Intellect has the capacity to idolize itself.
The human intellect is a powerful but paradoxical tool. Because it possesses the capacity for complex self-awareness, it can easily fall into the trap of venerating its own logic. When intellect idolizes itself, the ego mistakes the map (our mental models and frameworks) for the territory (actual reality, our joys and pain), prioritizing cerebral constructs over lived human experience.
Why does this idea feel so edifying to me right now? Watching friends and family members search for direction and seeing them hunger for transcendence, yet still want to maintain intellectual control.
Why is astrology easier to accept than the idea of the Judeo-Christian God? Astrology asks less of us. It requires less commitment, is less intrusive on what we do, and we get final say when we pick and choose what feels true or not.
It’s a one-way relationship that doesn’t require much. Many people today are comfortable with believing that the universe has energy, that everything is connected, that the cosmos influence us. It’s a religion. Yet, it receives a lower standard of scrutiny than religion.
People will easily accept statements like “Mercury is in retrograde”, even jokingly, even though it has no empirical support.
Because we crave for patterns. We know the universe has clues.
And so we constantly in search of our identity. If we’re not children of God, then who are we? Astrology provides an immediate answer. I’m an Aries. I’m ENFP. I’m Enneagram 5. We love categories like these because we get to feel seen.
Charm says “you can choose what you want to trust or follow and what you don’t want to trust and follow. Which is basically back to the idea of man thinking their minds are the most reliable and most real.”
Intellect. Idolizing itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Intellect has the capacity to idolize itself. The human intellect is a powerful but paradoxical tool. Because it possesses the capacity for complex self-awareness, it can easily fall into the trap of venerating its own logic. When intellect idolizes itself, the ego mistakes the map (our mental models and frameworks) for the territory (actual reality, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions\/1153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catchmyfall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}