Hope you gleaned some insights from the last post with excerpts from the Intro. and Ch.1 of The Okie Trad's new book Back to Nature. A philosophical analysis of how our contemporary culture has divorced itself from Nature, i.e. Creation, with the imperative of re-orienting ourselves once again to the extramental reality we call Nature.
Making time soon to format and upload it to Amazon Kindle as both an e-book and soft back. As to my blogger Stats, it was interesting to see a still steady flow of traffic from October, when I took a three month sabbatical from blogging, up until mid December when Stats dramatically fell. Okie Trad is back, but with a renewed focus. I hope to retain the same audience I developed, but to reach men from all backgrounds, and my fellow Okies, applying supernatural and philosophical Truths to the secular domain of culture, politics, and social issues.
See below an excerpt from Ch. 2. Enjoy.
Excerpt:
Does contemporary society have any clear, common idea of what makes up a human being, what is our nature, how we would define human nature not only in terms of biological science, as a higher order primate species, but in terms of what we are, that is answering the question as to what is our very nature? My argument is that we have lost all cohesive understanding of who we are, in large part due to our separation from Nature in the first place.
Using a rough syllogism, if through the excesses of modernity we have become separated from Nature…but if our understanding of our own human nature requires understanding Nature itself in the first place, since we are part of Nature…therefore we no longer know who we are because of our ultramodern lifestyle. Endless concrete landscapes, 5G internet, and full immersion entertainment devices in the home have made the very concept and existence of Nature, of the cosmos, of external reality, a vague and distant subject, us wrapped up in our cocoons tucked away conveniently from the non-artificial world.
The other popular extreme explored by some people dissatisfied with the urban, indoors cocoon is New Age transcendentalism, where the novice becomes one with a mythical version of Nature, in which the cosmos is merely a spiritual construct of our wishes and desires, an alternate dimension above the apparently physical reality, rooted neither in science nor in traditional philosophy, but in fads. It remakes a distorted version of eastern mysticism in which the soul exists as something good, but the body as an illusion which tends towards evil.
The mainstream though leans heavily towards a reductionist version of human nature, where we are reduced down to the biological species, to a physical body, to reflexes, impulses, desires, fleeting thoughts, and base needs, but that isn’t exactly clearly defined and agreed upon. You could have a church-going believer, who thinks from time to time about the supernatural dimension, and at least for an hour a week orients themselves to it, still focusing largely on their lower nature needs most of the week, with a tunnel vision of human nature being primarily material. There is a gravitational pull of materialistic popular culture pulling all of us downward into a hedonistic and survivalistic state, in which we behave like lower level animals instead of as human beings.
(Stay tuned for the published book to buy at a low price)