Big Questions
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Big Questions
Big Questions are the ultimate, existential questions of our being and our cosmology. Big Questions are existential or spiritual questions of existence, purpose, place, and so on.[1] The questions "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" are big questions.
Concept Map
Key Terms
List of Big Questions
Syncretic Terms
Big Questions > Existential Imperatives
Related LP Terms
Big Questions > Archetype Constellation, Identity Archetype, New Energy Archetype, Old Energy Archetype, Positioning Statements, Symbol
Non-LP Related Terms
Notes
Big questions are usually followed with various Positioning Statements, like you are a "fallen angel" or "you are here to be punished for past sins"), which locate and position the individual in a larger, usually elite derived, cosmology.
Sociologist Peter Berger called big questions Existential Imperatives[2]
Big questions are answered by Archetypes. On this planet, within the current Regime of Accumulation, archetypes are created in elite owned/controlled Symbol Factories and then distributed by Ideological Institutions
The Big Five:
- Who Am I?
- Where did I come from?
- What is my purpose/Why am I here. According to William James, what is "life's chief concern?" [3]
- Why am I Suffering
- Why do bad things happen in the world?
Smaller big questions
- What is the nature of God//Consciousness]?
- What is the nature of the cosmos/creation.
- What was the path we took to get here.
Under conditions of "normal consciousness", big questions are often answered by institutions set up specifically to provide them (e.g. Religion.) That is, when the individual physical unit is not Connected to the Fabric of Consciousness, organizations may arise that provide choreographed answers to these critical questions of identity and origin.
Under ideal circumstances, individuals will find a supportive social fabric that provides Right Thought, Right Action, and Right Environment with a view towards encouraging inner exploration, authentic Connection, and personal discovery of core spiritual truths, and our shared spiritual heritage.
The ancient Vedas were provided answers to many big questions. "According to Koller, “The Vedic philosophers raised questions about themselves, about the macrocosm around them, and their position therein. What is cognizance? What is the root thereof? Why is the wind blowing? Who set the sun in the empyrean, the giver of warmth and light? What is it that these sundry life-forms are taken forth by the earth? How are we going to renovate our lives and become whole? The commencement of conceptual thought is the quandaries of how, when, and why” [4]
Why do bad things happen in the world?
Geertz discusses the "problem of suffering" as one of the reasons behind the development of Religion. According to Geertz, suffering leads to existential angst which religion arises to allay.[5] Interestingly, Geertz shades into a discussion of Evil as an answer to the "problem of suffering" or, as I would say, the question of why bad things happen in the world. According to Geertz, evil is part of a complex of symbols that allows for the recovery of sensibility, [moral] order, and comprehensibility.
Thus the problem of evil, or perhaps one should say the problem about evil, is in essence the same sort of problem of or about bafflement and the problem of or about suffering. The strange opacity of certain empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man's life in the world, has no genuine order at all - no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. [6]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Lightning Path Workbook Four -Archetypal Study and Flow Control Using the Triumph of Spirit Archetype System. Vol. 4. Lightning Path Workbook Series. St. Albert, Alberta: Lightning Path Press, 2020.
- ↑ Lundskow, George. “Marxist Class-Cultural Spirituality in Theory and Practice.” Critical Sociology 21, no. 1–2 (2005): 213–4
- ↑ The latter is William James' phraseology. See William James, 1923, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin
- ↑ Coller quoted in Kumar, Shailendra, and Sanghamitra Choudhury. “Ancient Vedic Literature and Human Rights: Resonances and Dissonances.” Cogent Social Sciences, 2020, 1–18.p. 5 https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2020.1858562
- ↑ Geertz, Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton, 1–44. Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
- ↑ Geertz, Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton, 1–44. Oxon: Routledge, 2004. p.23.