From: Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 1997 - 10:38:17 MDT
One quasi-mystical model I particularly dislike & wanted to mention in
my earlier Extropians post about New Age myths of the mind (but
didn't have the reference at hand) is the LILA model of Doug Seeley &
Michael Baker at the South Australia Institute of Technology (couldn't
find anything on the Web), mentioned in the final section of Nick
Herbert's _Elemental Mind_:
<In the LILA story, before time, space, and matter came into
existence, One Mind is. The physical universe began with an
unprecedented event called the 'blanket denial' in which 'parts' of
the Timeless Mental Unity unaccountably refused to recognize their
connection with other 'parts'. ... The inner history of the post-Big
Bang universe, according to LILA is the story of certain entities
'wising up', renouncing the illusion of separateness, and accepting
their deep connection with certain other entities as fact. ... When
all entities connect (in a terminal event the authors call 'the
Restoration'), the physical universe simply vanishes like the mistake
it was in the first place.>
This sounds no different to me from the Christian Apocalypse &
Resurrection. We're supposed to regress back into the womb, the void,
from everything back to nothing, renouncing our worldly 'sins'! Isn't
that wonderful? This is the death wish most whimpish religions aspire
to rather than the rough and tumble, creative destruction of a truly
pluralistic extropian universe. (It's also why I sometimes hanker for
heroes and am eager to believe in boundaries for borganisms, and for
creepy nanofog clouds of grey-goo clones out to consume the cosmos...)
Mark Crosby
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