Darwin Plus! Edition 3

DarwinPlus!
Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

(A Reconciliation)
and about time too.
Nullius in verba (Take nobody's word for it)

Motto of the Royal Society
Test everything
Saint Paul in Thessalonians 5:21
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense
Buddha
ISBN 978-0-9542866-2-0
BIC Codes PDA and HRAM3 (should be more, but it seems I'm only allowed two) http://www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk/darwinplus/ Readers' comments at http://www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk/readers-comments/
Why This Book?
Are you puzzled by why Big Science seems to ignore even welldocumented paranormal events? And why so many Big Scientists are so scathing on the subject? And why Big Religion is no help either? And are you also puzzled by the Science/Religion schism, when neither side seems to be able to come up with completely convincing arguments for their case, and every 'discussion' ends up leaving you just as puzzled or uneasy as ever, but not sure why?
We can do better than that.
Things either happen or they do not happen. If something does happen.. then there is a cause for it. There is logic in there SOMEWHERE. Let's find that logical path. And once we've found it, who knows where it might lead
Thanks to Mainly my wife, Anne, for listening to me droning on about this book for over twenty years. Such patience Also to John Sheffield, Doug Taylor, Dr James Le Fanu, Emily Swanson, Mark Stanton, Adam Russell, Dr Phil Sanders, Tom Ruffles of the SPR, the ASPR, Nick Cumber, Sonu Bhaskar, Ian Bradley, Malcolm Whyman, Professor Hilary Downes, Sarah Day, Guy Lyon Playfair, Tricia Bloomfield, Nevil Hutchinson, Stephen Mclaren, Scott Pack, Ruth Jeavons, Dr Steuard Jensen, and Mark Edmunds.. for their input, and help with reading drafts. Special thanks to Caitlin Russell for the graphics on pages 329 and 378, and for going along with my brutalist design for the cover, rather against her better judgement. Thanks too to Google and Wikipedia for making the previously endless job of checking dates and spellings so much more enjoyable. Also to all the good people who have made various diagrams and pictures available on the www. I acknowledge their skills and generosity here. If someone would like a specific mention, please contact me. I cannot afford to pay a fee, I regret, but shall be very glad to offer a personal thankyou and a free copy of this ebook. If you feel you would like to reproduce a passage from DarwinPlus! please feel free to do so, but I would greatly appreciate it if you could acknowledge the source, and let me know where the extract will be used. I would like to know who is reading what, as you will no doubt understand. Many thanks. For any directly commercial re-use, please contact me at www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk Finally, but by no means least, thanks to Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, for getting me thinking, and to the authors of all the other inspiring and interesting books I read in the course of preparing this one. *** A caution: I include a number of internet hyperlinks in this text, but I'm afraid I cannot guarantee that they will all be up and running when and if you choose to use them. Paper still has its place, I guess!
Contents
Part One Problem? What problem?
Intro Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Spooks or No Spooks? Darwin's 'Creator' Some Puzzling Logic Why Materialism? A Positive Alternative So Where's the Evidence? DNA is Served PAGE 4 11 21 32 41 55 63
Part Two So that's the problem! Now what?

Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10a Chapter 10b Chapter 11 All in the Mind Philosophy, or er. A Brief History of Materialism a) Ditto b) The Tale of the Kale 76 91 102 112 124
Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20
Religion Yoga Exo and Eso Dreams and Hypnosis Vibes and Intuition The Occult The Occult: a Little More Mind and Brain The Paranormal
137 159 181 202 220 240 259 281 302
Part Three A Solution?

Chapter 21a Chapter 21b Chapter 21c A Great Surprise (DarwinPlus!) Another Great Surprise And Another No Great Surprise Time, etc A Paradigm Fit for Burning Movement 318 333 336
Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25
342 363 384 395
Part Four It all Seems to Fit.

Chapter 26 Other Implications of DarwinPlus: (i) Religion (ii) Philosophy etc The Price We're Paying So Who's to Blame? A Few Conclusions At Last! 409
Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30
440 467 482 504
A Word to The Reader
How to get the best out of this book. The text is in two formats. The normal one, like this, and passages in a smaller font, tinted in a restful shade of blue.
Like this.
The normal font sets out the main points I want to make. The smaller font passages mainly just add extra examples or matters arising, or an occasional joke. In other words, you don't need to read the smaller font in order to read the book. I suggest that you read the normal passages straight through, and if you find the a particular theme of special interest, then it might be worth rereading, adding the smaller font passages as you go. Or you can pick and mix. Or decide against the whole thing and go to the seaside instead. I wish you a lovely day, whatever. Oh.. and I hope you don't mind me addressing you directly as 'dear reader' from time to time. I find it helps me to concentrate. CG Newcastle Emlyn West Wales September 2011
Part One Problem? What problem?
This section discovers that there is a profound problem at the very foundation of what science accepts as a sound base to build upon .
Introduction
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored
Aldous Huxley
Are science and religion compatible? Yes, they are, despite all the slings and arrows the defenders of each respective faith throw at each other.
'Faith'? Science is a 'faith'? As a method of investigation, no it is not. But there is one extremely powerful element in current science which most definitely is an act of faith, and no good has come of it; and I don't mean 'evolution'. Any ideas? If not, this book is definitely for you.
What makes me so confident? Because my only belief is in logic, and logic leads straight to this conclusion. I can hear your gasp from here, but it's true. So why has nobody else worked this out? I've no idea. It's not exactly rocket surgery. Perhaps thousands have worked it out but have not thought to mention it to the rest of us. Or maybe we've just not been listening? Or maybe it's because of a near-universal human problem I've 'discovered' in my own search for some sort of logical understanding of What It's All About, and that somehow, in far too many places, logic has got forgotten. I will explain all as the book progresses, I hope, though it might be a bumpy journey for some: especially anyone with a firm conviction that they already have a firm grasp of 'the truth', thankyou very much. All I ask of you, dear reader, is that you put all convictions on hold for the duration, and simply work with the requirements of logic. No harm will come of this, I promise. In fact, I will be surprised if it does not untangle a couple of knots in your present philosophy. It has untangled a fair number for me. As everybody's life is a journey of shifting and expanding horizons, I've chosen to write in terms of my own mental journey, which I suspect a lot of people will find familiar, at least in part. My journey followed a definite path, from a childhood interest in ghosts and suchlike, to an understanding of why science didn't share my interest in spooks, and then on to an understanding of why science at one point even refused to acknowledge the existence of 'Mind' itself. Many other puzzles of a similar sort raised their heads. Then one day I realised what all these puzzles had in common, and what the underlying problem was. Step One.
DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal
Religion, meanwhile, had been a constant bewilderment to me. I'd spent 500 enforced hours in the school chapel and had come out none the wiser, and positively resentful. How could clapped-out myths and gobbledegook possibly have any relevance to anything? But the more I read and the more I thought outside the box, particularly after completing Step One, the more I could tease out from beneath the surface of tired old 'religion'. Step Two. Eventually, and much to my surprise, it became clear to me that both science and religion have much more in common than they realise. And not necessarily in a good way. Step Three. After worrying at this for many months, I suddenly realised that it would take the briefest of intellectual steps to rationally reconnect religion with science. So why hadn't it already been done and been seen to have been be done? Again, I've no idea. Actually.. after some twenty years of reading and thinking, and thinking again I think I now do have an idea why. Step Four. Now comes the tricky bit, of writing it all down in a way that makes my train of thought clear to you, dear reader, so you can judge for yourself. Step Five. The final link in the chain, that of logically analysing all my points and suggestions, without dragging in any favourite old beliefs you've been taught to hang on to, is down to you. I wish you joy! Please do check that my logic really is logic, but don't make assumptions about what hidden agenda I have. I don't have one, honestly. Logic is my only guide. And please don't assume that if I say x, that I must therefore mean y and z as well. I don't. I mean only x. If I do mean y or z as well, I will say so.
I've done my best to check everything that is presented as fact, but clearly my claims can only be as correct as my sources of information. There will be sure to be some errors of fact, for which I apologise, and areas of debated 'fact'; but none serious, I believe. I think the logic will remain, whatever. You will be the judge. It took literally years trying to work out how to present this book, and where to start it. I was originally going to write it as an academic investigation, but eventually rejected that route in favour of the 'personal journey'. After all, it had been a dramatic personal journey for me, and I thought it might be more interesting as a journey for you too. The book is cross-disciplinary in nature, and I am aware of the fact that I sometimes deal with issues too briefly. Part of me aches to fill out the details, or deal with 'objections' and counter-objections, but space is limited, and some sort of shape has to be maintained.
DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal 2
I've also done my best to reassure the careful and critical reader that I will be returning to an unfinished point later in the book, by adding 'More later' here and there. 'Far too often' many will say. Sorry but the intention is to reassure not irritate. If you know for a fact that some of my own quoted 'facts' are simply and absolutely wrong, please do contact me via my website (www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk) and give me adequate solid (and comprehensible: ie, not too technical) references so I can check your versions against mine. Thanks very much. I also make occasional judgements concerning historical movements and events, which I believe to be tenable. But if I am definitely wrong in a particular judgement, again, I would love to hear from you. But only if 'definitely wrong', please! And if you can think of a way I can make a point more clearly, then that would be valuable to me as well. Thanks. Much as I would like to, I'm afraid pressure of time won't allow me to indulge in debate about anything in the book. I've said all I have to say within the present pages. You will make your own judgement on the issues, hopefully after carefully re-reading them to be sure you really understand what I am saying, and then discussing them at great length with many friends.
Chapter 1 Spooks or No Spooks?

that is the question.
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Even the longest journey, the Chinese say, begins with the first step. So maybe it would make sense to start this journey with my first glimmering of intellectual frustration, although I was too young at the time to think in such terms. When I was thirteen or so, Dad used to read The Daily Telegraph and on Sunday, The Observer. All very boring. But my Auntie Ida, who lived over the river, in Toxteth, used to buy the much more interesting Tit-Bits and Reveille. Every now and then, these chatty little mags would find space among the pin-up girls and horoscopes for stories like 'Lady in Red Crinoline Startles Courting Couple', or 'Plates Flew Round the Room, Says Vicar'. I read them in the same sense that I would read anything else, and was vaguely puzzled by two things: firstly, why hadn't Science (I was a great fan of science, as was Dad) put a stop to all this nonsense, if it was nonsense? And secondly surely it must be nonsense, mustn't it? After all, a visitation from some sort of parallel reality, crinolined or not, is a very big deal, wouldn't you say, especially to science? And how can plates fly round a room of their own volition, as witnessed by a respectable vicar? Even aged thirteen or so, I knew Big Stuff when I saw it. So why did The Observer not send in a hit squad of top investigators? 'All nonsense', presumably.
Throughout this book you will find some unusual uses of initial capitals. For example, I will sometimes refer to 'science' and at other times to 'Science'. I use the former when referring to 'science' as a discipline, or method, or pursuit, as in: ' Man's pursuit of science has been a story of gradual accumulation, punctuated by moments of insight'. I use the latter when referring to the broad consensus of opinion of the scientific community, as in: ' we are assured by Science that there is no purpose in or to the universe..' Clearly, this is not meant to mean that every single scientist holds this view or any other that I make in generality. I use 'religion' and 'Religion' similarly. Occasionally I will capitalise other words and phrases in order to make similar distinctions. I hope these uses aid clarity, as they are intended to. Once in a while I'm not sure whether to use a capital or not. Nothing's easy, is it? If in doubt, I don't capitalise. I hope nothing is lost by this.
The trouble with it all being nonsense was twofold for me. First of all, I knew that ghosts and poltergeists had been known and reported from every society I'd ever heard of, and for hundreds of years. Were all these people fools or liars? And more importantly, I knew two people, both perfectly sensible adults, who had bought a pub in Shropshire, who told me about a ghost they regularly saw passing outside the kitchen window and then walking through a wall and disappearing. They had tried several times to speak to this hunched-up old lady in black but she paid them no attention, and continued to walk into and apparently through the same solid brick wall as if it simply wasn't there. These were sane and rational people, and good observers (he had been a Battle of Britain pilot). And no, they did not 'drink'. And no, they were not teasing me. Kids are good at spotting that sort of thing. Well I was, anyway. Back home, I mentioned this old lady ghost to a couple of friends, who, predictably, took the mickey. At school I made a tangential mention of it to our biology teacher, who was more directly scathing. Why was everyone so negative, I wondered? And so emotionally abusive? Why did nobody seem to think, as I did, that this was a profound mystery that needed looking into in a spirit of calm and proper scientific enquiry? I read a couple of books from the library and became convinced that there really was a great mystery here. There were dozens of reports, well-attested by reliable people, of strange sightings in numerous English castles, pubs and airfields. Hampton Court and the Drury Lane theatre are consistently reported as being haunted. So why did there seem to be some sort of global conspiracy of denial? After all, it could not be a question of 'belief', even though the common question chucked at me was 'You don't believe in ghosts, do you?' Surely, it was a matter of fact, one way or the other? Either ghosts did exist, or they did not. Belief didn't come into it. So why the wall of silence; and why the derision? Adolescence soon posed other and more immediate problems for me
Girls and exams, since you ask; edited details upon application.
and I let the questions fade into the background. It was clear to me that the science teachers and the school chaplains had nothing to say to each other, and seemed not to be interested in debating their differences for the benefit of the students, either. Each party was happily marooned on its own little island. I only once dared to raise my own perplexity at this and was repaid with scorn by the science teacher, and waffle by the priest. I gave up. Sarcasm and dogma had beaten me.
After turning down an offer to train as a nuclear engineer, I squeaked into university and squeaked out again with a modest degree in Slavonic Studies. The course did not greatly engage me, and I was always more than a little bothered by 'What is the point of all this? Why do I or any other sane person need to study the philology of Proto-Indo-European, as possibly spoken several centuries BCE, or even the relatively spanking new Old Church Slavonic?'
For example:
Declension of *wkos Nominative Vocative Accusative Instrumental Dative Ablative Genitive Locative Singular *wkos *wke *wkom *wkoh *wkoey *wkead *wkosyo *wkey Dual *wkoh *wkoh *wkoh ? ? ? ? ? Plural *wkoes *wkoes *wkons *wkys *wko(y)mos *wko(y)mos *wkooHom *wkoysu
You will note that in this fully-inflected declension of the Proto-Indo-European word for 'wolf', that the singular instrumental case is identical to the dual vocative. Fun, eh? Actually, something that has always bothered me about language is how such complications as declensions and conjugations ever arose in the first place. It seems to go completely against the run of how people generally treat language: ie, to constantly seek to simplify it. For example, English has gradually shaken off almost all its old conjugations like 'thou goest' and so on, along with vocatives and instrumentals and so forth. So how did it ever come about that the more primitive the society the more complex the language? Any ideas? More on language as we progress. It's very relevant to the book. Just as a matter of interest, the instrumental case is used to express 'by means of', as in 'He severed his opponent's head with ('by means of') a wolf'. Neat. The vocative is used when addressing an entity directly, as in this dual case of 'O both wolves' Some cultures and languages are on a hiding to nothing it seems to me.
But I did enjoy my time at university, and met my future wife there, so I had no complaints at all, apart from a vague feeling that there must be something else to life than learning more and more about less and less, which is what academia seemed to be about.
Significantly, to me at least, the most powerful memories I have of those three years are of a couple of paranormal experiences. Should we call 'hypnosis' paranormal? I do, but if you don't, that's OK. It doesn't matter.
Paranormal: Beyond the range of normal experience or current scientific explanation.
The facts are 1) that hypnosis is known to work, but 2) nobody knows how, or perhaps more interestingly, 'why' (which is why I classify it as 'paranormal').
'How?' and 'Why?'...the great divide. Science claims that it is not concerned with the 'Why?' of things, merely the 'How?'. This is because current Science thinks there is no 'Why?' to be answered. It's all chance. More later.
I had joined the university's Society for Psychical Research and went along to an open demonstration of hypnosis one evening, conducted by a man whose name I've unfortunately forgotten. He was of mature years, and was a practising surgeon, who used hypnosis as part of his patient recovery system. He told his audience of a hundred or so of how he had hypnotically removed all the pain from an airman who had lost a leg crash-landing a damaged Lancaster bomber during the war. The next time he visited the patient he asked how the leg was feeling. 'Fine,' said the airman, and to prove his point he punched his stump. This started the bleeding again. 'The "moral" of this', the surgeon said 'is that I now never take away all the pain. Just 'enough'.' This intrigued me very powerfully: that the Mind, and somebody else's Mind at that, could control pain partially or absolutely, at will
More on Mind and Matter in Chapters 20 and 23.
The other powerful memory is of a couple of months I spent with a few friends exploring the Ouija phenomenon,
until it scared me witless and I (a firm sceptic of both religion and, until very recently, the Ouija phenomenon) spent the night with my postcard of El Greco's Crucifixion on my bedside chair, close to my head, too frightened to go to sleep.
More on the Ouija business in Chapter 18.
I had no idea what to do with my life and drifted into the family trade of teaching, in a comprehensive school in the Black Country. You didn't need a teaching qualification in those days, so most of my time was spent learning how to teach. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and remember being impressed with the openness of the kids' minds. They asked questions, which was refreshing. They weren't all that interested in Old Church Slavonic either, which was also refreshing. I joined the national Society for Psychical Research, following my experiences at university, and eventually carried out a mass testing of the whole school for latent clairvoyance, using a pack of Zener cards, in conjunction with Professor Beloff of Edinburgh University.
A pack of Zener cards contains five each of the following cards:
The odds on guessing a particular symbol correctly are a neat one in five. You can have a lot of fun with a home-made pack.
The results were... inconclusive, as they always seemed to be in this area of investigation. Nonetheless, there were occasional flickers that continued to intrigue me and lead me on. My personal Ouija experiences had convinced me absolutely that there were secrets to be discovered here, but yet again, I was bewildered by the lack of interest most people showed in any of this stuff. Could nobody else see the potential that lurked behind it? The implications? Then came the 1970's, domesticity, and parenthood, and little time or inclination for following up on life's mysteries. I still found religion incomprehensible, especially as each sect seemed to hate its rivals even more than other religions, or indeed outright atheists.
This was a powerful trait amongst early immigrants to America, where the Congregationalist majority tried to repress the Baptist, Anglican, and Quaker minorities. Four Quakers were actually executed, just for being Quakers the most peaceable people imaginable. It took an English parliament's Act of Tolerance to sort it all out. So much for fleeing to freedom from the tyrannous domination of The Church.
Two major points bothered me: Why would anyone want to impose his own religious views upon somebody else? I'm thinking here of the Crusades, the Catholic Inquisitions, and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In recent years we have seen other examples, of course. And why was it that, despite all the intolerance and slaughter that Religion has brought to the world, people still took it seriously, in their billions?
Here meaning 'Big Religion': ie, organised, political, and monolithic.
What was going on here? Every society I'd ever heard of had some sort of transcendental or paranormal element to it, and many of these societies were spectacular achievers in other fields. The Indians, for example, developed arithmetic and maths while we in the West were still developing the pointed stick. The Egyptians built impossibly complex granite structures inside the pyramids, apparently using copper tools even earlier than that. And both of these societies were very heavily religious. And I knew that Isaac Newton, often called the greatest scientist of all time, was a religious obsessive. All this was a profound puzzle that I knew I needed to address for my own peace of mind one day. If rubbish, why rubbish? If not rubbish, why not? Interestingly, I gained some insight on these matters by getting involved in politics and joining the Labour Party in a safe Conservative constituency. After a year or so it dawned upon me that quite a number of the people I was mixing with were of a sectarian persuasion very like people in religious groups. The traditional Labourites and the Militant Tendency were at daggers drawn; the International Socialists couldn't get on with the International Marxist Group; and everybody hated the soppy liberal wing. Some people definitely put more effort into doing down another sect within their own party than they ever did in elections which hoped to reduce the Tory majority from 30,000 to something a little more manageable. This insight, of the tendency towards splitting, will surface again later, when I look at it more closely, and even give it a fancy name because it doesn't seem to already have one. My other problem, concerning the enduring popularity of religion, remained as a complete mystery. The only conclusion I could come to was that no, all these clever people and societies could not reasonably be written off as all fools or knaves. To do this would be, in my view, an unreasonable arrogance. There must be something afoot. Something they all shared in common deep down somewhere. But what? And how to
discover it, and disentangle it from all the sectarian baggage and rubbish that was obscuring the fundamental commonality so effectively? Or maybe there actually was no commonality; just random daydreams and mental confections? Sugar pies in the skies? I needed to know. That was as far as I got in the 1970's. The 1980's saw our family up sticks and change our lives radically, moving from safe and enjoyable circumstances in a leafy Nottingham suburb, to trying to set up and run an organic smallholding from scratch, in West Wales. The idea was to put our Green money where our mouth was, and to become reasonably selfsufficient, while growing garlic as a cash crop to pay for things like phone bills and petrol. Clearly, this level of change was both exhilarating and stressful. The exhilaration was fun, but the stress eventually caught up with me and floored me, literally, and I was hauled up to bed: 'We've run every test we can think of and you haven't got brucellosis, Weil's disease, liver failure or a bad heart: it's got to be M.E.', the doctor said, just three years into our new life. It was devastating. For the whole of the winter and following spring I slept for most of the day, had lurid dreams, stank of vinegar, and was as weak as.. well, as weak as somebody completely wrecked by M.E.
M.E.: 'Myalgic Encephalitis'. Also myalgic encephalopathy, post-viral fatigue syndrome, Royal Free disease, Tapanui flu, yuppie flu and a dozen other names, often generalised as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Everything goes into hibernation: intellect, emotions, will, and, above all, the body. Some people have a terrible and painful time of it. I was just totally exhausted in all respects.
I obviously couldn't work, but the land still needed rotavating; crops still needed sowing and planting; lambs still needed birthing; and the cow still needed milking twice a day. And of course, our two children needed tending to. Anne worked miracles, every day for six months. I was no good on the farm, but surely there must be something I could do? Well... on a good day, I could read
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Chapter 2 Darwin's 'Creator'

It may be conceit, but I believe the subject may interest the public
Charles Darwin
In a letter to his publisher, asking if he would be interested in publishing On the Origin of Species.
I began by reading a bit of lightweight science fiction, something I'd previously enjoyed, but which now, I discovered, did not satisfy. I tried other fiction but couldn't get on with that, either. It somehow felt like timewasting. Pickwick Papers just didn't do it any more. My old interests in the paranormal re-surfaced, and I read a couple of pop ghost books, but they were too vague and sensational, and contained photographs that were all too easily fakeable or just plain risible; and none of them contained any sensible ideas on what ghosts really were, and how they came to be. I needed something I could get my teeth into, written by someone I could trust and respect. One day a friend lent me Mysteries by Colin Wilson. I'd once read CW's learned book The Outsider, and knew him for an interesting, thoughtful, and responsible writer.
If you are not yet persuaded that there are some very strange things going on in the world that science never seems to have got round to properly explaining, I recommend reading something by CW (try Mysteries and Poltergeist for starters), and by Lyall Watson (Supernature; Lifetide; The Romeo Error) and then see if you still feel that way. There are a lot of similar books, many of which are bandwaggoning and unreliably sensationalist. I commend Wilson and Watson as they are both trained scientifically (in biology), and can distinguish evidence from fantasy and rumour. You might also try John G Fuller's Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife.
What this book did for me was to wake me up again to the fact that our universe really is a most peculiar place, which, despite the best efforts of people like my old biology teacher to reduce everything to mindless chemicals is actually packed full of baffling oddities and anomalies.
Were you ever told by a science teacher, usually with some glee, that you are nothing but 20 kilos of carbonated water, or whatever, and enough iron to make a nail? And did you, like me, find yourself thinking'Hmm.. something missing here, surely How can chemicals think, for example? And why is this teacher so pleased to be telling his students that they are essentially worthless?' Colin Wilson, meanwhile, documents cases of dowsing from maps with pendulums, lucid dreaming, psychokinesis and levitation, among many other strangenesses. How
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can a bunch of chemicals do any of these things? We'll be coming back to some of these issues later.
In other words, the problem I already had with Science ignoring ghosts and Ouija board phenomena had suddenly burgeoned into a huge field of anomalous occurrences, including near-death experiences (NDE's), out of body experiences (OOBE's), premonitions and clairvoyance, many of which had been well-attested by people who would usually be regarded as good witnesses: policemen; teachers; clergy; pilots; doctors; university professors, even. I broadened my reading to include the books of Charles Fort and other writings, particularly in the realm of proper psychical research.
The Book of the Damned and Lo!. The 'damned' in the title refers to strange reports and evidence that Science ignores or belittles. Also The Reach of the Mind by Professor JB Rhine and The Infinite Hive by Rosalind Heywood.
The more I read, the more I became convinced that Science, for some reason, was ducking or avoiding not just one or two anomalous issues, but a whole mountain of them. Why? Presumably there must be some sort of absolute and logical reason for this. I eventually came to two conclusions: I needed to find out what it was, precisely, about all these anomalies that Science found so objectionable, and, of course, why? I'd come across a quote by William James, the psychologist, to the effect that you only need one white crow to disprove the theory that all crows are black. Thus, a single clear-cut anomaly would blow a fatal hole in any 'absolute' theory at all, whatever it might be. I needed to see if I could find this white crow. So putting these two conclusions together with my growing conviction that there was something awry somewhere in the way Science viewed reality, I needed to channel my reading down two paths: 'the philosophy of science', which would probably also include the history of the philosophies of science; and some more reading in the realms of psychical research, to see if I could find just one absolutely clear-cut, well-attested, and unfakeable anomaly. Just one would suffice. Then, once I had discovered by what absolute principle Science was dead set against such anomalies, I could hold up my white crow, and say 'But what about this?' It might be of no interest to anybody else, especially not biology teachers or chaplains on their respective desert islands, but it certainly would be to me.
Where to start?
'How do you meet an elephant?' 'One bit at a time.'
I thought that I might as well make a start on the history with what was perhaps the most important scientific book ever published: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. I found a Thinker's Library edition in a charity shop and made a start.
The Thinker's Library published some 140 academic and factual books for the man in the street in the 1930's and '40's. The books had a strong atheistic and 'rationalist' bias, in accord with the prevailing ethos of the period. More on this mood in Chapter 27.
To my great surprise, I found it to be a very readable work, and not the great wodge of Victorian stodge I was expecting. In measured sentences, backed by mountains of evidence, Darwin slowly spelled out his sensational theory: that the world's species of plants and animals were not created as fixed and 'perfect' entities as had been previously and generally accepted as dogmatic truth, as propagated by The Church. In fact, Darwin showed, species slowly changed over time, morphing from one form to another, as climates and conditions varied. Thus, finches from one Galapagos Island differed quite significantly in their beak shape from finches from another nearby Island, depending upon what food sources were available. Those birds with the most suitable beaks survived to breed others like themselves; the others didn't. Eventually each island sported its own finch variation. This in itself was not necessarily earth-shattering news, as people had always known that dogs and pigeons could be bred to emphasise specific shapes and capacities, but Darwin now went a step further. Up till now dogs had always been dogs: no matter how much you bred them, they remained the same species, meaning 'capable of successful breeding among themselves'.
Although some might need stepladders from time to time
However, in nature, and over many millennia, Darwin suggested that species themselves could variegate according to the process of 'natural selection', as the Galapagos finches had done, right up to the point when one localised group of creatures could no longer breed with their previous peers, and thus became what we call a new species.
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Darwin eventually adopted the phrase 'survival of the fittest' as suggested by Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. This phrase has caused a heap of trouble, as it has been frequently mistaken to mean 'survival of the most brutal' rather than 'most appropriate', as Darwin intended it. More later.
Thus, left to nature, some dogs would eventually become, well a new species of 'not quite dogs'.
All dogs, including Australian dingoes, are descended from wild wolves, and share some 99% of their genes. The dingoes on Fraser Island, off Queensland, are isolated from other dogs. Thus, Darwin would predict, one day they might become a new species. But don't hold your breath; these things take time, and lots of it.
The world-changing book ended with one of the best finales of all time:
'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.'
Stanley Kubrick must surely have had that sentence somewhere in mind when he filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey. What struck me most about this sentence, apart from its magnificent sweep and cadences, was the mention of 'the Creator'. I'd always vaguely thought that Darwin was an atheist. How had I come to think that? And what did that 'Creator' signify? Whatever, to my mind, Darwin made such a strong case for evolution, that surely no reasonable person could gainsay it. But of course, lots of people did gainsay it, led vociferously by The Church who, up till now, had held a monopoly on theories of cosmology and creation.
I here mean the Church of England, although the Catholic Church had trouble with Evolution, too. Lots of people still gainsay it: According to a CBS News poll last month, 51 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution, saying that God created humans in their present form. And reflecting a longstanding sentiment, 38 percent of Americans believe that creationism should be taught instead of evolution, according to an August poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington. according to The New York Times in 2005.
The official view was that proposed by Archbishop Us(s)her of Armagh who had in the seventeenth century done a bit of back-calculating through all the generations of 'begetting' in the Old Testament, and other sources, and had come up with the declaration that the world was created by God,
about 6,000 years ago, during the six days beginning with the evening of Oct 22 4004 BCE. This calculation was anonymously inserted into some Authorised Versions of the Bible in 1701, and gradually became a dogmatic truth for many, if not most.
Were the Archbishop's declaration to be accurate, I find myself wondering what God was doing all the previous morning. As a piece of logic this heroic calculation is so riddled with holes as to be unworthy of serious consideration (especially as the good bishop also calculated the end of the world to be upcoming in October 1996). However, dogma has never had much in common with logic. Hence this book. The Archbishop also calculated that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BCE, and that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 2348 BCE 'on a Wednesday'.
The geologist Charles Lyell and Darwin had showed, beyond any reasonable doubt (as opposed to dogmatic rejection) that fossilised sea shells, such as those currently embedded in the rocks of Mount Everest, and thus several miles up in the sky, and the endless trillions of animal skeletons that make up the white cliffs of Dover, not to mention all the other-worldly-looking remnants of extinct and fossilised dinosaurs that had begun popping up all over the place, suggested overpoweringly that species had not been created perfect and changeless, once and for all, one October a few brief centuries back, (just shortly before the Egyptians started to make their mark), but instead had arisen via the track of 'natural selection', according to the climate and availability of food in a given region at a given time.
It seems that fossilised seashells are found embedded in Mount Everest as a result of the enormous geological deformations brought about by India crashing, very slowly, into Tibet, thus forcing up the Himalayas, sedimentary fossils and all, as a crumple zone. 'Evolution' had arrived, and 'fluidity' had entered the world of biology, just as Copernicus and Galileo had introduced it to astronomy three hundred years before. More on fluidity later.
Well, I was impressed by Darwin's simple reasoning and evidence. How could anyone not be? It was simply more evidential and reasonable than the Creationist view that The Church seemed to be set on defending. It explained more things, more coherently, and more rationally.
More on Creationism later. In the meantime, it seemed to me that most Creationists are not idiots, and they know perfectly well that there are real problems with taking every single word of the Bible absolutely literally, not least such clear-cut contradictions as 'an eye for an eye' and 'turn the other cheek'. Their problem is that they
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don't know how else to protest against what they see as the absolute and literally ungodly power that Science has over society.
My own questions here, and perhaps yours, are: On the one hand, Why has Science become as 'ungodly' as it clearly has? And on the other hand, Why is 'evolution' thought of as being 'ungodly' by Creationists, especially as Darwin himself refers to 'the Creator'? But another problem was troubling me: if Darwin was happy to refer to 'the Creator', which is about as 'paranormal' an entity as you can get, why had my biology teacher, a great fan of Darwin, been so scathingly antiparanormal? The next step, I thought, would be to read a bit more about Darwin and his times, and then see what modern scientists, the variegated descendants of Darwin, so to speak, had to say. I kept my eye open, and found a couple of books of interesting essays and historical pieces, but then one day I found a recent Penguin re-print of Origins containing what looked to be an interesting modern Introduction. What a treasure! I started with the new Introduction, but was pulled up sharp on page 13, where the author claimed that Darwin was offering 'a purely material' view of Nature. But just a minute didn't Darwin refer to 'the Creator' more than once in Origins, even in that famous final sentence? How can you square 'the Creator' with 'purely material'?
If I understood 'purely material' correctly. To me, 'materialistic' meant being greedy for worldly goods, but that didn't seem adequate, and a 'purely material' explanation of something must mean 'an explanation in terms of worldly things', and not other-worldly things like 'the Creator', presumably. This didn't seem like a good enough definition though. I would need to chase this up at some point. I did, of course, and was amazed at what it led to. More later.
I turned to the final sentence, and read:

'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.'
I guess you will have spotted what is missing. Where has 'the Creator' gone? And what of that odd phrase 'breathed into'. What did the breathing? Only living entities 'breathe'. I already knew that breathing onto things, to
cure or create, had a widely used religious (ie, non-'material') connotation. So what we have here is an unspoken paranormal being of some sort 'breathing' life into 'forms', without actually naming him/her/it. Odd I found on page 49 a note which explained: this edition was not the final thoughts of Darwin (ie, the sixth edition, of 1872) but a reprint of the first edition of 1859. My immediate response was 'Why?' Why would anyone reprint an author's first thoughts and not his final ones? Had anybody done this with Einstein or Galileo? The note went on to add that this first edition was 'in many ways a more clear-cut and forceful version than the later editions'. But if I'd written a world-altering book which ran to six editions and sold by the multiple millions, I would be quite sure that I would want my final thoughts reprinted and not my first. I was puzzled. The Introduction went on to claim that Darwin watered down his theories in later editions after criticisms by fellow scientists Kelvin and Jenkin. But, as the author explained, these criticisms were to do with estimated eras of geological time, and a point of genetics. They were not to do with 'the Creator'. Therefore, presumably, the addition of 'the Creator' to the final sentence of later editions was Darwin's own idea, and nothing to do with 'watering-down', or surely the writer of the Introduction would have said so? And it was the 'Creator-or-ape' business that really mattered (although not spelled out by Darwin in Origins) and which caused all the ructions with The Church and society at large, not details of geology or genetics.
You may wish to raise all manner of other points here concerning Darwin's views and motives, and there are already plenty of interesting books on this subject, but my personal interests in this book are: What did Darwin actually say in Origins? What have people claimed Darwin said in Origins? (And, ultimately) Why do people claim what they claim? As a matter of interest, in his television series called Twelve Books that Changed the World, Lord Bragg quoted that famous final sentence from Origins. But again, it was a quote from the first (Creatorless) and not the definitive final edition. Why? The good lord also claimed that 'We are an accidental event' and 'Darwin thought that life came about naturally'. Given that the meaning of the word 'naturally' in the second quote is less than crystal clear, it is quite apparent that Lord B has also overlooked Darwin's 'Creator'. How could such a respected polymath have missed this? Curiouser and curiouser.
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It is difficult for us, 150 years on, to appreciate the violence of the storm that Origins caused. The Church, with its power over people's minds, especially in the fields of cosmology and ontology found the notion of Evolution, and its implications for the origins of Man himself, profoundly threatening, and responded with smug derision; much of the press, as is normal, colluded with the powers of the day. Scientists and 'rationalists' thundered back.
Ontology: the study of 'being' and what it means. Rationalist: originally meaning 'one who pursues reason'. Its meaning has changed, however. More later.
Opinions became polarised: subtlety became reduced to slogans; shouting replaced discussion; and then reason, as ever, got forgotten, and the real issue, along with its subtle implications, became subsumed in a welter of aggravation and triumphalism.
More on this very important matter later.
*** This was all very interesting, and I would have loved to have been able to carry on with this research, but Real Life intervened once more, and I was unable to continue with my efforts, being either too ill or too busy with necessary things, like trying to earn a living while firing on only two cylinders
Which was rather more than our poor old tractor, a magnificent Little Grey Fergie, one of the greatest design icons of all time.. but my paltry skills and lack of time and energy meant that Fergie didn't like doing the one essential thing a man can ask of his workhorse: starting.
The horribly wet spring of 1986 had been nigh-on disastrous for us, as it wiped out every one of the 60,000 garlic plants which were to be the basis of our cash crop, to pay our council tax and so forth. It was a low point. But there's always sunshine after rain, as I'm sure someone must have said, and to cut a long and rather dreary story short after a couple of dramatic and anxious years of boom and bust, when I was either full of beans (in the summer) or completely prostrate (in the winter) my health began to stabilise. By 1990 the M.E. had settled down into a dull wash, leaving me with about 50-60% of my previous capacities, dropping to 30% on bad days.
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In those intervening years, I didn't give up completely on the research. (How could I? It was all too intriguing) and took to haunting local second-hand bookshops when we took a rare trip out, usually to sell a few veg or to visit the dentist. On our level of income, and with two kids to raise, new books were out of the question, so Fred's and Leo's emporia were invaluable, as were the half dozen charity shops in Carmarthen and Newcastle Emlyn. I picked up scores of suitable books and even had to (slowly!) put up a couple of extra shelves. From the new books I learned that Darwin was very much aware, right from the start, that his book was a bombshell. He was so nervous of the trouble he knew it would cause that he sat on his findings for a full twenty years before publishing,
Given this, you would imagine that he would have mentioned 'the Creator' more times rather than fewer in his first edition, wouldn't you?.. to smooth the path a little, rather than to antagonise? But no he started with seven mentions (of which two were 'positive' as in 'non-dismissive') and eventually revised this up to nine (three positive mentions), including that famous last sentence, years after all the furore had subsided.
And, even then, he published only when his hand was forced by receiving a letter from the orient from an Alfred Russel Wallace, another botanist who had come to very similar conclusions to Darwin. Charles Darwin became a household name, while Alfred Wallace sank into near-obscurity.
But I'll be returning to the excellent Mr Wallace later.
So.. where was I now? Quite shocked; not just by the contradiction between the judgement of Darwin being 'purely material' while the author himself refers positively to 'the Creator' twice in the first edition; but also by the free-hanging 'breather' in the last sentence; and also by what seemed to me to be the strange practice of putting out a non-representative version of Darwin's final views. Why? Could it be that someone (presumably a modern scientist) was somehow embarrassed by Darwin The Hero of Evolution admitting to some sort of paranormal necessity, and thought that the first edition was thus slightly more 'suitable' than the last? Surely not
It is perfectly true that CD did have problems with 'religion', meaning by this 'Christianity as believed and practised in middle-class Victorian England'. His favourite daughter Annie had died aged 10 after a nasty illness. As a consequence CD could not accept the Christian dogma of a personal and benevolent God. But he was a clear enough thinker to know that a Prime Cause (which he called 'Creator') is an entirely
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separate matter from 'a personal and benevolent God'. Hence, he insisted on a Creator while rejecting the God of Love of organised religion. Just for the record, he also wrote in a letter of 1879, to a Mr J Fordyce: 'In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.' This was written three years before he died, and 20 years after Origins first appeared. I think we can call this a mature opinion. More on this in the next chapter.
Questions questions I'd heard the name of Richard Dawkins mentioned as a leading light in the field of evolutionary studies, and chanced upon a dog-eared copy of his book The Blind Watchmaker in Oxfam. I turned to Mr Dawkins, a 'neo-Darwinist', to solve my problems.
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Chapter 3 Some Puzzling Logic

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler
Albert Einstein
As some strength returned I began to feel well enough to do a bit of light work around the farm, and when I faded I still had enough energy to get back onto the paper trail of spooks and why Science seemed not to want to investigate them. There were lots of questions to be answered, and I wasn't even sure what I needed to know in order to begin answering them. I understood that a 'Darwinist' was someone who approved of Darwin's opinions and theories. But what exactly was a 'neo-Darwinist', such as Mr Dawkins? Darwin accomplished his great theory without any notion of the pioneering work on genetics that was being carried out in another corner of Europe by Gregor Mendel. A decade or two later, as it became apparent that genetics was a powerful new tool, and after a brief period of competitive infighting, biologists realised that the two new theories and mechanisms could be elegantly integrated, and neo-Darwinism was thus born:
Evolution via Natural Selection + Mendelian Genetics = Neo-Darwinism

being the definition given by my Penguin Dictionary of Biology (1973). Technically, it is apparently not absolutely correct, but as rule of thumb it works fine.
Good. I understood that, and was looking forward to reading Richard Dawkins' book. After all, he had said 'What staggers me about Archbishop Usher's statement is not that he was wrong (so was everybody else) but that he was wrong with such precision'. Nicely put. I began The Blind Watchmaker and was deeply impressed by the dozen or more enthusiastic plaudits in the first few pages, clipped from reviews by famous people and newspapers. This clearly was a book of some great moment. I read the Preface and was swept gently along by Mr Dawkins' easy and friendly style. This was good stuff. Mr D would surely answer all my questions. But then something in the second paragraph caught my attention. Mr D states that:
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'Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.'
From this I inferred that RD did not think that biological objects show evidence of true design but rather of what might be mistaken for design (something that might be designated as 'pseudo-design', perhaps); and that non-biological, ie merely physical, objects show no sign even of pseudodesign, never mind design proper.
There is a real linguistic problem here, as English doesn't contain a proper word for 'pseudo-design'. You may think this doesn't matter, but I strongly disagree: watch any tv nature programme and you'll hear the narrator say things like 'the shark is designed for speed', but if questioned, he will agree with RD that the shark is not designed at all. It just looks as though it has been, and for the sake of brevity he is saying the shark is designed because there isn't an alternative word. All well and good, but the fact remains that 'designed' means 'the product of a designer'. That's what the word means. To use it for the sake of brevity or metaphorically, is to court misunderstanding in the listener and, I'm afraid, sloppy thinking in the speaker. More on this slippery use of language later.
But do not molecules have 'design' then? Or atoms? Surely, what makes an atom of oxygen different from one of helium is its 'design', just as much as the 'design' of a vole is what differentiates it from a hippo? Of course, biological 'designs' are far more complex than atoms, but the principle of design (or 'pseudo-design') still holds true as much for an atom as for a vole. Would anyone deny this? Would you? If an atom did not have any element of design, what would it be? Some sort of... mess. At the very least, it would not be 'an atom'. How could it be? It is its very design (of an identical nature to biological design or 'pseudodesign') that gives it its identity as an atom. You may think this is unimportant, but I insist it is not, for reasons we will return to. RD then goes on to state:
'(..man-made artefacts like computers and cars) are complicated and obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive, and they are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood. In this book they will be firmly treated as biological objects.'
Now hang on there, Professor! It seems to me to be entirely unreasonable to 'firmly treat' a mechanical item which is quite clearly designed for a purpose but not alive, as 'a biological object': ie as an object that you are suggesting is not designed for a purpose, but which is alive. The disparity is just too great. One might just
as well say that 'This horse is dead, while this other one is alive; but for the purposes of my argument I will treat them as both being alive'. Starting from the premiss that a computer is directly comparable to a nightingale, or that a goldfish is directly comparable to a bicycle, is bound to lead to faulty conclusions concerning the nature of life and design, surely? I was beginning to be worried by what I was reading. Then, over the page RD states:
'Machines are the direct products of living objects; they derive their complexity and design from living objects, and they are diagnostic of life on a planet. The same goes for fossils, skeletons and dead bodies.'
Oh, come on now! I appreciate that the point the writer is making is one of being 'diagnostic of life', but 'products of 'living objects''? .. Yes, OK, 'living objects', as long as you and I regard ourselves as 'objects', but surely Mr D is being more than a little disingenuous here? 'Living objects' do not create anything simply by virtue of 'living'. 'Intelligence' is the key to producing computers and cars and any sort of machine or artefact from a sun-baked pot upwards, is it not? Dogs are 'living objects' and so are jellyfish and protozoa and geraniums, but you and I are not like them. We are very particular sorts of 'living objects' who have extraordinary creative capacities, well beyond those of dogs and geraniums. Some 'living objects' can write interesting books on biology, for example, which requires a lot more of the writer than basic 'living'. As an example: 'living objects' in the form of humanoids, just 'living' and purposelessly kicking sand around on the seashore, did not make the semiconductor.
Semiconductors, and the chips in your computer are made from very carefully manipulated slivers of silicon, which is itself made from sand, via an extremely complex and hi-tec series of chemical and physical treatments and processes.
It required intelligence and purpose to do that, plus all sorts of other human qualities like: the desire to make something new; the imagination to foresee how a semiconductor might be possible; the planning and foresight to organise the work; the will to actually start the work; the persistence that saw it through; the culture that enabled modern scientists and thinkers to systematically build on the work of their predecessors
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and, to repeat myself, the consistent intelligence and purpose that guided the process through its numerous stages of failure through to success. and, of course.. that mysterious entity we call 'inspiration' or 'intuition', without which, I suggest, nothing new ever happens.
More on Intuition later. To claim, as RD does, that a car is an assembly of parts, each of which obeys certain physical laws is quite true; but it is not the whole truth by a country mile. At the simplest level, if you fit the wrong carburettor to a car, it will no longer be 'a car', in that it will not start or move, and thus will not fulfil the job it was designed to do by the intelligence of people with a purpose and for a purpose. If you then select the correct carburettor and fit it accurately, and then tune it properly, then your 'assembly of parts' (with any luck) will once more be restored to being a car: ie, after the application of intelligence, will, and purpose on your part. Add to this the obvious need for every single one of the 'parts' in the 'assembly' to have been carefully designed, with enormous and sustained quantities of intelligence and purpose, all the way from the smallest nut to the engine block and body shell, and RD's definition of a car as 'an assembly of parts' just looks, well.. simplistic and nave. A shocking thought, but how else would you describe it? And apart from all the above, any 'assembly' is in itself a work of intelligence, by definition.
To compare a computer, which is clearly the result of decades of intelligent design with a fossil, which you are claiming is not the product of intelligent design is, well.. let us say 'very unapt indeed'. I was by now quite alarmed at what I was reading, and I was still only on page 2. No fewer than three very questionable propositions in two pages?
Let's be clear what they are: 1 that a goldfish gives the impression of design, while an atom does not. 2 that a goldfish bowl*, is treatable as a biological (ie 'living') object. 3 that merely 'living' is enough to produce creations, with no mention of intelligence, purpose, will, etc. *One might object that a goldfish bowl is not comparable to a car or computer as a bowl is not a machine; but we are here talking of the principle of design, not the complexity of the artefact, and a goldfish bowl requires the principle of design just as much as a Jumbo Jet does.
I had the distinct impression that these highly questionable propositions were going to form the premisses that the rest of Mr D's argument would derive from.
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A little further on, still on page 2, he says:

'Our brains were designed for hunting and gathering.'
'Our brains were designed' but apparently not as you and I know it, Jim. I could see no way of making sense in this Humpty-Dumpty world, where words mean what RD chooses them to mean, no more, no less.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' (from Alice Through the LookingGlass by Lewis Carroll.) 'Words are our servants, not our masters.' (from The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.) This was rather alarming to me, especially as Mr Dumpty continued with: 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
'Designed' means 'constructed or delineated for a purpose, by an intelligent mind'. Check in any dictionary. And check whether there is also an entry for RD's definition, which is well, I don't know what his definition would be, except possibly 'something which has not been constructed or delineated for a purpose, by an intelligent mind'. I was quite shocked by all this. I was expecting a pleasurable read which would fill in lots of blank spaces for me, and which would explain my problems with why Darwin might be called 'purely material' and why spooks were unacceptable to science. But instead I was confused right from the start by what seemed to me to be several patches of seriously muddled logic. Obviously, my next reaction was of disbelief. This was a world-famous professor, whose book had been lauded to the skies,
and who in 1995 was to become Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford: the highest biologist in the land, if not the world.
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and here was I, a flipping gardener on sick leave, picking holes in his logic. Surely I must be mistaken? I checked and checked again, but couldn't find a flaw in my thinking on any of the four quotes above. I hope you, dear reader will have checked those paragraphs very carefully. Have I made an error of logic? I still think not.
I do most powerfully realise that to criticise anything in the writings of such an eminent man is heresy in eyes of some. But scientific progress is based upon disagreement and criticism, as Professor Dawkins would be the first to agree. Please consider my comments simply through the eyes of logic, and not of any philosophy or long-held and unquestioned belief. I repeat my promise that no harm will come of this. I also promise that much good will eventually derive, if you read on with an open mind.
I read on, but was now on my guard. What I urgently wanted to learn from The Blind Watchmaker was: Question 1: Why was RD, and presumably neo-Darwinists in general, so dead set against there being design in nature? Question 2: What precisely is 'materialism' in the scientific sense, and how precisely does it relate to this 'design'/'no design' business? Question 3: RD's views on the 'purely material' nature of Darwin's theories. And, with any luck Question 4: By what theory or argument did Science (as represented by RD) know that materialism was true and all other views were untrue? Question 5: And, what alternatives to materialism were there, anyway? Lots of other questions arose of course, but that was plenty to be going on with. Mr Dawkins.. lead on! Explain all! I began a very careful read. *** Let's cut to the chase. Did Mr D answer all my questions for me? No. I'm afraid not.
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He did give a very lucid description of the principles and processes of Evolution and Natural Selection, and an introduction to genetics, but the nearest he came to answering my questions were: Question 1: No explanation or discussion; just a bald declamation that there simply is no design in Nature. It is all an illusion. What we perceive as 'design' is simply the result of tiny incremental changes in genes and DNA, Naturally Selected over aeons of time.
But the complexity of living creatures would seem to be entirely in opposition to RD's notion of The Selfish Gene (the title of RD's first book). Surely, if it is allowable to give a gene the highly anthropomorphic quality of 'selfish', then surely that gene will do what selfishness does best: looking after Number One, and thus selfishly aiming to replicate only itself? That's what 'selfish' means. But all the designs (or 'RD-non-designs') of Nature point to quite the contrary state of affairs: a bewilderingly complex display of cooperation between genes. If no cooperation, then no structure of any sort; just a pile of genes. At best, any 'selfish gene' is the progenitor of a cancer, not of an immensely complex and cooperative human body or even a geranium. Or did 'selfish' now mean something else, too? More confusion. We'll come back to this 'selfish gene' business in Chapter 27.
Question 2: There is no mention of materialism in the book, so no definition is offered. Question 3: This was actually a bit disturbing. It is clear that Charles Darwin is RD's hero, and quite right too, but RD seems to have forgotten that CD mentions 'the Creator' in a positive manner in each of the editions of The Origin of Species. In fact RD says that any explanation that has the need for 'a Creator' is 'transparently feeble'. That's one in the eye for poor old Darwin, then, hero or not.
An apology: in a previous book, Scenes from a Smallholding, I stated as fact that the first edition of Origins contained no references to 'the Creator', whereas it actually contains seven, of which two are 'positive', as in 'not dismissive of'. To repeat myself, this number rises to nine mentions by the sixth and final edition of which three, including the famous final sentence are 'positive' in the same sense as above. I am embarrassed for my error, and apologise. Sheer carelessness. It won't happen again.
He also goes on to say that Darwin's explanation for all the improbable creatures we see in the world around us is that they came into being
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'by gradual, step-by-step transformation from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance.' Richard Dawkins
This, I'm afraid, is simply not true. Not only did Darwin acknowledge 'a Creator' in all editions of Origins, but he also states quite unequivocally
'I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.' Charles Darwin
Please read that sentence again, then check it for yourself: 1st paragraph, Chapter 7, 1st edition; or 1st paragraph, Chapter 8, 6th edition. Question 4: There was no discussion of why materialism might or might not be true, and no proof offered. Question 5: No discussion of alternatives to materialism either, although there is mention of 'ying (sic) and yang'. The options he did discuss could all be lumped together as 'materialistic', as I understood the term, though they were never called such. Now obviously it is silly to blame a writer for not writing the book you want him to have written rather than the book he actually wrote, but in this case I think my comments are valid, because my questions are all relevant to the deepest level upon which neo-Darwinist claims seem to be based. Please read the questions again and check whether you agree with me in this judgement of them. For example, 'materialism' seems to be an underlying premiss behind many of RD's claims, but it isn't even mentioned in the book. Surely we could expect to be told why materialism is true, as so much else seems to depend upon this? I found lots of other chunks of faulty logic too, of which perhaps the most important is RD's complete neglect of the relevance of Mind in the role of human creativity, and in the analogies he makes.
I'm using 'Mind' with a capital to mean 'The faculty of mind', as opposed to 'changing one's mind' etc. The capitalisation also helps to draw attention to the extreme importance of this faculty. From now on I will often capitalise Life and Consciousness for the same reason
For example, he shows us a page or two of electronic critters he calls 'biomorphs' which have all resulted from a computer program he wrote. He says that all the diverse little forms he shows us are 'randomly mutated
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progeny' which have developed 'over many generations of cumulative evolution'. But surely the force behind all this diversity was his own mind, which devised the program, and the instructions he inserted into the program? The truth of the matter, surely, is that the machine carried out RD's intelligent instructions? Thus the analogy that he is trying to draw between his 'computergenerated-biomorphs' on the one hand, and 'naturally-evolved-lifeforms' on the other, must require similar intelligent instructions for both parties, if the analogy is to be apt? It's as if for RD Mind as a creative force simply doesn't exist, although his own academic brilliance must surely suggest otherwise! I was very surprised that there is no mention at all in the index of The Blind Watchmaker of either 'mind' or 'intelligence'. Why such total dismissal of Mind as a force? RD often refers to 'our minds', 'your mind', 'my mind', 'the human mind', 'rational minds', etc in the text. Surely he must have known that he had to acknowledge the input of Mind, Purpose, Will etc into the design of the computer hardware and software that he was using, and into all his own tireless programming of biomorphs, if his analogy was to be at all apt? Any why so many false analogies? Computers, cars, locos all the products of endless intelligence, purpose, will etc equated willy-nilly with extraordinarily complex living creatures which RD claims are not designed by intelligence, purpose, will, etc. Where was the logic and reason in all this?
And what about RD's claim that the self-generation of Life from non-life all depends on there being enough 'time' in which for it to occur? This is simply an inappropriate argument. Of course you can argue quite sensibly that given aeons of time a fish might morph into a human via the process of Evolution via Natural Selection; but you can not argue sensibly that a stone might morph into a fish, no matter how many aeons of time you give it. A fish is alive; a stone is not. Evolution is not an appropriate process to look to. Thus time does not come into it at all.
And the misrepresentation of Darwin's views? Accident? Presumably. But as a careful and sophisticated scholar RD surely must surely have noticed at least one of CD's two positive mentions of 'the Creator' in his personal copy of the famous first edition, even if he managed to miss CD's denial of having any views on the origin of life? And could he really be ignorant of the 'Creator' in that famous last sentence of the final, definitive, edition?
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I'm not given to conspiracy theories, but this did seem particularly odd First the writer of that Introduction, and now the highest authority in the land, both misrepresenting Darwin's clearly stated views.
Darwin is at pains to make his views absolutely clear via the epigraphs he presented on the first page of Origins. Some reprints omit these brief quotations, but they may be found in full, in the original rather stodgy language, in the Gutenberg Project e-versions at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Common to both 1st & 6th editions: 'But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this - we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.' Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise. and 'To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an illapplied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both. Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning. From these it is clear that CD believed in 'general laws' (Whewell), and in 'God' (Bacon). How he squares the two apparent opposites is not so clear. However, by the time of the 6th and final edition, he clarifies things by adding a third epigraph: In the 6th edition, but not in the 1st: 'The only distinct meaning of the word 'natural' is STATED, FIXED or SETTLED; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.' Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion.. This third epigraph makes it clear that Darwin believes Intelligence forms what is 'natural'. In other words an intelligent creative force makes nature/the world/the Laws. This would tally with his use of 'the Creator' in the texts of Origins, and his comment in that letter to Mr Fordyce in 1879, in which he says: 'I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.'
What was going on here? I'd seen Mr Dawkins many times on television and he seemed like a perfectly honest man. Why were there so many lesions in his arguments? And how had he written such an apparently
comprehensive book without understanding how analogies may and may not be used, and without addressing any of the fundamental questions I've listed above? Why was so much apparently just taken for granted, in fact? I must be missing something. I checked and re-checked, yet again, but could not put my hand on my heart and say my crits were wrong. They were simply not wrong in the eyes of logic as I understood it.
Please do the same, dear reader. Check and re-check my logic above. If you find you must agree with just one of my comments on RD's text, then it follows that RD's logic is at fault in at least one place, and this single white crow makes his whole argument potentially faulty and thus in need of close attention from top to tail.
All the same I was very uneasy. How was it nobody else seemed to have noticed all these errors? What about RD's peers? All those people who wrote glowing testimonials in the front of The Blind Watchmaker? What about the entire scientific community, for heaven's sake? Had nobody else spotted what I had? Impossible to believe. Impossible. I must be wrong, somehow. More and more questions. Time to get more informed. At the very least, I needed to carefully find out what it was I needed to find out.
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Chapter 4 Why Materialism?

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Goethe
Our new house cow 'April' produced her first calf in the first spring of the new decade. A perfect and beautiful little creature, but still-born, poor beauty, and a cause for wonder for us all: immaculate hooves, eyes, nose just no spark. What, I wondered, was that spark? Where had it come from? Where had it gone?
In later years I was to see this 'spark' go from the eye of a number of animals, including pet dogs, sheep, and a cow. One second they are alive, but then the eye somehow alters. It's very difficult to explain, but if you've ever experienced it you will know what I'm talking about. The heart may beat on for a moment or two longer, but the animal has already died. One is then left with the puzzle of the fact that a few seconds ago this assemblage of 'selfish genes' was alive, but now it is not, although the genes remain precisely the same as they were a moment ago. Richard Dawkins scorns the idea of a 'vital spark' and compares it with the sparks emitted by a locomotive. This is another extremely unapt analogy, whether the 'vital' spark exists or not.
And how did green grass and water produce those immaculate hooves and eyes anyway? We buried her perfect little form in the orchard, rather drippily, then turned to the burstingly practical problem of what to do with all the milk April was still producing. We couldn't possibly drink it all so we bought in a couple of infant Jersey bull calves, who would otherwise have gone for veal production abroad, banged up in crates for their short miserable lives. In fact, we ended up with two milking cows and four calves that spring. Feeding time was a five-star pantomime: milk, buckets, whipping tails, and butting calves everywhere. The kids pitched in. Feet got trodden on. Yelps were yelped. Butter was made. Cheese was made. More butter. More cheese. It was a great spring, apart from our poor lifeless calf.
More detail in Scenes from a Smallholding, along with a discussion which explains why cheap milk means 100,000 calves being killed at birth every year.
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*** Reading The Blind Watchmaker had brought me no closer to answering the question of 'Why does Science seem to be pathologically opposed to Anomalies?',
Another initial capital. I'm using it here to indicate 'anomalies of an apparently paranormal nature', like poltergeists, telepathy, etc.
although I was now beginning to suspect that the level at which rejection was being made lay very deep within the philosophy of science, and it looked as though 'materialism' was somehow involved in this. So my next task, I thought, would be to first find a precise definition for materialism, and then look deeper into the principles of science which meant I was going to have to broach the bogs and swamplands of philosophy, isms, and ologies This did not fill me with joy, as my previous forays into this field had been pretty baffling. Every writer I had tried to read, from Berkeley to Nietzsche had left me more puzzled than when I started.
In my teenage days I thought I ought to read a bit of Marx, and borrowed Capital from the village library. By the time I'd got to the bottom of page one I realised that there were at least three words I'd never come across before, and another dozen whose meanings I was unsure of. As for the ideas expressed, well I didnt have a clue. I turned over the page and found someone had pencilled onto the top margin 'Don't bother, it gets worse'. Some of the best advice I've ever had. Actually, I did try Marx again in my political years, but with the same result. This time, however, I was older and a little more self-confident, and found that words and phrases that other people seemed to understand were just too perforated and slippery for me to claim to have fully grasped. I never did work out what 'dialectical materialism' was, other than some sort of cut-and-paste free for all, involving some sort of 'materialism'. The m-word again. (Interestingly, 'materialism' isn't mentioned in The Communist Manifesto either.)
The basic problem for all philosophers, and even more for their poor longsuffering students, is 'What do words actually mean?' You can't explain a theory without using words, and you must be very clear about what you want your words to mean. This is not as easy as it sounds, as HumptyDumpty knew full well.
As an example: take the word 'window'. Can you define it, so as to include all windows and exclude everything that is a 'non-window' (a dictionary won't help with this, incidentally)? Bet you can't. 'A window is a hole in a house wall, filled with glass' doesn't do it, does it? Some windows are filled with plastic, or nothing at all; some windows are not in houses, but in sheds, etc; pre-Tudor windows were made of sheets of polished horn, and were portable. Is a skylight a window? Is a porthole? A mesh-
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filled panel in a tent? And what about a wall made entirely of glass? Is it a window? And what about car windows? You can have hours of fun with a friend trying this game of definitions. And I bet you eventually come to the conclusion that a word means only what we at this present moment agree it to mean. (Humpty-Dumpty's problem was that he alone 'agreed' on what a word meant and someone else's agreement was not required: the world of paranoid delusion. Richard Dawkins seems to risk sharing this problem when he says: 'Words are our servants, not our masters', presumably including here the word 'designed', as previously noted.) And what will matter most in your final definition will not be the physical characteristics of a window, or a book or a nail, but its purpose. And this is for a simple physical object like a window. Note the intrusion of that nonmaterial, intelligent quality of 'purpose' again. So, bearing in mind how difficult it is to pin down meaning in a simple everyday word, what hope have we, when reading any philosopher, of coping with all manner of concepts and abstractions like 'sense' or 'feeling' or 'God' or 'soul' or 'being' or 'reality', or even 'I' especially when the text may have been translated from a foreign language whose subtleties of meaning do not carry across perfectly? (Incidentally, can you define 'I'? Worth a try and bear in mind while you are trying, what distinctions you find yourself making between things you might previously have thought were a unity.) An example of the trickiness of translation: the first line of the Lord's Prayer is traditionally translated as 'Our Father which art in heaven..', but the original language it was written in is apparently a much subtler tongue than English. According to Neil Douglas-Klotz, in The Hidden Gospel, the original Aramaic phrase of 'Abwoon d'bashmaya' might be equally well translated as: O Thou, the One from whom breath enters being in all radiant forms Or O Parent of the universe, from your deep interior comes the next wave of shining life Or O fruitful, nurturing Life-giver! Your sound rings everywhere throughout the cosmos Or Father-Mother who births Unity, You vibrate life into form in each new instant. Translation is a serious business. Consider the scientific and philosophical implications of these alternative versions, which are quite missing from our traditional Bible version. 'Resonance' and 'Light' seem to feature strongly, for a start. More on 'resonance' later. And 'light'.
I forget how now, but I did eventually come up with a definition of the philosophical theory of Materialism (for which I will now use a capital, to distinguish it from the everyday meaning of 'obsessed with the things of the material world; like shopping, say'.)
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Materialism: the belief that everything in the universe began with Matter: originally meaning nuclear particles and elemental chemicals, and eventually, gases, water, and rocks. Since Einstein has showed via E=mc2 that Matter and Energy are interchangeable, a modern Materialist would claim that Matter/Energy, (including electricity, gamma rays, etc) and only Matter/Energy, lies behind everything in the universe (I'm capitalising these profound principles of Matter and Energy to distinguish them from everyday usages).
That simple-looking formula, E=mc2, conceals the fact that 1gm of Matter apparently contains more Energy than 20,000 tonnes of TNT. Don't mess with it.
Straight away this led me to another problem. If only Matter/Energy lies behind everything, then where does that leave Mind? And Life? And Consciousness? Was Mind just Energy, like electricity? And Life? I was struck again by the fact that RD had simply never mentioned 'intelligence' or 'mind' in all his analogies. In fact (but I may be wrong here) I don't think either word is mentioned as a proper active entity in the entire book. Was he avoiding the subject? There's that conspiracy theory again!
Don't worry the conspiracy phase passed. I'll explain how and why as we progress.
*** Another couple of years buzzed by: more calves, more lambs, more veg, more experience. We'd long been members of the Henry Doubleday Research Association
HDRA: now re-branded as Garden Organic (www.gardenorganic.org.uk)
who were a fount of information and guidance on how to grow crops organically. I drifted into writing odd articles for their newsletter and magazine, and gradually became a regular columnist, under the banner of Smallholding Scene. We continued to improve our techniques and our tiny income grew a little every year. But the twin truths were that yes, we were coping, and our skills were improving, but the fact we could not avoid was that my health looked as though it was never going to return to 100%... which left us zero wriggle-room for either coping with disasters or for Great Leaps Forward. If we were both 100% fit, we knew we could make the smallholding work properly and could implement all the bright ideas we had for cutting down
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labour and improving efficiency, such as coppicing the woodland, and running a generator from the stream at the bottom of the cwm to heat the polytunnels. But anything less than our combined 200% meant an eventual slow but certain stagnation and long-term gradual decline. *** I'd read quite a lot of pop science books by this point and it struck me that all of them had the same thing in common with RD's book: they avoided the concept of Mind whenever possible, and all seemed to take Materialism as a proved fact: in other words, as the sound foundation upon which all other theories might be safely built.
One Scientist I heard on the radio, whose name I didn't catch, said that 99.9% of scientists believed in Materialism.
However, in none of these books was Materialism ever openly discussed, debated, or proved to be a Truth, even though to my mind it was seriously questionable, as it seemed to require something from nothing: ie, Life from non-life. Why was Materialism never discussed? And where might I find such a discussion? It must have been discussed somewhere! I'd also come across several claims such as 'Scientists do not believe in God'; 'No scientist takes the supernatural seriously'; 'Telepathy is bunk'; and so forth.
But not 'all scientists' do not believe in God (sorry about that clumsy double negative). I'd heard of several who do, including Dr Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, who had become an adult convert to Christianity. Working in the same speciality as the atheistic Professor Dawkins, but a deliberate Christian? More and more puzzling.
These were all clearly Materialist statements, but what struck me most was how 'Materialist' and 'Scientist' seemed to have become conflated to mean the same thing. Say 'Scientist', say 'Materialist', except for the few who seem to have been side-lined by the writers of books who claim that 'Scientists don't believe in God'. The notion that Scientist = Materialist was a new idea to me, but it was beginning to explain why Science wasn't interested in spooks and flying plates and all the thousands of other weird Anomalies that Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson and scores of others have reported down the centuries. I could imagine that a spook or telepathy would be pretty difficult for a Matter-only philosophy to explain.
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But my over-riding problem of the moment was that I could not see how Matter/Energy (ie, rocks, gases, lightning, radiation etc: none of which are regarded as being alive in any sense) could have produced out of themselves alone anything that might be called Life. Surely that would mean something coming from nothing? The Greater arising spontaneously from the Lesser? Wouldn't that be 'magic', or 'a miracle' the very thing that Science itself seems to despise? But presumably, this was just a matter of my own ignorance, so I went to see a friend who had a degree in palaeontology to ask if he could clarify things for me. By coincidence he was reading RD's first book, The Selfish Gene, when I arrived. I asked him what he thought of it. He looked puzzled and even a bit pained. I explained that I'd just read The Blind Watchmaker and had found lots of logical flaws in it. He looked flustered and then impatient. 'I don't see how Life can have spontaneously occurred just from chemicals', I explained. My friend's impatience became hard for him to conceal. Then he said, somewhat testily, 'Making Life is easy.' and went on to baffle me with long words about genetics. But it was that phrase about making Life being easy that caught my attention. Really? Easy? It had been done then? And presumably many times if it was easy. Another gap in my knowledge. They were piling up.
Can gaps pile up? I'm reminded of a friend who said that some days the local carpark was packed full, but on other days you couldn't move for empty spaces.
But I was making progress. At least I now knew roughly what I was looking for, and I knew what Materialism was. A couple more things were now bubbling to the top of my list: To discover who had made Life and how easy was it? And why hadn't I, with my long-standing interest in science, ever heard of it? Surely it would have been in all the newspapers? Nobel Prizes? And as Materialism seemed to require the bothersome spontaneous creation of Life from non-life, what alternatives to Materialism were there? There must be alternatives, surely? Or were the bumblings of The Church that had bored and baffled me for so long at school, the only alternative? Surely not
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And then there was that niggling issue of how 'Scientist' had come to mean 'Materialist', even when some of them clearly weren't. I couldn't work that one out at all. Maybe I should start right at the bottom, and define 'Science'. I consulted a few books and came up with:
Science: A systematic means of investigating the world via the process of Hypothesis, Evidence and Theory. A Hypothesis (a smart guess), when backed up by adequate Evidence (data amassed by observation or consistent experiment), is promoted into a Theory (a temporarily accepted 'truth'). This Theory is held as the best available until some other Hypothesis should be backed up by enough persuasive Evidence to replace it. A scientist seeks to explain an observed Effect by explaining its Cause and the Mechanism that links Cause to Effect. For example, the issue of why there are so many species in the world (an Effect) was explained by Darwin thus: the Cause of speciation was lots of slightly variable infants being born into varying circumstances; the Mechanism was Natural Selection, which ensured that only 'the fittest' survived to breed more infants suited to the local circumstances, eventually leading to new species being formed. A classic case of the scientific process.
Three points: 1 Science is essentially a process, which constantly updates and upgrades, replacing old Theories with newer, bigger ones, which include greater amounts of Evidence.
For example, the Flat Earth Theory gradually gave way to the Spherical Earth Theory in the popular mind as more and more evidence piled up from global voyagers (although the ancient Greek philosophers and every master mariner since those days, including Columbus, already knew the Earth was round). The President of South Africa, Paul Kruger, received a pioneering American sailor who had docked at Cape Town during his solo trip round the world in 1898. The President was a Flat Earther, and remained so even after his meeting with the sailor: '"You don't mean round the world," said the president; "it is impossible! You mean in the world. Impossible!" he said, "impossible!" and not another word did he utter.. to me.' This was despite the fact that a Phoenician sailor had rounded the same Cape in 600BC and almost certainly knew that the earth was not flat. Old Theories die a very slow death, as
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in the saying 'I've made up my mind; don't confuse me with the evidence'. We will be returning to this tragic human propensity later.
2 Thus, being essentially a process, science has, or should have, no dogma except the belief that logic, reason, and the principle of cause and effect should not be violated.
'Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could' from Something Good by Oscar Hammerstein II in The Sound of Music. As neat an exposition of the Law of Cause and Effect as I've ever come across. 'Ah! But what about the wacky world of quantum physics?' I hear you cry. We'll come to that later.
There is no mention of Materialism in this definition of 'science'.
I must point out that the definition above is my own, assembled from many others. However, none of these other definitions mentioned Materialism either. Check for yourself in a few dictionaries.
So how had 'Materialist' become near-synonymous with 'Scientist'? And did it matter? And if so, why? I feel the need to belabour this one a little just to be clear A general view of scientists is either of people who spend their whole lives wearing lab coats and peering into microscopes, or standing in front of blackboards full of Greek and squiggles. But the ordinary GP and dentist think of themselves as scientists, as do meteorologists, psychologists, and engineers and technicians. So too, as I recently discovered to my complete surprise, do yogis. Their reasoning is that they approach their business in a pragmatic, empirical, and systematic manner, questioning everything as they go, just as any other scientist does.
Pragmatic: solving problems in a realistic way according to present conditions rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas or rules. Empirical: relying on or derived from observation or experiment rather than dogma. A general view of yogis is of people who spend their whole lives trying to poke their toes up their nose. This is erroneous. More later.
A practical, workaday definition of a scientist, is 'someone who works according to the scientific method', either in day-to-day medicine, say, or in some sort of research establishment.
The scientific method for a researcher goes like this: someone comes up with an idea
Now where did that idea spring from? More on Intuition later.
that he thinks will explain something that is at present a bit of a puzzle. He then devises experiments or carries out observations to see if his idea (his 'Hypothesis') is actually valid: does it solve the puzzle? Yes or No? If the Evidence does stack up, he will publish his findings in a learned journal, like Nature, where like-minded researchers (his 'peers') will either support his findings and Hypothesis or rip it to bits. If it passes this peer review, it is likely to be accepted as a Theory.. ie, the best explanation we have, so far. That little phrase 'so far' is vital. No Theory is taken to be an absolute Truth. It is universally accepted that sooner or later some other, deeper and more inclusive Theory will overtake it. In other words, science should never get bogged down with a dogma: a 'Truth' of any sort. This is what made science such a breath of fresh air after centuries of Religious dogmatic absolutism, where logic didn't get a look in, and if the Pope said 'jump', you jumped or paid the price.
For example, Giordano Bruno, a priest, was burned at the stake for jumping in the wrong direction. More on him and Galileo later.
Now I felt I was beginning to see the way ahead. The most pressing problem now seemed to be the question of how easy was it to make Life? Back to the books
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Chapter 5 A Positive Alternative
The one thing that scientists ought to be is humble, because they, more than anyone, know how little they can explain
Professor Steve Jones
I had no idea where to find out about how to make Life, and as this was in pre-internet days I just kept reading what came to hand in our local library and in second-hand and charity shops, hoping that I'd strike lucky one day. I did find a couple of books on the history of science, but I couldn't find any evidence of Life having been manufactured. They were pretty old books, however. I obviously needed something more modern. I kept my eyes open. But meanwhile, I'd had more luck on the philosophical front. Leo the Books had let me have a 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, minus index unfortunately, for 30. It was a lot of money, but it bought 28 volumes of beautiful leather-bound volumes of a thousand pages each. It would contain all I needed to discover about the basics of philosophy, and a lot of early science history as well. All I needed was lots of time to read through it all. Where should I start? I spent a week flipping through the volumes, making note of any article I thought I should return to. There were hundreds, all the way from Abelard to Zwingli. It was going to take years. Fortunately, I was distracted from this endless task a week or two later when I was unexpectedly introduced to a professional biologist, of whom I had heard, and who had at some point been an editor of a well-respected scientific journal. He had also written what looked like being an interesting book. Several of us sat round a table, chatting. Then I mentioned to the biologist that I was reading up about Life and so forth, and Richard Dawkins' book, and my problems with it all, and how Materialism seemed to be very shaky, as it required what seemed to me to be magic, and could he help me? Indeed he could and explained about Evolution. 'Yes', I said 'I understand all that, but what about the origin of Life? Life must have somehow come into being before Evolution could take place. So how does Materialism explain that?' He smiled the smile of The Wise addressing The
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Foolish and spoke. I remember his words and my reply absolutely verbatim: Chas what you must understand is that everything is mineral. What? Even this conversation?
He: Me:
I hope you will understand why I've put this exchange into a box. I simply could not believe what this famous man, this minor pillar of the Scientific Establishment, had just said to me. Let's be clear: 'Everything' means 'everything' from stars to stones, to Life to Mind to Consciousness to the very meaning of the words you are reading at this moment. That is what 'everything' means. Stars and stones, OK: mineral; no question. But laughter, compassion, love, meaning, purpose, intelligence? All 'mineral'? It was back to Humpty-Dumpty again. I came away from our conversation in a bewildered state. Had the Scientist really said that? He surely had. Did he mean it? He certainly did, both by the words he chose and his intonation and body language. He had not denied that a conversation was mineral, and showed no sign of modifying his claim in the pause that followed. In fact he dismissed my query with a gentle wave of the hand which in Imperial China would have meant 'End of Interview; Proceed at Your Own Risk'. How could a well-respected personage talk such poppycock? I was actually a little angry. But what a gift! First there had been the writer of that Introduction who claimed that Darwin was 'purely material' in his views, which was quite untrue; then Richard Dawkins' erroneous claims concerning Darwin's views, and his cavalier use of language and metaphor; and now here was a third party making a palpably absurd statement
Please check Chapter 3 again to be sure we are progressing in proper tandem here. Meanwhile, here's a summary of RD's claims again: That a goldfish gives the impression of design, while an atom does not. That a goldfish bowl, or a car, is treatable as a biological (ie 'living') object. That merely 'living' is enough to produce creations, with no mention of intelligence, purpose, will, etc. That Charles Darwin thought that Life arose by chance, which is simply untrue, according to Origins.
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It seemed that all three of them were so seriously locked into a common mind-set (which looked like being 'Materialism') that it did not register with them that they were speaking untruths and/or absurdities. How had the fair art of science become reduced to such untruths and absurdities? And what was the alternative to Materialism? Surely there must be a logical and rational alternative? If not, the only options open were either that The Church's waffle and obscurantism must be true, or, unthinkably, that there simply was no explanation at all: that the Universe, and everything in it, including Life and 'meaning' itself, was just.. accident; just stuff even though 'meaning' can scarcely be called 'stuff', by any stretch of Humpty-Dumpty's imagination. But that view (ie, that the Universe just happened, without cause or purpose) was precisely the Materialist point of view, was it not?... which still seemed to me to require the magic of spontaneous creation of Life from non-life, etc, etc, and which, once adopted as Truth, led to such nonsensical claims as 'everything is mineral'. So, if Science/Materialism led to nonsense, and The Church's mumbojumbo was already nonsense. Well, there absolutely had to be something else. Purpose, reason, logic, all exist in the Universe. They had to come from somewhere. And so did Life Mind and Consciousness. There simply must be a rational explanation. Britannica helped, as did a couple of other philosophy books I stumbled across, checking out one convoluted and more-or-less incomprehensible ism after another until I bumped into one that pulled me up short: a school of thought called Idealism. Idealism, in a nutshell, claims that Mind came first in the Universe, not Matter.
You may feel that this is all well and good, and possibly even fairly interesting, but that I've wandered a long way from the point of trying to answer my question of why science wasn't interested in spooks. But, believe me, this is vital stuff. It's actually the crunch point: the key to finding the eventual answer. Please keep your antennae sharply tuned, and be sure that you keep testing my logic.
No prospector tripping over a four ton nugget could have been as excited as I was when I first came across this. Not only was 'naked' basic Idealism a genuine alternative to Materialism, but it seemed to be that rarest of items in the world of thought, one half of a genuine either/or choice. I couldn't believe it, and spent weeks chewing it all over, testing it and checking I had fully understood it.
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'Idealism' is unfortunately a confusing name. I'm going to spell it with a small 'i' for the everyday meaning of 'the condition of living by high ideals', and I'll spell it with a capital 'I' to mean 'the Hypothesis that Mind (as in 'ideas') came first in the Universe'.
Eventually, I had to admit that all my doubts in the matter were groundless. There really was a clear-cut either/or to be explored, and an absolute decision that could be logically arrived at. And, in fact, nothing in this whole area of enquiry can be interpreted or made any sense of until we have examined the Materialist/Idealist split. Here we go: The Question is 'What came first in the Universe, Mind or Matter?'
EITHER: Matter/Energy (in some form) came first and somehow gave rise to non-Matter like Life Mind and Consciousness (the Hypothesis of Materialism) OR: Mind (in some form) came first and somehow gave rise to Matter/Energy (the Hypothesis of Idealism)
Yes, it really is an either/or. They are absolutely contradictory in their claims. One must be right and the other must therefore be wrong. I'm afraid it's no good saying 'Well, perhaps Mind and Matter both came first, in parallel, so to speak', because that would then admit that Mind was indeed a separate factor from Matter, would it not?.. which is precisely what Materialism denies, when it claims that Matter alone lies behind 'everything', and thus, by definition, came before Mind. In other words, Materialism, by its own definition, will not allow for a parallel origination. Do you follow this? Please read this paragraph again until you are sure you see the logic of it. Similarly, we can't say 'Well perhaps neither came first, because they are both eternal, and have no beginning', because again, that would be to admit that Mind is a separate entity from Matter, which Materialism denies.
You may continue to insist that perhaps Mind and Matter both originated in parallel, and Materialism is simply wrong about Matter being supreme. In this case, you must still admit that Materialism is wrong in that it insists on Matter alone coming first. You then also still have a serious problem, as a parallel origination means that both Mind and Matter must ultimately have had this origination in a Yet Higher Cause of some sort; again, anathema to Materialism.
So It really is an either/or.. Either Materialism is correct or it is incorrect. If it is incorrect, then Idealism must be correct, in requiring Mind to be separate from Matter at the very least. One Hypothesis must be right; one
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must be wrong. Which is it to be, and why? Take a deep breath this is big stuff. Might I ask you, dear reader, to read the next passage as calmly as possible. I realise that it may generate a fair amount of steam in some people, but there is no need for this, and steam in matters of the mind is counterproductive. Better to use the steam to make a calming cup of tea and then start again. Please just read to understand, rather than to reject or deride. No harm will come of this, I promise. Let us ask a couple of questions, to clarify how Materialism and Idealism square up. Firstly: 'What came first in the universe?' A Materialist will say 'The Big Bang a ginormous explosion of Everything, and all of it Matter/Energy'. An Idealist will say 'Mind'. 'What came before whatever it was that came first in the universe?' A Materialist will say 'We don't know yet, and may never be able to know. But clearly it must be something super-material, capable of creating all the Matter/Energy in the universe'. An Idealist will say 'Mind'. 'How can we explain the existence of Life?' A Materialist will say 'It arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone'. An Idealist will say 'Life and Mind are inseparable; they (or 'it') pre-existed Matter'. 'How can we explain the existence of Mind?' A Materialist will say 'Mind ultimately arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone, via Life (see above)'. An Idealist will say 'Mind (Mind/Life) pre-existed the material universe'. 'How can we explain the existence of Consciousness?' A Materialist will say 'Consciousness ultimately arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone, via Life and Mind (see above)'. An Idealist will say 'Consciousness is inseparable from Mind and Life, and pre-existed the material universe'. 'How can we explain the existence of Matter/Energy?' A Materialist will say 'All Matter/Energy instantly appeared from a microscopic point in the moment of the Big Bang'.
An Idealist will say 'Life, Mind and Consciousness somehow produced all the Matter/Energy in the Universe, possibly via the mechanism of the Big Bang'. Thankyou for your patience. I hope all the points above were clear, and that you can perceive that each ism is self-consistent in its claims. Now then. Where did that get me? As I asked those questions and considered the answers to them I was struck by two consistencies: 1 Materialism keeps requiring something from nothing: Life from nonlife; Mind from non-mind; and Consciousness from non-consciousness. 2 Idealism merely poses a mystery, or possibly a series of mysteries, depending upon how we relate Life, Mind and Consciousness to each other. Time for another deep breath: Of the two, Idealism, mystery or not, was clearly (via the requirements of logic) the more rational philosophy. Why? Well, to require 'something arising from nothing', time after time, as required by Materialism, is simply irrational: in essence, it's an appeal to magic.
Just to confirm what 'something from nothing' means here: if Materialism is correct, then chemicals ('minerals'/Matter) and Energies, which do NOT contain Life, or any known 'potential-for-Life', somehow get together and produce Life from within themselves, without the involvement of any other agency whatsoever. And I'm afraid it's no good invoking the extraordinary metamorphoses brought about by normal chemistry as an explanation, as some people do. It's true that if you mix a flammable metal (sodium) with a poisonous gas (chlorine) you get an eerie burning process leaving as a residue something you can sprinkle on your chips (salt). This is most remarkable, but it can be explained in terms of standard atomic and electron theory. The process is well-understood and infinitely repeatable. There is NO theory, however, that can explain how abiotic (non-living) chemicals can spontaneously assemble themselves into a self-replicating living entity, even once.
To put it a little more technically, to claim that something arises from nothing flies in the face of scientific method, which insists, quite rightly, on Cause being followed by Effect, and every Effect having a Cause. Science is built on this requirement. Thus lice do not self-generate by magic from dirty clothes, as was often thought in pre-scientific days, but by means of eggs laid in seams. We'll be looking into Cause and Effect a little more in a later chapter.
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To maintain a Hypothesis which ignores this foundation rule of scientific method is to insult the principle of scientific investigation. Would you agree? If not, why not? Please think carefully and rationally. Bluster is not an option. Neither is throwing the book at the cat, as that would count as bluster.
If it's any help, Sherlock Holmes himself would be bound to agree with the logic of the analysis above; thus: 'How often have I said to you, that when you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? The Materialism/Idealism split is a clear either/or decision, is it not? Materialism is irrational, and is thus unsustainable. Thus Idealism, like it or otherwise, must be right. Pass me my violin please, Watson. I feel an impromptu coming on.'
It was also interesting to me that Materialism and Idealism could in principle both agree on the Big Bang Hypothesis, the difference being that for Idealism the BB was a Mechanism linking Cause (Mind) to an Effect (the Universe) (a classic example of scientific method), whereas for Materialism the BB was simply an event.
At a pinch you might call the Big Bang a Cause and the Universe an Effect but then you have no Mechanism. (You can't count 'expansion' as a Mechanism, as a Bang is an expansion).
Just as a point of academic curiosity: the difference between the two views could be neatly summarised in the Latin phrases 'Fiat lux' and 'Erat lux': 'Let there be light' and 'There was light'. As this idea occurred to me I felt a tiny shiver, as anyone who has ever read the poetry of The Book of Genesis will recognise. We'll be returning to this later. *** Having retrieved the book and apologised to the cat, let us continue with a few thoughts on Idealism and the mystery it poses: For a start, Idealism does suggest a Cause for the Universe (which Materialism does not, unless you count a spontaneous eruption out of nothing, which isn't entirely satisfactory to anybody), although it is not at all specific. It says that Mind was the cause, but does not define this mysterious 'Mind'. However, because it does not suggest a complete nuts and bolts solution does not make this an irrational suggestion; it is merely incomplete. 'Very incomplete', I hear you mutter, and am bound to agree with you. But 'incomplete' has never meant 'wrong'. Our understanding of
the workings of the body, ecology, physics or the cosmos itself are 'incomplete', but that does not necessarily mean that our understandings so far are 'wrong'. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with a mystery. Light was a mystery until Newton refracted it through a prism and made it thus slightly less of a mystery;
Light is still 99% mysterious, however. Much work will be done on it in future decades, we may safely predict.
why some heavenly bodies seemed to go backwards and doodle about the night sky was a mystery until Copernicus investigated and explained it, much helped by Kepler and Galileo;
More on Copernicus in a while.
why some species thrive, while others die out was a mystery until Charles Darwin investigated and explained how Evolution works, and how body shapes come and go. So there is no theoretical problem with Idealism offering only a mystery, or a huge bundle of mysteries. Mysteries attract intelligent and enquiring minds; and those enquiring minds are the ones that bring greater scientific understanding to the world. No mysteries no science no material progress. Idealism (in its basic, 'naked' form, as delineated above) offers no explanation for the nature of Life Mind and Consciousness, except that they are interconnected and 'came first'. This means that LMC
To save space I'll occasionally reduce Life Mind and Consciousness to 'LMC'.
must have existed before the world, and indeed before the entire Universe. The clear implication of this pre-existence is that LMC somehow created Matter/Energy. Absurd! ABSURD!!! (Watch out, cat..) But is it absurd? And why is it absurd? After all, we know from everyday life that Mind creates. We all do it every single day. We use our minds to create cakes, emails, cricket bats, cathedrals, Large Hadron Colliders,
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By the bye Nobody has yet explained to me by what principle the Large Hadron Collider can possibly simulate anything meaningful about the nature of the Biggest Bang Ever by means of the Tiniest Collision Ever. Any offers?
and of course the cars, computers, locomotives, and biomorphs that Richard Dawkins was concerned with in The Blind Watchmaker. Mind/ Intelligence creates. That's what it does.
Please refer back to Chapter 3 if you would like to recall how everyday creativity operates. And again, please consider once more whether intuitive/creative/imaginative/ intelligent/purposeful/persistent people might be accurately described as 'living objects'. More on the elements of Mind later.
We all know this to be true, so again, where is the problem with Idealism as a principle? True, it goes entirely against the Hypothesis of Materialism, but as Materialism is clearly irrational (as demonstrated above), so what? Surely this is a good thing? A candle in the dark? That's how it felt to me. It's time to pause, I think, and to confess that I felt all of the doubts that any open-minded scientist will be feeling at this point. But logic is logic and wishing things to be otherwise will not gainsay this fact. And by logic, Materialism had shown itself to me to be untenable: it was paradoxical,
'Paradoxical' meaning 'self-contradictory', as in acknowledging that chemicals do NOT contain life, while insisting that they spontaneously self-assembled into entities which could eventually self-replicate and thus be thought of as being alive in some sense. More on this soon, but meanwhile you might like to spend a moment on thinking about one of the implications of this notion: that non-living chemicals spontaneously self-assembled into living objects, and that these newly-living objects then spontaneously gave rise to Mind; these newly-mindful creatures then spontaneously gave rise to Consciousness; and these newly-conscious creatures spontaneously gave rise to Self-conscious creatures like you and me, who can use language and abstract squiggles on a page to convey meaning to each other. Now here's the crunch if you track this process back, all the meaning in this book and indeed in all the world, must have been somehow within those few original chemicals which accidentally bumped into each other millions of years ago. Yes.. it MUST, because there must always, by the rules of science, be a Cause for everything. Materialism claims there was nothing but Matter/Energy in the beginning. Therefore that same Matter/Energy must be the ultimate Cause of everything, throughout the whole development of the universe down to the present day, and as there is no expiry date on Causes, this must ultimately include this sentence and your own emotional reaction to it at this moment (bearing in mind the claim that ONLY Matter/Energy has ever created anything). Furthermore, as these original chemicals are claimed to have banged into each other at random, it stands to reason that ALL those primordial chemicals must have contained
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ALL meaning (as above), because otherwise the few that banged together to spontaneously produce Life (then Mind, then Consciousness, then self-Consciousness, then meaning, love, joy, etc), must have been very special chemicals indeed, being the ones that contained all the meaning (love, joy, purpose, etc) in the world for centuries to come, and there is no suggestion anywhere in science that the Big Bang or any consequent mechanical process ever produced a few special chemicals that contained meaning (or Life Mind or Consciousness, if it comes to that) in contrast to all the others. This whole mad confection is the great Materialist paradox re-stated: that LMC arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy which on the one hand did not contain LMC, but which, on the other hand, must have contained LMC, at least in some potential form. This barmy 'necessity' breaks the fundamental rule of logic: that something may not both be 'x' and 'not-x' at the same time. If you feel your need to brush up on your logic, I recommend Teach Yourself Logic by A A Luce as an elegant and readable introduction. (But you don't really need a book. That fundamental common-sense rule above will take you most places, especially as regards this book.)
and broke the accepted ground rules of scientific procedure. How could it be 'true'? Idealism truly was the alternative to Materialism, by logic. I was thus forced to take it seriously if I was to make progress with my enquiries. But it rankled something awful. I knew that this really was an absolute choice. Materialism was wrong; therefore Idealism was right. But I had a very hard time in accepting this after years of being sneered at by my allpowerful Materialist biology teacher and having been brought up inside a society that maintained a constant low-level hum of Materialism, without me having realised it was even there.
More on this most important element of background hum later.
The greatest problem that arose for me at this point, and will do now possibly for you, was that I could feel the hot sticky breath of religious dogma and the Inquisition at the back of my neck, and had no wish to engage with it.
But fear not, brave reader. There is a resolution to this. And it's logical and rational, otherwise I wouldn't be wasting my time and yours. AND for readers of a religious persuasion, please don't give up on me yet. I promise you that light will emerge from all this apparently 'anti-religious' carping, but it may not be exactly what you might be hoping for.
More weeks passed as I tried to make sense of Idealism without resorting to religious dogma. Clearly all religions were Idealist constructs, in that they all required Mind to come first in the Universe, but Christianity as I
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understood it appealed to me only to 'believe'. This wasn't an option for me, though.. I needed to 'understand'. The Hitler Youth had 'believed' and inflicted misery and murder upon millions; the Catholic Church regularly burned people who disagreed with them just a couple of centuries ago in 'Autos da F''Acts of (the) Faith'. And modern Islamist terrorists are driven by blind faith, and kill and maim hundreds at random, including their own brother Muslims. 'Faith' and 'belief' were not for me at any price.
The credo(!) of Mussolini's fascists was 'Credere, Obbedire, Combattere' ('Believe, Obey, Fight'). Very succinct: 'Don't think, believe, and become a slave.' 'Faith' is effectively 'Belief' in action, as one can have faith only in what one believes. Thus, as 'Belief' is a more fundamental entity than 'Faith', Ill be dealing only with Belief in this book.
Having said all that, I would clearly need to investigate other religions. And other philosophies. More flipping reading the Truth must be out there somewhere But meanwhile, good old-fashioned mulling brought some results. The most important one concerned the vexed problem of how Mind (amalgamated somehow with Life and Consciousness) had created an entire Universe. The problems are self-evident The most obvious problem might be stated something like this: 'How could Mind make a Universe? I've got a Mind and I couldn't make a Universe. Therefore it's all rubbish.' This is not a logical response to the issue, though, is it? Just think: IF Mind did indeed create a Universe, then we are dealing here with a SuperMind of some sort. How ridiculous is that? Well not at all, I would say. We all know that human intelligence varies enormously, from Plato to Pluto, so to speak. And speaking of Pluto, so does animal intelligence. Man is smarter than a chimp, who is smarter than a dog (and all dogs vary), who is smarter than a chicken (ditto; I know this), who is smarter than a woodlouse, who presumably is smarter than a tapeworm, who presumably is smarter than a bacterium; who, one might presume, is smarter than a virus. The point is: we already have plenty of evidence of a huge scale of Intelligence in our everyday world. At the one end we have the Einsteins; somewhere in the middle we have Einstein's dog, who, smart though he might be, will never understand why The Boss spends hours scratching about with bits of chalk instead of chucking him a stick;
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By the bye.. Rico the sheepdog can fetch 200 items by name, as tested by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, no less. His associate 'Betsy' can fetch 320 objects by name, or by being shown a copy, or simply by looking at a picture of the required object. now that's smart. I'm sure there must be people who can't do that... Alex the African Grey parrot could count to six, could identify fifty different objects and seven colours, and had a vocabulary of 150 words.
and at the lower end of the scale we have molluscs and insects, who, we might be pretty sure, have no concept of what life is like for a human being at all, just as we have little real idea of what it is like to be a beetle. Further down the scale, we can only admit to complete ignorance of the inner world of an amoeba. But all these creatures exhibit at least traces of intelligence in that spiders, for example, are smart enough to not run into ponds, and the extremely humble amoeba displays evidence of primitive choice or decision (see http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15068 ). So just as we have no problem with a diminishing scale of Intelligence, all the way down to beings of unknowable dimness thus we have no logical reason to deny the possibility of an increasing scale of Intelligence that would consider us as mere bacteria by their own intellectual standards.
A Materialist certainly would have a hard time in accepting that this is a logical option, as in his worldview, Life Mind and Consciousness all arose spontaneously from the original Matter/Energy of the Big Bang; thus Man is self-evidently the highest form of Life and thus the highest form of Mind and Consciousness on the planet or possibly in the Universe, and any sort of non-Material SuperMind capable of creating a universe is out of the question. But Materialism is irrational and thus untrustworthy, is it not? Please check back again if you are still having trouble accepting this. I realise it might be a total bombshell, and needs time to come to terms with. It took me many months to accept it, and I had worked up to it gradually, unlike yourself, who may well have been slung in at the deep end. As a matter of fact, I still have moments when I can't believe it and need to re-think it through. But every time, the first result is confirmed: Materialism is irrational, and for the sake of us all, not just of science, it must be dropped. More on the disastrous social effects of Materialism in Chapter 27.
What's more, I think we are pretty safe in assuming that molluscs and bacteria and so on are entirely unaware even of human existence, never mind our Mind power and abilities. It is logically possible that we humans are just as unaware of higher levels of Intelligence. But, you might say, surely we would be somehow aware of these SuperMinds if they exist? But would we? Is the E. coli who lives and moves and has his being in your own personal gut aware of you? Doubtful. But perhaps more to the point, we can only become aware of things if we are looking in the right place. Materialist-Science even refuses to look at ghosts, never mind the huge realm of other paranormal Anomalies whose
study might open up all sorts of doors, not least in the realms of communication, healing and psychology. Obviously, we'll be looking into this a little more later on. Why this refusal to even look? It seems to me that the only thing blocking us in this is our arrogance in thinking that we must be the smartest thing in the Universe because we can make enough atom bombs to kill everyone on the planet a dozen times over, which chimps and molluscs can't. We'll be coming back to this, too. Please note that I am not claiming that SuperMinds are real and true, as I have no personal evidence of such. I am merely saying that, by logic, we cannot deny that they might be real and true, and that perhaps we should begin looking.
Although you will have noticed that basic Idealism definitely requires a SuperMind right from the start, as in Darwin's 'Creator'. But Evidence is required as well as a Hypothesis...
As Materialism is demonstrably wrong, its only alternative (Idealism) must be right. Idealism claims that Mind came first in the Universe, so it seems to me that we really must accept as a logical possibility/necessity that SuperMinds actually exist, and that maybe one (or more?) of them is entirely capable of knocking up an entire Universe, and maybe even doing such in just six of your Man Days, so to speak.
But there is an obvious problem here in that Days as such did not exist at the time of the alleged Creation, as a Day is an intellectual construct dependent upon an Earth rotating on its axis. No Earth, no Day. So maybe we should propose a SuperMind 'Day' of, say a billion years, give or take. We might even like to consider the possibility that 'Time' itself is a man-made construct, in which case 'Day' has no meaning at all. (More on 'Time' in Chapter 23.) It would seem to me that the 'Days' in the Genesis story refer essentially to a sequence, with the timing expressed in terms suitable for a non-intellectual tribal people to get the feel of. They could get a handle on 'a day' but not on 'an aeon', or a 'nano-second', say. In fact, the original Hebrew word 'yom' can mean 'a period of indeterminate length'.
All of this is just logical speculation. Do I mean 'speculation'? It feels more like 'ramification'. We'll see so how about some Evidence? May there be any Evidence for SuperMinds? Actually, I think there might be, and we'll be coming to this later. However, it might not be what you are expecting. Meanwhile, what about actual Evidence for the Materialist Hypothesis on the origination of Life? The scientific process requires both a Hypothesis and Evidence. Was there any Evidence? What would count as Evidence,
anyway? Surely there must be some, because my palaeontologist friend had assured me that 'making life was easy'. But I dunno. If the Hypothesis is fatally flawed by its own internal (lack of) logic, I couldn't see how there could possibly be any irrefutable evidence of it being 'true'. But, maybe I'd got it wrong, somehow maybe my logic had gone awry somewhere, despite my endless ruminations and stand-up, out-loud, dialogues, pacing up and down the kitchen, asking rhetorical questions of a willing but increasingly bewildered dog. Time for more delving if I could find real evidence that Life had been created from non-life then I was going to have to go back and re-think everything I'd thought through so far. Humble pie would be in the offing. OK, so be it. Truth was what mattered *** And perhaps en route I might discover why there was such an outright rejection of Idealism by the Materialist/Scientific world. That still rankled.
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Chapter 6 So Where's the Evidence?
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas
Carl Sagan
One of the books I'd come across in Oxfam was an ex-library copy of Isaac Asimov's A Short History of Biology, and better still, his two volume Guide to Science. They were all twenty years or more old, but I knew Asimov to be a clear thinker and writer, and enjoyed reading the books. By the end, I felt I now had a pretty good overview of the history of science and its big themes. But had I found any evidence that Life had ever been manufactured by man, which would have been cast-iron Evidence for the Hypothesis of Materialism? No. Over the following months I delved into several other books, but still found no Evidence. The most modern book I could find was An Encyclopedia of Evolution by Richard Milner (1990), which has a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, an American scientific essayist and pillar of Materialism. Under the entry 'Life, Origin of ' RM says: 'Scientists cannot agree on a single formal definition of life..', which gave me pause for thought. If you literally didn't know what it was you were looking for, how could you know when you'd found it, never mind how could you know how to go about synthesising it?
The latest Encyclopedia Britannica also states that there is no generally accepted definition of life. Wikipedia (2011) says much the same thing. We are still none the wiser, it seems. A word of caution here: there are many lists of things associated with Life, like movement, metabolism, reproduction, reacting to stimuli, and so forth, but these do not describe Life itself, merely observed behaviours of things agreed to be living. It isn't even clear what should be on the list. As a grotesque example, is a person in a coma and on a ventilator 'alive'? After all, they don't move, react to stimuli, or reproduce. Common sense says that they are, nevertheless, alive, even if they don't strictly fit the list. But what about a virus, which can't propel itself, doesn't metabolise, doesn't appear to react to stimuli, and can only reproduce after invading a living cell and hi-jacking the cell's facilities? Alive? (Incidentally, if all the viruses in the world were laid end to end they would form a line 200 million light years long. Just so you know.) Curiously, Mr Milner's excellent book does not have an entry on Materialism. I found that very surprising.
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*** The 1950's was a time of great scientific optimism. Jet propulsion nuclear power (which would, we were assured, produce electricity 'too cheap to meter') new vaccines improved fertilisers and pesticides... amazing new plastics science was on a roll. All that remained before Man could finally triumph over Nature was the workaday task of assembling Life from its component molecules. How hard could it be? Stanley Miller carried out some famous experiments in 1952 which tried to synthesise a living molecule out of what were thought to have been the raw materials available, millions of years ago, in pre-life times. These famous 'Primordial Soup' experiments were symbolic of the optimism of the times. Nobody doubted that the job would be done.
Miller sealed samples of water, ammonia, hydrogen and methane inside a series of interconnected tubes and flasks. The water was warmed to encourage evaporation, and then sparks mimicking lightning were fired into the 'atmosphere'. Then the system was cooled down to allow condensation, and the process was repeated. After a week of continuous operation, Miller found that some 10% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Thus came a feeling of certainty that the next step would surely be a living entity. Who could doubt it?
But it wasn't done. Miller, and the numerous other people who followed in his footprints, performing countless thousands of other experiments in many different lands and laboratories have never assembled Life or a living object, or a 'replicating molecule' which would have been seen as an acceptable first step. No matter how ingeniously they revised their theories about what the primordial atmosphere might have been like, and what proportions chemicals might have been mixed in, and what temperatures and lighting conditions might have been like, Life stubbornly refused to appear in the apparatus. Right from the start, they produced chemicals 'associated with life', sometimes quite complicated chemicals, but no Life.
The most intriguing chemicals Miller produced were a number of amino acids which are found in proteins in living cells. However, these synthesised chemical acids are no more 'proof' of Life being the next step than a million monkeys randomly typing three small words amidst miles of gibberish is proof that Hamlet will be their next step. And interestingly. the carbon in these compounds all came from the methane included in the mix. However, methane is already an organic compound, found in natural gas. Natural gas, like coal and oil, is the product of biological processes of decomposition of the remains of once-living entities. In other words, 'natural' methane seems to be the product of Life already existing, although one of the moons of Saturn seems to have plenty of methane which seems to be abiotically formed. So who knows?
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Richard Milner, in his Encyclopedia, calls this episode 'decades of persistent failure to 'create life''. As the Soup Hypothesis failed to produce the goods, other hypotheses for how Life self-generated itself out of non-life arrived. Someone suggested it might have happened among layers of clay; others have suggested that the super-heated vents called 'black smokers', found in the ocean depths, might have provided suitable circumstances. There is no evidence for either of these hypotheses, and of course, they both have the same problem that the Primordial Soup approach has: by what theoretical principle might Life 'emerge' spontaneously from non-life? This lack of evidence confirmed my 'logic discovery' that Materialism was irrational, in that if the theory was wrong there could not possibly be proper evidence to support it. So, I had been right. No paradox discovered. Sigh of relief: logic worked. How could I ever have doubted it?
This claim, that there is actually no evidence that Life has ever been synthesised will come as a shock to many readers, who like most people, myself included, have had a vague background feeling that it had probably all been done and dusted long ago, and was no longer even worthy of comment. My palaeontologist friend was obviously so confident of this that he transmuted this vague background feeling into 'fact' when he claimed that 'making life was easy'. Well, I'm sorry to bear such shocking news, but fact is fact. If you find it impossible to believe, then I urge you to do as I did, and actually check. You will find that there is no shortage of hugely optimistic literature on the subject, which assures us that it's only a matter of time, etc etc but NO evidence. NO evidence. The best you might hope to find are claims that 'it must have happened, because well, here we are!', which is as irrational an argument as you are ever likely to come across, on a par with my friend's claim that whistling Send in the Clowns for three minutes every Tuesday is successfully keeping polar bears out of Wolverhampton. You will find lots of experiments that have produced 'interesting results'.. but nobody has ever synthesised Life from raw chemicals. You might wish to reflect for a moment on how you (and I, and virtually everyone else) have come to be misled in this matter. Curiously, some Materialists have claimed that the reason Life has not been synthesised in any of our Soup experiments, is that the Laws of Nature must have changed during the aeons between the original self-assembling synthesis of Life from no-life, and today, when chemicals and energies stubbornly refuse to self-assemble into living things. Is there any evidence for this? Not that I know of. And I would also like to know by what Law might the other Laws be allowed to wander. Presumably the Laws must have wandered more than once, as a Big Bang without a Cause appears to break at least the first of the current Laws of Thermodynamics. And at the end of it all, we still have the problem of how non-life can spontaneously assemble itself into something greater than itself, thus running head on against the Third Law of Thermodynamics, as does each and every living organism.
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*** This was the tipping point of decision for me:
Irrational theory + No evidence = (Non)scientific non-sense
That's the way science works. The Hypothesis of Materialism was simply WRONG. I realised that I must now make the absolute decision in favour of Idealism, whether I liked it or not. Materialism must be abandoned if science (not to mention the rest of human endeavour) is to make further progress in its attempts to understand Life, Cosmology and the Point of it All. When this penny finally dropped, I was conscious of being in a state of shock, and not a little alarmed. I'd definitely wandered out of my safety zone. And I was very strongly aware of the tragedy that science had adopted Materialism as a Truth: and had thus adopted the one thing science should never have: a dogma. What was worse, this dogma was not debatable, but plain WRONG; therefore the whole of Science was barking up the wrong tree. Gulp *** May I take pause here to make a couple of points? First of all, let me reassure you, dear reader, that I am not anti-science. Absolutely not. But I am against bad science, as I am sure you are too.
Why does it matter that Materialism is wrong? First of all, it immediately explains why Science has no interest in spooks (as a definitely non-material entity is inconceivable to it), but there is far far more to it. More later.
Logic had showed me, after weeks of trying to prove otherwise, that Materialism was simply irrational. The point is.. have I brought you along with me? If so, the rest of the book should be of great interest to you. After what might have been a period of astonishment and even shock (as it was for me), light will emerge I promise. There is a rational resolution to all this. You might also be anxious that accepting the necessity for Idealism will mean that the well-respected Theory of Evolution, say, must be abandoned.
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Absolutely not, although you may wish to re-consider one associated element of it (of which, more later). In fact, I can think of no scientific Theory that is in any way threatened by substituting Naked Idealism for the Emperor's New Clothes of Materialism, and I can think of a number of Theories that might actually be immediately enhanced, by enabling previously 'forbidden' lines of enquiry, or other possible interpretations of data. Again, more later.
Here are just a few of these theories or problems. You can no doubt add more: Bilateralism and cell differentiation in embryology; origin of pattern in Nature; even quantum multiverses and collapsing waves; and a number of other mysteries that might be rationally examined, not least the mysteries of psychosomatic illness; self-healing; hypnosis; the placebo effect and spooks, of course. More on some of these points later.
More broadly, abandoning Materialism does not (repeat: NOT) mean automatically returning to medieval superstition, or unreasoned Creationism, or blind Fundamentalism, as many scientists fear. There is a rational, reasonable alternative, even to the obscurantism and weirdness of The Church. All will become clear, if I can explain it well enough. Please stay with me. If I have not yet persuaded you via the path of logic and lack-of-evidence, then I urge you, if you are seriously interested in rational thinking rather than just chanting a creed and being Right, to please re-read the previous chapters, with a view to finding fault with my logic at a specific point. If you can find just one specific fault in my logic then my whole case falls apart. But please be sure that it is the logic you are finding fault with, and not the notion that I am insulting the great name of science or somesuch.
And while you're at it, please don't put words into my mouth, such as 'Oh.. this is just x-ism or y-ism in disguise', or 'He's going to tell us next that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam'. Please.. just take me at my word, quite literally, and add no assumptions of your own about what I am about to 'spring'. And please don't fall into the pit of thinking you've negated one point by raising another quite separate issue. Just stick with the issue at hand. I have no hidden agenda. Logic is my only guide, which I'm sure is as you would wish it to be.
Believe me, I have no wish at all to insult anyone or anything, but I do insist that truth and reason, where it may be discovered, should be accepted, explained, and broadcast, preferably in a book with a few jokes in.
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If you can find no specific flaw in my logic then I suggest you should, in the name of reason, take a deep breath and do the rational thing: accept that logic is logic, and that therefore Materialism should be abandoned forthwith. Good luck, either way! And thankyou for following me so far. And if you decide to soldier on with me, I promise interesting times.
I absolutely do understand how hard all this will be for some people, especially for people whose livelihood, and even more, whose reputation hangs on defending a status quo: in this case, Materialism. When I first wrote something about this business, in Scenes from a Smallholding, I sent my drafts to a friend, (a 'non-practising Materialist', much as some people are 'non-practising C of E') asking him to please find flaws in my logic if he could, as I had been unable to find any myself despite endless hours of trying. After a brief exchange of emails, Charlie said that no, he could not find any fault in my logic. 'So!' I said 'you must thus abandon Materialism in favour of its only logical alternative, which is some form of basic Idealism.' 'Well, yes' Charlie responded, 'but I prefer to sit on the fence a bit longer.' Many others will feel the same way, I know. But here's the point: there is no fence. Is there? It's a clear either/or, yes? No fence. If you can't remember exactly why, please go back to Chapter 5 and peruse the choice again. If you still insist on sitting on a non-existent fence, please bear in mind that you are sitting on an illusion. Could be painful.. Nevertheless, all this will be too much of a shock to the mental habit of decades for a lot of people. Some will never be able to face it, and will just fulminate in inner fury or write angry and scornful letters and blogs. Many will face the decision and its implications, however, especially among the inquisitive and undogmatised young. Slowly Materialism will be ousted. Give it 50 years.
I do realise that I have laboured my points very heavily indeed in the last couple of chapters, and used far too many italics. I apologise for this to a degree, but like it or not, extraordinary claims need to be hammered out in great detail, and the claim that Science's invisible but near-universal dogma is plain wrong, must be seen as extraordinary, I think.
Yes'dogma'. That is assuredly what Materialism has become to Science, and science should never have a dogma. Any bold researcher who would like to pursue experiments in something like telepathy, or homeopathy, or anything else that goes against the unquestionable beliefs of The Dogma, will find funding very hard to come by (although I do detect a slight change of late, and can think of at least two ongoing experiments into Near Death Experiences).
One quiet polite explanation of an unexpected point will not do. It will be overlooked. Even two or three mentions may not do, as human nature being what it is, people are disinclined to change their minds about anything they think they are Right about, especially if they are backed up by some sort of powerful Establishment. And people frequently tend to read what they think is there, rather than what actually is there.
In the case of Materialism the Establishment comprises Science, almost all of the media, and most of what may be called 'educated society': three super-heavyweights, each as nimble to the call for a fundamental change in direction as a supertanker in a canal.
To take a hammer to the very foundation stone of modern Science verges on sacrilege (a carefully chosen word; more later) and will be instantly rejected by many. However, I hope that by repeating my points in slightly differing ways, none of which can be automatically rejected by logical means... well, I hope that even the most hard-wired Materialist might agree to see the point. Thankyou for your patience. *** So.. emerging from my state of shock, I found yet more questions queuing up for my attention. Things such as: Why had the Miller experiments been done at all? And the new Big One: how had Science come to adopt a dogma? And such a duff one, at that? And, of course how had it come to pass that a smart man like my palaeontologist friend had assured me that 'making life was easy'? He was not an ignorant clown; he was a thoughtful academic who had passed through the full rigours of a scientific university course. How had he come to make such a woefully and totally wrong assertion? The answer to the first question is interesting, to me at least. The story seems to have begun in the 1920's with a Russian called Oparin and an Englishman called Haldane, both steadfast Materialists, who saw no reason why ordinary chemicals could not have spontaneously selfassembled in the Primordial Soup, given millions of years, until Life emerged. Oparin's book, The Origin of Life is still a lively and stimulating read (available from www.valencia.edu/~orilife) although, as with all his Materialist colleagues, including Mr Dawkins of course, you need to be on your guard for the sudden 'sleight of words' in which 'structure' or 'pattern' or 'complexity' or 'design!' suddenly appear from nowhere, without due Cause. The reason I'm mentioning Oparin is that I came across an article he wrote in the 1970's in some sort of biology year book in Carmarthen library. In it, (and I paraphrase, because the book disappeared from the library so I was unable to get the verbatim quote, years later) he said that we've been trying to synthesise life from chemicals for fifty years, with no success, so maybe
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it was time to call a halt. And when the originator says enough is enough, maybe we should have listened, and begun a re-think thirty years ago. But that doesn't seem to have happened. Materialism still reigns, to the bafflement of many, and Mr Dawkins and his colleagues are still convinced that Life created itself spontaneously from abiotic chemicals and energies, and absolutely nothing more.
Abiotic: 'devoid of life' Concise Oxford Dictionary.
How these experiments were carried out still interests me, not so much from the technical side but from the theoretical side. Huge assumptions were made about what the Primordial Soup may have been like, based upon the best information of the day. Thus all the researchers had to work on were optimistic guesses. Fair enough. But as the expected results failed to arrive, they must have fiddled the components a bit here, and tweaked a bit there, to encourage the process along, so to speak. After all, they were not troubled by doubt. But despite all the help they could offer to the experiments, Life remained unsynthesised. The rabbit stubbornly refused to appear in the hat.
And if you're still not persuaded, even after several re-reads of the logical case I'm putting for the abandonment of Materialism, you could try asking yourself 'Which chemical precisely is it that knows how to read this book?' Or do they all know? Because knowing how to read must come from somewhere, and for a Materialist, it can only be from chemicals (ie, Matter/Energy). Since writing this chapter I have become aware of the International Association for the Study of the Origins of Life (ISSOL). For forty years ISSOL has been trying to find what Life is and where it came from, but with no success. ISSOL has recently begun to widen its search into outer space, presumably as a tacit admission that the origins of Life are unlikely to be found on Earth.. the only place we know Life exists. Funny old world And a PS.. Even if Miller and co had succeeded in assembling a replicating molecule, the process would not have been at all representative of any process in nature. Why not? Because of the enormous input of human Intelligence, Purpose and Will which set up the experiment in the first place, and then monitored and guided it. It's the same issue again of Professor Dawkins' 'self-evolving' biomorphs. 'Mind' and 'Purpose'
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Chapter 7 DNA is Served
We have found the secret of life!

