The Creative Irrational - The Key to Individual Consciousness and Human Success - Table of Contents - free online

In contrast to the prevailing Western view, humans are irrational - and they have always been since the beginning of our evolution. We mean irrational in the Jungian sense of “something beyond logic”. In this sense it is linked to the highest strivings of human being. Our possibilities for spirituality and the transcendent are what separates us from other animals. From cave paintings to Gobekli Tepe, to the Egyptian Pharaohs, to St. Paul, to Plato, to the great modern physicist Einstein, we see that all human higher moments have resulted from the creatively irrational.

At this point in time as we discuss re-engineering to address the world-threatening problems resulting from our systematizing efforts, it is essential that we personally and societally reacquaint ourselves with our creative irrational and strive for our higher purposes. More money, leisure time and consumer goods have doomed us and our planet. What can our essential human characteristic - the creative irrational - contribute to addressing the situation?

In our proposed work we are pleased to build upon a perspective that more clearly connects ancient efforts with the modern world. We follow human development by tracing anew the persistent efforts of societies that have evolved worldwide over tens of thousands of years. They lead us to insights that we assemble into a new perspective that supports our renewed striving for transcendence from ordinary strictly rational perceptions. Our manuscript is designed to explore a new path that now appears.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

“What a great history of, and prediction for, human development! Of course human worldview determines our history and this influences what/how we act. As we are now impacting on a global scale, it is critical to review how we have gotten here so that we make decisions on where we might choose to go.

This is the first book that I have encountered that presents many of what I view as the most critical humans/individuals: hunter-gatherers, Akhenaten, Plato, Saint Paul, Philo of Alexandria, Roger and Francis Bacon, Einstein, Lovelock and many others. Their interjections to the developing Western worldview continue to be reflected in our present day perceptions. But their influences are rarely appreciated. Lent lays them out in a clear understandable fashion. 

His treatment of Eastern worldview may appear strange and foreign to most readers - as it is should. It is an excellent control study for those imagining the Western approach to nature and the environment as the only way.

Yes there is a lot of detail that may not appeal to all readers. Life is complicated. It is a mistake to think of humans - and our culture - as machines. There is relatively a lot of history to consider in assessing our present predicament. Our present beliefs are so firmly held that they not easily seen.

This book deserves the time and effort.”

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3065334540

A church is not a graveyard! A pyramid is not tomb!

In the modern Western World we would not maintain that a church and its associated graveyard as being strictly funerary, even though they are found in close proximity of one another and present similar images. Similarly, even though the structures within the pyramid complex might use some of the same images, concepts and themes, they may have performed different functions for the pharaoh throughout their lives and after their deaths. It is most likely that the Egyptians buried their dead in tombs, celebrated in their temples and used the great pyramids for their own directed purposes that we are still trying to fully understand." 

http://www.awhico.com/blog/egyptianpyramidmysticism

There is no "self-help" - it takes more than one

As much as we have been taught that rationality is the key to success (that is "grit, determination, perseverance), research is showing that human resilience in the face of adversity is based on available community support - i.e. our irrational:

http://dalmag.dal.ca/2019/11/the-science-of-bouncing-back/

Change Your World: The Science and the True Path to Success

by

Michael Unger: http://www.michaelungar.com/books/