The Wes Cecil Podcast

It is commonplace and true that we live in a consumer society. Less noticed is that being a consumer casts us in a role as passive non-makers who do not produce and participate but simply define ourselves by an association with objects or events. It is primarily by making that we can orient ourselves and escape a sense of meaninglessness in the world - which is why the notion of a consumer society is so powerfully anti-human.

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The Atman, Brahman, and Karma are presented quite clearly in book 8 and the implications are then extrapolated in Nine and Ten. These are the key ideas at the heart of Hinduism. The Atman is a challenge for western audiences because it pre-supposes a very different concept of individuality and what constitutes a self. A powerfully metaphysical argument, it challenges quite directly the critiques of metaphysics that have been at the heart of western philosophy for at least 200 years.

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This series is a concrete extrapolation of the ideals of Humanism within the context of our contemporary society. While it might seem like we can’t help but know how to be human, the pressures and structure of our society are powerfully opposed to the expressions of the ideals of Humanism and, de facto, of our human potential.

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It sounds a lot like monotheism, and perhaps this is what Krishna is arguing, but it is a conceptual framework very much different than the Christian concept of monotheism (the Jewish people did not have a monotheistic view of the world btw). In Book Seven we get the very different Hindu framing of this question in which there is only one ‘god’, if Vishnu can be conceptualized in that category, in but Vishnu is also all the Gods and all the practices, both good and evil, so there is no single god or approach or belief that actually frames Vishnu. In essence, like the different understanding of Sin, our dichotomy of Mono vs Poly theism cannot be applied to Hindu thought.

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I want to share the live audio of the 2nd lecture I gave at The University of Maastricht, the Netherlands a month ago. This one is from Thursday, April 30.

The focus of this lecture is the deep ontology—the how or why (instead of the what)—of our stories and discourse in the modern world. Here's the write-up for the lecture:

We make sense of the world through our values. Unfortunately, we have become overwhelmed with discourse and media. We no longer feel like we can make sense of the world through our own values. In this lecture Dr. Cecil will share his critical take on our responsibility to slow down our media consumption and to think about our values. The lecture will be done in an accessible and engaging format using parables, stories and personal accounts to make the topic engaging and stimulating.

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