Francis Crick
Nobel prize 1962 for discovery of the structure of DNA
I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken
Oliver Cromwell
You may perhaps be wondering why DNA has not yet made an appearance in this story. After all, isn't it 'the secret of life', as many journalists (and others) have called it? Surely the key to all these problems of origination lies in DNA? Well no, I'm afraid not. First of all, let's be clear DNA is a chemical, and chemicals are not alive, by definition. Nobody disputes this. Put a strand of DNA on a plate, and it just stays there until it dries up and blows away or is licked up by the cat. Put huge piles of DNA on a billion plates for a billion years and it still just lies there. How could it do otherwise? It's just a chemical. Put it into water and what do you get? A wet chemical. Mix it with other chemicals or chop it about and what do you get? Mixed chemicals or chopped-about chemicals. No more. Given this, how precisely, might DNA have ever been called 'the secret of life'? To answer this we need to go back to the 1950's again, and the discovery of the famous double-helix, following the investigations of a couple of dedicated Materialists called Crick and Watson.
And also upon the work of Rosalind Franklin, whose contribution to the final resolution the other two failed to acknowledge when nominated for the Nobel prize. Science, I discovered sadly, is not always the tale of co-operative and high-minded dedication to truth that I had imagined it to be. There can be a huge amount of rank ambition and ego involved, too. Also outright deception and cheating. Perhaps the most spectacular recent case would be that of the Korean 'king of cloning', Woo Suk Hwang, who quite deliberately manufactured evidence to support his own claim to having created the world's first cloned human embryo. All lies.
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People had already known something of the powers and role of DNA, but C&W provided the crucial twisted-ladder structure which made sense of the whole thing in terms of Mechanism. Since this discovery, enormous amounts of time and money have been poured into DNA research and again, as with the Primordial Soup experiments, simple-mechanical expectations have been dashed. Surely we were going to find a Gene for Intelligence and a Gene for Criminality and so forth? No sorry. No such things exists. The more people investigate, the more complex the picture becomes. Genes in isolation might explain your hair colour, but even something as apparently simple as the shape of your nose requires the involvement of multiple genes. So what to genes do, precisely? Ultimately, all genes do is to provide a template from which specific new chemicals ('proteins') can be synthesised to construct or repair the cells of the physical body.
A human body requires an astonishing number of different proteins, perhaps up to a million, although nobody is absolutely sure. Each is of a particular complexity and shape, and each is dedicated to a particular purpose, or sometimes several purposes.
A gene is a physical thing used for physical processes, and serves as the first physical link in a chain which leads to the fabrication of a specific chemical which is then slotted into its correct position in an already existing, or growing pattern. Anything not strictly physical remains elusive in terms of genetic coding. And, of course, we have the constant background problem of a gene being just a length of DNA, which is in itself, just a chemical. Thus a gene is a chemical. The problem is how, in principle, might an unintelligent chemical contain within itself a psychological aptitude, like Criminality or Intelligence?
If you've followed me so far, you will agree that Materialism will have a very hard time answering this theoretical question: it's essentially the same issue of 'something from nothing' again.
It is because of the key role that DNA plays in the physical repair and reconstruction of our bodies, and in the inheritance of physical attributes as the embryo develops, that it was called the 'secret of life' and similar nonsense, because, in a Materialist's world, the Matter in our bodies generates all that we are, so the 'secret of life' must lie within our bodies
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which are all chemical; thus DNA, being a clearly important chemical, was thought worthy of the title. It's still just a chemical. Who originally called DNA 'the secret of life'? Francis Crick I think. Such a dramatic phrase was immediately pounced on by the press and thus became 'truth' for most of the populus. Other scientists did not stampede to correct this false impression that journalists were unleashing on the world: that Science had indeed unlocked the Secret of Life: that Man had at last triumphed over Nature (and 'God', of course). Mr Crick called his book Life Itself, for example: no doubts there. Why did Scientists even half-believe that purely chemical DNA was the Secret of Life? Sorry to repeat myself, but it's because they are Materialists... for whom The Body (being composed of Matter/Energy) is the source of all our faculties. Well, they must believe this, mustn't they? If they believe 'everything is mineral', they are bound to believe this. I've heard several Scientists on television, and read others in newspapers, quite seriously claim that ideas are caused by brain activity. In other words, they are claiming that detectable processes in the brain, such as chemical reactions or electric currents, are actually generating thoughts from within their own being (it must be from within their own electro-chemical being as there can be no outside agency for a Materialist, remember?) Thus, we are asked to believe that the pulse that gives rise to a trace on an ECG is not something 'associated with a thought', or 'a result of a thought', but the originator of the thought; or is the self-generating thought itself.
To consider that an electrical pulse 'is a thought' is directly comparable to thinking that a television signal, 'is a picture', which it is not. A tv signal is a transmission of a deconstructed picture, intelligently encoded, for a purpose, which is intended to be intelligently decoded at its point of destination, again, for a purpose. Intelligence.. purpose.. we can't get away from it. A Materialist can not admit of an intelligent purpose as an outside agency; hence brain chemicals and electricity must for him be the exclusive formative agents of thoughts, absurd paradoxes notwithstanding. An Idealist, on the other hand, will admit of an intelligent source for the ideas that precede the brain waves. But why, one wonders, might a non-material thought come to be encoded as an ECG trace? How does Mind relate to Body? Might Idealism come up with any clues apart from admitting the need for an intelligent source of some sort? I was all agog...
According to this Materialist scenario, electricity either is, or produces from within itself, (which amounts to the same thing) not just one thought, but all the various and amazing and original thoughts that everyone has ever had in the history of the world. This presumably must mean that all electricity contains all thoughts, as it's very hard to see how just the right bit of it popped up into my mind rather than yours, and on this particular
Friday rather than twenty years ago, specifically to create my own special thoughts (and memories, of course) just for me. And presumably there must be numerous different sorts of electricity to account for all my varied emotions, and my will, and sense of purpose, and imagination, and so on and so on... For all my human faculties in other words. And I guess the electricity must be of all sorts of strengths or qualities to account for all the Plutos and relatively few Platos.
It might be useful here to recall how you got on earlier with trying to define 'I', because if electricity is providing my thoughts for me.. then who is this 'me' or 'I'? Or is the 'I' merely an illusion brought about by electricity contemplating itself? If you can find a few spare minutes, I can recommend spending them on this one: "Who am 'I'?"
By logic, this can only mean that as it can think, all electricity must be alive, and being thoughtful, can thus create cathedrals and so forth, unless brain electricity is of a special creative sort, different in kind from the stuff that makes the fridge gurgle, and I've never heard anyone suggest this. So if electricity is smart enough to create thoughts for us, presumably it is capable of many other marvels. Perhaps we should worship it. Yet again, once we ditch Materialism as the non-sense it is, we can safely ditch such bizarre ideas as electricity and/or chemical brains being or creating thoughts.
One wonders what these 'thoughtful-electricity' Materialists make of Dr Eleanor McGuire's famous study of London cab-drivers in 2000, in which she showed that the area of the brain associated with mapping and navigation (the hippocampus) increased in size as the drivers learned more and more of 'the knowledge' of London's streets and routes. Idealism says that Man's intentions, thoughts, and actions caused the hippocampus to adapt to its owner's requirements. Materialism claims, presumably, that the hippocampus grew first (for no apparent reason) and the electricity in it then created thoughts and memories of the mental maps that the drivers needed without any input on his part. Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall buzzing quietly.
Another shock-in-waiting in the early days of DNA research was that everyone assumed that the more advanced the life-form, the more complex would be its genome.
Genome: the name for the entire length of DNA specific to a particular organism. Every one of your body's roughly 100 trillion or ten quadrillion cells (that's between 100,000,000,000,000 and 10,000,000,000,000,000 of the little blighters, depending on which estimate you prefer) contains a copy of your personal and unique DNA-strand, each one made up of some three billion chemical units. Each strand is about 75mm in length, but is somehow coiled and supercoiled to fit within the cell nucleus, which is about 1/500th of a millimetre across. This represents a
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data storage rate some 100,000,000,000,000 times denser than the best current computer storage systems. Pretty neat for an allegedly random occurrence. If all the DNA strands in your body were to be uncoiled and laid end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back 8,000 times, and each strand contains more information than all twenty-eight volumes of my Encyclopedia Britannica.
But it turned out not to be so. For example, the humble guinea pig would seem to have a larger genome than humans; and Trichomonas vaginalis, a parasitic protozoan which causes something called Trichomoniasis in ladies, which I don't wish to find out anything more about, has an estimated 59,681 genes, as opposed to the human count of 20-25,000. Quite why a tiny pathogen should have twice as many genes than the host it infests is unclear to me.
What on earth are all these genes for in a tiny pathogen, if a vastly more complex entity like a human can get by very well with less than half as many? And how do a mere 25,000 human gene-units lay out the plan for an embryo and its entire placental support system intricately linked to the mother host, then construct all the hundreds of trillions of cells, all of the right type and in the right order, making muscle and bone and lungs and heart etc etc and then supervise and create the wiring up of the hundred thousand million neurons in the brain which dictate or allow a person's enormous range of mental capacities, never mind the forty miles of nerve strings and 60,000 miles of blood vessels, and inter-locking and harmonised endocrine and metabolic systems and so on and so forth. all at once? A computer programmer would want to plot out an algorithm in minute detail to methodically specify and sequence all the processes that were needed but he would be stumped by even a routine biological process. How, for example, would he devise a schema for an automated system which creates our 25 trillion red blood cells (each containing hundreds of billions of precisely placed atoms) at the rate of 2.5 million per second? (And he would also need to add to his program a parallel procedure for disassembling and disposing of 2.5 million worn out red blood cells per second, thus keeping the system in balance.) Twenty-five thousand 'clickable' units is clearly nothing like enough to set up and run even such a routine system, never mind building a highly complex entity like a liver from scratch, or the astonishing procedure for making an entire new body in a custom-built womb. Then add to all this the astonishing fact that 98% of human DNA does not code for a building-protein. This 98% was originally (and rather arrogantly, I would suggest) called 'junk DNA'. Now it is being found that it does have a purpose after all, being involved somehow in switching genes on and off. No doubt more purposes will be admitted in due course. If you are not by now either lost in wonder or completely gobsmacked and bewildered by some of these findings, then there is something wrong with you, I suggest, and you should immediately seek medical advice or at least a darkened room. Meanwhile you could do a lot worse than to read Why Us? by Dr James Le Fanu for a fascinating and eminently readable exploration of this extremely challenging issue of what genes do, don't do, and can't do.
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And you might like to take a look at a book on embryology, and ponder a while on the quite incredible number of precisely organised processes that go into the making of a new being, and all without any effort on the part of the mother. Who or what, any sane person must wonder, is in charge of this galactic-scale of organisation? It is unlikely to be a sheer accident as a Materialist must ultimately claim, if only because Materialism has been shown to be riddled with paradox and thus is not to be trusted.
Whatever, there was clearly much more to genes than the simple materialmechanical one-to-one equivalence that the original researchers had expected. What's more, it soon became apparent that the fact that all creatures share the DNA principle actually meant that all creatures actually share huge chunks of the same DNA code. For example, you and I seem to share some 50% of our Super-Duper Homo sapiens genetic code with a banana; and, good news for Welshmen, about 35% with a daffodil.
Tiny it may be, but the humble fruit fly needs 13,601 genes: half as many as a human. And, incredibly, it shares two thirds of these genes with us, apparently. A coarse little carp has 98 chromosomes (a particular assembly of genes). Humans have only 46.
What does all this mean? First of all, it's a little bit embarrassing for The Master Species, wouldn't you say? Arithmetically, it would appear that the extra 50% human-only genes that a banana is not privy to, are the genes which are responsible for all the attributes which we do not share with a banana. I can think of quite a lot. Do these extra 50% contain all our potential for Mind and Consciousness, as well as all the other more obvious differences, like body-shape and pigmentation ? Presumably so, although nobody seems to have found such specific genes. If not then maybe, if no absolute line can be drawn, we should have to admit the extraordinary possibility that bananas and daffs have some sort of Intelligence and maybe Consciousness? Who knows? Experimenters with polygraph lie detectors claim that tomatoes feel something akin to pain. A little more on the extraordinary findings of Cleve Backster later.
Guess what? It seems we have less than half as many genes as a rice plant, and wheat has more genes than we do, too. Make of all this what you will. What is certain is that a simple mechanistic approach of 'one gene does one thing' is dead in the water. A cartoon: a daffodil and Einstein, side by side. Under each is an identical chemical schema of a gene. Under one is the caption 'A very dim chemical-gene', and under the other 'A very bright chemical-gene. Compare and contrast'.
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So again what are genes? It's still a great mystery how chemical genes relate to the non-chemical thoughts, emotions, aspirations, and all the other 1001 non-physical qualities that people experience, and which make people people, rather than corpses or chemical assemblages. Clearly genes are involved in bodily processes, and heredity, and in some non-physical processes too (despite the mind-boggling problem of how a chemical can possibly relate to a thought or an aptitude, and so on, even given the logical requirement that Life, Mind and Consciousness must be in the saddle, rather than mineral, abiotic Matter), but it is a highly complex and baffling business, whichever way you look at it. For example, we share some 98% of our ~25,000 genes with chimps. 2% of 25,000 = 500. Thus these additional 500 genes, looking at it mechanistically, must presumably somehow account for all the differences twixt Plato and Pongo.
Although we are superficially close to a chimp, there are actually thousands of differences in body shape, each requiring thousands of modifications to cell, tissue, organs, etc; and more thousands of differences in the brain structure, each requiring need I go on? How many gene-units might be needed just to organise the 'hardware' in the brain that might allow humans to have abstract thought; speech; endless creativity; enormous memory; complex evaluative judgements; and so on and so on? The number apparently available is just 500. Again, make of that what you will.
And after all those enormous puzzles, the key point is that DNA can only operate within an already living cell. Once again:
DNA can do its stuff only within an already living cell.
In other words, it is most definitely NOT Life Itself, but some sort of tool, a former or blueprint, used within an already living entity, whose duty is to repair the fabric of the moment, or to pass on physical (and other?) characteristics to the next generation.
AND. If one removes the nucleus from a cell, thus taking out all the DNA from the cell, the cell continues to behave precisely as before, except that it can't replicate. Thus the genes can't even be in control of the cell's day-to-day behaviour, as is normally assumed.
If we admit that genes are only chemicals, with no power of operation outside of a living cell, then we may sensibly suggest that it is the cell that determines which coding genes are turned on and off, somehow using other, 'junk' genes in the process and thus requiring an unknown number of levels of power and control. What are these powers, precisely? Where
do they reside? What controls and coordinates them? A Materialist can only insist that these powers and controls simply don't exist, and that randomness somehow does it all. An Idealist can accept what logic insists must exist, and look more deeply.
'For their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe' according to Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of Biology, University College, London. These embryonic cells produce all our normal, average cells. There are thousands of different proteins at work in an average cell, beavering away at a gigantic number of immensely complicated procedures. We each have multiple trillions of cells, all slaving away on our personal behalf. More on this later.
Mutations happen from time to time, for what appears to be either good or ill. What causes these mutations? A Materialist is bound to say they are random. After all, for a Materialist there can be no possible 'ghost in the machine' to direct anything in the body in any way; but for an Idealist, Life, Mind, and Consciousness must surely be involved somehow, as LMC preexisted the Universe, and must thus have created all the physical stuff within the Universe, like it or not.
Please go back to Chapter 5 if you are still having trouble with this. Note that Darwin never used the word 'random' in Origins. For him there was a cause for all things, beginning with 'the Creator'. The process of Evolution by Natural Selection was not random, but caused by millions of contributing events; each individual death or birth fed into the huge overall pattern. Nowadays we would call this a 'chaotic' process, I suppose. 'Chaotic' is not really a very helpful word to describe a non-chaotic but merely extremely complex process, but we seem to be stuck with it. Another Materialist lexical hi-jack, suggesting 'purposelessness', as per the Dogma...
It would thus be reasonable to expect LMC to be involved with its creations somehow. But how, exactly? Another Idealist mystery More on this later. *** But meanwhile, any Religionist who has stuck with this book so far will be leaping up and down, yelling 'Told you so!' But take care if there are two of you, one Christian and one Muslim, which of you is right? Perhaps the answer may be 'both'. Or 'neither'. So please go easy on all the unseemly triumphalism and brace yourself for some more considered thinking. There's still a long way to go. All enjoyable, I hope. ***
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To my great surprise, it looked as though I had now answered my original question. Thus: the reason Science isn't interested in ghosts and NDE's and poltergeists and premonitions and all the rest, is that the unspoken Dogma of Materialism that Science has adopted simply will not allow Anomalies like telepathy to happen.
It is a scientific principle that for something to happen 'at a distance' a medium of some sort is required. For example, for sound to travel from your mouth to my ear, air is required. If you shout at me in a vacuum, the sound will never reach me. As another example, a magnet can move a paperclip across a table while hovering above it because of the magnetic field which links the clip to the magnet; block the field and the clip won't move. This requirement for a medium is standard, although there seems to be one mighty exception to it (for the moment, anyway), which is that Light is accepted as moving through space without a 'luminiferous' ('light-bearing') carrier. Clearly telepathy would be a terrible challenge to a Materialist: what could the carrier possibly be? And as for psychokinesis (the alleged movement of physical objects by Mind alone)
And, as The Dogma is so revered, it simply is not possible to allow it to be challenged by a single white crow, never mind a huge flock of noisy Anomalous starlings. If Science (and of course this means Materialist-Science) were to admit the reality of just one single spook or Anomaly the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. That is unthinkable, so the Materialist-Science establishment does what nervous people have always done when faced with anomalous evidence that would challenge their certainties: they ignore it or laugh at it. When they can't just ignore it or laugh at it they attack it, occasionally ferociously. More later.
We are all used to seeing tv programmes about a haunting automatically wheeling on a Scientist to debunk it, usually with a lot of vague generalities and dogmatic assertions, rather than any sound proof or evidence, but delivered with great authority, which is almost as good. (However, I have detected a slightly more independent attitude on the telly in recent years.)
When I realised that this was what was going on I was more than shocked. I was quite disgusted. Science was not meant to be like that. It was meant to be impartial, and was meant to collate ALL evidence to be carefully sifted and evaluated, without prejudice. Evidence was not meant to be ignored because it was inconvenient; and especially not so if it was inconvenient merely to a dogma; and, worse, to a completely irrational dogma. Science had been hi-jacked and distorted, and was now unfortunately operating according to the three-pronged maxim of:
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1 2 3
Anomalies cannot happen, by dogmatic definition; therefore they do not happen; therefore, as they do not happen, it would be a waste of our time to investigate them.
a terrible perversion of the Scientific Method. Do I exaggerate? Unfortunately, I don't think so. Can you think of another reason why Science would refuse to investigate such challenges as reports of plates flying round the room or endless reports of hauntings and poltergeists? Or of a reason for why they should regularly mock such reports?
To say that Science doesn't investigate these things because all previous reports have been false, being either fraudulent or erroneously interpreted, won't work for two reasons: firstly, once we've filtered out the frauds, we need to know who proved the others false, and what dogma (if any) he was operating under; and secondly the fact that in the strange world of Anomalies, past events are not necessarily a clear guide to future ones, as not enough research has been done to discover possible common elements. At the moment Materialist-Science has built itself a safely closed and vicious circle: No evidence because no research; No research because no evidence.
Whole libraries are devoted to Anomalous evidence, (for example the splendid one held by the Society for Psychical Research, in London) but only a handful of scientists have ever visited them, and always at high risk to their reputations. Even Isaac Newton, often called 'the greatest scientist who ever lived', and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of Evolution by Natural Selection, suffered professionally for their interest in the paranormal. More on Mr Wallace later. I've heard bland statements from 'sceptics' suggesting that they don't investigate Anomalies because they are merely anecdotal and can not be reproduced ('the acid test for science'), but this is nonsense on two counts: some Anomalies certainly ARE testable; and as for anecdotes not being admissible, well, as one clear-minded scientist once put it:
'One anecdote's just an anecdote; but lots of anecdotes is evidence'.
Just so.
A Materialist who roughly scanned a few pages of this book took objection to this quote, on the grounds that anecdotes are always just anecdotes and thus inadmissible as proper evidence. But what is a single experiment, if not an anecdote? Multiple experiments, all giving similar results count as evidence, so why should not numerous
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anecdotes all reporting, say, the observation that bats always turn left when leaving a cave? Evidence? In fact, all biological sciences rely heavily upon multiple-anecdotal evidence. And for that Materialist, one must wonder whether the single anecdotal report of an earthquake destroying Seattle would count as evidence? Presumably not This 'reader' is far from unique, alas. Some of the worst logic I've come across has been from Scientists.
To recap: it seemed I really had answered my original question now. Science did not take an interest in spooks because it was in thrall to an irrational dogma that would not allow it to take an interest, and would thus go to extraordinary lengths to discredit reports of Anomalies. I could see no other sensible reason, and was, yes.. disgusted. I could feel the notion of Conspiracy shifting outwards from Mr Dawkins and a couple of other biologists to include all of Science.
But, as I said before, this conspiracy tendency passed. More in a while..
*** So.. time to give up, then? Time to return to cultivating mon jardin, a little wiser but sadder? Maybe. But by now, it was becoming apparent that the smallholding would need to close down. My health had improved a bit, in that I was about 5060% normal for most of the time, but that wasn't nearly enough, and we could not realistically look forward to me ever being fully well again. Anne had worked wonders over the twelve years I'd had the M.E., but enough was enough. There was no point in her killing herself to prove a point. We would just have to admit defeat and go onto State Benefit full-time. That's what we did, with great regret. From now on we would be growing food only for ourselves, and we would continue to phase the animals out, mainly by what we call natural wastage: waiting for our lovely April to die, and then the sheep, one by one. *** The good side to the bad side was that now I had more time to read and think. Now I definitely wanted to know why science had got itself into this ridiculous and profoundly unscientific bind of setting its collective agenda according to a duff dogma. When did the rot set in? Why? And also, now that I was satisfied that Idealism was the only rational alternative to Materialism, I realised that here was a philosophy that could allow, in some simple basic way, for the existence of spooks: something to
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do with non-Matter being separate from Matter; non-Matter pre-existing Matter something to do with Mind whatever that meant Hmmm.. How far might one get with a bit more rational thinking..? More reading now, concentrating on science history, perhaps to try to track down the point at which science became a sub-branch of Materialism. And some more investigations into the paranormal. I'd come across some truly strange and 'unlikely' stuff, like the observation that ancient stone circles apparently 'contain' a power that will send a dowser's pendulum spinning wildly, or reports of anaesthetised patients reporting back things that they 'could not' have perceived while under anaesthesia. Perhaps the nearest thing to my white crow requirement were the extraordinary results in remote metal bending produced by John Hasted, Professor of Experimental Physics at Birkbeck College. He poked a dozen or so straightened paperclips through a small hole in a glass sphere and invited his young experimenters to scrunch them up by mind power alone. The resultant scrunches are impressive. Certainly they could not have been poked through the little hole in such a condition. But.. I dunno still not quite what I was looking for. Maybe if that little hole in the sphere had been heat sealed first? Getting closer, though. I guess this brings us to the end of Step One. Well, almost.
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Part Two So that's the problem! Now what?
This section discovers why science has accepted a faulty dogma as Truth, and how religions all have a secret something in common. It then investigates various aspects of Mind which science often seems to try to ignore, and concludes that there is an alternative to both Big Science and Big Religion's views on the nature of Reality. I feel as though I ought to apologise in advance for the length of this section, but as what I am saying will be seen as outrageous to so many people, I do feel it is important to make the case clearly, which inevitably means 'at some length'. However as I have found it all of great interest, I hope you will too. Part Three, beginning at Chapter 21, will be the 'positive' section of the book, building upon what I hope are the firm foundations set in Parts One and Two.
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Chapter 8 All in the Mind
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven
Milton Faith is the enemy of wisdom Quentin Charles
When the kids left home for university in the 1990's I had more time to put into researching and thinking, and to load up with carrier bags full of books I'd never heard of before from the famous Oxfam bookshop in Oxford. It struck me how alienated I felt in this monolith of academia, and how I felt that its mandarins would never listen to me, a hick from the sticks, or the thread of logic that seemed to me to be irrefutable. After all, it was the very heartland of Richard Dawkins and numerous other high-profile Materialists. It was at this point that I decided to abandon the academic approach I'd been working on, in favour of the present more personal one. ***
Please note that all of the preceding 'arguments' I've been making are not really arguments at all. They are not matters of opinion which I am attempting to persuade you with, but of elementary logic; and the duty of logic is to clarify, not persuade. I've been trying to point out a particular path that logic seems to dictate, and to invite you to follow me down it, strange and unexpected though it might be. The proposition is: that Materialism is fatally flawed from within, and thus its sole alternative, Idealism, must replace it. If you're still with me, I guess you must see the reasonableness of this claim. But if you are still having trouble with it, please do go back and check the 'Either/Or Decision' in Chapter 5. It took me months to accept it, so I do know what a challenge it might be.
I have run the Either/Or Decision (Materialism or Idealism?) past a number of people over the years, and have been surprised by how muddled thinking can be. Five examples:
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As I mentioned before, my friend Charlie, a Cambridge graduate, insisted on sitting on a non-existent fence, even when he was obliged to agree, by logic, that it was indeed non-existent. Another friend, Dave, read my drafts on Materialism/Idealism and immediately switched to aggro-defensive mode and became abusive. Logic was a stranger to him. At one point he sarcastically suggested that 'Oh.. so we're talking Area 51 here, are we?' Strangely, I knew what he was referring to. 'Area 51' is a great favourite of conspiracy theorists who claim that the US Government has a Five-Star Top Secret base called Area 51 where they are dissecting and trying to reconstruct flying saucers that have come into their possession. Quite how Area 51 might be associated with the inner contradictions of Materialism was never broached. On three separate occasions, in face to face discussion, someone has come up with the devastating question of 'Ah! But who made this Creator, or whatever you want to call it! Eh??' This is usually delivered with a pointing finger, as an unanswerable knockout blow. I reply, of course, that the same question may be asked of a Materialist or any other sort of 'ist', and that the question of who originated the originator, (or what was it that came before 'infinity' or whatever) is thus 'a constant', meaning 'common to all philosophical or cosmological theories and therefore can count neither one way nor the other', but the questioner is usually so delighted to have 'won' with his knockout blow (it's always a 'he'), that my comment falls upon deaf ears. For many, 'discussion' means 'competition', and 'competition' means 'winning' above all. And thus, personal aggrandisement matters more to them than learning something. Very common, alas. More later. Someone who reviewed Scenes from a Smallholding on the web had obviously enjoyed it, except for what he called the 'philosophical ramblings' in the last chapter. However, the chapter in question, called The Tale of the Kale (see Chapter 11) was neither philosophical nor rambling. It was logical, not speculative (ie, not philosophical) and it followed a logical and rational thread: ie, it did not ramble. The reviewer's comment was deeply disappointing as he had clearly not understood the chapter properly, or he could not have made such a comment. Unfortunately, a lot of people just scan a passage of writing and think that they thus know what it's going to be about, and then jump to erroneous conclusions. Sad, but a fact of life.
Perhaps the most alarming encounter with non-logic was with a man called Barry who had made contact via my blog. He was a dietician by trade and 'scientific' by inclination. We exchanged a few emails, and I introduced him to the Materialist/Idealist split. To cut a long story short, Barry claimed to be both a Materialist and a born again Christian. Nothing I could say could persuade him that any sort of Christian must be an Idealist, as the very essence of Christianity absolutely requires a non-Material Creator at the very least, never mind a personal (and non-Material) Saviour etc. How he squared the one with the other is completely beyond my comprehension. What all of these experiences showed me is how deeply the Materialist Hypothesis is buried in our culture as Truth. It is simply unquestioned, and worse, it is constantly reinforced by Materialists with on-demand access to the media. Nobody knows how to challenge it without being sneered at or ignored, and a general lack of confidence in or lack of understanding of logic means that Materialism continues to rule, unchallenged, with no end yet in sight. One underlying problem here is that both Scientists and Religionists have a compromised relationship with logic. It is more obvious with Religionists,
And here I mean 'dogmatic Religionists' as opposed to people of modest opinions who think there must be more to Life than beer and skittles.
who are quite happy for virgin births and stars in the sky to have occurred without rational explanation. For them, logic is irrelevant to Faith, and they may believe that excessive use of the Mind may even lead to irreligion, which means the work of the d*v*l. I think we can do a lot better than that, as we look deeper at what 'religion' is really about in a couple of chapters' time. Science, of course, should have no problem at all with logic, as it is quite rightly proud to assert that it is led by rationality and carefully collated facts. As I hope I've pointed out, the Materialist Hypothesis is actually hopelessly illogical, but despite this, many Scientists feel they need to defend it against any challenge, even if the challenge is patently rational. Dogma must be defended; that is its sole requirement. Both camps have both become so immersed in their own particular brands of double-think that poor old logic doesn't get a look in any more. But why? How has it come to pass that science and logic have parted company at such a deep level? Another problem. (eventually solved, I think. See what you think by the end of Chapter 10.)
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It was clear to me that while Step One had turned out to be matter of elementary logic (and thus in theory indisputable), that all my future investigations were likely to be in the murkier worlds of philosophy and religion, not to mention history, in which 'truth' is an evasive quality, and The Truth unheard of. How would I cope with these uncertainties? Would I be able to find anything approaching 'truth'? This puzzle led me down a side alley for a while. How do we evaluate what may be true and what is probably not? How do we 'know' what we 'know'? How, even, do we think? This issue kept pestering me, and wouldn't leave me alone until I'd explored it. Pretty soon I discovered that this area of research had a satisfyingly difficult Greek name: 'epistemology'; and it was as old as the hills. That too was satisfying, as it meant that I was not alone in barking up this particular tree. But it was also disappointing, in that it meant it was clearly still A Problem or it would have been solved long ago and would thus not have been worthy of a fancy Greek name. I read more books, and put up more and more shelves, and spent days on end mulling and pondering, and came to the conclusion, which I sincerely hope is not original, or we really are in trouble, that there are three major ways in which we 'know' things: 1 2 3 Belief Understanding Direct knowledge
Briefly: Belief Belief is what drives most of us. We are told, virtually from birth, that x is True, or possibly The Truth, and we believe it. Kids, the innocents, believe most of what they are told. People often talk of the romance of Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy for kids, but I'm not so sure myself. When I discovered that Father Christmas was a fraud, I felt hurt and stupid and betrayed, and never quite believed adults again. You could argue that this was a good thing, of course, in that it instilled in me from an early age the maxims on the flyleaf of this book.
Bet you didn't read the flyleaf, did you!
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But this could have been instilled in other and more positive ways, I think. Many or most religious Believers may be gentle, kindly, and harmless, and a blessing to the world, and I respect them for their positivity, but even so, Belief still smacks of cop-out to me. I can't believe something just because someone tells me it is so. For a start, what do I do when someone else tells me something different is so? Drop the first Belief and take up the second? Follow the sandal instead of the gourd?
The Life of Brian is an excellent cautionary tale, as it holds up to the light the way large numbers of people prefer to Believe rather than Think or Understand, and will go to all sorts of ridiculous ends to find 'The Saviour' on the one hand, and to then split into sects and mutually abusive sub-groups, both in politics and religion, on the other. Their twentieth century descendants are the very people who abused The Life of Brian as being blasphemous without having actually seen it, of course, as that might have required them to think.
What bothers me more is the fact that the potential dangers of Belief are huge. Apart from the atrocities directly resulting from blind faith, of which I mentioned just one or two earlier, Belief essentially closes down the Mind. If you 'know' (but actually just 'Believe') that y is the only saviour of mankind; the one true prophet; the father of his chosen people; or whatever it is going to colour your views of other people and other perspectives, and probably not in a positive way. You don't need to think, do you? Your thinking has already been done for you. And anyway, thinking might reveal things best left uncovered, like inconsistency, paradox, contradiction, illogic... which you nervously suspect might be there, but which you really don't want to face. Much safer and easier to just Believe, and perhaps to enjoy your superiority over other lesser beings who Believe something else right back at you. Maybe you cover your own doubts by laughing at these other poor infidels; maybe you ignore and scorn them; or maybe, if you are angry and ignorant enough, you bomb them or cut their heads off on video, for the greater glory of z, the one and only God of infinite compassion. Believers tend not to be troubled by irony. Belief so easily leans towards intolerance and absolutism. This is very evident in the worlds of squabbling religious and political sects in which I am right and you are therefore wrong. It's the 'therefore' that matters here. Belief does not encourage alternatives, discussion, mediation, common ground, synthesis, synergy, co-operation or development. It is simply Right and brooks no competition.
Examples: Charlemagne's violent conversion of the Saxons; Islam's conversion of the Maghreb; the Stahlhelm vs Spartacist atrocities in Germany, post WWI; Rangers vs
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Celtic riots; Catholic vs Orangemen; Hutu vs Tutsi (near on a million slaughtered); Shia vs Sunni; Serb vs Croat; mods vs rockers; Science vs Religion; etc, etc Many of the Beliefs at work here are of no more moment than 'My gang is better than yours', with no justification offered. It's all the same in the end: 'I'm right; therefore you're wrong': an irrational but extremely common and frequently tragic sequitur. See Chapter 28.
I'm not suggesting that this is true in all cases, but the tendency is always there. How could it not be? Belief does not encourage doubt, and True Belief has no doubts at all. And it does often seem to be the case that the keener the faith the keener the sword. In case this be seen as an anti-religious broadside, clearly there are millions of people for whom Belief is not an aggressive act, but if we look at history we find plenty of evidence of dogmatic Religious aggression. Religion (with a capital 'R') has killed millions, just as religion (with a small 'r') has brought a lot of good into the world, not least a large contribution to nursing, education, law, meritocracy and medicine. As we are brought up (as innocents) to believe what we are told by those with power over us, we naturally have a tough time shaking off this beliefmentality. Many of us never even try, for various reasons, not least for fear that questioning The Truth will shake the foundations of what we think is our security or purpose in life. Some people seem to positively seek out ever harsher rules, even to the point of 'if you won't make to me some chains, I'll make them myself'. Belief so often breeds fear, and Fear makes you a victim, with paranoia lurking. But it seems to me that increasing numbers of people who have been brought up to Believe do suspect that their own particular Belief is troubled by inconsistencies and may thus not be absolutely 100% True at all times. However, they often don't know what to do about it, as they are almost certainly still surrounded by the people who instilled the Belief in the first place: family, peers, the local Big Religion, and in recent centuries, the media, who insistently, and often subliminally, preach the same old story, whatever it might be, from Fundamentalist Religion to aggressive Materialism. People may feel trapped, but don't know what the problem is precisely, or if they do, they don't know how to resolve it. This can lead to unhappiness, mental illness, and depression. Alternatively, it can fire up anger, fanaticism, and aggression, (which one might argue are themselves forms of mental illness) especially as many people regard their Belief as their only 'true certainty' in an uncertain and dangerous world.
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Belief is essentially the way of conventional Religion. It is enormously powerful in the world, in a way that western liberal politicians seem not to understand.
The world contains some 6.7 billion people, of whom some 3-4 billion are Christian or Muslim. Another billion or so are Hindu/Buddhist. The remainder are rarely out-andout atheists (see Chapter 12). The point being that the overwhelming majority of the world looks to a religion as their moral, social, and sometimes political guide. That's important.
People down the centuries have become conditioned to believing that Belief-In-Something, be it Belief in their family, or ancestors, or clan, or tribe, or race, or x, or y, is the only natural or desirable human relationship with the World and the Heavens. It offers a secure base in a frightening and unpredictable life. But as the Intellect develops, so do the doubts... and it is these doubts that power the decline in C of E attendance, and applications to Catholic seminaries, both tumbling in recent years. Here's the sad bit: in many cases, if someone becomes unhappy with some aspect of their birth Belief, then their default behaviour, if they choose to do anything at all, is to seek out another Belief, another cut-and-dried certainty, delivered by another set of professional experts, unaware that they are chasing their tails and are thus likely to go round in circles and never make the progress they feel they are looking for. To break out of this vicious circle is not easy for many people. But people constantly try to do this. People want Understanding, even if they are sometimes fearful of where it might lead. The reason The Church is currently failing is that it does not offer Understanding: it is thus 'unReasonable'. It can not explain itself without appealing to 'Faith', inevitably 'explained' in jargon, fluff and waffle. This is not enough for a more intelligent age.
Science likewise, in its current vestment of Materialism, appeals to Faith. People know (perhaps grudgingly) that Darwinian Evolution does make sense, but Science's godlessness/nihilism is bothering to them, and they do not yet realise that the Origination of Life is the issue, not Evolution. Science knows this too, and knows it has had no success in proving its dogmatic assumption of Materialism. Thus it appeals to us, as intelligent people, to have Faith that it will one day be proved correct in claiming that Life arose spontaneously from non-life.
In Europe, Belief was The Truth for virtually everyone, usually enforced by armies and Inquisitions, until the advent of science and scientific method, about 300 years ago.
An Inquisition could be a fearsome thing. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV authorised the use of torture against heretics. He presumably saw no irony in this, considering the name he had chosen for himself (from the Latin for 'harmless'). Harsh times.
Understanding 'Understanding' is the process or condition inextricably linked with science. 'Understanding' is actively sought, by an independent seeker, whereas Belief is passively accepted.
I'll capitalise 'Seeker' from now on to mean 'someone who actively seeks out his own philosophy and understanding'. More on this important theme in Chapter 26.
Thoughtful people, from the Greeks onwards, and undoubtedly before them, too, have never been satisfied with mere Belief. The words 'adult' and 'grown-up' mean 'independent', and 'self-reliant', and for thoughtful people this surely applies to things of the Intellect as much as to more social things. How can any thoughtful person fail to see the contradictions that the local Religion tries to force upon him as part of the Belief? If the Christian God is the God of Love, what were His bishops doing blessing the British cannons in World War I? If Allah is all-merciful, why would he want anyone to fly an aircraft into a crowded building? If Yahweh chose the Jews, why have they always had such a bad time?
As the old Jewish plaint has it: 'Next time, Lord please choose someone else'.
Thought and Belief are uncomfortable bedfellows. And as intellect grows (and I recently read that some scientists believe that each successive human generation is some ten percent brighter than the previous one. See Chapter 21.) more and more people are beginning to see Belief for the prison it can be, and thus more people are becoming active Seekers. I realise that this will be seen as offensive to some Believers. But words are tricky things and I wonder if all Believers are in fact 'Believers' only; I suspect that many of them may be something more powerful. See Direct Knowledge, below Science arose and developed according to the precepts of logic, empiricism, and the twin pillars of inductive and deductive reasoning.
Logic, essentially, states that something cannot both be 'x' and 'not-x' at the same time: for example, a specific item can not both 'contain Life' and 'not contain Life' at the same time.
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Empiricism is the methodology by which facts are arrived at: by personal observation, experience, and experiment. Anything second-hand or traditional will not do. Inductive reasoning follows upon Empiricism, in that it arrives at a Big Truth, via the collation of lots of little truths. For example, if it has been consistently observed that everything released from a height, for example an apple on a tree, or a parachutist, or even an avalanche, all tend to descend to the lowest point possible as quickly as possible, we may then make a general rule that 'everything will tend to fall as far as possible'. Deductive reasoning works the other way round, from the Big to the local: thus, following the inductive truth that 'everything will tend to fall as far as possible', we might deduce that the ACME anvil teetering on the windowsill just above our head will also tend to fall as far as possible. Sherlock Holmes worked by deduction, and enthralled his Victorian audience, newly intrigued by the wonders produced by systematic scientific method.
Gradually, by using these means, Seekers came to Understand things about the heavens and the world instead of just Believing what an authority (almost always a religious authority; in the West this was of course The Church) told them. The classic case is of heliocentrism. The Church taught that the sun went round the Earth, but scientists could observe, calculate and eventually prove otherwise. More on this in a while. It's very important. Understanding is a superior mode of knowing to Believing, but it is all too easily tainted, because the habit of Belief, like all mental habits, takes a long time dying. It is thus not surprising that people disaffected with orthodox religion soon came to Believe in science instead of using and respecting science as the tool it is meant to be. I guess you can see where this might lead, can't you? It might lead to the adoption of a dogma, and thence to an unquestioning Belief-in-Dogmatised-Science and the tooth and nail defence of it in the face of all 'opposition to science' even when it wasn't opposition to science at all, but opposition to dogma. 'Understanding' is fluid and flexible which is at once its strength and its (apparent) weakness. The (apparent) weakness is that it has no certainties, only shifting and extending horizons, as more evidence is discovered over time by each society and by each individual Seeker, and as more connections are made and a broader matrix of relationships is established. The strength is that Understanding knows that it does not know everything, and thus continues seeking and thus gaining in wisdom. The smarter the Seeker (or society) the more likely he is to admit his ignorance.
It is (apocryphally) said that Plato's Academy classed its three years' of students as First Year: Men of Wisdom; Second Year: Seekers of Wisdom;
Third Year: Men of ignorance.
The downside to Understanding is that people of certain sorts, almost always Believers, find its openness disturbing, and its lack of certainty a fatal weakness.
A good example of this was that Hitler thought the western democracies were feeble and effete states that could not possibly generate the will to resist a country powered by an invincible Belief in its own superiority. The mistake he made was that the democracies (meaning America, mainly) realised that consensus based on Understanding is ultimately stronger than blind obedience to a Belief, especially when the Belief is as rabidly daft as the notion of Aryan supremacy. To a perceptive mind, the first World War had also borne this out, but Hitler and his ilk hadn't noticed. There's none so blind as a True Believer.
Direct knowledge Quite early on in my epistemological search I came across a quotation which impressed itself upon me, perhaps because it puzzled me:
'If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainty.' Roger Bacon, thirteenth century.
What intrigued me about the quotation was the second part. I could see that a Believer (of 'certainties') might well become an Understander (a Seeker, and thus a 'doubter'.. ie, not quite so certain any more in the more fluid world of evidence and discovery) once he found the courage to break free from the second-hand 'wisdom' of Belief to seek his own understanding of the Cosmos;
I immediately thought here of the legends of Parsifal, and Sir Gawain, and those Round Table people, and the Quest. More later
but how might a somewhat confused 'Understander/Seeker' ever find the certainty that Bacon refers to? The penny dropped only when I realised the relevance and importance of Direct Knowledge. This is the least known about and the least understood of the three modes of Knowing, but it is the most important by a huge degree.
It now seems to me that the reason we so far know so little about Direct Knowledge is that the Mind in general is a huge embarrassment to Materialists, never mind the possibility of the existence of anything as challenging as intuitive wisdom (Direct Knowledge). Hence, in the true tradition of bad science, if something doesn't fit your prejudice or dogma, you ignore it. I confidently predict that this attitude will change
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dramatically over the next few decades, as reason re-surfaces and Materialism is junked.
For the moment, let's just look at Direct Knowledge in our everyday lives. All of us, every single one, Believer or Understander alike (even Materialists!), we ALL know, without a shadow of a doubt that at this present moment we are feeling happy or sad or stroppy or hungry or violent, etc etc etc. We don't Believe these things. We KNOW them. Nor do we Understand that we are thirsty. We KNOW it. We don't need it explaining to us by some sort of priest or expert, and we certainly don't need to do repeatable experiments in order to prove that we are bored or whatever. We KNOW. You may think this is a trivial point and not worth mentioning at all, but I think it is supremely important, as it is the fundamental point upon which we build our attitudes and behaviours: our Reality. If, for example, we Know we have a headache, everything we do will be coloured by this knowledge. We might become rude, or scatty, or unfit to drive, for example. Our Beliefs, if we have any, are of no importance at all. Even our Understandings doesn't get a look in until the toothache has gone. One of the major things about Direct Knowledge is that it is essentially impossible to convey your Knowing to another person. If you are homesick, say, or depressed, you can tell someone, but they can never Know it the way you do. Direct Knowledge is a very personal Knowing when compared to the other two options: Believing, which is dictated; or Understanding, which is reasoned out.
Direct Knowledge is your deepest knowledge of your personal inner world: the world which matters most.
As I thought this over, the persistent legend of the Pilgrim, the Seeker, came to mind again. Could it be that the Holy Grail is symbolic of personal Direct Knowledge of.. well, what? Truth? 'Seek and you shall find'? 'Knock and the door shall be opened'? What did Roger Bacon mean by 'certainty', I wonder? He wrote with all the economy of someone who knew what he was talking about. More and more intriguing We'll be returning to Direct Knowledge, and its associate, Intuition, later on.
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Meanwhile, if you'd like to directly experience Direct Knowledge in action, try adding up three four-digit numbers when you are tired. Your first attempt may not satisfy. It may be right; it may be wrong; but often you can't be sure, so you do it again. If you get a different answer, you know you are in trouble, so you do it again. This third attempt will probably match one of the two others, but you may still be uncertain, so you do it a fourth time, or maybe a fifth. Here's the point: there will come a moment when you are absolutely certain that you have got it right. It's a detectable sensation. You KNOW and need to do no further checking. That's Intuition (or Direct Knowledge) at work. It is what makes connections, and what gives you certainty. So, to return to Bacon it looked as though he might be asking us to use our own Intuition to find this mysterious 'certainty'. Intriguing. We all have different things we Know. I know that I love guitar music. You know that you hate stale beer.
Well, that's no surprise, actually. So do I. Usually.
But some people just Know things that are deeply puzzling to many of the rest of us. Mystics, Christian and otherwise, seem to just 'Know' something we don't and which we find baffling. We have all met someone who Knows that there is an afterlife, for example. They don't try to persuade us (usually) because they don't see the point of trying to explain something they simply Know. And, in truth, how could they explain? It is personal and direct, and thus no more transferable than is my own knowledge that at this immediate moment I'm feeling tired. There are a couple of complicating factors here: Some Believers have convinced themselves that they are Knowers. This is usually because they don't know the difference between the two but feel peer pressure into 'feeling the spirit within', or whatever, and rather than feel left out, they fake it, without knowing they are doing so, although they may suspect something is awry from time to time. Cults thrive on this. It's a kind of brainwashing. (And, to my mind at least, Materialism also thrives on it: what budding scientist wants to be left out of the coolest club in town, especially if your career depends on Believing?) Conversely, some Knowers think of themselves as Believers. I have met a number of Christians who have done their best for me, but don't understand why I resist so much of their dogma. When pressed, they have each told me that they have had a personal experience, which they interpreted as
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spiritual. From that point on, they Knew something, but could only label it in the mode of the religion of the day, which was 'Belief'. Ever since they had their experience, they have tried to hold on to it, or to build upon it, again in the terms of the presiding local religion, Christianity. Hence a Knowing experience gets transmuted and muddied by being forced to fit into a series of second-hand Belief dogmas, which may not actually lie all that easily with the original personal experience.
Belief, Understanding and Knowing might also be thought of as the three phases of pre-rational, rational, and post-rational, as suggested by Ken Wilber, a researcher in the fields of consciousness, mysticism and science. I guess it is this process of inner development that Roger Bacon was thinking of when he said 'But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainty.'
*** I started my intellectual journey because I could not 'Believe'. After thinking through the epistemological options, I knew that I did not 'Know'. That left me with 'Understanding': the result of Seeking. Logic was the tool with which to seeking understanding. It would take me where I was headed for. But where would that be? And would there be (could there be?) a limit to logic? And if so, how would I 'Know'? The journey was beginning to become truly exciting now. I came across a quote that encouraged me:
'In order to understand the truth, you should not suppress your intellect. On the contrary, you should purify your intellect, exercise it and intellectually try to test everything which we can possibly put to the test.' Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy was a famously religious man. If he had no problem with questioning everything, then neither would I. Onwards, into the bogs of history, philosophy and religion! And the paranormal, of course. Nullius in verba But before we move on, perhaps we should spend a few minutes on that most misunderstood of epistemological conditions: 'scepticism'. 'Nullius in verba' and 'Test everything', and many other wise and famous exhortations along similar lines all support the notion of 'scepticism'. Excellent. We should all learn to think for ourselves and not have to Believe in anything unless it is true for us ('true for us' is an Intuitive process of 'Knowing', as above: more later).
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But it's not that easy, is it? Words change meaning, and even worse, can mean quite different things to different people. For me, 'scepticism' means what it ought to mean, according to any dictionary: 'a doubting or cagey approach to a body of belief; needing to test a belief or concept for truth before accepting it', but for a large number of Scientists (ie MaterialistScientists) it has come to mean something quite different, namely 'a refusal to consider as acceptable any phenomenon which is not explicable in purely Material(ist) terms'.
This is another example of how the currently dominant mind-set of Materialism has hi-jacked a word, and twisted it away from its original meaning. It has not been a deliberate deceit, of course; just a gradually developing habit. But whatever the intent, the result is the same. The words 'sceptic', 'rationalist', 'Darwinist' and even 'scientist' have all gradually come to be synonymous with 'Materialist'. Not everyone has realised this, so confusion reigns. You and I, and a 'professional Materialist' will often fall into disagreement simply because we take different meanings for these words. I maintain that we are using the word correctly, but the Materialist probably is not. There can be no discussion or comprehension while this confusion persists.
I recently met a Scientist who asked what I was currently writing. I told him something of this book, and he smiled and asked 'And have you seen a spaceship?' He thought he was being 'sceptical' and witty. I thought he was revealing his own mental laziness, and was attempting to ignore something he wasn't prepared to even try to understand, by belittling it: back to my biology teacher again, and everything that Science (as opposed to 'science') should be ashamed of. There's the rub: this sort of sneering 'scepticism' is really only a mask for bigotry and self-righteousness. From now on I'll spell this degenerate version as Skepticism, in memory of a loud group of mainly American bigots who will stop at nothing to deny the veracity of anything whatsoever that smacks of non-Materialism. More on this phenomenon later. Skeptics, like all True Believers, are not troubled by doubt, and, of course, the Truer the Believer, the louder the voice.
As an example of how Skeptics work, take the following Wikipedia entry for 'Cleve Backster' as of November 2008. CB once did some extraordinary tests on plants with a lie detector (Surely only an ex-CIA agent would ever think of doing this!) which showed that plants appear to experience pain, and many other unexpected effects. Wikipedia spells this out, then adds: Backster's 'Primary Perception' theory was referenced in the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters. The team attempted to reproduce Backster's experiments using a polygraph and an EEG machine. They reproduced the plant experiment and initially got something peculiar as predicted by Backster's work. However, after more carefully controlling the conditions of the experiment to eliminate the possibility of
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external influence, the plant did not demonstrate any measurable reaction to external stimulus. First of all, how fair and unbiased would you expect a team called 'MythBusters' to be? Would you call them in to test the veracity of 'Materialism', say? Note that when they got the same results as CB had done, instead of congratulating him and then expanding on their findings, they felt the need to fiddle the apparatus until they didn't get the same results as CB, but rather the answer they were looking for, thus enabling them to scoff at the original research, which was the whole point of the exercise of course. Tawdry stuff. Anti-science. Backster carried out his work over 35 years. It has been replicated many times with all due care being taken to exclude 'external influences'. Positive results are the norm. Skeptics don't listen; they just carry on shouting.
So having sorted that out, to my own satisfaction at least, now it was time to tackle 'Philosophy and Religion'. I groaned, but it had to be done.
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Chapter 9 Philosophy, or er
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference
Richard Dawkins
It is the theory which decides what we can observe

Albert Einstein
We see only what we know

Goethe
You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are
Herb Cohen
presidential advisor In a word: 'We (tend to) see what we Believe'
By now my mental journey was becoming more than exciting; even the looming prospect of trying to make sense of Philosophy. The M.E. might still be keeping me from doing a proper day's work, but we were still squeaking by, and meanwhile, I found that in my unfoggy periods I was exercising my mind more than ever. This had been a slowly developing process. While I was working as a college teacher I had noticed that I was getting restless more and more often. It showed up as needing to change the subjects I taught. Eventually I realised I had learned everything I could from teaching, and that was when the idea of moving to the country first began to take root. As soon as we arrived I found I was using my mind in a much more creative way than I had in the apparently more intellectual world of education. Previously, my concern was with learning other people's stuff and trotting it out in a comprehensible way to my students so that they in turn could trot it out onto exam papers. Uncreative, by and large. But on the farm.. there were real, creative, decisions to be made, every day. For example, should we grow radicchio this year? Why? How much? Which variety? Who would buy them? In what quantities? Would they be cropping at a time when we would have the time to deal with them? How would they fit into our organic crop rotation plan? Would they need liming? Mucking? How much? When? Would birds attack them? Rabbits? How could we best defend against them?
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And what about spring onions? All the same concerns as for radicchio. Then radishes. Melons. Calabrese. And twenty others. Meanwhile, which sheep should we buy in? Any at all? (sheep can be very tricky). If so, how many, given our small acreage (about two hectares)? What about their feet? It's wet in Wales. Would Southdowns, bred to live on well-drained chalkland, survive?
Yes they did survive, but yes, they did have trouble with their feet. Excellent wool though, and fine meat eventually.
Could we feed all the new lambs? Could we fence them properly? Every day there were new problems to tackle. But they were real problems, not bureaucratic-busy-problems, artificially created by Endless Rules and Shifting Regulations, which can wear you down in no time and which are the bane of the lives of most city folk, including teachers. Our problems called for decisions that produced results that mattered, directly. And we could see the results of our decisions day by day. Put up a polytunnel? There it is done! You can see it. You can literally bask in it, with a home-cured bacon sandwich (own bread and own butter too) and a glass of Elderberry '93. Muck out the cowshed? There it is.. clean and tidy, carpeted with gleaming golden straw. And the muck heap is composting promise for the next season. Wonderful. It was a life of genuine creativity. And the creativity also went a long way to keeping us just solvent, as we were forced to be ingenious in the economy: How do you keep torpedoshaped pigs in one corner of a field, with very little money to spare for posh fencing? How do you bodge fifty electric fence insulators, thus saving four or five precious pounds of cash? How can we speed up the dibbing process for sowing 200ft rows of seed, thus freeing up an extra hour in which to do an extra job? What was the most efficient ground plan for planting out 3,000 seedling courgettes, enabling easy access for future picking and weeding, thus saving an hour or so three times a week? And which variety would balance cropping rate against land-footprint? We kept thinking, and quite often made our own tools to do our own particular jobs. I was quite definitely using my mind far more creatively and satisfyingly than I had done at college. Now the mind-work moved up another notch, researching all this weirdo stuff about what made ghosts tick. It was like the greatest detective novel ever, but much more interesting because it was real and relevant, not just to me and my own personal development, but to anyone else who cared to take an interest. If I could do it, so could anybody else. Someone like you, I guess!
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*** Back to the task Where should I turn next? Philosophy or Religion? I wasn't much relishing broaching the fog of Philosophy, which seemed to me to offer no fixed points, but rather an infinite capacity for confusion. Religion might be more forthcoming than Philosophy, but I couldn't see how at first glance. Mumbo-jumbo squabbling wars hypocrisy hysterics tedium confusion all words that immediately came to mind when I thought of religion.
At the moment of writing there is a kerfuffle in Jerusalem concerning a brawl that broke out in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre between Armenian Christians and their brothers in Christ the Greek Orthodoxists. Fists, brooms and iron rods were involved and seven people were injured. Apparently the five (or is it eight?) different sects of Christians who insist on a presence in this most sacred of places, have so much trouble getting on with each other that the key to the church is left in the safe-keeping of a Muslim.
So which to pick first? Philosophy, like science, requires logic, which suited me fine. But religion seems to be the only one of the three disciplines to be definitely Idealist. Oh dear.. a dilemma. *** Something that life on the farm had taught me was that when faced with a potentially difficult or expensive decision, time spent pondering and mulling was never wasted. A walk round the field, talking to the cow and scratching her ear, or marvelling at the blossom on the apple trees, or even weeding half a mile of baby carrots, always served to bring focus, or to blow away irrelevancies. Philosophy.. philosophy..? How should I tackle Philosophy? The twin problems were that there have been probably millions of books written on the subject, which meant that there were far too many to read, and secondly that not one of the ones that I had chanced upon was either comprehensible or satisfying. I could spend the rest of my life confusing myself with them. What to do? I was in the orchard, watching a buzzard sweeping over the tops of the oaks and ashes in the cwm when the first penny dropped. The question that had come to mind was 'What is philosophy? And how does it relate to science and religion?' It doesn't sound like much, does it?
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A very simple question, but I hadn't thought of asking it before, so it came as a sort of revelation.
I later realised that this was Intuition at play, of which more later, as promised.
Here's what came of it: The three 'disciplines' of philosophy, religion and science are all concerned with the same thing: trying to make sense of the universe. How did they differ, in essence? Religion (at least, as I had experienced it) is concerned with Belief, and was therefore unacceptable to me as a way forward. However, all religions are concerned with transcendental or paranormal 'explanations' of Life the Universe and Everything. As I had discovered that Materialism was no sort of explanation, leaving Idealism as the only alternative, and all religions are Idealist, by definition, well there had to be something buried in the creases and crevasses of Religion, somehow, somewhere. But what it could be, I had no idea, other than it would have to do with Mind in some way. Science is concerned with Understanding, which made it much more my sort of thing. However, I was now satisfied that science had been hi-jacked by the Materialist mafia and was now effectively strangled by the non-sensical dogma it had adopted (though I still didn't know how this had come to be). Maybe Idealist-science could show the way ahead but it didn't seem to exist.
Although, come to think of it, Darwin was an Idealist-scientist; so were Wallace, Mendel, Newton all the truly BIG namesso it used to exist and was extraordinarily successful. What had changed?
Philosophy A second penny teetered, wobbled.. and dropped. I was never more relieved, as this dropping penny revealed to me the blindingly obvious fact that Philosophy is a matter of .. opinion. And for me, what was the point of 'opinion'?
Scientists don't like getting involved with philosophy, and I can't say I blame them. As a means for exploration, it's just too messy and dependent upon unsubstantiated noodling and vague terminologies.
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But every scientist really must address that logical Materialist/Idealist split we looked at earlier, which I suppose might come under the general aegis of 'philosophy'. Which of the two options stands up to reason, and which one does not? Any seeker of truth, and especially any rational scientist really has to face this one.
What I needed was facts. My question, as ever, was 'What is true and what is not?', and not 'What does somebody else think is true and what is not?' I actually let out a sigh of relief to the apple tree as I realised this. Then I patted it. Must have looked a bit odd. Somebody once described a philosopher as a blind man blundering about in a dark cellar, looking for a black cat that probably wasn't there. Precisely! And what was the point of that?
It is now clear to me, however, that this could only have been claimed by a Materialist, and as such, his opinion could no longer be taken seriously. Well, not by me, at any rate. But this realisation didn't help.
*** Why had so many people of alarmingly high intellect spent so much of their lives, blundering about in this dark cellar? Clearly they were trying to find some shred of something that might make a bit of sense to them, or bring a bit of mental relief to the appalling question of 'What is the point of my life?', but without any real hope of finding The Answer, because deep down many of them didn't believe there was or even could be, 'an answer'. A tragic situation, worthy of a Shakespearian plot.
Others had given up hope of Understanding, and had fallen back on Faith/Belief and said 'It's all God, so give up trying'.
This condition still obtains, probably even more so in these 'post-religious' days. Relativism rules, or rather 'no-rules'. It's a free-for-all. Have you tried reading a modern philosopher? Especially a French one? Obscure; abstruse; incomprehensible I can make no sense of them. Perhaps you can, of course, and if so, I envy you I think.
An extract from a book aiming to introduce the British to modern French thought: 'Hegel had said that difference is contradictory in itself. But the question now is to pave the way for a non-contradictory, non-dialectical consideration of difference, which would not envisage it as the simple contradiction of identity, nor be obliged to see itself as 'dialectically' identical with identity.' Vincent Descombes, 'Modern French Philosophy', CUP 1980
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But only up to a point, because as they all seem to be Materialist in their viewpoint, I can see no way that what they have to say can be taken seriously. The bits I've trawled through that I can make any sense of, seem to be packed with paradoxes: in fact, it seems that you're not much of a philosopher these days, unless you can blind and baffle everyone, including yourself, with an endless stream of paradoxes and bewilderments.
And, as ever, 'paradox' means 'non-sense'. If you ever come across a philosophy that cannot be stated clearly and simply, in terms even I can understand, then you may safely junk it and either look for something more sensible or better still, sit in the sunshine and gently ask yourself 'Who am I?' or 'Isn't this present moment just wonderful?'
Perhaps the most important insight for me, that morning in the orchard, was that all these ingenious philosophers seem not to have solved The Problem (of 'What is the point of it all?') despite banging away at it since the days of the ancient Greeks. If they had solved The Problem we would surely all know about it by now. But we haven't heard about it, have we? Maybe we should stop and think for a moment, as we should have done when Oparin suggested that after 50 years of failing to construct Life in a test tube that maybe we should call a halt? Maybe, we should have thought, some time ago, that maybe Philosophy as a method was faulty somehow, and the process of mental meandering would never provide the answer it was seeking?
Or maybe it was just that something crucial was missing from their premisses, like a serious consideration of Intuition, perhaps, of which more soon?
This failure must surely have occurred to many people over the centuries, and no doubt many of them considered that maybe the method was faulty. But what was the alternative? Religion provided only Belief and unreason as an 'explanation', and Science was concerned more with the 'how' of things than the 'why'. So Philosophy/Opinion plodded on, despite endless failure, and not a little nonsense. Of course, I mean no disrespect to the philosophers themselves, who have chosen to engage wholeheartedly upon the most worthy task of trying to figure out the Universe. The intention is admirable. But the method (of trying to apply human rational thought to the unspeakably huge questions of the Universe) really is, it seems to me, doomed to failure. For a start, we have the problem of the definition of terms, which we touched upon earlier.
Can you define 'a window', let alone 'Mind'? Or 'natural'? Certainly, we can all have a stab at it, but a philosopher needs to be absolutely precise in his definitions, and frankly I can't see it being done for any of the concepts that a philosopher might wish to discuss.
This is clearly a serious problem, which I'm sure you will have noticed. If, for example, 'Life' cannot be defined, even by the people who study living things (biologists, ethnologists, psychologists etc), well how can one apply logic to anything concerning it? And that 'one' includes me, of course. I acknowledge this problem, but will not be defeated by it, because there are times when formal logic is not the issue. As I mentioned before, we just Know when we have a headache. A logician is no help, unless he has an aspirin about his person. Similarly, I claim that I am perfectly capable of Knowing when my parrot is merely sick, and pining for the fjords, and when it is dead; gone; devoid of Life. When the 'light(?)' or Life goes from the eye of an animal, at that point the creature is dead. It is a recognisable moment. The eye alters A logician is not required to prove it.
And it's not much help to dress up your terms in abstract symbology, as the symbols mean no more than the terms they represent: ie, a quality or expression which has already been sort-of-defined in words.
It is something of a miracle that anybody ever communicates anything to anybody, once you take a long hard look at the slippery nature of words. In fact, the words of a conversation act mainly as carriers for the other qualities that really matter to us: intonation and body language: the two vectors of emotion, which is what we pick up on first and most lastingly in almost all our spoken communications. Writing is different, but it is astonishing to me how often people can misread, misinterpret, ignore, or misquote something I've written that seems to me to be perfectly clear and obvious. It is extraordinarily difficult to write a sentence that you can be absolutely certain will mean precisely the same thing to all people. Probably impossible, I would say. The good news is that sometimes communication does take place, which is what makes this book worth all the effort. Whew.
Once he feels he has hammered out some sort of definitions for the terms he is going to use (Apart from 'life' and scores of other ultra-important concepts and realities, like 'mind', 'consciousness', etc, which would seem to defy definition) the would-be philosopher next has to define his premisses. In other words, he has to choose for himself, and then make clear to his readers what he is going to take as granted, or as self-evident truths, before he even begins on his mental journey. Until the nineteenth century, virtually all philosophers would have taken 'God' for granted (Berkley was a bishop, even); since then they have mainly taken 'no-God' as a Truth. Can either of them prove the truth of these premisses (either that 'God exists' or 'God does not exist')? I think we would have all heard about it by now if they had, and would need no more philosophers.
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In fact, every premiss that I can think of (bar one) for a philosopher is really no more than an assumption. And what use are assumptions when seeking clarity? I eventually came to realise that we have grown so used to the specialisation of trades, including the various 'trades' of knowledgecompiling and information-sifting, that we think our self-appointed specialists in wisdom, ('The Philosophers'), must be the ones who can answer our existential dilemmas for us, and we have thus handed over our personal seeking to the professionals. The problem is that so far they have not come up with the goods But surely they can put us right if anyone can can't they? Well, a few moments' reflection shows that, largely because of the problems of definitions and premisses outlined above, it is obvious that they can do nothing of the sort, as they all disagree with each other. Therefore one of the following must apply: they are all wrong, one or more of them is/are partially right, or only one out of the lot of them is right, and all the others are too dim to realise it. Not a very good advertisement for reliability, whichever way you look at it. This is a rather harsh summary, I know, but it seems to be pretty accurate, wouldn't you say? If Philosophy had 'worked', none of us would be in any doubt by now about the nature of Reality, and what's more, we wouldn't need any further philosophers, French or otherwise, to further baffle us. But, as with Oparin, we seem not to be calling a halt, and continue to still need philosophers today, even if only to teach philosophy. Will they ever solve The Problem of 'What is the point of it all?'? I see no reason why they should. What do you think? Maybe you have been wondering what the 'bar one' premiss is that I mentioned above. Actually, I hope that it is self-evident to you what it is. I'm referring, of course, to 'logic'. Religion is not much concerned with logic, which is why so many of us find religion baffling. Philosophy and science are very concerned with it, however. Any philosopher hopes to persuade us by the logic of his arguments, and quite right too. There is no other sort of 'argument' than a logical one, except for the street (or church) brawl which never persuaded anyone of the correctness of any view. But, as above, the poor philosopher a) b) c)
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is hornswoggled by the problems of definition and proof, especially proof of premiss. Science is based upon the principle of Cause and Effect, reason, and logic. It is thus a great tragedy (for all of us, not just for science itself) that it should have got ensnared in dogmatic unreason, and was thus not going to be much help to me. So, you might ask, where did that leave me? How could I possibly make any progress in my hunt for an understanding between science and the paranormal after this analysis? It would seem that all three modes of investigation could not or would not operate according to the rules of logic: the one tool I felt I could trust. Yes I was as baffled as you may be at this moment. But I guess I must have had another subliminal Belief apart from a firm belief in logic. I simply could not accept that a Universe so full of order and pattern was ultimately random and thus irrational, and thus mad, as the Materialists claimed.
In later times, I realised that this Belief was an intuitive one, based upon a subconscious, intuitive, rejection of Materialism. As I applied reason to the issue, and discovered that Materialism was indeed faulty, then my previously unsubstantiated Belief became a rational Understanding.
I had discovered that (Materialist) Science had got it wrong, so the Materialist declaration that the Universe was mad and random was highly suspect, but that was scant comfort, as I could see no way forward from this position, except the inevitable requirement of Idealism that Mind must be involved with it all somehow. I dipped into a bit of psychology, but found most of the books I consulted to be hard-line mechanistic and Materialist in their basic premisses. No doubt much of the material they had turned up with would have some application, but they didn't look like being much help to me in my quest for deep meaning.
Freud's Id, Ego and Super-ego were a noble effort, but were too obsessed with sex.
One branch of psychology I found to be deeply shocking, both on the immediate level and on the philosophical one. More on Behaviorism later. *** I kept reading around, but found no way forward. I would just need to keep reading and thinking and see what turned up.
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Just to be sure that I wasn't going to be missing anything, I thought I'd better make a list for myself of the Terms and Conditions I would need to operate under, so that I didn't inadvertently fall under the spell of any dogma or prejudice. I ended up with this: 1. Reason and logic must apply at all times. 2. Any 'law', if applied at all, must be applied universally. 3. No paradox is ever acceptable as 'explanation'. 4. Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic. 5. No dogma of any kind is acceptable. 6. All 'evidence' is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori. 7. Until proved to be wrong, all 'evidence' is to be kept on hold. I called these guiding rules my 'Seven Principles of Investigative Thought', which sounded over-grand, so I abbreviated it to the rather more romantic 'SPIT'. Of course, any decent scientist will already recognise these principles as the ones he already works by. I don't claim they are original. But I'm afraid I do claim that not every scientist does operate according to them. To re-state the problems I find with Materialist-Science in terms of the seven requirements of SPIT, by number: 1 2 Logic and Materialism are incompatible, as Materialism requires something from nothing time and again (See Chapters 5). The basic principle of science (that Cause leads to Effect) is violated by Materialism as it suggests no Cause for Life. It merely assumes a spontaneous self-creation. Materialism is paradoxical in that it requires Matter to be both biotic and abiotic. Materialism is based upon the unproved (and irrational) premiss that Matter lies at the root of everything else in the Universe. Materialism has become a dogma, and is thus unacceptable. Materialism automatically rejects all evidence for Anomalies. As 6.
3 4 5 6 7
There was still no sign of where I might make real progress with how to account for the existence of spooks and other Anomalies, but meanwhile I could at least busy myself with the problem that had been bothering me for months: how had science come to adopt as a dogmatic truth, the fatally flawed Hypothesis of Materialism? If I could winkle out some sort of explanation of that, maybe something else would turn up en route.
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History time. More books running out of shelf space. The stairwell was the only place left.
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Chapter 10a A Brief History of Materialism Part One: A Body Blow
It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who never change
Confucius
Just to recap(Please do skip this passage if you are quite happy with the story so far.) Materialism claims that everything ultimately arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone, with no intrusive outside agency of any sort. Materialist attempts to explain Life, Mind, and Consciousness cannot be called rational, as they essentially require something to arise from nothing, time after time. To back up these 'explanations' Materialists have to resort to claims such as 'everything is mineral (including the meaning in this sentence)'; that electricity thinks; that cars and computers can be equated with fish and rabbits (remember this, from The Blind Watchmaker?); that living things look as if they are designed, but atoms don't (ditto); that the blindingly obvious billions of designs in Nature are all illusions; and so on Thus, as the Materialist explanation for the Known (Life, Mind, Consciousness) is frankly unconvincing how then could they explain the Unknown: Anomalies like telepathy or a poltergeist which could not by any stretch of the imagination be explained away as 'mineral', not even to another Materialist? The Materialist response to this problem is to just pooh-pooh all Anomalies, and breathe a sigh of relief that an awful lot of people don't 'believe' in ghosts anyway. To admit the reality of just one Anomaly would destroy the Materialist Hypothesis, and everyone knows it. I still needed to find that 'just one' Anomaly: my white crow. I knew the Materialist Hypothesis was untenable. I knew there was no Evidence for it either. Just one un-pooh-poohable Anomaly would blow it out of the water. Some of my questions were now being sort-of answered. Materialism allowed for no means whereby ghosts might exist, while Idealism did. But which Idealism? The Church could not be the answer here. They do allow for ghosts but aren't keen on exploring them: rather, they seem to think of them in terms of demons, necromancy, exorcism etc. What is all THAT about? More roads to go down There must be some reasonable truth somewhere.
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When I started on this personal quest, I didn't think I'd be spending hours reading up on all manner of histories, from the very ancient to the very modern. But it was worth the effort, as I gradually picked out a thread that seemed to explain why and how science had been hi-jacked by Materialism. Obviously I've not had time to delve into every culture in the world throughout the last several millennia, but I think that what I have gleaned will make some sort of sense to a Westerner. Although we tend to think of Materialism as being a recent hypothesis, it is at least as old as the Greeks, and quite probably as old as Homo moderately sapiens himself. There must have been more than one Palaeolithic hero who found himself, one freezing and soggy evening, huddled round a fire that wouldn't catch properly, soaked through and shivering, thinking 'Blow this for a game of hunter-gatherers. I mean what's the bloody point?' He may have mentioned his frisson of pique to the local shaman, who would, no doubt, have explained that the howling wolves were reincarnations of the moon, or somesuch, and to stop whingeing and hurry up with cooking that badger, before the bear-god came and bit off his head. Our hero might well have thought that reincarnations of the moon surely wouldn't have howled quite so blood-curdlingly, and that bear-gods ought surely to show a bit more couth, and that all that stuff from the shaman was self-serving codswallop. What really mattered was to get warm and dry as soon as possible, and to get a fair chunk of that badger inside him. Then kip. The world's first Materialist had arrived. And so it has been ever since: on the one hand, a never ending stream of shamans of various sorts, wearing any number of fancy frocks and hats, and with or without sticks, drums, wands, croziers or magic mushrooms, spouting no end of unprovable and quite often totally fanciful and selfcontradictory guff about harps and virgins and eternal torment; and on the other hand, down to earth types in the public bar who didn't believe a word of it. This situation still pertains, of course, although I'm optimistic that the two sides will quite shortly realise that there is some merit in both the generalised paranormal insistence of the shamans, and also the generalised scepticism of the man in the pub when it comes to exotic details. Meanwhile: how did Materialism as we know it today, come about? I guess the Greeks are the best people to start with. I've been unable to find any evidence of Materialism in the pre-Greek world. This does not of course mean that it didn't exist, but may suggest that it was simply unrecorded. And from what I've read of ancient societies, Materialism
would have been seen as only half a step away from lse-majest, treachery, and an unpleasant and lengthy execution. The whole of Egyptian society, to whom the Greeks owed a lot of their own philosophical and mathematical prowess, was obsessed with the afterlife.
Pythagoras' Theorem, for example was well-known to the Egyptians long before Mr P recorded it.
The Pharaoh was himself a god, so to suggest that 'We are all, including you, O Mighty Pharaoh, but mud and lightning', would clearly be a risky position for anyone to hold. The background to early Greek thought was one of a universe derived from a non-material primal essence, back to which the visible universe would eventually return.
This idea of the non-material primal essence persists down the centuries until the current era, when Scientific Materialism takes over and all but ejects it from the public mind. It survives in Eastern religions like Hinduism, which we'll look at in a couple of chapters' time. There are even parallels to this in Christianity, in Genesis ('The earth was without form, and void') and Revelation ('And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together', and 'that there should be time no longer'), although the process is here more personalised by invoking 'God'.
Physical bodies had somehow derived from this non-physical (and hence formless) intelligent essence. Plato's great contribution to this general philosophy was to add the notion of intermediary 'Forms'. A Form was the original 'Idea': the mental concept which preceded what was later to become a physical thing. In other words, the intelligent primal essence produced the physical 'reality' via the medium of the Form. In mundane terms: a designing intelligence made the template, and the template made the objects, or enabled them to be made. Thus:
Essence of mind >> thought form >> physical form
The actual process or mechanism by which thought became flesh, as it were, was unknown. This notion, that the physical body is a more or less rough copy of the 'Mental Ideal' or 'Form' gave rise to the school of philosophy known as Idealism. Its opponent, Materialism, claims that, au contraire, all things, including Life, Mind and Consciousness, arise or arose solely from
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insensate matter. We've already looked into this and, if you are still with me, found it sadly lacking in logic.
One simple example: if Consciousness was created by chemicals ('everything is mineral', remember?) then Materialists should be able to point out which particular chemicals did this remarkable act of creation, and in which chemicals Consciousness currently resides, as it must reside somewhere material, in a Materialist world. It won't surprise you to hear that these questions produce only a resounding silence. Well of course. it's all nonsense, isn't it?
Aristotle, Plato's most famous pupil, agreed with the traditional view that the whole of nature was filled with some kind of vital essence out of which the physical world was derived. But he claimed that this vital urge aimed towards a pre-selected perfection. This perfection was Man. Thus teleology was large in Aristotle's world.
Teleology: The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining observed reality. I find it is convenient to split teleology into two: Teleo A: the need to have a plan in mind when making or doing anything at all, like reading a book or whistling for the cat: a purpose. This clearly does exist, and Materialists are bound to accept it or risk appearing seriously out of touch. Teleo B: is the grander notion of there being over-riding purpose in the universe, such as Aristotle's belief that God was aiming at Man and that Man must therefore have some sort of purpose too. Materialists reject this, although it's really the same as Teleo A writ large, and no problem at all for an Idealist, of course, give or take this 'God'. And here's a bombshell of a quotation: 'As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.' Charles Darwin, penultimate paragraph, 6th, final edition, On the Origin of Species. Not only did Darwin require 'a Creator', he also saw the process of natural selection as being benevolent and teleological. How on earth could Professor Dawkins have failed to notice this, either? It's even in the first edition of Origins.
Plato's Forms, for Aristotle, exist only in nature, experienced as the physical world about us, as things we can see and touch. Whereas for Plato the physical item was only partially 'real', being a mere reflection of the perfectly real Form, Aristotle claimed that the physical objects were fully real and the Forms were mere concepts, made by man's mind. Nonetheless, he said, the Forms do exist, and it is man's job to learn to distinguish between them. And thus, he thought, as pure thought seems unable to suggest how Plato's Thought-Form became Physical-Form, it might make more sense to start with the Physical-Form and work backwards. Science
has adopted this approach ever since. One can see how the Materialist belief that 'there is only Matter' might have derived from such a nose-down approach.
This pragmatic stance explains Aristotle's great interest in the natural world. He knew the names of some 500 species of animal and is thought to have dissected about fifty. His personal contribution to biology has probably never been excelled. But because he was primarily a philosopher, he tended to expect reality to conform to the Laws he Believed were true: for example, that everything goes in sevens, as in the Ages of Man; and that the Earth lay at the centre of the Universe. He also believed in the spontaneous creation of Life. This would not be an irrational stance for him (as it would be for a Materialist), as he accepted that vital, supernormal essence as the invisible cause of everything, even apparently 'spontaneous' events, whereas a Materialist can offer no cause at all.
Aristotle's argument that the investigation of nature should distil general principles from observations made in the field (despite his own rather erratic acceptance of this rule) led to the principal tool of modern science: the Inductive Method, which claims that broad principles should be inferred after making lots of observations. Modern scientific method also adds that you may then use this new principle to deduce things about a new phenomenon of some sort, and continue this process ad infinitum, building up sure and reliable knowledge on the way. Thus: 1 2 3a 3b Lots of observations lead to the formation of a Broad Principle (Inductive Method) This Broad Principle can then be used to lead to solving a Specific Problem (Deductive Method) Continue 1, indefinitely Repeat 2, as required.
As a nave example of Induction and Deduction in action: 1 Observe that some creatures lay eggs, while others have live young. The ones that lay eggs are all birds. The Broad Principle derived is that 'all birds lay eggs while no furry animals do'. (Induction) A strange bird is brought back from an exotic foreign land. It has feathers and wings and scaly legs, is huge, eats all manner of rubbish, but can't fly. Odd. But as it is definitely a bird, it must lay eggs. (Deduction) This proves to be the case. Yippee! The system works! Keep observing. Other odd creatures are brought from foreign lands, which are definitely birds. The Broad Principle still holds. They do all turn out to lay eggs, as predicted.
3a 3b
Then one day, somebody brings back a duck-billed platypus and the 'Only birds lay eggs' Broad Principle needs to be re-thought.
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We usually call a Broad Principle a Hypothesis, and any Hypothesis is only as good as the evidence which supports it. It takes just one anomalous 'white crow' or indeed 'platypus' to destroy it.
While chasing up the historical cause of modern Materialism, I was still reading around, trying to find that one 'white crow' that Materialism could not possibly account for. Again, lots of intriguing stuff, but nothing absolutely irrefutable. For example the shamanic call to porpoises to beach themselves, reported by Arthur Grimble in A Pattern of Islands, or the strange series of Polaroid photographs apparently imprinted by mind power alone, as reported by Dr Jules Eisenbud, in The World of Ted Serios.
Thus Plato and Aristotle were both Idealists, of slightly varying kinds. Other thinkers, however, were not. The 'Miletan materialists', Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander variously believed that the universe derived from water, air, fire, or the 'apeiron': the infinite essence which lay behind the other three (a bit like the Chinese Tao). However they all seem to have believed in the gods, or God, or pantheism of some sort. It's never been easy being a Materialist. The Romans came, saw, conquered, declined, and fell without adding a great deal to The Great Debate. Practical folk, the Romans, who tended to trust in the sword rather than the Lord. They paid lip service to innumerable deities, but seemed not to take it all very seriously, in the sense that we would understand it these days. More on this under 'Religion' a little later. The dark ages which followed Roman rule in Europe became gradually enlightened by the courage of scores of Christian missionaries who walked unaccompanied through the forests and bogs of unknown lands, spreading the Gospel of love and kindness. In many places the Gospel had already been preached, since the Roman empire had officially adopted Christianity in 312 CE but when the central command of the empire collapsed, the new world religion tended to fade and old local pagan ways drifted back. Thus, the only generalised philosophy to exist in the western lands ruled by tribal warfare and heroic status was the dogmatic theology of The Church, which claimed that the world, and everything in it, had been created by The One God, and that was that. Alternative views were not welcomed, and anyway, they only amounted to the more or less ferocious and confused mythologies of quarrelsome tribesmen. Gradually The Church spread its message of peace and love and cooperation across much of what we now call Europe and established an uneasy truce with the hardmen of the day.
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This truce is well-illustrated by the relationship between Henry II and Thomas Becket. 'Uneasy, tending towards murderous' expresses it well, and led to Henry, after his apparent complicity in the murder of Archbishop Becket, making a pilgrimage, barefoot and in sackcloth, to the tomb of Becket in Canterbury cathedral where he submitted to a public scourging at the hands of the priests. A German Emperor fared even worse, after falling foul of a mighty pope. He went to plead forgiveness from the Pope, and was kept waiting on his knees in the snow for three days. Ah.. the 'good old days'
The philosophy of 'believe or be damned' (quite literally) had a cumulatively calming effect, and as the benefits of coexistence slowly filtered through, so smaller tribes coalesced into larger units, and a kind of Pax Ecclesiastica eventually ruled where once the Pax Romana had. Rome had returned. The people of the day regarded themselves first and foremost as citizens of Christendom, owing day to day duties to a local lord of some kind ('to Caesar', to quote the New Testament), but their ultimate loyalty was 'to God' (ditto), via the Pope and his Church and local representatives, who held a rigid monopoly in such matters. This new-found and long-developing stability gradually bore fruit, and some 1500 years after the days of Aristotle, a branch of European man began to think and ponder once more. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, (see also Chapter 8), inevitably a monk, as only monks had any proper access to books and the time in which to read them (or the skill), revived the idea of observation and experiment that the Greeks had begun to develop. Contact with the Muslims in Spain around the twelfth century, and ideas picked up via the Crusades had led to the re-discovery of some of the ideas of ancient Greece, and Islamic extensions of them. Universities were founded in Bologna, Paris, Oxford (where Bacon taught), and Cambridge. The idea of thinking was being re-born. Bacon's axioms of 'Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities: look to the world!' and 'Nullius in verba' (deriving from the Roman poet, Horace) were to become the watchwords for the Renaissance. Thus, during this period of intellectual 're-birth' (Re-naissance) observation took precedence over philosophising. The question of 'What was the world made of and how did it tick?' became more important than 'Where did the universe come from, and why?' The notion of ultimate particles had been a familiar one since the days of the Greek Democritus (~400 BCE) and the Roman Lucretius (~50 BCE) but now began the hunt to find out what these particles actually were. What was the world made of? The great scientific principles of Empiricism, Reductionism and Mechanics were developed here.
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Empiricism: the use of experiment and personal observation to establish facts and truth. Reductionism: the assumption that more may be learned by reducing a complex entity to its constituents. Mechanics: blokes who fix cars, windmills, etc and leave greasy handprints on the steering wheel, miller's daughter, etc.
And, on an even grander scale of thinking, the idea of Law in science was conceived. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these concepts and developments. They are the very foundations upon which all our modern science and technologies, and hence our whole Western societies, are based, but at the time they were revolutionary, and irresistibly exciting to men of intelligence. Inevitably the question 'What is man's place in the universe?' gave way to 'What is man actually made of? What is the body? How does it work?' It is a measure of the power of The Church that little real progress was made in this direction. The Church was very much still the fount of all wisdom and ethics, and it frowned upon the idea of human dissection, as it was believed that as man was made in God's image, dissection must therefore be sacrilege.
The logical derivative of this seems not to have been a problem. Did God therefore have curly hair and a broken nose, like the poor sod on the slab?
This ruling against the systematic hands-on examination of human anatomy lasted well into the nineteenth century, and the era of the 'Resurrectionists', who stole corpses for respectable surgeons to dissect, leading inevitably to the infamous Burke and Hare, who actually murdered people for the same purpose.
Note that from the middle of the sixteenth century, The Church of England replaced the Church of Rome in the UK. Thus, when I mention 'The Church' from now on it generally means the Church of England. The differentiation is hardly worth noting, in fact. Both Churches had an equally hard time in accepting that Dogma might in any way be supersedable by verifiable Fact.
Leonardo da Vinci made some important discoveries in the field of human physiology, but it was the publication of Vesalius' Concerning the Structure of the Human Body in 1543 that really set investigation into bodily mechanics in motion. This book, beautifully illustrated by a pupil of Titian, first showed that at least part of the human body obeyed the general mechanical laws that were beginning to be uncovered by the new techniques of systematic observation, systematic experiment and systematic theorising.
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Experiment and observation, rather than abstract philosophy, began to yield fruit, and not always from the most expected direction. For example, up till now, The Church had told everyone how the cosmos fitted together. It took its cue from Aristotle's claim that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun and stars all rotated around it, in a series of concentric spheres. Common sense, of course, agreed with this. Even the merry tippler with the badger sandwich
'The sandwich' had not yet formally invented, but an approximation must surely have existed since bread was first breakable.
could see that the Sun goes round the Earth. We don't need a pope to tell us that, thankyou. And mine's another pint, since I could see you were about to ask. But Copernicus' book Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (also published in 1543) showed for the first time in a dozen centuries that The Church was demonstrably wrong about something. The Church stated as a dogmatic and unquestionable fact that the Earth was the centre of all things, and that the Sun revolved around it. Copernicus' careful observations and measurements, using the new methodical tools of science, showed beyond any reasonable doubt that it was the Earth that orbited the Sun. Q E absolutely D.
The Indians had known about this since the sixth century, thanks to a man called Aryabhata. News travelled slowly in those days. Or perhaps it was the sort of news that an all-powerful Pope would not welcome? In fact, Aristarchus of Samos was the first to prove heliocentricity in ~250BC... and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he got it from the Egyptians. Needless to say, Aristarchus was persecuted by the religious authorities of the day. Plus a change...
The importance of this book can not be overstated. Imagine: The Pope, the head of the enormously powerful Catholic Church, the over-riding authority throughout Europe and the known world, who controls even your liege lord of the manor or county; whose claim to power challenged even kings. This titan was showed to be plain WRONG about something. And if The Church was wrong and Copernicus was right, the relative positions of Man, the Earth and the Universe were all thrown into flux. If the planets went round the sun, and were thus all in motion, where was the absolute and unchanging perfection of the heavens that medieval theology had preached? Suddenly the heavens began to look less like The Heavens and rather more like a huge impersonal mechanism, the likes of which had never been imagined before.
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This notion of 'mechanicalness' or 'Mechanism' that the astronomers had released upon the world was soon reflected by other thinkers including philosophers and experimenters. It is with us to this day, as part of the backbone of Materialist Science.
And if Heaven did not lie in the perfect heavens, where was it? Or dare one ask... did it exist at all? Could The Church be wrong even about that? Was there even a God, if Heaven was no longer 'up there'? Speculation, questions, ferment Maybe The Church was wrong about all sorts of things? And if it was, why should anyone obey any of the papal diktats, or pay The Church any money?
The modern word 'tithe' derives from the tax that everyone was literally forced to pay The Church in medieval times. This amounted to some 10% of earnings or produce. Fine for the rich, who could just screw the poor a little harder to make up the difference, but for the poor, 10% of very little was a severe burden that could mean starvation. This over-worldly element of The Church was widely resented. The 'priest-as-parasite' notion so central to the French Revolution and the thinking of Karl Marx had its roots in real experience.
The experimenters (the word 'scientist' did not yet exist) had more than a little in common with agnostic freethinkers, and the new Protestants, who objected to others of The Church's dogmas and practices.
Like selling Indulgences, for example. These were pedalled by Church authorities as Get Out of Hell Free cards. Pay the dosh; sins forgiven. Nobody seemed to wonder what Jesus might have thought of this, despite everyone knowing how he treated the moneylenders in the Temple. Indulgences were not invented by The Church, however. They were known to irritate Plato and Socrates, 2,000 years earlier. Plus a change again.
Absolute Authority might now be rationally challenged Although most researchers remained Christian, the stock of Materialism rose. The Almighty Church had been proved wrong. The world would never be the same again. In the three centuries following Copernicus' bombshell, built upon by Galileo, the level of observation of the natural world, and hands-on experiment, exploded.
Sometimes literally: early chemistry was a notoriously risky pursuit.
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Chapter 10b A Brief History of Materialism Part Two: A Knock-down

