with another question. That of a perfection of the essence of the human being in a teleology = in “happiness” or the discovered best way to live. That is like, we have an apple seed, now, what is the way to get the best fruit from it. I can’t speak with you because you refuse to clarify terms, you speak from a kind of hypnotic trance which is your blinding promise for thoughtlessness.
If happiness were the only goal in my life, then it would be very bland indeed. Since the main goal in most lives is to reduce suffering, we have here a central aim that has an effect on all of those we interact with. Since you regard yourself above such thoughts and deem them even “non-thoughts” then you are right – we have nothing more to say. However, just one more comment: This approach will gradually reduce the number of people you can have a meaningful life and conversation with.
I wish you well …