Bruce G Charlton
6th April 2023, 11:15
This is a very cheeky thread to post on Project Avalon; but it is a subject that has interested me, and about which I have thought, intermittently - but for a span of some forty-seven years.
I knew Bill for one intense month of an Outward Bound course in Scotland, when I was aged 17 and Bill was 22 or 23; and then I did not encounter him again until - via email and Project Avalon - 2014.
A pretty slender acquaintance on the basis of which to try and 'understand' him, it might reasonably be said? Indeed. But Bill did have a formative effect on my life; despite that it took a very different path from his, and ended in a different (spiritual) place. So I have spent a fair bit of time in trying to understand him - and feel that I have got somewhere in these efforts.
I regard Bill as 'one of the good guys' as well as 'on the right side' in the spiritual war of this world; so I hope he may find these comments amusing, maybe interesting; and if others contribute their sincere evaluations - perhaps he would even find it helpful and encouraging?
Bear in mind that this is one person's very partial view, and any briefly communicated statement is bound to add further incompleteness and distortion.
**
In a nutshell; I see Bill as one of very few modern people whose world-view is about as close as it could be to that of the 'animism' (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html) of paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherers. (The link is to an essay in which I tried to explain what I mean by animism - other people currently term this 'shamanism'.)
I spent several years intensely studying this now-lost way-of-being; through reading accounts of first-contacts with the last remnants of such people who existed until around a century ago - some of whom retained some features of this lifestyle until more recently.
I also looked at convergent evidence from anthropology, archaeology, putatively-evolved aspects of modern psychology, human evolution, and the analogous social structures of chimpanzees and baboons. A list of academic references can be found in this research paper (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html).
In another essay (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/meaning-of-life.html), I tried to describe how our ancestral hunter-gatherers may have seen the world, and the meanings they found in life - very different from typical modern Man.
Back to Bill... I believe Bill is one of very few modern people who are not significantly 'alienated' from this world: from other people, nature and the world of spirits and 'gods'.
I think Bill has that 'immersive' - and mostly unconscious - participation in the world, that most people have been losing since the invention and the agricultural way of life, and especially since the industrial revolution. Alienation, cut-offness, is now the modern condition - as has become common knowledge since the Existentialists (e.g. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Colin Wilson etc.) introduced it to public discourse in the 1950s.
Part of this is that (I think) Bill regards this world as essentially nurturing - as the hunter-gatherers regarded their environment - much as a loving parent who will provide what we need, and what is good for us. He trusts this world.
I think Bill regards our actual world as sufficient for all spiritual needs. I think (at root) his ideas of reincarnation resemble those of H-Gs; in that people (and indeed animals) are reborn in a recurrent fashion, from a finite realm of souls; with transformation as the principle; rather than (more common variants of reincarnation) either decline-from an earlier ideal state, or progression-towards a higher-state.
Life varies by a kind of infinite permutation; so that there is no exact repetition - yet the 'ingredients' of life are experienced eternal. Hence Bill's view of life as ultimately 'play', and that such open-endedly various play provides all that we need.
Bill, I believe, has a gut-sense that the totality of life-energies are neither increased, nor diminished; and that therefore the principle of of change is more like transformation than like entropy or continual-creation. I infer his view would be that when we die and are reborn, we are 'transformed', and the world around us undergoes transformation... In sum, it is a 'process' of transformation of 'life energies' which is characteristic of this life and world.
To put it differently; Bill, like the hunter-gatherers, is 'at home in this world' - in a way very different from most of the rest of us.
**
Now, I would not push this all the way; clearly Bill also has a high level of self-awareness, and can therefore explain himself by comparisons and contrasts; whereas (it seems) hunter-gatherers usually took-for-granted their condition, their place in the world, and their destiny.
After all, the ancestral H-Gs lived and knew of a world in which 'humanity' constituted only - perhaps - a couple of thousand people; and they lived their lives in 'clans' of maybe only 1-200. Bill inhabits, and takes into account, a world of billions.
Yet I think that this understanding of Bill is one that captures what I find to be special, in fact unique in my experience, about his nature - and therefore his task.