Man is a rational animal
Aristotle
By the middle of the nineteenth century the 'natural philosophers', and men of reason and experiment, had brought two sets of wonders to the world. For the quaffer in the new industrial public house, although life was still pretty tough, there were many more options opening up in the world and reasons for social optimism. The new canals had made trade throughout the country more reliable. Big stuff could be shifted more easily now; for example, the bricks that built the back-to-back terraces in Leeds or Manchester for the new factory workers. And farm crops could move in bulk right into the cities, along with fresh milk, for the first time. Town and country were far better linked. And the new railways speeded up the process even more. People might even aspire to days at the seaside or a visit to The Capital. The nation was being drawn into a unity. All this was due to the works of scientific researchers (now officially 'scientists', since 1833). They made steam power possible, and hence big factories which could turn out consumer goods cheaply, for all. They also developed gas lighting and by the 1850's were rapidly developing the greatest marvel of all, electricity. Steam power enabled books to be printed and distributed much more cheaply and, marvel of marvels, someone in a Bradford back-to-back terrace could get all the news from London and abroad via a daily newspaper; if he could read (or afford) it. Science had also helped everyone by developing new medicines, and probably more importantly for most, by improving public drains and hygiene. Water-borne diseases gradually disappeared. Cheap chemical dyes meant a more colourful world; steam-powered pumping systems meant water on tap for more people; things began to look up. It was by no means a period of wealth for all, but it was a huge step forward. And it was all due to those curious people, the experimenters: the scientists. With every new invention, the stock of the scientist rose in the public eye. He was the man who was improving the lot of the ordinary man, and making fortunes for the entrepreneurial middle classes and landowners.
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The comparison with The Church was devastating. It was Science that banished cholera from London, not The Church; the engineer made the railways, not The Church; the chemist made chloroform to ease Queen Victoria's confinements, not The Church. Pie in the sky was no substitute for affordable clothing now. And it got worse for The Church, because the second set of wonders that science produced lay in the world of the Mind and our understanding of the Laws by which Nature operated. Yes, Nature operated by Law, not by the whim of a bloke in a nightie with a fistful of thunderbolts and boils. And not just 'Law', but knowable Laws; and not just 'knowable', but as far as could be seen, these Laws were also both invariable and universal, meaning that they applied throughout the universe, now and forever, both past and future. God as Cosmic Fiddler didn't get a look in any more. This was very big stuff indeed. Despite all due scientific caution, these astonishing discoveries must have caused these early scientists to have become just a little cocky, it seems to me, and therein lie the roots of modern Materialism. Why is that? Well. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought developed in the 17th and 18th centuries: the Thinkers and the Feelers. The Feelers said that we can only know the universe through our senses. We know that this is a fish, for example, because we can see, touch and unfortunately, smell it. The Thinkers said, yes, but how far does that get us in terms of understanding? You can't work out how the universe ticks by just looking at fish. Much better, they said, to think and reason it out by doing experiments and controlled observations (the process called Induction). Is that fish big or small? The words are meaningless, until you measure it and compare it with other fish. 'Collation, comparison, measurement, and experiment' is the way to Truth, surely? And anyway, the senses can be very misleading. A stick poked at a fish in a pond appears to bend underwater, but when you pull it out again, it is not bent. Your senses will not explain this, but experiment might (and did). Not surprisingly, the Feelers tended to concentrate upon philosophy rather than science. The Thinkers did the science. Because they were devoted to Reason, they called themselves Rationalists.
Over the years, 'Rationalist' has been hi-jacked, so that it now means 'Materialist'; which is most unfortunate since Materialism is not rational, as I hope we've agreed.
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Descartes was the godfather of Rationalism. He so mistrusted the senses that he eventually claimed that 'I think therefore I am' was the only firm premiss he had from which to start his investigations. He was convinced that the universe could be explained in terms of maths and physics. Newton followed him. His work on defining the Law of Gravity, and the Laws of Motion proved him to be an exceptional genius. But in fact Newton wrote more on theology and the Old Testament prophecies than on physics. This embarrassing feature of his work was played down by the Science world, which was already becoming Materialist by default. More later. Newton, incidentally, predicted that the end of the world would occur in 2060.
Newton also stated that his work on mechanics and the properties of light, and the new mathematical tool of calculus, were all done for the greater glory of God. His reasoning was that the beauty and balance of the mechanical universe he had revealed showed that it must have been made by a Rational Being, rather than an interfering celestial busybody as had previously been generally believed, and that God must thus therefore exist, operating His universe according to an iron Law of Cause and Effect, shaping events from the beginning of Time and onwards, forever, until the end of Time. More on Cause and Effect in a little while. Interestingly, Descartes, the original Rationalist, began his work only after a series of inspirational dreams. He also made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto. These were times of flux. God or no God? Feelings or Thinking? Revelation or Matter alone? Thoughtful people were exploring, and were not always consistent. But the overriding point was that The Church was no longer the absolute master of man's mind.
Rationalism and Thinking paved the way for the Enlightenment, a period when large numbers of thinkers and experimenters felt brave enough to trumpet Reason and Logic over not only Emotion and the Senses, but also The Church's premiss of Revelation. Reason and Logic came to be associated with Materialism, as everything Rationalists mistrusted (like Emotion and the Senses) were non-Material and thus apparently unexaminable for reliable truth of any sort, and thus were to be regarded with caution. This, unfortunately, paved the way for them being eventually side-lined or ignored; and Revelation was definitely 'out'. Chemical elements were now being discovered and classified at an everincreasing rate. Nature was giving up some extraordinary secrets: layers of organisation previously unsuspected, and more and more Laws, including the astonishing confirmation that Energy can never be destroyed, but merely transformed into other forms of Energy. So something could change at one level, but not change at another Very odd. Very exciting. Where might this trail lead?
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As material things were examined more closely, the principle of Reductionism gained in power, particularly as chemistry boomed, eventually leading to the outrageous idea that every physical item, from diamond to elephant might be composed of just a few dozen ultimate components. A breath-taking concept, leading to the notion that you can learn more about a thing by examining it in ever greater detail: by reducing it to its most basic elements. The hunt for the atom was underway. Hiroshima was only a couple of centuries ahead.
Reductionism has its uses, but it was (and still is) a dangerous tool. In chopping up a frog you might well learn about nerves and cells and how muscles connect; you might even isolate certain vital hormones and enzymes and discover that electricity causes legs to twitch; and ultimately you might discover the very molecules from which a frog's body is made; but in the process you learn precious little about the frogness of a frog. You can so easily not see the wood for the trees, and not even realise it. My biology teacher had fallen prey to this Reductionist Fallacy when he told us that we were nothing but a big balloon of oxygen and hydrogen, a few kilos of carbon, a spoonful of sulphur, and a pinch or two of iron. Now I knew why it was that I found his claim ridiculous at the time but couldn't work out why. The Fallacy is remarkably widespread. Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, claimed that we people are 'just a chemical scum on the surface of a moderate-sized planet'. Thus he would no doubt agree that he is just a chemical scum who happens to be in line for a Nobel Prize. Astonishingly clever, these chemicals. Well, the ones SH is made of, at least. Hang on thoughI'm bigger than him and thus contain more chemicals. Why aren't I cleverer than him, then? A Materialist would no doubt reply that this is because my brain has randomly organised itself in a manner inferior to the way SH's brain has randomly organised itself. If you find this explanation to be somehow less than satisfying, please look back at the London taxi driver study in Chapter 7. The fact that the Reductionist method has led us to discover the presence of electricity and chemicals at the 'deepest level of the brain' (as opposed to the 'deepest level of the Mind', of course) does NOT logically mean that electricity or chemicals run the show. What runs a computer? Electricity? No Human Will, Intelligence, and Purpose, using electricity, run a computer. And of course it is that same Human Will, Intelligence, and Purpose that developed the electricity in the first place, and the hardware, and the software that eventually produce Professor Dawkins' biomorphs, Facebook, etc...
*** As I ploughed through these various movements, a couple of things struck me. Why did the investigators seem to set themselves up into little groups and isms and movements? Were they actually combative, or just taking sides to see how far the respective ideas could be pushed? I had an uneasy
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feeling that Being Right was important to them, and that that involved people who disagreed with them Being Wrong. But surely, both Thinkers and Feelers had a case, didn't they? For example, if you can't trust your senses where are you? All the world would be a madhouse, which it patently is not. And if the senses are meaningless as some Rationalists claim, what do Rationalists have to think about if they have no input from their senses? Literally.. 'What?'
I'm now going to call Materialist-Rationalists 'Rationalists' with a capital 'R', and ordinary rationalists, ie people who simply work by reason, with a small 'r'. Hence, I personally am a rationalist and not a Rationalist. I am now decided that if I am ever faced with someone who tells me that the senses are entirely unreliable as a means of understanding anything about the universe, I will ask him if he will undergo the Wet Fish Test. This will involve him standing still in some public place, and me swinging a ten pound cod across his chops, four or five times. 'Did your senses tell you anything at all about the universe?' I will then ask. If 'Yes', I will suggest that his Hypothesis has been flawed by a dead fish. If 'No', we will continue the Test either until 'Yes', or until the fish has totally disintegrated, and he has staggered off, bleeding profusely, but proud that he did not give in to coercion.
Something else that bothered me was Descartes' famous 'Cogito ergo sum': 'I think therefore I am'. But surely, you need to be conscious, before you can think? I have done a little meditating, and I know it is perfectly possible to sit quietly, 'being' without thinking. I think he'd have been nearer the mark saying 'I am therefore I think'. There has to be an 'I' to do the thinking, surely? And what sort of rationalism was it that declared, as Descartes did, that animals don't have souls? How could he 'rationally' know? And how did he feel about the outbreak of gratuitous dog-kicking that followed his declaration?
Modern studies on animal intelligence reckon a dog may have the intellectual level of a 2yr old child. Quite possibly, but I have personally known one or two that didn't.
My readings in this area were very limited, of course, but what struck me most was that Thinking and Feeling were both human faculties, and should both be valued and investigated. And what seemed to be missing from both camps was a proper recognition of the Intuition that connects us with what it pleases us to call 'reality'. Do you remember the passage earlier on about adding up sums when tired in Chapter 8? Things mean nothing until that inner connection has been made. You can stare at an anagram for hours until the solution 'clicks'. More later.
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Every teacher knows that you can physically see the moment when the inner connection has been made in a child's mind. It may take two minutes; it may take two weeks.. but you will know, when the student knows.
Thinking? or Feeling? Both need the Intuitive-Connective-Integrative 'click' (the 'Eureka Moment') before either of them can tell us a single thing, from knowing we have the correct answer to the sums, to knowing that that strange moonlit shape is a scruffy lilac bush and not a big hairy monster. It struck me that it was probably during this period that the Thinkers began to get out of touch and a little self-righteous. They and their methods were becoming so successful that they began to reject anything that would not succumb to their methodology of Collation and Measurement. As they saw it, feelings and sensations could not be measured; therefore they were sidelined and quite often rejected as unimportant or even unreal. This tendency matured, unpleasantly, early in the 20 th century, of which more later. Confidence gradually leaked over into cockiness, it seems to me. Huge success in the material world dazzled the scientific geniuses of the day, so that inconsistencies and fissures in the foundational philosophy became invisible. Materialism became a Truth for them, and nobody, especially the discredited Church, had a voice loud enough to challenge them. In terms of intellectual hygiene, the baby of logic was drifting dangerously close to the plug hole. *** Meanwhile, thoughtful minds had been turning to the question of Who are we? Where did we come from? Why Man? Why similar to apes? Why fish? Why bluebells and beetles? And, after the discovery of lenses and the microscope, Why wee beasties in pond water, and oh dear in semen? In Sweden, Linnaeus began classifying plants and animals via the now familiar two-part Latin names (eg Brattus vulgaris: the common child). He noted the similarities between lion/tiger, newt/lizard, man/ape, but saw no generative connexion. He saw only divine variation, each species created perfect and unchanging. But other people were definitely thinking 'Evolution', as people occasionally had since the ancient Greeks. They took their cue from the New Geology. James Hutton, a contemporary of Linnaeus, proposed in 1788 a couple of suggestions which would explain an awful lot about geological formations.
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These theories were, briefly, that rocks changed very very slowly indeed, and in a consistent manner, comparable to the processes we see today; and that thus the Earth must be many times older than Usher claimed, '... without vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.'
Sir Charles Lyell went on to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Hutton's Hypothesis of 'Uniformitarianism' was correct, especially as human remains had been found in strata that must have predated 4004 BCE. This came as another terrible shock to The Church. Could Usher really have been out by many millions of years? If so, did that mean that the Bible was wrong in the genealogy the bishop worked from? First Copernicus, then the unstoppable rise of the Godless Rationalists, and now this
Charles Darwin went on his famous trip to Galapagos in the 1830's, recording and collecting as he went. He took Lyell's Principles of Geology with him. By the time he returned he was already convinced that the evolution of one species into another was a fact, but it was twenty years before he dared to publish his theories in Origins as he knew what a tornado it would raise. In Origins he did not actually suggest that Man was descended from Ape, but he knew full well that his findings implied this, and that respectable society, personified by The Church, would react like a cornered tiger.
Darwin was by no means the first scientist to suggest Evolution as fact. The Theory of Natural Selection was suggested by William Wells in 1813, and was elaborated by Patrick Matthew in 1831. But they were ahead of their time. It needed the welter of evidence from Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. And before both Matthew and Wells, Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus wrote extensively on Evolution: 'Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.'
Meanwhile in those intervening twenty years, between Darwin's Beagle book of 1839 and Origins (1859), science and its brother in Law, technology, had been very busy indeed, (see below) and its reputation rose exponentially.
Between 1839 and 1859 the following discoveries and inventions occurred:
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Schwann: Beaumont: Daguerre: Goodyear: Grove: Owen: Jackson: Agassiz: Dana: Mayer: Whitworth: Adams: Bois-Raymond: Koelliker: Manson: Faraday: Boole: Ludwig: Cohn: Lamont: Fizeau: Snow: Pasteur: Wilson: Mendel:
Cells in animals Chemical nature of digestion Daguerreotype photography Vulcanisation of rubber The fuel cell Coins the word 'dinosaur' Discovers ether as anaesthetic Connects glaciers with Ice Ages Recognises phosphate as fertiliser Law of Conservation of Energy Standard screw thread Calculates the position of Neptune Shows that nervous system is electrical Shows that all cells originate from one splitting egg Connects mosquito with malaria Connects light with electromagnetism Symbolic logic Shows blood circulation is purely mechanical Shows plant & animal cytoplasm to be essentially the same Sunspots shown to affect the Earth Measures the speed of light Shows that cholera was linked to dirty water Shows that fermentation is due to yeast The first to note X and Y chromosomes Works out the laws of heredity
Other discoveries and inventions in this period include: ozone, shrapnel, Sirius B, uranium, the Doppler Effect and red shift, the Assyrian and Maya civilisations, hygiene in cities and hospitals, Morse code, spiral galaxies, guncotton, laughing gas, the rubber tyre, the Smithsonian Institution, nitroglycerine, chloroform, the sewing machine, rotary and web printing presses, hormones, the Burbank potato, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, anaemia, anthrax, the word 'thermodynamics', air raids (by Austrians on Venice), teletype, absolute zero, valency, kerosene, potential energy, steam-powered dirigible, Otis elevators, catalysts, the Bunsen burner, the seismometer, Neanderthalers, homeostasis, Bessemer steel, time & motion, experimental psychology, the electric lighthouse, the submarine Atlantic cable, and aerial photography. And add to this the fact that non-nobs were gradually getting the vote. The concept of practical democracy was spreading, and people were beginning to get used to the idea that they didn't have to accept exploitation and coercion any more. The previous iron rule by Church and State was wobbling. Busy days.
*** It was the Hypothesis of Evolution, plus the enormous timescale of tens or hundreds of millions of years that the New Geology insisted upon which allowed slow selective processes to operate, that finally made acceptable
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Darwin's version of Evolution by Natural Selection. It would never go away again, despite a desperate rearguard action by some of The Church's more excitable members.
In fact it was only in 2008 that The Church finally apologised to Darwin for 'getting our first reaction wrong'. Does it strike you, as it does me, that this is actually a political 'apology' and not a complete admission that Darwin had actually been talking sense? Still, even if 150 years late, and lukewarm, it's better than no realisation of error at all, I guess. It took the Catholic Church 359 years to apologise to Galileo; then, five years later, the Vatican put up 3m for a new telescope. First they burn you, then they mock you. Then they join you but slowly. In fact, it would seem that the Vatican's first reaction was to dig its heels in and declare Papal Infallibility (1870). New ideas really can expect a tough time in being accepted. But why? I keep asking myself. What on earth is to be gained by hanging on to a Belief that is clearly wrong? But I will guarantee that 90% of Materialists who bother to start reading this book will not accept the simple logic it contains. Instead they will continue to be True Believers and Defenders of the Faith just like The Church did in Darwin's day. That's what dogmas do to your powers of reason.
Darwinian Evolution was a devastating blow to The Church. Again, it had been shown, by reason, that it was simply WRONG about something. First Copernicus; then the triumphs of scientific discoveries, and the social improvements that came from them; then the New Geology; and now Evolution; all blows against The Church's unquestionable Truths. All The Church had to offer was 'The Lord God made them all', usually called Creationism (of which more later) but without explaining how the world worked and was constituted. Science could explain, and then act on the explanation: anaesthetics; canned food; sewing machines. People liked that. The Church also had 'Hell and Damnation', and 'You are born prince or pauper; athlete or cripple, and will die peacefully or in agony, according to the Will of God Who Loves All'. And people did not like that. The Church was thrown into confusion. Throughout its history it had struggled, sometimes brutally, according to the manners of the day, to maintain the purity (as it saw it) of Christ's Gospel of Love and Peace and Fraternity. The Popes knew that if not rigorously maintained, the Gospel would be diluted, polluted and eventually depraved by the infiltration of other, usually old and pagan notions of multiple gods, which often involved animal sacrifice or worse. We can see this in modern day Africa, where new Christianity and old voodoo or witchcraft are often interfused. New ideas can take a very long time to establish
As a tiny example of the pressures The Church worked under just three moments from the thirteenth century:
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* The English scientist-monk Roger Bacon published 'certain novelties' of thought in the areas of astronomy and optics (among others) which would clearly challenge Church dogma if not slapped down. For example, he estimated the distance to the stars to be 130 million miles, in clear contradiction of Church dogma. He was thus imprisoned, or at least side-lined, for 15 years. * Meanwhile, in Italy, followers of St Francis wrote that 'the love and fear of God were everywhere extinct'. Monks and friars were sent out in streams to try to restore faith in The Church's message, if not actually in God. * In 1209 the Pope called for a 'crusade' against the heretical Cathars, whose reincarnationist views on Christianity did not tally with the Pope's. Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander, wrote home: 'Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex'. Hundreds of these harmless people were burned at the stake. They were burned rather than strangled because burning would destroy their body, and they would thus not be able to take part in the final resurrection. Spiteful, I'd say. Perhaps worthy of the Jewish Yahweh, but not of the Christian Jesus. For 'crusade' read 'jihad'. Same thing. More later. (What panicked the pope was the dualist/Gnostic bent of the Cathars, meaning that they thought the world was evil and had been created by a dark power. Clearly the head of the Christian church could not tolerate this level of heresy, so mass murder was the obvious Christian thing to do.) 'He who is near the Church is often far from God.' French proverb.
It seems to me that it was at this point in the latter C19 that science lost the plot completely, and sold out to Materialism. As man had moved from multiple gods to one God, Darwin paved the way for us to see not multiple lives, but one life, manifesting through myriads of species, each a gradual development from a previous species. The Church's claim that each species was created separate and perfect was looking very suspect, if rational thought had any value at all. What's more, the clear implication of Origins was that Man is not created in the likeness of God, but a derived Ape.
We'll be coming back to this, however. We're just warming up, here...
Triumphalism now took hold among the Scientists: all the evidence was on their side. The Church's malign domination of Man's mind and creativity was finally over. Influential Scientists came to despise The Church and all it stood for or appeared to stand for. Thus, anything that might in some way be labelled as 'supernatural' or paranormal became as WRONG as The Church's dogmas had been proved to be on more than one occasion. It became assumed by many that 'We don't need God to explain anything. Science can do it alone'. By 'science', most meant 'Materialist-Science'. Some scientists who were less inclined to crowing, and who valued Evidence over Dogma, did begin to investigate paranormal happenings (more in Chapter 20) but they were sidelined by the Materialist majority and the new mass media, who were as ready then as they are now to side
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with where the money is, and to mock rather than think. The press also knew that they would be supported in putting up two fingers to The Church by the increasingly enfranchised rats'-nests of the cities' poor, who had long despised The Church's hypocrisy in preaching humility while bishops lived in palaces. *** So, I thought.. here was my answer to why Science refused to even contemplate paranormal events as being possibly real. It was down to a combination of adopting a silly Dogma, and then preferring the Dogma over any evidence that smacked of non-Materialism (of which there was plenty, incidentally. More soon). The American Skeptics and 'MythBusters' were the natural descendants of this narrowing of minds. As both the Materialist Dogma and the derivative anti-paranormalism came about as a reaction to an over-zealous, and often predatory and persecutory Church, one might say that it's all The Church's fault that the paranormal remains uninvestigated by Science. This would not be fair, of course the scientists chose Materialism over Reason of their own free will, but if The Church had not been so overweening and ridiculously stubborn and even ferociously cruel when faced with incontrovertible scientific fact, well.. perhaps science would have taken a different turn. Perhaps today we would have the Idealist science that we should have instead of a half-science dominated by an irrational Dogma. Anyway It had taken years of reading and thinking, but I had now answered to my own satisfaction my own big question concerning why science did not investigate spooks:
To Science, spooks cannot exist for reasons of dogma; therefore they do not exist; therefore they need/should not be investigated.
Anti-science. *** But I still wanted to find out what on earth a spook was. Science was clearly going to be no help; nor was Philosophy.. at least no philosophy that I'd stumbled across so far, apart from the ultimate but vague
requirements of Idealism; that left Religion. Which spoke of a Holy Ghost, so that surely was a start? I wasn't looking forward to it one bit, but I had now to enter the fantasy world of harps and angels, and dungeons and dragons that Religion seemed to be. I must admit that at this point my feelings of conspiracy which had been first directed at Richard Dawkins, then at Materialists in general, and then at all scientists had now faded. Or, to be more accurate, they had become transferred to Religionists. After all, it was their defensive arrogance and systematic cruelty that had forced honest rationalists into many unpleasant and murderous corners over the centuries, so it was perhaps not surprising that rationalists of all tints jumped for joy when Darwin delivered what seemed to be the knock-out blow. Things might have turned out a lot different if the Men of God had been a little more reasonable and a little less self-righteous: a little more like Men of God, in fact But (sigh) it wasn't really a conspiracy, was it? Just arrogance. And an assumption of Rightness. And preferring to maintain this position of power rather than to consider that they and the scientists actually had a common cause, so why not have some discussion to find common points of agreement and work from there? But no: Belief overwhelmed reason and the possibility of Understanding, just as it had done in ancient Athens when the city fathers condemned Socrates to death for annoying them with his embarrassing questions. Plus a change, as ever.
Another useful guide, especially when trying to unpick complex threads, is Hanlon's Razor: 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.'
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Chapter 11 The Tale of the Kale
All I ask is that you will take heed whether what I say be just
Plato
But before we delve into the murky depths of Religion In pursuing scientific method, it is vital that you start with a watertight premiss. You must have a sure foundation, otherwise you will be unwittingly liable to the Gigo effect ('Garbage in; garbage out' a term invented by computer programmers, which applies to all forms of thought). If, for example, you want to find out why your cup of coffee gets cold, you might choose as your Hypothesis one of the following: 1 2 3 4 5 God does it, for His own unquestionable reasons. Demons do it, against God's will. Naughty old demons. The Sun withdraws its blessing of warmth to all the Earth. There's a mysterious something called 'heat' that gradually seeps out and dissipates. There's an equally mysterious something called 'cold' that gradually infiltrates and builds up.
That will do for the moment. How do you pick the right one out of that lot? It is clear that 4 & 5 are different from the others. You can actually test them for truth or non-truth. It might possibly be true that demons are maliciously ruining your coffee break, but how on earth do you test this theory? However it is much easier to test for 'heat' or 'cold' as qualities. And lo, it turns out that 'heat' is the stuff we're dealing with. 'Cold' turns out to be merely 'not much heat'. Here's the point: if you insist that 1, 2, or 3 is true, you will have a terrible time even devising a way of testing it, never mind actually carrying out your research. These are the stuff of Belief, and are proofed against Reason and Logic, until we have absolute knowledge of how the minds of God, Demons, or the Sun operate.
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We should note here that Science often rejects Hypotheses because it claims they are untestable. They may be 100% true, of course, but if someone decides he can't test for it, for whatever reason, Truth doesn't come into it. Materialists 'know' that the paranormal in any shape or form definitely does not exist: thus they refuse to test for it. Thus there is no evidence for it; which proves that it doesn't exist; which means they don't test for it; and blah blah blah. A circular argument is hard to crack, but this particular one will be cracked one day fairly soon; probably within your children's lifetime, I would say. It just needs one or two high-status Big Shots to change their mind, or more likely, a gradual groundswell from the lower echelons who are fed up with unreason.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no anecdotal evidence to support 1, 2 and 3 either. More subtly, if you choose 5, you might get surprisingly good results for a while, but sooner or later, as your researches become more subtle or more fundamental, you are going to come up against a serious problem: for example, how is it that there seems to be a definite limit to coldness ('absolute zero', at which point all vibratory movement, which we perceive as heat, theoretically ceases completely) but no limit to hotness (billions of degrees, and counting)? Almost all of your calculations are now going to involve 'negative cold' to account for all that heat. Something feels awry So what do you do now? Battle on? Or accept that you've been working to the wrong Hypothesis for the past 150 years, or whatever, and joyfully switch over to the correct Hypothesis, which automatically gets rid of all those awful negatives? Similarly, if you decide that light is the absence of darkness, you might get some useful results to start with, but sooner or later it will become apparent that the energy you should be working with is light, not darkness. When you make the switch of Hypotheses, all kinds of stumbling-blocks and paradoxes suddenly disappear. So, a wrong Hypothesis might produce successes in the short term, but will fail in the long term, as you get into more fundamental areas of investigation. On Jan 31 2009 the Daily Telegraph's science correspondent reviewed Why Us?, a book written by a fellow columnist which used the findings of modern DNA and neuroscience research to cast very serious doubts upon various aspects of Materialism. In dismissing this thoughtful book out of hand the reviewer wrote:
'The cold materialist, rational approach of science is truly wonderful because it works.'
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Obviously I would quibble at the use of the hi-jacked word 'rational', as I do not see anything rational in Materialism, but the main thing about this quote is 'What do we mean by 'works'?' Yes, Materialism has had huge successes; no doubt about that. But aficionados will find (as many have already found) that sooner or later it comes up against the buffers, and nobody can explain why. Paradoxes appear that won't go away.
A physicist will immediately think of the paradox that a particle can sometimes be a wave (..of which a little more later). A biologist will wonder, one hopes, about the paradox of Life spontaneously creating itself from non-life.
One profound problem with the Materialist approach is that it inevitably leads to Reductionism, as in the notion that the deeper you look the more you will find. There is some truth to this idea, of course, but to think that Reductionism will tell you more than it can, is a grave error, as the deeper the level of dissection, the further you take yourself from the entity as a whole. In learning all about the systems, organs, tissues, cells or even the molecules that make up a rabbit's body you do not learn much about what it is to be a rabbit. To put it more bluntly, by chopping up Einstein's brain (against his wishes, incidentally; a fate he shared with Lenin) and examining slices under a microscope, nobody found a single thing about what made Einstein's genius tick. Would they have found more by going deeper, to the molecular level? Of course not.
Molecules, incidentally, are really tiny. If a single drop of water were magnified until it was as big as the Earth, each molecule would be about the size of a tennis ball.
This over-reliance on Reductionism is an example of the fact that if you work from a faulty premiss, you will eventually be rewarded with a nonsensical or problematical result. What will you learn from The Times leader by examining the etymology of every word it contains, or from the molecules of the ink it is printed with? In the case of the rabbit, this faulty premiss boils down to: 'A rabbit is a machine' (straight out of Descartes). The expectation from this is that by treating it like a machine, ie by disassembling it, we will learn about rabbits (as opposed to 'rabbits' bodies'). It simply doesn't work.
Similarly, you can't play football if you don't know the rules. You might be wonderful at dribbling, heading, bending it like Beckham, but if you persistently foul other players and don't know about obeying the ref's whistle, you can't play football. The false premiss you have been working to is 'If I have marvellous ball control, I can play football'. Not so. You will have great success in playground kick-arounds and may become the school hero, at least with the kids you haven't maimed, but as soon as you join a proper team, the shortcomings of your premiss (ie, 'that football is all about ball control') become apparent, and you are pulled up short until you change your premiss.
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Basic physics worked fine according to Newton's laws; then there came a point when the premiss needed to change, and Einstein stepped in with Relativity Theory; then quantum physics posed an even greater challenge, incompatible with Einstein even. At the moment these two mighty theories remain incompatible. I suggest they will remain so until the faulty premiss of Materialism is abandoned. More on quantum ideas later on.
It might be worth a couple of lines to explore the notion of 'wrong premiss' in running a country. Every government I know of, Bhutan's excluded, thinks that its job is to make its country and citizens richer. But Britons, for example, have never been wealthier (2011), yet the rate of alcohol and drug addiction, and food-related illnesses/conditions has never been higher. The divorce and suicide rate is steadily climbing. Polls constantly confirm that some 50% of UK citizens are not happy, and our children are among the least happy in Europe. This suggests to a rational mind that there is a wrong premiss somewhere in the sphere of government policy. The correct premiss for a government is, surely, to enable its citizens to become happier. The government of Bhutan seems to be alone in thinking this way (for the moment, at least). If we take this view, that happiness is the point, then greed and money worship would be much reduced and the banking scandals of 2008++ might never have happened at all. If men of wisdom, and government think tanks, ask themselves 'What is happiness, and how can we all get some more of it?' as opposed to the nave mantra that More Money = More Happiness, the world must surely become a better place. Just as a very simple example, we wouldn't have packs of disaffected 'yoof' wandering the streets at night, as a happiness-oriented society would realise that yoof needs challenges, not 'designer' hats and hoodies, and would see to it that creative challenges were available to the kids who need it most. Put simply: what people want is not wealth, but happiness. Adequate money may help in enabling happiness, but happiness is not directly linked to money, and never has been. If it were, we would never hear of millionaire rock stars and the like killing themselves with booze and drugs. I once met a man who had cheques for thousands of pounds drop on his doormat every day of the week. He drove the biggest Bentley in the world. He killed himself a month or two later.
*** When I first got involved in this area of thought I was still working (somewhat fitfully, admittedly) on the market garden and smallholding, and was used to working intimately with seeds and soil. One day I stopped for a moment to consider the grubby little seed I was about to sow; the last in the row.
The following text originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Scenes from a Smallholding. I realise that this passage is re-covering old ground, but as the abandonment of Materialism is such a big request to make of anybody, I thought it might be helpful to
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raise the Materialist/Idealist divide again, but from a different angle. If you still aren't convinced that Materialism is fatally flawed, please read on. As before, please read it with an open mind, checking carefully for lapses in my logic. I have tried a hundred times and can find none, and neither could the editors and publisher who dealt with the original text. Again Logic only, please Please put all beliefs, certainties, or dogmas on hold. If you feel you don't need to go over it all again, please feel free to skip to Chapter 12, and join me in finding a prickle-free passage through the thorny thicket of Religion.
I rolled that little seed across my palm and was suddenly struck by the wonders it represented. How can that tiny hard black sphere, about two millimetres wide, convert into a thundering great kale plant, four feet high, with huge crinkly green waterproof leaves, scores of yards of pale wiry roots, masses of purple shoots, then brilliant yellow flowers and, ultimately, several thousand carbon copies of itself, each containing the same astonishing powers as its parent? How? Where do all the myriad patterns and designs and energies and potencies come from? No seriouslywhere do they all come from? There's no sign of pale wiry root or yellow polleny flower inside the seed. I've looked. I expect you have too. Logic and science require that every effect must have a cause, so all these patterns and forms must have a cause too. They must come from somewhere. If not from inside the seed, then they must come from outside. Mustn't they? Where else is there? Inside; or outside. That's all there is. So if not from inside, the cause of all those effects must come from outside. But what about DNA? I hear you cry. Indeed but DNA just codes for churning out proteins, not for the shapes and patterns they eventually end up in. In other words, DNA-alone produces (at best) bland tissue like fat, not complex organs like hearts or livers. And anyway, how can a section of a simple double-spiral chemical 'contain' the leaf structures and textures, the root patterns and the astonishingly intricate blueprints for the machinery of the kale's flowering, pollinating, and seed-replicating systems? How can a blind chemical contain all that welter of abstraction? As there's obviously more to Life than lumpen masses of chemical proteins that DNA-alone seems to produce, perhaps we should be asking where all these various forces and patterns actually come from, knowing that we won't be able to answer the question completely, but that we might be able to make a little progress (which must be better than nothing) if we look at the question logically and without prejudice. 'What is Life and where did it come from' has been driving philosophers potty for millennia. The philosophers have then, in their turn, driven their
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students even pottier with their exotic and contradictory theories. Thus many people have given up on philosophy as a means of sensible exploration. Just too confusing. But the good news is that all these endless pontifications and ruminations can be boiled down and reduced to all fall neatly into one of only two broad categories. These are the suggestions that: 1. Life somehow arose spontaneously from non-life; ie from inert and abiotic Matter/Energy alone. This has become known as the Hypothesis of Materialism, because 'Matter' came first. or 2. Life somehow came first and was somehow involved in forming Matter/Energy. This has become known as the Hypothesis of Idealism, because the 'Idea' (ie 'Mind', as part of Life) came first. Note that the words 'Materialism' and 'Idealism' (with capitals) are special technical terms here, and are only loosely connected with the everyday words 'materialism' and 'idealism'. If I had my way I'd replace them with the much more chic names of 'Stuffism' and 'Mindism'.
Another way of contrasting the two hypotheses is this: *Materialism says that Life, Mind and Consciousness (LMC) came from Matter/Energy ALONE. *Idealism says that Matter/Energy ALONE is inadequate to explain the existence of Life, Mind and Consciousness, and myriads of other phenomena, like 'memory' or 'altruism' or 'purpose' for example. An additional factor of some sort is required. 'I don't believe consciousness is beamed down from the planet Zog', says Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford, and one-time Director of the Royal Society. Quite so, Professor.. but neither does anybody else. Idealism requires reason and logic, just as much as Materialism does. Rather more, in fact, as Ive been trying to point out.
*** The two Hypotheses of Materialism and Idealism are quite incompatible. If one is right the other must be wrong.
No.. I'm afraid there is no third way possible. Thus:
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If Materialism is right, then there is nothing else in the universe except Matter/Energy: ie everything is, so to speak, 'mineral', and Idealism is wrong in requiring an additional factor of any sort. If Materialism is wrong in claiming that everything is Material, then there must be an extra non-Material/Energy element, as claimed by Idealism.
How might Logic help us to decide which is correct? It seems to me that at every point, Logic vindicates one of these Hypotheses and knocks the stuffing clean out of the other one. I see the issue as being like the two pans of a set of scales, teetering on a diamond fulcrum. I invite you to weigh the evidence I offer below, and decide for yourself whether each piece should be placed in a pan. Just one single piece will tip the scales to an absolute decision. *** Before Darwin, various specialised forms of Idealism held sway, propagated by the Churches. Since Darwin, Science has propagated Materialism. A hundred and fifty years on from Darwin, modern society turns to a Materialist-Scientist to explain a strange light in the sky, not an IdealistPriest.
As my mental journey progressed, I was struck many times by the similarity between the Old Priest and the New Scientist, particularly in the realm of abuse of power. Perhaps the most extraordinary correlation came when a Top Scientist called another scientist's serious new work as 'the best candidate for burning there has been for many years', and 'heresy'. See Chapter 18 for details.
But while I'm mighty troubled by the incomprehensible ramblings and confections of priests, I find I'm mightily troubled by the bland pontifications of Materialism too. For example: Materialism requires the spontaneous generation of Life from non-life which Louis Pasteur, a hero of scientific method, famously proved doesn't happen. So which is right? Materialist Dogma? Or Pasteur's proof? They can't both be right. Straightaway we have a paradox. And 'paradox' equals 'non-sense'. Likewise, Materialism requires Mind to arise spontaneously from nonmind, and Consciousness to arise spontaneously from non-consciousness. Something coming from nothing, again and again. Paradox upon paradox. Non-sense upon non-sense.
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What is more: in order for the structure of the simplest replicating organism to spontaneously 'arise or emerge' by complete accident from chemicals, the Hypothesis of Materialism requires an astronomical number of atoms to have accidentally come together in a phenomenally complex and precise sequence of patterns and orders: a process so statistically unlikely, as to require odds of unimaginable multiples of gazillions to one against.
For the benefit of any budding bookies out there, who know that odds of 10:1 against are never worth taking, one trillion to one against looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000:1. Any takers? Now then: Professor Paul Davies has calculated that the odds against just the proteins needed to form the simplest self-replicating entity coming together by accident is 10followed-by-forty-thousand-zeroes:1 against. By comparison to these 40,000 zeroes, by the way, a trillion contains just 12. As a rough guide, 40,000 zeroes would take up over twenty pages of this book. Any takers now? Meanwhile, Dr Harold Morowitz of Yale thinks we should up Prof Davies' estimate to 1 in 10-followed-by-three-hundred-and-forty-million zeroes. They would make this book some 170,000 pages longer if spelled out in full. Better not. Where do they get these numbers from? I've no idea. And I'm not sure they were both speaking of precisely the same thing anyway. But what matters is not the accuracy of these estimates, but the fact that everyone agrees that any spontaneous coming-together of such enormously complex chemicals is vanishingly unlikely to have ever happened.
These odds suggest that, even if possible in theory, the spontaneous creation of Life by accident is overwhelmingly unlikely. In fact the Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle compared the likelihood of Life having ever spontaneously arisen via the accidental assemblage of all the millions of atoms and molecules required as being similar to having a tornado sweep through a scrapyard, and leave behind it a perfectly formed Jumbo Jet. Yet scientists who regard playing the Lottery, at odds of a mere 14,000,000:1 against, as a mug's game continue to implicitly accept these ludicrous odds by insisting that Life definitely arose by spontaneous chance, upon chance, upon chance, upon chance-to-the-power-of-'n' and by chance alone. Of course, if Life never spontaneously occurred by chance, as Idealism claims, then none of these ludicrous odds will have any meaning at all. Also: since Darwin's day there has been a fundamental Law of science which states that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Thus it follows that Life, supposing it is an Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This has profound implications, deeply unfavourable to
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Materialism. (Please forgive the heavy emphases in the next few lines. Experience tells me that they are necessary, to draw attention to important little words like 'if'.) The simplest and most obvious of these implications is that Life, IF it is an Energy, can not be destroyed, and must thus be eternal. Let this be very clear: IF Life is an Energy, then by the terms of the Law of Conservation of Energy, a cornerstone of science itself, Life must be eternal; yet no Materialist will accept this logical necessity (see also next para.). As Energy and Matter are taken to be different phases of the same entity, according to Einstein's formula E=Mc2,
E=M. Please forgive me capitalising the 'm' of 'matter'. I'm doing it to maintain consistency with 'Life', 'Mind' etc.
it is taken as fact that E and M must be interconvertible. Thus IF Life is an Energy, it must not only be eternal (as above), but it might (or must) be interchangeable with gravity or electricity. I have never heard anybody, scientist or otherwise, claim that Life is interchangeable with normal physical Energy in this way. Thus, it seems we already, if tacitly, regard Life as being in some way unique. We certainly agree on it being of a higher order than un-living, lumpen, 'stuff'. IF it is indeed the case that Life is unique, and of a higher order than lumpen stuff, then Life may not be treated according to the rules for everyday, interchangeable, lower order Energies and Matter. Thus we may not reasonably claim that Life, a higher-order entity, arose spontaneously from lower-order Matter/Energies. Yet Materialism does claim just that: that the Higher spontaneously arose from the Lower. Alternative to all the above, IF Life is NOT an Energy, then it is something automatically outside the purview of material science, meaning the study of Matter/Energy and the physical world, as currently defined; and Materialist Science can thus make no sensible or valid comment on what Life is, or where it came from. We thus arrive at more or less the same conclusion, whether we take Life to be an Energy or not an Energy: Life is different; it can not be weighed or measured or inter-changed in any way meaningful to Materialist Science. Therefore Materialist Science may make no valid declamations as to the nature and origin of Life.
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Idealist science may have a great deal to say, however, and should do so as loudly and as soon as possible, I suggest. I hope the next few chapters will be relevant here.
Note: If you define science as the study of anything whatsoever other than only Matter/Energy, then you are automatically not a Materialist, but an Idealist, and the objections above will not be a problem for you. You will be free to study Anomalies as well as normalities. And who would not choose freedom?
As a matter of interest, Charles Darwin, the hero of the arch-Materialist 'neo-Darwinist' school of thought, made it quite clear in all editions of On the Origin of Species that he had no views on the origin of Life itself.
'I may here premise, that I have nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.' Charles Darwin: second sentence, Chapter 8, sixth (final and therefore definitive) edition of The Origin of Species.
And just for the record, Darwin mentions 'the Creator' (yes, with a capital), in a positive manner, three times in the final edition of Origins. Check it yourself. But make sure you are reading the '6th, final' edition. There has been a recent flurry of re-prints of the first edition, the only one which does not mention 'the Creator' in its famous last sentence. Now why would anyone want to re-print the first and not the last edition? Furthermore: a scientific hypothesis needs evidence to support it, otherwise it is (or should be) discarded. I had been unable to find any evidence that Life spontaneously arose from chemicals and Energy (the only sound proof for the would-be Theory of Materialism) because, it seems, such evidence really does not actually exist. Lots of hopes and assumptions and expectations exist: so do lots of exhortations and reassurances and appeals-to-commonsense; but no actual evidence. None. Oparin, Miller, and all the thousands of other dedicated and ingenious researchers who have been trying for the last seventy or so years have produced a number of interesting and apparently relevant molecules from various pre-biotic 'primordial soups' but not Life; and nothing remotely resembling Life. Whereas physicists will dump unproven physical theories within a year or two, Biology has hung onto the entirely unsubstantiated Hypothesis of Materialism for over a hundred and fifty years, and shows no signs of changing its collective mind, despite the heroic efforts of Rupert Sheldrake et al. More on Professor Sheldrake in a while.
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The other Sciences, taken broadly, go along with this same Materialist stance as a default. It is never impartially or publicly questioned. Say 'Scientist', say 'Materialist'. What we have, then, is a whole scientific system, acting as guru to the whole Western world and far beyond, which bases itself on a Hypothesis which is traumatically paradoxical, and therefore irrational and fatally flawed, and which is supported by absolutely no evidence. Incredible, but true. Thus, our society, which now takes its cues from Science, in the same way it used to take them from Religion, behaves as if the Hypothesis of Materialism were a proven fact: that Life is an accident, as is Mind and Consciousness; that there can thus be no point and no purpose in the universe; and thus no logical basis for a point to life. It is thus not surprising that we are floundering in a sea of pointless 'postmodern' relativism and materialism (with a small 'm'), mistaking gratification for happiness, and possessions for purpose; and becoming more and more suicidal and drug-addicted in the process. 'Shop till you drop' sums it up rather more neatly than the coiner of the phrase intended. And gross pollution and ecological abuse are natural extensions of the whole mad circus. And all this because scientists who, of all people, should know better, have insisted on defending the Hypothesis of Materialism with all guns firing, despite it being philosophically irrational, and breaking all the deepest rules of scientific methodology. It's amazing what can grow from a grain of kale. Please note that all that the arguments in the previous pages do is to suggest that the Idealist 'additional factor' must exist. The arguments say nothing at all about the nature of the 'additional factor', except that it is not Matter/Energy. There is also, however, the unavoidable logical implication that if the 'patterns and designs and energies and potencies' mentioned in the opening paragraph do not reside in M/E, then they must somehow reside in that mysterious 'additional factor'. Please note also that the arguments do NOT have anything to say regarding the process of evolution or the importance of science, nor do they comment
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on such curiosities as virgin births, big bangs, transfigurations, genetic engineering, or men in purple frocks. *** All that the tirade in the previous pages arrives at is questions, not answers. The fundamental question arising is: What is this Idealist 'additional factor'?. and who will study it scientifically if Materialist 'science' can't, or won't? It seems to me to be very clear that science should and eventually must study this issue; but before it logically can, it must undergo a paradigm shift of Krakatoan proportions, away from Materialism and towards something entirely more rational: a simple basic Idealism, untainted by religious dogmas of any sort.
A paradigm is a deeply held concept or principle, upon which other, lesser, theories are based. See Chapter 24.
There are no great signs of this vital paradigm shift yet, but it will happen one day; there are already rumblings if you put your ear close enough to the ground. Truth will out, as they say, even in the ivory towers. *** So if Life, Mind and Consciousness are not physical Matter/Energy what are they? If I find that I must logically accept the Idealist claim that an 'additional factor' is essential to our rational understanding of phenomena. then what is the nature of that mysterious and potent 'additional factor'? What may be known about it? A Shaman, a Spiritualist and a Shi'ite will, I assume, all tell me that they exclusively know the answer. So will a Druid and a Druze. And any member of any of the 30,000 Christian sects. And what about Yogis? Buddhists? Taoists? Voodoo priests? Clearly they can't all be right; and maybe they are all wrong. Or they may all be partly right. And what about the findings of psychical research? Is it just a mad coincidence that Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace (the codiscoverer of the theory of evolution) and Sigmund Freud were all interested in it? Whatever, they all seem to be at least addressing the issue in some way, rather than ignoring it or denying the possibility of its existence, the way Materialists (ie, 'Scientists') do. ***
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I know well that the above diatribe and comments will not go down well with some readers. One response I got to the original publication of The Tale of the Kale was a scalding letter from someone who thought he was being a true scientist by assaulting me tooth and nail for daring to challenge any aspect of the Hypothesis of Materialism. We exchanged several letters, very time-consuming on my part, in which I put the rational objections as clearly and quietly as I could, but to no avail. The attacks just became more and more rabid, with no attempt at all to address or answer the points I raised. He'd completely lost sight of the principle that Science is a method, not a dogma. He is, unfortunately, far from alone in this. It is worth bearing in mind here that a definition of a 'psychosis' is a persistent belief in something for which there is no rational basis and also no evidence. Materialists please note! *** Well, dear reader, as you are still with me, you must surely by now have given plenty of your time to this issue of whether Materialism is tenable as a Hypothesis or not. There is nothing more I can do if you have decided to stick with Materialism after all! I wish you well. Meanwhile, from now on, I will simply assume that Materialism is wrong and Idealism is right. No more discussion Time now, I think, to finally take a look at Religion. At first glance it doesn't seem to have a lot to say on the subject of spooks, but what gems and treasures, if any, may be hacked out and buffed to sparkling clarity from its ancient haunted cellars? As an intrinsically Idealist mode of enquiry, Religion must surely have come across ghosts and banshees and so forth at some point. Let's see Meanwhile, I kept looking for my White Crow... newly capitalised in my own mind.
I had read of many apparent wonders, including the alleged hauntings of Borley Rectory, and the extraordinary 'psychic' drawings of Matthew Manning. Intriguing, but not totally copper-bottomed unfakeable.
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Chapter 12 Religion
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use
Galileo Galilei
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother
Albert Einstein
As my health stabilised, I was able to help with some of the farm work that Anne couldn't possibly keep up with on her own. In small doses, I could do the ploughing and harrowing,
When I could get our classic tractor going, that is.
and help with the sowing and planting, and then the watering and weeding of the 3,000+ courgettes, for example. Courgettes were our new cash crop (after the Great Garlic Disaster) that the local organic wholesaler encouraged us to grow for him to sell on to Tesco and Sainsbury. As it turned out, the wholesaler often gave us 10p a pound for top quality organic produce that would appear next day on a supermarket shelf for 50p or more. Infuriating but how else could we sell half a ton of veg a week? Local shops could only take a few pounds; roadside stalls would need staffing; restaurants were miles apart, and expensive and time-consuming to reach. We were essentially trapped, like every other farmer, in the Great Supermarket Food Racket.
If you have not yet been scandalised by the way supermarkets force farmers into ruin, try Scenes from a Smallholding and More Scenes (or any other of the myriad books on the subject) and please think of how you might either grow some of your own food or support a local grower/farmer/market/shop.
Never mind; we did have an income, small though it might be; we could still control our destiny more or less; and were happy in the knowledge that we were producing wholesome food for somebody, even if they (the customer) and we (the producer) were both being ripped off en route. ***
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When I finally plucked up enough courage to start looking into Religion I realised I really didn't know how to define it, except that it must surely all be of an Idealist bent, and must therefore contain non-physical components, which must themselves be of a Mental and/or paranormal nature.
I was surprised to see that the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'religion' as 'A particular system of belief and faith'. No mention of 'paranormality'. How very odd. I was as surprised as I had been that Richard Dawkins didn't see 'intelligence' as a creative force in The Blind Watchmaker (although he does refer to how 'life, once started, will evolve sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins', thus requiring something to occur by an accident of chemistry and then inevitably go on to ponder upon its own existence. I can see to rationality in this, I'm afraid. Can you?)
So where should I start? With the ancient world and work forward? Or with today and work backwards? Or what? After all, I didn't want to become a theologist of any sort, or an expert on world religions past and present. All I wanted was to find out what made religions tick, and to see if they could offer any clues about those elusive spooks that Science refuses to investigate. Also, it would be nice to see if I could find any solid rational content among the flummery and candyfloss of Religion that would replace the failed Hypothesis of Materialism. There were a few other things as well, like Why do all peoples and cultures seem to need religion? Why were they all so different? And is there any Truth in any of them? And if so, which one, and how would I know? Oh. and lots of other things which I hadn't yet formulated properly. I hoped that things would become clearer as I blundered about in the various theological thickets, trying to apply logic and reason to a field notoriously alien to such approaches. In the end, I thought it would be simplest to start near home, so I read the Bible. I'd had to read bits of it at school and it bored me stiff, but this time it was different. I was doing it because I wanted to. It took a long time to read, pondering as I went, and trying to grasp the big picture. I guess three things struck me most, when I finally put the book down, thunderstruck by Revelation: * Firstly, these guys were serious. Whatever the veracities of the matter, they meant what they said. Secondly, there was no shortage of paranormal activity, all the way from water-divining to resurrection, with quite a lot of casting out of devils.
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For example, if you've never read Ezekiel, Chapter One (written in ~600 BCE) prepare for a surprise. This was no soft-centred 'heavenly vision' of harps and pastel angels. Visions don't 'come from the north' or have wheels. A NASA scientist was so impressed by this report that he set about reconstructing what he was convinced was a flying machine. He even wrote a book about it, which I once owned but have since lost. The whole episode impressed Ezekiel so much that he went to stay with friends 'and remained there astonished among them seven days'. Personally, I'd have stayed a fortnight.
Thirdly, the Old Testament (OT) and its God is remarkably different from the New Testament (NT) and its God.
Now here's a dilemma: should God have a capital or not? I'll stick with the convention of giving a (the?) monotheistic God a capital. All others will not get one. Serves them right.
The essence of the Bible seems to me to be that the Jews claim they were selected by God to tell the world that Monotheism was Truth, either by word or by example; and that they accepted this, but eventually wandered off-message, as we might say today, so somebody was sent to sort them out. Jews would not accept this interpretation, of course. For them, the Messiah, the Liberator, is still due. And they don't think in terms of needing to be sorted out, either. For them Jesus was just a trouble-maker, sticking his nose in where it wasn't required. *** To me, as an impartial reader, the two key themes of the Bible are Monotheism (OT), and Reformation (NT), with lots of strange paranormal activity en route which the local folk found absolutely convincing. That was all I needed, it seemed to me. Judaism was The Ten Commandments, and Christianity The Sermon on the Mount: both being a page or two of rules set by. by whom?
Very similar, these two rule books, except that the Christian one seemed to be more conciliatory and kind. Why was that? The Ten Commandments 1. You shall not worship any other god but YHWH. 2. You shall not make a graven image. 3. You shall not take the name of YHWH in vain. 4. You shall not break the Sabbath. 5. You shall not dishonour your parents. 6. You shall not murder.
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7. You shall not commit adultery 8. You shall not steal. 9. You shall not commit perjury. 10. You shall not covet. The Sermon on the Mount (briefly) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. You must be more righteous than the people in authority. Do not murder, or even become angry or abusive. Make peace with those you have dispute with. Lust is as real an act as adultery. Divorce is only acceptable after unfaithfulness. Don't make oaths. Your word is your bond. Don't resist evil. Turn the other cheek. Lend when asked. Love your enemies. Pray for your persecutors.
Jews would say their rules were set by Yahweh, who is God. Christians would say theirs came from Jesus, who was (or still is) the Son of God. Hard for me to prove, either way. But it was very clear that the violent vain and vindictive Yahweh didn't sound much like the compassionate God of Jesus. I'll come back to this briefly in Chapter 26.
The only other thing I wondered about at this point was 'Was Jesus a Christian?' Obviously not; he was a Jew, and Christians were first called such only many years after Jesus' death, when Paul visited Antioch. But, I wondered, would he have even called himself a Jew? It seemed to me that he was concerned with Mankind, not just Jews. And he said he had come with a sword, which I took to mean something to cut through the Gordian mass of legalistic empire-building that had led to 'Religion' becoming more concerned with The Temple and The Gravytrain than with The Word. In other words, it seemed to me that Jesus was primarily a Reformer, whose aim was to put Monotheism back at the forefront of The Message the Jews were meant to be exemplifying as 'the chosen people'.
No doubt a number of Christians and Jews will be outraged by something I've written here. Please don't be. I'm just feeling my way . I then read the Koran. My overall impression was one of sympathy for poor old Archangel Gabriel, who they say dictated the Book to Muhammad. At a rough estimate, some 75% of the text is an extended plea to his audience to stop being selfish and greedy, and to turn their thoughts instead to God's wishes and the next world, where they will be judged for their deeds in this life, good and bad alike. This is repeated over and over, sometimes five or six times in almost identical words. It struck me as being very like the OT, but with the volume turned up to 12.
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'The Arabs of the desert are most stout in unbelief and dissimulation; and likelier it is that they should be unaware of the laws which God hath sent down to His Apostle' (9:97). I also felt sympathy of a similar kind for Moses and Jesus. People will not listen to good sense, will they? Every parent, teacher, and probation officer knows this.
So what had I gleaned from the three 'Desert Religions'? For a start, I was very surprised to learn that they had a huge amount in common, despite all the surface differences we hear so much about: That they were all Monotheistic, and were concerned with the same God. That they were all revelatory: ie, instructions had arrived from a paranormal source: either God, His Son, or His Angel. That the various rules dished out concerned mainly ethics, morality, and justice, especially divine justice. That they all insist that Man should pay less attention to worldly things and more to otherworldly things. That people should treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves. This has been called 'The Golden Rule'. That individuals will be rewarded or punished for their good and bad acts accordingly. That the writings were all written for the societies and moralities of their day. They all insist on some sort of Day of Reckoning. (See Revelation, if you're feeling bold). That their writings all contain puzzling passages (not least, Revelation). And, upon reflection They all centred on Jerusalem, the 'Heritage of Peace'. Hmmm. Sounds like a nice quiet place to live.
Said Heritage of Peace has been invaded 44 times in its history, more than frequently in the name of the God of Peace, Love, Mercy, etc.
That they were not in principle incompatible, but have been made so by clerics. And, upon more reflection
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They all seemed to require people to choose morality of their own free will. In fact, it was the central common theme. That was another surprise.
Jesus had nothing against Jews; he was clearly trying to help them. The local Jewish folk had nothing against Jesus; he was widely supported and admired for his healing and message of peace. But The Management did not like him one bit. Similarly, Islam has nothing against Jesus (in fact he is mentioned by name in the Koran over twice as often as Muhammad) but respects him as a great prophet. But there are sections of The Management who take up an anti-Christian stance for political reasons. Similarly, the Koran respects Jew and Christian alike as 'people of the Book'. The doctrinal beef seems to be with whether Jesus was 'The Son of God' or just a prophet. It also despairs of the Jews for having wandered off-message. Jewish and Christian views of Muslims are similar in origin. As the Jewish texts came to them a thousand or so years before the Koran appeared, there is no comment to be found in the Torah, the original Holy Book of the Jews. Thus we must assume that any animosity must have come later, from some level of The Management. The same applies to Christianity, which had a 600 year head start on Islam.
Perhaps the over-riding impression is that these three Books, the Torah,
Aka the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Old Testament, mainly attributed to Moses.
the New Testament, and the Koran, are all making the same plea: 'For pity's sake.. will you just use your free will to choose to behave nicely to each other? Listen! Listen!!!!!... just 'be nice' then everyone will be happy? Right? That's it. Where's the problem?' The more I thought of this 'free will' element, the more intriguing it became.
More on free will in Chapter 21.
It had become clear that the Abrahamic Three are very close in essence, but had become separated by differences in man-made ritual, beliefs, and priestly power.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim descent from Abraham. The Koran even calls Abraham a Muslim. That caught my attention, as Abraham lived thousands of years before Muhammad. It seems to mean that anyone who 'submits to God' is Muslim by definition, despite whatever else he may call himself. Hence the phrases in the
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Koran 'To you be your religion; to me mine (109:6) and 'There is no compulsion in religion'. (2:256). This idea of 'submission' bothered me a bit, as it rings of bullying, but it became clearer later (Chapter 17).
Ritual had always been a mystery to me: stand up; face East; burn this candle; sit down; take your hat off; stand up; sit down again; sing this or chant that; ring a bell; stand up again; drone; bow down to the floor; turn round three times it was just meaningless. But as I thought about it (for the first time!) I began to see the point. A shared ritual is a collective glue. It pulls people together, and, as I was to discover (see Chapters 17 and 21), collective mind seems to be an important issue.
Unfortunately 'shared ritual' can also separate one group from another. This is a very common effect, as we all know. There's a famous joke about a Welshman marooned on a desert island. When he is finally rescued, he is living in a modest wooden hut, but he has built a huge stone chapel on either side of it. Why two? 'Well that's the one I go to, and that's the one I don't go to.' If we substitute almost any person of religion for the Welshman, we get a pretty clear picture of much of human history: Protestant vs Catholic; Shia vs Sunni; Liberal vs Orthodox; blah vs blah.
Also, a statue or a candle or an icon is a personal focus: an aid to concentration. They are not per se, 'idols' or 'graven images', although some people do indeed invest powers to images. I later came across a school of thought that helped to explain this strange phenomenon. More in Chapter 18. 'Beliefs' also baffled me. The essential revelatory message of all the Books was very simple: You were made by a very superior Being; choose His way of kindness and justice towards each other, and be rewarded; or carry on being selfish brutes and be punished for it.
Nearly all the rest was fabricated by priests and clerics and their hangerson.
unless there were indeed other revelations which had not been printed in the Books for some reason, which does seem to be a possibility, if not a fact. There are another dozen or so books written in the first and second centuries, which claim to be authentic gospels (including the brief alleged Gospel of Mary Magdalene) or first-hand experiences or reported collections of the sayings of Jesus. These are collectively called the New Testament Apocrypha, and make fascinating reading. Google will take you to as many as you care to sample. Incidentally, Revelation probably only made it into the Bible because it was thought to have been written by John, 'the beloved apostle'.
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A fine example of man-made doctrine is the carryings-on in 12th century Europe, when the Roman half of Christendom and the Greek half mutually excommunicated each other over a couple of details of ritual and Belief.
One of the points concerned how many fingers one should make the sign of a blessing with (no, the Bible has no comment on this essential point); another dispute was over whether Jesus was the Son of God as well as the Son of Man or, well. not. It doesn't seem to have occurred to these Men of Certainty that they were dealing with points of definition that might be way above their own level of comprehension, much as a dog might decide that a broken-down and terminally punctured but doggy-smelling car was a better car than a brand new one, which didn't smell doggy at all, and willing to fight to the death over this vital belief.
What was the point of all the excess 'Beliefs', except to confuse and control? Power games? Yes, although so many of these zealots seem to be utterly sincere. So is 'games' the right word? Or something else? This bothered me for a long time. More later, in Chapter 28. Power: From my political days, I knew all too well how easily people can manipulate and stretch apparently clearly obvious axioms to suit their own purposes: 'God gave us this land. How dare you say it's yours? No, we won't stop building on it.' 'Ah.. when Jesus said 'Love thy neighbour' he didn't mean Catholics, did he? I mean, be reasonable' 'Anyone who is not a Person of THIS Book is an infidel and must be beheaded on video amidst much self-righteous braying and claptrap.' And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to the misery and detriment of all. It was very clear to me that basic religion, of whatever local stripe, was constantly undermined and corrupted by professional manipulators and power-mongers. The early popes felt obliged to sign up a tribal hardman (Charlemagne) to keep other tribal hardmen at bay. Eventually there were popes who were rapists, sodomites (one allegedly died on the job), and murderers, getting rich and luxurious off the sales of Get Out of Hell Free cards ('Indulgences'). Another Big Reformation was necessary, and came about in Tudor times, amidst much burning and counter-burning of sincere people, all in the name of the God of Love. So what is Religion? 'Truth'? Or an extension of man's greed and cruelty? It would seem to depend on who you are speaking to, and when, and why.
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*** Back to my own concern with the paranormal: 'Revelation'..? Did it really occur? If so, why doesn't it occur today? Why in the Middle East and not in Bagshot or the Bronx? It all seemed a bit unlikely, but I couldn't dismiss revelation out of hand any more, the way a Materialist could, because non-Materialism (ie Idealism), insists that Mind must have preceded Matter, so 'revelation' could not be out of the question, and might even be an essential part of the human condition, for all I knew. I would have to think about this one. For a start, who was doing the revealing, and why? God? Son? Angel? There was no way I could check, and no philosophy or operational structure I knew of that would enable me to make any progress. It all felt a bit unsatisfying. I listened to a few bishops and rabbis and mullahs in the media and got the impression that deep down they were as baffled as I was, and the louder they shouted the more desperate they sounded. The difference between us was that this didn't matter to them. They 'Believed'; I couldn't.
And just by the byewhy are there so many discrepancies in the various biblical reports over say, the birth of Jesus? Matthew tells us that when Jesus was born he was visited by 'wise men' (not 'three' wise men; just 'wise men'), but Luke makes no mention of them, which seems a bit odd, as they were preceded by a bright star which would have been the talk of the town. He does however mention shepherds who come to visit. Matthew doesn't mention the shepherds. Mark and John, the other gospel writers, don't mention any of them, or indeed Jesus' birth at all. Luke says Jesus was laid in a manger because there was no room at the inn. None of the others mention an inn or a manger. Just to help things along the Koran says Jesus was born under a palm tree. Granted that all the Gospels have been filtered through human memory, perhaps many times, and have been edited by other human minds, sometimes for personal purposes, but you would have thought that God or His agents would get His basic facts consistent? A magistrate would throw a case out of court if it was supported by such garbled 'evidence'. On the other hand, if the whole story is nothing but a cynical forgery, surely even the most half-witted forger would have made sure he got his basic 'facts' consistent? And why would any forger go to such trouble? What would he gain from it? I can find no reasonable answer to this. You might suggest that it all helps to keep parasitic priests in power, but when you look at the dates when everything was written, and the strong consistent forces that keep the texts alive, this argument doesn't really stand up, I don't think. Where does that leave me? Puzzled. Also puzzled that anyone can think 'every word' of the Bible is 'literally true'.
***
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An associated problem, which I remember from my youth was 'Why should I think any of this old waffle is in any way true? It's too ancient to be taken seriously; just fairy tales from the olden days when people were stupid and didn't know any better, and hadn't even invented Zyklon B or napalm. I can't believe in any of it'. A good enough theory for a foolish youth, but not for an adult. Firstly, I have no trouble in 'believing in' Julius Caesar, who lived before Jesus. Nor in Tutankhamen who lived close to the days of Moses. So why did I not 'believe in' Jesus or the reports in the Bible? Jesus is even referred to by a couple of diarists of the day. He was clearly a historical figure.
And as for olden-days people being stupid I've heard modern engineers say they wouldn't know how to go about even starting to build a Great Pyramid. Some bright spark once suggested that they built a huge ramp and hauled the blocks (up to 60 tons in weight) up this. But then an even brighter spark pointed out that it would be harder to build such a ramp than to build the pyramid. It's still a mystery how they did it. And just up the coast, at Baalbek, there's a huge stone platform that contains three dressed and chiselled stones that weigh an estimated 800 tons each. And they lie on top of two dozen or so other dressed stones of ~300 tons each. Nobody has a clue how they might have been moved. And there's an unfinished obelisk at Aswan weighing 1,200 tons. Another expert once decided that Stonehenge was a solar computer constructed so farmers would know when to sow their crops. I've been a farmer, and have never once felt the need to rush off to Salisbury plain to check when to get the spuds in. Farmers use their eyes; they watch the seasons and the grass; they plant when common sense and experience tells them it's the right time. They don't need any sort of computer. And it doesn't seem to have struck the expert that if you have the ability to build a whopping great stone computer, you must already have the knowledge for how to 'program' it, hence obviating the need for the computer at all. And anyway, where would that knowledge have come from? Observation of the seasons and the grass, as above. It takes an academic Mechanist to come up with such twaddle. Rant over.
I then realised that it's nothing to do with the age of the texts at all: it's all to do, yet again, with the prevailing wash of Materialism that our society is drenched in without even realising it. Materialism says miracles and Sons of God cannot exist; therefore they do not exist. That's that. Thus the Bible and everything in it must be rubbish. But as I had now discovered that Materialism was irrational nonsense, I was free to think the Bible and religion out for myself, with nothing to fear from the Mullahs of Materialism who had controlled my mind at school. And boy, did I have fun *** Apart from the basic issue of Revelation, there were scores of other Anomalies that caught my eye, some small, some stupendous. Among them:
The Koran mentions various angels, including personal guardians for every soul; djinn (spirits created from 'subtle fire'); the creation of humanity from clay, 'moist germs', and breastbones; 'those who conduct the universe'; possession; Houris (ever-virginal non-carnal maidens); the fact that God is the Lord of Sirius; the notion of multiple Satans; a competition between magicians; the production of quail and manna for the Jews in the desert; a djinn called Iblees arguing with God; God shrouding people with a veil; loud noises killing people; the possibility of repeated Creations; the rumour of inter-breeding with angels; efreets (powerful djinn, or the ghosts of dead people); and, intriguingly, 'He well knew you when he produced you out of the earth, and when ye were embryos in your mother's womb'. The Old Testament is packed full of Anomalies. Here are just a few, pretty much at random, from the Torah: God planted a garden and walked round it, talking; there were giants in those days; the Sons of God bred with humans; Jacob wrestles with someone he thinks is God; a rod turning into a serpent and back again; a hand that turned 'leprous as snow' and back again; magicians producing hordes of frogs; boils, hail, lice, fire, at will; pillars of fire; don't touch the Ark or you'll die; God encouraging an invasion; 'And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people'; great masses of quails appearing from nowhere; 'and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague'; water from a rock; a bed twelve feet long; 'the foreskin of the heart'. The New Testament: just a few examples from the four gospels, again, pretty much at random: baptism with fire; disease cured at a touch or at a word; remote healing; possession (quite a lot of possession and dispossession); becalming a sea storm with words; devils trying to bargain with Jesus; multiple possession discharged into pigs; raising the definitely dead; creation of bread, fish and wine; water-walking; foreknowledge; lots of angels, sometimes ascending and descending; transfiguration; possibility of reincarnation; the extraordinary phrase 'before Abraham was, I am'; three hours of darkness in the afternoon, plus earthquake; consultation with non-physical beings; talking clouds; ..and of course, 'the Holy Ghost', the closest I came to a normal spook in all three books, (except for Koranic 'efreets' who/which are not clearly defined). And clearly the Holy Ghost is no sort of 'ghost' at all, but a great power, somehow associated with 'fire' (as are efreets, come to think of it. A curious coincidence).
'Before Abraham was, I am' actually stopped me in my tracks. The implications were just stupendous. *** Despite all the obvious objections, all three of these books had, to me, a ring of reportage rather than of Stephen King. Take the plagues of Egypt as an example: an absurd series of God/man-made disasters.
Water turning into blood; hordes of frogs; ditto gnats (possibly lice); ditto flies; mass disease of livestock; boils for everyone; enormous thunder and hail; swarms of locusts; untimely darkness; and finally.. death of the firstborns. Nice.
Why should I be even a little bit persuaded by such nonsense? The answer came in a flash ('Intuition' again) one morning: it was because of the context. The over-riding purpose of the Old Testament is to be an extended tribal history, concerned with the identity of the Jews as a people and their relationship with God. Nothing extraneous is mentioned. No insightful description of personalities or sentiments; nor of landscape nor of raiment save that worn by Joseph; nor yet of the splendours of Egypt and they who dwelt therein (this style is catching) Only actions and important events are recorded. The style is very spare and factual, and suitable for memorising accurately, to be passed down orally over generations. Secondly, it is absolutely without irony or humour. What is stated is stated as bald fact, yea even unto the last jot and tittle. I detect no trace of creative imagination anywhere in the Old Testament. That's why the plagues, and so many more of the utterly extraordinary and bizarre events read so convincingly, I think. Another feature is the repetition of whole chunks (as in the Koran). An oral history can well do without superfluous repetition, you might think, but it is there, nonetheless. Clearly these passages are thought to be superimportant. The same feeling of reportage infuses all three books. Unsettling. Perhaps Mind really had contacted Man, somehow. Try as I might, I could not now logically deny the possibility. But proof? And if these revelations really had happened, were any of them 'reflections of Truth'? They are certainly sensational stuff. I do commend Genesis or Exodus to you, as an example; and any of the Four Gospels; and a few dips into the Koran.
Leviticus goes into amazing detail of how the tabernacle (tent) to hold the Ark of the Covenant should be constructed even down to the fixtures and the colour of the curtains.
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The Koran is so insistent upon bad guys burning in Hell that it's not surprising that a number of impressionable young men, maybe thoroughbred idealists, or youths with less than perfectly clear consciences and thus fearful for their futures, should have become easy meat for angry and bigoted clerics who will tell them anything to get them to do their dirty work for them in exchange for a 'promise' of Paradise with 72 virgins (who, incidentally, are not mentioned in the Koran). It's the old Get Out of Hell Free stunt all over again; the popes in crusading days did exactly the same thing: 'Go fight the unbeliever; sins forgiven on the spot. No fasting required.' What blood-sodden knight could resist? The Old Testament is essentially a tribal history, complete with whole pages of historical begettings to prove the blood line, and a hope for (or revealed expectation of) better times; hence all the prophets. The New Testament is entirely different from the other two Books. It is gentler in tone and urges more than hectors. They all three have precisely the same message, though: 'Choose to be nice; it's for your own good.'
*** Reading three books is obviously not an exhaustive study of ancient Middle East history and theology, but the overall impression I got was of a singular message insisting that there is only One God, and if you don't pay attention to this fact you will seriously regret it when you die. The audiences of the day were the munchers of badger kebabs who literally couldn't see this One God lark when clearly there were lots of gods.. of the tree, the mountain, the lake, the dawn, the desert, as other clerics (or equivalent) had previously told them down the previous centuries, and as visually represented by various idols. Why change the customs of our fathers and our fore-fathers before them, etc etc? These old gods would let us rape and pillage as much as wanted, so why are we likely to sign up to this new god of yours who won't allow us a few harmless pleasures? But now and then the prophets prevailed and the masses adopted, or pretended to adopt, this new-fangled Monotheist Whotsit. The priesthood then maintained orthodoxy largely through threats of Hell. Phase two developed over the subsequent decades as the prophets and shakers died off and were replaced by professional priests, who gradually slid into the very same worldly paths of luxury and corruption that the prophets had only recently warned against. True, they may have maintained the name of the Monotheist God, and may indeed have put aside blood sacrifices, and idols and 'graven images' but they replaced them with 'graven images' of their own, metaphorically speaking, in making The Temple or The Book or The Liturgy or The Church Taxes more important
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than the Monotheistic message, which seems to have been remarkably consistent: 1 2 3 Understand and thus believe that there is only One God That he is nice Therefore you should be nice too.
.otherwise it's Hell for you, boyo which is always somewhere very hot.
except for a Zoroastrian version which was freezing. Same principle, I guess: jolly uncomfortable.
Thus the progress of the Monotheist Desert Religion/s seems to have been: 1 Prophecy or revelation or declaration of Monotheism. 2 Very slow uptake. Not popular with the masses, though they are impressed by the miracles, and any healings in the offing. 3 Priesthood settles in. Cushy life. Becomes corrupt and degenerate, and literally backsliding to previous beliefs. 4 Reformation occurs. 5 Repeat 1-4, ad lib. We might think of Moses as the first Reformer of the Desert Religion/s when he smashed the golden calf. It's gone on ever since. First Jesus, then Luther, then a lot of others, each with his own idea of The Original Purity. There are tens of thousands of different Christian sects at the moment. Judaism also has a couple of major branches, one Trad, one Reformed. There are others. Interestingly, the latest revelation of the Desert Religion, Islam, has not yet had a serious Reformation, but has nevertheless split into two major camps (based around a power issue) and a number of smaller ones. We see remarkably similar patterns in politics, don't we? Somehow, some comrades seem to rapidly become more equal than others.
*** Anyway, very interesting though all this may be, my real concern was with the Anomalies and what they might tell me about the true nature of spooks. I also wondered if any one of them might be the White Crow I was still looking for.
Sexually rapacious demons looked promising for a while. They were taken very seriously by The Church, and in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a Bull chastising people for having 'intercourse with evil angels, incubi (m) and succubi (f)'. This launched an Inquisition to purge Europe of witches. Powerful stuff but not my White Crow, as psychological explanations were plausible (up to a point, although some of the accounts are pretty hair-raising).
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Also not-quite-suitable was a report of a somnambulist woman in Wisconsin who had been sleep-driving vehicles for several decades, for up to fifty miles at a time, while never having had an accident.
Jesus raising someone from the dead despite the scepticism of the local neighbours who would certainly know a corpse when they saw one
'Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.' John 11:39
would most definitely qualify, but there was no way I could investigate such ancient claims. Either way, they had either happened or they had not. In my previous 'unwitting-Materialist' life, I would have written all these miracles off as hogwash, but now, after dismissing Materialism itself as hogwash, I was left with the intriguing possibility that Mind, if it could create a universe, could certainly raise the dead or fix up a virgin birth. Piece of cake. But could Mind really do such things? I'd recently read of a few cases of what seemed to be impressive 'non-medical' healing in the modern world. Who knows? Leave the door ajar The Anomalies I'd noted seemed to fall into four main groups: 1 2 3 4 Revelation (eg Yahweh speaking directly to Moses) Healing (Jesus and the disciples) Phenomena (Walking on water; stick becoming a serpent) Explanation.
'Explanation' includes the central message of 'be nice, or else hell', endlessly repeated, but also something else which I wasn't expecting at all My unconsidered understanding (ie 'prejudice') of Monotheism was that there is One God; that's it. All other personages are sinners of varying degrees whose main duty is to worship the One God, by telling him how Great and Holy He is. This had never seemed like a satisfactory state of affairs somehow, and I was intrigued to see that my prejudice was clearly quite wrong, according to all the various revelations. There was much more to Heaven than God demanding adoration and a hell stoked by imps. But the imps were a clue that God is by no means the only power operating in the Other World, as revealed. Presumably as Monarch (single power) He retains overall power, but there seems to be a host of Subarchs, all somehow doing variations on His will, on the whole. The fourteen examples I noted are:
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Angels Holy Ghost Efreets The Devil Satans
Cherubs (with and without flaming swords) Seraphs with multiple wings Sons of God who can breed with humans 'Those who conduct the universe' The Trinity
Djinn Houris Devils Satan
Clearly, this short list of powers and beings that live in a higher realm of some sort, is not enough for anyone to draw up a proper Natural History of Heaven from, although it seems to be accepted by many that there are numerous grades of Angels ('Those who conduct the universe'?).
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Archangels and Guardians.
What is the difference between 'a devil' and 'the devil', for example? And what's all this about Sons of God picking up a bit of rough? I do like the Koranic phrase of 'those who conduct the universe', painting, as it does, a picture of a calm and competent hierarchy making sure everything runs smoothly. This suggests, of course, that there is some sort of enormous plan afoot. But what is it? I couldn't find an answer in the texts. In fact the fourth category, of 'Explanation', is pretty thin in all three books.
In the light of the Koranic 'conductors of the universe' I am surprised that Muslims so often complain that Christianity claims three gods and not one. I can't see this, myself. Surely the Trinity is just another way of expressing 'conductors' or 'facets', or something similar. After all a triangle has three sides, but is still one triangle. St Patrick (allegedly!) chose the trilobed shamrock to illustrate the same thing to the pagan Irish.
Two other things stood out for me. Firstly, Jesus reportedly met up with the long-dead Elias and Moses for what seems like a consultation of some sort. The implications of this are just immense: the possibility of 'spirit return',
Which might finally put me on the track of what 'ghosts' might be, don't you think?
and the extraordinary idea that the ('one and only, and all-powerful', as related by Christians) Son of God, might need advice of some sort from other beings, 'dead' or alive. Big stuff.
See Mark 9:2-4 'And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them.
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And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus.'
Secondly, the utterly unexpected theme of disputes in Heaven and elsewhere. In the Koran I found:
'I am about to create a man from sounding clay, black mud moulded into shape; when I complete his moulding and breath into him of My spirit, kneel down and prostrate before him.' Accordingly the angels prostrated altogether, except Iblees (The Satan); he refused to join those who prostrated. Allah asked: 'O Iblees! What is the matter with you that you did not join those who prostrated?' He replied: "It does not behoove me to prostrate myself to this man whom You have created from sounding clay, black mud moulded into shape.' (15:28-33)
How very odd.. is God omnipotent or isn't He? Seems like some sort of free will applying, even in Heaven, at the dawn of time and before Man's creation. It also has a reek of pride and insolence. I do like the idea of Allah asking an angel 'What is the matter with you?' There is a ring of exasperation about it. What on earth is going on?
Then there is the extraordinary caution in I John 4:1 'Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.' Even odder. Free will for 'spirits' to go on the rampage?
This reminded me of something in Isaiah:

14:12 'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.'
More cockiness cut down to size, of course. But Lucifer (whose name, rather puzzlingly means 'Bearer of Light') clearly felt he might get away with it. Again, where is the monotheistic omnipotence? And thirdly, in the Gospel of Matthew:
8:28 'And there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way. And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.
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So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine. And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.'
Not so much consultation as attempted negotiation, perhaps, but what were 'devils' doing, thinking they might possibly be able to patch up a bargain with the Son of God?
And, for good measure, what did they mean by 'before the time'? This implies a plan, even a plan of predestination of some sort, which is known to the riff-raff of the Other World, but not to us on this one. What's going on?
I was left with the strange feeling that not only did the three Great Books urge their readers to choose a good life of their own free will, but that this same element of free will continued in the Afterlife, and even, according to the Iblees story, in the Prelife.
The 'Prelife'? as in 'Before Abraham was, I am'?
And add to this the notion that the Son of God had consultations with Elias and Moses, other Great Beings who were nominally dead. This was getting very intriguing. The consultation above suggested a possible lead to how 'ghosts' appear but it lacked all detail. Where now? Other religions? If so, which ones? There's an awful lot of them. How about India? *** I couldn't spend the next fifty years researching every religious nook and cranny, so I decided to settle on the other Big Two which had been around for millennia and which had travelled the world: Hinduism and Buddhism. What would their central themes be, and would they help me with my quest for an understanding of spooks? The central Hindu text is the Bhagavad Gita, I discovered. It's a part of a much longer work, but it contains the essence of the revealed truth of Hinduism, rather like the Gospels do for Christians. And what a similarity!
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The revelator is Krishna, who seems to be God or the Son of God, or a Manifestation of God,
A manifestation of God is called an Avatar. Very roughly speaking, Avatars seem to be as important to Hinduism as prophets are to the Abrahamic world. I found myself wondering whether Jesus might have been called 'Son' as this would be easier for a bunch of boisterous camel thieves to understand than the more tricky and abstract concept of 'Manifestation'.
and who sounds remarkably like Jesus in tone. But whereas the Gospels spread their message via the life of Jesus, here all the action takes place before a symbolic battle and consists of a rather nervous army commander (Arjuna) directly questioning Krishna, who gives direct answers in response.
And the name 'Krishna' is oddly similar to 'Christ'. In fact, one Indian dialect calls him 'Krista'. In many places in the Gita, Krishna speaks of His oneness with God: 'I am the way Come to Me' and 'Neither the multitude of gods (or Devas), nor great sages know my origin, for I am the source of all the gods and great sages.' (10.02) In the Bible, Jesus says much the same: 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well' John 14:6 There is some discussion on this similarity in names on the internet. One pundit declares that Krishna and Jesus could not be the same person, as Krishna died a long time before Jesus was born. Ah so.
Here there is no hectoring, or drumming up repeated and lurid threats of hell, just gentle explanation and patient encouragement. What's more, there is enormously more Explanation than in the NT or the OT or Koran. Yes, but what about Anomalies? Well, because of its unexpected nature, much of what is presented as Explanation in the Gita comes under the heading of Anomalies for most Westerners, especially me. Here's a sample: Loud noises causing harm; three worlds; 'just as our body exists in space, similarly our thoughts, intellect, emotions, and psyche exist in the space of consciousness'; 'all beings are unmanifest before birth and after death'; the world is made up of mind, intellect, ego, ether, air, fire, water, and earth; spiritual energy is the cause of the universe; this world is a sort of illusion; raising energy to between the eyes; the universe comes and goes in 4.32 billion year cycles; there is a force higher even than spiritual power; ignorant people possess the delusive qualities of fiends and demons; 'worshippers of the demigods go to the demigods, the worshippers of the ancestors
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go to the ancestors, and the worshippers of the ghosts go to the ghosts, but My devotees come to Me' (and are not born again); 'I continually support the entire universe by a small fraction of My energy'; body-giving mother and life-giving father; levels of power and being; one can become whatever one wants to be; bioimpulse powers (pranas); presiding deities. I found this to be pretty heady stuff. There is no talk of miracles, and hell is spoken of as a rational result of one's own actions, rather than as of somewhere you are cast by another power. I read the Gita twice in quick succession. Not only did it actually mention 'ghosts' (Aha! Progress!) but it spent a lot of time explaining a term I had come across elsewhere, but had never really understood: karma. More on this soon. I then moved on to a central text of Buddhism: the Dhammapada, and was immediately struck by how similar it was to the Gita. This is not surprising perhaps, as Buddhism was a reformatory movement within Hinduism, aiming (as Jesus did with Judaism) to cut through the rituals and distractions that had become attached to the core message and which were threatening to strangle it. Same old story Any Anomalies? Again, much like the Gita, it had no end of Explanatory 'otherworldly' passages, again largely concerned with the vital importance of duty over desire, and the need for self-improvement via choice, but no miracles or effects, as seen in the OT or the NT. The only specific Anomalies I detected were: Mara (the tempter); 'lordship of the gods'; Yama (the lord of the departed); the world of the gods; heaven, hell, Nirvana; the wicked man burns by his own deeds, as if burnt by fire; '36 channels'. If you have never read the Gita, I do recommend it; and the Dhammapada too.
There are now excellent versions on the internet. The Gita in particular is translated with modern Westerners in mind. First class work. Don't get caught up in the historical side. Skip through it until you get to the philosophical body of the work; then be prepared to read slowly and to think. The Dhammapada is shorter and more succinct. Gita: http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/gita.htm Dhammapada: http://manybooks.net/titles/anonetext99dhmpd10.html But of course a printed version is more sofa-friendly. There are dozens to choose from, most with excellent and helpful commentaries.
So where was I now? All of the Big Five were in absolute agreement, I had discovered:
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This is not the only world; be nice or be nasty, at your peril.
The choice is yours.

