Stuart's book

[Louis Droulers]

Hi, I've just finished reading Stuart's book, "Re-inventing The Sacred".
The title sounds kinda corny with every-man-and-his-dog using the cool word of the moment "sacred" in all sorts of contexts. i picked it up and read it anyhow.
Wow!!

Surely it's obvious to most thinking people that the Creator-God sitting outside of everything was always just a temporary story till we got our thinking caps on and grew up.
Now we are getting it. Bit by bit by qubit.

"God" might not be real but I'm sure mind/ consciousness is; just like atoms, rocks and galaxies. All natural.
There MUST be a natural explanation for everything that is ( as opposed to a super-natural one).
We are getting there and thanks to Stuart K and many others we get closer day by day.
I don't know about you but I am getting very excited about how far we have come and how close we are getting.

The chapter about the antenna protein on the chloropyll molecule being able to mediate the photon and it's quantum decohering was electrifying. Asif this wasn't enough the next lot of stuff about the tightly packed cell, ordered water molecules at the 10-15 angstrom range and 'Percolation theory' really got me going! No, really!!

The real TOE will not only have to tie in the big four fundamental forces but also explain mind/consciousness as well. This just might be a breakthrough with all of these topics.

I'm still meditating on these ideas and internalising them for my daily life.
What about you?

[Ulrike Reinhard]

Hi, I'm honored that you like Reinventing the Sacred! The aim of this effort is not just a book by one author, but hopefully to be part of an expanding conversation about what a global civilization might become. My own image is a persistently coevolving ecology of our 30 or so civilizations, with enough overlap among them that we can invent ever novel ways, hard rock from the minarets, to further diversify our cultural inventions.

Then too, I think we need to rethink economic growth and how to drive it. There is growing evidence that the richness of interconnectedness of the economic web in a country and diversity of goods in the country correlate with economic growth and wealth. This raises the programatic issue of how to find, recognize, and abet economic webs and grow their diversity of goods, production capacities and what I call the "transition" from subcritical to supracritical economic growth. By this I mean that the global economy is persistently inventing new goods and services, but Alberta, Canada, where I have now spent five years, exports only meat, oil, lumber and grain, with attendant oil rigs and an IT industry tied to oil. Alberta's economy is not generating new goods and services, it is subcritical. Now consider the Washington Consensus, free trade and no tariff barriers, is largely based on brilliant David Riccardo's 19th century idea of nations competitive national advantages of trade: my apples traded for your avocados, hence free trade. True, but it drives Ethiopia to a narrow focus on coffee bean production, deeply subcritical, and hostage to world prices for this commodity, instead of a regional East African economy that is locally supracritical and grows its own wealth and also trades with the world beyond. Riccardo did not know about economic webs, and sub and supracritical economic growth, so the standard economic growth and international trade theories need to be rethought.

These are two of the many topics that we all need to be thinking about.
If you don't mind come and join us on http://www.stuartkauffman.com - a website where we will pretty soon publish 10 BIG QUESTIONS which will be discussed online ...

Stuart Kauffman

[Bernard Angerer]

Louis,

i am sure you are also aware about

FIVE PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman09/kauffman09_index.html

i wish there would be video material talking more about light beeing the medium of "communication and coordination" for self organization of living systems :)

also: what about the work of Fritz-Albert Popp (biophotons) ?