OK - that's it for now! I do hope that Bill will take this impertinent comment in the positive spirit it is offered; and perhaps others may be able to add their different perspectives in the same spirit?
I knew Bill for one intense month of an Outward Bound course in Scotland, when I was aged 17 and Bill was 22 or 23; and then I did not encounter him again until - via email and Project Avalon - 2014.
A pretty slender acquaintance on the basis of which to try and 'understand' him, it might reasonably be said? Indeed. But Bill did have a formative effect on my life; despite that it took a very different path from his, and ended in a different (spiritual) place. So I have spent a fair bit of time in trying to understand him - and feel that I have got somewhere in these efforts.
I regard Bill as 'one of the good guys' as well as 'on the right side' in the spiritual war of this world; so I hope he may find these comments amusing, maybe interesting; and if others contribute their sincere evaluations - perhaps he would even find it helpful and encouraging?
Bear in mind that this is one person's very partial view, and any briefly communicated statement is bound to add further incompleteness and distortion.
**
In a nutshell; I see Bill as one of very few modern people whose world-view is about as close as it could be to that of the 'animism' (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html) of paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherers. (The link is to an essay in which I tried to explain what I mean by animism - other people currently term this 'shamanism'.)
I spent several years intensely studying this now-lost way-of-being; through reading accounts of first-contacts with the last remnants of such people who existed until around a century ago - some of whom retained some features of this lifestyle until more recently.
I also looked at convergent evidence from anthropology, archaeology, putatively-evolved aspects of modern psychology, human evolution, and the analogous social structures of chimpanzees and baboons. A list of academic references can be found in this research paper (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html).
In another essay (https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/meaning-of-life.html), I tried to describe how our ancestral hunter-gatherers may have seen the world, and the meanings they found in life - very different from typical modern Man.
Back to Bill... I believe Bill is one of very few modern people who are not significantly 'alienated' from this world: from other people, nature and the world of spirits and 'gods'.
I think Bill has that 'immersive' - and mostly unconscious - participation in the world, that most people have been losing since the invention and the agricultural way of life, and especially since the industrial revolution. Alienation, cut-offness, is now the modern condition - as has become common knowledge since the Existentialists (e.g. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Colin Wilson etc.) introduced it to public discourse in the 1950s.
Part of this is that (I think) Bill regards this world as essentially nurturing - as the hunter-gatherers regarded their environment - much as a loving parent who will provide what we need, and what is good for us. He trusts this world.
I think Bill regards our actual world as sufficient for all spiritual needs. I think (at root) his ideas of reincarnation resemble those of H-Gs; in that people (and indeed animals) are reborn in a recurrent fashion, from a finite realm of souls; with transformation as the principle; rather than (more common variants of reincarnation) either decline-from an earlier ideal state, or progression-towards a higher-state.
Life varies by a kind of infinite permutation; so that there is no exact repetition - yet the 'ingredients' of life are experienced eternal. Hence Bill's view of life as ultimately 'play', and that such open-endedly various play provides all that we need.
Bill, I believe, has a gut-sense that the totality of life-energies are neither increased, nor diminished; and that therefore the principle of of change is more like transformation than like entropy or continual-creation. I infer his view would be that when we die and are reborn, we are 'transformed', and the world around us undergoes transformation... In sum, it is a 'process' of transformation of 'life energies' which is characteristic of this life and world.
To put it differently; Bill, like the hunter-gatherers, is 'at home in this world' - in a way very different from most of the rest of us.
**
Now, I would not push this all the way; clearly Bill also has a high level of self-awareness, and can therefore explain himself by comparisons and contrasts; whereas (it seems) hunter-gatherers usually took-for-granted their condition, their place in the world, and their destiny.
After all, the ancestral H-Gs lived and knew of a world in which 'humanity' constituted only - perhaps - a couple of thousand people; and they lived their lives in 'clans' of maybe only 1-200. Bill inhabits, and takes into account, a world of billions.
Yet I think that this understanding of Bill is one that captures what I find to be special, in fact unique in my experience, about his nature - and therefore his task.
OK - that's it for now! I do hope that Bill will take this impertinent comment in the positive spirit it is offered; and perhaps others may be able to add their different perspectives in the same spirit?