This wasn't at all what I was expecting. My previous views of Religion were of barking superstitions backed up with mad charades and parasitic clergy of various tints. How had I come to be so mistaken? I was reminded of the shock of discovering that Materialism was not a rational philosophy, as I had been vaguely used to thinking, but completely irrational. Now I had to face the fact that Religion was not completely mad, as I had previously thought. If the Desert texts had attracted my attention, the Indian texts did so much more strongly. I was intrigued by the consistency between all of them, especially by the appeal to people to use their free will to choose what they would make of their life. I really hadn't been expecting that. And as for the hierarchy or maybe even hierarchies that are hinted at in the Other World including the possibility of having the free will still to disagree with God. Well who could resist reading on? But read what? I had no interest in pursuing any philosophy (ie, personal opinion) based on a third party's revelation, so theology was out. I wasn't interested in 'following' anything or 'belonging'. I was still very much an agnostic in matters religious, and felt no great urge to be otherwise. 'Revelation' is all very well, but what about reason and evidence? If there is an Afterlife or (gasp!) a Prelife, that is clearly fantastically important, to put it mildly, but so far all I'd got were reports and rumours, albeit 'revelatory' reports. Keep the door ajar, again there must be something somewhere that would cast some light on it all Meanwhile, my quest remained the same: I still wanted to find out what ghosts are or are not. And I was still looking for a White Crow Anomaly.
What about an engineer who works for United Utilities on Merseyside, who usually uses radio waves to detect underground leaks in pipes, but who sometimes just uses a couple of welding rods to dowse for them instead? I've personally witnessed an employee of the then Electricity Board dowsing for cables on a brown site, using an official kit in a nice wooden box issued by his office. For centuries people have been successfully dowsing for water, minerals and even corpses, using a map and a pendulum. Science isn't interested.
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And I still wanted to rely upon my own SPIT (see page 100) to pursue these goals. I was a bit stumped for where to turn next, though. At this point I was working to the following clues: Materialism is demonstrably irrational nonsense; Idealism must therefore be correct. All the religions I'd had a quick look at were definitely Idealist; but none of them jumped out as being The Truth. I had a feeling that no other religion would, either. The Gita gave a clue or two about ghosts though Then the next step presented itself to me all of a sudden, although it had already been a part of my life for quite a while
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Chapter 13 Yoga
This world is neither good nor evil; each man manufactures a world for himself
Swami Vivekananda
When I first began to understand the yogic philosophy (of which I explain a little below), I tried explaining it to a Christian friend. I thought he'd be interested. Not so. He immediately flew into a sort of controlled fury and warned me against 'evil' and all sorts of other things I was too shocked to later recall. Where had this come from? I've no idea: 'ignorance' was all I could suggest. I had found absolutely nothing remotely 'evil' in what I'd read of yogic thought. Quite the contrary. Kind common sense, more like, which insists upon the Golden Rule of 'Do unto others as you would like them to do to you' quite as much as Christianity does, give or take the odd paranoid supporter like my friend. So may I urge you, dear reader, if you consider yourself a Christian, or any other sort of Religionist please just read what I have to say without imposing anything else onto it. I am not the devil's catspaw. I am, like you, looking for Truth. And please don't read anything between the lines. There is no hidden agenda.
The M.E. had wiped me out so completely that for years any form of exercise had been out of the question. Even a gentle walk would exhaust me. The best I could manage was a few light duties around the farm: weeding; holding things; admiring the view; a few minutes of wood sawing; leading April in and out of her shed. Anne (She Who Understands Things) suggested yoga. Well, why not? I'd seen a bit of it on the telly so I followed her initiative, doing a gentle daily routine from a second-hand Richard Hittleman book. I'd dabbled in meditation since the days of the Maharishi and the Beatles, but it had meant little to me. I did find that the stillness it generated made me feel more relaxed, but it didn't bring any insights of any kind. The main point of the yoga for me was to enable me to exercise in a way my body could tolerate. Some time later I came across another Hittleman book which had better pictures in it.
Richard Hittleman's 30 Day Yoga Meditation Plan. An excellent workbook.
This one included some theory as well as the exercises, and I began to realise that the stretches were just a part of an entire philosophy; and that
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the natural extension into meditation that I had discovered was not a coincidence. The physical asanas (the technical term for all the different shapes and postures) were actually intended to do precisely this, by gently stretching and toning the entire physical system of muscles, joints, organs, and the nervous and lymphatic systems; and especially the spinal column. To a yogi, meditation is the point that everything else leads towards. And meditation itself is meant to be a means to an end but an end that I couldn't make any sense of. Samadhi? Nirvana? 'Nothingness', is it? Sorry.. don't get it. Meditation relaxes you, I could see that. But mantras? And 'yantras'? Funny little symbols and diagrams Surely a mantra was just a distraction-tool to stop my mind from wandering? And presumably a yantra was something of the same a bit like a candle to a Catholic?
A mantra can be any phrase, but Hindus favour specific names of God, as dwelling upon the name associates your mind with the quality the name represents. A yantra is symbolic diagram, usually geometric, with a similar purpose to a mantra.
And then there were exercises involving moving light up your nose and into the solar plexus and then from there to the forehead. I couldn't take them seriously, but gave them a try anyway, out of respect for the system as a whole. All that happened was that I discovered I was absolutely awful at visualisation, and I already knew that. This all changed when I came across a book called Fourteen Lessons in Yogic Philosophy in the traditional musty old junk shop. It had been published in Edwardian times and was suitably tired and battered. But it was the contents I was interested in, after opening it at random and reading that 'the etheric body envelops and interpenetrates the physical body, and acts as a bridge for the life force to operate through'.
I can't be absolutely sure of the words, I'm afraid. I read the book twice inside a week then lent it to an acquaintance. Fatal. But I've read a lot of yogic philosophy books since, including three more by Yogi Ramacharaka, the writer of the Fourteen Lessons. The 'quote' above is close enough.
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YR's other major books are An Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy; Gnani Yoga; and Raja Yoga. I cannot recommend them highly enough, if you are interested in seeing Man and the Universe from a different angle. These books are still in print a century after publication, largely because they are so brilliantly readable, I guess.
'Interpenetrates'...? 'A bridge for the life force'? This was stunning stuff, and stated in such a matter-of-fact manner. Clearly, as Materialism was rubbish and Idealism must therefore be True, this 'etheric' and 'life force' business could not be dismissed out of hand, but all the same Here was a sort of dualism: Life and Body being separate things; the polar opposite of Materialism. I read on, and was constantly impressed by the simplicity of the tone. This was someone explaining, not trying to convert me or exhorting me to stop pinching my neighbour's camel or his wife's bum. And what's more, it was non-paradoxical, self-consistent, and, wait for it entirely plausible, if you could get over the shock of seeing what has previously been traditionally inscrutable and unknowable being systematically unwound before your very eyes and laid open for inspection. More details shortly. But the overwhelming thing that struck me was that the good Yogi didn't just explain; he also insisted that I, the reader, should not take his word for it but that I should read very critically until I was sure that he was indeed making sense for me and that my sense of reason was not being in any way violated. So different from the thunderings from the desert, and the similar thundering plus muddled logic of Richard Dawkins. I did indeed read with a very critical mind, looking for the sleights of logic or vague generalisations that I'd become accustomed to in much of my previous reading. But there was none. This was simple honest stuff. Embarrassing, really, to someone brought up to think of Science as the good stuff and everything else as being superstitious rubbish. Something that pricked my ears up was Yogi R's explication of a traditional technique a guru (a master) will use with a new chela (a seeker). It's very simple. Briefly: 'Who are you?' That's it. It immediately reminded me of the inscription at the Delphic oracle, and Socrates' own exhortation to people: 'Know thyself'. But whereas the Greek version was bald and gnomic, the Yogic one followed through, something like this Are you your body? No, you are not. If you were your body, you would be less 'you' every time you cut your nails. If you were to suffer an amputation, would you be any less 'you'? You may be less capable, but you would not be in any doubt about the youness of the 'you' who knows you are now less capable.
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That Lancaster bomber pilot was in no doubt that 'he' was 'he', with or without his leg.
More on amputation later. And since you were a child, you have grown enormously in size. Has the essential 'you' also changed? No. You may have greater capacities as an adult, but the 'you' who experiences these developments remains precisely the same. Add to this the fact that we speak of 'my' body, meaning by this word 'my' 'something I possess and can control', not 'something I exclusively am'. My hat, my bike, my body.
Modern Science now tells us something the Yogi (presumably) could not have known: that every cell and atom in your body seem to be completely replaced every ten years or so. Thus, you are quite literally several different people during a lifetime, if your physical body is your only true being. But we all know that our inner 'I' remains constant. It's true that you might say that you are now 'a different person' from when you were a feckless yoof, but by this you mean that you now have different ideas and standards and behaviour patterns. The 'you' that now has these different standards etc is still the same 'you', otherwise how could you judge the changes that have occurred within?
This was precisely the opposite of what the Materialists have been preaching with ever-increasing volume for the last 150 years. They claim we are nothing but our bodies; Yoga claims we are ultimately not our body at all. And as Materialism is nonsense, well, maybe the yogis are right. Maybe they must be right! This was an almost shocking thought to me, as a child of my culture. It might be to you too. But I couldn't fault the logic. Can you? I am definitely not my body alone, at the very least. For a start, I can dream and can thus visit all sorts of venues without my body. I can experience delight and terror without its active participation. I can talk and dance and fly, and it all seems perfectly real at the time.. and so does the body I seem to be inhabiting at the time. There's a thought. Overall, I am never at any point in my dream in any doubt that 'I' am 'I', and that I am alive and conscious, and that what I am experiencing is real. 'Conscious'? 'Real'? Whatever these words might mean, 'I' am still and always 'I'.
Another thought that struck me was that the Yogi uses the word 'etheric' as being a sort of medium of transmission for a force. Newton the physicist also required an 'aether' for the transmission of light. That struck me as an interesting coincidence.
Next, says the Yogi, is the question of 'If you are not the body, then what?' Are you your emotions? Obviously not, because we speak of 'my' emotions; they are, like the body, something we own and use. Are you a different person when you are happy from when you are sad? No; you are always the same person who is experiencing these emotions. You know
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this. When you are angry, you know there is a distinction between the 'I' and the anger; that is how you are able to know that 'you' are angry; not that 'you are anger'. 'You' also feel the remorse that follows upon anger, and can compare the two conditions. Who does the comparing? 'You' do. Again, I could not fault this. I can clearly remember moments in my life when I've been distraught with some powerful emotion, but was always aware that the real 'I' was witnessing all the drama as a separate entity. I expect you've noticed this too. I truly am not my emotions. The very fact that I can control them (well.. usually..) is proof enough of this. This simple analysis struck me very forcibly. I was used to psychological analysis involving complex and incomprehensible Freudian constructs, which never seemed entirely real or believable, and which took a lifetime to investigate if you were to become confused or unhappy ('neurotic' they call it), frequently unsatisfactorily, but always expensively. But here was a man telling me in very simple terms that I am neither my body nor my emotions, and that I am thus not at the mercy of either of them. In fact, I am in charge of them, or ought to be, and do indeed have not just the option, but the obligation to do this.
Quite shocking stuff to me, coming from a culture soaked in the psychoanalytic mind-set of the West, which assumes weakness while the Yogis assume strength. I found myself thinking that the Yogi's analysis must have very profound implications for the concepts of health and wellbeing. Would you not agree? More later.
So if I am not my body or my emotions, what on earth am I? I am something else. 'My mind', presumably? This would not be a great surprise, as clearly we identify ourselves with our thoughts and ideas rather than with how tall or violent we are. It's our beliefs and understandings that make us what we are. But no the Yogi goes on: Are you your mind? No. Again, the clue is that we speak of 'my' mind. We ourselves know full well that our minds are things we own and use, just as much as our emotions and bodies. Our minds develop as we mature and use them, certainly, but it is still the same central 'I' who does the thinking, either as a toddler or a professor. The mind's capacity changes. The 'I' does not change. We even have linguistic clues to this: 'I have changed my mind'; 'I'm in two minds about this'; 'He doesn't know his own mind'; etc.
Including 'I have made my mind up'. There is no doubt about who is in charge here.
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You use your mind for many things. You can switch your attention; you can concentrate; you can seek out a memory; you can re-live a moment, a feeling, a sight, an aroma, and a fear; you can attach a name to a face; you can compare two scents or the tastes of two wines; you can compare a present musical chord with a remembered one; you can subtract abstract numbers; you can envision a beautiful face or scene; you can focus on one voice in a crowd; you can recognise someone you haven't seen for twenty years; you can invent a fantasy animal out of as many parts as you wish; you can plan several moves ahead in chess or even in tennis; you can gauge relative forces when moving an awkward object; you can deliberately learn something; and a million other things.. all by controlling the mind and using it. And who is doing this 'using'? The 'I'.
Students of Freud and Jung might like to see how their own analytical tools relate to this system. No terrifying id, for a start.
'Gulp', as they used to say in the Beano. This was so simple, and with even the most critical analysis I could muster ('I' could muster..!), it was so clearly rational thinking, and as such, very different from the blusterings of Big Religion and Big Science. Was it actually true or not? I needed to think about it If I need any immediate proof or reassurance that I am neither my Body, my Emotions nor my Mind,
From now on I will capitalise Body, Emotion and Mind when referring to them as technical elements. I hope this will aid in clarity and not just be an irritant.
all I need to do is to remember that I can control all three of them. Thus 'I' am superior to them. I am in charge.
Of course, this gives rise to all sorts of other fascinating and potentially bothersome questions. We'll come back to some of them in Chapter 17.
And I knew from my patchy experiences of meditation that it is perfectly possible to switch off the Mind completely for long moments at a time, and just. be. It is not easy to do, but it is possible. And if it is possible then it means that the 'I', the condition of just being, with no thoughts present at all, can not be the Mind. Instead, 'I' am the condition of pure being: consciousness: awareness, into which the six senses feed: sight, sound, taste, aroma, touch; and also Mind the sixth sense to a Yogi. 'Mind', he would say, 'processes the input from the other five senses and adds memory and calculation to the mix'.
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Of course the Yogi accepts that part of our Mind is set to doing automatic jobs for us, like breathing or blinking. We can also choose to have other acts set to auto if we wish, like playing the piano or driving a truck. It is the 'I' that does this choosing, either consciously or subconsciously. Yes, he agrees, there is an 'unconscious mind' and a 'superconscious mind' as well. More later.
We are stimulated by the senses: a smell; somebody shouting at us; a colourful sunset. We respond to these stimuli via our Emotions, which are, basically, the responses of 'like' and 'dislike'. Nice smell; nasty smell; frightening shouting; sensationally beautiful sunset.
Advertisers understand this basic stimulus/response business better than we do ourselves: 'Monkey see shiny.. Monkey want shiny'. ('Shiny' being a reflection of 'light', and thus 'desirable'. Light seemed to turn up all over the place in the course of my investigations. Obviously the 'monkey' business above is metaphorical, and often refers to 'beauty' rather than 'shiny' which leads us down another path entirely if we have the time. I don't have the time here, alas. But you may.)
The 'I' is in charge of the whole set up, or should be, and can use the Mind to analyse the incoming stimuli and to then select a suitable and considered response to them rather than just have the knee-jerk response of the Emotions in charge all the time. We are presented with endless decisions to be taken every day, deriving from the thousands of inputs from the outside world. It is the choice of our 'I', every time. Do we pinch our neighbour's sensationally beautiful camel or not? Our 'I' chooses. Do we pay our bus fare when it's possible to avoid it? Do we leave a mess for someone else to clear up? Do we smile or frown? We choose, just as the Desert Three were so keen on us doing. Here's an interesting point: sometimes our 'I' chooses to let itself be overridden by its Body or Emotions (or is too weak to prevent it). Hence the plaint from the girlfriend 'And I thought your mind was in your head' (referring to a partial Body-Domination of the man's 'I'), evoking the response of 'How many more pairs of shoes do you need, for God's sake?' (referring to a partial Emotional-Domination of the woman's 'I').
Yes.. stereotyping, and I don't care. Clichs are always based on truth, and have their value now and then. But please feel free to switch the male and female round if you wish. It really doesn't matter. The point is made, either way.
Here's an interesting point on human behaviour and types, and even social evolution, based on the yogic psychology above:
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People are almost always in control of their physical Bodies. Quite a lot of us have good control of our Emotions (those of us who are not at all good at this are likely to spend time in prison sooner or later on charges of assault or acts resulting from unresisted temptations to greed, like theft and embezzlement). But.. and here's the point that caught my attention very few of us are in proper control of our Minds. This is immediately provable by looking at how susceptible we are to misleading advertising; or to blustering demagogues; or to impulse buying; or to being 'led on' by peers; or to charismatic preachers or Scientists; or to voting for the one with the prettiest tie. We have a progression here: the animated Body; the reactive Emotions; the considering Mind. One might legitimately compare these three states with the worlds of the vegetable, the animal, and the human. When we refer to someone as 'an animal' we mean someone who lets his emotions rule him; when he is reduced to mere existence, after a stroke or an accident, we even refer to the Persistent Vegetative State; it's only when we are properly controlling and using our Mind that we become human. More in a while.
I was intrigued by this Yogic analysis, as it confirmed something I'd already thought about (and mentioned above somewhere): that Descartes really had got it the wrong way round: we don't exist because we can think; we think because we exist. I do appreciate that Descartes was using the expression 'cogito ergo sum' to prove that he exists. But I suggest he'd have been nearer the mark by saying 'I can think as a result of being; and I accept my being as self-evident, after a prolonged series of experiments with the Wet Fish Test', whatever that is in Latin. Just by the bye if 'being' is the precondition of 'thinking', what might that mean for the mental (and emotional) capacities of lower 'beings' like dogs and molluscs? More on this later, too.
This analysis (that 'I' am not my Body, Emotions or Mind) is the bedrock of the yogic philosophy. To my mind it is logical and reasonable, and it fits very well with the world as I experience it. It is non-paradoxical and selfconsistent. It does not fly in the face of any observed phenomena; and it is simple. Why do we in the West not know about it?
I suspect this is because of the overwhelming influence of Christianity in our cultural and mental life, with its insistence upon us being Children of God. This claim may or not be true (it will be one or the other of these options, will it not?) but as expressed, it must surely lead to a sort of infantilisation of the individual, it seemed to me. The yogic view, that we are essentially Units of Consciousness (as opposed to mere children, with its overtones of dependency) already sounded like a more adult way of looking at ourselves. I could sense the phrase 'personal responsibility' looming. Oh dear..
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(And, of course, the other overwhelming influence on the Western world.. Materialism.. rejects all this airy-fairy stuff, but without suggesting anything rational to replace it with; unless you still think the spontaneous self-creation of intelligent Life from chemicals is rational, of course.)
*** The very simple analysis above took a long time to sink in. It was simply too different from the values and analyses of the world I'd been brought up in. Naturally, it raised a dozen questions in my mind, as it will have in yours, I expect. As examples: If I'm not my Body, Emotions or Mind.. then what the hell am I? Or 'I'? Where do Mind and Emotions come from? How do I relate to them? How should I? Why are there so many Emotions and only one Body? What is the point of any of them? What on earth is my Body? 'Oxygen and sulphur' is no answer at all. Why is my Body shaped the way it is? And how? What am I doing here, living in it? Why aren't I someone else? How does my dream world and dream Body relate to my physical one? And if I can think and move without a Body in my dreams, why do I need a Body at all? Or a brain, it being a part of my Body? No doubt you can think of several more questions, dear reader. I hope I can address a few of these as we proceed. No doubt you will yourself address the ones I miss. One odd thought that occurred to me was that as two heads are famously better than one, why are we all unicapellar, to coin a silly word? Then I realised that we do actually have two brains, don't we? (More on 'left brain/right brain' in Chapter 19.) Things weren't getting any simpler although, to be fair, the yogic psychological analysis did seem to be a lot simpler and smoother than the ones we've generated in the Materialist West. The essential point for me was that this analysis insisted on the reality of some sort of non-physical, or discarnate controlling entity. If 'I' am neither my Body, Emotions or Mind, then I must be something that is essentially non-physical, but which can control Body, Emotions, and Mind. This was
OK with me. It was a rational proposition, in accordance with the requirements of basic Idealism, and was not lumbered with any incomprehensible religious fripperies. *** The next thunderbolt came in the form of an explanation of that hugely misunderstood word: 'karma'. The root of the word is the ancient Sanskrit for 'action'. That's a clue in itself. The twin principles of the Law of Karma are:
Every action causes a result. Every action causes a reciprocal reaction.
It's all a question of Cause and Effect, as required by the process of standard scientific investigation. In fact, the process of Cause leading to Effect is the very bedrock of the whole scientific endeavour. An interesting correlation between Yoga and science, I thought.
It may strike you, as it struck me, that Newton's Laws of Motion are a cut down version of the Law of Karma. Newton's Laws of Motion (simplified): 1. Unless forced to do otherwise, a body will remain either at rest or move at a constant velocity. 2. A body experiencing a force will accelerate or change direction in proportion to that force. 3. Whenever one body exerts a force on another, the second body exerts an equal but opposite force on the first body.
The difference between yoga and science is that yoga goes much further, by applying the absolute Law of Cause and Effect to things other than simple physical objects. It applies them to things of the Emotions as well. Thus the strange part of the yogic Law of Karma (or Law of Cause and Effect) to the Western mind is that it claims that if I do a bad action (for the sake of argument, beating up a programme seller at the ballet one evening) the effects of my bad action will be returned to me, sooner or later. It does not necessarily mean that I will one day be beaten up by another balletomane programme seller, but that the precise same amount of suffering that I inflicted will be returned to me. No more; no less. It may
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not even involve being beaten up at all. But the suffering I caused, will eventually come home to roost. This is a curious or even laughable notion to most Westerners (as it was to me when I first read it and only half-understood it) but wait a minute the only difference from the physical Laws of Motion is that the Law of Karma extends to the non-physical realm of the emotional results of human action. We understand Mind and Emotion to be non-physical entities (unless we are still Materialists). But why should that mean that they should not obey Laws of some sort? Indeed, as the universe is clearly a highly ordered entity, operating according to numerous well-attested Laws, which must (according to Idealism) themselves have been formed by (Super)Mind, it is madness itself to insist that any entity within the universe should not obey certain discoverable Laws. Whether our particular culture has succeeded in discovering these Laws yet, is quite another matter. And as already considered, a blinkered Materialistic culture is unlikely to discover anything other than itself until it chooses to remove its blinkers. So.. the Law of Karma says 'whack someone and the pain will whack you back one day'. Worth a thought.
'(Pigeons) coming home to roost': a phrase I used a couple of paragraphs ago, meaning that some bad deed will eventually return to the doer is an old English expression that is pure karmic theory. I wonder if you recognised it as such when you read it?
But the Law of Karma goes deeper than this, because it includes 'speech' in the concept of 'action'. Thus, it claims that not only will bad physical actions rebound upon you, but so will bad speech, as they are essentially the same thing. We know this from our own culture as it is often claimed by victims of long term abuse that the emotional damage caused by lies and malicious bullying were more harmful to them than any physical smacking they suffered. Children run away; overdose; slash their wrists; hang themselves as a result of extended verbal abuse and denigration. Harsh words can cause suicides. The tongue can indeed be mightier than the sword. 'Action' need not be physical. So what we have here is a Law which treats Emotion as a real entity which obeys those two basic laws above. It goes out and causes an effect; it then comes back and causes that same effect: precisely that same effect, measured in terms of 'suffering caused' or 'joy conveyed'. 'Doer' and 'Do-ee' are intimately connected by the link of the action, physical or verbal. I found this hard to accept, but could not rationally reject it. After all,
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Idealism requires Mind to act on the universe in some sort of creative way: either once and for all, or immanently.
Emotion shares much with Mind in that it is non-physical. In fact, it makes sense to use the word 'Mind' to include both 'Emotion' and 'Thought' (as in 'Intellect'). Immanently: 'all-pervasively'. Not to be confused with 'imminently', meaning 'any minute now'.
If there is such action, then by the argument above, there must be Laws which add order to those actions, not least to balance the proportion of the reciprocal force, and more prosaically.. to help it to find its target. Something must be at work here. A Law, a force. Many forces, maybe? Do you agree? There's more: the Law of Karma insists that 'action' includes not only physical and verbal action, but also mental. In a word: bad thoughts about someone also obey the Law of Out and Return, and thus link Doer and Doee. This was a step too far for me for quite a while. How could a spiteful thought (involving an ACME anvil falling off a window ledge) about the rat who ripped me off after bodging a little job on my car possibly obey any sort of Law at all, never mind a reciprocal one? But things became clearer later, you'll be glad to hear. (More in Chapter18.) There are further extensions or ramifications of the Law of Karma. Firstly, a single action (see 'a night at the ballet', above) may have any number of results. Firstly, the physical injury to the programme seller, of course, but what else? How about the emotional harm I caused her by suddenly leaping from my seat and striking her with a large and glistening halibut, smearing her make-up and dislodging her expensively coiffed hair-piece, with no provocation at all? How about the disruption and distress I caused to the hundreds of people who'd paid to see Swan Lake, not Oaf Goes Ape? And what about the cast, half of whom were led off in hysterics? And the police and security staff who dragged me away would they be upset by my random act of cruelty and the stink of fish on their uniforms and down their collars and inside many of their pockets and undergarments? And the hospital staff who treated the victim? Her family? Perhaps they had planned to take her on a well-deserved holiday for her 75th birthday the following day. And so on it's clear to see that any single action, no matter how apparently trivial, can have all sorts of knock-on effects that we never normally spare a thought for. Ripples which can cross continents, and, for all I know, an entire universe; maybe further.
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By comparison, every single electron (one of the smallest known particles in the universe; every atom has between one and about a hundred of them) is surrounded by a force field, which technically speaking, 'ripples' infinitely in every direction. Atoms, and most of the rest of the submicroscopic teenies that pack the universe, have similar fields. That means that just about every particle of the universe is literally 'in touch' with every other part. And that's Official Science, not a wacky foreign philosophy. Why, in principle, should thoughts be any different? This smacks of possibly being some sort of theoretical basis for telepathy, doesn't it? (A little more in Chapter 20.)
This ripple effect has to be taken into account when calculating the 'suffering caused' by any ill-considered action. Maybe I had harmed more people than I thought I had on that fateful night in Covent Garden. It's not all bad news of course. Karma works the other way round too. Give a tramp a sandwich, and this gets chalked up to your credit. One day someone will help you out of a dark corner, maybe literally with a sandwich, or maybe with the offer of a new job.
I've recently seen terrific examples of the reciprocal effect of helping people on the television show The Secret Millionaire. After giving away tens of thousands of pounds, self-made millionaires regularly turn to camera with tears in their eyes and say 'I feel wonderful' And I feel myself welling up, too. In fact I find I'm more likely to cry at acts of kindness than cruelty. A barrier I've built up against the cruelty of the world, I expect, which comes down when positivity is revealed: 'what might be'.
I know you shouldn't get emotionally involved with Laws of the Universe, but I couldn't help thinking 'Gosh isnt the Law of Karma fair?' So refreshing in such an unfair world. The Desert Religion/s tell us to be nice, or else, but only Yoga seemed to be able to add the reassurance that there is perfect parity at play here. Big crime, big penalty: little lapse, minor penalty. Good act a future return guaranteed. 'Invest wisely', if you like. But the real key is to do willingly and joyfully what is clearly rational (to treat others as yourself, as we are all ultimately 'one', deriving from the same 'Ultimate Mind') rather than to 'do the right thing' just because it will bring you a selfish reward. Buddhists call joyful dutifulness 'acting dispassionately'. What else? Well, there's the urgent matter of how to pay off bad karmic debts. We'll come to that in a minute. Could I accept this extraordinary Law of Karma? Well, as ever, it was either true or it was not true. My acceptance or otherwise was of no interest or importance. If the Law was untrue, I would be sure to find evidence for this sooner or later. Similarly, if it was true.
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The connection with our own physical Laws of Motion, and its younger brother Chaos Theory, was interesting.
Chaos Theory is concerned with systems or events which, while proceeding according to basic physical Laws, are simply too complex to untangle or predict precisely. An explosion would be an example.
*** Assuming I've not bored you to sleep over the last few pages, I'm sure you will have thought of one immediate flaw in this parity-of-karma business. If he who lives by the sword will be bound to die by the sword, where did that leave murderous inadequates like Hitler, Mao and Stalin? Only one of them definitely died a suitably barbarous death, and that by his own hand. Between them they were responsible for instigating some 140 million murders, give or take. So by the Law they should each have been unpleasantly murdered, on average, some 40+ million times each which history tells us didn't happen. This brings us to the second element of the Law of Karma: Reincarnation. I had previously considered this to be an invention of the lunatic fringe, but the good Yogi had been making his points so clearly and rationally that I withheld my scepticism and read on. I'm afraid this means a bit of a detour into what yogis claim is the Meaning of Life. I wasn't really looking for this but it became inevitable that I should explore it, if I seriously wanted a proper explanation for 'spooks and ghoulies' and so on. I hope you will see why as we progress. It all ties up in the end, honest. It's all concerned with what we think of as 'this life'. To a Westerner 'this life' is just what happens between birth and burial, but to a Yogi, Hindu or Buddhist, this is a very short-sighted view of Reality. Thus: What is Life all about...?
Hinduism is a vast complex of overlapping systems of Belief, Understanding, and Knowing, ranging from the basest superstition to the loftiest philosophy and highest wisdom. Yoga is the high philosophy of Hinduism. Buddhism is the reformed branch of Hinduism, concerned mainly with Understanding and Knowing (Direct Knowledge) and deriving ultimately from the ancient holy texts called Vedas ('Veda' meaning 'knowledge').
A Materialist thinks life is about nothing at all; for him the entire universe is pointless and purposeless (which view, if followed to its logical
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conclusion, presumably must include his own opinions on the universe). For a Religionist, Life does have some purpose, which is bound up with a Creator, and expected standards of ethical behaviour, and/or of worship.
Another word I've always had trouble with. What sort of an all-powerful God needs me to tell Him how wonderful He is? I'm with the Materialists on this one, I must admit; or, to be more accurate, the 'anti-Big-Religionists'.
Philosophers all have their own pick and mix ideas. What makes Yoga different is that it sees Life as a sort of multi-levelled kindergarten-school-college in which Units of Consciousness (my term, not theirs) like you and me strive to develop ourselves from animals to gods (again my terms, not theirs). At the animal end of the dipstick we have the people who live only for animal sensations of bodily comforts and quite often, excesses. At the god end of the scale we have people for whom spirituality is the only thing that matters in their life.
'Spirituality'? What does this mean, exactly? Terribly hard to define, I think, but I would suggest that a 'spiritual' person is someone who somehow knows or feels or is persuaded (ie via the processes of either Direct Knowledge, Belief or Understanding,) that Man is not Pig, and that there is a moral imperative and an ethical dimension in his life, which is of supreme importance. This is reflected in his/her caring for other people (respect for others) and not falling down pissed as a rat on Saturday nights (respect for self). One might also add 'someone who tries to find out more about the superior power he aims to emulate'. The fact that we are aware that our animal component is not our best side is proved by our coyness over displaying our genitalia. Usually.
To a Yogi (or Buddhist) 'this life' (meaning twixt birth and burial) is just a part of 'Life'. This is a fundamentally different understanding from the Western world's. What does it really mean? Very briefly. You are born; you live your life, striving as you go to improve your own character (ie to develop your selflessness); you die. So far no great surprises, perhaps. Now, here's the interesting bit: You die but no, you don't die. Instead, you shift into the Other World, lock, stock, and both smoking barrels. You do not immediately become 'perfect' in any way. You are still very much yourself; good points and bad. This Other World has certain qualities that make it as 'real' for you there, as This World is for you now. The only absolute difference in it is that you don't have a normal physical body (of which more in Chapter 17). After a period in this Other world, you are re-born into This world, sometimes as a male, sometimes as a female, to carry on with the job of
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slow but sure self-development from Pig (or possibly Frog) to Prince, picking up precisely where you left off in the previous life.
There have been many theories of rebirth, from metempsychosis (the notion that you may be reborn as a human or an animal or a rock, depending upon your degree of sinfulness) to immediate reincarnation upon the moment of death. Reasonable objections have been raised to such ideas, but we don't have space here. The Reincarnation I am concerned with is a measured process, based upon individual needs (not 'immediate'), and progresses always upwards (not back into a frog, for example) as everybody makes some progress in a lifetime, even if it is not apparent to the people he offended. This version would seem to be more rational than the others, above. Along with it goes the idea that you are not judged and tormented by a big fierce god after you 'die'. Rather, you take stock of your own behaviour via a re-run of your life, seen as an all-embracing movie or slide show, in which all 'forgotten' details are played back to you. It is you who is your own judge and jury, aided if necessary by other smarter, but always kindly, beings who have all 'Been there; done that; bought the hair shirt'. I've seen various objections to reincarnation, but I'm not impressed by them, I must say. A common one was first put forward by Irenaeus, one of the Church fathers in the second century, who claimed that reincarnation must be wrong because we can not remember our previous lives. This is not an adequate argument, not least because most of us can't remember anything of our first three years of this life. Personally, I have great trouble with remembering the day before yesterday. This does not prove that I was not alive then. There is another school of thought which claims that you do not always need to physically reincarnate, even if you have been a thoroughly bad lot in your recent life. As long as you realise, post-mortem, that what you have done is wrong, and choose to make amends, then it may be possible for you to pay off your karmic debts via services to humanity in and via the higher realms. This would seem to be a rational proposition, not conflicting with the normal reincarnation pattern in principle. And those karmic debts always need repaying somehow, it seems. This process continues for as long as necessary until you have no more lessons to learn, which will also include paying off all the bad karma you have built up in your previous lifetimes. Eventually, you will become a perfect Man (which obviously includes 'Woman') and will lift off this mortal coil and enter into a quite different world, a nonphysical Reality called Nirvana. For those with eyes to see, Shakespeare's image seems to have been a lot more prescient than mere fancy words. Think of the notion of many births and deaths, improving as you go, and the shape of a coil.
Thus, to a Hindu/Yogi/Buddhist 'Life' means a very long series of 'lives', moving back and forth between This world and the Other via the process we call reincarnation, with self-development very clearly in mind, and determination to resist the enormous physical temptations of the animal
world we are to be birthed into again. Much food for thought here, it struck me, not least that the Bible and Koran are keen on Satan being 'the Tempter', against which we must test our mettle. See also Chapter 17. 'This World' is, after all, a world of temptation above all else. Every day we have to face moral challenges: to do the right thing or the wrong; to be generous or mean; to push or to smile; to grab or to share? We make a thousand ethical choices every day. There is far more to it than this, of course. There's no room to go into it all here, but it seemed to me that the double doctrine of Karma + Reincarnation would at a stroke explain (or 'offer a possible solution for') several of the odder phenomena we observe in the world. Here's a few of those puzzling questions that come to mind at the moment: How will Hitler, Mao, and Stalin get their just desserts? Why are some people born very rich and others into poverty? Why are some apparently born as geniuses, like Mozart, while most of us are not? Why do some of us have artistic/sporting/mathematical inclinations, seemingly from birth, while others don't? Why do some people have irrational fears of, say, mice, or water? And why do some have an otherwise inexplicable love of the sea, or the desert? Why are some people from good homes seemingly irresistibly drawn to the seedy side of life? Why does bad stuff happen to good people? Why do the good so often die young? Why do children brought up in the same family, even identical twins, often have quite different leanings and personalities? Why do some people feel unaccountably drawn towards other countries and cultures? Why do some people seem to become more easily addicted than others? Why do some people have feelings of dj vu when visiting a house or a locale they've never seen before? Why do 'the wicked seem to prosper' and so many people appear to 'get away with murder', sometimes literally? Why do some people appear to be 'accident-prone'? Why do there still seem to be so many bad eggs about, despite centuries of civilisation?
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Why can one child in a family turn out nasty while others are kindly? And might it explain the curious phenomenon of masochism? Why do we sometimes take an immediate shine or dislike to a stranger? Why does 'love at first sight' actually happen, now and then? Why do some people feel they were born in the wrong sex? Why do some feel they need to cross-dress? And, perhaps the most extraordinary thing I've ever come across, why do some people feel they 'ought to be' crippled, and even go to the extent of having a limb surgically amputated, after which process they feel 'complete'? Yes, I didn't believe this when I first read about it, either. But it is a medically recognised condition, called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). So there you go. Funny old world but just a little less incomprehensible if we apply the double doctrine of Karma-Reincarnation to it.. 'some dire deed, done in a previous life, which must be paid for' I'll leave you with those questions hanging. You might like to add 'Could the operation of Free Will, plus Karma, plus Reincarnation help to explain the problem of evil, especially in children who are 'born evil'?' Ie, if you are born into your next life in exactly the same condition as you left the previous one? (More on the true nature of 'evil' in Chapter 26.) And might it make sense of 'altruism' (the power that causes a mother to give up her own life for her child, or one soldier to give his life for another)? Altruism goes absolutely against the grain of the 'selfish gene' school of thought, and of all Materialist thinking. But seen as a karmic debt repaid, or a chosen act of selflessness, it makes perfect sense. And then there's 'remorse' Materialism can have no explanation for remorse, but it fits perfectly within the Law of Karma.
The best Materialist attempt I have heard to try to explain altruism involves devious planning: 'If I am nice to my baby now, perhaps my baby will be nice to me later'. It's hard to know where to begin with this one. Let's just say: Try asking a mother what she thinks of it; and then try asking a 'selfish' chemical how it gets to be so clever as to plan ahead, and deviously at that.
Just by the bye, if K and R is indeed true, then it would contradict John Locke's famous notion that a child is born as a blank slate (tabula rasa) upon which experience imposes all the child's eventual knowledge. Many people (especially parents) already suspect this notion to be untrue.
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In 2009 the Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh discovered that girls are born with a fear of spiders, while boys aren't. This too runs counter to the tabula rasa idea, as does the considered opinion of the godfather of psycholinguistics, Noam Chomsky, that we are all born 'pre-programmed' towards learning language.
Clearly there is a whole book's worth to be written here, but I don't have the space. If you don't see the immediate connections, you might like to take each of the items in the list above in turn and mull them over to see how reincarnation might suggest a resolution, bearing in mind that if you have a karmic relationship with a group of other people (one owes the other, so to speak) then it makes sense if you choose to reincarnate together. This, say the Yogis, does indeed happen.
There's that element of free choice again.. it keeps turning up, doesn't it?
You might also try to work out convincing Materialist explanations for the items in the list above. I wish you luck! The other thing to bear in mind is that there are two major ways to pay off a karmic debt: by suffering the precise equivalent of the harm you once did to another being, not forgetting the ripple effect; and by doing enough good stuff to precisely wipe out the bad stuff you did. Either way, you need to rebalance the scales.
Egyptian tomb paintings show the soul of a man being weighed on scales against a feather, representing purity and 'innocence'. (The word 'innocent' derives from the Latin, meaning 'non-harmful'.) The Book of Enoch: 41:1 'And after that I saw all the secrets of the heavens, and how the kingdom is divided, and how the actions of men are weighed in the balance.'
And always, always, you have free choice, they say. Incredibly, Yogis insist that you can even choose where you will be born, in order to give yourself the best possible chance of paying off a debt, by either the Emotional route or the Mental, depending upon your own personal level of development, and the effort you are likely to put in (ie, how strongly your Will is developed). This took some swallowing, I found, but the more I thought about it, the less outrageous it seemed to become. Let's assume, for example, that you had a terrible problem with greed your last time round, and damaged a number of people because of your rapacity. You might now choose to be born into a very rich family so you could actively resist the temptations surrounding you; or maybe more likely, given the short supply of such families, you might choose to be born into surroundings where you could very easily fall prey to the temptation to fraud and embezzlement. Either way, you would choose to back up this resistance with certain patterns of generosity to others.
As another example, perhaps you were previously given to pomposity. This time round you might decide to be born into circumstances which would enable you to become a government official or a priest, where you could work on resisting the obvious temptations. A worst-case scenario is that you once chopped off someone's hand, or even tortured someone. How might you be re-born?
Yes.. startling stuffbut not irrational.
'Always, always, always', the Yogi says, 'whatever the circumstances, you should use your free will to choose to fight the temptations to greed and selfishness, and to thus strengthen the 'I's control over the Mind, Emotions, and the Body'. And always, you should accept what Life throws at you. There are no accidents. Karma is precise. What should concern you is not what Life and Karma brings to you, but how you choose to deal with it.
Tough stuff. Believable? If not, why not?... precisely? Any evidence?
Some people 'see the light' quite quickly and choose to stop being a prat and get on with the process of living a happier, more fulfilling life by being kind and considerate in everything they do, from remembering birthdays, to giving way at junctions, donating the occasional kidney, not dropping litter, never being rude, etc. This is the superior, Mental, path. Others choose not to do these things and continue to live selfish brutish lives, thus accepting the cost of paying off bad karma via the path of equivalent suffering. This is the inferior, Emotional, path. Both paths bring results. The 'superior' one is quicker and less painful. We may all choose which one to adopt. *** Do you know what impressed me most about the Yogi's writings? I wasn't being asked to 'believe', or 'have faith'. Quite the contrary, in fact. I was encouraged to think for myself and to question everything. A breath of the freshest of air after the diktats from the Desert and Big Science, both insistent on telling me The Truth, and never inviting me to question anything at all. I actually found myself smiling while reading Fourteen Lessons. Such a relief Gosh.. this feels like it had been a long chapter. It's taken a very long time to write, at least. I hope the subject matter has been of interest to you, as it was to me when I first came across it. I'm very aware that there are big holes in the explanation so far.
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I'll return to some of the major points arising shortly. Meanwhile, you may care to see what the Yogi R has to say in his own most lucid words, by reading his own books.
You may discover en route that Yogi R is something of a shadowy figure, and that his books were at least ghosted by an American journalist. Whatever the details, it's the contents that matters. You could waste several journeys round this mortal coil proving that Bacon, Lettes, or Tom Artaud wrote 'Shakespeare' and never find the time to enjoy the plays themselves.
*** Now I was getting somewhere in my search for what ghosts and spooks were All this stuff may or may not be true, but it was at least selfconsistent and did not fly in the face of anything else I'd come to accept as logical and reasonable via the Tool of SPIT. The only thing it did fly in the face of was Materialism, and that was fine.
I know.. you're still having trouble with this. I still do myself, believe it or not, even after 20 years, or whatever it is now. But the logic will not be denied. Please go back to Chapter 5 (or 11) if you want to check it again for your own peace of mind.
That meant it might well be on the right track, specifically if people (sorry: 'Units of Consciousness'!) are constantly nipping back and forth between This world and the Other from relative death to relative birth, as it were. Here, I thought, was a hint of a scenario and even of a system which might allow not just normal death-rebirth, but also some extra sort of disjointed access from the Other to This world. And ghost reports do tend to have something of the 'disjointed' or 'not quite right' about them. Just for starters, happy ghosts seem to be very thin on the ground, so to speak; also thin enough to walk through the walls of a Shropshire pub, for example: what was that all about? Was this my first almost-breakthrough? At last I felt I was making progress.
I'd always been puzzled by Christians' insistence that 'Jesus died for me'. What on earth did it mean? It would only make sense if Jesus and I were somehow contemporaneous. Otherwise, how could he die in the past for me in the future? The notion of Reincarnation would begin to offer a glimmer of sense here. But there was still the question of 'Why did he want to die for me? To what end?' Again, the notion of karmic debt would seem to maybe offer a crumb of sense. Might it be that karmic debts from previous lives might somehow be paid off for some people some times by Higher beings? Did Jesus take upon himself all of humanity's karmic debt by the suffering he went through in order to clear the slate so Man could progress from barely-human to almosthuman-with-options?
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I've no idea. But at least there would be an element of logic in this suggestion, given the apparent rationality of yogic theory. Here are a few quotes (among many similar) from the Bible. What do you think? 'For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God.' I Peter 3:18 '..and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross.' I Peter 2:24 '..so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many.' Hebrews 9:28 'But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.' Romans 5:8.
*** But now what? Obviously, I would like to see how the Desert Three might chime with Yoga/Buddhism's doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation. Was there any commonality under all the fluff and incrustation? My previous readings of the Bible and Koran hadn't rung any immediate bells, so I was in for some more explorations. I was gearing myself up for a re-read of the Genesis when I discovered three slim volumes of Discourses in the local Oxfam.
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Chapter 14 Exo and Eso
As soon as you make a sect, you protest against universal brotherhood

Swami Vivekananda
A quick summary before those Discourses I had begun my search for the truth about ghosts by looking at Science. A complete washout. Then Religion. Still no good. Religion didn't seem to be interested. It didn't exactly deny their existence as Science did, but it wasn't interested in explaining them. Philosophy was no use either, perhaps not so surprisingly. But despite all the disappointments, I did at least now have two clues to work on: The layers or hierarchies that all the Big Five Religions spoke of, or hinted at; And the Yogic notion that you and I and everyone else are forever nipping backwards and forwards between This world and the Other. (One technical term for the combined This Life + Other Life is 'samsara'. From the samsaric perspective, the 'prelife' and the 'afterlife' are essentially one and the same; we just move back and forth, improving as we go, according to the relative wisdom of the choices we make.) Both were Idealist scenarios, so both were consistent with my discovery that Idealism had to replace Materialism if logic and reason were to be served. And both scenarios were mutually compatible. So maybe the key to the mystery of spooks was this notion of moving back and forth upon 'death' and re-birth. Maybe that 'door' could sometimes be negotiated or even forced from the Other side? And maybe the idea of Other hierarchies might have something to do with the extraordinary variety of Anomalies that have been reported for centuries, all round the world, from ghouls and demons to angelic visions and voices from on high?
And, of course, maybe the door might also be negotiated or forced from This side, too? Where might that idea lead? More in Chapter 18.
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It felt at this point as if Yoga might be able to suggest an actual mechanism via which ghosts might appear, or 'appear to appear', or whatever. Well, maybe. But why should Yoga, of all things, seem to have a comprehensive and comprehensible view of human psychology and its place in This world and the Other, while the Big Five religions, as publicly perceived, do not?
It took a very long time for me to become anything like comfortable with even the idea of Another World. At the risk of repetition, even now, after 20-odd years, I still find the concept difficult. The Jesuits say 'Give me the child and I'll give you the man'. Too true the ideas implanted in me via the subliminal indoctrination of my education and background culture refuse to simply give way in the face of mere Logic. But I insist that Logic must be my guide; and Logic and Evidence both point to the existence of some sort of Otherness. But now what?
If I think of Hinduism I think of enormous temples, some with very remarkable carvings; fire, snake, and rat temples; of naked, ash-smeared men rushing into the Ganges; of brilliantly coloured ceremonies, and multilimbed gods and goddesses being lovingly carved, then bustled down to the river, to be floated away down to the ocean, mingling with the ashes from cremations upstream. Buddhism brings to mind monks in shades of red and orange; chanting; gongs; statues, often huge; weird alpenhorns and cymbals; curious unicorn hats; prayer wheels and flags thrashing in a Himalayan gale. When I think of Islam I see men in robes and beards with lacy caps; women in varying degrees of concealment; elegant mosques and masterful geometric tiling; people praying according to set patterns and timing; huge crowds swirling round a cube in Mecca, then rushing uphill to throw stones at the devil. Judaism brings to mind men in strange old-fashioned coats and homburgs, with equally strange ringlets; skull caps; enormous scrolls; queues forming to pray at an old wall, stuffing written prayers into cracks. Christianity suggests processions, with or without statues of saints, or a man bleeding on a cross; leaders wearing extremely fancy and ornate clothing; churches, ranging from penny plain Methodist chapels to sixpenny fancy Spanish Catholic cathedrals, with matching staff and music. I'm well aware that these 'first impressions' are laughably nave, and comparable to thinking that Scientists are men in white coats with mad hair, but these impressions are the ones that millions of outsiders pick up on, and never bother to question, probably because they feel no compelling wish to do so. For most people, I would guess, these or similar impressions are 'truth'. And, of course, these clichs, like all clichs, do contain truth.
Hindus do have festivals where the done thing is to hurl coloured poster paint at each other; Muslims do venerate their Book, not just as a medium of communication, but as a sacred object; Buddhists do shave their heads and give every appearance of worshipping enormous statues; Jews do employ specialists to microscopically investigate every single lettuce leaf for some poor errant insect; Christians do hold a ceremony which must look like blatant cannibalism to an outsider; and even Scientists do have mad hair, though that is mainly mathematicians, it must be said. Overall, it is true to say that the Big Five, as normally perceived by an outsider, do not seem to have much to say about the mechanics of This world and the Other, and how they inter-relate. My experiences of talking to Christians have not been very enlightening in this area, for example. I guess this is because religions are really concerned with moral imperatives, delivered in various ways and with varying degrees of vehemence. They don't 'do' technicalities. This could be for the simple reason that the technical stuff is of little importance, relative to the moral stuff. The universe is far too big and complex to be understood by Man's relatively tiny mind, so why waste your time? But I found this puzzling. Surely the various congregations must be curious about the Afterlife? Christianity is vague to the point of insulting. Islam sometimes seems to dish out virgins to people who murder other people. Not satisfactory, to my bothersome mind. I wanted to know what there was about this Afterlife or Prelife that allowed access back and forth, as suggested by Yogis (some results in Chapter 17). And, how might some individuals come by what seemed to be a sort of season ticket? That's if ghosts really were repeating visitors from the Other, and not constructs of our own Minds, or somesuch (whatever that might mean). Be all that as it may, the question here was, to put it rudely, how is it that the knees-bend school of Hinduism seems to know so much about This world and the Other while the rest of us, here meaning just about everybody West of India, have to settle for incomprehensible mumblings and rituals? Was Yoga truly alone in this? Surely not? *** Time for those Discourses now. They were a set of three volumes by an oriental bloke, Indian looking, called Meher Baba. I flipped through a couple of pages and found that he was talking about very much the same sort of thing as Yogi Ramacharaka, in an equally readable manner. Karma and reincarnation were explored in great detail. If Yogi R and Mr Baba had
been put at the same table, they would have found they had 95% of their philosophy and understanding in common. So what? Put two vicars together and you'll get the same result: pious platitudes by the schoonerful. Yes, but the difference here is that the good Yogi is a Hindu, and Meher Baba is a Muslim. At first I didn't really appreciate the relevance of this, but then I thought back to the Koran, and searched through it again. There is no actual mention of Karma in it, apart from the broad notion that everyone will be judged for his bad deeds, as in 'Whatever affliction may visit you is for what your own hands have earned' (42:30). No clear mention of reincarnation either, apart from a rather ambiguous
'How can you deny Allah? Did He not give you life when you were lifeless; and will He not cause you to die and again bring you to life; and will you not ultimately return to Him?' (2:28)
So how was it that I was reading a book by a Muslim packed with clear and explicit references to both Karma and Reincarnation? I thought Islam was a pretty straight-down-the-line business. 'If it ain't in the book it ain't so' I looked more closely at the Discourses books and discovered that Baba was a Sufi. I'd heard vaguely of Sufis, but imagined they were some sort of sect, perhaps as Adventists are to Catholics, or somesuch, but the more I investigated, the more interesting it became. The reason Baba's and Ramacharaka's writings are so similar is that their philosophies actually are the same. In other words, the Yogi and Sufi doctrines had more in common with each other than the Sufi with the Muslim or the Yogi with the Hindu. This is an outrageous generalisation, but I think you will see my point. They had both clearly got the same doctrines in common, beneath the surface, as it were, yet still called themselves Hindu or Muslim. To put it crudely: every few years Indian Hindus and Muslims massacre each other, stirred up by fanatics on both sides. But some of their number, the Yogis and Sufis, will never be involved with such outrages (except, perhaps understandably, in self-defence). How could they be? Their joint philosophy of respect for all, backed by an understanding of the Laws of Karma, could never allow them to attack anybody, particularly not for the 'crime' of being 'A Hindu' or 'A Muslim'. This came as a great and very positive surprise. I can remember the circumstance well. I was sat in the conservatory, too tired to work, on a
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lovely sunny morning, while Anne was hauling a dilatory April in for milking.
Not in the conservatory, no. We milked her in her shed, just across the yard from the conservatory.
So there are certain Hindus and certain Muslims who share identical values? And these values are not identical with, but are clearly held to be compatible with, mainstream Hinduism and Islam? Thus, these two thoughtful men clearly must have considered that Islam and Hinduism were strongly compatible. So why didn't all Hindus and all Muslims share the same philosophy as the Yogis and Sufis? And why the regular massacres? Something to do with priests no doubt and, just possibly, politicians. It then seemed appropriate to check out Judaism and Christianity again. If Hinduism and Islam could be united at some level, maybe Judaism and Christianity could too? Worth a look The Old Testament was no more help than the Koran. Nothing directly on Karma except for the constant promise of judgement and the threat of a burning hell. The NT was much the same, except that some people wondered whether John the Baptist was Elijah (aka Elias) reborn; thus the notion of reincarnation seems to have been current in the local populace, but it's never mentioned as such in the Gospels.
Another example of the current expectation is in John 9:2 'And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?' Both Karma and Reincarnation are hinted at here.
So maybe this Yoga-Sufi connection was just an Indian thing (except that I read somewhere that the Middle Eastern Druze sect of Islam seem to be keen on reincarnation). Then I came across a mention of the Kabbalah, which seems to be a sort of deep-rooted by-way of Judaism. It was only a brief mention, but it suggested that reincarnation was an accepted, or at least acceptable, doctrine.
This is not the same as the kabbala (many different spellings) marketed to pop stars and the like. To compare the two would be like comparing the yoga stretches of the evening class to the Yoga cosmology of the gurus. The essence of the kabbalist doctrine is found in the Zohar, meaning 'Radiance' or 'Light'. More on 'light' in Chapter 17. The Zohar can be downloaded from http://www.kabbalah.info/engkab/the-zohar/downloadthe-zohar .
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Thus, at least to some degree, Judaism could be linked to the doctrine of reincarnation. I did a bit more checking and found that Kabbalah is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down, and that no one follower agrees with any other one about everything. 'Very Jewish', I thought. But the point is, that reincarnation was not anathema.
Jonathan Sachs, the Chief Rabbi in the UK, is on record as saying that Judaism is very strong on leaders, but not on followers.
I looked a little deeper and found that (some of!) the people who accept reincarnation in Kabbalah, accept it as a concomitant of Karma. In other words, you are reborn in order to Get It Right, and not just as a result of some cosmic cock-up. Each time you are re-born, you have a task to do: to pay off, somehow, some of the bad Karma you have piled up in previous lives. I guess it will be hard for you, dear reader, to sense the excitement this brought to me. Hinduism, Islam, Judaism.. all (to a degree, at least) unitable. Buddhism, of course was very much into K+R, and was very upfront about it. So four out of the Big Five That left only Christianity. I tried! I read great chunks of the Bible again, and was astonished at its raw power again, but I could find no convincing evidence of reincarnation in Christianity. Well, four out of five isn't bad
En route it occurred to me that the Emotional route of exact repayment, was what the Old Testament commandment of 'an eye for an eye' was all about. The New Testament law of 'turn the other cheek' was more of a Mental approach: 'Avoid bad consequences by avoiding the crime'. A connection with the Law of Karma, perhaps, and the two ways of repayment? Hmmm Maybe, but I wasn't persuaded.
So I looked at a few more religions instead. Sikhism? Karma and Reincarnation are central to their philosophy.
'You shall harvest what you plant. O Nanak, by God's Command, we come and go in reincarnation.' SGGS p4 'The body is the field of karma in this age; whatever you plant, you shall harvest.' SGGS p78 'Because of your past actions, you shall be consigned to the womb of reincarnation. Your past actions will not just go away.' SGGS p900
Jainism ditto.
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Confucianism? No.. but then Confucianism isn't a religion. It's more a sort of ethical doctrine, aimed at promoting social harmony. The other ancient Chinese system however, Taoism, does recognise reincarnation, at least to some degree. For example, Taoist documents from the Han Dynasty claim that Lao Tzu appeared on earth as different persons in different times. And Taoist writings seem to be connected to something very like Karma.
'Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without a starting point. Existence without limitation is space. Continuity without a starting point is time. There is birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there is entering in. That through which one passes in and out without seeing its form, that is the Portal of God.' Chuang Tzu Is this reincarnation? No, I guess not, but 'issuing forth' sounds pretty close. If Taoism interests you, try www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/feb3/taoism.htm
What about more minor religions? I found myself buying and borrowing more and more arcane and abstruse books, and dipping into my 1911 Britannica more often. Broadly speaking, this is what I found, looking for evidence of Karma or Reincarnation: Voodoo? No, not really, although one of the parent influences, the Yoruba culture of West Africa, has a strong tradition of a sort of 'partial' reincarnation, in which children are sometimes called 'Father Returns' or 'Mother Returns'. Voodoo certainly believes very strongly in 'spirits' though (of which more later in Chapters 17/18), and many of the AfroAmerican derivatives like Umbanda fully support the Karma + Reincarnation doctrine. Umbanda claims that humans evolve via this system. Now that was interesting
The general African approach is neatly put at www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/atrreincarnation.htm.
Native Americans? Yes. The notion of reincarnation is, or was, very common, it seems, especially among Inuit peoples. Native Australians? There seems to be no absolute agreement here, although as there are over 500 tribal groups, it's quite possible that some do and some don't. Some authorities claim it was a widespread belief.
See http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:fWp2lmlbjLcJ:ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/spencer But it is amazing how one source can flatly contradict another one. There is a book called Voices of the first Day by Robert Lawlor, who is clear that reincarnation is not an
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aboriginal doctrine. But, he explains, they do have an extremely interesting and sophisticated cosmology involving Higher Beings, and the ancestors who dreamed this world into being, which chimes with other cosmologies I've read of. They also have a sophisticated system of initiations. So what's that all about? Rolling up a trouser leg? Hazing? Another mystery. (..and dreaming a world into being? Idealism neat.)
Maya and Aztec? Not sure, although the Aztecs note 22 layers of heaven and hell. But they do have initiations. More initiations Come to think of it, African cultures are strong on initiations. So are the Native Americans. It was looking as though I would need to look into what these were all about at some point. See Chapter 18. Wiccans? As in modern day 'pagans' and 'people of wisdom'? They too believe in the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation.
Please don't write and tell me I'm wrong in any of the above details. I'm sure you will be partially right, and what I have presented here will be partially right also. What matters to me is the big picture. And the big picture does seem to be as I've described it above, broadly speaking. One complication is that some cultures seem to believe in reincarnation for specific people (important leaders or 'gods') rather than everyone. A very full and interesting book on the subject is Reincarnation: the Phoenix Fire Mystery by Joseph Head and SL Cranston.
So it would seem that the notion of reincarnation, if not exactly universal, was at least not limited absolutely to India. Much more common was the notion that you had to pay in the following life for whatever harm you might do in this one. That belief does seem to be universal, even if it's not spelled out as precisely as the Law of Karma.
Connections, connections Either every culture in the world was mad, or they all knew something I didn't know.. nor anybody else in 'the educated West', so to speak. (However, a Harris Poll of 2008 found that some 24% of American adults believed in reincarnation. I don't think this proves anything, but it is a sizeable minority, especially as some 70% believe in orthodox Christianity which does not believe in it. In 2005 the reincarnation percentage was 21%. A trend?)
*** Back to the Big Five: Four of them, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism each presented some sort of split between their public face and their private, or hidden, face.
Buddhism is much less split than the other three, presumably because it came about as a reformatory movement, determined to bring Hinduism back on-beam and away from the clutches of the priests and cult-devisers who had begun to strangle the original
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message with all their complexification and waffle. I'd come across that degenerative process somewhere before!
It's time for a technical term or two: it seems that the public face of the Big Five, meaning the services, rituals, processions, bells, chanting and so forth, is called the Exoteric (outer) face. These very public displays are designed to appeal to people who are led by their emotions'Believers' (see Chapter 8). The bells and smells help to focus the mind. The more private, or even secret, doctrines, are called the Esoteric (inner) face. These are for people who are led more by their mind.'Seekers of understanding' (see Chapter 8). As the intellectual approach aims at reasoned truth, rather than emotional solace, it is not surprising that the various religions should all share very similar Esoteric doctrines. After all, you can't have conflicting 'truths', can you? If you appear to have, then one of these 'truths' must be wrong; or both may be wrong; or, most likely, both may be only partially right (cf the problem with philosophers in Chapter 9). There can only be one ultimate truth, way way back, beyond all the little truths. There may be many facets of the one Truth, but if they be true, they will never be paradoxical or contradictory. How could they be? Truth is truth and paradox is non-truth, or more likely, badly-thought-through partial-truth. The fault lies with the thinker, not the Truth. But why was there any sort of distinction between the Exo and the Eso side of things in the Big Four? And why was Christianity the odd one out in seeming to have no proper Esoteric side at all, apart from the occasional eccentric mystic, given to bleeding from the palms or floating up into trees?
As in St Francis of Assisi and St Joseph of Cupertino St Francis of Assisi is said to have had a vision in 1224, as a result of which he received the first known occurrence of the stigmata: the five wounds to the hands, feet, and side, said to have been received by Jesus on the cross. Brother Leo, who was with Francis, left a clear account: 'Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ'. A mixed blessing, you might think, but, as always, there is more to this bizarre event than meets the eye. If I have the space, I'll come back to this later on. But if I don't have the space, try thinking in terms of the Little Being in This World, and the Greater Being in the Other... and the difficulty of making the right choice when constantly assailed and distracted by This-Worldly temptations to make the wrong one.
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And St Joseph On St. Francis of Assisi's feast day in 1630, the town of Cupertino held a procession. Joseph, a friar, suddenly soared into the sky and remained hovering over the crowd. When he came down, he was so embarrassed that he ran home to his Mum. This was the first of many flights, which earned him the name 'The Flying Saint'. Eventually his superiors would not permit him to take part in community duties as he was becoming a major distraction. He would regularly rise up when he heard hymns, or when he was praying before the Sacrament. His most famous flight occurred during a papal audience before Pope Urban VIII. He bent down to kiss the Pope's feet, and suddenly wafted up into the air, and only came down when ordered to by a senior dignitary. He would also occasionally fly up into a tree. On one occasion his talent came in handy while some workmen were struggling to plant a huge stone cross in its socket. Joseph rose above them, took up the cross and placed it in the socket for them. So they say. Each a promising candidate for a White Crow, especially an episode witnessed by a pope and full retinue, but unfortunately rather too remote in time to be absolutely foolproof examples. And how impartial and accurate were the witnesses? Hard to say. But flying up into the air isn't something you can spin. He went up or he didn't.
Presumably, the answer to the first question would lie in the annals of history, and the second in the annals of The Church. Time for a bit more digging, and on the way, a check on what ancient religions had to offer on the Exoteric/Esoteric front Britannica was coming in very handy, along with the small dog-eared pile of histories I'd accumulated from boot sales and Oxfam. *** Herodotus, some 2,500 years ago, wrote that:
'The Egyptians are the first who propounded the theory that the human soul is imperishable, and that where the body of any one dies it enters into some other body that may be ready to receive it; and that when it has gone the round of all created forms on land, in water, and in air, then it once more enters the human body born for it; and that this cycle of existence for the soul takes place in three thousand years.'
That's quite clear, and supplies a lot of extra detail, too.

Including the idea that Human life may enter other living forms. Be that as it may or may not be, reincarnation is clearly affirmed here.
The Egyptians had a dual system of priests and hierophants. The priests handled the Exoteric, public stuff; the hierophants the Esoteric, private stuff.
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Our word 'hermetic', meaning 'tightly sealed', derives from ancient Egypt, where Hermes Trismegistus ('three times great' Hermes, also known as Thoth) was understood to be the bringer of Esoteric wisdom: pearls of wisdom too powerful to be 'cast before swine' as Jesus would put it later on, and hence held as closely guarded secrets.
Now that's what I call interesting. Wisdom too dangerous to be publicly released? What on earth could that mean?
Here then we already see the split between Exo and Eso that was to mature in the later Desert Religion/s. We've inherited it from Egypt. Well, well. Hermes T's axioms were apparently collated in a book called the Kybalion which sounds a little like Kabbalah, don't you think? And Moses, owing to his rank in the hierarchy, and his subsequent role as religious leader to the Jews, must surely have known about the Esoteric mysteries, and presumably stuck to the tradition of not releasing hidden wisdom to the masses, or the Torah would presumably contain it even today. The Kabbalah, however, does contain many elements of this Esoteric teaching.
Interestingly, the Talmud (the basic book of Jewish law) claims that the Torah (especially the Oral Torah, passed down by rabbis) does contain Esoteric truths, but they are 'concealed', and are revealed only to those who have reached the level of the righteous. This means, presumably, some sort of encodement or symbolism. Again.. concealment of information from the morally lowly. Why?
The next great culture, the Greeks, borrowed heavily from the Egyptians, as one might expect, as the pharonic cultures were at least a thousand years older than the Greeks'. Some would say much older than this, as the Sphinx shows signs of water erosion which could only have occurred, say some geologists, some eight thousand years earlier, when the climate was fundamentally different from the modern bone dry one. Who knows? Anyway The Greeks most definitely had an Exo/Eso tradition. On the one hand were the gods of Olympus, more or less human in their lusts and eccentricities, and on the other hand were The Mysteries. Everyone in the West knows at least a little about Athena and Apollo, and randy old Zeus, the original swan-upper, and the endless stream of other godlets and godlettes who are the bane of all crossword-puzzlers and quiz show fans, but very few know anything about the Mysteries of Orpheus or Eleusis, inherited from the Egyptian Mystery of Isis. This is because they were, as the name implies, kept secret from the masses.
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Yes, but Why! Why.. WHY? More in Chapter 17.
Some details have come down to us, however. This is an extract from an old Orphic hymn:
'When souls return to the light, after their sojourn on earth, they wear upon their more subtle bodies, like searing, hideous scars, the marks of their earthly sins-these must be obliterated, and they go back to earth to be cleansed. But the pure, virtuous and strong proceed direct to the Sun of Dionysus.'
These 'scars' sound very similar to the Yogic notion of unpurged bad Karma for which the 'soul' must 'go back to earth to be cleansed'. K+R again (and 'subtle bodies', whatever they are). The Romans came next: the hard men of Europe, not much given to nancy flights of the intellect when there were huge aqueducts to be built and barbarians to be slaughtered. Their religion might be summed up as a vague sort of ancestor worship. Their distance from the Egyptians, Jews and Greeks is shown by Julius Caesar's rather surprised comment in The Gallic Wars that
'The principal point of doctrine (of the Druids of Gaul) is that the soul does not die and that after death it passes from one body into another.'
I wonder if that came as a promise or a threat to the butcher of the Gauls?

Someone who definitely knew what he thought of the prospect of an afterlife was Lucretius: 'The fear of eternal life should be banished from the universe; it disturbs the peace of mankind, for it prevents the enjoyment of any security or pleasure.' No namby-pamby aprs-vie for the father of Materialism, then.
There were occasional philosophical moments though. Cicero, for example, said:
'Know that it is not thou, but thy body alone which is mortal.'
Elsewhere:
'Nothing perishes, although everything changes here on earth; the souls come and go unendingly in visible forms; the animals which have acquired goodness will take upon them human form.'
Hello? Animals becoming human? How does that relate to the Egyptian notion, above, I wonder? Something else for the Bag of Mysteries More in Chapter 17.
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And Virgil says:

'After death, the souls come to the Elysian Fields () and there meet with the reward or punishment of their deeds during life. Later () they return to earth.'
To the Romans' great credit goes the fact that they were extraordinarily tolerant of all the cults and creeds they came across, as long as none of them threatened the State. They did eventually lose patience with the Jews however, who kept up an endless campaign for freedom despite having been allowed a number of concessions not granted to other provinces. Forty years after the murder of Jesus, the Romans lost their rag and destroyed the Temple. Still the zealots persisted, so fifty years later, they destroyed Jerusalem too, rebuilt it under another name, and forbade Jews from living there. However, one 'Jewish cult' blossomed mightily Christianity. St Paul and St Peter went to Rome and rapidly made many converts. The movement was so successful that eventually (in fact, in less than 300 years) Christianity had become the religion of choice for the emperor himself. Soon afterwards it became the state religion. The almighty and worldaltering Roman Catholic Church was just a whisper away. Then something astonishing happened. In one of my history books I came across a reference to the Second Council of Constantinople, convened by the emperor Justinian in 553. Essentially, it was at this Council that Origen, a church philosopher of 300 years previously, was denounced as a 'foremost heretic', and his writings were declared anathema.
Anathema: 'A formal ecclesiastical curse involving excommunication', which meant essentially 'damned in the eyes of God.' Heavyweight and extremely spiteful stuff.
What's more, anyone not agreeing with this judgement was also anathema. So what? Power struggles and denouncements have been the stuff of power politics since Day One. What made this one so special? What was Origen's appalling crime that called for such heavy-handed treatment....?
It was that Origen was a known supporter of the doctrine of reincarnation.
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I let out a loud whoop! followed, as is traditional, by an equally loud holler when I first read this. I read it again, and then again then checked it another book. It was true I grabbed the book and took it through to where Anne was having a cup of tea after a morning sowing half a mile of radishes in the big polytunnel. She was politely interested, but asked to be excused so she could listen to The Archers. Well, yes, of course. Sorry I cast around a little more and found that reincarnation had been a perfectly acceptable Christian doctrine for over 500 years. Saint Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, had written in the fourth century:
'It is absolutely necessary that the soul shall be healed and purified, and if it doesn't take place in one life on earth, it must be accomplished in future earthly lives.'
Various other bishops were also well-known for their support. It was a prominent doctrine. So there it was. The link that united Christianity to the other Big Four. I was just delighted. Naturally, I dug around for a few more details. There seems to be little doubt that Justinian's Council was deliberately packed in advance to secure the required decision to expunge the notion of reincarnation. But why? The explanations I came across ranged from the lurid to the cynical.
Broadly: Theodora, the emperor's wife, didn't much like the thought of reincarnation to pay off sins, so she lobbied hubbie to get it banned. Apparently, she was the daughter of the imperial bear-keeper and 'a bit of a courtesan', so she allegedly knew of what she spoke. Alternatively, The Church power-brokers thought that it would be better for their murderous flock not to know about the notion of reincarnation, as the option of a second chance would cause much backsliding. 'Truth' didn't come into it; political expediency and social engineering were what mattered to the men of power, the religious professionals (See Chapter 28 for some thoughts on how religions go wrong). Control by fear. The Chinese already knew about these things. Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism, had written, some 800 years earlier: 'If you cannot scare people with death, then you have nothing left to scare them with.' From now on the fear of death would become central to Christianity, and in this respect, jar it out of step with most of the other great religions.
Whatever, emperor Justinian ordered another mass burning of unapproved books (this was regular behaviour for the early Christian Church).
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To be fair, The Church fathers knew perfectly well that if they didn't get their story straight and stick to it absolutely, then the Good News Gospel would be absolutely certain to be diluted and ultimately completely depraved by competing dogmas, usually of ancient orgiastic tradition.
He also ordered the mass torture and murder of all the non-Christian inhabitants of Antioch. This was also traditional behaviour for the early followers of the Lamb of Peace. Mutilation and murder in the name of Love had happened many times before across the newly-Christian empire. It would become synonymous with the new Roman empire of The Church for centuries to come. One example will do: in 1014 the emperor in Byzantium captured and blinded most of the 15,000 strong army of the Bulgars. And then there were those murderous Inquisitions, of course, a little later on.
Again, to be fair mass slaughter of anyone who didn't agree with you absolutely was the currency of the day. It still is, in some parts and cultures. As matter of interest, reincarnation was a central doctrine in Celtic Christianity right up to the Synod of Whitby in 664, when it was elbowed out of official Church dogma by the Romanists. They never gave up.
*** So, at last some sort of unification. Did this powerful connection mean that I was finally on the trail of something? Well, possibly The key point was 'Is reincarnation a theory or a fact?' Philosophically speaking, as Idealism was the only ism in town, I could have no a priori reason for rejecting it, but that wasn't enough. How could I possibly find out? Meanwhile, it was impressive that all of the Big Five had strong links with the doctrine, despite varying attempts to sideline it. What was clear was that the Exo/Eso dichotomy was a fact, and now I thought I could see the reasons for it. These ranged from the expediencyof-power to the fear of misuse. Christianity (ie, 'The Church') seemed simply to want to keep power through fear, and in this it has been very successful, as the esoteric side of Christianity barely exists today. The few mystics that we come across do not easily fit into the hierarchical requirements of dogma (floating up into trees?), so they are played down as much as possible, and little attempt is made to put them into the context of The Church's main thrust, as being the 'vicar', or intermediary power-broker, between hoi-polloi and the Almighty.
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In modern times we have seen the growth of fringe groups which enjoy some sort of Esoteric element, but the explanatory background seems to be feeble.
OK, you can handle snakes without getting bitten to death (very often). Or you can speak gibberish now and then, possibly while trembling on the floor. So what? What does it mean? How does it work? What is the point? I've not yet heard a sensible answer
Islam has its Sufis and Druzes. The Sufis are traditionally the thoughtful, Understanding, and out-reaching wing of Islam, while the current crop of Wahhabi-inspired fundamentalists are the blinkered, Believing, and inward-looking wing. In essence, the Koran is clearly Exoteric in thrust, but many Sufi saints have gone their own way and preached reincarnation. I detect the same whiff of tolerant confusion that the C of E is famous for.. except that reincarnation doesn't exist at all in Christianity, of course (but exorcism does. See Chapter 18.). Islam seemed to be concerned mainly with keeping the story straight, even down to insisting that every Muslim should learn Arabic so the Koran could be read in its original language so misunderstandings could not arise in translation. Nice idea, but doomed to failure, as nave learners very rarely reach the level of competence of educated native speakers. Judaism has its Kabbalah and its Hasidic traditions, both given to Esoteric beliefs. Here the Exo/Eso split is more clear: the secrets of the Kabbalah (Kybalion?) used to be thought to be too dangerous in some way, to be proposed as doctrine to the general populace. Intriguing. Hinduism has its endless variety of Exoteric 'gods' and whatnots, but also a very powerful Esoteric tradition as in the philosophy of the Yogis (and others). Again, some Esoteric elements seem to be kept more or less secret. Still intriguing Buddhism is very strong on the Esoteric side, some of which is public; some of which is not. Ever more intriguing I'm well aware that these conclusions leak like a factoryful of sieves, but they are very broadly true, I think. I'm not concerned with details here. I'll leave that to theologians. It's the big picture that interests me.
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In matters religious, one can find a dozen contradictions for every single thing you might care to name as being 'true', or 'a fact'. Put four people in a room, and expect fifteen different answers after a fortnight's discussion. But it is definitely true to say that the Eso view of Reality is little known in the Christian world. To be perhaps more accurate, it is slightly known, but is rejected or ignored by The Church and mocked by Science, which effectively stifles it. More in Chapter 28.
The Exo/Eso split can be quite porous, in fact. Probably all exoteric Hindus, for example, believe in the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation. Substantial numbers of more-or-less orthodox Jews and Muslims, and even a few well-read Christians are inclined that way as well, although some of them must have a hard time reconciling this belief with the rigours of their religion's dogmas. This leakage has not always been to the general good, a fact that the keepers of the ancient Mysteries seem to have been aware of ('pearls before swine', etc). An example from Christianity: 'And he said unto (the disciples), unto you is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but unto them that are without (the general public), all these things are done in parables.' Mark 4:11. We'll be returning briefly to this element in Chapter 18. And in Chapter 17 we'll be briefly returning to the Esoteric understanding of the universe. There's rather more to it than I've mentioned so far obviously! *** So where did that leave me in my search for an explanation of things that go bump in the night? It did seem to me after discovering the debacle of 553, when what may possibly be a Truth was corruptly voted out of Christianity, that here was some sort of progress. If reincarnation, then there must be two worlds, and passage between two worlds. Thus, it might well be possible for 'a ghost' to be some sort of entity involved with this two-world system. Moving between them? Or bilocating? Or stuck in the vestibule? Or something? Also, if reincarnation was a Truth, then clearly there must be a Life force of some sort capable of doing the reincarnating.
or maybe many forces, including Mind and Consciousness, unless perhaps L M and C are all aspects of the same force: sides of the same triangle so to speak. There's that 'triangle' again.
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This force must be quite independent of the physical body and quite counter to the Materialist's fantasy of chemicals suddenly sprouting the ability to think. LMC was coming to loom ever larger in the grand scheme of things. *** Was reincarnation such a silly idea anyway? The only alternatives I had come across were the discredited magical self-creation required by Materialism, or the Christian notion of being born just the once, rich or poor, radiantly fit or grotesquely crippled, at random, and being expected to worship God for it, whatever. That scenario didn't even chime with Christianity's other central requirement of God being Love Personified. How could Love Personified allow crippled babies to be born? Something missing, or plain wrong somewhere. Whichever way I looked at it, reincarnation was fast becoming the only horse in the race. The crippled baby to a Yogi would have been born that way as a result of past Karma, and would be seen as now having an opportunity to put right a past crime or to suffer a pain equal to one that he once caused, and thus pay it off forever. (More on such things as 'group karma' in Chapter 26.) This also sounds nothing like a God of Love Personified, but at least it contained a thread of reason and logic. Still very puzzling, whatever. Time to press on looking for evidence of the minimum requirements of the reincarnation process: 1 2 3 Two worlds to shuttle between. A Life force (or Mind, or LMC, or something) capable of doing the shuttling. A mechanism whereby the shuttling might occur.
If I could find credible evidence of all three, then not only would I be forced to take reincarnation very seriously, but I would definitely be homing in on a system within which spooks might plausibly be operating. See Chapter 17. *** This reincarnation thing had obviously exercised greater minds than mine down the centuries.
Other fans of reincarnation include (all dates approximate):
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Pythagoras (Greek philosopher and mathematician, c.582-c.500 BCE) Socrates (Greek philosopher, 469-399 BCE) Plato (Greek philosopher, 427-347 BCE) 'I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead.' (Attributed to Socrates.) Plotinus (Greek philosopher, founder of Neoplatonism, 204-270) Giordano Bruno (Italian philosopher, 1548-1600) 'The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.' Franois Voltaire (French philosopher, 1694-1778) Benjamin Franklin (US statesman, philosopher and inventor, 1706-1790) John Adams (Second president of the United States, 1735-1826) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet and dramatist, 1749-1832) Napoleon Bonaparte (French Emperor, (1769-1821) repeatedly told his generals that he was Charlemagne reincarnated. William Wordsworth (English poet, 1770-1850) Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher, 1788-1860) 'Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.' Honor de Balzac (French writer, 1799-1850) 'All human beings go through a previous life' Ralph Waldo Emerson (US philosopher and writer, 1803-1882) 'The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.' Robert Browning (English poet, 1812-1889) Richard Wagner (German composer, 1813-1883) 'In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow.' Henry David Thoreau (US social critic, writer and philosopher, 1817-1862) Walt Whitman (US poet, 1819-1892) 'I know I am deathlessWe have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, / There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.' Leo Tolstoy (Russian novelist and social critic, 1828-1910) Mark Twain (US writer, 1835-1910) Gustav Mahler (Austrian composer, 1860-1911) Rudolf Steiner (Austrian philosopher, 1861-1925) David Lloyd George (British Prime Minister 1863-1945) 'The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc. nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.' Henry Ford (US automobile pioneer, 1863-1947) 'Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives.' Rudyard Kipling (English writer, 1865-1936) W. Somerset Maugham (English writer, 1874-1965) Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, 1875-1961) 'I can well imagine... that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.' Memories, Dream, Reflections Sir Hugh Dowding (British Air Marshal during the Battle of Britain, 1882-1970) George S. Patton (US general, 1885-1945) Robert Graves (English poet, 1895-1985)
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This list doesn't prove a thing of course, as one could very easily produce a list fifty times longer of famous people who think reincarnation is baloney. But the above list does show that a lot of people who are well thought of for their creative and original intellectual (and other) achievements, and who are thus not idiots, have been convinced enough to speak up, often braving the ridicule of the current accepted wisdom. The list fifty times longer, suggested above, would include a huge number of Materialist -Scientists, of course, possibly even '99%', as that Scientist on the radio had claimed.
Voltaire, the arch-supporter of French rationalism and anti-popery while the French Revolution was looming said:
'It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.'
and I think he has a point. A cursory glance at the millions of closely interlocked designs (there's that word again..) and processes that go into the production of an embryo must surely give any sane person pause for thought.
For example: an embryo creates an average of 250,000 brain cells every minute during its 40 week gestation. Chapter 22 looks a little at the complexity of a cell.
Then add to that the astonishing difference between a still-born and a live baby,
I'm sorry about all these poor suffering babies, but we might as well be blunt about these things.
which will both share those designs and the results of those processes, and may even have identical DNA if they are identical twins; but nothing could be more different than a live baby and a dead one, despite what my old biology teacher might say. I would certainly call the birth of a live insect, never mind a human being, 'surprising' at the very least. Something else that was a surprise was to stumble across a quote from TH Huxley, 'Darwin's bulldog', famous for his relentless defence of the Theory of Evolution against all comers, particularly The Church:
'I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.' Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
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First Darwin not being an atheist; now his bulldog believing in reincarnation. I now felt even more deceived by the Materialist education I had received, and the constant thunderings of Big Science. I could sense something waiting just round the corner.
'For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, everexisting, and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.' Bhagavad Gita 2.20
*** I once read that Mahatma Gandhi called himself a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian. Now I understood. *** MIND. MIND Idealism requires Mind, or other non-physical powers of some sort to lie behind the physical universe. Surely I now needed to find out what I could about Mind? ***
Yet another trawl of the Koran and the New Testament came up with a couple of quotes that do seem to be entirely consistent with the Law of Karma: 'Good deeds annul evil deeds. This is a reminder for the mindful' (11.114). 'Give and it will be given to you for the measure you give will be the measure you get back' (Luke 6:38). I suspect that a closer re-read of the Old Testament would probably discover 'neokarmic' verses in this book too. A challenge for a rainy day.
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Chapter 15 Dreams and Hypnosis
I had a dream which was not all a dream

