The Capture (BBC series)

   Just finished watching series 2 two nights ago (11/11/22). Wow, it really makes you think. What is reality? We so desperately need to question everything; especially, if half of America can believe one thing (stolen election) and the other half not. I would like to add maybe here there is a conflation of levels: the election happened and the result was valid in a real world sense but in a more mythic, noetic, sense the election was stolen from Trump (after all he certainly lost the presidency).

   But back to the formulation of important questions (What is reality?), which is the theme of Parsifal, it is we ourselves that hold us back from questioning out of either fear or desire. Desiring the answer to be a certain way or fearing the answer we will get. I think most materialists know this fear very well. If the spiritual worlds exist then the whole way we approach life is not only wrong, but destructive: destructive to the individual (loneliness), destructive to the community (addiction and mental disorders (mass shooters)), and destructive to the world (greed driven profit destroying the natural world).

   This ever increasing need, felt by many, to know the truth meets an ever increasing uncertainty and inability to question towards. This difficulty with differentiating reality from illusion is portrayed in the Matrix movies (based on the philosophy of Schopenhauer) and is described as the brain in a vat experiment: which goes how do you know that you are not a brain in a vat receiving direct electrical input that then simulates what you experience as reality? You only appear to be a person in a three dimensional world but, according to the experiment, you are a brain in a vat.

   Kant never solved this and, in a sense, said it can not be solved. Kant and most philosophers after him believed that the brain creates an image of reality by interpreting sensations and this is all we can ever know! R. Steiner fundamentally repudiates this in this book The Philosophy of Freedom. One way of understanding his refutation is that by understanding the nature of knowledge and thinking we can tell whether our mental image of the world corresponds to the world reality behind it.

   When we are asking the fundamental questions, like what is real, then we are asking Pontius Pilate’s question. [John 18:38] “What is truth?” This is ever more important in our increasingly disconnected world, because without knowing the truth or keeping to the path of truth we create more and more disharmony and ill-health in the world. The old gem of wisdom explains: ‘the truth will set you free.’ It is only actions that are done out of freedom that will lead the world and humanity forward to the future. Without truth, without freedom, we will become stuck in an ever darkening backwater. The evolution of the world will become forfeit and the materialistic nightmare of science will become a reality: extinction in thermodynamic death void.