Byron
As time passed I found I was being increasingly confronted by three interlocking notions: a) b) c) That the universe is stranger, even much stranger, than I had been educated to think. That Mind (and/or other non-physical forces) is the powerhouse behind it all. And that a rational explanation of it all (or at least some of it) was possible.
I hope I have been able to explain the story so far to you in terms that make logical sense. I'm certain I will have missed bits out, and left unexplained all manner of things that you would quite rightly want to be explained, but space is limited and I'm trying to make sure I get the essentials down. Please forgive any gaps, and use this book as your own starting point for further explorations. *** It's hard now to put myself back into the mental space I was in while all these ideas were flooding in, and flood they did. There were days when connections and insights tumbled into my mind so fast that I could barely keep up. For example, one day I realised I could even begin to see some sense in the old Greek gods of Olympus. If one thought of them in the same sense as the multiple Indian 'gods', ie, as personified aspects of one Great Deity, or personifications of human psychological conditions, then it was possible to see how the otherwise nonsensical escapades of Zeus and the rest of them might make some sort of sense: as exoteric parables hinting at esoteric truths. True, they still remained pretty bizarre, but threads might be teased out of the silliness. In the case of the story of Ariadne and the Minotaur, quite literally.
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For all I know, this might be the standard interpretation. But it was new to me, and arrived out of the blue as an unexpected insight rather than from a book, which was in itself interesting.
All these insights and connections were tending towards one end, I can now see, but they involved a fair amount of intertwining and unexpected side-tracking on the way. The process is now clear to me; but how can I make it clear to you? I've decided to spread it over the next five chapters, under different headings, but all quite closely connected. Are the chapters in the right order? I hope so, but you might not agree. They also take some time to spell out their points clearly. Please bear with me some of the ideas might be unexpected, so may need a little time and space. All five chapters deal with aspects of the emerging superpower: Mind, and I thought it might be good to start with something close to home that we all know something about. dreams. Heaven knows how many books have been written about interpreting dreams, but every single one of them can only be as good as the premisses or assumptions they start with. If we assume that all dreams are sent to us as guidance by angels, then we will arrive at quite different interpretations from someone who claims that dreams are self-generated garbage caused by random pops and bleeps in the electrical discharges of a disengaged chemical brain-mass. The one will claim deep meaning, the other no meaning. Which can we take seriously, if either? It all hinges on whether their premisses are true or untrue, as with any process of logical thought. The two interpretations I would like to look at are the Materialist and the Esoteric, as being the two most open to rational investigation. (The 'angelic' version would seem to be beyond rational investigation, for me at least.)
The Materialist/Idealist split lies behind this, as always. Materialism is a failure; that means Idealism must be correct in requiring Mind (or LMC, or something non-material) to lie behind all physical and mental manifestation. The Esoteric model of Karma + Reincarnation was the only rational explanation I had come across so far that could explain to any degree at all the order and coordinated processes of the observed world. This does not of course mean that K+R is right, but it does, I think, mean it is a polar opponent of Materialism, in that the one claims 'reason' while the other claims 'random'.
To start with: what are dreams? What are their qualities?
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We all know we have them, some of us more frequently than others. Mainly we dream in colour, but not all of us, and not always. We are quite certain that we are present and active in our dreams. There is no question of us being someone else, for example. We can interact with other people, creatures, and situations in Dreamworld just as we can in Wakeworld. We can sometimes do things in Dreamworld that we can't normally: flying is a favourite, or suddenly shifting from place to place. We are sometimes vaguely aware that there's something a wee bit fishy about the reality we are experiencing, but can't quite put our finger on it. Our experiences can have very high emotional power; sometimes more powerful than in Wakeworld. We feel as if we have body of some sort (A 'subtle body'? see p192). I've never heard of anyone being physically hurt during dreams; 'frightened' or 'terrified' or even 'murdered' but not physically hurt. Some people do report feeling pain in dreams, though. We may occasionally meet and converse with friends and family we know are dead, perhaps even knowing this at the time of the conversation. Once in a while some of us bring memories or ideas back from a dream (more below). If we are starved of dreams, we can expect to make up for it by dreaming extra later on. We sort of know that some dreams are (or should be) meaningful, or important. Others appear to be junk. We appreciate that dreams often seem to include some sort of symbology. We also know that dogs and other animals dream. That's quite a lot of qualities. You may wish to add others, but for the purposes of this chapter, this is enough. The point is 'What is the reality that we experience in a dream?' And weird though it might be, it is a reality at the time, is it not?
'Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?' Havelock Ellis.
Dreams are serious stuff. In fact I've not so far come across a culture in the world or in history which did not pay attention (sometimes very close attention) to dreams, starting with the Sumerians of 5,000 years ago. Several big names in the Torah claim to have been visited in dreams by
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God or a prophet. The Talmud states that 'dreams which are not understood are like letters which are not opened'. In ancient Egypt and Greece people would go to special dream temples to 'incubate' dreams that would contain meaningful messages. Some of these temples remained 'esoteric': by invitation only, so to speak. And in Rome, the emperor Augustus decreed that anyone dreaming of Rome must describe it publicly in the market in case some meaningful prophecy of the wellbeing of Rome was hidden within it. The list is probably endless, especially if you add all the traditions of ritualised and induced dreaming in shamanic societies (more in Chapter 18) which use various drugs to stimulate visions/dreams. These ceremonies are invariably held to be sacred and not recreational.
The English language reflects an ancient folk concern with dreams in such phrases as 'the girl of my dreams', 'win a dream holiday', 'may all your dreams come true', etc. Clearly a 'Dreamworld' is here held to be a meaningful and ideal world of some sort, and not a pointless shuffling of random neuronic pops and tweets.
However, it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that the subject achieved scientific respectability in the West, via Sigmund Freud. He published his shocking The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, in which he drew attention to the world of what he called the 'unconscious', meaning a level of being and awareness and motivation that lies well below our normal perception. It surfaces in various ways, for example in neuroses and dreams, which, said Freud, are hidden messages from the deep to which we should pay close attention. It struck me that Freud, as a Materialist, must have had a hard time in deciding on a source or a location for this vast subconscious world he was investigating, and for the subliminal meaning and purpose that he claimed resided there. All random, as a Materialist must ultimately believe? 'Random meaning'? 'Random purpose'? These are paradoxical and thus meaningless concepts. And how to explain all the intricate symbolism and disguises that dreams notoriously employ? How could those levels of complex organisation tie in with the random firings of neurons that a Materialist relies upon?
Yes 'random', because non-random firing would require a non-random force to control the firing. And that force can only be non-physical.. which Materialism is bound to deny.
And above all, how can a Materialist premiss explain the realness of the temporary Reality that dreams present us with, in which we can walk about, think, talk, have sexual encounters, and even smell things, play
football, and fly? From what I could gather in my scanty researches, Freud seemed to think that sleep (and dreaming) was a retreat from Reality, not a Reality in itself. I guess, as a Materialist, he was bound to think this, but I wonder if it bothered him? I'm sure it must have.
Freud took his Materialist cue from the professor he studied under who claimed that 'No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism', which was an increasingly popular view among scientists in the decades following upon Darwin's apparently heartless and pointless scenario of Evolution by Natural Selection: the ruthless weeding out of inferior specimens. Ruthlessness was now OK; psycho-brutalism as above, was commonly expressed. It is with us still. More in Chapter 19.
Bearing all this in mind, could Freud really have a sound basis for explaining what a dream is? Perhaps the people who say dreams are all caused by angels or devils or whatever, have just as strong a case for credibility as Freud the Materialist? A stronger case, possibly, as the angel fans do at least require an intelligent non-physical force of some sort, in line with the basic requirement of simple Idealism, which Freud logically could not and did not bring into his theories. No doubt some of Freud's interpretations were useful, but if you start from the wrong set of assumptions then your conclusions can not help but be seriously skewed and hence questionable. In short, if the Materialist premiss is wrong, is the analysis and subsequent treatment likely to be consistently accurate or the best possible? This question spills over into modern psychiatric treatment, which, as I understand it, still tends to treat people with chemicals more or less by default (although 'talking cures' are gaining in popularity). Clearly some chemical treatments work for some of the time for some of the people, even if nobody has a clue how they ultimately work.
It's the eternal Mind-Body problem again, this time at a molecular or atomic level. Chemicals certainly do affect Mind but how? To say that a molecule of chemical morphine or steroid locks into another chemical within the brain does not explain the associated mood changes and behaviours, from calm and deep relaxation on the one hand, to aggression and violence, mania, and occasional psychosis and promptings towards suicide on the other. And a simple objective, mechanical, lock-and-key 'explanation' doesn't even begin to explain the generation of the subjective and dynamic visions and hallucinations produced by LSD. Which chemical contained the glass giraffe, and which the paisley-patterned pyramid?
But it's the overall blanket assumption that the Person (and his Mind and Emotions) is a merely physical-mechanical entity which can be physically-
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mechanically treated which I was now finding questionable. But please see Chapter 26 before hurling this book at the cat on the couch. Modern neuroscientists are also much given to Materialism and tend to hold the idea shared by all Materialists, that thoughts and dreams and any meaning they might occasionally contain are all manufactured by, yes random chemical and electrical discharges in the brain and nervous system.
If you still think this is a rational hypothesis, please refer back to the London taxi driver experiment in Chapter 7 and the fact that this 'explanation' ultimately requires the entire universe to be quite random in all details, and thus completely lacking in order, and thus completely mad: which it clearly is not. For a start, you can understand the pattern of meaning in this sentence which you could not do if your thoughts were simply the random firing of neurons. Could you? There's a further exploration of this issue in Chapter 19.
*** So what of the Esoteric view of dreams? Is that any more helpful? Well, yes, I would say so, because even the basic doctrine of Karma + Reincarnation does at least allow for an Other World of some sort in which an altered Reality, such as a Dreamworld might exist. Freud's non-material 'unconscious' could only exist in a vague and unknown manner inside the material mass of randomly firing chemical porridge that created it, along with all those other difficult abstractions like purpose and meaning and judgement. How can an abstraction like 'meaning' lie in a chemical, no matter how complex, for example? A chemical has no life, while meaning is the very Stuff of Life. An Other World sounds more rational, I would say. Neater, at the very least, and in accordance with Occam's Razor, of course, which always helps.
'Occam's Razor': is attributed to the14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Occam/Ockham. It states that 'entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily' or, popularly applied, 'when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better'. An 'Other' world is a lot simpler than any convoluted Materialist attempt to explain the existence of the unconscious mind. (Not that such an explanation exists, as far as I know, except for the assumption that it must have self-generated itself from electricity or chemicals which do not themselves contain mind of any sort, unconscious or otherwise.)
The Karmic element of K and R might also have a part to play in determining the nature of the Reality experienced in Dreamworld. Freud and Karmic theory would agree that 'hidden desires' lie behind the contents of our dreams, but whereas Freud tended to make these desires sexual, Karma suggests a broader 'animalism' or 'weaknesses of character' (to a
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Yogi these are the same thing) as the cause. We'll be returning to this theme in Chapter 17, but also below when considering nightmares and horrors. What about the experiences people have in dreams? And what are their effects? Nobody would doubt that dreams can affect health. Repeated bad experiences in Dreamworld can exacerbate anxiety and even bring on depression. Conversely, eating a heavy meal or drinking too much late at night can affect your dreams, so we can say that Dreamworld has a Reality comparable to Wakeworld, insofar as each can world can directly affect the other.
There are studies which suggest that bad dreams, relating to fears of pregnancy complications, or of giving birth to an unhealthy child, can contribute to spontaneous bleeding, or even miscarriages. Asthmatic attacks are known to have been brought on by dreams, as well. Of course, you might suggest that the dreams were themselves brought on by daytime anxiety, but that just reinforces the circle of Wake-Dream-Wake affecting each other. Simply: Dreamworld can have a real effect on Wakeworld. Thus Dreamworld must have a Reality of its own (as Unreality can assuredly not affect Reality), and not be simply vaguely dismissed as somewhere to run away to 'from Reality', as Freud suggested.
But how can that be? Dreams are just the random firing of brain cells, the neuroscientists tell us: there can be no cause for the firing other than the chemicals or electricity of the brain matter. This 'random' business was beginning to be irritating to me. It simply did not (and could not) explain the real effects above, or the myriad other effects people report in Dreamworld, especially not the weird notion of meeting and talking to people who are known to be dead. But it happens all the time. Perhaps it has happened to you or to someone you know? It is so common that I would put a small bet on one of the next ten people you speak to having had a dream similar to this.
According to a US Gallup Poll of 2005, about one person in five believes it is possible to communicate with the 'dead'. You would think science would be keen, even dead keen, to investigate this phenomenon, wouldn't you?
And as dreams clearly have a Reality powerful enough to physically affect the body, even if only to zombify people who are afraid to go to sleep for fear of night horrors, I would say that Dream Reality might be rather more 'Real' than we normally assume (and which all Materialists must completely reject, of course).
In fact, the more I thought it through and the more I read about it, this Dreamworld Reality was definitely beginning to sound like a real (but completely non-material) locus in which 'dead' people (or 'ghosts'?) might have their being, the fringes of which we drop into and out of at night when we dream. In other words, it was remarkably similar to the Other World required by the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation. Another interesting coincidence. Could Dreamworld be a portal of some sort into the Other World? Or were they one and the same, even? And if so, so what? Dreams are normally, for me at least, pretty inconsequential things, usually betraying a constant low level anxiety. I take that to mean that I am a more anxious person than I normally think I am, but that's as far as I get. But for some people that is not the case. Most of us either vaguely remember having dreamed, or might possibly become half-aware of dreaming at the time, but some people can do better than this. They can maintain full consciousness in their dreams, which means that they can choose where they go and what they do, and remain lucid throughout. This experience is called 'lucid dreaming'. Lucid dreamers tell us they can construct their own Reality in dreams. As an example, if you find yourself being chased by a nameless horror, you have three choices. Either you can flee in terror, which might mean waking up, or, say the Lucids, you can fight the beast, or you can simply wish the monster to turn into a friendly moggy, and it will oblige. The implications of this are pretty huge. It is saying, in effect, that we can all make our own Reality, at least in one of the Worlds.
Fighting the beast reminded me of one of Carlos Castaneda's books (see bibliography) in which he had to fight a (non-physical) 'ally'. And didn't someone wrestle with an 'angel' or similar in the Bible somewhere? Any connection here? And what about hypnotists being able to change someone's Reality? See 'Jumbo and the levitating briefcase', below.
This hit me like a brick when I first read about it.

See Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by S LaBerge and H Rheingold.
Here was a direct example of the Idealist requirement that Mind should create directly, and not just via manufacture ('using the hands') or other physical means as we normally think of human creativity. Obviously, converting a terrifying beast into a cuddly kitten was not in the same league as creating a modest universe, but it was the same in basic principle: Will it so and it becomes so.
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What came to mind immediately was 'In the beginning was the word', from John in the New Testament. The original Greek word is 'logos' and 'logos' means 'the principle of reason' as well as 'word'. The 'principle of reason' must work via intelligence and meaning. So the universe began, the NT says, with reason, meaning and intelligence. 'Let it be so' and it becomes so. In other words 'Will it so' And in the Torah (Genesis) we find 'Let there be light..' The idea, intelligence creating, simply by Will. Immediate links here to the lucid dreaming monster-to-kitty transmogrification; and with the power of the surgeon hypnotist to control another's pain: Will. More on this in Chapter 17. And what of 'Light'? 'Let there be Light' not 'Life' or 'Humanity'. .. More puzzles.
There's something else about Lucid Dreaming: practitioners say that instead of running away from the monster, or fighting it, or avoiding it by neutralising it, you do actually have a fourth option: you can face up to it. You do this on the understanding that the monster is, or carries, some sort of symbolic message, representing a weakness in your character, from which you can learn, and that once you have faced up to it, that monster never returns. This sounded to me like some sort of connection with the Law of Karma, which claims that your bad deeds (brought on by weakness of character) will need paying for at some time, either in this life or another one. As Karma + Reincarnation requires an Other world, and the Dreamworld looks so similar to that Other world that we nip back and forth to upon 'death', well, maybe our night monsters and trials are just another way of bad Karma 'coming back to haunt us'. This karmic connection might also explain why nightmares seem to recur: they concern issues that demand attention in order to be paid off somehow, or at least to be put back on one's agenda. And they keep returning until you take notice. I can hear your scorn from here... but don't be too hasty. Read up a bit about lucid dreaming and see what you think then. You might even like to learn how to do it. There are several websites devoted to it, as well as a number of books. And if you still prefer Freud to Karma, then the paragraph below might be reassuring It's nice to be able to end this section with a reconciliation: Freud believed that the mere act of raising up some repression or fear from the hidden darkness of the unconscious into the light of reason would free us from its power over us. Now doesn't that sound remarkably similar to the Karmic interpretation of why we have nightmares?
Of course, nobody would deny that brain damage can affect dreams, as the Mind and the brain are clearly very closely, if most mysteriously, linked. But that isn't the issue here. I'm concerned with the basic theories of what dreams are and mean, and am thus more concerned with normality than pathology.
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Carl Jung, Freud's successor, claimed that dreams can be a positive source of wisdom and personal growth. An Idealist view, which brought 'Meaning' back into the world again and which rejected 'random'. Tibetan Buddhists and Islamic Sufis have used lucid dreaming techniques for the best part of a millennium. As for creativity associated with dreams, please see Chapter 17. *** Moving on to hypnosis Two key things about hypnosis: 1 2 It works Nobody knows why.
There is a third key point which we'll come to in a minute. My only personal contact with hypnosis was via the lecture by the surgeon I mentioned in Chapter 1. As a part of his demonstration he told one subject that an ordinary table ashtray would be too heavy to lift when he awoke. And so it was. I knew the subject, and he wasn't pretending. He was as baffled as the rest of us. Strain as he might he could not lift the ashtray. The next subject was told that his arm would become too rigid for two other people to bend. This too happened. I found this fascinating. What was going on here? You can't fake having two big blokes forcing down on your outstretched arm without it giving way. I've tried it myself. The arm bends. How can simply being instructed, 'make it so'? The surgeon showed us a few more variations, then told a subject that when he came round again that Rob (the host of the meeting) would not be visible to him. The subject (a large lad called 'Jumbo')
A nickname, I believe.
came round and rubbed his eyes. 'All well, Jumbo?' 'Yes, fine.' 'I want to have a word with Rob. Do you know where he is?' Jumbo looked round the podium. 'No.' Rob was no more than ten feet away from him and in full view. The surgeon leaned towards Rob and indicated that Rob should pass him a briefcase that was leaning against a table leg. Jumbo was looking about, clearly still a bit dazed. But as the briefcase left the floor and was passed across to the surgeon's hand Jumbo's face changed from a bit blank to a mixture of horror and terror. I've never seen anything like it. I actually
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feared for him. So, possibly, did the surgeon, as he snapped his fingers and put Jumbo out for the count again. He then spent quite some time reassuring him that when he came round he would feel fine and that nothing at all frightening would remain with him. Soon afterwards he ended his presentation and made a point of telling all his subjects that from now on the 'influence' was lifted and no posthypnotic suggestions would apply any more. He added an anecdote of one occasion when he had had a guest for dinner who wanted beer and not wine with his meal. They had been exploring hypnotism before the meal, and the surgeon put his guest into a trance again, and assured him that when he came round 'Water would be beer'. Not only did the guest praise the quality of the 'beer', but he became quite tiddly on it, even down to his pupils dilating.
Remarkable.. a direct physiological effect which is not under conscious control The surgeon said he'd seen it many times.
The following morning the surgeon went on holiday for a week. When he returned he received an irate phone call from his guest asking what the hell he'd been playing at when they last met, because for all the previous week he'd been bathing in beer, shaving in beer, making tea with beer. It seems that it is vital to be very precise in your suggestions. This mattered to me as well, because I had volunteered to be a subject at the start of the evening. The surgeon rejected me, perhaps because I didn't seem to be suggestible enough. I don't know. But odd to relate, about twenty minutes before the end of the presentation I suddenly felt as if a blind had been drawn in my head and I became quite woozy. My girlfriend became concerned for me; so much so that as the surgeon was leaving she helped me to force my way through the throng to ask if the influence had been lifted from me as well. 'Yes,' he said, and my head began to clear. I have absolutely no idea what that was all about. In my judgement, five very strange things were demonstrated that evening: 1 2 3 4 5 That one man's mind can control another's That his control can have an effect on normal physiological systems like muscle control That it can also affect subconscious systems like pupil dilation That it can somehow fool a sensible person into literally not seeing what was in front of him And that it could, or so it definitely seemed, affect even someone not directly involved with the process. ***
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Thirty years on, as the M.E. continued to prevent me from doing productive work, I returned to the puzzle of hypnotism, and was lucky enough to come across a general psychology text book in a library sale, with its spine hanging off, for 30p. It was twenty years old, but would have some useful stuff in it. When I got home I looked up 'Hypnotism' in the index. It wasn't there. In a 750 page book, designed for students, there was no mention at all of hypnotism. There were equations with Greek letters in them, and graphs showing Mean Reaction Times in Milliseconds, and lots of articles called things like 'Limitations of Factor Analysis', and pages and pages on Oedipus and incest and the like but absolutely no mention of one of the most profound and baffling psychological conditions of all. How could this be? It remained a puzzle to me for years. Meanwhile, I read of many examples of how hypnotism was being used in therapies of various sorts. For example, one of America's leading academic hospitals uses hypnotism routinely: to reduce pain generally to stop smoking to reduce anxiety to improve depression to overcome a fear or phobia to relieve pain during certain surgeries
Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, ranked among the top 50 hospitals in the USA for heart surgery, cancer and respiratory disorders.
Important hospitals use hypnotism regularly so why was it ignored in the textbook? Was it because it was an old book? I looked in the indices of all my other pop science books and was surprised to see no mention, except that one or two did note that Freud used it, but that was all. It wasn't mentioned at all in my Penguin Dictionary of Biology. The clue came from Richard Gregory's mighty tome The Oxford Companion to the Mind in which he states that interest in hypnotism has largely passed into the arena of the experimental psychologist. These are the people who like measuring things above all, and who produce graphs with Greek letters in them. They thus tend to concentrate on things they can measure, and thus they also tend to disregard things they can't. As you can't weigh an idea, or calculate the volume of a happy thought, or take the square root of a mother's love, these things get left out of the picture. Hypnosis as an extraordinary potential power became reduced to tests and measurements and, more recently, patches of brain lighting up in MRI
scans. No doubt all these things have some value, but the problem is that Very Big Stuff (like using hypnotism to help people) gets left out in the cold, simply because it can't be reduced to plots on graphs, and (and here's the rub) if something gets left in the cold for long enough it begins to become invisible, undervalued, and eventually dismissed as irrelevant or non-existent. Add to this the fact that Materialism is the philosophy of the day amongst most physiologically-inclined researchers, and that Materialism can't possible accept the existence of something as bizarre as hypnosis and mind control at a distance, and the subject gradually drifts into non-existence.. Am I exaggerating? I don't think so. By the time I came to write this chapter I had finally got broadband and could access extra and up-to-date data. I found an article which claimed to give the modern scientific view of hypnosis and read it. It was by a man of some eminence in the world of psychology, but as I read it through I became at first puzzled then confused and finally irritated. In the course of 10,000 words, the writer made no mention of the practical application of hypnosis for all the above extraordinary effects. Nor did he mention the even more extraordinary examples of hypnosis and selfhypnosis leading to immunity from pain. In fact, his main thrust seemed to be that hypnosis didn't well, didn't really exist: it was just 'suggestion' of a certain sort.
Yes, well of course it's 'suggestion', but of an extremely remarkable sort, that cannot be dismissed lightly.
He also suggested that 'hypnotic trance' did not exist; it was really just very deep relaxation. The penny dropped. Yet again, we were in Humpty Dumpty land where the true meaning of awkward words and effects could be massaged out of sight. The writer was clearly a serious Materialist (although this was not stated)
Well no it wouldn't be, would it? He was, after all, a Man of Science, which has come to mean Man of Materialism. It is simply taken for granted that this should be so. which is a great problem for a general member of the public, who does not realise that 'Science' now means 'Materialism'.
and thus he was obliged to dismiss anything ever so slightly odd that did not fit absolutely into the dogmatic certainties demanded by Materialism. This included the concept of the unconscious mind, which he refers to as a 'magical entity'. Thus the third key thing about hypnosis:
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To a Materialist it is a gross embarrassment which must thus be ignored, scorned or talked out of existence wherever possible.
Let's take a quick look at the reality of hypnosis. Just a couple of White Crows will do to show the poverty of the Materialist stance: In the 1930's the Irish surgeon, Dr Jack Gibson, a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, performed over 4,000 hypnosurgeries involving many serious operations including amputations and eye operations. The decision to use hypnosis was made on medical grounds. Numerous studies have shown that patients who have been prepared for surgery with hypnosis need less anaesthesia, shorter operation times, have less anxiety, less nausea and recover faster. Specifically, the use of hypnosis prior to breast cancer surgery reduces the amount of anaesthesia needed, the level of pain reported afterwards, and the time and cost of the procedure, according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. David Spiegel, MD, of the Stanford University School of Medicine, says 'It has taken us a century and a half to rediscover the fact that the mind has something to do with pain and can be a powerful tool in controlling it'. Hypnotherapy has been successfully used as a treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders, sleep disorders, compulsive gambling, and post-traumatic stress disorder. A couple of 'personal' examples that made the news in the UK, including being reported by the BBC: In Peterborough in July 2008 a 67 year old lady called Bernadine Coady insisted on using self-hypnosis to control the pain while undergoing a keyhole surgery operation inside her knee. An anaesthetist was on standby but was not needed. Hypnotist Alex Lenkei, age 61, from Worthing in West Sussex, chose hypnosis over anaesthetic before undergoing an 83-minute operation at Worthing Hospital in April 2008. This involved removing a piece of bone about the size of a walnut from the base of his thumb using a hammer and chisel and a surgical saw. Consultant
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orthopaedic surgeon David Llewellyn-Clark agreed to the unusual sedation on Mr Lenkei, as the patient had been a registered hypnotist since the age of 16. Mr Lenkei says he was fully aware of everything going on during the procedure and felt no pain. The hypnosis process took less than a minute. As if these effects are not astonishing enough, there is more Hypnotists (and the occasional brave scientists who have tested the effect) know that they can cause real physiological effects on people's bodies, including raising blisters on the skin, simply by suggestion. Space is limited here, but if you'd like to investigate an extended account of such a thing by following the impressively long address below, you can read an extract from The American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 103, no. 6, May, 1947: http://uk.wrs.yahoo.com/_ylt=A9mSvd4dj5ZKQzkAF153Bwx.;_ylu=X3o DMTExcXNkdHFhBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2lyZAR2dGlkA wRsA1dTMQ/SIG=14d7u7rqv/EXP=1251467421/**http%3A//siivola.org/ monte/papers_grouped/copyrighted/Misc/Herpes_Simplex_and_Second_D egree_Burn_Induced_Under_Hypnosis.htm
And finally.. Dr Mike Gow, who regularly uses hypnotism to subdue pain in his patients, recently became the first in the world to replace a woman's front teeth with implants using only hypnosis to control the pain. He received the Best Young Dentist award at the Dentistry Awards 2008. Note: Dr Gow was honoured by a proper respectable professional association, not a mob of loopy hippy fantasists. *** There is no doubt whatsoever that hypnosis is a real effect, and of a different order to just 'suggesting' things to people who are 'relaxed'. It is indisputable that Mind can control Body in ways well beyond everyday experience. But how can it possibly work? The absolute necessity is for one Mind (or possibly two) plus an idea (hypnosis?) plus the desire to act, plus the will to see it through. Is that enough? Or is there more to add? I think there is: see Chapters 17 and 18. There is a growing industry devoted to 'sports hypnosis' which can successfully improve a tennis player's serve or a golfer's drive by applying imagination and will to 'mental tennis' and so forth.
There is also the practice of biofeedback, whereby someone can achieve deep relaxation by using their will to correlate their mind's activity with the brain wave frequency associated with relaxation.
'Will' had turned up a lot by this point: a hypnotist requires it to deny pain, as does a lucid dreamer, in turning a monster into a kitten. More on this as we progress.
These things do work. But how? And how about the effect that has been noted many times that post-hypnotic suggestions will be obeyed hours or even days in later, and to the minute? I didn't really need to know the answer to these questions, but they seemed relevant to my ghost hunt somehow. Maybe something would turn up as I progressed with my reading and thinking. For the moment, what mattered was that dreams and hypnosis were two well-known examples of how Mind can powerfully affect our Reality: we can play 'bodiless' football in our dreams.. except that we do have a body, albeit one that can fly; and under hypnosis we may feel no pain, even during operations which normally require a general anaesthetic. What dreams and hypnosis seem to have in common is that the mysterious Mind/Body link (the nature of which has baffled philosophers, religionists, and scientists for centuries) seems somehow to weaken, allowing some degree of separation of Mind from Body, thereby allowing strange facets of Reality to peep forth, which, if they weren't so common and clearly natural, we might call 'super'natural. *** By now I'd read enough Materialist writings to be clear that to me (and I would suggest, to anyone with a normal sense of logic) they all suffered from a huge abundance of optimism over evidence, and from a repeated requirement for the magical derivation of x from non-x. They also strongly tended to completely avoid any evidence, no matter how powerful or indisputable, that didn't fit the Dogma. The word that came to mind as I considered these writings was 'gobbledegook'. The dictionary defines 'gobbledegook' as 'Something written in an overly complex, incoherent or incomprehensible manner; pretentious, pompous or unintelligible jargon'. Certainly the various writings did sometimes exhibit these characteristics, but what I objected to was any argument which outraged my own code of investigation (SPIT), by for example, avoiding evidence, or claiming unsubstantiated opinion or dogma as fact, etc.
SPIT again:
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1. Reason and logic must apply at all times. 2. Any 'law', if applied at all, must be applied universally. 3. No paradox is ever acceptable as 'explanation'. 4. Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic. 5. No dogma of any kind is acceptable. 6. All 'evidence' is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori. 7. Until proved to be wrong, all 'evidence' is to be kept on hold. Would you agree that these are fair rules for carrying out an impartial investigation? And have I been sticking to them, would you say?
There doesn't seem to be an existing word for this sort of loaded writing, so I've taken the liberty of boiling gobbledegook', down to 'gook' to call it by. Again, I hope this aids clarity and not confusion.
As an example, from the above-quoted document: The author claims that 'there is little evidence that hypnosis allows access to the magical entity called the unconscious mind and little theoretical justification for this' (my emphases). Note the phrase 'little evidence'. That means that there is 'at least some evidence', which flies in the face of the claim that the unconscious is 'a magical entity'. Let's be clear: you can not access a 'magical' and thus non-existent entity; you can only access a 'real' entity. And apparently the author knows of 'a little' evidence for this, but he is not willing to share it with us. He would rather (all unconsciously, of course: I don't for a moment assume any dishonesty) defend the dogma of Materialism which can never allow for a 'real' as opposed to a 'magical' unconscious. Although Freud, managed, didn't he? Materialists end up in all sorts of tangles. I do realise, dear reader that these chapters are becoming a little repetitive, in that they all seem to be slating Materialist interpretations and urging their replacement with Idealist ones. I'm truly sorry about this repetition, but that is how my quest had developed: in order to track down The Ghost I need to find its lair. And its lair cannot possibly be in 'the unconscious', say, as long as Science thinks of 'the unconscious' as being 'magical', in the sense of 'thus immediately dismissible' (except for Freudians, again. More confusion in the Materialist camp).
*** Intriguingly, Freud once said in his later life that if he had his time over again he would spend it in the field of psychical research, yet in earlier years he had spoken to Jung of 'the black tide of occultism'. First Darwin speaks of a Creator; then Huxley adopts reincarnation; and now Freud the Materialist suspects he may have been wrong all along? Smart people all and none of them as dogmatically Materialist as they are claimed to be by their modern heirs. ***
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So now where was I? Any closer to the truth about ghosts? Perhaps a little, as the Other world which was required by simple Idealism and suggested by K and R did look as though it might somehow relate to the Other world which dreams might share with ghosts. And then there was the unexpected overlap of Mind being seen as a creative force in both lucid dreaming and hypnosis. In dreams Mind can, the Lucids say, convert a monster into a kitty; and in the world of hypnosis Mind can perform what is to any rational observer, who knows about nerves and neurons and basic physiology, something akin to miracles. There can be no doubt that hypnotism is induced by purely mental causes, and no Materialist explanation will do. Yes I felt things were definitely hotting up. Where next?
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Chapter 16 Vibes and Intuition
Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality
Alexis Carrel
The only real valuable thing is intuition

Albert Einstein A caution to the tired reader: best leave reading this chapter until you are alert. It's not 'difficult', I don't think, but is perhaps a bit unexpected. This is because the subject matter is explored in a possibly unfamiliar light, requiring crisp critical faculties. Hope you enjoy it. CG.
Mind can clearly operate in a separate Reality from the physical body in dreams, and can also affect the physical body in quite remarkable ways, via hypnosis. We all know that to be true, despite Materialist Science trying to convince us that black is white. But what else might Mind be doing that we haven't been paying close enough attention to? One most powerful mental effect, which I touched upon in Chapter 8, is Intuition. Yet it is almost entirely ignored by science. Why should that be? By now I guess you can either work out the answer, or guess what's coming next Here it is: one problem for science is that Intuition is hard to measure, as it tends to occur anecdotally, rather than to order in a laboratory. And if something is hard to measure, science tends to ignore it, and as with hypnosis, if something gets ignored for long enough, thoughts of its very validity or even reality slowly evaporate.
It's important to always bear in mind that lack of measurability does not mean nonexistence. 'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.' (An observation associated with Einstein.)
More important is the fact that Intuition seems to require a non-physical input of some sort into our Minds. And this, of course is absolute anathema to Materialism, which prefers the notion that all our thoughts, and the very meaning you are deriving from the squiggles on this page, are all created by random electrical discharges, or possibly by chemicals
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leaching across a synapse in our 100% chemical brains. Again, quite how electricity or a chemical can create 'meaning' is consistently overlooked.
Just in case you think I'm exaggerating: 'We are nothing but a pack of neurons.''Our brains create an objective science.' VS Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. I could fill five pages with very similar quotations from extremely senior figures in Science, such as Mr R. They really do believe this. Somehow the illogic of such statements seems to elude them. Just a couple more: 'A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.' Niels Bohr, pioneering nuclear physicist. 'We are all just nuclear waste.' Jim Al Khalili, modern nuclear physicist. Snappy phrases. but essentially just meaningless sound-bites once you try to make real sense of them. However, because they have been said by famous men who are cleverer than we are, we tend to just shrug and accept them as therefore being True. We should not! Instead, we should take these claims at face value and trust our own judgements and agree that they are so lacking in logic as to be laughable. Still acceptable as rational and meaningful by Materialists, however. And of course, Science's popularisers keep up the drip feed: this from a BBC programme Inside the Human Body (May 2011): 'Bit by bit her brain is creating her mind' Michael Mosley. It was the same 150 years ago: 'Life is essentially proteins in motion', said Friedrich Engels. But FE was just a would-be social reformer and bankroller of Karl Marx, and not a top notch scientist, so he had some sort of excuse for saying such things.
Nonetheless, Intuition occurs. For simplicity's sake I'm going to split its occurrence into five areas, and sum up later: Vibes; Hunches; Normal mental processes; Genius; and last but certainly not least, Precognitive. Vibes I guess everyone has experienced the vibe effect at some point: the room in a strange house that has an unpleasant feel to it; the pub which feels instantly welcoming (or repellent); or the ancient church which invites introspection and calm. Of course, a Skeptic will say that these effects are all generated by things like dampness in the room, a jolly log fire (or dead horse) in the pub, or the silence of a country church. Of course these effects matter a lot, but they are not enough, as everyone who has had the shivers in a particular location knows. They also don't explain why normally genial dogs refuse to go into certain rooms or why cats avoid certain corners and hiss at empty chairs; or why perfectly normal and rational people sometimes feel the need to call in exorcists or 'rescue mediums'. So what's going on here? And what relevance might it have to ghosts and so on?
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Well, it seemed to me that as I must now accept Mind as having some sort of creative power, could it be that Mind (here meaning 'thought' and/or 'emotion') could leave traces of some sort, in, at, or around certain physical objects and places? This would explain all the effects above, of 'irrational' feelings of calm or fear in certain locations, and even some of the more bizarre reports I'd come across of people feeling something like an electric shock off certain standing stones, or of getting the feeling they were being watched at ancient sites or in allegedly haunted houses. Moving up a notch on the dipstick of wackiness, it would also explain the fascination in medieval times with holy relics. It all sounds terribly nave and superstitious to us (we?) 21st century sophisticates, but? Clearly, the relics trade was cynically manipulated by The Church to increase the cash flow opportunities at certain monasteries and so on, but that did not in itself prove that the original notion was fraudulent. Religion itself constantly gets manipulated and exploited; so does science. This does not automatically make the core activity wrong. Maybe the relics of a notably saintly person still do 'contain' detectable vibes, which might somehow benefit any poor sinner who might get to touch them, or even look at them? I once would have laughed the idea to scorn but now that I had been logically forced to accept Idealism, I decided to merely put it on 'hold' pending further investigation.
Just as a couple of examples of fraud: Henry V famously brought back to England Jesus' foreskin, plundered from a French church on the way home from Agincourt. But it didn't matter too much as there were at least a dozen others, scattered across Christendom. There were little holy foreskins venerated in Germany, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, and Rome itself. I can think of a number of jokes at this point and will refrain from all of them. I acknowledge your gratitude. But St Apollonia must have had a mouth like a hippo to hold all those teeth. And just by the bye There is nothing in the New Testament about Jesus saying 'Thou shalt preserve and venerate my foreskin(s)'. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity and what Jesus stood for. (See Chapter 18 for a possible link, however.)
Half a step from relics we come to more personal things, like the Victorian penchant for keeping locks of a loved one's hair in a locket. Just a memento, or something a little more? Suddenly one can see creepy things like voodoo gris gris and pincushion-dolls looming, and even those laughable tribal types who don't want their photographs taken in case it 'steals part of their souls'. (Is that what they really think, or is it just our interpretation? More in Chapter 18.) Amulets, talismans good luck charms. blessings. spells curses. taboos (initiations?) These things all cover the same territory as 'vibes', in that they involve the application of mental and emotional force to (frequently) physical things and they are found throughout history and in every society in the world. I find it an arrogance to write off all these
cultures as the delusions of ignorant 'unscientific' peasants, essentially because they are not (irrational) Materialists.
The Europeans who 'discovered' and studied and labelled exotic cultures did so largely in the heyday of Empire, when Materialism was newly triumphant. Thus the explorers and their ethnographical associates would have had very firm views about 'magic' and 'primitive beliefs'. Their predecessors would also have seen themselves as men of science pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge, and would thus have no time for 'mumbo-jumbo': a word has now entered our language to mean 'superstitious or meaningless verbiage', similar to 'gobbledegook'. It was originally a word associated with a certain African deity or supernormal force. Of course, the other people who worked with these cultures were The Church, and they had a similar agenda when it came to 'superstition', here meaning 'not believing precisely the same sort of transcendental stories as I do'. I'll come back to this theme in the next two chapters.
Meanwhile, on a more day to day level why would someone spend 200,000 on John Lennon's old guitar when they could buy a brand new one for 200? And queue up to stride across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road? Or dig out the cat's eyes that border it? Why do historians get a buzz from handling original documents rather than photocopies?
I remember looking at an original Magna Carta in Salisbury cathedral. A copy would not have had the same impact. Why not? It's the contents that matters, after all isn't it?
Why do certain historical memorabilia consistently sell well, especially authenticated autographs of the famous? And why did two Scientists get as excitable as a couple of teenage girls when confronted by a chunk of Einstein's brain in a pickle jar? (I saw them on the telly.) A quasi-religious awe. One of them said 'It really is weird being so close to the grey matter that came up with relativity.' Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey. ('Grey matter' is abiotic chemicals? Yes or no?)
The most popular exhibit at the Oxford Museum of Science is a blackboard Einstein once wrote on, with traces of his writing still visible.
Perhaps the most curious everyday example of how vibes seem to be memories of some sort is the practice of psychometry. I once attended a demonstration, and passed over a nondescript personal item to the lady. She didn't look at me, but said 'Abroad. Do you live abroad?' Fishing, if you like, but a bit of a long shot, I would say. And yes my family address was abroad at that time. She didn't get much else spot on, but that
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one point has stayed with me. And no, the item in question was not from 'abroad', neither was I wearing anything foreign. She scored rather more highly with the other people at the demonstration. Were there 'vibes' of some sort associated with the objects we passed her? And did these curious vibes contain, or somehow evoke, information about the owner? Unlikely, surely? But so is the universe. Ask any physicist. So, in the spirit of SPIT: put it on hold. Interestingly, I have heard people report that they get definite sense impressions of previous owners and eras when wearing old or second-hand jewellery. At the wackiest end of the dipstick we have cellular memory cases, as reported by recipients of organ transplants, of which a little more in Chapter 19. In one study, Professor Bruce Hood, of Bristol found that even Materialistatheists baulked at the idea of accepting an organ transplant from a murderer. By what logic, I wonder? But unfortunately, logic and Materialism have long since parted company, so it's an idle question. A Torah for ceremonial (as opposed to everyday) use must be laboriously hand copied. Before starting work, the copyist prays that the holy work about to be undertaken will be imbued with the reverence in his heart. It is then critically important that the copyist should concentrate on the sanctity of every one of the 300,000+ letters, each of which must be said aloud before copying. It takes a year or more to complete a Torah. In other words, he has to soak the document with suitable vibes. Meanwhile, I wondered, might 'vibes' help to explain the mystery of love at first sight, and 'instant dislike'? And the odd business of 'lucky' and 'unlucky' cars and ships?
One of the most famous is probably James Dean's Porsche: nicknamed The Little Bastard, which killed him, and bits of which subsequently killed two or three other people as well as injuring many others so they say.
On the ghost front I could now see how a vibe and a ghost might be related. If 'emotional vibes' can indeed 'permeate' material objects as a sort of recording, then maybe ghosts are re-runs of this recording. Certainly many ghosts give the impression of being impersonal and repetitious recordings. The black lady of the pub in Shropshire was like that. No hint of personality. But other ghosts do give the impression of being inhabited, so to speak; and some seem to be positively demanding or aggressive. What about them? Is there more than one sort of ghost? Anyway definite territory for exploration here.
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Hunches We all come across hunches in our own lives, usually in a minor but helpful way. 'I won't throw that away. It'll come in handy.' And it does week or two later. 'I'll just pop into this shop' and it has the very thing you've been seeking for months. 'I'll put a fiver on No Hope in the Derby'. And No Hope comes home at 5:1.
Of course many, or most, of our hunches don't work out, and we end up with sheds full of junk that didn't actually come in handy at all. My Uncle Idris, ill in hospital, palled up with the bloke in the next bed who was a bookie. 'Bookies never lose, Idris. Trust me' So they took bets round the local wards on next week's Grand National. Business was very brisk. That year there was an outsider called Never Say Die running at long odds. Guess who won? Guess who lost a packet? Why do some hunches 'work', while others don't? Good old-fashioned random luck, I guess. But some people are quite certain that they had a hunch about something which turned out to be very important for them.
A variation upon hunches is at work when doing a crossword. I remember a clue wanting 'A large Australian fish'. 'Shark' didn't fit, so I left the space blank. The next day the word 'barramundi' came to mind. I recognised the word but didn't know what it meant so I checked it in a dictionary: 'A large Australian fish'. Yes, it was a memory, but a memory is just a piece of data. What was it that selected that piece of data from among the millions of other scraps of nonsense that I have stored somewhere? And delivered it to my conscious mind for me, even though it was something I didn't consciously know the meaning of? Intuition, I reckon, as it turned up in my head in precisely the same way as a 'hunch'. Some people have bigger and more impressive hunches, which lead to them making unexpected and rewarding connections. We'll be looking at them in a moment. Meanwhile, consider the extraordinary example of Helen Keller, the girl who went deaf and blind aged 19 months. She was thus completely isolated from any meaning in the world, and became a 'wild child', until a gifted teacher taught her some 'fingerspelling' sign lettering. This too meant little to Helen until the teacher one day held their hands under a gushing pump and repeatedly spelled out w-a-t-e-r on Helen's hand. After a while, Helen's face 'lit up', as the connection was made, and 'meaning' entered her life. She learned 30 words that day and went on to become a graduate, and to then tour the world lecturing on behalf of the blind. What connected w-a-te-r with water? A sort of hunch: insight: Intuition.
I wonder how much dowsers ('water diviners') etc operate on hunch? After all, some use wire rods, some use hazel twigs and some use their bare hands. And despite
Science's attempts to pooh-pooh dowsing hard-nosed folks like farmers regularly use them, and oil companies, of all people, pay good geological dowsers a fortune.
Normal mental processes It came as a great surprise to realise that Intuition works within each and every one of us every moment of every day, in making routine connections for us. In fact it is the very medium by which we operate at all. I realise this might be an outrageous claim, but please read on and see what you think by the end of the passage. Remember the problem (Chapter 8) of adding up long numbers when tired? And how there comes a point when you know you've got it right? What is the nature of this knowing? I suggest it's Intuition, making the connection for us between 'Have I got this sum right?' and 'The current answer is correct'. Intuition is the synthesiser in the background that computes the various inputs from our senses and our memory and then adds whatever is necessary to integrate and make sense of it all. More than that it makes judgements for us too. Hence confirming that we've got our arithmetic right. As another, bigger, example: do you remember how difficult it was to define a simple word like 'window', never mind a tricky one like 'beauty'. And yet we somehow manage to understand thousands of original sentences spoken to us every day. How? None of the words has an absolutely precise definition. Bang one word after another and what have you got? A string of badly defined concepts, arranged in a curious order. Other languages would put similarly badly defined concepts in quite a different order. And yet, we somehow manage to understand each other, often even across a badly garbled language barrier. The term psychologists use for this is 'gestalt': the facility whereby we somehow squeeze meaning out of gappy strings of data; sometimes very gappy strings indeed. It seemed clear to me that the force behind the gestalt was Intuition. In other words, the power that makes new associations or connections for us (as for Helen Keller above) makes our essential everyday associations too; and it is this linking-associative-synthesising process that generates, or delivers, meaning for us. And of course, we should not forget that spoken words are just sounds, which have no inherent meaning at all. Yet we infer meaning from them. How? 'Intuition', I think. And also, let's not forget that what actually reaches your brain isn't even sound. The eardrum transposes vibrations (that word again..) into electrical impulses, which are then somehow decoded by the brain into hundreds of thousands of different meaningful 'sounds'. A totally extraordinary process. I've yet to come across any sort of explanation for how brain jelly can convert electrical
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impulses into 'sound' while containing no detectable amplifier or speakers. And as for 'vision' we'll come back to this later on.
Because words lack precise meanings, misunderstandings are common. Perhaps even more common are misunderstandings which are thought to be linguistic, but which are actually misreadings of intonation or body language. Sarcasm is the obvious example of the power of intonation to completely distort the meaning of the words. There are dozens of other examples, as every actor knows. To the best of my knowledge these don't have names, but we recognize them right away. A slight pause here a tiny rise or fall of tone there. a momentary glance away A lot of the time we gestalt the true meaning behind the utterance, despite the words rather than because of them. Intuition at work again, I suggest.
Human beings do not live in a world of precise definitions, and in real life, have no use for them. When you want to cross the road, you do not think: 'If I cross the road now, at 2.46mph, the approaching Ferrari Priapos 4.8 17 valve coup, which I estimate to be travelling at 52.36 mph will strike me below the left capella in 4.1 seconds. Therefore I will not cross.' Or do you? I suspect not. You glance; you pause; your Intuition does the rest in a moment: 'OK, go'. Or 'NOOOO! Oh.. ****. You and your blasted free will' Have you ever looked at a clock and realised that you can't actually 'read' the time? You can see the hands, but nothing 'clicks'. Then suddenly, it does click and you can 'tell' (ie, 'understand') the time. Or met someone in the street whom you know you know but 'can't place'. With luck, Intuition will eventually rescue you. There will be a definite moment when you know you know who they are, when your Intuition 'places' the person into a meaningful context for you. You can actually feel the moment when you know. Every time we correlate impressions, memories, thoughts and feelings, it is our Intuition that is doing the work for us. It happens a billion times a day: so often that we can't see it for the astonishing process it is. Science is no help here, as it insists that Intuition, if it recognises it at all, ultimately arises from chemicals, a view that was now to me so foolish as to defy belief. Intuition does not operate by calculation, which is what the Intellect is good at (as in experimental psychology, for example, or science in general).
But even then, Intellect needs Intuition to 'glue' data together meaningfully.
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Intuition supplies Direct Knowledge. You might even say that Intuition is Direct Knowledge, as that's certainly its instant result in our minds. You can only know something when it is okayed by your Intuition (remember the 'moment of truth' when adding up those numbers? If you've never tried this, I do recommend it. There is a definite detectable moment when you know. If you watch out for it, you will feel it.)
It would seem that Intuition is the territory of the right-brain of every one of us. The right-brain has for long been denigrated as the lesser or pointless brain by, guess who? ..people whose work is predominantly left-brained (ie neuroscientists). And the leftbrain can't conceive of anything other than set formulae and rules and little boxes. 'Intuition' is anathema to it. All of science is predominantly a left-brain activity.
And of course, in conversation, nobody carefully plans each word before speaking a sentence. We open our mouths and it is all there, ready for us, gestaltable meaning and all. Intuition does this for us as well, I suggest. It literally puts words into our mouth. We may not be consciously aware of Intuition (forgive me, but I would say this is largely because of the malign influence of Materialism over the last 150 years or so) but our language betrays signs that our ancestors who created our language were well aware of it, as a mental input of some sort, apparently coming from outside. Consider such phrases as: It suddenly struck him Like a bolt from the blue She gradually became aware that she hated her mother The idea suddenly flashed into his mind It came to me that Such a thing had never entered his head before It dawned upon her that and especially the everyday 'realised'. When we say 'He realised that he was lost', the word 'realised' means 'made real'. However it is not used in the sense of 'actively made real, by effort', but as in 'the reality of it became clearly known to him', meaning it became real to him as a sudden, fullyformed, and undeniable truth where none had been before. This sounds to me precisely like Intuition. These phrases are so workaday that we never think about them and their implications. But please spare a minute on just one of them to be sure you see what I mean.
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For example: 'became aware', above: the scene is of someone who 'realises' an unexpected fact. What this means is that something previously unknown and therefore unreal to her, somehow becomes known and therefore real to her. It is not a process of intellect or reason, or of emotional excitement. It is a simple, sudden and unchallengeable Knowing. The word 'gradually' is slightly misleading here, as the moment of 'Knowing' is always sudden and immediate. 'Gradually' here means that she was resisting the truth that was trying to make itself known (extended resistance to incoming Intuitive truths results in inner conflict and, presumably, in what we call neurosis). Note that we might also write: 'She suddenly realised that she hated her mother'. Same process, but without the resistance.
I hope this isn't becoming too abstruse, but I think it matters. I'm trying to show that our understanding of the world comes to us not via reason, but via Intuition, which seems to come to us from outside ourself. Reason most certainly has its place, but it's Intuition that links Cause to Effect in our minds, which makes reason reasonable, and which adds the meaning to data, and balances and integrates the findings of reason into our personal worldview.
Every teacher knows this. If you explain a new point of French grammar, say, to two children, one will 'get it' and the other will not. This is because one child has the 'fertile soil' for the seed to drop into (meaning a suitable level of understanding of essential background material) and the other does not; therefore integration cannot happen. The 'pearls before swine' scenario is precisely similar: you cannot fully impart Higher information to a mind that hasn't already reached a level suitable to assimilate it.
It operates at the 'points of decision' in our lives. In fact it is Intuition which makes our decisions, if you like. Think of how it works in your own life and a real problem, like which car to buy: you assemble information; you dither; you mull; then one day you are decided, and act. Where did that impulse of decision come from? Not your Intellect its job was to assemble the information from your senses and your memory; not Emotion.. Emotion adds only desire or attitude, not decision. Intuition balances, judges and decides. So it seems to me. But yes, as discussed earlier, Emotion may well colour genuine intuitive decision to the point of swamping it. So you buy the ex-race track Ferrari Priapos you can't afford rather than the slightly-used Ford Frog that your Intuition was trying to guide you towards. Regret will assuredly follow. Intuition did its best for you, but you used your free will, and ignored the obvious eventual consequence of your choice, meaning you will soon have to fork out twice as much for a new gearbox than the Ferrari cost in the first place, or the clapped-out brakes finally crumble as you sashay round a fast tree-lined bend at full grunt.
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Desire swamping Reason or Intuition leads to the sort of pseudo-decision we call 'whim' or 'impulse'. A good rule of thumb to distinguish between Intuition and whim is whether the urge lasts or not. If it lasts, it's Intuition. If it fades quickly, it's whim. And if it makes you feel just a little guilty, it's whim. Also, if the decision to be made has a moral overtone, Intuition will go for the moral choice every time. It is your conscience, as well as everything else, it would seem. Whim is animated by 'Instinct', which may be distinguished from Intuition by looking at which direction it points in. An Instinct is backward-looking, to old habits and attitudes, usually of a selfish or careless nature; an Intuition looks ahead to newer and fresher ideas, often more selfless; new connections; deeper understanding; broader horizons. Instinct is 'animal', if you like, and Intuition is 'human'.. always looking forwards. I think this 'forwards' element is very important. What we think of as 'good' instincts, towards 'doing the right thing' for example, are really aspects of conscience, linked closely to Intuition. So it seems. More on this in Chapter 21.
All of the above shows, I hope, how my admittedly rather sketchy analysis led me to the surprising conclusion that we are quintessentially Intuitive beings, even more than emotional; and certainly more than 'rational'! And Intuition, above all things, makes a nonsense of the Materialist hypothesis that only Matter/Energy created everything out of itself alone. But it's not yet my White Crow. Too complicated and open to argument
Meanwhile 'Life is pretty much only chemicals; the interaction of atoms and molecules.' Brian Cox, Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University. 'Life began with little bags, the precursors of cells, enclosing small volumes of dirty water containing miscellaneous garbage'. Freeman Dyson, Professor of Physics, Princeton. Thus your brilliant mind, dear reader, is pretty much down to the interactions of atoms and molecules in little bags of dirty water and miscellaneous garbage which has accidentally become capable of speech and creative Intuition. Bet you didn't know that.
*** Logic plus Occam's razor had led me to the conclusion that Higher Mind of some sort must exist, and it was beginning to look as if it might be closely connected to our Intuition. Could it be that the 'Higher Mind' required by basic Idealism exists in or operates through 'the unconscious mind', and somehow, and for some reason, contacts our normal Body-Mind via Intuition, bringing Direct Knowledge as it does so? Ie, that this Higher Mind is intimately connected with Intuition in all its shades? Wacky stuff, but then so is quantum physics, and everyone takes that seriously. And it's only wacky if you can prove that Idealism is definitely wrong. And it isn't. It's definitely right, by
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logic. So maybe the guess above is correct? More on this theme in Chapter 17. Bearing that in mind, it would seem that Intuition is some sort of external input. However, the etymology of the word suggests that intuitive learning comes from within ('inner tuition') which implies directly that our Inner Self, our unchanging 'I', either already knows the answer, or that it has immediate access to the answer. So, putting the two poles together, could it be that the Lower, 'personal', day-to-day Body-Mind has constant access to the Higher Know-it-All Mind, which is our constant synthesiser of meaning from data and which occasionally drops into our daily thoughts unexpected gems that we call 'insights' or 'hunches' of unknown origin: ie, little drops of Intuition? Is this the link between right-brain and left-brain? This was becoming just a little weird, but not in the eyes of Yogis and Sufis and the Esoteric world in general, as I was discovering (see next chapter). And the various Exoteric Religions all recognised some form of external mental input, which they attributed to angels, saints, demons or God. Kant and many other philosophers were interested in this. In fact, only Materialists had (and have) no time for it.
Carl Jung was very keen on the reality of Intuition. Freud seems to have been quite hostile.. which is not surprising. (Einstein thought that it was the only thing that really mattered.)
But if the above were true, how did the Inner Self, the 'I', relate to Higher Mind? This was all getting very tricky but there must be a rational explanation. I'll be returning to this in Chapter 17. Meanwhile, as far as I can see, it is simply a fact that Intuition is what makes sense of our daily world for us. Nothing else does the job once you get down to the nitty-gritty. From now on I will treat this as a fact. I hope you will feel free to pick logical holes in this suggestion. If you can find errors of logic, good. If not, then I guess it must stand. Genius In the light of all the above, 'genius' appears to be what you are called if you can access enough insights via Intuition. Is there any evidence for this? As with my 'barramundi' experience above, there is ample evidence for insights arriving when the (Lower, Body-Mind) Intellect is switched off or distracted, allowing the (Higher Mind) Intuition access. It's as if the bawling and bellowing of the constant internal chunter that most of us are victim to is blocking out input from the Higher.
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The 'still small voice' comes to mind here. Coincidence? And the very principle of meditation is to 'still the mind' to allow access to something else.
If you can staunch that chunter, important things sometimes happen: the mathematician Henri Poincar solved an intractable mathematical problem in a flash of Intuition after having spent ages focussed on the problem, then relaxing to go on a trip.
In fact he 'realised' that groups of motions of tessellations of a disc by curvilinear polygons are actually groups of motions in hyperbolic geometry. Or, as Mr P so neatly put it, 'An automorphic function is one which is analytic in its domain and is invariant under a denumerable infinite group of linear fractional transformations.' I think I've got that right. Please don't write and tell me if I haven't. Please
And it is well known that taking a relaxing bath can serve as a distraction which allows the Intuition to make itself heard, as Archimedes would testify to with his famous cry of 'Eureka!'
Only kidding. But we do speak of 'eureka moments', don't we? meaning a definable moment of sudden and absolute Knowing, and they do quite often occur in the bath.. relaxing.
Many scientists are clear that their work is often inspired by a hunch of some sort. Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection before he had any data to prove it.
In fact it's hard to conceive of any new Hypothesis that doesn't begin as a hunch: an Intuition, in other words. A sudden moment of realisation a connection made a sudden 'Maybe, if?' I would suggest that all scientific hypotheses are actually hunches, arrived at via the extraordinary intrusion of Intuition, maybe while poring over data; maybe while feeding the ducks. Maybe after 'sleeping on it'. What do you think? Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, was quite clear about Hypotheses beginning as 'guesses' (ie, a connection intuited but not yet supported).
The phrase 'I'll sleep on it' is not a metaphor. 'Sleep' is the best known example of Lower Body-Mind being distracted or disabled for a while, thus allowing Higher Intuition-Mind to peep round the 'door of perception'. There are dozens of well-known examples of artists and scientists waking up with the answer to a problem, or an inspiration of some sort. Here are just a few. You no doubt know of others: Albert Einstein: Dreamed that he was sledding ever faster down a steep mountainside, and approaching the speed of light. He then saw the stars refract into a brilliant spectrum of unearthly colours. This experience led him to the principle of relativity:
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'I knew I had to understand that dream, and you could say and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on that dream.'
Auguste Rodin:
Dreamed pictures of his finest sculptures in advance.
Friedrich Kekul: Was dozing by the fire after struggling with a problem of chemistry, and dreamed of snakes:
'One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.'
The snake seizing its own tail gave Kekul the circular structure idea he needed to solve the benzene problem. John Lennon: Said Across the Universe came to him lying in bed one night with his wife Cynthia - who was talking ... and suddenly the first line came to mind. He described it as being seized by something which would not let him go and would not let him sleep until he had gone downstairs and completed the lyric. (Not exactly 'a dream' of course, but a state of semi-distraction)
..and Paul McCartney: Awoke with the music to Yesterday in his head. He thought it was a tune he'd heard somewhere else for quite a while. Mary Shelley: Had 'a waking dream' while in bed, which led to her writing Frankenstein.
Dmitri Mendeleev: Dreamed that the basic chemical elements are all related to each other in a manner similar to the themes and octaves in music. This led to his Periodic Table. Elias Howe: The inventor of the sewing machine: he could not think of how to get the thread and needle to work together until he had a dream of a bunch of 'natives' dancing round, jerking their spears up and down. The spears had holes near the tips Was subject to vivid nightmares. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde occurred to him in one of them.
RL Stevenson:
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Wolfgang Mozart: 'I always dream music. I know that all the music I have
composed has come from a dream.'
Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci once said: 'Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the mind while awake?' *** Freud called his worldview 'scientific,' because of his premiss that knowledge can come only from research (Empiricism). Of course, this basic premiss is not itself based on scientific research. It is actually an assumption that all knowledge comes only from research and that no knowledge comes from any other source. Thus it does not comply with Rule 4 of SPIT, and anyway all the evidence above suggests that research is most certainly not the only way to gain knowledge or ideas. It can certainly come via dreams (ie, a sort of 'revelation'), and other modes of partial mental dissociation. It was beginning to look to me as though the precise opposite of Freud's premiss might be the truth of the matter: that Intuition, as the Great Hunch-Deliverer and Synthesiser, might be the only way that anyone ever knows anything.
Or perhaps we ought to separate 'knowledge' from 'ideas'. Perhaps 'knowledge' (facts, facts, facts) does come only from research, while 'ideas' (making connections between all those facts) come only from Intuition, arriving when the straight-down-theline Intellect is disengaged: when right-brain takes over from left-brain. 'If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.' Enrico Fermi, pioneering atomic physicist. But you have to be open to the significance A contrary result, an anomaly, is a beacon: but only to those with eyes to see.
Now for the really weird one Precognition Science finds precognition entirely unacceptable, as do most of us. After all, what does it say about the nature of time, and our being, and the future? If things can be foretold, they must already sort-of-exist, must they not?
and where does that put our own free will? And what does our very identity mean? Are we just acting out some mad pantomime? And if so, who is directing it.. and why? A Mad, or worse, a Bored God? Nobody wants to feel he's a puppet. But fear not, dear reader; a possibly helpful explanation is at hand in the next chapter and in Chapter 18.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, not much Scientific work has been done on precognition, but there was once a famous study done concerning train crashes. In the 1950's a Mr WE Cox suggested that some people somehow avoid trains which have accidents. He did this by comparing the number of passengers aboard 28 trains involved in accidents with the number of passengers in the same scheduled trains a week earlier, and trains on the same schedule a few days after the accidents. He discovered that there were significantly fewer passengers on the crash trains than on the same trains over the weeks before and days after. He suggested some form of precognition would account for the statistical blip.
See Volume 50 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
Well, maybe but a rather leaky statistic, I would say. Perhaps if it were repeated a hundred times Definitely not a White Crow at the moment. As precognition tends to be very anecdotal by its nature, and of doubtful verifiability too, it's very hard indeed to pin down. But I for one have experienced it in a feeble sort of way, and I'm sure you have too. I'm referring to getting a phone call or getting a letter/email from someone you have recently (and unexpectedly) been thinking about.
Doctor Rupert Sheldrake, an independently-minded researcher in biology, has been doing some experiments on these lines, including the hypothesis that dogs can tell when their owners are coming home. He's written about them in his fascinating Seven Experiments that Could Change the World. More on Dr S later.
There are a lot of premonitory dreams on record. Here's one very famous one, that President Abraham Lincoln told his wife just a few days before his assassination:
'About ten days ago, I retired very late. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were
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stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers 'The President' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.'
Lincoln ascribed powerful significance to his dreams. On the morning of his assassination, he told General Grant that big news from General Sherman would soon arrive. Grant asked why he thought so, and Lincoln answered: 'I had a dream last night; and ever since this war began I have had the same dream just before every event of great national importance. It portends some important event that will happen very soon.'
Lincoln was by no means the only statesman who had dreams or hunches or intuitions concerning his own future. Winston Churchill commented at various times: 'I believe I am watched over. Think of all the perils I have escaped.' (1898); 'It is not meant for me to be killed. My future is in other hands. When my time is due, it will come. In the meantime, I have lots to do. Don't worry.' (1931); 'There is someone looking after me besides you, Thompson (bodyguard). I have a mission to perform. And that person will see that it is performed.' (1940). Later Churchill wrote 'I felt as if were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial'. Hitler, meanwhile, had similar views on his destiny and invulnerability. During WW1 he had a dream that made him leap to safety, just before a shell landed, killing everyone else in his trench. A decade later, in Munich, he unaccountably ended a speech early and left the venue. Thirteen minutes later a bomb exploded. During WW2 an anxious aide tried to get Hitler into a shelter during an air raid. Hitler said 'Don't worry. Nothing will happen.' After the 1944 briefcase bomb failed to kill him, he said 'Fate has saved me for my mission. I must do what I must do.' Overall, there were more than 40 attempts on Hitler's life, including an American attempt to bomb him from the air, in a Berchtesgaden carpark. But his car had a puncture, three minutes from the bomb point. Hitler claimed that he was 'a sleep-walker on the way Providence dictates' and 'living in a dream', and more than once when a great decision had to be made, he said: 'We must hurry. My time is short.' He relied on his famous 'intuitions' increasingly, and with spectacularly disastrous results. He had no faith in meteorologists, for example, claiming that 'What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense who live in and with nature'. He thus dispatched millions of men in summer uniforms to freeze to death in a Russian winter, and hastened the defeat of his own regime.
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What are we to make of all this? Two leaders on opposing sides, both with a sense of Knowing their own mission, both 'protected', and one of whom was the main agent of his own destruction and that of his nation and millions of his followers. I'll leave that one with you. (I'll touch upon 'national karma' in Chapter 26.) *** Right.. that's enough of that. Sorry if it's bored you, but if we can get some sort of handle on that brash claim that we are Intuitive Beings, it helps to get a further handle upon such otherwise odd effects as vibes, and vibes must surely have something in common with ghosts, don't you think?
It won't surprise you to learn that I suggest that Intuition is what enables us to perceive the vibes of a certain place. Of course, before Intuition can integrate the vibe into our general world-view, there must have been a mechanism whereby the outside vibe could come into contact with our being, to be detected via our sensory system. Vibes seem to have locations, in a place or a thing. The questions naturally arising are: how do they come to be in that location or thing, and how do they actually impinge upon our physical being, before Intuition gets to work on them? More in Chapter 17.
'Everything connects', I was discovering. It was this flurry of connections and fallings-into-place that led me to continue with my investigations. Truth can not be paradoxical; therefore things which are not paradoxical and which also inter-connect may be Truth. So keep going, brother see where they lead *** Something that niggled at me throughout writing this passage was wondering what principle was at work when our first calf was born. Wally, as we eventually called him (not terribly bright) struggled to his feet, staggered about for a bit and then butted his head against his mother's side. She nudged him round to her udder, where he butted again. This is standard behaviour for a calf and seems to serve to get the milk flowing. But how could he have been born knowing he had to do it? 'Instinct' we say but if so, how had it been passed on? 'In his genes', they say. A chemical that can instruct a newborn to butt its head up against its mother's flank, then her udder, and to then latch onto a teat? A chemical?? Or, if you prefer, 'a combination of chemicals which have come together by accident'? And even odder was the fact that the mother, a life-long vegetarian of the most pedantic herbarian sort, somehow knew that she had to, wait for it eat her own placenta. I could not believe it, but she did, one endless glutinous gulp at a time. This was also 'normal behaviour'. How on earth
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does this 'instinct' get transmitted? A calf has no background to learn from. Nor has the new cow-mother. How do they know to butt, or eat their own body? Some sort of collective 'species-memory' is suggested, I would say, plus a means of selecting one particular item from that memory and delivering it to the local point of action: ie the brain of the cow-mother, which then presumably takes over and sets the chops a-chomping. Another hopeless challenge for a Materialist, but just another fascinating puzzle for an Idealist. It was a more or less unwelcome extra complication for me, however, as I thought I was only concerned with the fact that 'Mind can affect matter' as a broad generality, which might thus suggest how ghosts fit into Reality. *** So Mind definitely influences body in dreams and via hypnotism and, it was now clear to me, in an absolutely fundamental way via Intuition. But how does it do this? What rational explanation might there possibly be? My previous reading had led me to the point where I knew I really ought to hold my nose and delve into even murkier waters. But dare I tackle 'The Occult?' Dare you, dear reader?.... (Cue strangely haunting chord over muffled heartbeat.possibly a distant lingering howl). Well.. I will if you will. PS An unusual example of Intuition and crosswords: The clue was 'An absorbent fabric; also an England football player.' I couldn't find the answer by scanning my memory. But a picture kept coming to mind of a footballer in a blue jersey whose name I couldn't remember. Shortly afterwards I did remember 'John Terry' of Chelsea FC. It was not the most brilliant clue ever; which made recovering the correct answer all the more surprising. PPS Given that Intuition plays a huge role in our everyday lives (making connections, infusing meaning, etc), and that it 'brings things to mind' for all of us, from the humblest anagram fan to the greatest scientific genius well, one begins to wonder how Intuition might be distinguished from Revelation, as reported by Big Religion. Are they identical? I guess classic Revelation requires a discarnate Revelator, while Intuition might be thought of as a mental vibe which arrives anonymously, or as information that arrives via a suitable vibe. And, of course, the yogic/esoteric doctrine is perfectly happy with discarnate entities, anyway.
Intriguing similarities. Resonance comes to mind. More on resonance later.
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Chapter 17 The Occult

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all
Stephen Hawking
I was as alarmed and amused as you might possibly be at this moment, dear reader, when I realised I'd have to delve into the bloodstained crypt of 'the occult'. I was actually a little nervous, in fact: nameless things with horns and fangs, and greasy heavy metal bands Hammer House of Horrors so much screaming But I'm glad to report that what I found was of immense interest. What's more, it helped a lot in my quest for the Lair of the Ghostie. I'll keep it as brief as possible, but there is a great deal I'd like to mention, and it all interlocks in a most satisfying way. The 'o' word has a terrible reputation, being regarded in equal measure with disgust and derision. This is because the twin cultural powerhouses of the West are The Church and Materialist Science.
Most of us have forgotten that The Church has been a tremendous force in the West for some 1500 years. Overall, and after reading a fair bit of history, I would say it has generally been a force for good, especially in the fields of basic education and supplying a universal moral code, but you may disagree. The point is though, that it is only in the past 150 years (post-Darwin) that it has been forced into the background so much that we have forgotten our own history. Christianity's past and potent influences still live on in our general world-views however, sometimes at a very deep level. I wonder how much the very idea of democracy owes to The Church's insistence that we are all equal (in the eyes of God)? Christianity certainly had a powerful role in stopping the mass slaughters of the Roman Colosseum 'games', and gradually developed the concept of 'mercy' in the lands it was absorbed into.
The Church is very wary of 'The Occult', partly because it sees it as a threat to its own power and partly because it thinks it should remain 'occult' (see below), while Science dismisses it on principle, as it apparently requires non-Materialistic elements to have real independent existence. And for a Materialist this can not happen; therefore it does not happen; therefore 'the occult' must be a joke, whatever the evidence for it may be. So what's 'the occult' really all about?
The word 'occult' is related to 'occluded', meaning 'concealed' or 'hidden'. 'The Occult' refers to a supposed body of knowledge. Now then: For something to be 'hidden' several things are implied: * * * * * * * That something must actually exist for it to be hidden. That someone knows what this something is. That someone judges that it should be hidden. That one person can't really hide it alone: a group is implied. That someone (or a group) has good reason for hiding it. That someone (or a group) has the ability to hide it. That what is hidden might somehow become revealed.
This already suggested to me that there was a link here with the ancient Mysteries: that certain pearls (of knowledge) were not to be cast before swine. The public/private (Exo/Eso) split in the doctrines of the great religions also came to mind. A second useful correlation was that I kept coming across writings which alternately called these various pearls 'esoteric' or 'occult'. The terms turn out to be practically interchangeable. Thus the creepiness of The Occult could be dispersed by simply thinking of it all as 'The Esoteric', about which there was nothing creepy at all. And Yogic philosophy, my first introduction to the Esoteric world, was the most positively benign and helpful thinking I had ever come across. And just to reassure you still further, I was amazed and delighted to come out of the other side of my researches into the Big O invigorated, and with the understanding that there actually does exist an Idealist doctrine which insists that the universe and everything in it is actually ruled by Law, and not the random irrationality (madness) that Materialism requires.
Yes it does. If the universe just appeared randomly and for no purpose (Materialist doctrine) and Life Mind and Consciousness arose randomly from abiotic chemicals (Materialist doctrine), then everything must be random: hence purposeless; hence mad. Richard Dawkins states that 'The universe is not capricious or whimsical. The universe is orderly'. Quite so. But how can one square 'orderly' with the purposeless and random origin that Mr Dawkins' Materialist philosophy requires? Whence came the 'order'? And the Laws of Nature? And the Law of Causality itself? Did the 'undesigned' and abiotic primordial elements of Matter/Energy spontaneously create these immense Laws out of themselves alone? Apparently so, according to RD's mindset. 'Not so', says Idealism in general, and the Esoteric Understanding in particular.
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What's more, this doctrine appears to be universally held by all the multifarious strands of 'The Occult', but with varying emphases. In other words, The Occult is not just the mad jumble of assorted superstitious rubbish that it is assumed to be by people who have never looked into it, but a coherent system for the understanding of certain rules of power. The problem with The Occult is that as with any other system concerned with power, it has attracted all sorts of snakes and weasels. Great care is needed in sifting the fragments of gold from all the sewage. *** You may not agree, but I think it might be a good idea to summarise the journey so far: My own experiences and those of friends, backed up by lots of reading, had convinced me that paranormal events definitely happen. I decided to investigate what ghosts really were, using only logic and SPIT (see p100). I discovered that science had been hi-jacked by a dogma. This dogma (Materialism) was irrational, paradoxical, and supported by no evidence. The only alternative to the dogma was Idealism which required Life, Mind and Consciousness to have non-material existence.
If you've forgotten why Idealism is the only alternative to Materialism, please check Chapter 5 or 11 again.
All religions were Idealist, but were also very confusing, and to me, unreliable witnesses. Yogic philosophy, on the other hand, was Idealist and not confusing. The Yogic notions of Karma + Reincarnation were shared by the hidden faces of all the big religions, and in many or most current and ancient cultures, under the name of 'esoteric' or 'mystery'. Dreams, hypnotism and Intuition all show that Mind in some form has powerful effects upon body. And we all know that high emotion can drive up blood pressure, for example, sometimes in remarkably specialised areas.
A 2009 Australian study discovered that the physiological effects brought on by the loss of a loved one can actually lead to death. They concluded that one can literally die of a broken heart.
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Thus, while there was no evidence at all for Materialism, there was quite a lot already for Idealism, to add to the fact that it was self-consistent at the theoretical level (unlike its sole alternative, Materialism), and did not jar with observed events (unlike its sole alternative, Materialism). What might 'The Esoteric' add to this, if anything? That was my starting point. *** Let's jump in at the deep end: remember Isaac Newton requiring an 'aether' to carry light waves around?
'That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.' Isaac Newton.
The yogic/esoteric (and occult) world says that something very similar to this does indeed exist. They call it 'the ether' or 'akasha' (see Chapter 13),
When I mention the occult or esoteric world I'm being selective. There are so many strands to this world that life is too short to investigate them all thoroughly. Thus I've limited my summary below to principles held in common by major threads like magic, Freemasonry, paganism, and shamanism, as well as the more well-known threads like Buddhism, Yoga, Sufi, Theosophy, and some more recent New Age movements. I've ignored other threads like astrology (which Isaac Newton spent years investigating, incidentally), alchemy (much studied by Jung [and Newton]), and numerology, of which I know nothing (0)). The material which follows is a sort of rough and simplified composite, which does reflect the consistency in the various esoteric/occult threads, but which will almost certainly offend every esotericist/occultist who knows far more than I do. My apologies to all.
and claim that every physical item, from atom to walrus and beyond, has an etheric 'double' which occupies the same physical space as the physical body. In fact it is slightly bigger than the physical. You can see your own etheric body, they say, by holding your hand against a dark surface and looking at the rim of your fingers. It's not obvious, but you can definitely see a faint transparent 'shadow'. Well, I can, anyway. Or is it an optical illusion? The effect is not strong enough for me to be certain.
There is something called 'Kirlian photography' which can apparently make visible the etheric field or body, even to the point of 'restoring' a cut-away section of a leaf. If this is true, then maybe it would help to explain the mystery of the 'phantom limb' reported by amputees. I am reminded again of Plato's 'forms', whereby the abstract
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'form' precedes the physical, which infills the 'form'. Logic then suggests that a missing physical entity, like a limb, would leave behind it the non-physical, etheric, 'form' as a phantom. Try www.kirlian.org/kirlian2.htm and www.fullspectrum.org.uk/default.asp Phantoms can be very real. One lady who was born without arms, nevertheless felt the presence of two phantom limbs which would gesticulate while she was speaking (mentioned in The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist).
Some people, they say, can see this 'etheric body' better than most. These people, usually called clairvoyants, call what they see 'the aura', and claim that it carries information about a person's physical condition.
No, I'm not saying this is all true. I'm just reporting the yogic/esoteric/occult understanding of Reality. It gets stranger, so hold onto your hat.
The ether pervades everything, including space itself, which might well have pleased Newton, and may interest modern astrophysicists one day. In fact a few physicists are already wondering whether the infamous 'dark matter' that seems to be holding galaxies together may be 'aether'-related. The purpose of this etheric body is to transmit life force (one word for this life force being the old Sanskrit word 'prana') into the physical body.
Or 'qi' in China (also 'ch'i'); 'ki' in Japan; 'ik' in Maya; 'tona' in Aztec; 'zoe' in ancient Greece; 'ase' in Yoruba; 'kau' in Egypt (all definitions approximate). Kirlian photographs seem to show both an etheric field and radiant 'electrical' lines of what might be seen as prana.
In other words, the etheric body is the bridge between the clearly Physical and the apparently non-Physical worlds. When the physical body dies, the life force is withdrawn, and the physical and etheric bodies both decay and return to the appropriate general pool, as in 'dust to dust,' etc. As if that wasn't odd enough, they claim that we all, along with every atom, walrus, etc have a third 'body', often called the 'astral'. This is the body of the emotions. Some clairvoyants can see this 'aura' too, and can read your emotional condition from it, from, say, the rose pink of unconditional love to the black daggers of malice. Had enough? More yet. We also have a 'mental body', in whose aura the quality of our thoughts is readable (only the quality: not individual thoughts: 'logical' for example, or 'fuddled'.. although telepathy does suggest itself here, doesn't it?). It seems that a mind consistently concerned with thoughts of an altruistic and highly intelligent nature has an aura strong in golden yellow, encircling the head. Hence 'the halo' of religious art, I imagine.
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Each of these three extra bodies exists in its own world, so to speak. Thus we all simultaneously exist in four worlds.
In fact there's much more to it than this, but this is more than enough for the moment, I suggest.
So why can't we all see these alleged bodies? We all can, say the occultists, if we just take the trouble to learn the skills needed. Of course, they add, the reason so many people don't bother is because they simply don't believe that these 'bodies' exist, so they never try. Given that we've all been drenched in Materialism for 150 years, this is a valid point, even if the whole scenario strikes a newcomer as rather bizarre. It certainly struck me as such when I first came across it. 'Bizarre' or not, the question must be 'Is there any evidence for all this?' Well, it all depends on what you call evidence. People have reported seeing or feeling or hearing 'other-worldly' visitations of various sorts in all cultures, and for thousands of years. Under the terms of SPIT I would call those millions of reports 'evidence' until it is proved otherwise. Surveys also repeatedly show that a large proportion of the population are sure they have had some sort of contact with what they think of as a being from 'another realm', but they don't tell other people until asked, for fear of the ridicule that would certainly be poured upon them. Remember my biology teacher? I found this idea of having four bodies hilariously laughable at first, then weirdly intriguing, and finally 'tentatively persuasive'. OK, I couldn't see them, but then I can't see X-rays or electricity or radio waves, which doesn't stop them being real. A blind man can't see light at all, but I doubt if he claims it doesn't exist. And these extra 'bodies' would definitely allow for a few of the oddities people have always reported: strangely luminous 'wraiths' in churchyards (the 'etheric' decaying); telepathy (two mental bodies making contact); the mob mentality (emotional bodies overlapping); hypnosis (one mental body dominating another); and of course these bodies would provide a location for dreams to happen in. Presumably dreams take place in the 'astral/emotional world', as dreams do tend to be preoccupied with emotional issues rather than say, questions of philosophy. However, as Mozart and Einstein would testify, not all dreams are emotional; thus perhaps the 'mental body' might be a home for intellectual rather than emotional information. The 'mental world' would also supply a locus in which and from which Intuition might operate, not to mention the Laws of Karma; and the 'astral world' would be the Other World to which they say we shuffle back and
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forth upon death and pending rebirth. An invisible 'astral body', emanating powerful negative emotion, could explain why dogs and cats refuse to enter rooms. I guess 'astral emanations' might also 'explain' the medieval concern with saintly relics and why people pick up 'vibes' from artefacts and places.
Just en passant St Teresa of Avila was so revered for her visionary experiences and goodness that her body was disinterred several times, and was always found to be intact (and possibly 'fragrant'). Eventually, she was cut into pieces; her jaw being sent to Rome, for example. Lovely. It is said that General Franco, the murderous fascist dictator of Spain in the 1930's slept with St Teresa's hand next to his bed.
But, above all, as far as I was concerned.. it would allow for the existence of ghosts. It would not explain ghosts, but it offered them a natural home, which Materialist Science could not. Could be promising. Weird or not it was all self-consistent. I could find no paradoxes in what I read, and 'no paradox' means 'might be true'. There were a million mysteries raised, of course. But 'mystery' does not mean the same as 'irrationality'. 'Continue with caution', as urged by the good Yogi Ramacharaka. *** Something that helped me was that all the cultures and traditions that thought in terms of these 'multiple bodies' also thought in terms of the Other World being a 'superconscious' world, as opposed to 'subconscious'. To us in the West, the Freudian 'subconscious' has a rather creepy connotation: it's beyond our control and somehow out to ambush us with irrational and savage iddish impulses. This savage iddishness is held to be our 'true self', by many Materialists.
Some of these Materialists seem to take a depressing delight in this sort of nihilism, as did my biology teacher. I wonder why? The humour of hidden despair, perhaps?
To yogic/esoteric/occultist cultures the Other World is quite the opposite of creepy. It does have its lower levels, but overall it is a superior locus, full of wonders and possibilities, often of a sort we would call magical, or perhaps more realistically, 'paranormal'.
You will have noticed that I'm avoiding the word 'supernatural'. That's because it is meaningless. If something happens, it's natural. If it doesn't happen then it doesn't exist. 'Paranormal' is a much better word for weirdo events. I will generally abbreviate 'yogic/esoteric/occultist' to 'yogic/esoteric' from now on, in the interests of relative brevity.
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It has struck me that perhaps it would be best to reserve the 'subconscious' for learned behaviours like walking and reading and avoiding electric shocks (good old StimulusResponse patterns: learned habits) and for what you might call 'collectively remembered' behaviours, which we normally call 'instincts': things like a new Mum eating her placenta, and a new calf butting for milk. The 'superconscious' would then be the world of what we might call Intuition: forwardlooking; new developments; new ideas, creativity, connections This might be a good point at which to mention that our word 'education' comes from the Latin 'e + ducere' meaning 'to lead out': ie, the job of the teacher is to bring forth that which already lies within: ie, to stimulate the Intuition ('inner' + 'tuition') into action.
Yogis claim that human creativity derives from the 'Mental world' via what we call Intuition, or 'hunch', as in a scientist's eureka moment when he makes the vital connection, or a poet's sublimely sunlit metaphor, or a comedian's fun with a pun. These are all 'new connections', deriving from an intuition: a message from the Mental world. Well, why not? It makes more sense than lifeless chemicals spontaneously creating poetry and laughter from out of their abiotic selves for no purpose at all, don't you think? And, they say, if you can access this superconscious world on a regular basis, you make more and more connections, and people call you a genius. One genius's view is that:
The only real valuable thing is intuition
Albert Einstein
Thus, in yogic doctrine, we here have a theoretical basis for the source of 'inspiration', 'Intuition' of course, 'vocation', 'genius' and even 'revelation', as received by, I guess, Moses and Muhammad, and saints assorted down the centuries. *** So what are we to make of all this? We have a This World (the Physical) and a tripartite Other World. OK.. how do they relate to each other? Simple, the yogis say: the worlds are not actually separate, but on a sort of sliding scale of vibration.
Vibration again. Physics tells us that pretty well every particle in creation vibrates or undulates somehow, so some room for agreement there.
The physical is the lowest rate of vibration, then the etheric, then the astralemotional, then the mental, and they all relate to each other in precisely the same way as different radio stations on a dial. If you are tuned to one level, you will perceive that level (or hear that particular programme). Tune to another level and you will be aware of it instead. Bizarre? Yes.. unless it's
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true, and I can't see a rational reason for condemning it. Can you? We even have the example of the electromagnetic continuum as a precedent; and the sliding scale of intelligence, as we looked at earlier.
More on the 'electromagnetic continuum' in just a moment.
Why not a sliding scale of entire worlds? The neat point being that they are not actually separate worlds: just a continuum to which you and I can attune ourselves at any point, if we know how, and can operate at the appropriate rate. They are all actually in one place, just as your own body space is simultaneously occupied at this very moment by thousands of radio and television wavelengths, hundreds of sound vibrations, heaven knows how many magnetic and electrical fields from your mobile, the telly and the toaster, and, it seems, the trillions of ultra-tiny solar neutrinos that pass clean through you every second. And of course, as previously mentioned, virtually every particle in the universe appears to have an infinitely radiating field associated with it. Each of us already shares 'our' space with the entire universe. A couple of extra vibes would seem to just conform to the general pattern. This idea of tuning in would start to make sense of clairvoyants and psychometrists, and would be a good candidate for explaining why certain people in a group will report seeing a ghost while others won't. Some can tune to that vibe while others can't. And when we go to sleep we simply raise our vibe and live our life in the astral for an hour or two. Food for thought, for me at least.
The 'rose pink of unconditional love' mentioned above would be a vibration at the highest, most refined, end of the astral world-vibe. The 'black daggers of malice' would be at the lower, coarser end.
*** An unavoidable diversion: If all this stuff is true well, so what? This, I guess, is to ask The Meaning of Life. Take a deep breath: the purpose of life, the yogis say, is to (re)find one's Higher Self. The four worlds we live in, as above, are actually one, perceived as varying scales or octaves of vibration. I'll use the yogic name for this multi-world: 'samsara', as mentioned in Chapter 14. We are born and re-born, back and forth between the various planes and sub-planes of the samsaric continuum until we have shaken off (or 'risen above') all the lower vibes of our animal nature and have thus become compatible with the much higher vibratory
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rate of a totally different Life in the Higher World, in which our Higher Self permanently resides.
I guess some people will be thinking of the word 'soul' at this point. A Buddhist won't, because he regards every existential condition we can imagine as being temporary, and thus not worth getting too excited about. I won't either, as it is a word so loaded with prejudice and expectation that it's much better left to theologists. Just by the bye Buddhists don't get too excited by the notion of 'God' either, as for them the Ultimate Creative Force, or whatever, is so remote from our own piddling worlds that it's not worth the effort of even trying to make sense of it. Hence why Buddhists tend not to worry about much, and seem to be always smiling, while the Believers of the Desert Religion/s are more prone to shame, shouting, and shooting.
In other words, This World, the Lower World, may be regarded as a sort of extended education, during which we come across challenges which we can triumph over or lose out to. If we make right decisions, in other words 'selfless ones', we begin to purify ourselves from our basic, animal and selfish, Lower Self, and in the process, raise the rate of our personal vibration. This is the Law of Karma in action. If we fail our challenges, they keep returning until we get it right. Eventually, we do get it right
Yippee!!
and are finally free to slip off the vibe-continuum of this coil and to move on to something grander, knowing we are now tried and tested and strong, and able to meet any challenge in the future. More on this notion in a while. A couple of notes on the Higher/Lower worlds before we move on: Our animal body (the 'soma') is a temporary home to our incoming Lower Self, which reincarnates ('becomes flesh again') after a spell in the higher vibe of the astral (they say). The body is a mechanical device to be carefully used by the incoming being, for the purposes of learning to become selfless and finding his/her own personal power by coping with problems and conquering adversity. Among the qualities of the Lower (animal) Self we find selfishness, greed, excess, instinct, competitiveness, envy, carelessness, fearfulness, body obsession, short-term thinking, skittishness, savagery, gratification, materialism, anger, unhappiness, irritability, blame, thoughtlessness, lust, 'iddishness'!, etc. The keynote being 'thoughtless, selfish, excess, and automatic'. Qualities of the Higher (human) Self include sharing, humanity, persistence, mercy, balance, good humour, intuitiveness, consistency, joyfulness, caring, self-reliance, trust, cooperation, spirituality, calm,
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creativity, altruism, etc. The keynote here being 'thoughtful, caring, moderate, and creative'.
You may have a bit of fun relating these qualities to political parties and movements, and to the traditional seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount of the New (see Chapter 12). Just to remind you, the seven deadlies are, by Church tradition: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Originally, in the Book of Proverbs, they were: haughty eyes; a lying tongue; hands that shed innocent blood; a heart that devises wicked plots; feet that are swift to run into mischief; a deceitful witness that uttereth lies; him that soweth discord among brethren. I can honestly say I've definitely never had haughty eyes.
Each of us is a mix of these qualities, and each of us will recognise in our daily decisions the opportunity (challenge) for doing the Higher thing or the Lower: to be 'high-minded' or a 'base character'. At best we might act as a 'superior being', and at worst, as a 'low-life': to be saintly or beastly, in fact. Our language seems to know all about this Higher/Lower business.
An example of the symbolic representation of the Higher and Lower worlds is the 'mandorla' or 'vesica piscis': a curious double-curved shape often used to frame a picture of Christ.
The conventional interpretation of this is of a vagina. Why, I have no idea. A Freudian scholar, perhaps? What it really represents is Christ as being the link between the Two Worlds. Can you see how it works? Imagine two identical circles side by side, then brought closer and closer until they overlap a little The 'Star of David' is similar in meaning.
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In this case the Two Worlds are represented by two triangles, one (the Lower World) pointing upwards, and the other (the Higher World) pointing downwards. The Star shows how they eventually integrate, as in the Christian notion of 'Heaven on Earth', for example. Note how the two triangles interlace in an 'impossible' manner, indicating absolute unity. I guess this device neatly proposes a solution to the eternal Christian concern over whether human 'Effort' or heavenly 'Grace' is the key to finding 'salvation'. The Star suggests both, as in 'knock and the door shall be opened'. The Star was adopted by Judaism in the Middle Ages. It seems to have originally been an early JudaeoChristian symbol. See http://zeevgoldmann.blogspot.com/). The illustration above is of a 3-4th century Roman silver dish, found in the UK. The Hindu yantra in Chapter 13 would seem to have some similarity to this star. The Chinese version of the two worlds and their relationship to 'the whole' shows up well in the subtle symbol of ch'i (the life force) often called the yin-yang symbol:
The Higher World (of Intuitive Wisdom) communicates with the Lower World of samsara via a system of 'transformers' called 'chakras', which step down the higher vibes to be usable in the denser lower strata. You might say that Life Mind and Consciousness are piped into our brute physical bodies via the other three bodies, and their respective transformers. The Higher World is quite beyond our comprehension until we earn the right to join it by shaking off all our selfish beastly ways and becoming fully responsible and altruistic beings: 'fully human'. We do this by building character; by resisting temptation.
Interestingly 'Satan' means 'adversary' or 'tempter', as in 'get thee behind me, Satan'. You could say there's nothing actually evil in Satan (assuming he exists as a real personage, rather than a personification of temptation): he's just a sort of challenger, and thus a sort of guide. As we progress, we must resist the temptation to backslide, or 'look back'. A number of old Greek myths can be interpreted as parables of this Esoteric view of Lower and Higher worlds, and Man's quest to reach the Higher. Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, or Ariadne and Theseus, who was sent to slay the Minotaur animalmonster; rather like Saints Michael and George slaying the dragon, and Apollo slaying Pythia. I guess the symbolism is obvious. The myths and religions of the world are full of such things. No space to explore them here, alas, but something on 'The Quest' follows in Chapter 26.
One other vital thing: when we 'die', the yogis say, we go to the level of the astral world that our own personal dominant vibe is currently in tune with. We don't automatically become angels or devils, or privy to all the secrets
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of the universe; we don't get judged and flung into pits; we remain precisely as we were on the Physical, as witnessed by the Law of Karma. In other words 'we get what we deserve' in the 'afterlife'. A relief for some and a threat for others no doubt. If, for example you have been a kindly soul, keen on music in This World, you will (almost literally) gravitate to a plane in the astral which you can chime with, filled with people of a similar vibe. If on the other hand you have been a ruthless drug dealer or a greedobsessed banker, you will end up on a plane filled with people of your own moral level. Thus, say the yogis, we each make our own heaven and our own hell, via our use of our free will to make superior or inferior choices, every day of our lives.
All this would seem to be a rational response to the persistent Materialist challenges to Christianity of: 1) 'If God is Good, why does he let his children suffer?', and 2) 'If Man has free will, where does that put God's omnipotence?' Briefly: 1) The suffering in the world is mainly caused by Man's own actions, according to the Law of Karmic Cause and Effect (more on 'evil' in a little while); and 2) What if 'God' chooses to let his 'children' use their free will to make their own mistakes and learn by experience, so they can grow, as 'children' must, into self-reliant and responsible 'adults'? It may be unexpected, and startling even; but I don't think there's anything irrational here. What do you think? As a matter of interest, the 'children' parallel just might be more than a metaphor. There's an ancient saying in the occult word 'As above, so below'.
Another way of looking at this 'progression of worlds': in ascending order we have the animated Body; the reactive Emotions; the considering Mind: an increasing scale of engagement with the world outside: ignorant; reactive; (potentially) proactive. One might reasonably add to these three the creative Intuition of a Higher World. An undeveloped person lives in his astral-animal-emotional body; a very primitive, or damaged, person may live only in his animated-vegetableetheric body. It's only when we are properly using our Mind, firstly by learning to think straight, and then by using it to access the Intuition of Higher Mind via meditation, for example, that we become fully human. And then what? 'Largely unknown,' the seers say, 'so don't worry about it. Just get on with becoming fully human'. This attitude would seem to be the key to understanding why the Dalai Lama says 'My religion is kindness'.
A Sufi perspective: 'I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal,
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I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as man, To soar with angels blest; But even from angelhood I must pass on ...' (excerpt from Masnawi, by Hazrat) 'Onwards and ever upwards' is the consistent message. See I told you it was invigorating. I must confess that I do not remember any previous life as a pebble or a daffodil or kangaroo, however. I don't even remember any previous human life, or come to that, anything before the age of four, or even the day before yesterday. Some people do claim they can remember previous lives however, and a lot of work has been done on 'pastlife regression', a hypnotic process which claims to enable people to remember past lives in some detail. Remarkably, the statistical spread of class/occupation reported by regressees fits remarkably well with the normal sociological spread: ie, contrary to the Skeptics' scornful declaration, not everyone claims to have been Napoleon and/or Cleopatra. On the contrary, almost everyone does claim to have been a peasant or of some other lowly background. (See Life before Life by Dr Helen Wambach or Many Lives, Many Masters by the erstwhile sceptical psychiatrist Dr Brian Weiss). Why don't we remember old lives? It would be too much of a burden to have to remember all our ancient wickedness, they say. But when we die, we do re-remember, and integrate our pearls of progress in our recent life into the matrix of our previous efforts. Thus, slowly, we progress. Speaking of pearls, one common decorative Chinese symbol is of a dragon pursuing a pearl. Again, the symbolism is obvious, isn't it? Oh alright it's the pearl of enlightenment.
*** All more than a little interesting, but what relevance does all this have to ghosts? Well, it seems to me that given the notion of samsara plus the Law of Karma, plus the purpose of life (as suggested above), we now have a pretty full scenario for what at least some sorts of ghost might be. Might they not be people who were so animalistic or materialistic in This World that their vibes were so lowly that they have somehow got stuck here, but in an astral body? Barmy? The evidence does suggest otherwise. I recommend reading Matthew Manning's remarkable book The Link, for starters. Then consider that very few ghosts seem to be of a cheery nature. Mostly they are morose or angry, and occasionally even malicious and violent. That would suggest either great confusion or 'low character'. Add to this the fact that a number of mediums regularly 'clear' ghosts out of houses by going into a trance (altering their vibe to tune with the ghost's) and then literally telling the wretch 'Look you've died. The reason you're so unhappy is that you've become too attached to some aspect of this physical place and have not
been paying attention to your options. Now relax.. look about you and you will see a bright light. Go to it.' And the house is henceforth free of the ominous presence it used to have. Householders consistently report this. If you find this hard to credit, do some reading around. It's a commonplace. *** 'You will see a bright light' Light seems to crop up all over the place in the esoteric world, and in our 'normal' world as well. Consider: He has seen the light! An enlightened policy It dawned upon him The light of reason A bright idea 'Let me elucidate' ('bring light to the matter' from Latin 'lux', meaning 'light') A brilliant mind A flash of inspiration A glorious moment (a 'glory' is a sort of rainbow, or another name for the traditional halo) A flicker of intelligence crossed his face A lucid argument A man of 'vision' or 'insight', or 'farseeing': all connected to light. And of course, the lightbulb to indicate an incoming idea in cartoons. And the opposites: A black look Benighted heathens An unenlightened attitude A dimwit A dull boy (or 'thick' or 'dense') A shady deal There is something of the night about him Dark deeds An argument generates 'more heat than light'.
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Of course, some of these latter phrases also carry the connotation of 'badness'. This is no coincidence. Light = good and dark = bad has always been a part of our language and understanding, as in 'light-hearted' and 'black-hearted'. And, as goodness makes us happy and 'light', we might add phrases like 'a sunny disposition', and 'a radiant bride' to the list. There are many more. Esoteric connections include: The Zohar, the basis of the Jewish Kabbalah, means 'radiance' or 'the light' The original name for the Great Pyramid was 'Khut': 'the light' The Essenes, an important esoteric group in biblical times called themselves 'People of the Light' The enormous Hindu festival of 'diwali' which celebrates the triumph of Light (Good) over darkness (Evil) Akhenaton, the first monotheist, emphasised the Light of the Sun Countless civilisations which appear to worship the sun An Egyptian obelisk represents a ray of light Jesus being 'the Light of the world' 'Everything that is made manifest is light.' (Ephesians 5:13.) The much abused 'swastika' seems to have once been a sun-ray symbol in India and China And of course the fundamental aim of any Buddhist is to achieve full wisdom: 'enlightenment'.
'Light' and 'shining' turn up consistently in the big religions, and are often associated with the great angels Gabriel, Uriel, Michael, etc. The letters 'el' seem to be associated with light or radiance. A Nordic elf is a shining being, and apparently 'el' means angel in old Cornish. And, of course, it is a Hebrew word for 'God'. A 'guru' would seem to be someone who disperses shadows and thus leads you from darkness to light.
In the yogic/esoteric world 'light', as in 'electromagnetic (EM) vibrationradiation', is the very stuff the 'worlds' are made of. This understanding seems to be in good accord with Big Bang theory. BB says that in the beginning there waswell, some sort of soup of ultimate particles and forces: the biggest blast ever, which included the power behind EM vibration-radiation.
'For the rest of my life I will reflect on what light is.' Albert Einstein
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EM vibration-radiation, as I understand it, is a continuum. That means it is an endless snake of wavelengths, from the enormous to the minuscule. In our world this includes long waves like radio, through the visible light range (red waves longer; blue waves shorter) to x-rays, gamma rays and beyond. This continuum seems to be limitless. We can actually see an infinitesimally tiny fraction of all the possible wavelengths. With technology we have become aware of another teensy fraction (radio etc). To a Yogi, all the rest of this apparently infinite spectrum is as meaningful as those fractions we can normally relate to. Indeed the entire spectrum is related to the very reality of everything. Not just related, but close to the cause (and all of this continuum is vibes). In this we find an extraordinary similarity to the Big Bang, except that for a Materialist the Bang was merely a purposeless random event, but for a Yogi it was the means of, or the medium for, purposeful physical creation. Because theories change, I found myself wondering whether science might one day come round to the idea of Einstein's equation of E=mc2 (which shows that energy and matter are different phases of the same thing, rather like ice and steam) being involved in the formation of matter right from the start. Genesis says that light was the first creation, and yogis have been saying something similar for millennia. For science to come to the same conclusion would be astonishing, to say the least. But for the moment, science just suggests that EM was sort-of-there right at the start of physical creation. Quite a coincidence, all the same. Speaking of coincidences, there is another theory of Big Bang called the 'cyclic' theory. This suggests that our BB was just one of a recurring cycle of Bang and Collapse, with possibly a trillion years between Bangs. Yogis have been saying something very similar for thousands of years. They call the Bang and Collapse The Breath of Brahman, and time the intervals at some 4.32 billions of years. *** Assuming anything these Yogis and so on say is true, how do these guys know so much? Easy, they say. The outer world (the Lower) is the world of the physical senses. That's the world we take as normal and 'real'. But, they say, the Higher worlds, (the 'realer' worlds) are accessible only by facing the other way, and turning within, via the path of meditation. If you can subdue all the sensory inputs, including that incessant mental chunterer, and relax completely, you can contact the Higher, or rather, allow it to contact you. If you take this seriously, they say, and persist, you too will
come to Know the truth (rather than 'Believe' or 'Understand') of what they claim. But you have to make the effort (remember the Star of David?). Now there's a challenge, if you want one in your life.
Speaking of challenges: the esoteric view that this world is a place to pay off karma and to learn to behave, makes sense of the word 'Islam' ('submission') to me: ie, it's not submission to bullying, as the word would seem to imply to English ears, but an acceptance of the fact that 'problems' will arise in our life which are actually the opportunities to pay off karma that you came here to confront in the first place. In the view of Islam, as I understand it, these opportunities are sent by God in person; hence your need to 'submit' to them in the sense of positively dealing with them and not trying to avoid them; in the Esoteric view, the problems come to you more or less automatically following the inexorable Law of Cause and Effect that has defined your own karmic path. Either way, it is silly to duck 'problems' when they arrive into your life, Muslims and Yogis say. They are challenges for you to overcome and opportunities to do the right thing. Duck them and they will surely return. You may have noticed this in your own life. The thing about 'problems' is not that they occur, but how you deal with them. Thus, your 'problems' are your friends. They are your means to growth and personal development in terms of patience, kindness, judgement and courage. To look at it from another perspective: if you don't give yourself enough new challenges, Nature will do it for you. There is an apparently flippant middle eastern proverb, which has a deeper meaning around this theme: 'If you have no problems in your life, get a goat'. 'Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.' James Allen in As a Man Thinketh.
Rather than dismiss all this out of hand as a Materialist must, a proper scientific approach, according to SPIT, is to try it and see. But the patience required for regular meditation is a problem in our busy busy NOW NOW NOW world. Each of us will make our own decision in our own time. *** I was intrigued to discover that the word 'yoga' means 'union'; meaning 'union with the Higher World' (a condition called 'Nirvana'). Even more intriguing was the discovery that our own word 'religion' derives from the Latin 're-ligare', meaning 'to re-tie' (..something which has become separated: ie the Lower World from the Higher).
The biblical parable of the Prodigal Son is concerned with this theme: conquering (or tiring of) the lower nature, and finally returning home. 'Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world.' Sufi Hakim Sanai, 12th century.
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I now really did feel as though I'd stumbled across some sort of plausible 'explanation' for at least a habitat for ghosts, and had come across a couple of extraordinary coincidences that might link science and religion and the yogic/esoteric world as well. Most unexpected.. and intriguing. And perhaps, by re-tuning my attention, via a meditative process of some sort, perhaps using a mantra or yantra to help me hold my attention firm, I could tune into the higher vibe of a higher world of some sort. Well well... *** A couple of final points before moving on to The Occult Part II: Even Weirder Stuff The Yogis and co say that the four worlds that make up samsara (physical, etheric, astral and mental) are really just four consecutive vibratory states, and are thus not four separate worlds at all; also, and this took me by surprise, they say that it thus follows that all four of these 'worlds' are ultimately physical in their nature. Again: the etheric, astral, and mental worlds are physical. This means, if true, that scientists (eg physicists: students of the physical) are thus 'free' to investigate them without worrying that they are wandering away from their 'physical' brief. As the Yogic view speaks of sliding scales of just about everything, and an individual karmic path for everyone, would it be too fanciful to think of a sliding scale of animality-humanity which even crosses species? The Sufi poet quoted above would not have a problem with this, and Darwin/ Wallace showed that there is essentially only one Life.
More on movement and fluidity in Chapter 25.
Freemasonry claims that its understandings derive from ancient Egypt, and regards an 'astral body' as being another name for one of Plato's 'ideal forms' (see Chapter 10). The 'astral body' would also seem to equate with the 'subtle body' of the Greek Orphic 'mystery' (see p192). And finally: Einstein's earth-shattering discovery, that matter and energy are interchangeable, according to the formula of E=mc2 has so far proved to be only a one-way ticket. Hiroshima showed how m becomes E, and numerous atomic power stations have backed this up. However, nobody has yet unequivocally showed how E becomes m. Something is missing from the formula. I'll leave you to ponder on that before you turn the light out. Sleep well, and happy dreams! I wonder if the answer to that E=mc 2 puzzle will come to you as you 'sleep on it'?
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Chapter 18 The Occult: a little more
No one can get anything unless he earns it. This is an eternal law
Swami Vivekananda
You may perhaps be sharing some of the intrigued bewilderment that I felt when I first came across these 'occult' doctrines. Could they be true? After all, they have been around for as long as mankind and have been taken seriously by much smarter people than myself. If they are true, the good news is that we don't die! The bad news is that we have to come back to this world of lies and woe again.. and again.. and again until we get it right, and become fit to graduate, literally summa cum laude.
And the other good news, for me at any rate, is that my own future lies absolutely in my own hands, not in those of some mad god, or some abiotic but super-intelligent and malignant chemical.
Well, tiresome it might be, but I could at least see some logic to it. It made more sense to me than the only alternatives offered by Religion or Science: of being born once, at random an emperor or a cripple, and then dying forever, still none the wiser, to either sing Holy Holy Holy forever, or be cast into a flaming pit forever; or the Materialist claim that we are born by a spontaneous act of self-creation by a slew of chemicals which eventually learned how to think and compose operas. Both of these scenarios now seemed completely laughable to me. You will have your own considered view. You also have noticed, no doubt, that I didn't actually explain why 'The Occult' had come to be hidden. So who did it and why? I think it happened thus: Until about 350 years ago, the power of The Church was absolute in matters cosmological. You might literally be burned alive for disagreeing with a papal diktat. Obviously, the 'occult' doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation were not only completely counter to The Church's dogma, but a total bombshell. If allowed freedom of expression, K + R's democratic philosophy of personal responsibility would ruin the intercessionary power of The Church
overnight. It had to be suppressed. Hence the murderous crusade against the Christian Cathars in the thirteenth century, and the constant sniping at such esoteric movements as the Freemasons (who were natural enemies of The Church, as they supported religious equality), Rosicrucians, and alchemists.
Contrary to popular belief, many alchemists' prime purpose was not concerned with turning lead into gold, but with turning Man's Lower elements (metaphorical 'lead') into the Higher (metaphorical 'gold'): the yogic doctrine and process in yet another form. The 'lead into gold' notion was partly a blind to keep The Church off their backs. Pretty obviously, it wasn't the best idea ever.
But there were other, rather more altruistic, reasons for The Church's actions. We all know that before the Age of Reason Europe was awash with superstition and fear of 'the supernatural'. The Church preyed upon and bolstered that fear, as it reinforced its own position, but it also knew that humanity in its current state was highly likely to misuse certain powers, should they become public knowledge. Essentially, this occult knowledge was that Mind is a creative force; more, it is the creative force in the universe. Mind-power misused could be a powerful force for evil. Thus The Church came down hard on anything 'occult'.
A couple of examples of how violent and cruel the world was, a mere couple of centuries ago: In C16 Paris, a popular public entertainment was burning cats alive. Aristocrats and monarchs joined in the hilarity. And the British House of Commons, re-built just a few years before Darwin's Origins was published, was still designed so that the space between the two 'front benches' was greater than the length of two swords. Cruelty, short temper, and malice (all aspects of selfishness and The Lower) were everywhere in the pre-modern world. We may find it hard to believe, but history tells us that current society is quite a lot less cruel (and selfish) than even our recent ancestors' world. Bearbaiting? Cock-fights? Dog-fights? Slavery? Torture? Outlawed, and almost gone. Bullfights linger on in southern Europe as the last gasp of the bloodbaths of the Roman Colosseum. Believe it or not, we have progressed, particularly when you consider that between 1336 and 1367 there were no fewer than three kings called Peter the Cruel fighting each other in Aragon, Castile, and Portugal.
As a lightweight example: hypnosis misused might lead to mischief. We know that potential from television shows. What if there are indeed further powers of the Mind, of which we, living in our Materialist bubble of denial, know nothing? The Church was sure that there were such powers, and knew that they were already being used by witches and so on for the purpose of cursing and spreading harm and fear. Clearly, a lot of 'witchcraft' is based upon sheer psychological bullying. Even now, if someone points a steady finger at us and quietly says 'I'll get
you', we are taken aback, and some might even become ill through fear. The near-global fear of 'the evil eye' recognises this. And in the UK children have been known to hang themselves after protracted verbal bullying.
My father witnessed such a death in Nigeria in the 1940's. A perfectly healthy man became convinced he was going to die because a witch doctor had said so, and die he did. Nothing the army could do could save him. Many people in Africa (and elsewhere) live in terror of witchcraft. It is a real power in their lives, whatever it might 'be'. As recently as 2009 a goat was arrested in Nigeria, accused of stealing a car. The assumption was that the thief had used black magic to turn himself into a goat to avoid detection. Absurd. But then there are some fascinating tales told by early travellers in Africa (and elsewhere) of people who had remarkable connections with wild animals, even to the point of being able to temporarily take over the body of an animal. The European tradition is of the werewolf/vampire. I guess if 'possession' of one human by another is possible, as some claim, (and as reported more than once in the Bible) then it might well apply to an animal as well. Ridiculous, to Materialism; but not necessarily so to Idealism. More on possession later.
But The Occult claims as a matter of fact that 'other forces' may indeed be (sometimes quite literally) drummed up and used by anyone who puts in the effort.
In the modern Afro-Brazilian religions of Candombl, Umbanda, etc, various 'spritaspects' of God, called orixas, are summoned by their own specific drum pattern.
Many, but not all, of these forces are neutral in principle, and may be used according to the free will of the individual. Hence white magic, used for the benefit of others, and black magic, used for selfish ends only: also called theurgy and thaumaturgy (posh names indicating that educated people also took these powers seriously).
More on 'magic' in a moment.
As the yogic/esoteric/occult doctrine claims that there are numerous 'worlds' (astral etc) inhabited by people of all grades of intelligence and morality from the beastliest to the saintliest, I guess it is possible to see that some of these powers might possibly be evoked, just as people in our everyday world might be cajoled or persuaded to join us in a project. So, again, there's a consistency about this doctrine. A malicious person might very well evoke a low-life astral ne'er-do-well to add his power to her own (I'm assuming the clichd wrinkled crone here; please feel free to adjust to taste).
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But there's more to it, as you might suspect, as the doctrine also claims that there are living beings of a quite different order from humanity (several different orders in fact, which reminded me of the list of 'other beings' I'd made after reading the Bible, Koran etc. See Chapter 12). These too may be evoked, invoked, pleaded to or compelled, via rituals, prayers or concentrated effort. How this works, we'll come to in a moment.
Yes.. pretty weird. But not inconsistent and not irrational, according to the possibilities implied by Idealism. We have no way of proving this claim wrong, but we do have the means for seeing if it is correct. Perhaps one day a dogma-free science will put its powerful collective mind to it. Some individual scientists have already made a start here. More on these brave people in Chapter 20.
*** There are two obvious modern examples of how it seems that people can contact 'the other world' in a way that The Church would have mightily disapproved of, purely on the grounds of spiritual hygiene. The first, of which I have personal experience, is the Ouija board. I guess everybody knows how this works: you set out the letters of the alphabet in a circle and place an upended tumbler in the middle. Two or more people rest a finger on the glass and someone asks a question out loud. Ridiculous. 'Is there anybody there?' Yes, ridiculous, especially if the glass slowly moves across the table to spell out 'No', as once happened to us. When I first reluctantly got involved with this I was sharing digs with four friends. With no money to go out, a couple of them started messing with 'the glass' on the kitchen table. I was profoundly sceptical, but as I watched I became sure that nobody was actually pushing the glass. I joined in, and asked each friend to remove his finger if I suspected he might possibly be guiding it, albeit 'unconsciously', whatever that might mean here. The glass always continued to move, 'north', say, with only 'east' and 'west' fingers (one of them mine) resting vertically on it. Eventually I became convinced that 'something' was happening, and began taking notes.
However, I have no idea why you need a glass, or an empty paste pot, as we often used. Presumably it's a sort of focus for a sort of temporary collective mind, but that's not much of an explanation.
Space is too short to go into detail but we apparently contacted several entities. Most were of a low quality, but one was most certainly not. He introduced himself out of the blue, during a lull in proceedings, and returned time and again with very forcefully delivered messages. It was impossible to keep up with the words spelled out. We had a scribe take down the letters one at a time as one of us called them out. Later, we split
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them into words. Some answers were several sentences long, coherent, lucid, and self-consistent. I still have most of them.
The glass spelled out the letters far faster than we could spell them out ourselves when deliberately guiding the glass, as we confirmed later.
Whereas the lower entities had nothing of interest to say apart from banalities and general low-key unpleasantness, the higher force was determined to convert us to Jesus. He thundered in true Old Testament style, but was very much a Christian. There was no realistic way I could deny that I was being addressed by a powerful personality holding a coherent philosophy (which was considerably more 'esoteric' than 'exoteric'). Ridiculous to my Materialist-by-default 'philosophy' at the time; but it happened. I could not deny that. And I'm quite certain none of the material was fraudulently produced. Thirty years later I came across in Yoga a philosophy that would 'allow' the process to have happened. A big connection. If it is indeed possible to invite or compel certain astral (or other) types to join you in 'a work', as The Church was sure was possible, one can easily see why The Church was strongly against it. 'Do you truly know what you are messing with, my son?' Another effect I have witnessed for myself is that the messages received via Ouija can prey on someone's mind. One of my friends was badly affected in this way. The other 'other-world' experience that is common these days is spiritualism. In pre-Victorian days a variation on this practice was called necromancy, or 'raising the dead', and had a bad reputation. It was also likely to get you burned or at least jailed. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, spirit contact became something of a rage, with spirits being evoked to tip tables round the room and levitate articles at parties. Parallel with this grew the religion of spiritualism whose two main threads are of clairvoyant or clairaudient contact with deceased people, and healing. These processes often involve trances, and occasionally other effects.
A couple of definitions of terms I have seen confused: Spiritualism: is a monotheistic religion based on the belief that spirits of the dead can be contacted, usually via a medium, to discover information about the afterlife. Spiritism: is similar to the above, but definitely believes in reincarnation.
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Spirituality: is the personal condition of taking an active interest in one's inner life, or 'reality', often through study, meditation, prayer or contemplation, with an emphasis on ethical behaviour and learning. Words being the slippery things they are, one comes across all sorts of other usages of all three terms, but the above is a useful rough guide.
Spiritualism has suffered a terrible press on two counts. Firstly, from the start it attracted an awful lot of fraudsters who spied that there was easy money to be made from grieving widows, especially after a war, and secondly from Materialist 'investigators' who were simply bigots determined to 'expose' as fraud absolutely everything which 'could' not happen according to their blinkered dogma.
'The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.' Bertrand Russell.
However, if you witness a spiritualist 'medium' or 'channeller' at work, and keep an open mind, I think you might be surprised. They vary a lot in their psychic abilities, of course, as in every other human capacity, but a good one will do no 'fishing' and will come out with a string of 'unlikely' information, purporting to come from a dead relative. The level of communication is usually of a confirmatory nature: simple personal details (perhaps correctly naming the family cat 'Rodney' or stating that Julie has bought a new purple and red hat) designed to reassure the client that their loved one is indeed still somehow alive and still somehow with them. This modest, very personal, level of communication has always attracted derision from 'sophisticated' commentators and humourists on the grounds that it is banal.
unless they make the effort to seriously test it, which they rarely do, being too sophisticated for such things. People who do take the trouble to actually investigate, more than frequently change their minds. More in Chapter 20.
But sometimes mediums bring through less personal material. As a highly verifiable example, I recommend John G Fuller's book The Airmen Who Would Not Die, which concerns the fate of airship travel after the disastrous crash of the R101 in 1930. Reputable mediums do not claim to be able to bring through information that they themselves are not capable of understanding. This is one reason why not all mediums can relate identical messages; for example, a peasant medium could not handle the technical material that the above-mentioned book is full of. Mr Bean could not transmit Einstein's most recent thinking. I found myself thinking of 'vibes' and 'tuning' when I first read of this limitation.
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There are other constraints on clear communication, it seems, but I don't have the space here.
Mediums usually work via a 'control', an entity of high moral standards who acts as a sort of bouncer, keeping at bay all the lower-astral thugs and yobbos who want to elbow their way through to cause mischief. Occultists of the highest type tend to discourage mediumship, particularly of the individual experimental type, as it can lead to all manner of unpleasant experiences, not least being obsession and possession. I could not take this seriously either at first, but as I thought it through, I could see that it was quite consistent with the whole yogic/esoteric understanding of things. Like this: if we all have a certain range of vibes, varying from person to person, we are likely to 'chime' or 'resonate' with another person of similar vibe. If we have lowly bestial vibes that we are trying to shake off (or literally 'rise above' by our own efforts),
Here was a link with the Desert Religions' constant urging to choose to do the right thing, that had so impressed me. 'Raise the rate of your own vibes' would be a more technical (ie, Esoteric) expression of the same process.
or simply wish to keep concealed from others, it would seem to be not unreasonable that a discarnate entity who resonates heavily with our secret vibe, might want to become more closely associated with this aspect of our nature, whether we want it or not. Hence, they say, 'obsession': a condition in which an alcoholic, for example, finds himself being constantly tempted into drinking ever more by an astral 'ex'-drunk (the monkey on his shoulder) who likes to associate himself with the lowly physical vibes of drunkenness. True? I don't know. But it is logically compatible with the rest of the philosophy. If it all gets out of hand, a person might find himself actually invaded by another entity who means him no good. This is possession. The 'veil', as occultists call it, which separates This world from the Other can be weakened by drugs (alcohol, pot, LSD etc) and by certain 'practices' (meaning ill-advised occult experiments). Once weakened, the veil can allow access to astral entities and conditions that are best left in the lower reaches of the Other world where they belong. The Church (Roman and Anglican) definitely recognises 'possession' as a reality and every diocese has a couple of trained exorcists on hand. I've seen films of an exorcist in action. He wrestles with the human/entity with great effort, sometimes involving the traditional bell, book and candle, and a number of forceful adjurations and even a little bellowing. It's a high energy business. Eventually the entity seems to be forced out. What the final condition of the possessees was, I don't remember.
'Vacant possession', perhaps? A survey of 2005 showed that 42% of Americans believe demonic possession is real. But is 'demonic' the word we want here? See below..
However, I've also seen film of a medium doing the same job, in the same way as clearing a house of a ghost. She tuned herself in and said much the same thing as the ghost-clearer: 'Look.. you've no right to be here, bothering this person. You should have gone elsewhere. Look around you.. go to the light.' and suddenly the possessee slumped unconscious. No ritual, bell, book etc. All very low key and reasonable, and the possessee seemed to be 'cured' when she came round.
For further information, compiled by two people well-versed in the business, try http://www.bookorphanage.com/ghosts.html and http://www.spiritrescue.co.uk/ 'Light' and 'The Light' does keep turning up, doesn't it?
Most interestingly, at least a couple of psychiatrists have tried treating schizophrenics as if the voices in their head belonged to real entities: in other words as if the patient's body had been literally taken over by an intelligent other being. They claim a similar rate of cure as orthodox psychiatry. Dr M Scott Peck's book Glimpses of the Devil assumes these entities are 'demons', whereas Dr Carl Wickland makes what seems to me to be the more rational assumption (given all the material above) that the entities are not evil 'demons', but simply ordinary (but discarnate) people of a low astral type, 'stuck in the vestibule', and looking for a means of living a pseudo-physical life again, as suggested by the yogic/esoteric/occult understanding of these things. Dr W's remarkable memoir Thirty Years Among the Dead is available for free at http://www.spiritwritings.com/ThirtyYearsAmongTheDead.html
Dr Wickland also published research concerning people who had become insane after dabbling with the Ouija board and other 'occult' devices. 'You have been warned', as they say; and no, I personally do not in any way recommend dabbling in this stuff. It can be very dangerous whether the powers involved be objective or subjective. By all means read, think, mull, and learn what you can from the theory and philosophy but don't get involved. The website www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/04/classic_case_psychi.html offers details of a modern case that might be of interest. If 'the veil' might be damaged by some drugs, might it be restored by others? I don't know. Nobody seems to really understand how drugs work at 'the point of contact', anyway. In 2009 it came to light that a number of sufferers from Parkinson's disease were reacting badly to their medication: running up debt, becoming violent to spouse, cross dressing, 'slipping into a fantasy world of erotica and pornography', compulsive
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shopping, and becoming generally angry. Note that all these disorders are of a 'low' or deviant kind. I wonder why nobody reports suddenly being better at learning French, or taking up recreational calculus, or becoming calmer and sweeter? Mysteries The notion of obsession or possession by discarnate personalities: ie, by maliciouslyinclined people who have died, is old news to Jews, who have a tradition of such things, and even have a name, 'dybbuk', for such an entity.
*** The notion of 'chiming' or 'tuning in' or 'resonating' occurs all the time in the esoteric world. Well, I suppose it would, as their Understanding (or 'Knowing' as they claim) is that the whole universe is one unimaginably huge skein of vibrations of unimaginable complexity. And as Matter could only have been made by Mind, according to the unavoidable philosophy of Idealism, the universe must thus be ultimately composed of Mind. And that unimaginably huge skein must thus be composed ultimately of Mental vibrations. In other words, the universe, according to the yogic/esoteric view, is all 'of the Mind'.. (and must thus, I suppose also be all 'in the Mind' as there is nowhere else for it to be.)
Bizarre? Sir James Jeans, the physicist and astronomer would not agree. After years of research his considered view was that 'The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine'. He is not the only scientist to think this. 'It is not a long step from thinking of matter as an electronic ghost to thinking of it as the objectified image of thought.' Albert Einstein; and even Max Planck, 'The Father of Quantum Theory', considered that the atom might be a mentally-constructed sort of particle.
Just for fun, I tried thinking this through. What is a vibration? Several things are implied by this apparently simple word. First of all there must be something which vibrates: a discrete 'thing' of some sort; then an axis of some sort about which it vibrates, then a force to initiate the vibration and another to sustain it. This sustaining force must be able to keep the vibration either constant or wavering. And there must be a medium of some sort in which the discrete object vibrates. That's quite a hatful of requirements already. And presumably there must be some sort of poles, to keep the ends still while the centre section does the vibrating (unless the entire entity is moving), and a force which can differentiate these poles from the surrounding matrix and maintain them in being; and an unknown number of hidden variables to allow for all kinds of different vibrations otherwise the universe would just be made up of one great vibrating gloop, like a jelly on a cosmic plate; except that there could be no plate, of course.
The idea of 'poles' is interesting, as it is a tenet of yoga/esotericism that This, the Lower world, is the world of two poles: of opposites, striving to re-tie; re-connect; 're-
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ligare' ( etc). 'This world' is thus the world of 'becoming', of seeking unity, as opposed to the Higher world which is the unified world of 'being'. No I don't properly understand all this, either, but I'm willing to put that down to ignorance or lack of imagination my part rather than the concept being 'rubbish by definition'. Put it on hold, as SPIT requires. (We certainly do understand that what seems to be the fundamental physical power of This world, electromagnetism, operates according to positive/negative and north/south; and that these poles do indeed seek to 'neutralise' or complement each other by unifying. So, some would say, do males and females.)
Scientists tell us, very broadly speaking, that every particle in the entire universe is somehow carrying out a complex vibratory action (or some sort of continuous cycling or undulating process), via ultimately unknown means, often radiating some sort of energy infinitely outwards. In fact, current scientific theory has it that every 'particle' might just as well be thought of as a vibrating 'energy packet', which ties in remarkably well with the Idealist/Yogic view. But for Materialists, Mind-energy can not possibly be the force behind the vibrations. Unsurprisingly, they have no definitive suggestion of their own, just an infinitely receding hall of mirrors which can never ultimately resolve the problem.
I wonder whether all this would tie in at all with physicists' current String Theory? Whatever, a 'simple' vibration poses a lot of queries.
All this depends, of course, upon our normal word 'vibration' meaning the same thing as what seems to be going on at these more exalted levels. Whatever, science and the yogic/esoteric worlds would both agree on the universality of vibration, it seems. A remarkable connection. Also, the Big Bang seems to be a confirmation of the Breath of Brahman. It seems that science and the esoteric may have more in common than I would ever have imagined. *** What has all that to do with ghosts? As suggested before, it seems to be about 'resonance'. Just as a wine glass will resonate according to a certain musical tone, so, the yogis say, do entities relate to each other. Hence the reason we seem to gravitate towards others 'on our own wavelength', and avoid other people who 'jar' with us, with whom we can find no 'harmony'. I guess a person's 'wavelength' might be thought of as a composite mix of radiating fields, with some elements
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more powerful than others, expanding outwards to an unknown degree, overlapping every other field on the way. Telepathy does sound a bit less wacky if this is the case, doesn't it? Occultists say that one can be obsessed or possessed only by an entity you have vibes in common with, and that the powerful vibes inherent in a holy relic might help to raise one's own feeble version. Simply looking at or thinking about a thing of beauty or a saintly person can also help. I suppose an ancient and venerated icon might come in at this point. Weird? Yes indeed, unless it's true, of course, and try as I might, I could not find any jump cuts in the internal logic of all these suggestions. I found all this of interest, without being completely convinced. But then I thought of the voodoo dolls, and the traditional way witches are supposed to work. What they both have in common is vibes: the doll is a symbolic representation of a certain person, whose vibes are thus associated with it, simply by thinking or willing it so. The pins are thus designed to damage by proxy, linked by the vibe. Black witches traditionally use hair clippings or a stolen personal item which 'contain' the vibes of the victim. Thus mischief can be made.
There is a remarkable link here to the Koran (15:28) and the Old Testament (Genesis 2:7) which both refer to God making a man from 'clay' or 'dust' and breathing life into him. (Darwin seemed to accept this too. Remember that final sentence of Origins?)
Mediums, clairvoyants and psychometrists are all clear that they need to 'tune in'. And 'primitive' people are averse to having their photographs taken not because it is 'stealing their soul' or some other uninformed Victorian guess, but because in their eyes the photos will by definition now contain their own vibe, and might be used in witchcraft against them: ie, they might enable one person to impose his own will upon them via the vibe. Still bizarre again, unless it's true. And the circumstantial evidence kept piling up for me: The Altamira cave paintings of animals with arrows in them ('sympathetic magic' anthropologists call it: set up the wish, and the fact will follow) and a man dressed in antlers. Then we have icons and plaster saints; hero worship and touching the hem of the master; rituals, symbolically linking the idea of some thing or event or process with a current idealised copy of it: for example following the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem, or baptising babies in memory of Jesus' own baptism. The list could go on for pages. The power of mental association 'resonance' And of course, many elements in the 'acting out' processes of many initiation ceremonies.
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Australian aborigines use commodities called 'maban' to link a person's This-world consciousness with the Other world, via the resonance the maban is imbued with. The material may be ochre, feathers, blood, quartz, or something else, which suggests strongly that the power is imparted by human Mind and Will rather than being solely inherent in the physical matter itself.
The whole realm of symbol and myth comes in here, not to mention archetypes and ritual. All madness to a Materialist, but all of potential importance to an Idealist, and all definite realities and powers to the yogic/esoteric philosophy. Which brings us to the next ridiculous thing: magic. It is traditional to laugh at 'magic' as being childish nonsense, but there are many people who think otherwise (including all religionists, who, if pressed, must see it as a rational, if dangerous, extension of the Idealist premiss that Mind (as exemplified by their God) is the creative force).
There are actually three sorts of 'magic': the familiar music hall trickery and illusion; mind-creativity, following obscure ('occult') laws that we are concerned with here; and the irrational creation of something from nothing as required by, for example, Materialism.
The yogic/esoteric/occult doctrine suggests how it works: you decide on what you wish to do, and then concentrate your mind most powerfully upon the result you are seeking. If possible, you visualise the effect as brightly as you can. Some people choose to involve more than one mind in this task. Some follow a set pattern, or ceremony, to help focus the mind/s. Some evoke or invoke help from other quarters. Then they apply their powerfully developed Will, working on the principle that Will = Power. Hence the word 'willpower' the force that most of us develop only very slowly via sticking to a diet or giving up smoking or completing a course of study. Mind.. mind.. mind
'Magic is concerned with change: recognising it, willing it into being, and controlling it'. Marian Green in The Elements of Ritual Magic.
This is not such a strange idea at all if you accept the inevitability of Idealism. After all, Idealism ultimately requires the entire universe to be a mental construct. and the power to use the Mind must surely have been Will. What do you think? I think it sounds entirely reasonable. Highly unexpected, maybe, but it seems to follow logically enough, and it does seem able to 'explain' a number of otherwise completely bizarre but welltestified events which Materialism can only mock or ignore, like the 'faith'
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healing of apparently incurable diseases, hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of which have been confirmed by doctors and surgeons.
But all too often explained (away) as 'spontaneous remission' without due and impartial investigation of each individual case. It's the old story of 'Can't happen; thus doesn't happen'
Anyway willpower, plus clear purpose and intent, plus steady visualisation of the result, plus a declaration of Will (as in 'Amen', meaning 'So be it', or 'So mote it be', or 'Let it be so' or 'I have spoken') is what it takes. And, they claim 'magic' is not 'magic' at all. It works according to wellunderstood Laws. It's just that our Materialist + Church dominated world either does not recognise these Laws, or tries to keep them quiet. The more powerful the Will, the more powerful the magic. Hitler knew all about this. His creed was 'Will', and he clearly had some sort of psychic sensitivity to go with it. Bearing in mind that the premonitions that inspired him to action led to his own destruction and to the destruction of millions of his beloved Master Race, I suspect that obsession (involving a lowly vibe) and not Intuition (involving a high vibe) will be found to have had a part to play. Paul Roland's The Nazis and the Occult is an interesting read on the theme of Will and power and magic. *** Healers operate via similar means, except that they usually claim to be mere channels for what they call Higher Forces, or actual individuals. Arigo, the Brazilian healer, was clear that a discarnate German Doctor Fritz (and others) was the active healer, who just used Arigo's body as a means (a sort of friendly 'possession', I guess).
See Arigo: Healer of the Rusty Knife, again by John G Fuller. Don't laugh till you've read it.
I went to three healers in the hope that someone somewhere might be able to alleviate the dreadful inertia that the M.E. had cast upon me. I'd already tried Chinese herbs which did nothing except bring tears to my eyes and stink out the kitchen for days. Two of the healers were ineffectual (Frauds? Or just a mismatch? I don't think they were frauds.) but the third lady made a real difference. I went weekly for three months and was noticeably improved at the end of it. Coincidence? Maybe. But interestingly, this slight lady's hands set up a powerful vibration on my back and shoulders. I really don't think she could have faked that power. Who knows? It seemed to work, whatever. The fog lifted noticeably if not completely.
An extension of the power of concentration and Will, as outlined above, is the entirely unexpected concept of the 'thoughtform'. All aspects of the esoteric/occult world acknowledge the reality of this phenomenon. In essence, it just means that as thoughts are real things (remember the vibrating mental matter of which the whole universe is apparently made up?), so might they be focussed and built up in power until they are quite literally a force. Then, they may be dispatched to a destination, for ill or good; curse or cure. It is acknowledged that a negative thoughtform may be automatically rejected by the target if the target's vibe is too high, and guess what? It then rebounds upon the sender. Karma in action. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. What goes out, comes back. Live by the sword
The Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom is surrounded by a garter (hence 'the Order of the Garter').The inscribed motto reads 'Honi soit qui mal y pense': which has come to be translated as 'Evil be to him who evil thinks'. A curious similarity to occult theory. It is easy to see how ancient symbols and myths might be seen in terms of 'thoughtforms'. I was also reminded once again of Plato's mental 'forms' which he claimed preceded any physical forms, and of Carl Jung's 'archetypes'. And might Claude Lvi-Strauss recognise the long-dwelt-upon thoughtform as a basis for universal myth?
By now I was becoming very intrigued. I felt no wish to experiment any further, I'm glad to say, after my experiences with Ouija, but I kept reading and thinking. The more I read, on all sorts of bizarre topics,
Ranging from a little astrology (Try True as the Stars Above by Neil Spencer for a level-headed study of this very odd business) to Tarot, totemism, and tyromancy (divination by cheese).
the more this basic core doctrine seemed to be acknowledged. Yes, bizarre, to my baffled-Materialist philosophy of the time, but all self-consistent. I never found a single point of paradox in anything I read; unlike in my reading in the Materialist world which I kept finding to be riddled with it.
Of course there were moments when the connection was not immediately apparent('Cheese'?!) but a little thought soon found the common hidden thread. Eg, tyromancy and tea-leaf-mancy and all the other mancies were linked by 'the application of intuition' to a pattern of eg clouds, bird giblets, sheep droppings etc. No, I am not claiming that there is any obvious rational sense in any of these, except that as I had discovered that Intuition (a force of 'connection' and 'ordering') is a key player in our understanding of Reality, it was clear that the underlying theme in all these 'mancies' was that Intuition might reveal truths, given something to focus on. (Or perhaps
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'defocus around' might be a better phrase, given the need to relax the Lower mind if contact with the Higher is to be made.)
So, like it or not, I was bound to tentatively accept all this strange stuff as being possible logical extensions of the Idealist philosophy I had felt obliged to accept via the path of basic logic. And thus it was not rejectable 'on principle'. It must be put on hold, according to SPIT (see p100). 'Logic' had led me to curses and magic?? Yep. It's a funny old world. Another extension of this general theme is the curious world of initiation. The Egyptian and Greek Mysteries required an initiation and an oath, so the secrets could remain secret. Now I understood why secrecy or 'occlusion' was necessary. Any Man of Wisdom would most certainly not want to make public a handbook on how to curse your neighbour, or himself, for that matter; although being of High Mind himself, no curse would stick to him. However, being a Man of Wisdom and hence of Compassion, he would not want the nave curser to receive the returning malice of his own foolish curse. The initiation tradition is found throughout the world, among 'primitive' Amazonian societies, Native Americans, Pre-Colombian civilisations, Native Australians, and throughout Africa and Asia. Shamans take drugs, or chant or dance or drum themselves into an appropriate vibe ('to cross the veil', an occultist would say) to make contact with whoever or whatever they think is out there, and bring back messages and information. How it all works is a long and interesting issue, but there's not enough space here.
As a clue to ponder on, if you feel so inclined: It is a truism in the esoteric world that any mental entity that you (and others, singly or collectively, and over a period of time) think about hard and long enough eventually takes on a lesser or greater actual reality (via 'thoughtforms' of varying power). I guess you can see how that would fit with the overall logic of the core understandings. The implications are absolutely vast remember the notion that the mental, astral, and physical worlds are actually just focus points on a sliding scale of realities, some of which are visible or tangible to us while others are not? And that we each make our own heaven and hell by our own decisions and choices? I'll leave you with that thought to ponder on at your leisure. Big Stuff.
In the 'civilised' West we are initiated into Christianity with baptism and confirmation. To be admitted further, as a priest, you must have hands laid upon you by a bishop. Freemasonry is famous for its initiations.
I hope this book might encourage people to look a little more deeply at what society in general thinks of as silly masonic nonsense and dressing-up. The symbols alone are worth some thoughtful consideration, starting with the previously-mentioned Star of David
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..and the Eye atop a pyramid on the American $1 bill. All that radiating Light again! Of course, viewed from the side, a pyramid is an upward pointing triangle.
Science has backed off this sort of thing, but the academic world still maintains rituals and prizes and special chairs. Faint echoes of esoteric initiations, I would suggest. And might the academic 'degree' be a faint echo of one of the 33 degrees of masonry? *** A further thought on how all this might relate to ghosts: 1 2 Given that Idealism is unavoidably the only game in town And given that Mind must thus have preceded Matter, and thus must have somehow created Matter (this is surely so far a logical, if thunderously unexpected, extension of the logical journey begun in Chapter 2, I think. Would you agree?) And also given all this stuff about vibes and 'relative realities' (ie, many superimposed worlds of different vibrational rate, accessible only to people of a suitably resonant personal vibe) we are then faced with the reasonable possibility that the two commonest sorts of ghost may be 'explained' by the yogic/esoteric doctrine thus:
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o The 'unquiet' or 'lost soul' type, of definite personality who may be exorcised, one way or another, and packed off to the Other World, where he belongs, and o The strangely anonymous type, as personified by the Lady in Black pub ghost. Could it be that some sort of vibe of the LiB's life 'lingered' after her death, and of itself and its own creative power attracted to itself suitable vibrant matter of say the 'etheric' type? This might then be sensed by suitably sensitive persons as a 'cold patch', say (as is often reported at haunted places). If the residual vibe was of a higher nature, perhaps it might set into resonant motion matter of an astral type? This would be detectable by people of psychic sensitivity as an emotional frisson of some sort (almost always of some degree of fear or misery: no gag-cracking ghosts, remember!). And presumably, if the residual vibe was of a higher type yet, it might attract to itself vibes of a mental type. Thus possibly making a highly repetitive and 'soulless' apparition of the traditional spooky type? Ie, it would contain just enough low grade mental vibe to give the appearance of shape, but no more. Anonymous essentially unreal but detectable, nonetheless, from time to mysterious time.
A couple of definitions: Psychic: means 'having access to the Other World(s)'. It is often reserved for 'access to the astral world'. Access to the mental world, and beyond, is usually reserved for 'seers' or 'rishis' or 'masters'. The word 'master' has nothing to do with being a boss. It refers to someone who has developed mastery over himself (ie, has perfected his own character and thus raised his vibes towards the saintly end of the spectrum through consistent will and effort: the notion of 'sacrifice' comes in here, meaning sacrifice of Lower things like power, money, lust, etc in favour of Higher, more rewarding, things; which is presumably why Saxons used to break the jewellery and weapons they offered up to their God/god). A mystic: is someone who has access to high astral planes, and is thus essentially an emotional 'knower'. A devotional type. A metaphysician: is someone who works with the mental planes. What he may come to 'know' is likely to be of an intellectual rather than an emotional nature.
Well, maybe. It would fit with the doctrine, but that doesn't mean it's true. However, to me it seems to be much more promising from a logic point of view than anything Religion or Science can come up with. ***
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There's a final connection to be made here. In the 1980's the Cambridge biologist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, proposed a theory that any yogi/esotericist would find harmonious. He suggested the idea of 'morphic resonance', as being a sort of feedback mechanism between an original formative field and the final physical shape of a plant.
Yes it's Plato's 'forms' again. And 'resonance' again. And getting very close to 'thoughtforms'.
He saw this as adding to Darwin's process of Natural Selection in helping to explain why new species arise.
It struck me that it might also help to explain such outrageous behaviour as a dedicated vegetarian eating her own placenta, if we extend the field idea to behaviours as well as body-shapes. It really does sound uncannily similar to the yogic/esoteric Understanding of the 'thoughtform'. Might the whole 'morphic resonance' process be reasonably seen as a form of Intuition?
What makes RS's suggestion remarkable is that it is made by a pukka scientist, but it is not thoroughly Materialist in nature. Thus you may well guess what sort of reception it got from Big Science. The editor of Nature, the prestigious science magazine, said of RS's book, A New Science of Life, 'This infuriating tract... is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.' Note carefully that this is a high-ranking man of science speaking of book-burning, not a fanatical Inquisitor or Nazi thug. He added later that 'Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy.' The parallel between Big Materialist Science and the Big Religion it has replaced could barely be put more clearly: arrogance and abuse of power, purely in the defence of a dogma rather than of truth and rational enquiry. We'll be returning to Mr Sheldrake in a while.
'Heresy' derives from the Greek word for 'to choose'. The Guardians of Dogma really don't like you choosing to think for yourself, do they? But this fascistic and repressive attitude is so common, there's even a fancy Greek word for it: 'Allodoxaphobia: the fear of opinions'.
Meanwhile, there is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that perhaps these other 'forms' or 'fields' or 'bodies' that Plato and Sheldrake propose do exist. The obvious examples from the text above are the mental, astral, and etheric 'auras'. Other researchers claim to have evidence of such entities. If it interests you, check out Saxton Burr, Reichenberg, Mesmer, Kilner or Reich. Their
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scientifically-derived findings have been systematically poo-poohed and belittled for hundreds of years by guess who? That's why you will almost certainly have never heard of them. *** Almost finally: There are a couple of books by Bird and Tompkins that you might find unexpectedly interesting: The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of the Soil. I was going to experiment on our farm with some of the ideas in these books but the M.E. knocked that one on the head. Maybe you will give some of them a try in your garden? You might also like to read a bit of Rudolf Steiner (the founder of the biodynamic school of agriculture) but he can be heavy going, I think I should warn you. Perhaps better to start with something like Biodynamic Gardening by John Soper. It's all a bit weird, but it works, as attested to by a large number of prosperous biodynamic farmers and vignerons on the continent. And, I repeat, I do not recommend dabbling in any occult procedures of any sort at all. This even includes the generally benign area of yoga. By all means do the stretches, and a bit of regular basic meditation, but steer clear of anything that claims to 'develop powers or abilities'. This is a serious warning. And if you find you'd like to read a bit more about the wacky world of the esoteric, I recommend starting with Yogi Ramacharaka or Meher Baba or Dr Paul Brunton. Several of their books are in print or available as free downloads.
Try http://www.consciouslivingfoundation.org/ebooks-inspirational.htm. There are many others.
I really don't advise getting involved with 'groups' or 'courses' of any sort. 'The Occult' has always attracted huge numbers of fruitcakes, loonies, deviants, and dispensers of deluded poppycock and depravity. I suggest you steer well clear of joining anything. Just read and think. That's all you need. *** Finally, a brief summary: According to the Yogic understanding, we have three separate bodies apart from the Physical one that we all know and abuse so carelessly. These are
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the Etheric, Emotional, and Mental bodies. It is through these bodies that Power enlivens the physical body. In a word, Life Mind and Consciousness are piped into our brute physical bodies via our other three bodies. When LMC is present, we call each other 'alive'. When LMC withdraws from This World, and returns to the Other, we call each other 'dead'. But it's just the coarse animal body that's died. The rest of us, the inner essences, are as alive as ever ('more so' according to many reports, which is really good news for those of us who enjoy being alive), and will continue to develop in power and happiness by our own efforts.
Happiness? Surely religion is all about shame and fear? Not so, according to the yogic/esoteric doctrine. I hope you are not as shocked as I was when I first realised this. More in Chapter 26.
Another unexpected claim is that all four of these bodies are actually physical. It's just that the three higher ones are of a more attenuated nature, whatever that might mean. If this claim is true, then the Materialists have something solid to bite on here! *** PS: I now felt I was definitely on the right track for nailing ghosts, and had en route discovered a number of quite unexpected links between occult theory and science, and also with religion. I could feel my direction altering Although it now seemed less important, in view of the lucid and internally rational doctrine I'd been reading about, which was common to yoga, esotericism, occultism, and metaphysics in general, I was still looking for a knockout White Crow to metaphorically wave in front of Big Science. There was the famous case of Emanuel Swedenborg, for example. During a dinner party in Gothenburg on July 29, 1759, he claimed at six o'clock that there was a fire in Stockholm (400 km away), and that it had destroyed a neighbour's home and was now threatening his own. Two hours later, he claimed that the fire had stopped three doors from his home. Two days later, a messenger from Stockholm confirmed every one of Swedenborg's claims. This was a well-attested and thoroughly witnessed event, a hundred and thirty years before the first telephone in Sweden. But I was feeling less and less confident that Big Scientists would be capable of even seeing the Crow, let alone considering its implications. 'Wrong vibe', I guess. Mental blinkers ***
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I wonder if hypnotism might one day be considered in terms of a sort of temporary possession?
Likewise murder cases like that of Brian Thomas, 'a decent and devoted husband' who nevertheless strangled his wife while they were both asleep. He had been suffering from 'night terrors' for fifty years. He was acquitted by the judge. This is not a unique case of decent people suddenly killing others, usually while in a nightmare, but sometimes 'in broad daylight'. They admit the act but claim no memory of doing it. This strange amnesia they hold in common with people who have 'multiple personalities'.
*** I had a bit of fun at this point re-reading the Anomalies I'd found in the various holy books in Chapter 12, and seeing if any of them made a little more sense in the light of the stuff I'd been reading in the world of the occult. I thought a few things did. What do you think? *** Stop Press: Since writing this chapter I have come across the following group of quotes from Louis de Broglie, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics: 'Matter has waves which 'correspond' to it.' 'Not only subatomic particles, but atoms and molecules as well have associated matter waves.' 'Theoretically, in fact, everything has a wavelength: baseballs, automobiles, and even people.' This hypothesis, as wacky as anything in the occult locker box, has been taken so seriously that the 'waves' are often called 'de Broglie waves'. L de B won a Nobel Prize for this thesis.
Just for fun: According to de Broglie's equations, an object with high momentum (ie, big and heavy) has a wavelength which is very small. Thus a person, having a galactic momentum compared to the miniscule units of the subatomic world, would have a seriously short wavelength of roughly 10 -36 metres: ie 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a metre, give or take. Too small to be detectable by any current measurement tools.
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This does not of course mean that it is always going to remain undetectable. Experiments in Vienna in 1999 confirmed quantum qualities in molecules called fullerenes which are normally considered far too large to be so affected. Next stop a sumo wrestler.
In general, the de Broglie hypothesis is expected to apply to any well isolated object.. although how anything might be considered 'well-isolated' in the pan-galactic stew of wavelengths and fields that seem to be in us and around us is not apparent. But isn't it interesting that Big Science should be getting so close to traditional weirdo occult theories/understandings? Waves, vibes... 'resonance'?
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Chapter 19 Mind and Brain

..or should that be 'Mind vs Brain'? (No.. probably not, but please read on, and make your own decision) Much learning does not teach understanding
Heraclitus
Fifth century BCE and 2,500 years later..
How is it we have so much information, but know so little?

Noam Chomsky
I had learned a lot through dipping into the much-maligned world of The Occult. What struck me most was that the doctrines of The Occult, The Esoteric, and Yogic Philosophy were essentially the same. And they were the same as the esoteric side of the exo-eso split found in all the major religions: all variations on the same theme, echoed in various cultures across the world and throughout history and all of them, without any exception that I had found, were logical derivations of the Idealist requirement that Mind must somehow not just be separate from Matter, but must somehow have created Matter (by means unknown): all concerned very much with Mind power.
Obviously, if Mind is the only ultimate creative power in the universe, then Matter must somehow be a form of frozen thought. Hmm But so, I guess, in a less impressive way, is a cathedral or a rice pudding (see below). And didn't the ancients deal in varying degrees of solidification, ranging from the four essences of air and fire, through to water, to earth? All starting from the mysterious and highly 'ethereal' source they called the 'quintessence', the source of all things physical: again somehow connecting to Plato's concept of 'forms' plus 'infilling matter'? I guess the logical pattern here is of mental idea + physical matter = physical world? That Mind controls and assembles Matter according to its Will? 'Wouldn't that fit fairly neatly with quantum physics, as well?' I wondered. More in Chapter 23.
This should not really have been the huge surprise to me that it was. After all, it is precisely similar to the way we work in our normal lives. No physical entity, from a cathedral to a tasty rice pudding, gets made without it having first occurred as a plan or 'form' (as Plato would put it) in someone's mind. It's the mental functions of Intellect + Desire + Will that get things done and made.
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The esoteric/occult axiom of 'as above so below' came to mind again as I thought through this comparison between Universe and Rice Pudding.
And, of course, every plan or idea originates in the Mind via what? ..Imagination and/or Intuition, which, my sense of logic insists, must be inputs to the Lower Mind from somewhere outside of it. This somewhere is the Higher Mind, for want of a better phrase (or 'superconscious', if that suits better.) You might call Imagination and Intuition two sides of the same coin, the difference being that Intuition tends to arrive spontaneously, often while relaxing following a period of attention, whereas Imagination is more akin to deliberately opening the mind and thus evoking and focussing on the possibility of Intuition arriving. The former is a more passive form of the latter, if you like. Revelation would seem to be something similar, but more directed and forceful. The thing all three have in common seems to be 'stop the mental chunter; clear the line and allow access' which is precisely what meditation is all about. The yogic/esoteric doctrine allows for somewhere for all these mental capacities to reside in and arrive from (the 'astral', etc), whereas the Materialist one does not. *** But whatever your philosophical base, be it Materialist or Idealist, there exists the enormous problem of How does Mind relate to Brain? For as long as Man has been able to think in abstract terms, the 'mind-body problem', as it is called, has always been the Big One. Every philosopher has wrestled with it. Religion says God did it all, and continues to do so, so don't bother your pretty little head about it. Science (here meaning our current Materialist-skewed science) claims that the brain creates mind, but without a shred of evidence to support this notion or any shred of logical theory to make the claim from.
The best 'theory/evidence' I have heard offered is the circular illogicality of 'But look, for heaven's sake we all have brains, don't we? And we all have ideas, don't we? So it must be the brain that makes the ideas!' Richard Dawkins says this quite a lot, but I've noticed more than once a note of doubt in his eye as he says it. He's a troubled man, I think, who sometimes wonders if there may be a loose cannon somewhere in his armoury. Darwin was also a troubled man, in that he didn't think Natural Selection was enough to explain everything about how one species derived from another. And the origin of 'mind' and 'life' troubled him too, remember. Just to re-cap: it is not logical to assume that A ('brain', for example) causes B ('mind', for example) just because A and B are associated in some way. As a silly
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example: trees moving their branches (A), and wind (B) are clearly connected. But it is not a rational conclusion to claim that wind is therefore caused by trees waving their branches about. Scientists are very aware of this problem of deciding what is Cause and what is Effect, and they strive intently to get it right except, it seems, at the very deepest levels of the philosophy within which they do and interpret their work; which is a great shame.
We've been over all this before in previous chapters, of course. If you are still bothered by it, please go back and check the logic again. I definitely do understand how difficult it is to shake off the old Materialist 'certainties' we've had drummed into us for 150 years. *** The essence of the mind-brain issue must lie within the theme of 'meaning', don't you think? After all, 'meaning' is as abstract as you can get, as it clearly has no physical/material existence at all. A Materialist is completely stumped when you ask him how chemicals create meaning out of nothing but themselves. At best, he will expound enthusiastically about DNA and future developments, and complexity theory, and 'emergent' qualities, and may possibly get very excited about fractals but without being quite sure why, but he will have no actual answer, and no hint of an actual answer either if you press him for comprehensible details or for references you can check out. And how could he have? He is asking the impossible: that meaning, as in the understanding that this pageful of squiggles is currently 'generating' in your mind, is somehow implicit within the dumb and mindless chemicals of DNA or the neurotransmitters which leak across the tiny gaps between brain cells; or possibly within the electric currents that whizz round our brains. It's just not reasonable, is it, unless all chemicals and all electricity contain meaning which would mean assigning inner intellectual qualities to even the atoms of the salt on your chips, and the microwaves that heat them up? It is no more reasonable than 'What you must understand, Chas, is that everything is mineral (including your laughter at this sentence)'.
Unless you know something that nobody else does, of course, and can offer any sort of evidence at all (never mind 'proof'), in which case you should claim your Nobel Prize immediately. Ring the Permanent Secretary at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: Sweden 08-673 95 02.
Clearly, DNA/neurotransmitters/currents are immensely important to the functioning of the brain, and the more that people study them the more complex their actions and relationships become, but that's not the point
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here. It's not the mechanics I'm interested in at the moment, but the principle of how purely material entities can possibly carry or 'be' meaning. Of course brain cells are living entities and not insensate DNA or neurotransmitters. But we must not forget that Materialism claims that these cells spontaneously self-assembled themselves from insensate chemicals and nothing but insensate chemicals (see Chapter 7 and Primordial Soup). Ultimately, for a Materialist, Life and chemicals must be the same thing, give or take a cosmic ray or bolt of lightning.
'Somehow these very ordinary atoms (of eg oxygen, carbon, iron, zinc, etc) conspired miraculously to organise themselves into thinking, breathing, living human beings.' Professor Jim Al-Khalili, on BBC4's The Secret Life of Chaos. This, I think is a collector's item for gook-hunters 'conspire' 'miraculously' 'organise themselves' 'Lightning was probably the force that created the first life on earth.' Heather Couper, Astronomer Royal So unintelligent lightning is a more acceptable Prime Mover than a Vast Intelligence?
A (Materialist) neuroscientist who has managed to restrain his outrage so far, might jump up and spill his coffee at this point and yell 'But what about neural networks? One brain cell might not amount to much, but what about a vast inter-linked network? Who knows what that might achieve?' Of course, I understand the Scientist's irritation, but again 'complexity' is not the point, just as it was not when discussing DNA in Chapter 7. Neural networks do illustrate how complex a brain might be, containing, as an average brain apparently does, some hundred thousand million neurons, each networking to possibly ten thousand others,
It has been calculated that if every neuron in your brain were to connect to its maximum capacity, then the number of connections would be far greater than all the subatomic particles in the entire universe. Your brain is the most complex known structure in the universe. There's a thought. So's mine, I suppose. Just by the bye, it is estimated that there are also a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy; and a hundred thousand million galaxies in the universe. A curious coincidence.
but all of these are still just reducible to chemicals in the Materialist philosophy. and the fundamental point remains: How can a mass of inert and 100% abiotic chemicals, no matter how galactically interconnected, store the memory of a scene at the seaside, with kids running about in multicoloured outfits, ski-jets racketing across the bay, and a girl in a distracting bikini walloping a lifesaver about the chops with a large wet fish in principle? If there is no theoretical principle, then it must surely be foolish to look for proof, as there can be no proof.
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I'm aware that this argument is the same one that Materialists use against investigating the paranormal. But what I am trying to point out (in broad principle at the moment; in greater detail in the next chapter) is that the paranormal is backed up by evidence and some sort of consistent theory, as witnessed by all the closely linked yogic/esoteric/occult doctrines, whereas Materialism is backed by no evidence at all and a serially paradoxical and therefore irrational and therefore wrong theory. That is a very great difference.
*** Philosophy, Religion and Science have simply not come up with a consistent or rational answer to the mind-body problem. The Yogi, on the other hand, speaking for everyone who has realised that Idealism must rationally replace Materialism, has got a theory which is rational and self-consistent. It's worth a look, I think. If you've followed the suggestions made in previous chapters, I don't think anything which follows will be very surprising.
You may find a few things startling, as I did, but that's a different matter.
First of all, the Yogi says that meaning is something quite separate from matter, and exists quite apart from it. This is a more rational starting point than the magic required by Materialism, but it's not actually a lot of help in sorting out the Body-Mind problem. If meaning and Mind exist apart from the Body (brain) then the obvious question is Why does Mind need a brain at all? What's the point? And what about all that DNA and the chemical neurotransmitters and the enormous skeins of electrical activity that fill every brain? What are they all about, if Mind and meaning are perfectly capable of independent existence? Let's come back to that in a moment. But first: can we accept that Idealism requires Mind to be the creative force in the universe?
If not, then I'm afraid I've not been explaining the logic very clearly. I'm sorry about that. Please try again, if you have the patience. See Chapters 5 or 11.
Next: let us assume for the moment the yogic/esoteric doctrine that Man's purpose in This world of polarities is to better his character, meanwhile raising his vibes, and to thus increase his personal power and personal responsibility for himself and his actions: to become fully autonomous, in other words: 'a god in the making' as some say.
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For example 'Ye are gods.' Jesus, quoted in John 10:35. Jesus and Buddha both insisted on growth via personal responsibility of choice of action, rather than expecting 'salvation' via rules or rituals. Their reformations taught that Man should put childish dependency behind him. Now he should grow up and take responsibility for his own life (or 'growth' or 'evolution' or 'salvation' or 'enlightenment'.)
Next: let us also assume that the medium through which all the above selfimprovement occurs is the absolute Law of Karma and Reincarnation: your errors of selfishness will haunt you until you correct them. When perfected, you may leave this mortal coil and move on to greater things. Quite a lot to accept, and I still struggle with it myself, but try as I might, I have been unable to find any genuine flaw or inconsistency or paradox in the logic of the broad yogic/esoteric/occult philosophy. And whatever else, it still makes more sense to me than anything Religion or Science can offer. So. let's see The next step in the Yogi's train of thought develops the ideas touched upon in the previous chapter: that This world is the world of polarities: male/female; light/dark; left/right; positive/negative; left-brain/right-brain; north/south; etc, all summed up neatly in one of the meanings of the 'ch'i symbol'. In this case the symbol represents the principles of polarity: the dark yin (feminine/cold/moist/passive/negative/etc) and the bright yang (male/hot/dry/active/positive/etc), held as complementary opposites within an all-embracing circular whole, or unity. In other words, This world is the realm of relativism.
I was intrigued to discover, some years after reading this, that it is a working rule of particle physics that 'for each particle, there exists an antiparticle'.
The Other world, the Yogi says, is the 'holistic' world of perfect unity (as in the rim of the ch'i symbol, and the circle enclosing the Celtic cross, where all poles are reconciled: where 'yoga/union' has been achieved, and the act of 're-ligare/re-connection' has occurred.
Hence the 'unified' androgyne (male + female) figure that crops up in alchemy, the Tarot system, and on Indian temple carvings, etc. Wiccans represent the temporary polarity/duality of This world as the God and the Goddess.
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Can you see what all the above is tending towards? I forget now where I first read it (it was definitely not in a yogic text) but it immediately rang a bell for me: the idea that the brain is actually a filter. In other words it is not a creative item, but quite the opposite: its purpose is to keep information out of our consciousness. Years later, I could see that this would chime (or 'resonate'!) very neatly with the yogic/esoteric doctrine, which sees This world as a kind of educational system. Thus: the Higher world is the world of 'panmentia' (all-knowledge), from which rays of Intuition etc occasionally descend to 'enlighten' us, or at least help us to solve a silly crossword clue, according to our receptive ability or readiness; and we earn our higher ability or readiness by our own actions. It's the parable of the seed and the fertile ground again.
Sorry about the new word, but I think we need one here. 'Omniscience' which would seem like the obvious choice actually means 'The condition of knowing all things'. I'm suggesting 'panmentia' to mean 'the knowledge-in-potential of all things'. A person will achieve 'omniscience' after accessing panmentia. Does that make sense?
The suggestion is that the Lower world, 'our' world, This world, the world of polarities, is a sort of training ground in which we set off in complete ignorance, as babies, and gradually gain in knowledge, and finally in wisdom as we learn to pay greater attention to the world about us, and its cause and purpose, and to then act within it. This wisdom ('meaning') comes to us little by little from an astral or mental level suitable to what we ask for and what we can cope with. It's all there for the asking.
The four layers of mental stuff: 1 2 3 4 Data.. which, when mechanically sorted becomes Information.. which, when intelligently organised becomes Knowledge.. which, when intuitively integrated becomes Wisdom (meaning).
I guess the esoteric addition would be: 4 5 Wisdom: which, when intuitive integration is perfect becomes Omniscience (of Panmentia).
But clearly, unrestricted access to information above our capability to integrate or comprehend would be a disaster, as many a victim of a bad LSD trip can testify, along with anyone else who has weakened 'the veil' that the yogic/esoteric doctrine speaks of, perhaps by occult dabblings, and has thus allowed access to the conscious mind for creatures and ideas that are best kept outside.
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As a frankly extreme metaphor: imagine that dogs were suddenly capable of understanding how to ride a bike, without all the background knowledge and wisdom that goes along with bicycles, like driving on the left, road courtesy, oiling the chain etc. The M25 would become a shambles overnight. Psychiatrists regularly have to deal with people who are convinced that they are God or Jesus, or a close relative of both. Too much information crossing a weakened veil, into a brain/mind complex that hasn't been properly prepared to receive or correctly interpret it, is a recipe for disaster and delusion, a Yogi would say.
A number of paranormal and mental occurrences might be half-explained via the brain-as-filter breaking down or being over-ridden somehow: everything from angelic visions to hallucinations and some sorts of schizophrenia, if Drs Wickland and Peck (see Chapter 18) are even halfright.
'The veil' is a real physical thing, the yogis say, but of a highly refined nature (cf etheric/astral/mental matter, as in Chapters 17 & 18). The brain has etheric etc bodies just as the body as a whole does. The chakras are strongly involved in how strong the veil is. No space to elaborate here, alas. There are lots of sites on the www concerning chakras. Try http://www.healer.ch/Chakras-e.html
In dreams, of course, we access these filtered-out elements more freely, and can use them to further our development even, as noted by lucid dreamers. Bizarre? Yes.. unless it's true, of course, and the whole mind-brain relationship is pretty bizarre whichever way you look at it. And it does fit into the rest of the yogic/esoteric philosophy pretty seamlessly. So maybe The basic idea of brain-as-filter is already acceptable to modern neuroscience which has found areas of the brain associated with filtering mechanisms that allow us to pay attention in distracting circumstances. Maybe this is a connection? Maybe there are more connections to come? Thus, one supposes that at least some of the chemical and electrical activity in the brain is symptomatic of the filter in action. But the precise relationship between Mind and Matter remains a mystery, as before. *** Neuroscience is a huge industry these days. Barely a week passes without some new fascination being reported via the new tools of fMRI machines and PET scanners. Various areas of the brain light up when a person is shown pictures of patterns, puzzles, family, buildings, and yes, 'artistic studies'.
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Sensory stimuli of all kinds affect the brain most powerfully, and in a broadly predictable manner.
But only 'broadly'. People stubbornly refuse to react like machines. Some react strongly to a certain stimulus; others weakly. Some refuse to react predictably at all. We really are all different, and may not reasonably be treated as only biological machines, or Richard Dawkins' 'living objects'. It is already a well-established fact that some people are actually allergic to the wonder drug penicillin, and others have been killed by ingesting a tiny grain of peanut, of all things.
The left parietal lobe, for example, is concerned with spatial sense and navigation; the temporal lobes seem to be connected to the processing of sound and speech. The amygdala is associated with fearfulness. Thousands of these correlations have been reported, but nothing in the brain is simple. Every little 'fact' discovered seems to raise a dozen other questions.
*** One deeply puzzling matter is why do we have two brains? Our left brain seems to be mainly associated with mathematical and coping abilities, while our right brain seems to be more concerned with emotional and relationship issues.
Left Brain: verbal, mathematical, responds to word meaning, intellectual, sequential, processes information linearly, logical, objective, plans ahead, analytic, introspective. 'Male' (so to speak). Right Brain: visual, tactile, feeling, intuitive, holistic, processes information in chunks, responds to emotion, subjective, spontaneous, imaginative, relational, extroverted, likes open-endedness and surprises. 'Female' (so also to speak). Iain McGilchrist would find this Male-Female division howlingly inappropriate, but I think it will do for the moment. See Mr McG's brilliant book The Master and his Emissary for a more detailed and respectable explanation of L and R brains. This present book is clearly written largely by one left-brain for another left-brain, being mainly concerned with logic. But I hope that by the end of it something more may be seen emerging.
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Most men do seem to be left-brain dominant, and most women do tend to be more rightbrain dominant; but here's the bat up your nightie: women are much better at using both sides of the brain at once. I am tempted to diverge here into a short essay on why Women seem to me to be the basic unit of humanity, while Men seem to be extremely useful for lifting heavy things and getting the lids off pickle jars. But space is too short, alas. We'll return to the l-brain/r-brain split and re-synthesis later.
Just to add to the puzzle: on the motor front, each brain tends to affect the opposite side of the body. Thus, your left-brain controls your right leg, for example.
Presumably this might explain why touchy-feely artistic people are more often lefthanded than non-artists.
This counts as 'pretty weird' in my book; just as weird as anything the yogic/esoteric doctrines suggest, and possibly weirder. What's more, it seems that left-handed people may or may not have the same left-brain and right-brain function balance as right-handers, and it seems that our nasal functions do not cross-over at all. Hmmm As an extreme example: Professor John Lorber, an expert in hydrocephalus ('water on the brain') reported that only a minority of the people he's examined with this problem have motor problems on the opposite side as the problem in the brain, meaning that the crossover effect is usually either missing, or even occasionally reversed. Why am I mentioning all this? Just to show how hard it is to make Laws concerning anything to do with the brain, and none of the Sort-of-Laws go any way at all to explaining how the chemical pudding in the skull relates to the fundamental core of our mental being: 'meaning'. *** Even 'memory' is hard to pin down in the brain. We are all certain that memories are stored in our heads, but science can't find them. Not for sure, at least. Wilder Penfield discovered in the 1950's that if you touch a certain point on the brain, certain memories can be reliably re-lived.
Sometimes with associated sounds or smells.
This is most intriguing, but there are two snags for the 'brain holds memory' theory. Firstly, re-calling a memory by prodding a brain does not prove that the memory lies at the point of prodding. When you press a door bell and a voice answers you, that does not prove that the voice lives in the
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doorbell. All you know for sure is that prod and memory are somehow associated. You do not know how. Secondly, if memory were somehow held in the (chemicals and electricity) of the brain, you would expect to be able to find one memory per cell, or something similar. But no it doesn't work that way. When recalling something, the brain cascades with light in an fMRI scan. Various patches and stripes of networks and brain areas 'talk to' each other. What is going on? Nobody knows, but the 'one memory per cell' idea is as invalid as 'one gene per feature' turned out to be in DNA research. While checking this chapter over, I googled 'Where are memories held in the brain?', expecting the usual 20 million or so replies. But no; there were no replies at all. Not one, which must be some sort of record. This proves nothing of course, but it does suggest that the memory/brain problem is still unfathomed or the www would be full of it.
If you re-phrase the search question in various ways you get thousands of responses of varying interest. Mainly they deal with chemical or mechanical conditions that seem to be associated with memory; but association is not proof of cause, or anything else, as everyone knows.
It is often suggested that memories are somehow encoded before mechanical storage in the brain. But if so, there arises another enormous problem in that we need a force (or many forces) to do the encoding. What is this force? Where is it held? What is the code? Where are memories encoded? How does it allocate coded memories to cells or complex and diversified networks? How does it distinguish between sight, sound, and smells? What controls this force? How does it control it? And how does it organise the retrieval system to pick out the one single useful answer you are looking for from the millions of memories that we seem to have pretty accurate access to?* Or, even more mind-bogglingly, all the thousands of elements of sound, sight, colour and movement that went into the memory of that day at the seaside, wet fish and all?
*Except when doing a quiz or crossword, of course.
Materialism has no answer to any of these problems; nor could it have, of course, as it will only allow for dumb chemicals and a few equally dumb material forces in its repertoire of active or creative elements. 'Electricity plus chemicals, pal. That's your lot.'
Plus smoke and mirrors, added later, alas.
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Curiously, there is some light arising on the horizon, but from a bizarrely unexpected direction. The Daily Telegraph reported on March 15, 2008, that a woman claims to have 'changed completely' since having a kidney transplant. She used to read 'low' novels but now she suddenly prefers Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, and became stroppy and snappy for a while after the operation. She is clear that these changes are a result of the transplant. This is by no means a unique case. The Daily Mail of 31 March 2006 reported that a certain William Sheridan's artistic ability blossomed from the stick-man level to drawing beautiful landscapes and wildlife pictures after he'd had a heart transplant. He later discovered that the donor had been an artist. Dr Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona, says he has documented 70 cases where he believes transplant recipients have inherited the traits of their donors.
In fact, it seems to be a well-known phenomenon, now usually called 'cellular memory'. People have reported changes in taste for food, music and art, and in sexual, recreational, and career preferences. More mysteries
How on earth can all this be? Materialism has no suggestion to make, other than 'hysteria' or 'hallucination' or some other ill-defined term which goes no way to explaining, for example, the enduring precision of the changes in the recipients' personalities and tastes, never mind any kind of mechanism whereby lumpen chemicals might generate a preference for Dostoevsky. The hypothesis that the yogic/esoteric doctrine would support is that the donor organ, the physical lump of flesh, does not contain the memory and attitudes, as such. Instead the memory/attitudes etc reside in the astral/mental bodies which infuse and surround the physical organ, and travel with it on its journey from donor to recipient. Odd? No odder than the reported personality changes, it seems to me. And it is quite consistent with the basic yogic/esoteric doctrine. So maybe it is (gasp!) true.
This of course suggests the possibility that memory may be some sort of holistic thing. Let's suppose an aptitude for skiing, say, can be transferred along with a kidney. It is reasonable to suppose that kidneys have no special relationship to the piste. Thus one might expect a liver or heart transplanted from the same person to also take along with it a love of skiing. Thus, one might reasonably surmise that our whole body is suffused with our emotional and mental aptitudes and desires, as a sort of whopping great (astro-mental?) hologram. And our memories too? All those holy relics come to mind again. It does also make one wonder about the possibility of importing into your own body the traumas and distress felt by a slaughtered animal.
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It would be very easy to test whether a partial 'personality transplant' can go along with an organ transplant (or multiple transplants), but I don't think Materialist doctors will be queuing up to do the work. After all, 'These things can't happen, and therefore they don't happen', seems to be the working rule. But no doubt some brave soul will dare to do the simple thing one day, and just check. Then he'll have the much trickier job of getting his findings published and not burned. *** Just to add to the bewilderment of how the brain/mind works, perhaps we could spend a few paragraphs on the mystery of vision. We see through the eyes, right? Hmmm. Light bounces off things and enters our eyes. It passes through the lens, registers on the retina, and is then converted into electrical signals at an estimated rate of ~9Mbps: a good broadband rate. Note: light, 'visible light', is here converted into invisible electrical pulses. The pulses reach the visual cortex (the most massive system in the human brain) where it is processed. Can you see the problems here? How can the brain, which is only a bag of chemicals, Materialists tell us, convert invisible electrical impulses into comprehensible visible scenery or a recognisable picture of a loved one, in full motion and full colour?
It's no good saying that 'television and computers do this so why not brain cells?' because televisions and computers are designed by and run by intelligence, purpose and will, not mindless chemicals.
What's more, the visual cortex is at the back of the head. So how do we ever get the impression that we are seeing something beyond the front of the head: 'out there'?
To be fair, an Idealist will also struggle with this stupendous poser. There may be a clue, however see below.
Add to this the fact that the information processed by the technically simple lens comes out upside down, and that the left eye field is passed over to the right side of the brain, and vice versa, and the picture quality is, frankly, pretty fuzzy, optically speaking. And add also that the information leaving the eye is reshuffled and effectively compressed before sending to the back of your head
Apparently some 130 million photoreceptors absorb light, but only 1.2 million channels transmit the pulses from the retina to the brain.
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What's more, according to a BBC Horizon programme of October 2010, the information arriving via the eyes provides only 10% of the total information that goes into our actual perception. The other 90% comes from other (ie, non-optical) areas of the brain. The implications of this for our understanding of 'reality' are enormous.
And what have you got? A blindingly baffling puzzle. How do we see electricity? And see it as pin-sharp, right-way-up, left-right balanced, stereoscopic, full-colour, full-motion pictures of 'out there' instead of an incomprehensible fuzzy mess of brain matter in the pitch-black back of the head, which has no access to the outside world except via the optic nerve which sent the electrical pulses to it in the first place? If you don't find this process utterly and totally baffling, then you clearly know something nobody else does, and I would love to hear from you, and so would the Nobel committee (see above for address).
You might like to add to this extraordinary puzzle the fact that we cannot, literally speaking, actually see light. If we could, the night sky would be a uniform wash of brilliant white. All we can perceive are light rays that point directly into our eyes. All the light radiating out from stars in every other direction is invisible to us. Thus, we can not, strictly speaking, 'see light'. Closer to home, we only see light rays that are reflected off a surface and directly into our eyes. All the lateral rays, we do not see otherwise the visible world would be a meaningless jumble of splodges of moving colour. Make of all that what you will. And, of course, a wavelength of light is precisely that: a measurable physical zigzag, as on a graph, like any other wave pattern. There is no trace of colour in it or implied by it. All the colour is added, somehow, by the Mind. So what on earth is it that we 'see'? And how on earth do we see it? NB If light is actually invisible, whatever that means, then the conversion from 'visible light' into electric pulses may just be some sort of electromagnetic transformer job and not a change in kind at all. It doesn't seem to help though. Doesn't help me, at any rate. All that is apparent to me is that light is an enormous mystery and might turn to be the greatest mystery of all if the implications of the little list in Chapter 17 are carefully considered.
*** Even though vision, and every other mental capacity, is still as baffling as ever to standard brain science, we have at least come a long way since the beginning of the twentieth century when real hard-line Materialism was beginning to impose itself. The most fierce branch was Behaviorism, whose followers claimed essentially that Mind literally did not exist (along with Consciousness. I don't recall what they said about Life). Of course, it was assumed that animals were mindless, thoughtless, and senseless: just 'stuff' at the end of the day.
In 1962 a Behaviorist Scientist isolated a monkey's brain and attached it to the blood supply of another animal.
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This had several unpleasant consequences, as numbers of ethicallychallenged researchers latched onto the opportunities it offered. More in Chapter 27.
The Behaviorist approach discounted any inner self-guiding thought or source of creativity: any 'I', in other words. 'Conditioned response to stimulus' was the working hypothesis. You will obey you will obey. They had no way at all of explaining things like innate Instinct (eating one's own placenta) or Intuition (suddenly connecting w-a-t-e-r with water), so they ignored them. Picking holes in the 'logic' of Behaviorism is like shooting turkeys in a barrel, so let's leave it at that. Richard Dawkins' attempt to replace the Idealist word 'idea' with the more mechanical and impersonal word 'meme' is a hangover from Behaviorism. It is currently very popular with some Materialists: 'Memes colonise us; they parasitize us and get us to pass them on. Our sense of self is thus an illusion.' Dr Susan Blackmore, Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. One can only assume that the Professor is herself parasitized by the meme of Materialism which has tricked her into thinking she has no self. But I wonder who she thinks writes her books?
But the Behaviorist tyranny is weakening as more sophisticated thinking takes over. It is very rare these days to see a nature programme on television which does not acknowledge animal intelligence, as more evidence of tool-making emerges, for example. Anyone who has ever kept a dog will already know that animals are intelligent; and if you have ever seen a cow's love for her new calf, or a bitch for her puppies, you will know that animals feel and show affection, often of a higher order than their owner's or breeder's.
Mechanist-Behaviorist ideas linger on though: 'We accept that our minds are produced by our brains.' Dr K Jansen, Psychiatrist. 'The brain creates who we are.' Dr Alice Roberts, on Don't Die Young, BBC tv. Evidence please? And possibly, a logical explanation of the principle involved?
*** So what does the brain do? Perhaps the yogic/esoteric doctrine of the purpose of our life in This world might explain it. After all, this is the physical world, and to properly experience it, we need a physical body. The most appropriate one would seem to be one that has evolved a lot of flexibility of limb and digits, via the primate branch of the naturally selected evolutionary tree, and which is thus suitable for intelligent reincarnating incomers who will be expected to manipulate their environment for good or ill, as per their individual free will. Perhaps a
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dense physical and mechanical body simply needs a heavy-duty electromechanical nervous system to take the currents needed to keep the monkey mobile? That would make some sense. But it still doesn't explain how Mind relates to brain, even allowing for the astral/mental bodies which, they say, actually 'contain' or handle our emotions and thoughts (as in the organ transplant mystery, for example). One possible clue might come from the fact that Mind clearly can affect body psychosomatically. 'Think ill, and you will become ill', sums it up. Every doctor knows this to be true. Hypochondriacs really can bring illness upon themselves. (Yogis would say that they do this by focussing on negative vibes and thoughtforms and thus attract them into their mental and astral auras, from where they eventually show up in the physical.) What is less well accepted by doctors is the opposite: that positive thinking can restore health. 'A positive attitude' is known to be helpful, but the logical extension, of thinking yourself cured, is not. That's rather odd, I think. If it works one way, then why not the other? And why not extend this to other minds as well as the patient's own? We know from the effects of hypnosis that outside minds can profoundly affect people's inner being and behaviour. And what is called 'spiritual healing' (a misnomer, but it will do for here) does sometimes work. There is a mass of evidence for it. And then there is the 'mind-input' of people like Dr Carl Wickland who have cured many seriously ill people, as have other more conventional 'talking-cure' psychiatrists and psychologists. Studies have been done which show that people who have been prayed for get better quicker than those in a control (non-prayed-for) group.
Prayer? So God gets personally involved? Hang on if we are following the so-farrational yogic/esoteric approach, then we are not necessarily talking about 'God' as such, but of Higher Mind and entities who know how to use it for creative purposes. If you have not yet read Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife by JG Fuller, you might find it helpful at this point. Or try Hands of Light by Dr Barbara Brennan (an ex-NASA physicist).
And then there is the placebo effect. Every doctor knows that someone given a sugar pill, while being told it is a wonder drug, will quite often be cured of his ill. What does the curing? The doctor's and patient's minds combined somehow. What else could it be? Mind affects body. There is no doubt of this. The problem is that our current medical paradigm is based on Materialism, which has a terrible struggle with the notion that Mind can affect body (because in the Materialist book it is Body that creates Mind), and thus, of course, with the
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placebo effect. They know it works, but have no idea why; thus they do the next best thing to understanding it, and ban it. It's not at all anathema for a Yogi of course. For him, Mind is power, quite literally. The sad result of this Materialist domination is that doctors are not allowed to prescribe placebos, by law. There is no doubt that placebos can work (when administered according to a physician's professional judgement), and they are immensely cheaper than the Big Drugs which are, one might think, inappropriately administered in placebo-treatable cases.
And 'inappropriate' might even amount to unhelpfully or even harmfully, sometimes. The patient simply does not need them at all if a placebo would do the trick, and taking a drug you don't need is not a good thing, surely? Every drug has side-effects; some very unpleasant. I wonder what Hippocrates would say? According to a 2009 report in Science, a medical team in Hamburg found that 'painrelated activity in the spinal cord' definitely reduced after the application of a placebo ointment to the arm. The immediate assumption here is that Mind can control pain, as hypnotists have always known. In other words: pain is a purely mental event. Only a Materialist system, obeying the anti-scientific dictum of Can't Work Therefore Doesn't Work, would ban such a helpful (and cheap!) potential aid.
The clearest summary of the yogic view on these matters would be that of the ancient esoteric dictum that 'Energy follows and conforms itself to thought'. 'Think ill and become ill; think well and become well'.. although there are clearly many other factors to consider, including karmic debt.
It might also go some way to explaining the mechanism of the weird phenomenon of religious stigmata, in which concentration upon the thoughtform of the suffering of Christ and the world causes actual bodily damage. This would not be a surprise to a hypnotist who can raise blisters in a few moments, I guess. St. Catherine of Siena at first had visible stigmata but then asked (who or what, precisely, I wonder?) that they might be made invisible. Now you see it, now you don't. Sleight of mind?
What does Materialism have to offer as explanation for the placebo? Nothing. So maybe *** A final illustration to show that the brain itself is a total mystery, never mind how it relates to Mind: About thirty years ago Professor John Lorber published a paper called Is Your Brain Really Necessary?
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This is a quote from an article about the paper, from Science 12 Dec 1980, by Roger Lewin:
'There's a young student at this university' says Lorber, 'who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.' The student's physician at the university (Sheffield, UK) noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. 'When we did a brain scan on him,' Lorber recalls, 'we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles (gaps in the brain mass) and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimetre or so. His brain is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.'
In other words, his head was like an orange made up of only the rind and a layer of pith. No fruit. Not for him the galactic tapestry of a neural network, but he managed a first-class degree without one. This may have been an extreme case, but Lorber said that in his study of hydrocephalus he had come across numerous other cases of otherwise normal people who had large areas of their brain missing. If one needed proof that the brain/Mind isn't just a very complicated mechanical device, like a diesel engine or a computer, surely this single case does the job? It is a White Crow par excellence, which throws into question just about every bit of brain research there has ever been.
'The brain is the onboard computer.' Richard Dawkins. Is it? Even when most of it is missing? And anyway, 'a computer' needs Mind to design it, if the metaphor is to make any sense. But in RD's world, the 'onboard computer' of the brain presumably designed (as in 'did-not-design') the Mind necessary to design (or 'not-design') the computer. Circular turkeys in a barrel.
Not surprisingly, but rather depressingly, the Medical World tried to ignore it. It still does. Lorber was even taken to task for 'over-dramatising' the case. His response was 'You have to be dramatic in order to make people listen'. But even then, they wouldn't listen. The old Materialist dogmas were stuck to just as tenaciously, despite the coach and horses Lorber had driven through them.
Among many other things, Professor Lorber had showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no relationship between volume of brain tissue and IQ. To be fair, nobody (apart from a few Nazis, I suppose) seriously thought there was a perfect correlation. After all, Neanderthalers had bigger brains then Hom Sap but nobody has suggested they were brighter.
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To add to the oddness of brain size: some children who have extremely severe epilepsy have had a complete hemisphere of their brain removed. This has led to an improvement in the patient's condition (ie, they are better off with half their brain missing). And just for fun: a cockroach can live for several weeks without its head, and some insects can live headlessly for a whole year.
Clearly the brain and the memory/recall system have some sort of close relationship. But what is it? The old Materialist hypothesis that brain makes mind just doesn't cut the mustard, even after decades of trying very hard to show that it does. There is no real sign that I've come across that anyone is seriously questioning it, however. This is fully in line with ignoring Oparin's plea concerning the Primordial Soup experiments (see Chapter 7), and the similar notion that chemical-DNA creates Life. The Dogma must not be questioned. *** The last few chapters have peeped at a number of aspects of Mind, and an alternative (ie, 'non-Materialist') view of its power and role in the universe, which is fully compliant with the requirements of Idealism, and which is acceptable to every aspect of the yogic/esoteric philosophy that I have come across. I hope it's not been too long or too boring or too complex. I think it needed space to be aired in a little detail. Obviously, I've only scratched the surface, and have raised a thousand more question than I have suggested possible solutions to, but maybe it's a start for you, dear reader, to advance from, if you find all this stuff interesting. *** A final couple of thoughts: Could it be that vibes are a clue to all this Mind/brain business? As I understand it, every atom and molecule in the universe is vibrating. Science seems to be happy with this. Yogis would say that everything vibrates at a different rate, according to its nature. Could it be that memories are 'tagged' as some kind of vibration rate in the mental aura which resonates with the vibe of the memory per se, which is stored somehow, somewhere else, and that it is resonance, generated by Will which causes recall via the bookmark-tag? I don't think the yogic/esoteric view would have a problem with that. And one scientific theory of smell already involves the suggestion that the vibratory rates of scent molecules are detected by resonating sensors in the olfactory system.
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This 'vibratory' hypothesis is suggested as an alternative to the 'key and lock' hypothesis which suggests that scent molecules lock together with detector molecules in the nose, and thus produce a signal to the brain. Fine.. but that would not explain the sensation of 'scent', would it, any more than a specific electromagnetic wavelength explains the perception of 'redness'? But I guess there's no logical reason why 'key and lock' and 'vibration' should not both be right: the locking process stimulates a new composite vibration, which well all one can say is 'somehow produces (or maybe 'accesses the thoughtform of') the sensation of the aroma of jasmine or socks.' Who knows? Light is a vibration too, so maybe the solution to the mystery of vision may also lie down this route? Perhaps 'redness', say, is a Higher-mental concept that is resonated into our own Minds via the vibration-tag of a certain wavelength?
And might it be that memories, somehow stored as 'vibration-tags' in the mental/astral bodies resonate according to the vibe rate of certain bodily chemicals/compounds/structures and thus become associated with eg, transplanted organs? Idealist science could easily look into these matters, even if it couldn't easily resolve them. Materialist science can't (ie, 'won't'), of course. It might turn out, I suppose, that DNA is, after all, the medium of transmission of non-physical attributes like preferences and talents; but at the astral or mental level, not the physical. Proteins (the building blocks of all our cells) all have different chemical compositions and thus different shapes. They will thus be bound to vibrate differently. It was recently reported (Daily Telegraph, October 2009) that biologists have just 'embarrassingly' discovered that proteins manufactured by one gene have been noted to take on differing shapes. Can you see the importance of this observation? If abiotic-chemical-DNA is the sole agent in protein manufacture, then every protein made by one chemicalmechanical DNA-gene should be identical and curl up identically. Not so, it seems. So what other forces are at work to produce the differences in shape? And what is the point or meaning of the different shapes? Maybe it's the vibratory rate, or vibratory 'shape' that matters. Who knows? Avenues that will be investigated one day, no doubt, but probably not while Materialism is still in the chair. *** It had become very clear to me by this point that there must, absolutely must be higher forces than mud and lightning at work in the universe. Mind (as in 'Intelligence/Intuition') must be a force, if not the force, working in conjunction with various other mental entities like desire and will. Thus science, and all of us who are struggling in our own personal way to understand Life the Universe and Everything,
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Wasn't The Hitchhiker's Guide a breath of fresh air! Materialist nonsense, of course, but still great stuff.
must begin to address the issue of 'Higher Forces' in principle, and we can make no real progress until we understand a little more about them than we currently do. And no doubt, as we seem to ultimately be dealing with the sort of mental forces that can create a bit of a universe, we shall make relatively little progress, whatever! But progress is progress. Good fun. *** And finally: the mental condition we call autism seems to be yet another astonishing challenge for how brain and Mind relate. Stephen Wiltshire is seriously autistic, but can recall and draw accurately very complicated buildings after one sight of the real thing, and I have seen on television a youthful pianist who can play just about any music in any style, again after just the one hearing. But this young man, genius that he would seem to be, can't tie his own shoelaces. What on earth is going on? Perhaps the most astonishing prodigy of the moment is Jay 'Bluejay' Greenberg, a child prodigy who entered the Julliard School (of Music in New York; acceptance rate ~6.5%) at the age of eleven. He had written five symphonies by the age of twelve. He tends not to correct his works, and claims that he hears them 'playing like an orchestra' in his head. All he does is write them down. 'I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written, when it isn't.' He has already been compared to the 14-year-old Mozart, who famously wrote down Allegri's Miserere after one hearing, much to the annoyance of the pope who was trying to keep the masterpiece to himself. Actually, Mozart did return once to tidy up a couple of details. Not bad going, though. Bluejay apparently hears two or three pieces playing at the same time, and can deal with them all. He would seem not to be autistic.
Miserere followed the habit of the time in employing castrati singers. These young men had frequently been sold by their impoverished parents to be mutilated by the Church of Love so they would sing soprano/falsetto forever. We've definitely moved on a bit.
*** After this list of extremely odd (but not officially weird) examples and challenges to Scientific orthodoxy, perhaps it's now time to check out a few people and events which are not at all acceptable to Materialist science: the curious world of the paranormal.
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Chapter 20 The Paranormal
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence
Nikola Tesla
The actual, the real, the true is not visible

Max Planck (The Father of the Quantum)
When I started planning this book, I was expecting that the chapter on The Paranormal would be quite a long and complex one, but now that I've reached this point, I find I've changed my mind. This is because it struck me while writing the previous chapter, that if Science didn't even break step when confronted with the astonishing White Crow of the case of the brainless Lorber student, then any exotic bird I might be able pull out of the hat in a chapter on the paranormal would have no effect whatsoever.
There's none so blind as those that choose not to see, for one of a number of reasons. More on this extraordinary phenomenon in Chapter 28.
Nevertheless, although I have little expectation that any professional Materialist will choose to rattle the cage of his convictions as a result of reading this book, I feel I still ought to present a little something on the subject of the paranormal, as there is a plausible explanation for it all which fits in so well with Idealism and the general Yogi philosophy, and all the material I've presented in previous chapters, that I am tempted to believe it might just be true. See what you think I guess you might say that 'the paranormal' falls into two broad categories: parapsychological research, and the rest. 'The rest' tends to be anecdotal, and thus unacceptable by definition to quite a lot of scientists.
But I do wonder whether the anecdotal (one-off) event of a fifty-ton asteroid landing on New York would count as evidence for the hypothesis that 'asteroids sometimes hit cities'. Presumably not, as a one-off sighting of a ghost doesn't seem to count for the hypothesis that 'ghosts sometimes appear'. And why is it acceptable to ignore strong anecdotal evidence such as a tennis ball which spontaneously everted (turned itself inside out), as reported by Lyall Watson in Lifetide? Skeptics hate to admit that anyone might possibly be cleverer than they are, so
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let us here note that Lyall Watson apparently held degrees in botany, zoology, geology, chemistry, marine biology, ecology and anthropology, and a doctorate in ethology. I think we can agree that he knew how to observe, how to think clearly, and what counts as evidence. He was also better informed in more areas than any Skeptic I have heard of.
Parapsychology is a relative newcomer, and really began in the 1930's, at Duke University in the USA. It tends to be mechanically based, looking for strong mathematical/statistical evidence in the pursuit of evidence for ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). Thus, in the early days, people spent hours and hours trying to guess which Zener card (see Chapter 1) would turn up next. It was not spectacular work, but it turned up with several sequences of events which require odds of several millions to one against chance. Curious, and evidential I would say; but not definite. Statistics never are. Ghost-hunting is a tricky occupation too, as film and video evidence can so easily be misinterpreted or simply faked. There are some photographs which do seem to genuinely defy rational explanation, but they almost always look fakeable, and of course there is an endless queue of selfrighteous Skeptics waiting to demonstrate their creed that 'If something is even approximately fakeable, then all events of this nature must be fakes'. Dreadfully poor logic, but it is currently quite acceptable to the Materialist court. Again, more on this in Chapter 28.
Meanwhile, clearer minds have always taken a more rational stance: 'I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.' Carl Jung.
Sadly, spook photos must be considered unreliable evidence, as must streaks of light across video tapes, and dull thuds on tape-recorders. And anyway, they can't really teach us anything about the paranormal and how it might work. At best they are 'suggestive of effect' and not of cause or purpose.
Apparently two out of three Britons 'believe in spirits' and one in ten thinks s/he has seen a ghost.
So leaving aside methodical parapsychological experiments, and ghosthunting, what are we left with? A surprising amount, actually. Ever since the days of table-turning and early spiritualism in the nineteenth century, there has been a small but dedicated number of scientifically-minded people who have turned their ingenuity towards devising experiments to check whether paranormal events genuinely occur or not, and if so, what they mean.
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This systematic work was preceded by the slow trickle of Indian philosophy into Britain from the Raj, in the early nineteenth century. Mainly it was viewed through the distorting lens of dogmatic Victorian Christianity, and was thus routinely misinterpreted and trivialised. But some wiser beings took the trouble to study it in proper depth. Then came the establishment in New York of The Theosophical Society in 1875, which presented a sort of synthesis of yogic and buddhic ideas, repackaged to suit western minds. The writings of Yogi Ramacharaka (and other similar writers, like Swami Vivekananda) followed a decade or two later.
'Theosophy' is derived from the two Greek words, 'theos' (a god, the Deity) and 'sophia' (wisdom), and may be defined as 'wisdom as possessed by the god/s'. It claims to be a new presentation of the secret doctrine or perennial wisdom or esoteric truth underlying all the world's religions, sciences, and philosophies. The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley is an interesting read on this subject. An Outline of Theosophy by C W Leadbeater is more specifically theosophical. Theosophy attracted the attention of Thomas Edison the inventor, Frank Lloyd Wright the architect, writers Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize in Literature 1925), Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, the educationalists Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner, and the artists Kandinsky, Klee, Gauguin and Roerich. It is possible that the term 'Sufi' also derives from 'sophia'.
*** The scientific approach to the puzzle of the paranormal began in 1882 with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in London.
The American SPR followed three years later.
It was founded by the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University, along with some of his academic colleagues, and from the start it busied itself with the mysteries of hypnotism, and also with the deepest mystery of all: did people 'survive' death or not? The best way of tackling this question, they thought, was to work with mediums: the seers, witches, wise women and nature's children of old, who were enjoying some new-found respectability thanks to spiritualism. Mediums claimed to be able to contact people from 'the other side'. The SPR thought that the information mediums came up with could surely be either verified or proved to be nonsense. The researchers did indeed collect some impressive results, receiving messages from beyond containing information which later checked out, but which could not reasonably have been known to the medium or anyone in the room.
However, the Skeptics of the day (and there were many, particularly in the higher echelons of Science) could not, by definition, accept that anything whatsoever could possibly be real evidence and thus insisted that everything thought to be evidence must be fraud.
The reputation of Theosophy as a thought-system still retains a quite irrational tinge of negativity after the savage onslaughts of the C19 bigots. I recommend looking at it for yourself and making your own mind up. Nullius in verba, every time. You might like to try Leadbeater's Outline as a starting point. For a free download, try http://www.archive.org/details/outlineoftheosop00leadrich. I don't recommend tackling Madame Blavatsky; dreadfully heavy going. I've still not managed to finish her Secret Doctrine. If you're prepared for some shocks try AE Powell's books, which also seem to be available to download from the www. I would start with The Etheric Double.
Their case was strengthened by the fact that an awful lot of Victorian 'psychics' were indeed frauds, using all kinds of Music Hall trickery to deceive the bereft and the trusting. 'Spirit photography' followed quickly on the heels of proper photography, and if you've ever seen any of these ghastly crude caricatures, you can only shake your head in wonder than anyone could take them seriously. Also, the few apparently genuine psychics whom the SPR filtered out from the liars and the deluded, were often still not above massaging their own techniques and 'messages' from time to time. Their reasoning was that too much was expected of them; that they were not like those new-fangled talking-machines, and could not perform to order; they could only receive messages when conditions were right both for themselves and for 'the other side'. So, when a half dozen well-heeled gentlemen turned up of an evening to hear wonders reported from beyond, well, what's a girl to do? She gotta live, ain't she, and a shilling here and a shilling there can't be turned down just like that, guv'nor. I'm a nice girl, I am.
The mediums were usually women of little education, but they weren't all called Eliza. That couple of sentences just seemed appropriate, by way of setting the social tone of these early investigations.
If you ever read any serious reports of mediums' work, you will probably appreciate that the women had a point. As it was realised that mediums could only transmit concepts that their own minds were suited to, in terms of subtlety and experience, more sophisticated mediums began to be used, and the evidence for survival, though never absolute, kept creeping upwards, and the SPR began to attract increasing numbers of serious and educated people, despite the current zeitgeist of triumphant and scornful Materialism. Brave men, I would say.
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Shortly after the death of Frederic Myers, a classical scholar and one of the SPR's founders, there began a series of automatic writings (an alternative to the Ouija board for receiving messages), produced by a number of mediums not in communication with each other, with interlocking messages full of classical allusions. The mediums would not have properly understood the import of the allusions, whose complexity seemed to indicate an organising intelligence, taken to be Myers and others out to prove their own 'survival'. This 'cross-correspondence' (produced over some 30 years) seems still to be good evidence for 'survival', as no other satisfactory explanation has been suggested. Incidentally, one message claiming to come from the discarnate Frederic Myers reported that communicating via a medium was like 'standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary'. That would be Eliza, then.
Among them were two Nobel Prize winners (Lord Rayleigh: physics, 1904; and Charles Richet: physiology/medicine, 1913); William James, the Professor of Psychology at Harvard University (who discovered Mrs Piper, one of the most impressive mediums the SPR ever dealt with); Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Great Britain; Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor of Maths and Physics at Liverpool University, then Principal of Birmingham University.
Lodge lost his son in the First World War and subsequently wrote an interesting book about his experiences of trying to contact him via mediums. See Raymond, or Life and Death.
Supporters included such illuminati as Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carroll and Carl Jung. The SPR was a serious project, and among its most serious supporters was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and the one man most responsible for Darwin publishing his own On the Origin of Species. *** Perhaps the most thorough practical investigator was Sir William Crookes whose careful scientific work was, and still is, highly thought of. Sir William was a busy man. He did original work in the fields of chemical analysis, disinfection, photography, the metallurgy of gold and silver, polarized light, spectroscopy, solar and terrestrial spectra, the optical phenomena of opals, the spectrum microscope, the luminous intensity of light, the photometer, meteorology and astronomy (including taking standard photographs of the moon), wireless telegraphy, the conduction of electricity, cathode rays, plasmas, the spinthariscope, and diamonds. He also devised and
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constructed the Crookes radiometer, and the Crookes tube... the forerunner of the television tube. He discovered two new chemical elements: thallium and helium, and paved the way for a third: protactinium. And he was a member of the Government Eclipse Expedition in 1870. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1863, and eventually became President of this august body. He was also, at various times, the President of The Chemical Society, The Institution of Electrical Engineers, The Society of Chemical Industry, and The British Association. He founded the Chemical News, and became editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science. He received numerous awards: a Royal Gold Medal for his various chemical and physical researches, the Davy Medal, and the Sir Joseph Copley Medal. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him a gold medal and a prize of 3,000 francs in recognition of his important work. Oh, yes and he was knighted for services to science and went on to be awarded the Order of Merit, an honour limited to 24 living persons. He also found the time to father ten children.
As far as I know, he did not invent the stop-watch. But I may be wrong in this.
Why am I mentioning all this? Perhaps you can guess.
All research depends upon the honesty and thoroughness of the researcher, and it seems to me that in Wm Crookes we have a man of the highest integrity and capability.
Crookes was initially very sceptical about psychical research, but explained that:
'I consider it the duty of scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to examine phenomena which attract the attention of the public, in order to confirm their genuineness or to explain, if possible, the delusions of the dishonest and to expose the tricks of deceivers'.
He insisted that his investigations

'...must be at my own house, and my own selection of friends and spectators, under my own conditions, and I may do whatever I like as regards apparatus'.
You can't want fairer than that, can you?
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He investigated a number of mediums under these conditions, and with a suitably sceptical (but not 'Skeptical') mindset, and witnessed, among other things, rappings, the movement of things without physical cause, levitation, and the appearance of luminous objects and writings, with no normal human input. I think one of the experiments of this careful, intelligent, and scrupulous man will stand as a White Crow. A famous medium of the day was Daniel Dunglas Home who had been witnessed to levitate to a variety of heights on dozens of occasions, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will.
Crookes had experiences of levitation himself: 'On one occasion I witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting on it, rise several inches from the ground. On another occasion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such a manner that its four feet were visible to us. It then rose about three inches, remained suspended for about ten seconds and then slowly descended. 'At another time two children, on separate occasions rose from the floor with their chairs, in full daylight under (to me) most satisfactory conditions; for I was kneeling and keeping close watch upon the feet of the chair, observing distinctly that no one might touch them. 'The most striking instances of levitation which I have witnessed have been with Mr Home. On two separate occasions have I seen him raised completely from the floor of the room. Once sitting in an easy chair and once standing up. On each occasion I had full opportunity of watching the occurrence as it was taking place.' In the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Vol. 6, no. 15, 1889), Crookes further stated: 'On several occasions Home and the chair on which he was sitting at the table rose off the ground. This was generally done very deliberately, and Home sometimes tucked up his feet on the seat of the chair and held up his hands in full view of all of us. On such an occasion I have got down and seen and felt that all four legs were off the ground at the same time, Home's feet being on the chair. Less frequently the levitating power was extended to those sitting next to him. Once my wife was thus raised off the ground in her chair.' The most striking occurrence of levitation was witnessed on December 13 1868, at Ashley House, Victoria Street, London, in the presence of Adare, the Master of Lindsay and Charles Wynne, Adare's cousin. Home floated out of a third story window and came in through the window of another room. Lord Adare noted: 'He [Home] then said to us, 'Do not be afraid, and on no account leave your places' and he went out into the passage. Lindsay suddenly said 'Oh, good heavens! I know what he is going to do; it is too fearful.' 'Adare: 'What is it?'
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Lindsay: 'I cannot tell you, it is too horrible! Adah (the spirit of a deceased American actress) says that I must tell you; he is going out of the window in the other room, and coming in at this window.' We heard Home go into the next room, heard the window thrown up, and presently Home appeared standing upright outside our window; he opened the window and walked in quite coolly. 'Ah,' he said, 'you were good this time' - referring to our having sat still and not wished to prevent him. He sat down and laughed.' Charlie: 'What are you laughing at?' Home: 'We [the spirits; Home always was spoken of in third person when in trance] are thinking that if a policeman had been passing and had looked up and had seen a man turning round and round along the wall in the air he would have been much astonished. Adare, shut the window in the next room.' I got up, shut the window, and in coming back remarked that the window was not raised a foot, and that I could not think how he managed to squeeze through. He arose and said, 'Come and see.' I went with him; he told me to open the window as it was before. I did so; he told me to stand a little distance off; he then went through the open space, head first, quite rapidly, his body being nearly horizontal and apparently rigid. He came in again, feet foremost, and we returned to the other room. It was so dark I could not see clearly how he was supported outside. He did not appear to grasp, or rest upon, the balustrade, but rather to be swung out and in. Outside each window is a small balcony or ledge, 19 inches deep, bounded by stone balustrades, 18 inches high; the balustrades of the two windows are 7 feet 4 inches apart, measuring from the nearest points. A string-course, 4 inches wide, runs between the windows at the level of the bottom of the balustrade; and another 3 inches wide at the level of the top. Between the window at which Home went out, and that at which he came in, the wall recedes 6 inches. The rooms are on the third floor. I asked Lindsay how Adah had spoken to him on the three occasions. He could scarcely explain; but said it did not sound like an audible human voice; but rather as if the tones were whispered or impressed inside his ear. When Home awoke he was much agitated; he said he felt as if he had gone through some fearful peril, and that he had a horrible desire to throw himself out of the window; he remained in a very nervous condition for a short time, then gradually became quiet.' From Experiences in Spiritualism with D. D. Home by Viscount Adare. The Master of Lindsay gave an account of the incident before the Committee of the Dialectical Society in London in 1869 and wrote out an account in 1871. Before the society he stated: 'I saw the levitations in Victoria Street, when Home floated out of the window; he first went into a trance and walked about uneasily; then he went into the hall; while he was away, I heard a voice whisper in my ear 'He will go out of one window and in at another.' I was alarmed and shocked at the idea of so dangerous an experiment. I told the company what I had heard, and we then waited for Home's return. Shortly after he entered the room, I heard the window go up, but I could not see it, for I sat with my back to it. I, however, saw his shadow on the opposite wall; he went out of the window in a horizontal position, and I saw him outside the other window [that in the next room] floating in the air. It was eighty-five feet from the ground. There was no balcony along the windows, merely a string course an inch and a half wide; each window had a small plant stand, but there was no connection between them.'
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Crookes had a wooden cage made, wrapped with copper wire, built especially to contain an accordion. In Crookes' own report:
'The accordion was a new one, having been purchased by myself for the purpose of these experiments at Wheatstone's, in Conduit Street. Mr Home had neither handled nor seen the instrument before the commencement of the test experiments. 'Mr Home sat in a low easy chair at the side of the table. In front of him under the table was the aforesaid cage, one of his legs being on each side of it. I sat close to him on his left, and another observer sat close to him on his right, the rest of the party being seated at convenient distances round the table. 'For the greater part of the evening, particularly when anything of importance was proceeding, the observers on each side of Mr Home kept their feet respectively on his feet, so as to be able to detect his slightest movement. 'Mr Home took the accordion between the thumb and middle finger of one hand at the opposite end to the keys. Having previously opened the bass key myself, and the cage being drawn from under the table so as just to allow the accordion to be pushed in with its key downwards, it was pushed back as close as Mr Home's arm would permit, but without hiding his hand from those next to him. Very soon the accordion was seen by those on each side to be waving about in a somewhat curious manner; then sounds came from it, and finally several notes were played in succession. Whilst this was going on my assistant went under the table, and reported that the accordion was expanding and contracting; at the same time it was seen that the hand of Mr Home by which it was held was quite still, his other hand resting on the table. 'Presently the accordion was seen by those on either side of Mr Home to move about, oscillating and going round and round the cage, and playing at the same time. Dr A. B. now looked under the table, and said that Mr Home's hand appeared quite still whilst the accordion was moving about emitting distinct sounds. 'Mr Home still holding the accordion in the usual manner in the cage, his feet being held by those next him, and his other hand resting on the table, we heard distinct and separate notes sounded in succession, and then a simple air was played. As such a result could only have been produced by the various keys of the instrument being acted upon in harmonious succession, this was considered, by those present to be a crucial experiment. But the sequel was still more striking, for Mr Home then removed his hand altogether from the accordion, taking it quite out of the cage, and placed it in the hand of the person next to him. The instrument then continued to play, no person touching it and no hand being near it.'
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Crookes continues:
'The investigators present on the test occasion were an eminent physicist, high in the ranks of the Royal Society, whom I will call Dr A. B.; a well-known Sergeant-at-Law, whom I will call Sergeant C. D.; my brother; and my chemical assistant.' These people were Crookes' chemical assistant, Williams; Crookes' brother Walter; Sir William Huggins, the eminent physicist and astronomer, and ex-president of the Royal Society; and Sergeant EW Cox, a prominent lawyer.
And he added:
'It argues ill for the boasted freedom of opinion among scientific men, that they have so long refused to institute a scientific investigation into the existence and nature of facts asserted by so many competent and credible witnesses, and which they are freely invited to examine when and where they please.'
This refusal to investigate continues to this day, 140 years later.

For a fuller account of this experiment try http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/books/crookes/researches/investigation.htm
Many believed that Crookes would expose the phenomena he investigated, but he insisted that his investigations 'point to the agency of an outside intelligence'. This surprised the general public and shocked his Scientific colleagues, who were convinced that all of spiritualism was fraudulent, and Crookes' final report so outraged the Scientific establishment that there was talk of depriving him of his Fellowship of the Royal Society. WB Carpenter, a biologist from London University, made an anonymous attack upon Crookes in the Quarterly Review, describing Crookes as 'a specialist of specialists'. If we look back to Crookes achievements in multiple areas of science, we can only lament at the mindset of the bigot. For any rational thinker, of which you, dear reader are clearly one, or you would not still be reading this book, this surely is a White Crow? How can a Materialist explanation possibly apply to this well-witnessed report by a most highly regarded scientist? Well, obviously it can't, so they fall back to the default position of 'All is fraud!!!' 'Prove it', say I. 'And if you can't prove it, then please learn some manners. Better still, learn a little logic.'
Sorry about that. But the arrogance of ignorance was by now seriously irritating me.. and from men of science. It is apparent that scientists are only officially Great when they support the Materialist dogma. Otherwise their works are ignored, suborned, ridiculed or. well, add your own negatively-tuned adjective.
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Newton, 'the greatest scientist of all time' suffered from this, as did Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. If these great men were abused, how much more must less famous men have had to endure? As of now Rupert Sheldrake is the prime target, but he is not alone by a long shot. James Lovelock faced the wrath of the Materialist Establishment when he first published his Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a complex self-regulating system. They accused 'Gaia' of being teleological ('having an end in view; a purpose': anathema to Materialists). JL even 'adjusted' his turn of phrase to fit in better with their diktats. But he stuck to his guns. Good for him. Many people who have studied the arguments and the evidence now consider Gaia as a sound Theory. You will not be surprised to learn that the yogic/esoteric philosophy is quite clear that the self-regulation Lovelock discovered is indeed teleological: it would seem to be there to enable complex Life to evolve and flourish. Lovelock is pessimistic about the future, as he calculates human spoliation of the planet is likely to be more than Gaia can cope with. I suspect that yogis foresee a crisis, followed by an outbreak of (relative) sanity, as reason begins to replace fear and greed.
*** I think the accordion experiment is enough. However, just for fun, here is another report which I think qualifies as a White Crow. See what you think I will deal with it only briefly here. In 1920, Professor Charles Richet (Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine 1913) set up an experiment in the newly formed Parisian Institut Mtapsychique International (IMI) which aimed to produce a permanent relic of a paranormal event. The medium was Franek Kluski, a remarkable man who had once survived being shot in the heart and being declared clinically dead. Under closely controlled conditions, and with multiple responsible witnesses (including Richet), Kluski produced a number of odd effects including partially-physicalised fingertips, which would touch the sitters. The main experiment involved a 10cm layer of molten wax, floating on a bowl of heated water situated in front of the ring of sitters. Kluski's hands were firmly gripped at all times, and he had no assistant. Kluski's task was to 'form' a whole semi-physical hand, and to cause it to be plunged multiple times into the molten wax. The ensuing wax 'glove' was then allowed to cool. It was then filled with plaster and the wax was melted away to leave a permanent plaster cast of the event. The experiment was repeated a number of times, and very great precautions were taken against the possibility of fraud, even down to secretly inoculating the wax with a marker chemical immediately before the experiment started. The 'glove' was subsequently tested for the secret marker. It was present. Thus the glove had been produced from the wax in the bowl and could not possibly have been smuggled in.
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For the full account of the conditions and results of the experiment visit www.metapsychique.org/The-Kluski-Hands-Moulds.html Another candidate for the White Crow was the remarkable experiment with Mme Kulagina, who could reputedly move matchsticks around a table without touching them, and set a compass spinning by passing her hand over it. I've seen film of these events, but they are not really fool-proof experiments, it seems to me. A much better experiment involved cracking an egg into a bowl of saline solution of such a strength that the egg floated in it. Kulagina then separated the yolk from the white by mind power alone. I believe film exists of this event, but I have been unable to track it down. Still photographs are pretty meaningless, especially as science in Stalin's Russia was very much a political tool, and demands considerable scepticism. However, a proper unedited movie of the egg experiment would be pretty conclusive evidence, I would say. I really don't see how anyone could separate yolk from albumen with wires or magnets or mirrors, or tipping the table with her foot, or any other shenanigans. Perhaps one day someone else would like to duplicate this experiment, in a properly controlled lab or studio, with multiple witnesses and continuous HD video recording from several angles. Kulagina also apparently stopped a frog's heart from beating. I think we can do without repeating that one. What explanation can there be for the accordion and the wax glove? Obviously there can be no Materialist one except systemic deception and fraud, involving previously heroic figures in the world of scientific investigation and experiment. There is no evidence of such fraud. And anyway, what possible motive would a Nobel Prize winner or a member of
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the Royal Society have for sticking his neck out in such a provocative manner, and thus risking the ridicule and abuse he predictably received from his colleagues and peers? Please, Skeptics use a little logic. *** The Idealist explanation is more interesting, and of course, more rational. I'm sure you can write it yourself after all the previous chapters. Given that Materialism is irrational, and must thus be replaced by Idealism
See Chapters 5 or 11, if you need to refresh your memory
the yogic/esoteric Understanding claims that: Mind came first in the universe (as required by Idealism). Thus Mind made Matter (somehow... clearly, the ways of Higher Mind are not likely to be comprehensible to Lower Mind. The frog cannot understand the prince.) Matter ranges from very very fine mental, through astral and etheric, to densest physical. Thus Mind manipulated Matter (presumably via Will and mental Form) down through the various increasingly dense 'bodies' via some sort of solidification similar to an electrical 'stepping-down' process. (More in Chapter 22.) Add to this, the reasonable claim (logical necessity?) of Idealism that people don't die. Only the body dies. The Mind does not. Thus discarnate entities are not a problem, and would explain very well such things as ghosts, poltergeists, possession (and some cases of multiple personality, no doubt). In the cases above, it is thus not unreasonable to assume that the medium can contact and engage the cooperation of certain discarnate beings (usually referred to as 'spirits') to precipitate physical matter via their own mind power to a great enough degree to squeeze an accordion or make a hand-shaped former for a wax glove to deposit upon.
This 'former' being physicalised via a mental 'Platonic form', of course.
If we follow the logical progression of these threads then both of the White Crows above start to make some sort of sense. In fact the accordion stunt is now easy to 'explain'; and the wax glove only a little harder.
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Obviously, this is only the most elementary precursor to a full explanation, which may lie beyond the capacity of Lower Mind, in the realm of panmentia and Higher Mind.
The Kulagina egg separation, assuming it is genuine, is something more abstract, as it seems not to involve any discarnates, but simply(!) involves the creative process itself, of applying the triumvirate of Desire (to create) + Intellect (delineation of required result) + Will (power) in a particular direction, and with quite extraordinary physical and mental effort, as monitored and reported by the experimenters. *** The science correspondent of a national daily paper, recently (2009) said that few subjects more infuriate scientists than claims of paranormal phenomena, because if confirmed, 'the whole fabric of science would be threatened.' What nonsense Science is a process a method.. NOT a dogma. Such Anomalies as the above should be seen as grist to the mill for curious and investigative minds; not seen as threats to 'the whole fabric' of anything, except an irrational dogma that science should never have adopted in the first place. *** All of these suggested explanations may be baloney of course, if you can find a flaw in the logic.
Personally, I can't find one, and I've tried very hard over many years.
But I'm sure that the effects reported above, by Crookes and Richet, are not baloney, and I would be supported in this by one of the greatest, yet relatively unsung, heroes of science: Alfred Russel Wallace. He stuck his neck out and impartially investigated spiritualism, again knowing what derision it would attract to him. He consistently supported William Crookes. Yet he was the 'other man' who independently arrived at the Theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection. But for a gentleman's agreement arrived at with Charles Darwin, Wallace could now be held in the same regard as CD, and thus be Richard Dawkins' hero, assuming that RD could cope with the embarrassing fact that Wallace would not dismiss spiritualism, even when strongly urged to do so. He was an impartial and
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honest thinker and would not be distracted from what he perceived as solid evidence for a non-Materialist reality.
It is my view that in the light of all the above, he will one day be seen as a greater and deeper analyst than even Darwin was. Anyway we now have Newton, the greatest scientist ever, being a religious maniac Darwin not being a Materialist Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, believing in reincarnation Mendel, the pioneer in genetics, being an abbot, no less and Wallace, the co-discoverer of Natural Selection being a positive recogniser of paranormal reality. None of them would have considered for a moment joining the modern 'neo-Darwinists' and Richard Dawkins; hence Ill use a small 'd' from now on: 'neo-darwinism'. This one's for you, CD. PS Heaven knows what to make of those reports of levitation. I guess the mediums themselves would claim they were lifted up by invisible, but partially-physicalised hands, similar to those which plunged into the hot wax in the Richet/Kluski experiments. That would fit, I guess. All a bit odd. Decidedly odd, in fact. But 'odd' does not equal 'lies' or 'rubbish'. It simply equals 'ignorance'. And of course 'that's odd' has always been the starting point for all great science and scientists.
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Part Three A Solution?
A rational extension of Idealism is that the standard Theory of Evolution does not go far enough. There are many other ramifications, too. A few are explored here.
This section also takes a brief look at paradigms and fluidity.
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Chapter 21a (DarwinPlus) A Great Surprise
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth
Sherlock Holmes (as told to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it

Albert Einstein
All the previous chapters follow pretty accurately the way my researches had led my mind, from a teenage wish to find out why science didn't tackle ghosts, to a broad understanding of what science, religion, philosophy and the occult are all about, and how they relate to each other. It had taken a couple of decades to make all the connections I've been discussing, ferreting out commonalities and discarding all accreted nonsense as being possibly interesting in its own right, but not of central importance. The greatest shocks I had come across had been firstly that Materialism existed as a 'philosophy'; then, that it was irrational and unsupported by evidence; and then that it had enormous power and influence over the whole of society and not just science (More on this in Chapter 27). What then surprised me most was how all sorts of apparently disparate elements slotted together (eg the scientific Law of Cause and Effect connecting with the yogic Law of Karma; Intuition connecting with Higher Mind; the Big Bang connecting with the Breath of Brahman) and dropped neatly into place once one thing, and one thing only, was discarded on the grounds of being 100% wrong; and that one thing, you won't be surprised to learn, was the dogma of Materialism. All the other elements of science, religion and various philosophies, could be seen as valid or partially valid.
The problem of conflicting philosophers as outlined in Chapter 9 was now resolved for me as: 'All (bar one!) are partially right; hence all the overlaps and inter-twinings, but the problem they all have in common is that they are all trying to go ever deeper with insufficient levels of information: ie, any level less than panmentia.'
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Nothing apart from Materialism (in its claim that Life Mind and Consciousness arose solely from physical Energy/Matter) was clearly and absolutely wrong.
For example, even such a thing as a virgin birth was now not a real problem, as it either happened or it didn't. Either way, it did not change the essential nature of what Christianity is about: ie, that there is a Higher Mind than your own, which created the universe, and of which you are, by definition, a part; and that this Mind is benevolent; thus, you and everyone else must be essentially benevolent too, so use your free will to be nice to each other. Would any Christian argue with this? (Or any Jew or Muslim? Hindu or Buddhist? Not according to what I'd read.) Did the virgin birth actually happen? Don't know; don't care. But it would be a piece of cake for the sort of Higher Mind that can knock up a universe. And the incredibly complex number of systems and processes that go into a normal birth seem to me to be equally as unlikely as a virgin one, if not more so. More in Chapter 22. All the findings of science concerning Laws, and Evolution, and the importance of DNA, and just about everything else, were fine. What mattered was the interpretation put upon all these findings. It had become clear to me that as Materialism was wrong, then any interpretation of data or theory based upon Materialism must also be at least faulty, if not plain wrong, too. Paradox would be bound to appear, as indeed it does, over and over again: an obvious example being that DNA was/is claimed to be Life Itself, despite DNA being known to be a lifeless chemical.
I'd completed the task I'd started out with, and had found a rational philosophy to account for ghosts and the paranormal in general, and had, en route, discovered a rational suggestion for the meaning for Life, which I had not been looking for. Was this Truth? I couldn't say; but it did obey the rules of logic, was self-consistent, and did accord with SPIT, which was always going to be the best I could hope for, wherever the journey took me. Whether I have explained it all clearly to you, dear reader, I can only hope. You will make your own judgment on its validity. *** So.. job done! Now what? It felt as though there might be more to come. And there was. It arrived on another sunny morning in the orchard. I was tying protective lengths of chicken mesh round the lower apple boughs to protect the bark from the nibbly attention of the sheep when I spotted Cheeky, our old Jacob matriarch, eyeing me up and clearly plotting. She was the resident woolly genius to whom all the others deferred. It was Cheeky who found gaps in hedges, and who had discovered how to dig up Jerusalem artichokes from the winter soil. Within a week they were all at it. I idly wondered how this might relate to how evolution worked in practice when the penny dropped with loud mental clang:
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Evolution is not about body but about Mind

Cheeky had seen us digging artichokes. She knew they were in the ground. She remembered this and discovered how to hack them up with her hooves. The others copied. Thus did the many evolve a little via the example of the one. If we transfer this principle to humans we eventually arrive at 'education'. Education is what helps to make us smarter. It is the smarter ones who are most likely to survive, in the strictly physical Darwinian sense. So far, so unsurprising, perhaps, but if you add all the material I've tried to explain in previous chapters, it becomes perfectly obvious that what matters for Man to evolve in a meaningfully human sense (ie, from Beast to Saint) is not his body but his Mind (including here emotion, ethical attitudes etc), and above all, his deliberate choices. Man evolves, animals evolve, everything evolves constantly in this 'world of change', the yogic/esoteric philosophy claims. And the power behind it, and in which all creatures move and have their being, is Mind. It can be nothing else if the logical necessity of accepting Idealism is obeyed. And every creature evolves via the choices it makes.
Of course the body evolves too but it is not the most important factor in Man's evolutionary progress.
For the sake of convenience, I think I'll stick with the usual Darwinian word 'evolution' for body-form (somatic) development, but will call the higher form, concerning the development of Mind, 'DarwinPlus'.
Sorry about that, but it does seem to need a new word. And I realise that 'DarwinPlus' is a bit annoying but it's the best I can manage, I'm afraid. Every other option I could think of (like 'Super Evolution' or 'Mega Evolution', 'Evolution2', etc etc, has already been taken, it seems. I tried over 8o and nearly wore Google out.
If the broad yogic/esoteric/occult doctrine is correct (and I can find no rational flaw in it, and can think of no other possible rational alternative. Can you?) then Man is essentially a non-physical being (in keeping with the necessity of Idealism), who incarnates into a suitable body in which to exercise his own powers of choice according to his karmic needs on his
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journey from frog to prince. The body has evolved along its own route, according to Darwin and Wallace's path of Natural Selection. It is quite literally a vehicle. Life is a Mind school. The physical vehicle for the Mind is that of a self-obsessed and sex-mad monkey. It's a tough old school to master.
'Yes indeed Life is hard to master.. but if you'd thought it was going to be easy, would you have joined?' Socrates (and others) has been attributed with saying that the male libido is 'like being chained to a madman'; we might also say 'like being chained to a selfish ape, whose animal drives and emotions, as witnessed by the more primitive urges associated with the older parts of the brain, are a huge challenge to the Man's slowly developing sense of self-control'. This would fit perfectly with the karmic view of life and its challenges and struggles towards mastery of one's inner self, and towards perfect autonomy, finally able to effortlessly resist all worldly temptations. Your outer monkey, like Satan before him, is your friend, in that he provides the resistance against which you test and develop your own purpose, will, patience, courage and persistence. This is why monks choose celibacy, and why religions urge us to 'sacrifice' the animal pleasures of the physical world in order to further develop the lasting joy of Higher priorities, though they rarely seem able to explain it in ways that make sense to people like me.
So did we evolve from apes, then? Yes or no? Well, it depends on how you look at it. DarwinPlus says that our bodies did; but we, the inhabitants of the ape body, did not.
This 'we' refers to the essential 'I' we all have (or 'are'), which has cropped up in previous chapters. It is also very relevant to Socrates' plea to 'Know thyself'.
DarwinPlus would thus seem to cause the age-old philosophical issue of 'monism' vs 'dualism' to simply drop away. Is Man a single 'mindbody', or a dual 'mind + body'? People have come to blows over this one. But surely, it just depends on how you look at it? Yes, he is clearly mindbody at the dayto-day Wet Fish level, but when the body dies, Man (as Mind) does not. 'Paradox' resolved. I wonder what your reaction is to this idea of mental evolution? Perhaps you had already worked it out. Perhaps you find it 'interesting' and worthy of some thought. Or perhaps you think 'That's it. He's flipped. I was willing to allow him some slack up to this point, but now he's tipped over into fantasy.'
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All I can suggest is that you look at the logic of it again, considering all the suggestions and evidence of previous chapters, and abandon any old Beliefs while you're doing it. Logic. Always logic
Obviously logic cannot take us right into panmentia; but it can show the way, 'like a finger pointing at the moon'. Please note that my insistence on logic does not mean that I am demeaning the role of emotion. Far from it. 'Love' is the highest emotion, and in the end, it's all that matters if the esoteric Understanding is to be believed. Meanwhile, what matters in the terms of this journey is being sure to separate the clear logic of Understanding from the clouding emotion of Belief. For further possible steps, see Chapter 26.
*** The first reaction of an awful lot of people will be 'Well if that's the case why hasn't science told us all about it already?' Need I answer that one? Perhaps I'd better, just in case: science, which ought to be an impartial method of investigation, has allowed itself to become subjugated to the irrational and unevidenced dogma of Materialism, and is thus heavily prejudiced (a word which ought to be quite alien to science) against almost every proposition in this book.
Remember that Materialism insists that Life, Mind, and Consciousness itself, arose as by-products of mindless chemicals binding together, by chance, at odds of countless googolplexes to one against. These odds are apparently quite acceptable to Materialist Scientists who would never dream of entering a lottery at odds of a mere 14,000,000 to 1. (See Chapter 11 for just one very tiny fraction of the calculation. A googolplex is a mathematical term for a number originally defined as 'one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired'. Google it for more info.) Of course, if an event never happened then it is nonsense to ascribe odds for or against it 'happening by chance'. The only way to get rid of all those billions/trillions/gazillions of embarrassing zeroes is to accept that Life 'never happened by chance'. And surely Idealist logic requires this?
As Materialism sees the whole of creation in terms of only chemicals and mechanical energies which obey the blind Laws of physics, it can have no rational explanation for the existence of any non-physical entity like Mind or love or commonsense, or logic itself; and no explanation for any of our mental sensations. The gorgeous colours of a sunset? The fragrance of a lily? The haunting beauty of a D minor chord?
And what about the existence of those Laws themselves? If the Big Bang produced just a bland super-plasmic yottaflex-flux of energy-goo, how did Law of any sort spontaneously create itself from this mess? How could it? By what principle might Law arise spontaneously from no-law? How might cosmos arise spontaneously from chaos? It's the same paradox as 'Life from non-life' etc, all over again. Of course a DarwinPlus universe created by Mind, for a purpose, does not present a problem in principle here
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(cf Darwin himself requiring a 'Creator' to form the Laws. See the epigraphs from Origins quoted in Chapter 3).
Materialists can explain something of the astonishing intricacy of the neuro-sensory system's electrochemical processes, but not the personal sensation of the perfume of jasmine, the frisson of velvet, the elevating power of Miserere, or the sheer brilliant redness of vermilion.
Further proof that colour does not come to us from the mechanical senses (eyes) is that we can remember a red balloon, in all its redness when no balloon is physically present. We can also make up a pink and purple striped zebra, such as does not appear to trot up and down the Serengeti. Colour comes from the Mind.
And they cannot explain how the visual process (see Chapter 19) results in perception of a world 'out there'. Neither can they explain the formation, storage and recollection of memory; or the cellular memory of organ transplants; or hypnosis or Intuition. But if we substitute Idealism for Materialism and follow the logic through, as per the yogic/esoteric Understanding that Mind lies behind everything, we can at least begin to explain all these phenomena. We can even add telepathy, levitation, ghosts, mediumship and channelling, clairvoyance, psychometry, Near Death Experiences, Out Of the Body Experiences, voodoo, possession, obsession, sudden religious conversion, angels, shamanism, sorcery, 'spiritual' healing, the placebo effect, poltergeists, invisible friends, idiots savants, dowsing, exorcism, hauntings, stigmata, psychokinesis, inspiration, the Ouija board, apparitions, deathbed conversions, automatic writing, prayer, witch doctors, 'death-greetings',
Harry Patch, one of the last survivors of WW1 reported watching a soldier dying, and suddenly calling 'Mother!'. Mr Patch was quite sure this was a call of recognition, not a frightened plea. This effect has been reported thousands of times.
visions (as in the well-documented case at Fatima in Portugal in 1917), phantom limbs, hallucinations, bilocation, meditation and a thousand and one other 'supernatural' phenomena, as reported by the score in the writings of Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson to name but two, even down to Watson's everting tennis ball. All totally anathema to Materialists, but consistently reported by sensible people, including Nobel Prize winners and many other heroes of science in every country of the world and throughout history. Add to this the obvious 'instinct to religion' that all societies seem to have
A modern example being the powerful revival of Christian Orthodoxy in Russia, despite seventy years of dedicated state obliteration. Stalin dynamited the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 1931. As soon as the USSR collapsed, planning started. The re-build took just six years. A million Muscovites contributed to the
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building fund. The urge to religion will not go away. Post-Maoist China is discovering the same thing. (Freud called the 'instinct to religion' 'a delusion'. As he had no proof of this, one might equally suggest that the 'instinct to atheism' is also a delusion.)
and one is reminded of the old joke about the rookie soldier's Mum complaining that everyone is out of step except him. For 'rookie' read 'Materialist', to be absolutely clear.
Where does this 'instinct to religion' come from? To a Materialist, a Freudian most likely, it is a neurosis based on fear of death. To a Yogi it is the innate yearning to 'religare', to 're-connect' with the Higher world one originally descended from.
It is, at the end of the day, a question of substituting the superior category of Understanding (of the logic of Idealism) for the lower category of Belief (in the illogic of Materialism). All we need to do is to turn the telescope round. To properly understand the Effect ('out there') we need to look at the Cause ('in here'). Yogis have been saying this for thousands of years. No wonder they smile a lot at our clever Materialists. I guess you might already have worked all that out, and wonder what I'm making all the fuss about, but it was an explosion in the head for me. *** So, if evolution is primarily about Mind and not body, what does this imply? Well, straight off, it implies that 'death' is not what everyone's so frightened of. It's simply a matter of dropping the monkey suit and moving 'through the veil', as the occultists put it, to the world we originally incarnated from. Not bad for starters.
A little innocent fun may be had with an atheist around this point. Something like this: 'Well, sir, it seems that I expect an afterlife and you do not. Must we not then assume, sir, that one of us will be in for a surprise upon our demise?' The atheist may not think carefully enough before he replies.
Another immediate implication is that we can now happily accept the idea of teleology, which has been yet another hopeless problem for Materialists. 'Teleology' just means 'having an end or target in view', and is closely linked to 'intention' and 'purpose'. Clearly, for a Materialist, there can be no question of evolution having any end target in sight, or for Man being 'perfectible' as he is just a random accident of slimy goings-on. This leads once again to another paradox, as Materialists constantly require animals to do x and y 'in order to pass on their genes'. No.. they don't. They don't
know what genes are. The phrase 'in order to' means purpose is involved; and animals (or chemicals) don't have purpose, by Materialist definition. Paradox. Neither are our (unalive, chemical) genes in control of our lives, 'selfishly' or otherwise. For a start, how can a chemical be rationally called 'selfish'? Secondly, how can a mindless chemical of any sort organise the enormously complex and precise business of fertility, breeding, embryodevelopment etc with NO mental component to do the organising or hold the pattern or algorithm? And thirdly, how can any Materialist/chemical device design or plan anything at all, ever, as any plan of any sort is, by definition 'for a purpose; aiming at an end': ie, 'teleological'? let alone anything as absurdly complex as a new birth? Paradox paradox nonsense. For Religion however, man's perfectibility has always been on the cards. DarwinPlus + the yogic/esoteric Understanding absolutely supports the notion that Man has an agenda, implemented via free will and choice, and mediated by the perfectly just Law of Karma. Hence, we can all begin to accept our own inner promptings that 'Surely there must be some point to all this?'
But please don't jump the gun. Don't make any assumptions about what this 'must' mean. All it means here is what it says here. No more. (More on this theme later, however...)
And if we take DarwinPlus to its logical extension, that everything is mentally evolving (a claim that is central to Yoga, for example: everything, from atom to Man and beyond, including all those entities I discovered in the Bible, Koran etc; even the stroppy ones) then we no longer have any problem with the strangely intelligent behaviours of animals and even of plants. We might posit, for example, that the power behind the genotype
The genotype is the genetic makeup of a cell, organism, or an individual: the particular set of genes it possesses.
inhabits the Other world at some level(s), and acts as a sort of collective mind, (or 'thoughtform'?), or archetype for both the species in general and the individual in particular, deciding which genes are switched on and off and when, as the human body develops from one single fertilised egg in the uterus, to hundreds of trillions of cells, of some 250 different types, from blood to bone, and each final soma ending up with ten digits and two eyes, and not the either way round. The cause of gene-switching is a real headache for Materialists, as we just don't seem to have enough genes to run the show, whichever way you look at it, never mind how they might
have the ability to switch themselves on and off. Well of course it is a terminally difficult problem for them, as they will not admit to any force other than chemicals and normal mechanical energies, which are simply incapable of organising anything at all as they lack any mental capacity.
Switching a gene on or off would seem to be a total doddle for the sort of Mind we are speaking of here. In fact, gene-switching would seem to be a very elegant solution to the engineering problem of 'How can we subtly tailor an off the peg monkey-suit to suit a particular karmic need?' The implications of this are interesting. As a remarkable example of what gene-switching can achieve in terms of 'simple' anatomy, consider the transformation of caterpillar to pupa to butterfly.
If we accept that we, and all other species, learn by integrating (via Intuition) new information from the senses with previous experience, then it is clear that our greatest ally in this process is 'awareness'. The more aware we are of our surroundings the less harm we are likely to come to, and in traditional Darwinian terms, the more likely we are to survive to breed, etc. 'Awareness' is very close to 'intelligence'. An aware animal is more likely to survive, just as humans are. This applies as much to predator as prey. DarwinPlus in action evolving by becoming smarter, via the process of awareness, challenge, free will, and choice: via the Mind. In other words, we might well say that experience-integratedvia-Intuition is the vector of Evolution.
This is remarkably similar to Karmic theory: that we humans advance via how we choose to react to challenges. Animals clearly do have choice as well. Freeze or flee? for example.
What about plants? Runner beans are smart enough to know how to climb poles. All plants seek light. There can be no thorough Materialist explanation for this sort of behaviour,
Observation and measurement of a process, even in very great detail, does not count as explanation. A robot can strip a Ferrari Priapos to its knickers and beyond, but never have any idea of what it's for: what it is.
but DarwinPlus says it's just Intelligence at work, albeit at a lower level than our own. Dung beetles have purpose in their lives. So do bees and termites. We may not understand anything about how they comprehend their purpose but DarwinPlus does at least allow them the intelligence and purpose they so clearly exhibit.
According to the BBC in May 2011, chimps use 'at least 66 gestures to communicate with each other'. Purpose in action.
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It will also 'allow' us to accept that animals are endowed with emotions, as we are, but on an unknown scale. We know that cows and dogs can show affection, so why not those bees and termites too, at the end of the day? Perhaps bees act in a deliberately self-sacrificial way when they sting in defence of the hive? Many animals co-operate: wolves, chimps, dolphins, lions. Intelligence plus emotion, or just intelligence? Mother love and altruism is well-documented in the animal world, so take your choice. Other creatures, like bower birds and magpies, seem to have some sort of aesthetic sense. Materialist neo-darwinists see this behaviour, and every other animal behaviour, only in terms of adaptation and mate-seeking, but I wonder if there's more at work? DarwinPlus would allow lower creatures a developing aesthetic sense, along with the love and intelligence they clearly display. It might even help to explain the thing that even Darwin flinched at: the peacock's tail. (Maybe lady peacocks just like bling?) All creatures, from humans to algae show awareness and discrimination. If they could not discriminate, between say friend and foe, or food and poison, they would not survive.
Obviously, this needs a little thought: an onion can not choose where it roots; nor can it dodge a marauding onion beetle. But if we think in terms of the power behind the genotype, or 'collective onion Mind', or 'deva' as some occultists would call it, (see The Findhorn Garden by the Findhorn Community, or The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken) then some sense may be made of this. Individual onions may 'survive' via multiple seeding. However, an onion's identity does not lie with the individual, but with the collective, and the Mind behind it. The onion has not yet reached the evolutionary point of individuation, as humans have (see below). 'Losses' don't count, as there is no loss: if the seed does not germinate, it provides nourishment for some other living creature. There is merely a transference of 'life-force' from one life form to another life form in the greater cyclical economy of Life. (As Darwin/Wallace suggested, because all species are inter-related, we can all agree, Materialist and Idealist, that there is essentially only one Life.) This also applies to hunter and prey. In the matter of discrimination, the onion's roots must seek out compatible elements among the elements and microlife in the soil. It's a start.
Could DarwinPlus be the component that Darwin, and more recently, David Attenborough and others, have felt was missing from the Theory of Natural Selection? More on this in Chapter 26. It would certainly seem to be a fuller 'explanation', which would also not deny the rational findings of the original Theory.
'I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.' Charles Darwin. One keeps coming across surprising quotes by Darwin doesn't one? Why should we be surprised? Has poor old CD been misrepresented? Well, yes.
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I wonder how zoologists will react to this idea? Maybe more positively than I fear. I've certainly noticed fewer dogmatic Materialist certainties being offered on television nature programmes over the past decade. I think this indicates that more Materialists are becoming gradually more openminded, but don't know where to look next. They see 'non-Materialism' as being equal to 'Churchy-weirdness', and nobody has offered them a serious alternative to this false equation. I hope the previous chapters might be a help here. I've also noticed that modern weirdo programmes on the telly, about spooks and the like, no longer seem to absolutely require a man in a white lab coat to pooh-pooh the whole thing in the interests of 'balance'. It seems that Materialism is not the absolute master here any more either.
A personal plea: perhaps one day the tv producers will feel free to no longer put grotesque 'music' and swishy thumps, and jumpy camera shots into these programmes in the mistaken conviction that they add 'atmosphere', whereas all they really do is confuse and irritate the viewer. They also tend to trivialise the subject matter. Perhaps that's the point, of course. I hadn't thought of that.
*** DarwinPlus might also make sense of the recently discovered 'Flynn Effect'.
Professor James Flynn, of Cambridge and Otago, and recipient of Otago's Gold Medal for Distinguished Career Research.
Prof Flynn noted in the 1980's that IQ scores seemed to be going up more or less consistently around the world, and at the rate of some 3% per decade, or roughly 10% per generation. This would mean that you, dear reader, are likely to be pretty much one third as smart again as your greatgrandfather. You may have a job explaining this to him, of course. The effect has been tested by other experts and is held to be true. Perhaps the most surprising element is that it seems to be independent of culture, schooling, or nutrition. So what's causing it? Nobody seems to know (as opposed to 'guess'). A Yogi might nod and smile in the irritating manner that they sometimes have, and say: 'It is just the general wheel of evolution at work. Learning and intelligence that has been earned by the few is slowly diffusing around to the many, possibly via what you call the '100th Monkey Syndrome' or 'morphic resonance' as Dr Sheldrake might put it (see Chapter 29). Now please excuse me; I wish to be alone with the universe.' Bizarre? Yes, unless it's true, of course
DarwinPlus also chimes with another esoteric claim that knocked my socks off when I came across it
It is an Understanding of, I think, Theosophy, that Creations as in Big Intelligent Bangs and Breaths of Intelligent Brahman occur according to a regular cyclical pattern, each one being imaginable as a Great Wheel (see above).
Heavens! I just used the word 'Creation' with a capital C! Heavens! Now then this is simply an acknowledgement of the Idealist necessity (as recognised by Charles Darwin, if you recall) that there must be an intelligent cause for an intelligent universe. It does NOT mean that the religious subgroup known as 'Creationism' is or is not 'truth'. More on this in Chapter 26. Please put all knee-jerk reactions on hold. En passant, we note that Materialists will not accept the Big Bang as a Creation, as 'Creation' implies intelligence. However, they will happily accept chemicals with plans and agendas: 'We are all reproduction mechanisms for genes.' Richard Dawkins. Paradox yet again.
To start with (see diagram), as each Creation/Great Wheel gets underway, all the intelligent 'sparks' are very closely bound and unintelligent. Gradually they 'descend' around the curve as the Wheel turns, into matter (remember the mental > astral > etheric > physical densification?), via the long long spiral process of samsaric birth-'death'-rebirth. As they descend they begin to individuate, gaining in intelligence, and eventually, at the rock bottom of the physical mode, they individuate completely. Then, as
they learn to use their free will to apply the Golden Rule, they begin the path of return as billions of increasingly fully autonomous and cooperative beings, back up through the samsaric spiral through the etheric, astral, and mental levels, to eventually achieve yoga ('union'/'re-ligare') with the source from which they originated. The Wheel (or extended spiral) has turned full circle. They left as 'sparks of light'; they return as 'beings of light'.
Please note: this broad picture does NOT suggest that one person is better than another. What it does suggest is that we are all living in societies best suited for our personal development at a given moment. We are looking at overall social structure here, and not individual value. As a coarse example, a fully individuated American junkie could not reasonably be called 'superior' to a devoted servant of a tribal chief. He is merely experiencing challenges suitable to his own personal development at that moment. The broad picture also does not dictate the qualities of individuals within a social group or 'tendency', any more than the word 'French' defines in detail all French people. You might like to have a bit of fun trying to place historical events like the Reformation or the Russian Revolution onto the most recent turnings of the wheel, or maybe look at the wheel on a personal level, and plot the development of an individual, from childhood to maturity. I find it quite interesting. Does it reflect Reality? I don't know. But stuff fits, it seems to me, as long as we realise that all progress is very slow and very patchy. Socrates did not succeed in dragging all of Greece along with him, for example, but his contribution to the growth of sanity in world culture has been inestimable. Gandhi likewise. Twas ever so. Slowly we learn
This scenario, 'unlikely' though it might appear, would seem to allow for the 'Downcurve' group-minds of bees, say, flock and herd behaviour, tribal devotion in humans, and teenage gangs; 'Bottom-curve' nationalism gradually replacing the narrower tribalism, and the gradual spread of individuating democracy; and the slowly developing 'Upcurve' growth of international cooperation (see Chapter 29), globalisation, etc. It might even make sense of a number of puzzling moments in the Bible, for example:
'God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.' Genesis 3:5. Note 'gods'. Some translations have it as 'God'. Which version is correct, I wonder?
On the Great Wheel model, this would tally with Adam and Eve choosing ('choosing' again..) the path of individuation and self-responsibility, and thus engaging with the Law of Karma and intelligent choice, enabling their personal evolution to get under way.
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'And the Lord God said, behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.' Genesis 3:22. (Note 'one of us'. One of who, exactly?)
Then:
'The first man Adam was made a living soul. The last Adam became a quickening spirit.' I Corinthians 15:45.
Whether this Great Wheel business is true or not, I have no idea. Obviously it is only a metaphor, anyway. You decide. It would, however tie in with that Sufi poem in Chapter 17 if we think of the Wheel as rotating through a spiral... winding ever-upwards, making possible ever-greater awareness and intelligence as it goes. I would have written this off as fanciful nonsense were it not for the fact that it seemed to make sense of a few local (ie 'worldly') phenomena. Consider these three points in terms of the Great Wheel idea: Which societies do we consider as 'primitive'? Tribal ones, meaning societies in which devotion and obedience is owed according to accident of birth, or rank: essentially, societies which are turned in on themselves. Hence the retrograde nature of fascism. Which societies do we regard as progressive? Democracies, in which loyalty is not owed but freely offered according to merit and not right: societies which turn more outwards. What sort of society are present democracies stumbling very slowly towards? Well, you may disagree with me here, but it seems to me that we are very slowly and erratically moving in two senses. Firstly, at home, we are edging towards a greater respect for each citizen and a need to share the wealth; and secondly, abroad, towards a sense of global responsibility for each other: an all-embracing 'socialistic' impetus. In other words, we are very very slowly moving, as a world, towards the path of the Golden Rule. What do you think? There's no space to extrapolate on this here. I'll leave it to you and your sense of history. The Yogi would here smile again and say 'Of course of course! The wheel of evolution... Don't worry about it. Just do your bit. And do notice that you might like to apply the alpha and omega notions of Christianity right at the top of the wheel and your funny little diagram.'
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One interesting point: it does suggest that Karl Marx was on the right track when he outlined the 'inevitable' path of history from Capitalism to Communism. (This does not, of course, mean he was necessarily right about anything else.) The fact that his historical prognosis has been butchered by his followers is not a proof that he was wrong; merely a proof that good, or accurate, ideas like the Golden Rule (of religion) and Impartial Investigation (as in scientific method) are very likely to be grossly distorted, and worse, by the metaphorical swine into whose trotters the pearls of wisdom fall. Animal Farm comes to mind as a perfect exposition of how a Good Intention becomes corrupt and degenerate once the pearl falls into the hands of professional, ignorant, and self-seeking porkers. More in Chapter 28.
*** So.. Cheeky the Sheepy Matriarch began a mind-process for me, resulting in an Understanding (and, it would seem, a Knowing for some) that evolution is not only a Truth, but a truth chronically underestimated by Materialist Science. Evolution is in fact about Mind, and is thus on a far, far grander scale than we so far realise. An explosion in the head for me, as I say. What do you think? *** One more thing The yogic/esoteric philosophy claims that the Higher Mind which lies behind the universe and DarwinPlus also gently guides it along, via the 'wheel of evolution' as above. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Flynn Effect? And whether it is just a coincidence that Esoteric philosophy in its various forms has been gradually imported into the West at a time of improving education (Understanding-based) and falling Church attendance (Belief-based)? And whether what we are seeing is indeed a gradual 'lifting of the veil' that hides the occult worlds, as New Agers seem to think? These are just idle speculations. I'm leaving them on the back burner as men of business say. Truth will out, one day. As a matter of interest, what would your instant definition of 'apocalypse' be? See Chapter 26.
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Chapter 21b Another Great Surprise
A little bit of logic again: There can only be one Ultimate Cause of Life the Universe and Everything. If there were two 'Ultimate Causes' then one of them would not be the Ultimate. And science of whatever ilk, insists on Cause always preceding Effect.
Except somehow in quantum physics, you might say. But don't forget that the scientists involved are usually Materialists and may (or must) thus somehow be making wrong interpretations, or even asking wrong questions. More in Chapter 23.
So if the universe is the Effect, what is the Cause? Even poor old Darwin, so wrongly demonised by Religion, insisted on there being a Creator of the Effect, a fact which really ought to be better known, but which has been effectively censored out of existence by popular writers on Materialist neodarwinism. I've tried to make clear in previous chapters that Idealism is the ONLY alternative to Materialism when seeking the nature of the Ultimate Cause. (By all means check again: see Chapters 5 and/or 11). Materialism is discredited by virtue of its irrationality. Thus, the universe must have an Idealist cause, and MUST thus be a creation of Mind, whether I like it or not. This Higher Mind is smarter than our own minds.
Some will call it the Great Spirit, others Allah or Yahweh. It doesn't matter what you call it. It will take no more offence at your 'blasphemy' than you would yourself at a beetle blowing you a raspberry. That's what being 'High Minded' is about.
This Higher Mind/Ultimate Cause must, by definition, thus have ultimately created us and our little minds. We and our minds must by definition be a part of the original sole creative HM/UC. And we must thus continue to be a part of it, as there is nowhere else to be. We must, by sheer simple logic 'live and move and have our being' within this HM/UC, because there is no such thing as 'without'. Thus all sound religions (as opposed to superstitions), arrived at by whatever means, either by logical analysis, or by revelation from other elements of HM/UC are fundamentally one and the same.
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Thus:
THERE IS ONLY ONE RELIGION
One might also say: There is only one religion, but many faiths. There is a Chinese saying that 'There are many ways up the mountain'. Same thing. Mahatma Gandhi said 'God has no religion.' Same thing again.
This was also a surprise to me, despite the researches I'd done into the various Big Religions. The essence of The Religion is: There is an entity which is a lot smarter than you: smart enough to make a universe. This entity is essentially benevolent. (More on 'evil' in Chapter 26) You are literally a part of this entity, just as every other creature is, and as you have free will, you should thus choose to be benevolent to others, according to the Golden Rule, as you are all ultimately one. That's IT. Anything else in the various religions has been tacked on by 'religionists' and professionals for either reasons of personal power, or to protect the flock against powers they don't understand, or, as often as not, through erroneous thinking and analysis, much of it hubristic.
Hubristic: Arrogant in its misplaced assumption of unquestionable correctness. More on this in Chapter 28.
It we accept this simple analysis, it is clear that we don't need to 'do' anything to be a good religionist. Instead, we need to 'be' something, which some people will find a lot harder. In other words, going to a church or mosque or temple is not necessary, but being kind to your 'neighbour' is. Taking off your hat, kneeling, bowing thrice to the carpet, waving frankincense around, chanting precisely the same tunes every week at precisely the same time. None of these 'doing' accretions are necessary. But putting others before self, being gracious, sharing a little more of the Earth's bounty, 'being' a kindly person is. In the end All You Need Is Love.
Incidentally, once you understand something of the yogic/esoteric
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philosophy, some of the lyrics of this song become very perspicacious: There's nothing you can know that isn't known; Nothing you can see that isn't shown; Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be It's easy John Lennon.
And science? Once it abandons its Materialist chains, and accepts that there is a Mind at large which is smarter than even Big Scientists, enormous progress can be made. More later. We might like to consider the idea that just as the human monkey suit is a vehicle for the individual being, so the various religions are vehicles for evolving cultures, each tailored to suit the relative savagery/civility of the local community; and just as human DarwinPlus-evolution means that fully individuated people gradually choose to come together again on the upcurve (as opposed to being forced to stay together on the downcurve)
Not literally 'forced' as an act of violence (although that can often be the case; witness the scandal of forced marriages; female genital mutilation; 'honour' killings, etc), but in the way frogspawn is 'forced' to stay together in its early phases: it's just the way it is, and is beneficial at the time.
so will the 'individuated' religions we see today also gradually choose to come together in recognition of the fact that they have more in common than what separates them. It seems to me that this great ecumenical movement is gently getting underway already, even if witnessed only by the fact that the Prods and the Micks
An old Liverpool term for 'Protestants' and 'Catholics'.
of Ireland are gradually losing their hate (that dreadful perversion of 'faith'). Half the wars of Europe over the last 500 years have been intra'Christian'. No more Well.. nearly! Next stop Jerusalem. Then the Balkans. Then Jerusalem again
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Chapter 21c And Another
Following upon the two previous surprises, is a third: all that is needed for science and religion to be reconciled is very simple indeed:
Drop all the dogmas.
All of them. Once Religion does this and accepts the simple logical necessities of The (One) Religion bulleted above, and forgets about its theological nit-picking about things it can not possibly understand, as the literal bookworm can not possibly understand the metaphorical one, then it can concentrate on its traditional brief of encouraging ethics and morality among the rest of us, according to the universal Golden Rule. Thus can we progress. And science, once freed from its cage of Materialist non-sense, can get on with trying, impartially at last, to unscrew a little more of the cosmically inscrutable, perhaps starting with the mysteries of mediumship or hypnosis. Rational metaphysics will then gradually become rational physics, as it always should have been. Thus also can we progress. If Religion can see reason in the scenario I've proposed in an earlier chapter, ie, that it was the long and violent struggle with an arrogant and occasionally vicious Church which led to a triumphant post-Darwinian Science chucking out the baby with the bathwater, then there is no problem. If Science can see the simple reasonableness of Idealism when compared with the irrationality of Materialism, and accept the fact that 'anti-Churchdogma' is not the same as 'anti-paranormal', then there is no problem. After dropping all the nonsense and dogmas, both 'sides' can respect the fact that the other is engaged on a compatible body of work. It will no longer be a question of 'We're right and therefore you are wrong'. Now it can be 'We are both right. We are simply working in different but complementary fields, based on the shared understanding that Mind created Matter, and not the other way round.'
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Science will continue to work on 'How does it work?', while religion works on 'What does it mean?' No conflict required or logically acceptable; overlap welcomed; cheerful collaboration perhaps one day inevitable.
Perhaps picking up where Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird left off. It seems to be a fact that their inventions (radio, telephone and television) all came from an interest in spiritualism and were originally efforts to find a hot line to the 'dead'. 'I am convinced that discoveries of far-reaching importance remain waiting along these shadowy and discredited paths'. John Logie Baird, on spiritualism. For an overview of a modern spiritualist Understanding, try http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.bradley4/planes_of_existence.htm http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ian.bradley4/states_of_consciousness.htm
Of course I'm not so nave as to believe that anybody anywhere will rush to drop a single dogma of any kind! Dogmas are, among other things, comforters to people who are uncertain or afraid, for whatever reason. But some people will see the point, and they will act. Others will thus be encouraged, and follow. In time
Jesus had a pithy comment on this matter: 'Neither will they be persuaded, (even) if one rise from the dead.' (Luke 16:31.)
If Flynn is right, we are steadily getting smarter and are thus becoming ever more dissatisfied with second-hand and incomprehensible dogmas in religion (or science, of course). St Peter said: 'Add to your faith... knowledge.' (II Peter 1:5). A Yogi would say: 'You can't possibly have faith in something you don't understand. So what are you going to choose to do about it?' *** So where did that leave me? A little breathless, for sure. And a little elated, it must be said. Science and Religion, those traditional enemies, could be so simply reconciled? I checked and re-checked the logic of both these 'surprises' for many weeks, but could not find a flaw. Can you, dear reader? If I accepted the logic, I found I was still able to claim, quite rationally, that I have nothing against either science or religion. But what I am against, as we all are, is bad science and bad religion (sometimes called 'scientism' and 'religiosity'). Both are the result of inadequate thinking, and a foolish readiness to accept and defend as Truth, usually loudly and abusively, some nave slogan or half-baked Hypothesis, or something superficial and
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comforting to our sense of self-righteousness masking our fear of Death. More in Chapter 28. *** Why should science take any notice of all this? Well, it must surely be a fact that your results can be only as good as your assumptions and premisses. A more rational, and therefore more accurate premiss (as in Idealsim or even DarwinPlus replacing Materialism), is bound to produce more realistic results, if only in the long run. Surely? And religion? As above, for science, but also because religion has been tricked for far too long by the noisy Materialists into thinking that evolution is 'anti-religious', and must therefore, if true, prove that religion is rubbish. Now, if it can accept DarwinPlus, religion can rationally accept Darwinian evolution as being quite reasonable, and not a problem because it is actually quite irrelevant to religion. Real evolution is DarwinPlus, a process of the Mind, as required by Idealism; and Idealism is entirely compatible with religion's core axiom: that Mind/Logos preceded flesh. All religions agree on this.
The real battleground, if there need be one, is not 'evolution' at all, but 'origination'. The Materialists still think it's acceptable to believe that the carbon, hydrogen, sulphur etc 'that we are all made from', as my biology teacher claimed, spontaneously came together and blah blah blah I hope thoughtful people, religionists and rationalists, will begin to point out the logical errors in all this. Even Richard Dawkins will be relieved, I'm quite sure, once the penny drops for him. I once witnessed RD on a BBC news programme following the launch of his new book The God Delusion. He said, verbatim: 'I have not been put on this earth to be comfortable'. What does he mean? The Hammer of Religion, speaking of being 'put on this earth'? That's as teleological a thought as you will ever come across. A troubled man? But not, I hope, for much longer.
*** A word about 'faith': Surely the yogic/esoteric philosophy gives a person of faith some extra knowledge, which will give him a surer, if possibly slightly different, basis to work from?
The Bible drops occasional hints of accord with the yogic/esoteric philosophy: 'There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body... first... that which is natural then that which is spiritual.' (I Cor. 15:44, 46).
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I don't know, though. People of faith can be pretty recalcitrant. There is certainly some truth in the adage that faith (without knowledge) causes all the woes of the world. 'I have faith. Thus what I have faith in must be right, or my faith would be misplaced, which would be unthinkable. Thus you, who have another faith, must be wrong.' This is bad logic, but is widely held to by Believers. It might even extrapolate into 'As you are wrong, you should be punished.' Worse still 'And I will punish you.' Worst of all ' safe in the knowledge that I am doing the will of the one true God'. Times are changing though, I think. People are beginning to think more clearly. Christianity for example, now actually is a religion of peace, and hasn't held a proper murderous crusade for several hundred years. *** All the previous chapters have, I hope, showed that unchallenged dogma is constricting, deforming, misleading, confusing, and eventually destructive to rational thought and the sober balance of the mind, as per the Materialist who so irrationally lambasted me (see Chapter 11). It can even lead to severe mental problems, as seen in cases of religious mania, for example. Clearly, natural logic is at risk when you choose to Believe contradictory things: for example, for Christians, the problem of reconciling the OT 'take an eye for an eye' with the NT exhortation to 'turn the other cheek'; and for scientists the absurd contradiction which claims that chemicals are both not-alive and Life Itself.
I've flogged to death the 'chemicals' paradox. What about the Bible one? Well the OT Commandment came a good thousand years before the Christian one, and we might imagine that the 'wheel of evolution', or whatever, had slowly reduced the degree of savagery in the population of Palestine over this period. So perhaps, at the time of issue, in Moses' day, the Commandment to 'take an eye for an eye' may well have been a step forward from current practice. 'You took my eye! I will rip out all your teeth, both your eyes, put your wives to the sword and rape your goats and many of your shorter camels. Justice will be served!' A thousand years later, Jesus judged that 'You can do better than that, lads. How about a bit of forgiveness and breaking the endless chain of revenge and vendetta? Eh? What about it?' It hasn't been a huge success, has it? An awful lot of 'Christians' are still very keen on the bloody revenge of the OT. Nonetheless, we have progressed, although you need to look at a little history to spot the progress. As examples: after WW2 there was a proposal by a high-ranking American to 'reduce Germany to the stone age'. This was replaced by the Marshall Plan, which offered aid instead. Fifty years on, after a long and cruel history of racial oppression, South Africa set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead of a thoroughly-understandable campaign of revenge.
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Dogmas just have to go, before Man can step into the sunlit uplands of reason and goodwill, and out of the shadow of the valley of self-righteous and stupid bigotry. *** You may be thinking that all the 'answers' I've been looking at are just a little self-righteous themselves. Two points: I'm not claiming any of them are The Truth. I do, however, claim that they do all accord with SPIT and logic as I, and I think you, understand it.
SPIT again: 1. Reason and logic must apply at all times. 2. Any 'law', if applied at all, must be applied universally. 3. No paradox is ever acceptable as 'explanation'. 4. Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic. 5. No dogma of any kind is acceptable. 6. All 'evidence' is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori. 7. Until proved to be wrong, all 'evidence' is to be kept on hold. I urge you to test everything, but, as ever, from the standpoint of logic alone and not some pet Belief, no matter how anciently it has been held in the family, laboratory, seminary (of whatever religion), or college. Rely on logic. It won't play you false. You will ultimately find that whatever is sound in your religion will shine ever brighter.
Secondly: Very few of these ideas are remotely original. They are as old as mankind. I'm just re-packaging them for a modern world that has got bogged down because of a terrible error that science has made and will not accept, and which nobody seems to even know exists, as the error has sunk so deeply into western culture as to be completely invisible. Don't believe me? Try asking a dozen people what the philosophy called Materialism claims. I would guess that half of them might say 'something about shopping, is it?' And it might come from all twelve. Then ask them what 'Idealism' is *** To me, the most appealing thing about the whole DarwinPlus + yogic/esoteric schema, apart from its logical coherence, is its simplicity. In a few words:
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Benevolent Higher Mind created the universe, including us; we are all thus a part of this Mind; we are slowly evolving into properly intelligent beings; thus our minds (especially when used to make choices) are the key to our evolution.
Religion should have no problem with this; neither should science, as there is nothing 'supernatural' or irrational involved in the process, being a rational derivation of necessary Idealism. And Occam would approve, I think. The only snag I can see here is the issue of a 'benevolent' Higher Mind. What about 'evil'? More on this in Chapter 26. Where now? Ah yes an old chestnut, I think
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Chapter 22 No Great Surprise
I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design
Charles Darwin
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring
Carl Sagan
You'll be glad to know that this chapter will probably turn out to be quite a short one. I hope it might also finally release you from an existential ache that has caused millions of sane people to doubt the evidence of their own eyes and common sense, and to thus have their self-confidence seriously shaken. So, dear reader Be prepared to shake off an irrational mental shackle! Breathe free!! Smile again!!! In a list in the previous chapter I looked at what Idealism and DarwinPlus might explain rather better than Materialism can, but there was a big something missing, as I'm sure you noticed: 'pattern'. It ought to be obvious to anyone who has stuck with me so far, that if you accept the rationality of DarwinPlus, it is now perfectly acceptable and logical to believe the evidence of your own eyes and common sense:
Pattern in Nature does exist, as everything in Nature has been designed and made by Mind
All of Professor Dawkins' efforts to use his own fraction of this Mind to deny pattern have been in vain.
Please refer back to Chapter 3 to confirm the mental and linguistic contortions RD puts himself (and his readers) through as he attempts to avoid the screamingly obvious
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fact that pattern is within us and all around us, and claims instead that these 'nonpatterns' are all artefacts of accident and randomness. There are hundreds of thousands of Materialist Don Quixotes like RD, all heroically fighting off Reality. They are all wrong, if Idealism/DarwinPlus is logically sound, which I believe it simply is, if logic means anything at all. In other words, Wm Paley's 'Argument from Design' is rational and not a delusion, as you and I and millions of others have been confidently told by biology teachers and far too many others. If you find a fine pocket watch, WP says, you correctly infer that it must have been designed; that there must thus be a designer. And if you see a robin or a buttercup, creatures that show much greater evidence of design than even the finest pocket watch, you infer that there must also be a designer for them too. 'Not so' says RD and the Materialists. 'Absolutely so', says DarwinPlus.
Pattern means 'design', does it not? Please, dear reader, just follow the logic, accept where it has led us to at the moment, and don't jump to conclusions. In the end it all fits, honest. (We'll be sorting out the confusion which swirls around 'Creationism' and 'Intelligent Design' in Chapter 26.) Just for the moment: many people object to 'design', as Richard Dawkins does, as a result of the demands of dogmatic Materialism. Many others' objection will be simply scientistic: ie, unthoughtful, shallow, sloganbased, knee-jerk, and quite valueless. Loud, though. I think it unlikely that these Skeptics will have got this far into this book. So, with all prejudices on hold here goes. First of all, let's get some sort of handle on the sheer scale of design we are faced with. We're not just talking a few flowers and polar bears here. We must begin with the Big Bang. According to current physical theory, this yotta-slew of expanding energy
'Yotta' is just another word for really really guessed from Chapter 21.
really
immense, as I'm sure you
gradually settled down into particles, which later settled out into atoms, then condensed into molecules. Each step being an example of Order from disorder: Cosmos from chaos. And each step is one of design. A proton is not a non-proton, or a sort-of proton, or proton-ish. It is a proton. This name-fact alone recognises it as a design: an entity clearly distinct from everything that is a 'not-proton'. Every other particle, and every atom, and every molecule is likewise a design, involving ever greater and regularly controlled assemblies of sub-components. And every design requires a designer, by definition (which Idealism is happy to provide). The only reason Materialists have a problem with this blindingly obvious fact, and the obvious meaning of words, is that they will not accept the
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necessity of the outside force needed to produce order from disorder (a design), despite knowing full well that every Effect requires a Cause.
In order to convert a pile of quarks into a smaller pile of protons, we must evoke an outside force to enable or enforce this alteration in the status quo. Every deviation from the status quo requires an added force. This is standard science. To claim that quarks somehow 'just do it' is to wilfully evade this requirement. Similarly, for protons and electrons to 'self-assemble' into very specific ordered relationships, as atoms, something must have pre-defined the nature of those relationships, especially the strange parameters of electronic quantum jumping and energy levels.
So for Materialists, what is patently obviously a design, can not be so. It must be.. well complexity, or.. emergence, from an accident arising from time! Yes, lots of time! Or some other flummery, perhaps very intricate, but always ultimately vague and intellectually unsatisfying, even to themselves.
More on Time in Chapter 23.
If we accept Idealism, however, as a rational thinker surely must, the problem simply drops away. Intelligence lies behind the Big Bang. It designed the Big Bang, and everything ensuing from it. The fact that we cannot comprehend Intelligence on this scale is neither here nor there. A microbe cannot understand Michelangelo's David or the Taj Mahal. This does not make David nonsense, or an accident. And yes, I am here comparing Man to a microbe. Remember the sliding scale of Mind from Chapter 5? To merely assume that Man is the brightest spark in the universe not only flies in the face of Idealist reason and evidence, but reeks of adolescent vanity.
Strong words? I don't think so. In an infinite universe (as assumed in their different ways by both Religion and Science) there is clearly an infinite amount to know. Thus, as Man's Mind is clearly not infinite, the Man who knows a lot knows insignificantly more than the Man who knows a little. The greatest genius is but a tinkling bell. And anyway, to take a different angle, what matters is not how much we know, but what we know and how we handle and integrate it. The man who wins every quiz show on the planet is not 'cleverer', and certainly not 'better', than the humble villager who knows how to care for his goat and his environment and that he should be kind to his neighbour. And yet we continue to value knowledge above wisdom.
Every other layer of Order, of which there are endless googols, or indeed yottas, requires intelligence, design/form, and means of construction: all non-material, mental, attributes.
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The fact that we (here meaning 'I') can't explain the full process of creation in Nature does not mean that the yogic/esoteric/occult Hypothesis is wrong. It just means that I'm not smart enough to figure it out, or not well enough informed. My money's on both. 'Matter' seems to be extremely odd stuff. Everyone knows that solids are nothing of the kind once you look closely enough at them. The molecules and atoms of a solid are held in more or less firm relationships by electromagnetic forces. It is the strength of these forces which give the illusion of solidity. Is ice a solid, for example? Only at a certain level of bond-energy. Is glass a solid? No, it just flows really slowly. Moreover, each constituent atom of a 'solid' is made up of 99% literally nothing. The space between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons is nothing, in terms of conventional physics (although of course Yogis etc may make mention here of etheric or astral etc matter). Take away all these nothingnesses and you have the stimulating statistic that the bodies of every one of the world's nearly 7 billion people could fit into a space the size of a sugar cube. The entire world and everything in it would fit into a modest handbag, I suppose. So you are not 'made of carbon, oxygen and sulphur' after all. You are made of (on overwhelming average) nothing. That's the logical extension of the Materialist fallacy. So if I'm made of nothing, I can't be writing this book, and you can't be reading it. Add to that Einstein's formula of E=mc2 which parallels the Big Bang notion that Matter is just 'frozen' Energy. and Matter simply doesn't matter any more. It effectively does not exist, except as a temporary state of 'low-energy energy'. So what is it, bearing the Wet Fish Test firmly in mind? More in Chapter 23, but please don't expect too much.
*** In the course of this journey I came across whole fields of information and knowledge that I knew nothing about, but which I needed to investigate. Modern biology was obviously one of these fields. If you are in any doubt as to the layers and intricacy of design in a human body, may I refer you to any book on anatomy or physiology, which will show, for example, how many thousands of miles of carefully laid blood-piping we each contain, and will confirm that the active surface of your book-sized lungs is actually the size of a tennis court (some 250 square metres: the same active area as your gut contains); and take a look at any description of the workings of the cell (which appears to be the smallest unit of life, and within which DNA is employed to do its stuff).
One book on my shelf is an undergraduate textbook called Molecular Biology of the Cell, and runs to some 1,150 pages. It took six people to write it, and takes two to lift it. Every page has at least one diagram on it, most of them incomprehensible to the layman. Greek letters, graphs and formulae abound. Whole pages and chapters are completely baffling to anyone but an expert in the field. It contains hundreds of technical terms and jargon words that I've never heard of before or since. It is, frankly,
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just a pointer to a world of unimaginable complexity: ie, the world of just one single cell.
We each have an estimated 100,000,000,000,000 cells in our body, or maybe many more, give or take a few hatfuls of trillions.
Nobody knows how many we have, but clearly a midget or a pygmy has enough to be a fully functional being, just as a giant three times his size has. What are we to make of that? How does the design cope with such an extraordinary size range?
Every single one of these hundred trillion, or whatever, needs to be in the right place. That alone requires design and organisation on a super-colossal scale, wouldn't you say? Could you imagine organising a library of a hundred million volumes, let alone a hundred million million million? Or sorting a hundred million kids onto the right busses at going-home time? Then doing it for scores of trillions more? And each one of these hundred trillion cells is of incredible complexity in its construction and in its work. At any one moment a typical cell may be carrying out twenty functions, including repair, reproduction, communication, waste disposal, and nutrition. And all these functions must be coordinated to support the economy of the body as a whole. The hundred trillion operate as one unit. No selfishness here.
Perhaps you will remember that 'For their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe.' Professor Lewis Wolpert of University College, London. I guess ordinary cells can't be far behind.
There is no space here to go into it in even trivial depth, (I refer you back to the six-man book, above) but perhaps this diagram will help to give some tiny impression of the complexity of one typical cell among your hundred trillion.
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Bear in mind that your body somehow reproduces itself in all its coordinated complexity at the rate of some 300 million cells every minute of the day accurately, and on time, and in the right order. Amazingly, your overall body shape is maintained throughout, with no noticeable errors. Over the years, every single cell and atom will be replaced up to a dozen times, and yet You will still be You, and recognizably You to others. Impressive, eh? Even the chemical we call DNA, 'Life Itself'(!), has its component atoms regularly replaced. Each time a cell splits, it goes through a quite incredible series of processes of stunning complexity. The diagram below hints at it. The circular/oval item is the nucleus as in the diagram above. The little ribbony things are the chromosomes, which are made up of genes, which are made up of DNA: all chemicals, and thus not alive, but performing the most astonishing stunts of self-duplication, down to the last detail; even down to duplicating the unimaginably complex machinery needed for selfduplicating itself again; and then again; and again. down apparently endless generations.
This illustrates just seven of the stages a cell goes through when it duplicates itself. When I first read of this process, called 'mitosis', I counted eighteen procedures, with dozens more implied in the background. Heaven knows how many there actually are. And this all happens in just about every one of your hundred million million million cells (except for red blood cells, which are routinely destroyed and replaced), in a rolling process of regeneration and renewal, that operates non-stop over a period of some seventy or eighty years. I don't know about you, but I, who can not organise a pleasant evening in a brewery, am profoundly impressed. I also find it simply unbelievable that anyone who knows about even a little of this can ever say'It all came from an accident', or 'There is no design in Nature', or 'What you must understand is... everything is mineral'.
At an 'everyday' level of observation: the humble gecko's feet have multiple billions of tiny hairs which enable it to walk up glass walls, each hair adhering by the minute
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force that holds molecules together. There can't be a person/Materialist alive who isn't just a little bit perplexed by the assertion that these billions of hairs spontaneously and randomly evolved themselves out of chemicals alone.
In order to reduce over-crowding and rampant monsterism, cells are preprogrammed to die off and be replaced after a certain while, via a process called apoptosis: more astonishingly complex organisation, teleological (purposeful) in nature, ensuring that there are no fatal gaps in supply and demand. The dead cells are disassembled and flushed out of the system without you even being aware of the fact. Over the course of a few years, you actually flush away your entire body at the rate of some 60,000,000,000 cells a day, as the programme of continuous refurbishment rolls on.
If cells divide outside the pattern allotted to them we develop a cancer. A definition of cancer should be 'growth and division of cells without pattern', but you are unlikely to find the word 'pattern' in any dictionary definition. I guess you will know why by now.
Again, read a pop book on the subject, or try looking up 'Apoptosis' on Wikipedia.
Or try John Gribbin's very readable In Search of the Double Helix. Bear in mind that JG is very much a Materialist who recommends that we should read the first edition of Darwin's Origins. Why? Would he recommend the first edition of Encyclopedia Britannica? Or the first edition of one of his own excellent books, on the basis that it is 'in many ways the strongest statement of his ideas'?
Once I got into the realm of reproduction and genetics, my jaw hit the floor and stayed there. I'll leave you to find it out for yourself. I think I've made the point about endless complexity in design and process in the 'mitosis' business. The reproduction of sex cells, called 'meiosis', is a good place to start, if you'd like to find out more. Then check out how a sperm actually gets to an egg ('A Tale of Passion, Drama, Treachery, Swimming, Courage, and Utter Unlikeliness: with a Cast of Half a Billion'); and, if you still think that 'design' is an inappropriate word, read up on some basic embryology: Of how one single fertilised egg splits into two (Why? No, really: 'Why?' By what logic should 'a mineral' spontaneously split into two identical parts, then split again and again?) then into four, then eight And of how it suddenly (and for no apparent reason) develops a line within the cluster, and from then on 'lateralises' into left and right (Why? How? What energies cause all these changes? And what controls these energies? And what power coordinates the controllers of all these energies?).. And then how
that single cell is eventually converted into 250 or more quite different sorts of cells muscle, brain, blood, nerve, liver, fat, bone.. and all in the correct sequence and position (.. and what controls this extraordinary process of multiple diversification?). Then organs with complex inner structures, and limbs begin to appear (again, for no apparent reason) out of the mass and gradually become perfected, and again, all in the right place and at the right time. Add to that the fact that the whole process requires to be completed in every detail in just 48 'doublings' from the first cell to the finished human being. The algorithm for this astonishing process of creation and assembly would require yotta-googols of lines of computer code, if it could ever be even attempted,
If you're feeling creative, try working out the algorithm for making a nostril, say, then work your way up to a toenail. Leave the eye for when you've got the hang of it, especially as the eye will need to be able to distinguish a million different colours.
and yet the 'holder of the code' (DNA) has only some 25,000 units to work with (or 21,500, according to recent estimates) and of course, DNA is just a chemical, with no mental or organising capacity whatsoever. It seems to me that anyone who has learned a little about this subject must be astonished and maybe humbled.
unless s/he's still a Materialist, of course, still in awe of The Dogma! And don't forget that you can't be just a bit of a Materialist any more than you can be just a bit pregnant. Either there is a force outside of Matter/Energy, or there is not. No fence to sit on.
If you'd like to look at an even more microscopic level of organisation, pattern and design, then you could do worse than to check out the astonishing process whereby the body generates energy from chemicals. This process takes place in special units called mitochondria. These are roughly five one thousandths of a millimetre across, so some 1000 would fit onto this full stop. They work inside your body cells: sometimes one per cell, sometimes 10,000 per cell. Your liver has about 1,000 per cell; the average is about 200. So your body has some 100 trillion x 200 of them. In order to do all the work required of it, each mitochondrion needs to be geared up with suitable little organs and systems, just as its host (the cell) does when it carries out the astonishingly complex process of importing relatively simple raw products and exporting hugely complex proteins.
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Just as a small example: the inner membrane of a mitochondrion (it has two membranes, each with different properties and duties) contains proteins with five types of functions, as below. Don't worry about understanding all the technical stuff:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Those that perform the redox reactions of oxidative phosphorylation. ATP synthase, which generates ATP in the matrix. Specific transport proteins that regulate metabolite passage into and out of the matrix. Protein import machinery. Mitochondria fusion and fission protein.
The membrane also contains more than 100 different polypeptides and is rich in an unusual phospholipid, cardiolipin, which may help to make the inner membrane impermeable. Unlike the outer membrane, the inner membrane does not contain porins and is highly impermeable to all molecules. Almost all ions and molecules require special membrane transporters to enter or exit the matrix. Proteins are ferried into the matrix via the translocase of the inner membrane (TIM) complex or via Oxa1. In addition, there is a membrane potential across the inner membrane formed by the action of the enzymes of the electron transport chain. (Wikipedia)
This is just to illustrate the complexity of the structure and functions of just one of the membranes of this microscopic powerhouse, let alone the complex manufacturing processes that go on within the structure that the membrane encloses. And just about every one of your hundred trillion cells contains scores or hundreds of these little marvels, all beavering away on your behalf to produce energy for you to waste on popping bubble-wrap or spelling your name out in the snow. If you take a peep at the full ATP process, whereby glucose gets converted into the energy that enables you to cast your eyes across this page, you will be faced with screeds of ever-increasingly technical detail which makes the paragraph above look like Dr Seuss.
Google and Wikipedia are your best allies here, I would say. Just spend five minutes browsing for 'ATP', or 'biochemistry', or well, any tecchie term from above, or the following passages.
As a pared-down taster:
'Some of the ATP produced by mitochondria is generated directly during glycolysis and the Kreb's Cycle, which is also called the Tri-Carboxylic Acid (TCA) Cycle. More ATP is generated from a chemical called NADPH. This is the starting point of the electron transfer chain (also called Hydrogen transfer). The final Hydrogen acceptor is Oxygen. NADPH is produced during the Kreb's Cycle. One molecule of NADPH can be used to generate three molecules of ATP.'
But you already knew that, of course! A full description takes up pages. This diagram might help.
.. to show how vanishingly unlikely the whole thing is. Boggling++. Or maybe this one
This diagram illustrates a little of the complexity of cell biochemistry, all occurring endlessly, in just about every one of your hundred trillion microscopic cells. Believe it or not, the diagram above is a vast oversimplification. If you'd like to take a quick peep at a bit more detail of what is going on 24/7/365 on your behalf in every one of your cells, I strongly recommend a visit to http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl Click on any of the squares for a closer look, and do be prepared to be seriously gobsmacked.
'All ultimately accidental; all emerged via random mutation and collision; all purposeless; all simply an illusion of pattern and order', a Materialist must ultimately say of this bewilderingly complex system of systems.
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Each mitochondrion has its own strand of DNA called mDNA, which is quite different from your own personal DNA, and is also unique in coming down only via the maternal line. Hence your mDNA can be traced back to your various fore-mothers, right back to when She packed her crocodileskin bag and said goodbye to Olduvai Gorge for good. *** Intriguingly, a mitochondrion is similar in many ways to a sort of bacterium. An Idealist is happy with the possibility (necessity) of many many levels of Mind in the universe. It seems to me that we are here faced with the splendid possibility of witnessing a cosmic engineer's mind at work! 'What can we use to generate all that energy in this new monkeyjob? Ooo.. how about that little whotsit bacteria thing with the twirly motors? Should do just right'
'Twirly motors'? Read on
Mitochondria can (of course) self-replicate like a normal body cell but they are essentially aliens, albeit symbiotic or synergic, which might possibly have been put to use, somehow, somewhen. Wooo! Scary stuff
Symbiotic: of a mutually beneficial relationship. Synergic: of an interaction between two or more agents whose combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
Not too scary though, as we humans, the strutting Lords of the Earth, can literally not digest our own food without the aid of trillions of various sorts of bacteria to do it for us. We are, each one of us, a walking universe of little lives: we have trillions of bacteria on our skin, each variety having its own DNA-genome.
There are hundreds of varieties, at densities of up to 500 million per square inch. Astonishingly, we have about 100 times more microbial genes than human genes inside our body, mainly in the gut. We also have 9-10 times more bacterial cells in our body than human cells. But don't panic. They are almost all entirely harmless and many are actually beneficial, as they help to convert raw food into nutrients, and synthesise vitamins for us, and protect us from invading pathogens. If there's a disturbance in their balance, we are vulnerable to such nasties as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Just wash your hands before eating.
On top of this, each one of our own cells is stuffed with bacteriamitochondria to power us up to do all that walking and strutting. And, of
course, just about every one of our hundred trillion cells is a living and self-replicating entity in its own right. Add that lot together and it means that you, Sir, and you Madam, are Lord and Master of some twenty quadrillion or so tiny little lives, give or take a few multiple trillions. 20,000,000,000,000,000 lives, all dependent upon you, as you are upon them. We are each the Master of a Universe. The level of organisation, and of co-operation and co-ordination of all these living entities we each have on and within our bodies is way way beyond stupendously mind-boggling, I would say. Agree?.... 'Accident'? 'Random?'
Yogis know all about the complexity of our bodies, and make a point of regularly thanking their 'little lives', without whom they know they could literally not lift a finger. They also know that it is they themselves who somehow hold together these quadrillions of little lives in one coherent whole, until it's time for the Yogi to move on in the DarwinPlus samsaric process, at which point the cohesion-pattern is withdrawn, the body dies, and what we call rot sets in. 'Dissolution', in fact. Pattern lost. Cosmos returning to chaos. A microcosmic Brahman has breathed in.
*** If you are game for a real surprise: how about a rotary motor in a biological construct? What a unique find that would be! Surely not!
A rotary motor implies one part totally free to rotate within another. Very mechanical; very un-biologicalone would think.
Well, every mitochondrion contains lots of them driven, perhaps surprisingly, by protons: ie, sub-nuclear particles. Professor Paul Boyer and Dr John Walker were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for work on what Dr JW called The Motor of Life. This is an enzyme called ATP synthase, which rotates at about 6,000 revs per minute. It exists in and through the membrane of a mitochondrion, and is very very very small (about 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead). Every cell in your body has hundreds, if not thousands of them. I'll leave the arithmetic to you. Just keep adding zeroes. These motors are what enable Idealists and Materialists alike to move, as they make energy available from chemical and physical entities and processes.
Dr John Illingworth, of the University of Leeds says: 'The parallels between the molecular motors in living organisms, and the mechanical systems in modern vehicles are remarkable, although the components differ ten million times in size. Among the cellular machinery we can already identify emission control systems, fuel pumps, heaters, batteries, turbines, electric motors, drive shafts, gearboxes and universal joints.
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The major difference is that the cellular systems are self-maintaining and achieve performance levels that Ferrari can only dream of.' For more information and a simple animation of a motor in action, try. http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations/atpgradient/movie-flash.htm
Not only is this critter the tiniest motor in the world, it is also rated as the most powerful 'for its size'.
One last bit of techno talk, this time on how ATP synthase works, just to reinforce the levels of complexity and organisation we are talking of here. Don't worry about understanding every detail. Just consider the intricacy:
In mitochondria the free energy stored in transmembrane electrochemical gradients is used to synthesize ATP from ADP and phosphate via the membrane-bound enzyme ATP synthase. ATP synthase can also reverse itself and hydrolyze ATP to pump ions against an electrochemical gradient. ATP synthase consists of two portions: a membrane-spanning portion, Fo, comprising the ion channel, and a soluble portion, F1, containing three catalytic sites. Both Fo and F1 are reversible rotary motors. Fo uses the transmembrane electrochemical gradient to generate a rotary torque to drive ATP synthesis in F1 or, when driven backwards by the torque generated in F1, to pump ions uphill against their transmembrane electrochemical gradient. F1 generates a rotary torque by hydrolyzing ATP at its three catalytic sites or, when turned backwards by the torque generated in Fo, as a synthesizer of ATP.
Let us remember that this is a microscopically minute motor, dealing with subatomic particles, and that it is found by the multiple quadrillion in every human being, including your good self. A Materialist is bound by his dogma to say it's all ultimately accidental. Rational thinkers are allowed to differ.
One further and final example of the level of design that surrounds us at all levels: every tiny carrot seed (roughly 2,000 to a small spoonful) contains the following chemicals: acetone, acetyl-choline, alpha-linolenic-acid, alpha-pinene, alphatocopherol, apigenin, arachidonic-acid, arginine, asarone, ascorbic-acid, bergapten,
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beta-carotene, beta-sitosterol, caffeic-acid, camphor, chlorogenic-acid, chlorophyll, chrysin, citral, citric-acid, coumarin, elemicin, esculetin, ethanol, eugenol, falcarinol, ferulic-acid, folacin, formic-acid, fructose, gamma-linolenic-acid, geraniol, glutamine, glycine, hcn, histidine, kaempferol, lecithin, limonene, linoleic-acid, lithium, lupeol, lutein, luteolin, lycopene, magnesium, manganese, methionine, mufa, myrcene, myricetin, myristicin, niacin, oleic-acid, pantothenic-acid, pectin, phenylalanine, potassium, psoralen, quercetin, scopoletin, stigmasterol, sucrose, terpinen-4-ol, thiamin, tryptophan, tyrosine, umbelliferone, xanthotoxin and many other vitamins and minerals. It would not be a carrot seed without just one of these chemicals, nor would it grow successfully into a proper carrot. All spontaneously constructed and assembled by mindless minerals/chemicals/atoms/quarks, if the Materialist notion is to hold.
*** If we accept that Mind created all, we are still left with endless puzzles, are we not? Not least How? When?(!) and Why? If we retain a little modesty, we will admit that we are unlikely to ever be privy to most of the answers being, as we currently are, on the wrong side of panmentia. But maybe we can take a peep and have a guess or two.. Darwin's deistic view (ie, that the universe is made/run according to a Creator + Physical Laws + no revelation or tinkering) suggests a sort of mechanical Newtonian universe, which is really pretty deterministic: ie, the clockwork is just set running and potters on, until the power runs out. This would make us all pointless puppets, would it not? And in a pointless universe, too? just obeying the Laws of Motion and Thermodynamics, like some seven billion clockwork rabbits.
Deism: 'The belief in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.' The Free Dictionary. Of course this definition and many other similar ones do not make any clear statement about what Life is and what Laws might govern it. This is a most important point, which the yogic/esoteric Understanding has a lot to say about.
But the world is not like that, is it? People are not simple mechanical assemblages, as Prof Dawkins' phrase 'living objects' implies. We do unexpected things all the time. 'Original' things, even, like writing bad poetry and painting fish on the kitchen ceiling. Was that striking sonnet I once wrote about the A Certain Young Man from Nantucket an inevitable occurrence, pre-determined by an ultimate cosmic Law, which came into being (presumably spontaneously in Prof Dawkins' view) billions of years ago?
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Or was it a 'flash' of inspiration? An 'insight'? A moment of Intuition which witnessed the potential for creative rhyming? It must have been one or the other, must it not? Either a primordial pre-determining Law, or an immediate creative Intuition You choose. *** Materialists are troubled by the notion of 'free will', as you might expect. Their dogma ultimately demands a pointless mechanism, applicable to all and everything, including you and me (and a Materialist's own ideas, of course: a touch of irony. Do they notice it, I wonder?)
Some experiments in neuroscience have come up with the shocking finding that the brain may sometimes show a signal connected with a specific motor action before the person has deliberately chosen to carry out that action. This invokes a sense of panic for Materialists because of the implication that the brain somehow knows what you're going to do before you do, thus clearly negating free will and imposing some sort of creepy mind control by mindless chemicals! (Although I'm not sure why they should be surprised, as that is the very thing they claim the brain does all the time when it makes our thoughts for us.) But for an Idealist, there is no problem, as the 'I' is the one in charge. 'I' decide to do something, and this non-material decision, plus the power of Will, starts up the electrical circuitry in the brain, which then tells the monkey suit what to do. There is a brief time lapse as the process gets underway, while the Intuitive/Higher Mind instructs the Lower Mind (somehow) via the brain mechanism. Hence, we can measure the brain firing up before the person's Lower Mind or body feels the urge. How and even why the brain signals come into being simply by willing it so, is still a mystery, of course: the Mind/Body problem will not go away. For more details on this shocking neuroscientific discovery see the excellent Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense by Michael Brooks. If you read MB after reading this book I think you will find that six of the 'things that don't make sense' are certainly horribly perplexing or paradoxical if viewed from the Materialist perspective. But they are not paradoxical for an Idealist scientist. The six issues are 'sex, death, free will, homeopathy, the placebo effect' and'Life' itself. These are all challenges to Idealism but not paradoxical. They all fit quite rationally within the Idealist/DarwinPlus paradigm, even 'sex' and 'death' which are utterly baffling to Materialist-evolutionists, as in their view a simple budding or splitting system is surely a more efficient means of reproduction than all that messy passion and dissolution and subsequent wasted energy. These points above are more reasons for optimism and confidence in the Idealist/ DarwinPlus Understanding as they all fit neatly alongside each other, with no paradoxes. They are only paradoxical for Materialists, and a paradox is a sure sign that something somewhere is simply wrong, probably at a deep level. As yet another example of the paradoxical non-sense you are driven to if you insist upon retaining the Materialist fallacy: Steven Pinker, a Harvard Professor of Psychology, is on record as saying 'Free will is a fictional construction. But it has applications in the real world'. So which is it to be, Professor? Fiction or the real world?
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Personally, I prefer to live in the real world. If you prefer fiction, good luck to you and all your paradoxes
But if we follow the yogic/esoteric path, involving as it does the combination of Karma + Choice, we can allow, with a huge sigh of relief, that we do after all have free will, as we always knew but didn't dare declaim for fear of our biology teachers. Even the family mutt has perfect free will. After all, he can choose whether to turn left or right when he's booted into the garden, can he not? By what Primordial Physical Law could he possibly be pre-programmed for each turn he makes after every unseemly odour? And the cat and Grandma Your challenge, dear sceptical reader, is to codify that Primordial Physical Law. There isn't one, is there.? Thus:
Free will is a fact

A deterministic Materialist is free to disagree, especially if he has a sense of humour.
If you do disagree, what would it take to make you change your mind (!)
So given DarwinPlus and free will, what can we infer regarding the processes of 'normal' Darwinian somatic evolution? If we can accept that the stuff in Chapter 21 is all rational and therefore possibly correct, we can play with the concept of the Collective Mind. Thus: an experience of an individual animal or person (exercising his free will) can (somehow) add to the overall experience of the Collective Mind of the species, and thus enrich it. And this addition might then be diffused around to the other individuals of the species via some sort of field/vibe/resonance/Intuitional process. The stronger the repetition, the greater the power (think back to 'thoughtforms' and 'magic'). And thus, as Mind controls all, including pattern and design in body forms, this suggests that individual experiences might be fed back into the evolutionary process of the species, perhaps using Rupert Sheldrake's notion of 'morphic resonance' as a suitable mechanism.
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There does seem to be some evidence for this, involving subsequent generations of mice and rats being able to find their way more quickly round mazes than their predecessors.
No doubt students of evolution will see where this is leading: is there some truth in Lamarck's idea of 'inheritable characteristics' after all? Does a creature somehow, via its own choices, efforts and will, help to alter the physical features of the next generation? After all, we now know that DNA is just a chemical which requires a separate force (and 'Mind' seems to be the only rational candidate here) to switch its various genes on and off in order to produce the various physical shapes and 'characteristics' Lamarck was concerned with. If Mind must inevitably be involved, why should individual mental effort not be relevant? Darwin never lost respect for the idea that a characteristic might be inherited.. which is an embarrassment to modern Materialists. Thus they either ignore it or 'work round it' and insist that Darwin was really a proper sound Materialist who dismissed anything remotely like Lamarckism as silly. Darwin, who was a profoundly clear and honest thinker, would have been furious at this judgement, in his own perfectly-mannered and genteel way.
He did occasionally show a little of his own frustration, even in early days 'But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position - namely, at the close of the Introduction - the following words: 'I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.' This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.' Charles Darwin, last chapter, The Origin of Species, 6th and final edition. In other words, in every edition. And a hundred years later still nobody listens. The 'power of steady misrepresentation' does indeed 'endure'; but for a long long time. Something the great man was wrong about. Also: 'My argument has always been that the mind and the spirit, while being influenced by the struggle for existence, have not originated through natural selection.' (My emphasis, CG.) Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the process of Natural Selection.
Might it be that a species develops via its own collective experiences (as well as the brute forces of accident in environment, as Darwin and Wallace pointed out) up to a point where it can go no further in its current format in its quest for ever-increasing knowledge and experience and awareness? I realise this sounds ridiculous but might it be true? If Mind is behind all;
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if everything is evolving, from atom to 'god'; if we all have free will.? And if Evolution is about Mind, not simply body.. I wonder if this might suggest a possible explanation for previously unfathomable mass extinctions, and subsequent surprises?
Ie, the Collective Mind/Deva/whatever ensures that the individuals under its dominion get as much useful experience as possible from being, say, a sabre-toothed tiger before extincting that physical strand and returning to the physical later as a more generalised 'big cat'. Ridiculous to a Materialist, but not necessarily so to an Idealist.
Perhaps there are 'extinctional' leaps from species to species, brought about as the potential of each collective samsaric experience is exhausted: 'quantum evolution' if you like, which might explain why some 98% of every species that has ever existed has become extinct. It might also perhaps reconcile the current split between the 'gradualist' and 'saltationist' schools of evolutionary theory: the academic battle being fought between the self-styled 'creeps' and 'jerks' (!).
Ie, did evolution always proceed by endlessly slow and progressive steps over millions of years, or did it occasionally take an unexpected jump? There is a precedent for jumping in Nature, as electrons seem to take sudden quantum leaps from one energy state to another. Perhaps the old esoteric saying of 'As above, so below' has a point.
Perhaps they are both right. Perhaps evolution is gradual according to the Natural Selection model; but once the Mind/Deva has exhausted the total potential of that particular physical form and its capacity for awareness, then the job is complete and it's time for a leap forward, via extinction + reincarnation in a new form with greater potential for learning/awareness: another step up the slow and slippery slope from zero to hero: from a soma that is capable of 'lower-awareness' to one that can handle 'higherawareness'.
In fact, might 'the struggle for life' that CD found so wearying and troublesome be more realistically seen as 'the struggle to understand better'?
Naturally, a larger brain will be required from time to time, and brain morphology, as I understand it, does suggest that brain size might sometimes develop in jumps.
There seems to have been a gradual increase in brain size among hominins (human ancestors) over a three million year period. Then, suddenly, about 200,000 years ago,
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there was a remarkable increase of about 30% or so, for no apparent purpose. DarwinPlus would suggest that this was purposefully brought about in preparation for Man's next stage in his journey.
If there is any sort of truth in this suggestion, and speciation is indeed the mechanism whereby ever higher levels of awareness are achieved, then this same process might possibly be reflected in other aspects of life. Maybe emotional and mental niches are similarly explored, showing up as political and religious developments. If I have the space, I'll take another look at this in Chapter 26. *** A couple more things concerning 'pattern' and 'design'. Cosmologists are constantly puzzled by the fact that the universe seems to be just right for human life to exist in it. All sorts of fundamental values of gravitation and binding forces are balanced to within a tiny fraction of a percent. A tiny bit more of x, and the universe would fly apart; a fraction less, and it would collapse. A tiny alteration in y would mean particles could not form, never mind chemical elements and water. If z were not 'just so' there would be no chance of 'life emerging'. It all looks, to a rational eye, as if the universe saw us coming, as somebody once put it. But this, of course is screaming anathema to Materialists, for whom there is no purpose in the universe or in anything else.
"What nonsense it is to say that the universe was set up for us! Or that any of these forces, x, y and z were in any way 'tuned' to produce the only format imaginable for a life-compatible universe. It's all accident! Accident, I tell you! Meaningless! Everything.. meaningless! Yes.. everything, including this sentence is No, hang on"
And to be rational about it, if you seriously still believe that dumb chemicals can spontaneously self-assemble themselves into Life and then teach themselves to write symphonies, then I guess you have a case.
Remarkable things, chemicals: menthol, vanilla, glucose, aspirin, camphor, ambergris, cholesterol, vinegar, and testosterone all have something in common. Any ideas? Yes, they are all made up from various combinations of just three elements: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. If we add a fourth (nitrogen) we can make all manner of other goodies including nitroglycerine, cocaine, adrenaline, caffeine, thalidomide, morphine and nylon. DNA is made of these same four, plus a touch of phosphorus. The components of DNA are adenine C5H5N5, guanine C5H5N5O, cytosine C4H5N3O, and thymine C5H5N2O2; plus phosphate PO4 and 2-deoxyribose C5H9O4. That is to say that
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DNA is made of: three gases, carbon, and a dab of phosphorus, none of which are alive in any known or expected biological sense. No sign of any symphonies at this level (of pattern, design, and organisation).
If, on the other hand, you have followed the logic of this book so far, and accept that Idealism beats Materialism hands down in the logic stakes then you will have no problem at all with the universe being tailor-made, and will wonder what all the fuss is about. There is an awful lot of Materialist gook written about this subject, of everincreasing ingenuity and circularity. If you want to follow it up, keep your eyes peeled for some very slippery and evasive language. All good fun. It keeps you on your mental toes helps you to evolve! *** Of course, if design is to take place, there must be a time and place in which it occurs. And as DNA seems to be very intimately connected with the physical formation of the body, it would seem to be reasonable to think that there must be a specific point in the earliest stages of the formation of a new embryo when the DNA machinery of the new individual is clearly established. Is there such a point? Well, it seems there is. At one point during the complex process of cell division, sections of DNA from one strand of a chromosome may swop their position with a DNA section from the other strand. This process is called 'recombination' or 'crossover' and is thought (by Materialists, naturally) to be 'random'. Perhaps it is. But I would have thought that given the unbelievable complexity and precision of the algorithm for creating a bacterium, never mind a human body, that random crossovers would have a vanishingly small chance of being unharmful, never mind stable or creative. If you shuffle round chunks of computer code at random you produce chaos in no time flat. Why would a shuffling of DNA code be any different? If the recombination is not random, that means it is non-random, meaning thus that it is specific, or deliberate. It is thus following a meta-program of some sort, of a higher order than the material it is shifting around. Where does this meta-program reside, and what runs and coordinates it? It has to be Intelligence, wouldn't you say? 'Random' doesn't serve. So perhaps crossover is the point at which tweaks are carried out by some sort of Higher intelligence, for karmic purposes perhaps, to produce a suitable body for the incoming 'I'. It's a thought, compatible with the yogic/esoteric Understanding. Perhaps one day someone will give it serious thought and either prove or disprove it.
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*** See.. I told you this chapter would be a bit shorter. I'm not sure about the next one, though.
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Chapter 23 Time etc

Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labelled as 'conceptual necessities', etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors
Albert Einstein
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again
Goethe
If the yogic/esoteric Understanding is not just rational, but reasonably accurate, then there are quite a number of 'matters arising', I think you would agree. I'll take a quick look at one or two on the Physics front here. If you don't find Physics appealing, I urge you to give it a try. At the level I'm concerned with it's all just common sense, really.
'All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.' Albert Einstein
Yoga says that all the various bodies (etheric, astral, mental etc) are 'physical' but of an increasingly refined nature, and are all perfectly real in their own way: in fact more real than 'this world', which is more or less a sort of boot camp in which relative ruffians can learn some manners. This immediately brings up the problem of what do we mean by 'Reality' or 'more real'? I have no proper idea what 'more real' means. But as all the rest of the yogic/esoteric doctrine is so reasonable (if unexpected) I'm willing to see what might be extrapolated from it. After all, our dreams are absolutely real at the time, are they not? Can we say any more about our 'waking' reality? It seems 'real' but is it? Is it not possible, as esotericists etc have been saying for millennia, that this world is another sort of dream, or illusion ('maya' to a Buddhist) created by Higher Mind for our own use and delectation, and separated from 'real Reality(!)' by a 'veil'? How would we know whether this is true or not? (But see Chapter 26 for some possible help here.)
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'Some illusion!' the Wet Fish Test suggests. What is illusory about being painfully knocked off your feet by a swinging weight? However, as established earlier, we (and the fish) are composed of 99.9999999999999% absolutely nothing,
An accurate figure, apparently.
so what is making contact with what? And as for pain, well, it is established beyond any doubt that pain can be controlled or blocked completely by self-hypnosis: ie by an act of choice and will. So, at the end of the day, nothing hits nothing and it doesn't hurt. A paradox Well, hang on you might say there's something fishy here. Indeed there is, and that something relates to 'scale'.
Sorry about that.
Yes, at one level, we (meaning the sub-atomic make-up of our bodies, of course) are 'nothing', but on another level we are clearly feeling, thinking, creative, physically active entities, definitely susceptible to fishy flagellation. The essential difference between the scale of 'nothing' and the one of everyday reality is pattern, design, form call it what you like, but be sure to acknowledge it if reason is to be served. Our bodies are what they are because of an immensely complex yotta-system of interwoven designs, from atom to cell to heart; from molecule to mitochondria to neural network. Looked at from this perspective, the paradox of the Wet Fish Test disappears, wouldn't you say?
The physical clout of cod on chop is 'explained' by the power of the electrical bonds of our respective atomic structures which act as repulsive poles against each other. The energies are so powerful that their repulsive action is perceived as 'solidity', and does indeed produce the noted effect of being staggered by an impact.
And, of course 'we' are not our bodies at all, which are just the mechanisms which respond, via electro-mechanical nerve sensors in our fingers, ears, eyes etc, to outside stimuli. We are the temporary tenants of the astonishing monkey suit, who are learning to live in it and how to control it, all the way from physical, through emotional, to mental control, as discussed earlier. The animal nervous system does its thing, in reacting to stimuli of touch or taste or sight etc, which the inner I then interprets, according to our own personal remembered experience of 'reality' and the mental connections we have made. We do not all respond to the same stimuli identically.
We may also choose to override certain stimuli by acts of will (for example via self-hypnosis for pain perception). So where does that leave 'Reality'? It's all linked to our own personal perception in the end, and is largely formed by our (mental) interpretation of (physical) stimuli.
Einstein's relativity theory and the quantum principle of uncertainty also note the relevance of human observation to 'reality', and underline the notion that 'all is perception' See below.
Input + interpretation = perception. Our only 'reality' is our perception.
All is perception .and perception may be fooled or mistaken, as we know all too well from our dreams, and occasionally from 'real life'.
I once watched this occur. Sat in the bathroom one day I saw out of the corner of my eye a little something on the wall. As I turned to look it was clearly a woodlouse. No doubt about it. Then it morphed into what it really was a sticker off an item bought in a local shop, which was the same size and shape as a woodlouse, and with the same ribbed pattern at a quick glance. It has been stuck on the wall by one of the kids. The point being that I perceived what seemed to me to be a rational interpretation of something that size and shape on the bathroom wall, based upon my own memories and expectations, until proved otherwise. I've never forgotten seeing it change from a bug to a sticker as I watched. Perhaps you have had a similar experience? Perhaps with a sound? 'You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.' Herb Cohen, American presidential advisor. (Some words of wisdom are worth repeating). To put it a slightly different way: 'Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.' Marcus Aurelius 121-180 CE.
So maybe the whole of our perception is 'mistaken', meaning it is real, but only relatively real, as a dream is, and is anyway dependent upon our own personal memory and experience. It is our own personal 'reality' in other words. Thus we can be pretty sure that 'reality' is a variable, dependent upon our individual mental condition. Nothing is certain and common to all, by definition. Thus science is bound to eventually come up against a big problem in its search for an objective and certain Reality.
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Now then. *** Materialism is effectively paralysing science from further creative progress by its irrational insistence upon there being no cause for the universe or LMC (Life, Mind and Consciousness). As it also insists that Matter/Energy spontaneously created everything (including itself), out of itself alone and by accident, Materialism can admit of no possible locus for the Higher (of any sort) to exist in. Idealism-DarwinPlus, on the other hand, has options, but these will require some re-thinking of previous Materialist assumptions. Here goes: Time: Time is usually assumed to be real stuff, particularly since Einstein developed the idea of spacetime, which seems to somehow incorporate time as the fourth dimension.
I've struggled to understand what spacetime is several times but still can't get a proper grasp of it. 'The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.' Hermann Minkowski 1908.
But surely, time does not actually exist? There are three points worthy of a moment's thought: 1 The past is gone, and no longer exists; the future does not yet exist; all that does exist is the present instant, and as soon as you realise this, it has passed. The present moment is all the time there is. It is the razorblade of being, on whose edge all events, thoughts, and actions occur. ALL of them. The eternal present is 'time'. Once you are happy with the rationality of this, let's move on
Memories of the past are made or recalled only in the present moment. Plans for the future are made only in the present moment If the past is all dead and forgotten.. And the future is not yet begotten.. If the Here and the Now is all that there is Well, there's no time in which to feel rotten. Is there?.... Happy now; happy forever!
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I once watched a famous physicist on the tv explain in his introduction how St Augustine had also come to the conclusion that time did not actually exist. The physicist then completely ignored the issue and spent the rest of the programme expounding upon some very strange Materialist ideas involving 'spacetime'.
2 Our personal-time differs completely from clock-time. Ten minutes with friends passes much faster than ten minutes at the dentist's. You may think this is a trivial point, but it isn't. We'll take another look in a minute. 3 To re-engage with Occam, and keep things as simple as possible, try this little mind experiment: Imagine a bunch of planets, A, B, C, D etc pottering about in empty space. A particle of some sort is travelling between A and B. It reaches B and bounces off, and heads towards D. It misses D but instead catches F a glancing blow, and continues on its way. That's it, until it does or does not hit something else. Notice anything?
Apart from it being the most deeply disappointing experiment you've ever come across?
What we have here is a description of how events occur according to cause and effect and only cause and effect. There is NO mention of 'time' but the job gets done all the same. The universe rolls on and on and on without the concept of 'time'... Entities Move according to Cause and Effect, and the greater the energy the greater the speed. That's it. 'Time' is not required. Transpose this little episode to all the events of the world, and what have we got? Entities (maybe people), force/motion (maybe motivation/will), and encounters (results of causes). Every single event in the world will continue to take place as normal, but without the need for involving 'time' at all: just Entities, Motion and Encounters. Materialists will have trouble with this stripped-down analysis, of course, as at the human level it involves mental conditions like 'motivation', 'choice', 'purpose' and 'free will', which are all serious problems for them. Deep down, Materialists insist that 'accident is all' (following Laws, which have themselves presumably arisen by accident). In other words, the universe and everything in it must follow a predetermined pattern; much as the one I have outlined above in that nifty experiment. However, Newtonian-style clockwork determinism does not have a part to play in any scenario which involves people (or to a lesser degree, animals, as discussed previously). Human scenarios are ruled by the threads of Cause/Effect brought about by human purpose, will, and choice.
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But either way, Effect will inexorably follow Cause, irrespective of 'time'. (More on why we are so wedded to the concept of 'time' in a moment.)
The yogic/esoteric Understanding says that 'determinism' in the intelligent world is caused by karmic obligation: an obligation is due; an opportunity to pay it off arises (apparently by accident, perhaps); a free choice is made; an action is taken (or not taken, of course). Mechanical determinism, as in say an earthquake, appears to be different. More later.
*** Meanwhile, the notion of Newtonian clockwork determinism is so deeply ingrained in its culture that Science has come to accept time as a reality, and has even promoted it to the 'fourth dimension'. The fact remains that the present instant is all the 'time' there is, and it can thus not be a fourth dimension, as it essentially does not exist at all. What we call 'the past' exists only in memory, and to repeat myself, memory is only effective when recalled in the present moment; likewise 'the future' exists only in the imagination at the present moment.
An interesting diversion: as language requires memory to call up old ideas about the meanings attached to the sounds being uttered, then not using language frees one from this particular aspect of the tyranny of old ideas. Is this why various monks live in silence? To be in the present moment and only in the present moment? Ie, to be at the only point where Reality may be encountered? It would certainly seem to be why drinkers and druggies do what they do: to flee from the past (or maybe the expected future) into the present moment, where they feel more at peace.
So if time does not exist. what is it (so to speak)? It is two things: one a Materialist interpretation, which we all find very useful, and the other an Idealist version which relates to Reality at a deeper and much more important level. Firstly the Materialist day-to-day version: 'Time' as we normally understand it in the world of clocks and railways is a result of measurement of celestial events (the Earth going round the sun for example) boiled down into handy units we call hours or minutes.
Just to underline the man-made nature of these units, the ancient Egyptians and Romans had hours which varied in length according to the season.
But when we do this measurement, what we are actually measuring is 'number of occurrences', as in 'periodicity'. We are counting events, and 'events' are not 'time'; they are the results of causes. In the case of the
movements of the solar system the cause of every event is a mechanical process which operates according to the Laws of Motion: Things, Motion, Events; all according to Cause and Effect (the concept of 'time' is not required in order for the Laws of Motion to apply inexorably to heavenly bodies rotating for millions of rotations; for billions of 'years' before the term 'year' was invented). The physical universe has no need of 'time' in order to do its stuff. Agree? The Materialist version of 'time' is an artefact manufactured by Man for his convenience. Hard to imagine? Not really Ugg and Ogg, living on their badger nuggets in a cave somewhere did not have 'time' in their lives. No clocks. Just changing seasons and sunrises, which were all events, brought about by causes, which we now know to be 'Newtonian'. You don't need a clock to make the sun rise. This mathematical notion of 'time' turned up only when Man began to think scientifically and empirically. Measurement. Measurement. And measuring the periodicity of heavenly events helped Man to build with increasing precision. Do you need the concept of 'time' to build a steam engine or a jet? Strictly speaking, no you don't. But it does make things easier. An engine is a sequence of causes and effects, when you think about it. A 'sequence' means 'a required order' and does not involve 'time', other than the notions of 'before' and 'after'. However, getting the highly precise sequence of cause-effect needed to make an engine work is near impossible, I would say, without precise measurement of 'timing'. However, even 'timing' is not the same as 'time'. 'Timing' is ultimately just a carefully ordered sequence, in which effect follows cause with great precision. This could go on for some 'time', so I'll leave it there for your further consideration. Computer programs which can send missions to Mars, or stop advanced fighter planes from falling out of the sky operate with no concept of 'time': just a hugely complex sequence of sequences, spelled out as an algorithm: this, then this; if that, then this; if not that, then this...
True, an algorithm might make allowance for 'time', as in 'after five seconds, do x' but the 'five seconds' actually refers to the sweep (movement) of a clock hand, or a click or a pulse in a system: all physical countable events, not 'time'. A truer version of that instruction would be 'after five clicks, or five degrees of arc or whatever, do x'.
Clocks do not measure 'time'; they measure the relative movement of planetary bodies which happen to move in helpfully regular periods, as moderated by Laws of Motion, which do not need the concept of 'time' in order to occur. Over to you.
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Einstein once said that 'Time is what clocks measure'. I think he meant what I've just been exploring above.
What we commonly think of as 'time passing' is actually our own consciousness of our own enduring awareness
Sometimes this awareness is of movement in space, plus the desire to compare one event to another, via measurement of their relative separation in our enduring awareness. We may choose to call this separation 'time'. Thus, the concept of 'time' occurs only when the activity of an observer is added, and we wish to add a very particular sort of measurement to an event. The other sort of 'time', the Idealist version, refers to personal, 'experienced' time, as mentioned above. After all, we do exist and we do experience things and some things seem to last longer than others. We often think of experiences as 'taking time', meaning clock-hours. But our experiences of 'time' can vary enormously and are by no means ruled by clock-time.
'Everything takes time': No not really. What this actually means is that everything we do requires a certain number of sequenced actions of a Cause/Effect nature. These will all be carried out whether or not we hold the concept of 'time' at all. Agree? Think caveman frazzling badger goujons How long does it 'take him'? 'Eight minutes'? 'Minutes? Eh? Wot?' No; it takes 'until the process is complete'.
As a personal example I once went over the handlebars of a friend's Lambretta when a nut fell off and the brake mechanism whipped round and jammed in the mudguard. We were doing about 35 mph. I remember every fragment of the next, what?.. three seconds? The shock of leaving my saddle; the view of Friesian cows over the fence, one of whom was looking straight at me; noting that there wasn't any traffic coming; the realisation that I didn't need to analyse the cause of my flying through the air at the moment, only what to do next; seeing the tarmac approaching my face; noting the size of the aggregate in the tarmac; realising that I, the passenger, was likely to end up in front of the driver; smelling the fresh tar; turning my cheek; then turning my shoulder to take the blow; making sure my legs were straight and relaxed; bouncing over; moving my head to avoid the tarmac again; relaxing; checking body mentally for pain or distress; knowing that there would not be even a scratch on my crash helmet. Three seconds maximum that took about ten minutes, if you see
what I mean. I guess we will all have had an experience like that. A 'peak moment' of some sort, when your attention level shoots up to 11 and you are more aware of your immediate surroundings than you have ever been before. Then it's all over and 'the clock' speeds back up to 'normal' again. Of course, 'time' doesn't come into this at all. What happened to me was not that time slowed down but that my perception, or awareness, speeded up. I was, if you like, experiencing ever finer shavings of the present instant. People often report 'never having felt so alive' when recounting some dramatic event or period in their lives which required their close alert attention. Many wartime experiences would fit in here. 'Nowness', as you might call it, is the sense of continuous and enduring personal experience, or awareness, or perhaps 'accelerated consciousness', and has nothing to do with clocks. 'Time' is indeed relative.
Other examples of such relativity: Watching seconds tick by on a clock. It is possible to glance up suddenly and 'catch the clock unawares', so that the second hand 'takes' an apparent 2-3 seconds before it clicks again. Try it. Then try paying full attention for the whole second and see how it stretches. Waiting for the result of an x-ray takes hours. 'A watched kettle never boils.' Hypnosis: your consciousness has been given the afternoon off. You are doing just the opposite of paying close attention to the moment. Subjects seem to underestimate their 'time under' by ~90%. Meditation: you have deliberately withdrawn your attention and consciousness from the present moment. 'Time' passes quicker than expected. Life Recall: survivors of Near Death Experiences confirm that one's whole life (especially key moments) pass before one's eyes at death. What seems like hours pass in what is later known to have been seconds. 'Time' goes quicker when you're having fun. By definition you are relaxing and not paying close attention. Your awareness/consciousness is partially withdrawn. Also possibly full of beer, which complicates the issue somewhat. Under anaesthesia, 'time' passes 'instantly': consciousness is 'sent away'. In sleep, 'time' passes according to different 'rules' from normal. Dreamless time passes immediately; dream time seems to be slower. This would accord with one's attention/consciousness/awareness being fully engaged, albeit on a different plane. LIVING IN THE NOW seems to be terribly relevant to being fully alive; after all, there is no other time in which to live. To live fully is to be absolutely aware of and fully in the present moment. This means paying close attention to your thoughts, emotional surges, actions, and surroundings. Buddhists call this 'mindfulness', and from it they derive the axiom: 'When walking, just walk; when sitting just sit. Above all, don't wobble'.
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An interesting experiment was once done which showed how specific concentration can conflict with mindful awareness. Students were instructed to watch a video of people playing basketball and were asked to count how many passes were made. During the video a woman in a gorilla suit walks through the players for five seconds, and beats her chest to camera. Afterwards, the viewers were asked did they see anything unusual, and even 'Did you see a gorilla?'. Some 46% reported no gorilla or anything unusual. If you'd like to take a look at the video yourself, go to http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html then select 'View the 'basketball' video'.
At the end of the day(!) what does exist is 'conscious awareness in the eternal present moment'. 'There is no time like the present', indeed: in fact 'there is no time but the present', and everything happens in the present moment.
Looked at in this light then maybe relativity theory, which suggests that 'time' slows down as one approaches the speed of light, should be reinterpreted as 'consciousness/ awareness increases as one approaches the speed of light'. But 'awareness' would seem not to be part of the equations, so maybe not Or maybe it should be?
*** So where does all this leave (non-existent) 'time' as a fourth dimension, and even the spacetime that Einstein worked with? On a day to day level, it mainly doesn't cause a problem. Cosmology, and much of normal physics is deeply concerned with measurement and strict and precise 'timing'/sequencing, and conventional Newtonian 'time' is fine for all these jobs of understanding how strictly three-dimensional physical things relate. But I suspect it might be causing problems elsewhere in physics when 'time' is taken for something it is not: like the fourth dimension, for example. And it will certainly run into trouble when the yogic/esoteric worlds of the astral etc finally come into play. worlds in which Mind is the moving force, and where, according to mediums and Yogis, 'time' does not exist in any sense at all.
I suspect that this is really no different from 'time' in our 3-d world: it doesn't exist here, either; it's just that we've got used to thinking that it does. Intriguingly, to me, the timelessness of the Higher world might help to explain the notorious unreliability of honest mediumistic predictions (having excluded all the usual issues with fraud, mania, etc). Thus: if Cause, Choice, and Effect (ie Karmic Law) is what makes things happen, then mapping out an Effect for a given Cause might be a horribly complex job, as there are so many variables involved as a result of many people's many choices constantly interacting with each other. Perhaps a medium can pick out one likely Effect from the enormous web of possibilities, but as time is of no importance in these things (not least because it doesn't exist) it will be very hard to predict when the Effect will materialise. (That notion of a web of possibilities seems to
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be similar to something in the quantum world. More below.) Hence, yogis often speak of karmic debts 'ripening' or 'maturing': a gradual organic process which depends upon multiple external variables.
I'm not the only one who has a hard time with spacetime, apparently. Real physicists do as well:
Many spacetime continua have physical interpretations which most physicists would consider bizarre or unsettling. For example, a compact spacetime has closed, time-like curves, which violate our usual ideas of causality (that is, future events could affect past ones). For this reason, mathematical physicists usually consider only restricted subsets of all the possible spacetimes. One way to do this is to study 'realistic' solutions of the equations of general relativity. Another way is to add some additional 'physically reasonable' but still fairly general geometric restrictions and try to prove interesting things about the resulting spacetimes. (from Wikipedia, 'Spacetime')
So maybe something really is awry with 'spacetime' as a concept, if it leads professionals to such tortuous and even questionable attempts to force it to behave. DarwinPlus would suggest that the problem might be that 'time' is NOT a dimension, and it's the assumption that it is which is causing (some of?) the problem. Speaking of which Dimensions: There is another reason why 'time' can't be the fourth dimension: the position has already been taken, by a much more rational candidate: the hypercube (or tesseract). When I first came across this oddity, I was baffled as to how science seemed to accept two entirely different entities as being representative of the fourth dimension. I still am baffled. I understand that the 'time' of spacetime is handled by a different sort of maths from the maths of the hypercube. So is it being treated as the fourth dimension or not? And if not, what is it? And if it is, where does that leave the tesseract? I can only assume that I'm missing the point, somehow, but for the life of me, I can't see where, especially as 'time' surely does not exist at all? See what you think A hypercube is pretty much what it says: a very special take on 'the cube'. It goes like this. Begin with a point. A point has zero dimensions.
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Stretch the point out into a one inch line. A line is, by definition, one-dimensional. The dimension is 'length'. Sit a second identical line on top of it. Next, grab hold of one of these lines and move it away from the other one for, again, one inch. Now join both left hand ends together; and both right hand ends. You now have a square (or 'plane') with four sides of one inch. A plane is, by definition, two-dimensional: length and breadth. Next, apply a suction pad to the top of this plane and draw it upwards, again for an inch. Joining corners together, you now have a cube (or 'volume') with all six sides of one inch. A volume (or 'solid') is three-dimensional: length and breadth and height. I guess you will see the pattern here Take the original item and extend it at right angles to itself, thus adding an extra dimension. Now for the tricky bit By logic, surely the fourth dimension must be 'at right angles' to a cube? But how on earth can you conceive of something at right angles to a cube? It doesn't make sense. Well.. not quite. It does make sense mathematically, but our 3-d vision and brain systems are unable to completely 'see' the result. Try this, though Attach six suction pads, one to each surface of the cube and extend them all outwards. You now have a cube in a cube. Clearly this is not an adequate image, but it's a hint. Have a look at 'Hypercube' on Wikipedia to see a brave and strangely unsettling animation, which gives a better idea, given that it is a 2-d picture of a 3-d simulation of a 4-d entity! Below is a still photo taken from the animation:
This odd entity seems to me to be a much more rational (if barely conceivable) candidate for the job of being or representing the fourth dimension than 'time' is. If nothing else, it follows a rational and established mathematical series, and although we can't quite grasp it, we
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can sort of see that it might exist, just beyond our grasp, whereas the other candidate, 'time' simply doesn't exist at all. And I can see no way to reconcile Time with Tesseract. They are entirely different are they not?
Another way of attempting to get a handle on the 4-d world is to consider the fact that a normal shadow is a very poor 2-d 'reflection' of a 3-d reality. So maybe our 3-d world is similarly a poor 'shadow' of a spectacularly 'more real' 4-d reality. Perhaps sunshine is the shadow of 'Reality'. This may be nonsense, but it would fit the pattern, and I guess it would make some sort of sense of the seers' and visionaries' reports that the Higher World is utterly beyond description.
So if 'time' is not the fourth dimension whither spacetime? And what of all the calculations which are based upon it, including, as I understand it (which is 'hardly at all') the current cosmological enthusiasm for String or M Theory, which requires ten (or eleven) dimensions, some at least of which are conceived of as being curled up in corners somehow? But the maths of x2, x3, x4.. etc, plus common sense, combine to tell us that a higher dimension must be hugely greater than its predecessor. A line contains an infinite number of points; a plane contains an infinite number of lines; a cube contains an infinite number of planes; thus, a hypercube/tesseract is going to contain an infinite number of solids, or volumes. Upwards and onwards adding a fresh infinity every time. How on earth can the eighth or ninth dimensions curl up somewhere, or be anything other than higher upon higher levels of infinities as are their more lowly predecessors in the series? So Time does not exist, and the 4-d world lies 'at right angles to reality' as I'm sure somebody must have said. Of course to the yogic/esoteric philosophy, this 4-d reality is not only a fact, but it is also a superior Reality which exists in 'an infinite number of volumes'; or 'an infinite number of 3-d spaces', which might rationally mean 'an infinite number of universes'.
I remember here a puzzling phrase from the Bible: 'In my Father's house there are many mansions'. Any connection, I wonder, allowing for what the Aramaic word translated here as 'mansions' might really mean?
Theosophical doctrine is clear that there are many planes, sub-planes and sub-sub-planes etc of the Higher world(s), presumably each one relating to a different vibratory rate.. of which we already understand there to be an infinite number in the electromagnetic continuum, for example. So, maybe Maybe there are infinitely grading vibes or planes, which somehow flip over into separate dimensions at certain definite 'quantum' points?
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This does seem unlikely, doesn't it?.. but then so is the universe. *** This might be a good point to remember Oparin again, and his idea of there having to be a point of creation, at which Life first appeared. His logic was that as we see in the present world an enormous array of species, and rather fewer when we look at the fossil record, then common sense says that if we follow the 'v' or 'cone' backwards in time we must arrive at a point of origination, where Life began. The notion of the Big Bang follows a similar logical path. So far so good but there is a problem POINT OF ORIGIN / BIG BANG
PP
PRESENT DAY because what the cone represents here is an Effect emerging from a point but without a Cause. A Yogi would suggest that the Cause of all Matter, from particle to universe, derives from Higher and more intelligent realms, from which the Energies necessary to produce our 3-d Matter are stepped down via chains of transformers ('chakras') in a process that you might symbolise as: HIGHER / PRE-PHYSICAL
PHYSICAL / BIG BANG So, he might say, if you put next to , you have Cause and Effect neatly described: . The point of connection, between the two cones, is the point of what we call 'creation'. POINT OF ORIGIN / PHYSICAL CREATION / BIG BANG
PRE-CREATION
PRESENT DAY
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It's a curious coincidence, I guess, that the traditional symbol for infinity looks remarkably similar, and could be similarly interpreted: : two spheres or worlds linked. which again looks remarkably similar to the mandorla in Chapter 17. This would satisfy both the Materialist and Idealist scenario, I think, and would supply the Materialist's missing Cause for the universe etc. Interestingly, if you run the 'Higher ' and 'Lower ' across into each other you get
which brings us back to the Star of David again, in which the Higher and the Lower worlds are absolutely united, this time using more realistic (?) (if badly drawn) 3-d cones rather than symbolic 2-d triangles. As chakras are said to be rapidly spinning cones, taking in higher vibes and spinning them down into lower ones, I wonder if the vortex may have any connection with the formation of physical particles? *** How did science come to mistake 'time' for something real? I don't know, but I think it may go back to Descartes. One of the great man's many achievements was to invent a way of pinpointing how two variable sets of numbers related to each other: in other words, he invented 'the graph'. A typical graph, to show the rate at which heat is lost from a hot badgerburger, would have units of temperature (degrees Celsius, for example) along the vertical line of the graph, while the horizontal line carries units of 'time' ('minutes', say: as conveniently used for comparing one condition/event [ie, samples of the gradual mechanical process of heat loss] against another).
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Very useful for metallurgists, cannon makers, industrial blacksmiths, etc. The point I'm interested in is that 'time' turns up here as an apparently real entity, rather than a convenience for measuring before-and-after conditions of lengthy or complex physical events, and hereafter continues to be considered as 'real' by mathematicians and physicists.
Note: the 'regularly-spaced' ticks of a clock do not represent 'time'. They might be of any length at all (remember the Egyptians' extendable hours?), and are merely our attempt to regularise and formalise what we've come to think of as the passage of 'time'.
As maths progressed, the original x (horizontal) and y (vertical) axes of a graph were supplemented by a z axis, which came up out of the page, at right angles to the other two. Using this system, any point in a space could be identified by three numbers. A backpacker's map can pinpoint any pub on the planet with just two numbers, read off the x-horizontal, and the yvertical scales. If you could add a third, perpendicular, axis you could pinpoint any place in the air, at any height above any pub on the planet. Useful for a hang-glider picnic rendezvous. Now then There came a point at which physicists wanted to plot sequences of events. Which preceded which? In other words 'at which point in 'time' did each event occur, relatively and practically speaking?' This called for the perfectly valid and useful addition of a fourth axis to the graph system (but completely imaginary this time, as you have no hope of drawing something at right angles to something which is already at right angles to the page). An illustration of its usefulness might be that if you want to put a smart bomb through Captain Evil's window at precisely 1.32pm, when he will be having his lunchtime cocoa and puppy sandwiches, you can pinpoint your target precisely by programming your bomb with four numbers: you locate
the building with an x and a y reading; then locate the correct floor of the building by adding a z reading. You can then pinpoint the snarling Captain by adding a t reading of 1.32pm for 'time'. I guess this might be considered a nicer option than carpet bombing the entire city for a less certain effect. These four sets of locating numbers are called 'Cartesian coordinates' and they are really useful in day to day activities. However By this point 'time' has become thought of as something other than it really is ('nothing') by virtue of its practical usefulness on a graph, and having a whole new (fourth) axis named after it. The notion of 'time' as the real fourth dimension (as opposed to 'graphical' or 'notional') gradually became unquestioned, and led eventually to the notion of 'spacetime' and the confusion which seems to surround it. It is my guess that this is how the error occurred. It may be entirely wrong, of course. What matters is that, as far as my sense of logic tells me, 'time' is NOT the fourth dimension, and never was.
Unless you, dear reader, can persuade me otherwise, by reason, starting with the reconciliation of Time with Tesseract.
If I understand them rightly, esotericists etc claim that the fourth dimension is the astral world: a real place, of refined physical nature, and of infinite volumes (as perceived by each precise and specific 'vibe' in the local continuum, as in tuning into radio programmes) in which entities live and move, and in which events occur, according, as ever, to choice (Mind) plus cause and effect. The mental world is the fifth dimension, and so on. Some reports by people who claim to have lucidly experienced the astral world, suggest that one feature is of planes/volumes that can overlap and interpenetrate. So they say.
This overlapping may presumably just be a result of their own wavering focus: not being powerful or 'mindful' enough to 'hold the vibe'; perhaps similar to our own paranoid schizophrenics who have trouble distinguishing between two realities. By the same token, mediums are pretty skilled at making the distinction. The erratic appearance of ghosts may also refer to 'wavering focus' of a sort.
I guess that once we admit of a fourth dimension that is 'volume-based' rather than 'time'-based', perhaps room may yet be found for Newton's idea of a luminiferous aether. The famous experiments that could not find a trace of the aether were not looking in the fourth dimension, or even in the realm of 'highly refined physical reality' that the yogic/esoteric philosophy speaks of.
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Mind and matter: There would seem to be an extraordinary area of convergence for science and yogic/esoteric theory in the sub-nuclear world. Physics has reached an impasse in that it can't find a way of reconciling the Physics of the Huge (Einsteinian relativity) with the Physics of the Tiny (quantum mechanics). Common sense says that if they cannot be reconciled then either one of them or perhaps both of them is/are wrong in some way. Relativity requires 'spacetime', and as 'time' doesn't exist, I wonder if that's one area where error may have crept in. Quantum mechanics is an extremely odd world in which theorists claim that time can run backwards, apart from many other counter-intuitive processes. I wonder how the equations work out once 'time' is perceived as a) not the fourth dimension and b) non-existent? Then it doesn't run anywhere, and we are left with simply Things, Movement, and Cause + Effect (including the possible Effects of Mind: attention, will, etc).
'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.' Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize physicist. 'Anyone who claims to understand quantum physics is a liar or a fool.' Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize physicist. Both men are indicating that quantum physics appears to be beyond reason. All physicists seem to share this sentiment. But if we remove 'time' as being the fourth dimension, does that help to resolve the paradoxes?
If the hypercube model is indeed representative of the fourth dimension, it would account for some of the weird effects reported in the world of psychical research in which things apparently leap instantly out of or into sealed containers: from one volume to another one, which seem unconnected in the 3-d world but which might well be connected in the 4-d one.
Remember Lyall Watson's report of seeing a tennis ball evert (turn inside out) before his eyes? This too would suggest a case of 4-d behaviour.
The 'impossible' interlacing of the limbs of the Star of David also suggest some reference to a Higher dimension in which things apparently unlinked are, or may be, linked.
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Similarly, it might help to explain the quantum condition of 'entanglement' which seems to show that one particle can be in two places at once, or that two apparently separate particles are somehow in intimate touch.
If you'd like to read a fuller and more persuasive account of the relative conditions of life in various dimensions, you could do worse than Charles Hinton's very readable paper from 1884. It's available free to read online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/16775059/Selected-Papers-of-Charles-Hinton-About-theFourth-Dimension-Hinton Also Flatland by Edwin A Abbott.
But the most intriguing yogic/esoteric connection with the quantum world is in the area of Mind. Put very briefly, it would seem to be a truth of quantum physics that a subnuclear entity might be considered to be either a particle or a wave, depending on how you choose to measure it.
Note: 'choose'
In the end, Mind decides on what is there.
Mind forms reality
I don't think any quantum physicist would quibble with that statement (although he might baulk at the grand baldness of it and its universal implications). Neither, of course, would any yogic/esoteric philosopher, but he would beef it up out of the realm of the physically sub-microscopic, and into the multi-dimensional stratosphere of the Higher worlds. A human mind choosing whether a tiny blip manifests as a wave of energy or a particle of matter is very small beer to his thinking: but entirely consistent with the principle of 'Mind the Creator'. Again, 'as above, so below'. One thread of quantum theory thinks that before the wave/particle finally 'collapses' into one or the other, it exists as a sort of potential in a vast web of possible conditions. It is Mind which causes the 'collapse'. This strikes me as being remarkably similar to the issue of the medium trying to pin down one particular Effect out of a vast web of possibilities, as above. This association might be nonsense, of course. Materialism hits yet another paradox in the quantum world, in that it insists that Matter created Mind, but is then faced with the quantum insistence that Mind determines Matter. There is nowhere for the Materialist to run to to
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explain this runaway loop of perpetual motion. The only solution is to admit that Materialism is a mistake. A Yogi might also suggest that the problem physics currently has in uniting the force of gravity with the other three ultimate forces of physical matter/energy might one day be resolved by considering gravity as a Higher force which is concerned with re-uniting ('yoga'/'re-ligare') all the polarised and thus separated opposites in the 3-d physical world. He might not, of course. It's a bit hard to tell what Yogis think sometimes. Pattern again: A final thought on E=mc . A tiny amount of matter can be forced to release vast 'frozen' quantities of energy from within its own pattern/structure. This is well established. But nobody has ever run the equation the other way round, to convert energy into matter, apart from a few fleeting ghostly particles. It strikes me that it is never going to be possible to create 'real' matter from energy because E=mc2 takes no account of 'p' for pattern. Energy is patternless, but matter has pattern ('design'), so to get matter from energy you need to understand the pattern ('form') that needs to be formed and then infilled. Nonsense? Idealism says 'not at all', and it's a fact that nobody has yet synthesised an atom from scratch.
The amount of energy contained in matter is enormous. It took the energy in just 0.6gm of uranium235 to kill 80,000 people in a flash at Hiroshima. That's about as much matter as in a generous pinch of salt.
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The formula is obviously all too accurate, but is it complete? I suspect that in years to come the issue of pattern/form/design will be finally upgraded from the elephant in the corner to a place at the head of the table, and people will begin to incorporate the 'p' of pattern somehow. Presumably this will need to find a way of integrating 'Mind' into physics on a serious scale. How, I've no idea. Consciousness again: You and I, dear reader, are conscious and self-conscious beings, meaning that we Know we are conscious, and thus do not require any proof offered by any priest or scientist. We Know that we are free to choose our own behaviour and attitudes, and that we are capable of quite astonishing acts of creativity. Science, at the quantum level, would agree with us here: Mind creates, or at least 'formulates', meaning that 'form' is allocated by Mind, just as Plato said, 2,500 years ago, and Darwin echoed 150 years ago
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(remember his insistence upon 'a Creator' having 'breathed' life 'into a few forms or into one', in that famous final sentence of Origins?) Thus by elementary logic: if no Consciousness, no Mind; no Mind, no form. If no form, no... thing: no universe, no-thing, including 'time'. At the end of the day, it does look as though 'time' really is only an artefact of Consciousness. It is essentially unreal, but can be handy for mathematical models and hence for engineering. A snare and delusion for physical theories of reality, however. What do you think?
'As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.' Max Planck.
*** Now what? I'm sure that the idea of mental evolution which this book presents as 'DarwinPlus' will one day (when Materialism has been finally junked) have profound effects upon science, of which a little more in later chapters. But what of other areas of human endeavour and interest? What about religion, for example? Yes, it will be extremely important there too. I'll make a few suggestions on this area in Chapter 26, but first
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Chapter 24 A Paradigm fit for Burning
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them
Albert Einstein
Science is a broad church full of narrow minds

Professor Steve Jones
Once I felt I had truly understood the drift of the yogic/esoteric view of Reality, if not its fine detail, it seemed to me that here was a broad philosophy that would one day change the world, which is currently run to a large degree according to the claims of Western Science and Materialism. My thinking went like this: a) Materialism is demonstrably mad. b) Idealism/DarwinPlus is not mad. It also c) is compatible with all the events and structures of the observed world that science is concerned with, and d) goes at least part of the way towards explaining not just ghosts, but all manner of heretofore 'supernatural' and paranormal effects that everyone knows are there, but which Materialist Science refuses to even acknowledge, never mind investigate. e) It can also incorporate the fundamental tenets of all religions, and even g) reconcile large areas of western philosophy. Thus, to my sense of logic, Idealism-DarwinPlus was a superior Theory to Materialism in every important way. What do you think, dear reader? It's that either/or choice, all over again Put very baldly here, it's the choice between reason and madness. Can you gainsay that? Rationally? It was around this time that I came across the word 'paradigm' and a book by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In essence, TK is concerned with the deep basic premisses upon which science builds its Theories. This sort of profound basis is called 'a paradigm'. You might be tempted to think of it as an 'unquestionable' truth upon which all other truths are built.
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The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines a paradigm as 'a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly: a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind'.
As an example, it was once an 'unquestionable' truth/paradigm that the Sun went round the Earth, because an ancient Greek had said so and nobody knew any different, so it became a permanent fixture of wisdom, meaning, of course 'Church wisdom', as there was no other sort in those days. Many other scraps of unquestionable dogma were hung upon this skeleton. However, along came Copernicus (an active churchman himself), who took the trouble to check this dogmatic assertion by measuring the movement of heavenly bodies, and found that the Earth was not the centre of all things. Then Galileo, Copernicus' 'bulldog', spelled out the implications of the new discoveries to The Church, and things changed. It took a long time, but change they did. In 1600 The Church had decided that Giordano Bruno, himself a monk, was a definite candidate for burning (alive), possibly for suggesting that there might be life on other planets,
But as in every other case of low behaviour in high places, spin is ever-present. The official charge sheet seems to have been: Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers. Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation. Holding erroneous opinions about Christ. Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass. Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity. Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes. Dealing in magics and divination. Denying the Virginity of Mary Top of the list, you will note, is the awful crime of challenging the absolute authority of The Church. The arrogance of dogma and self-righteousness that runs throughout the charge sheet is depressingly similar to the way the current Materialist Establishment tends to conduct itself.
but by 1633 they had moderated a little and merely imprisoned Galileo for claiming that Church Truth in matters celestial was simply and demonstrably wrong. Before long (a mere couple of centuries blisteringly fast for The Church) the Vatican had its own telescopes and would go on to build an international reputation for astronomy.
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Mind you, it took until 1992 for the Vatican to admit that Galileo had actually been right. What gets into these people? What is the problem with welcoming the truth? They're not alone, of course. Far from it. More in Chapter 28.
In Kuhn's terms this was a spectacular 'paradigm shift', from an earthcentred universe to a sun-centred system. Astronomy was completely altered by this shift in perspective. Another spectacular paradigm shift occurred in the years following 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It took the Vatican a mere 150 years to admit Darwin was right (2009), so things are really zooming along in Rome these days. However, they did find it necessary to point out that evolution had already been mooted by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, several hundred years previously. So that's alright then. Face is saved, which is what matters most, it seems.
Although one might wonder why it's taken them several centuries to discover that they had been right all along. Again, more in Chapter 28. Meanwhile: 'That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist'. St Augustine. A very similar idea to that of Muslims calling the long-dead Abraham 'a Muslim'. It's that underlying commonality and essence they are referring to.
I guess you can see what's coming here, can't you? It seems clear to me that 'Idealism + DarwinPlus ' (also incorporating the basic elements of the yogic/esoteric Understanding), is a paradigm superior in every way to Materialism, the current ruling paradigm of science.
We might think of the path from scientific Hypothesis to Theory as a sort of 'densification' from a vague and fluffy idea to a fully formed and accepted one. More 'solid'. A paradigm is more solid still: a firm rock to build upon, but still subject to change if a better one comes along. Materialism's problem is that it's allowed this densification to proceed too far: from 'solid' but still mutable Theory/paradigm to utterly rigid Dogma.
I claim no authorship for this paradigm. Very little of the contents of the previous chapters is anything like 'original thinking' on my part. It is all ancient knowledge and wisdom which has somehow become lost, distorted, and buried under all the anger and waffle generated by the battle between religion and science, or to be more accurate, between Church dogma and Materialist dogma. (The distinction is a vital one.) Neither do I claim this as a matter of opinion. It is all borne out by logic, as I understand the term, and nothing more. Opinion is of no interest in these matters.
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So there's the proposition. What do you think? *** A few more points to consider before deciding absolutely, perhaps: A Superior Paradigm 1. will include all the proved findings of the previous paradigm; 2. will correct the root error or omission in the earlier paradigm; 3. will not run counter to reason, or logic; 4. will be less paradoxical than the previous paradigm; 5. will include more areas of previously incompatible findings; 6. will resolve some conflicts thrown up by the current paradigm; 7. will open the way in deep principle for further work and discovery; 8. and will enable the greater integration of previously apparently alien fields of wisdom and study. It seems to me that DarwinPlus knocks Materialism into a cocked hat on every point. Do you agree? Please go through the above points and check them off. I don't think any of them will raise any questions, except perhaps point 6. Will DarwinPlus resolve any conflicts? Well, I think it might help a little in one or two areas: Cosmology has no explanation for the source of the Big Bang. DarwinPlus suggests one. There is also the matter of what the 'missing 95%' of the universe might be, currently described as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. Perhaps the 'highly refined' material dimensions of the Higher world might be of help here. Maybe even the old luminiferous a/ether might be of assistance. Newton would be chuffed. DarwinPlus might also help towards resolving the rat's nest of confusion surrounding M/String Theory as it supports the 'infinite volumes' view of the fourth dimension, and rejects the 'time' version.
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Physics cannot reconcile relativity theory with quantum mechanics. DarwinPlus suggests that 'time' needs to be re-evaluated, and that it is OK (necessary, even) for Mind to be introduced into the question of how matter is formed. Perhaps these two suggestions might help with an integration of the two conflicting schools of thought, not that I have the faintest idea how. Biology is currently in a frightful mess, claiming as it does for its basic paradigm that abiotic chemicals, (plus a possible bolt of energy) spontaneously assembled themselves into living and self-replicating entities which also spontaneously developed mind and thinking, again out of absolutely inert chemicals, which then went on to develop consciousness and then self-consciousness for no reason at all, and began writing chamber music and inventing digital cameras. DarwinPlus does away with all this nonsense, and replaces it with the notion of evolution being concerned with the growth of awareness, driven by Mind. It also supports the Darwin-Wallace paradigm of 'evolution of species' but enlarges its scope and alters its perspective (from evolution of body to evolution of Mind). It might help to reconcile 'gradualism' with 'saltationism', as previously suggested. It is a well-attested fact that nobody
Well.. hardly anybody (present company excepted, of course)
welcomes a new idea. This might be for reasons of stupidity, or senility, or vested interest, or laziness, or established reputation, or not wishing to take a risk, or not wishing to rock the gravy boat. But truth will out, one day. And it seems very clear to me that DarwinPlus is a step closer to Truth than Materialism is, and will one day be accepted as such, no doubt by another name. How long will it take before DarwinPlus is the accepted norm? Hard to say, but 'decades' would seem to be likely, going on past form. A little more on this a little later.
'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.' Max Planck.
*** Thomas Kuhn makes the point that a new paradigm arises when science is in crisis. I think the points above might count as crises, particularly in biology, but whatever, Materialism is certainly in crisis, and always has been, as it is simply irrational and untenable for any reason at any time.
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As a philosophy which underpins the more practical paradigms, of say 'evolution' or 'quantum mechanics', you might say that DarwinPlus is a 'super-paradigm', as has been Materialism, despite the fact that it is no philosophy at all.
The phrase 'a philosophy' bothers me rather. In truth, surely there can be only one philosophy? And that would seem to be the one (the 'perennial philosophy') that the yogic/esoteric doctrine has been investigating for millennia.
I'm aware that I've been consistently rude about Materialism, but looked at from the perspective of history, perhaps a hundred years from today (2011), one might say that barmy though it is, Materialism has done its work well. It arose as a powerful and energetic reaction to the obscurantism and dogmatic bull passed off as Truth by The Church, backed up as often as not by terrible cruelty and coercion. Materialism was science: a beacon of observation and logic that blew demons and superstition out of the window, and let in the clear light of reason. 'God? What is God? A cruel man in a nightie, dispensing curses and blessings at random. What rubbish! We don't need such fairy tales! And we certainly don't need parasitic priests and bishops in palaces while the rest of us live in squalor! A la Bastille! We have nothing to lose but our chains! Science will cure diseases, light our streets, breed better animals, cross the oceans, give us washing machines and telephones, and take us to the skies and beyond!'
'God is dead!' Nietzsche. 'You're looking a little piquey, Nietzsche..' God.
The only thing wrong with this way of thinking, was the undeniable fact that Materialism as a philosophy or super-paradigm is simply irrational, and despite strenuous efforts, has never been supported by a single scrap of evidence. Yes, The Church was wrong in many ways, but so was Materialism. It's time to recognise the fact and move on. The undogmatised Third Way, which can reconcile the essence of religion and the essence of science, is beckoning. Materialism has done a great job of rescuing Man from a world of unquestioning and thuggishly-enforced Belief and introducing him to the superior world of thoughtful Understanding but Understanding now requires the removal of its stern and ignorant headmaster. The emperor has no clothes! The king must die! to mix a metaphor or two. A Great Paradigm Shift is on its way.
'The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.' Albert Einstein.
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And similarly: 'A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.' Also Albert Einstein. It seems to me that DarwinPlus scores well by both of these (very similar!) yardsticks.
*** The fact that the wonders of scientific discovery have been abused by governments (atom bombs, napalm, mustard gas) and business/ advertising (massive over-duplication, short-termism, inbuilt obsolescence, pollution, grotesque squandering of finite raw materials, desecration of billions of acres of farmland, forest etc), and maniacs assorted (sarin, fertiliser bombs) is not the fault of scientists. We are each of us responsible for our own actions (or so says the Law of Karma, and all the religions and philosophies I've come across) and someone who abuses the technology made possible by scientific investigation is personally responsible for that abuse. Yes, I'm talking to you, whoever it was who marketed the non-degradable nylon tea-bag, or the ball-point pen with an inch of ink in a six-inch tube, or the mp3 player that breaks down irreparably after twelve months and twenty minutes.
Please feel free to add to this list until the sun goes down, dear reader. Then make an early start again tomorrow. Draw up a super-list with friends in the pub. Post the results on the web for us all to add to, perhaps under the name of enemiesoftheplanet.net. Name names.
Of course any scientist (or bureaucrat or marketing agent) who wilfully aids in the creation of anti-social technologies, must bear his own karmic burden, as his own conscience will persistently explain to him until he can avoid it no longer. And once you hear even a whisper from your conscience, you are responsible. The fact is that Scientific Materialism has become inextricably linked with its own offspring, social materialism (and its mad twin, consumerism), which in turn derives from capitalism. Capitalism and Materialism go hand in glove, if you think about it.
Mark you, so do atheistic-communism (as perverted in the USSR etc) and Materialism. More in Chapter 26.
If capitalism were to disappear, an awful lot of specialist, market-oriented, scientific research would close down. Would we miss it? I wonder. Would we even be better off without at least some of it? Do we really need a dozen different DVD codecs? Might we be better off with just one or two
that worked everywhere? Or a hundred different painkillers? Wouldn't just two or three do the job? Fifty sorts of 'scientifically formulated' hair soap? All debatable My point is that just because something is 'scientific' does not necessarily mean it's of value. Nuclear power? Concorde? Genetic engineering? All very clever stuff, but not everyone is a fan, and for good reasons. When Materialism is finally dragged and dumped, still kicking and squealing no doubt, into the landfill site of history, people will begin to seriously think about other things, like whether there is more to Life than buying stuff that they don't need, which does not make them happy as they were assured it would by lying advertisers, and which needs to be replaced, either literally or fashionably within a few months. They might even begin to seriously wonder what Happiness really is, and how they might achieve it. This step forward would not be possible under the bleak and nihilistic rule of Materialism, but is quite possible, and I would say inevitable, under Idealism-DarwinPlus. Yet another reason to be cheerful. (See Chapter 30.)
As opposed to the much-quoted 'It is meaningless that we live, and meaningless that we die.' Jean-Paul Sartre, Materialist philosopher. So presumably everything in life must be meaningless too.. like what you just said, for example?
*** We have no idea what Life is. Or Mind, or Consciousness. As I kept reading and thinking, particularly around the yogic/esoteric doctrine, it occurred to me that maybe LM and C are actually the same thing: ie, inseparable: three facets of a single entity. But if they are separable, then it would make sense for Life to come first, followed by Consciousness, and then Mind, on the grounds that something can't think unless it is previously conscious, and it can't be conscious unless it is already alive? Agree? This analysis conflicts with the current Materialist view that Life came first, then Mind then finally Consciousness. This sequence is based upon the observed levels of complexity in creatures from the simply Alive, like plants, to animals, which show elements of Mind, and finally to people, who are clearly Conscious. But what if LMC are just the one thing, which we have falsely split up, as per the Materialist interpretation above, deriving from the ever-present urge of Man the Measurer to reduce everything to its tiniest parts, even
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when it's inappropriate, and to then be surprised that he hasn't found the Truth of the Thing after all, not even in the handbag full of the world itself? What if everything that has L also has M and C, but to varying degrees? Is that irrational? No, it just runs counter to Materialist dogma. As ever, the fact that we can't understand the Mind or Consciousness of a weevil does not prove that the weevil has no mind or consciousness. In fact, it is now well-known that animals do definitely show signs of not just Mind and Consciousness, but of abstract thinking and Selfconsciousness, previously thought to be unique to humans.
Tricky words to define, but try Consciousness: awareness of environment. Self-Consciousness: awareness of own identity. Following the path from 'awareness' to 'greater awareness'. Mind evolving
We have all seen videos of crows dropping stones into bottles of water to float a berry to the surface where they can reach it; or chimps recognising themselves in mirrors, or carrying water in leaves; or gorillas testing the depth of a pond with a stick; or chimps and elephants mourning their dead. And bluetits are known to use lavender or mint to disinfect their nests.
I taught our dog, Dylan, the very abstract command 'go round', meaning he should seek another route if the first one was blocked. He learned slowly, but he did learn. I have also seen a sheep mourn her stillborn lamb, and a cow become distraught when she'd forgotten where she'd left her new calf. It is a known fact that cows who have been given names give more milk than those who just have numbers. Relationships matter with animals, just as with people.
It is an error that has led to much cruelty to assume (as did Descartes and the Behaviorists, for example) that animals have no mind or feelings or consciousness of self or of anticipation of harm. Any pet owner or smallholder knows that the animals they spend time with become more aware and intelligent. Our old housecow definitely knew when she'd been naughty and would try to hide her head in a bush. A Yogi would say 'Why are you so surprised?' at this point, and by now I can see why.
Researchers in Georgia USA have discovered that monkeys and apes make judgements about fairness, offering empathy and help, and remembering obligations. These are elements associated with morality and, wait for it, the Golden Rule. Meanwhile, I've seen a video of an Alsatian being skinned alive in China by Men for the fur trade.
The notion that Life, Mind, and Consciousness are just three ways of seeing the same unity would tumble neatly into place in the yogic/esoteric philosophy which accepts that every thing in the universe is to some
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degree alive, and evolving towards greater and greater awareness. And you can't evolve (as per DarwinPlus) unless you already have at least the seed of potential for what is recognisable as Consciousness and Mind.
So, bizarrely, here is what seems like a paradox: that the chemicals which somehow came together to form the first self-replicating entity are actually not abiotic after all. They do have a trace of Life about them. But the yogic/esoteric Understanding points out that it's not a paradox in fact, as it's not their own individual traces of Life which assemble them all into a complex living moving and thinking being like you and me. It's a higher level of Mind which does the assembling. Layer upon layer worlds upon worlds. The common or garden slime mould is a remarkable example of such layers. The 'entity' spends most of its life as individual single-celled foraging creatures which, when a chemical signal is secreted, all move to a focus and then assemble themselves into a 'slug' that acts and moves as one organism, eventually sending up a tower-like growth which bursts and releases more single-celled units. If you don't think that is utterly extraordinary, even armed with the Idealist Understanding of layers of Being, then I'm afraid there is no hope for you, and you should become an economist. (See Chapter 26.)
*** In the end, 'absurd' or not, the only test for a new paradigm is Does It Work? Does it comply with observed facts? Can phenomena previously explained well by the previous paradigm be explained better, by this new paradigm? Can more things be explained? Do inconsistencies and paradoxes in other paradigms lessen or disappear in this one? Does it suggest new avenues or techniques for scientific exploration? Might it include other areas of investigation previously thought to be unincludable? If the answer to any one of these is 'yes' then DarwinPlus, and all the apparently weird effects and possibilities it suggests, is worthy of reasoned and responsible attention by the scientific community. If the answer is 'yes' to more than one, then DarwinPlus is worthy of close attention. If the answer is 'yes' to all of them, as I suspect it is, then DarwinPlus may safely be regarded as a paradigm superior to its predecessor.
'Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.' Sir Isaac Newton 'Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.' Goethe These two views appear somewhat contradictory at a casual glance, but are not so if considered from the DarwinPlus perspective.
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*** TH Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, believed in reincarnation, but 'simply could not get up an interest in the subject' of psychical research. I find this attitude extraordinary, but I guess it just goes to show that there are people who are prepared to go 'thus far and no further', presumably due to a need to protect some sort of a dogmatic 'certainty' rather than explore new horizons.
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Chapter 25 Movement
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions
Oliver Wendell Holmes
'Eppur si muove'
..as Galileo is alleged to have murmured after being forced to deny that the Earth actually went round the Sun and not the other way round. It was a pantomime moment, best translated as 'Oh yes it does.' in response to the Vatican's 'Oh no it doesn't'. The old paradigm, deriving from Aristotle and others 2,000 years previously, imagined the Earth as being the immovable centre of a ball of 55 concentric spheres, each of which supported another world: first the Moon, then Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, etc, each patrolling the heavens, embedded in their own 'crystal sphere'.
These spheres were said to be made up of aether: the fifth element or 'quintessence', being the Higher relative of earth, water, air and fire. Interestingly, modern cosmologists have revived the word 'quintessence' as a name for a hypothetical fifth primal source of mass, popularly known as 'dark energy', which they suggest is causing the universe to be expanding at an ever-accelerating rate.
Beyond the spheres lay the realm of the Prime Mover, who kept the whole show spinning, and whose concern for humanity was such that he put the Earth at the very centre and focus of it all. The Church picked this schema up, converted it into dogmatic 'truth', and placed Heaven 'up there' with the Prime Mover, now called God. As a metaphor, well perhaps the PM did put Man at the centre of all, but as a literal guide to the heavens, this schema didn't work. The planets kept wandering about and no matter how they fiddled the 'spheres' the problem could not be solved. 'God's perfection' (as fabricated by The Church, not God), was endangered by Galileo's embarrassing evidence, especially when 'perfect' circular orbits, had to be replaced by relatively wonky elliptical orbits. And the 'perfect' moon was found to be as pockmarked as a medieval cleric's conscience.
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The crisis in astronomy had been building for a long time. Copernicus and Galileo simply supplied the tipping point for the first huge paradigm shift in modern science. The Earth moved.
Intriguingly, if the universe is infinite in size, as is currently assumed, then of course the Earth is the centre of it, as is every other point in an infinite system. This sounds like a paradox to me, not least because we also seem to be assuming that the universe is endlessly expanding, and must thus be expanding to somewhere, somehow, and is thus not infinite. However, if the universe is a Higher dimensional construct, then our current 3-d concept of 'infinite' is not going to be sufficient to explain it all, and we are simply left with a situation we can not envisage: something ineffable that is never going to be convincingly effed by Lower mind. This suggests a limit to the knowable, but also a rational solution to the paradox, possibly referring back to the hypercube model of the fourth dimension.
What Copernicus and Galileo had done on the grander scale of things was to begin to admit movement into a previously fixed model of the universe.
The second great shift came with Darwin and Wallace. Ever since the ancient Greeks, people had been putting forward theories of evolution to account for the existence of so many different plants and animals, and the similarities between them. D&W solved the riddle by putting forward the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Not only did this more or less solve the immediate puzzle, plus the problem of all those gigantic fossils that had begun to emerge, but it also did something else. Just as Copernicus and Galileo had done for astronomy, Darwin and Wallace introduced movement and fluidity into biology. Gone now was the old biblicallyderived notion of species formed 'fixed and perfect' by God, and in came a sliding scale of body-shapes. Ultimately, D&W were saying, there is just one Life, expressed in multifarious and ever-changing ways.
Yogis had been saying 'one Life' for millennia. Historically, religion seems to have moved from multiple gods to 'one Creator with many facets', and now D&W were saying not multiple lives, but 'one Life with many facets'. The logical Idealist extension of this is that I am thus indeed my brother. I wasn't expecting that. And if we ally 'one Creator' with 'one Life', we are beginning to approach the concepts of 'yoga', 're-ligare' etc. I wasn't expecting that, either.
A little before D&W there had been the paradigm shift in geology which proved beyond reasonable doubt that the world was millions of years older than Church dogma claimed. This shift, too, brought more movement into
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the world, quite literally this time, via huge but 'simple' geological processes like earthquakes and volcanoes and sedimentary deposition. All three of these major shifts did two things: they first of all challenged absolute Church dogma (the first challenge [Copernicus] coinciding with and encouraging huge social changes across the board, via the Renaissance and the Reformation) and in replacing this rigid dogma they introduced movement and fluidity into previous fixed and 'perfect' conceptions of the universe.
Every paradigm shift increases fluidity.
But a new paradigm does two other things as well. It introduces elements of commonality or 'democracy', and tends to re-emphasise the supreme role of Cause and Effect. Copernicus had introduced the idea of the commonality of heavenly orbits, and the idea that the Earth was not perfect and special as an astronomical entity. The discovery of galaxies, some 300 years later, confirmed this commonality, and confirmed the eternal movement of all heavenly bodies in ever greater orbits and relationships. Wheels within wheels endlessly rotating to the immanent waltz of Cause and Effect. Darwin and Wallace introduced fluidity to species' body-forms and ended up with admitting the commonality of Life itself. Lyall, the geologist, showed how common routine processes, like tides and weathering, lay behind all the mountains, chasms, beaches and rivers of the Earth's surface. Both systems emphasised Cause and Effect, just as Copernicus did, and thus contradicted another of The Church's dogmas: of how the universe was created wham-bam in six days flat. But a little more on this in the next chapter. The very Laws of Nature, so intimately connected to Cause and Effect, and so painstakingly uncovered over a period of some three hundred years, all underlined the theme of 'commonality', in that these Laws were found to be (beyond reasonable doubt) quite literally universal. Thus the chemistry of Venus is confirmed to be the same as the chemistry of Earth. The universe seems to be made of the same 'common' stuff, everywhere. The Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy showed that previously 'separate' entities can be transmuted to each other: weight can be converted
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into electricity or motion, and back again. Essentially, 'all matter-energy is one common entity'. *** It can be tricky to decide on what is a Paradigm and what is just a Theory. The border seems to be pretty fluid(!), but a rough rule of thumb is the metaphor of 'the box'. These boxes or paradigms tend to be nested, so for example, someone working on quantum electrodynamics would be working in one box, which was itself working in the bigger box of 'quantum theory', itself nesting within the paradigm of the Laws of Physics, perhaps.. and which itself resides at the moment within the Really Big Box (or paradigm) of Materialism. A new paradigm only arises when somebody begins to think 'outside the box'.
To repeat Albert Einstein: 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.' How do we achieve a higher level of thinking? Via Intuition. What else could it be? Einstein adds: 'The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know why or how. The only real valuable thing is intuition.'
Below are a few Theories which you might consider to be Paradigms, because of their breadth and importance. When they arrived, they all added greater fluidity to the previous paradigms, demonstrated greater commonality, and emphasised the vital role of Cause and Effect: Tectonic plate Theory quite literally set the 'fixed' continents moving, and showed that all land has derived from the same common subterranean source, via knowable processes. Systematic anatomy showed that all living creatures are built of similar common components, even down to the basic structure of 'the cell' and beyond. Even plants and animals have a lot in common. Germ Theory demonstrated the interaction of living creatures of all sizes, and the practical commonality of their structures. Virology has even shown how genetic elements can be exchanged from virus to mammal, etc. The DNA revolution introduced yet more fluidity into current schemes of inheritance and body shapes. Along with this fluidity went the notion of shared material: a commonality of genetic
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biochemistry in all biological things which works according to a system of cause and effect. The Big Bang is currently the ultimate in fluidity and commonality, as the theory claims that everything-that-is started out as the most primitive energies imaginable. Relativity Theory set the universe moving as never before. The very word 'relativity' shows how points previously thought static are actually 'relatively' moving, and interacting. Nothing in the universe is now fixed and static, but fluid, and relating according to cause and effect. Atomic theory showed how movement between chemical elements is possible, and demonstrated the commonality of every atom's component parts. Quantum Theory added enormously to the notion of movement and non-rigidity, to the point where a miniscule particle is not definitely even a solid thing any more, but may be thought of as an energy packet. All is energy. The (near) ultimate commonality. Neuro-plasticity demonstrated that a damaged brain can reorganise itself: ie, its areas are not permanently specialised, but flexible. Chaos Theory inter-related the famous butterfly in China with a hurricane in the Caribbean. Everything in the global weather system, as an example, is moving and connected within an immensely complex webs of common basic forces, and thus of Causes and Effects. The individual shape of every tree in the forest is the effect of the innumerable forces that have acted upon it, of such complexity and subtlety as to be undecipherable by Man the Measurer. And so on pick a scientific breakthrough of your choice and I would be surprised if it does not involve increasing fluidity somehow, while recognising a commonality or sharing of structure or energy and an extra recognition of the inexorable potency of Cause and Effect, with no need to impute the existence of an interfering God (as opposed to a Prime Mover, or 'Creator'). Darwin would nod at this point, I think. *** So far, so good. But if Mind is behind the whole shebang, as logic seems to insist, then all of the current paradigms will eventually be found to contain at least the seeds of error, as none of them acknowledge the role of Mind (except for Quantum Theory, which, being historically based on Materialist principles, is currently baffled by the implications).
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It seems to me that DarwinPlus is on the right track, not just because it is rational while Materialism is not, but because it also follows the process above, of adding more movement, fluidity and commonality to our understanding of the universe than was perceived via the previous paradigm of Materialism. Thus: Mind and Matter are involved in an endless dance of interaction; hence the Material and the Non-material have a fluid relationship. And the force (Cause) behind everything (Effect) ultimately is Mind/LMC, whatever that might mean: total commonality, whatever. DarwinPlus also insists 100% upon the Law of Cause and Effect in worldly things, which Materialism signally does not, with its repeated calls for spontaneous (uncaused) creation (of the Universe, then Life, then Mind, then Consciousness). DarwinPlus derives from the Idealist principle that ultimately Matter/ Energy is made, somehow, by Mind, and as there is ultimately nothing else but Mind then Matter/Energy must also be of Mind, as numerous philosophers, and not a few thoughtful scientists have surmised.
Yogis have been saying so for millennia, if I dare repeat myself.
Can there be any greater fluidity or commonality than that, I wonder: 'That Mind must be the ultimate Cause of all Effects, including the creation of Life and the Universe, and Everything within it, including your mind and mine and our joint consciousness'? *** The process of revealing ever greater depths of commonality in things, from geological processes to life-forms, to the cell, to atoms, to electromagnetic fields and hence to Mind, looks rather like the Materialist process of Reductionism at first glance. The difference between them is that Reductionism confuses the component with the whole, and thinks that by investigating the structure in ever-increasing detail it will somehow come closer to the Truth about the entity. DarwinPlus recognises that this is the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, and sees The Whole as being assembled for a purpose, by Mind, via will, form, etc, building upwards from components of ever-increasing complexity. DarwinPlus could never make the mistake of claiming, of example, that DNA is Life Itself, or that a brain cell can tell us anything about thought, or that Life 'emerged', all by itself, from chemicals, with or without the help of lightning.
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The Hypothesis of Evolution, as laid down by Darwin and Wallace led to the rational conclusion that there is 'one Life taking many forms', although science seems not to have seriously thought about what that implied. The Hypothesis of DarwinPlus leads to the conclusion that there is ultimately 'one Mind, taking every form'; and, of course, the Hypothesis of Karma Reincarnation - Samsara adds enormous fluidity to the last bastion of Church dogma of 'there-is-but-one-life-at-random-then-death-forever-yousinful-wretch'. The universe, to DarwinPlus, is a gigantic and constantly modulating mesh of Cause and Effect, powered by endless levels of Mind and mediated, it would seem, by the Law of Karma and personal choice. *** It is worth reinforcing the fact that Materialism was also a new paradigm in its day (ie, especially over the last 150 years) and it too fulfilled the two functions of increasing fluidity (by breaking up The Church's rigid dogmatic 'truths') and commonality (as in claiming that 'we are nothing but chemicals; we are only animals; we are nothing special; we are a chemical scum on the surface of a minor planet', etc). However, being irrational within itself, it did inevitably lead to streams of unresolvable paradoxes. One further example of these applies again to biology, which knows on the one hand, since Pasteur proved it so, that 'Life comes from Life', but which on the other hand claims that non-living chemicals spontaneously converted themselves into living, thoughtful and self-conscious poets and mathematicians, once and once only, and with no Cause for this Effect. DarwinPlus resolves this paradox.
Attempts to fudge the issue, as in: 'Life gradually came into existence.' (Richard Dawkins) simply don't hold water. One might as well say that 'the Emperor's third assistant handmaiden gradually became with child'.
*** I was also intrigued by an apparent time-link between this increase in fluidity and commonality in science and the same process in social affairs, as 'scientific' Man has slowly, and usually bloodily, trodden the path from Absolute Monarchy to Relative Democracy. As an example: over the last 400 years (as science developed) European man has moved from Charles I, and the various Louis and their claim to Divine Right to rule, via revolutions, invasions, and intellectual transfusions to the present moment, at which we have the commonality of (fairly) democratic representation of all of Europe in one single supra-
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national institution, with the hugely increased fluidity of movement in the physical world that has come with it. Some common fluidity of the mental and emotional worlds is already following, as people actually see for themselves that Foreigners are not All-Wicked-by-Definition, etc. The present system is very imperfect, but it is a huge improvement on the Divine Right to plunder and butcher at whim that was the norm just a few generations ago. And the body politic will no doubt evolve just as the body physical has done: ie, 'organically', meaning by 'evolution' rather than by 'revolution'. Revolution, no matter how well-meaning, has been tried and shown to be doomed to failure, as it always tries to force the pace too fast.
Hitlerism was the last gasp of the outrageous 'revolutionary' claim to supernatural superiority (ie by virtue of 'race'). Will we see its like again, in Europe? Or have we finally learned our lesson and moved permanently one notch further up from beast to saint, as the esotericist might see it? ..a little further away from the downcurve of the compulsory and rigid 'cooperation' demanded by the fascism of the 1930's, towards goodwill and genuine and freely offered cooperation in the new millennium?
Just as democracy brought with it movement between classes, so the Enlightenment brought science and reason and 'the individual' into the frame, fracturing rigid social formats en route. Education gradually blossomed from the medieval trivium and quadrivium, into a broader 'classical' education and then into the yet broader liberal education of today. Even in art.. we see the movement from the tightly prescribed religious art of medieval times to the everyday subject matter of the Dutch masters, leading eventually to acceptance that any daily theme might be suitable for 'art'. Drama and literature similarly have followed the path from prescribed to liberated, and eventually to libertarian, as court gave way to drawing-room, and drawing-room gave way to kitchen sink. Even wars have played their part in the irresistible pressure towards democracy and commonality, for example by liberating women from their traditional 'Kinder Kueche Kirche' roles and bringing their talents into the larger arena of human endeavour. A process by no means yet completed, but slowly it progresses.
Some processes can be exceeding slow and bumpy. It seems that women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets during the first three hundred years or so of the early Christian church. Only later did traditional male dominance reimpose itself. Now, in the 21st century, women are again beginning to take their rightful place. See http://www.godswordtowomen.org/walford2.htm Meanwhile, it seems that the ratio of women managers in industry in the UK has risen from some 2% in the 1960's to some 22% in the 2010's.
***
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What of religion? Materialism, for all its faults, added freedom of movement to Man's moral code. For the Christian West, the strict and detailed Ten Commandments
Apparently there were originally 613 Commandments in all. Presumably these were all thought necessary for an unruly society, although the Talmud Shabbat 31a gets to the heart of things pretty concisely: 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; that is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary; go and learn'. What could be simpler?
had already been superseded by the more general Sermon on the Mount, which urged forgiveness and the Golden Rule rather than an eye for an eye.
..thus following the tendency of all new paradigms towards greater fluidity, democracy, and generalisation. As in 'Rules are for kids; Laws are for learners; Principles are for adults'. The implication of this being that biblical Man was beginning to grow up and was thus ready for more responsibility, as suggested in Chapter 21c.
But the urge to specific control and regulation lived on in The Holy Catholic Church, the New Rome, with its centralised imperial powerbase and clear views on what was Right and what was Not. Reason, or a concern for social justice, was frequently lacking from Roman diktats, which made them increasingly unpopular with the populace who were forced to obey them and, humiliatingly, to pay for their creation. Eventually, the overweening abuse of overwhelming power led to protest and calls for reform. These trends became established as Protestantism during the Reformation. What the Reformation meant in effect was a reduction in 'superstition' in Church affairs (trashing of 'idolatrous' statues, paintings etc); a removal of the 'vicarious' powers of the priest, and the establishment of a personal hotline between the sinner and his God, aided by being able for the first time to read for himself what the Bible had to say rather than having to rely on the priest's word for it; and an overall general sense of greater social and personal responsibility, and an increasing requirement for him to make deliberate personal choices. This meant more personal fluidity of options, without the prop or threat of a priest behind him.
A Yogi would probably nod here, as he would perhaps see this process as a gentle turning of the wheel towards greater individuation.
These reforms became, in their turn, stultified and corrupt or exaggerated, of which a little more in Chapter 28.
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But, overall, in keeping with the Spirit of the Age, Man's religion became a little more fluidified, and a more democratic ('common') society began to emerge from this.
Democracy, too, had been a long time gestating. As John Ball had put it, several centuries earlier, 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'
A century or so after the Reformation, Britain and France had established forms of democratic government, and authoritarianism in all walks of life began to be superseded by consensual association.
I'm ambivalent about making moral judgements regarding social control by the medieval Church. Times were different then, and from the social history I've read, society was a much more savage place than it is now. In fact the very idea of 'society' didn't exist until C17. A moral imperative endlessly thundered from The Church must have had some sort of civilising effect, for which we descendant-secularists should be grateful, I guess.
*** To return to morality: as Materialism chipped away at rigid Church authority and dogmas, Man was released from all externally-applied moral rules and was left to be completely responsible for himself to find how to live with his fellows without the threat of eternal damnation to concentrate his Mind. He was, as the Yogi might put it, being kicked out of the nest ('out of the box'?) to think for himself, and to grow up. Hence his experiments with existentialism, positivism, epiphenomenalism and all those other Materialist isms I can't really understand. (And as Materialism is fatally flawed, this is surely the only rational response to them?) Kicked out of the nest or not, Materialism has put Man on his mettle, for sure, and frankly he hasn't done too badly, I would say. All those isms needed to be explored in full, and to be found lacking, once and for all, before being replaced with something more rational, meaning the essence of DarwinPlus, by whatever name it ends up with. To take a slightly different thread: once, we are told, Man had many gods, of trees and rivers and so on. How true this is, I don't know. It might just be a bit of Victorian Muscular Christian supremacism. After all, the Victorians were sure that Hindus worshipped rats and idols, and were thus benighted heathens, whereas, of course, Hinduism is an absolutely tolerant religion which understands that different people have different levels of Understanding, and must be left to get on with it and develop in their own
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way in their own time. Hinduism 'proper' is monotheistic, as reflected by the Yogic philosophy. So did ancient Britons 'worship' water gods at sacred wells, or were they doing something else? Placating grumpy ancestors, perhaps, who they knew from experience could be selfish and troublesome discarnate bullyboys? This tradition is alive and well in Africa, and many other places in the world, where the ancestors seem to be rather more earth-bound than in the West (perhaps 'substantiated' by enduring local thoughtforms?). So, allowing for some confusion between a little local placatory 'worship', and gods proper, the path of Monotheism is an interesting one, in that it also added to fluidity and commonality, thus: Many gods = competition and confusion. One God = One in All, with a subsequent reclassification of apparently separate godlets into aspects of the One God: a sort of fluidity/commonality in terms of multiple facets.
The Christian version of this is the triangular notion of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, which has the equivalent in the yogic/esoteric philosophy as Will, Love, and Power: the three forces (or aspects) behind Creation.
No doubt there was plenty of room for confusion when Monotheism arrived, but the element of 'My god's better than your god, therefore you are wrong so I'll kill you' must surely have been reduced?
Let's not forget that the current plague of 'Islamist' mass murders are carried out mainly by politically motivated, emotionally vulnerable and confused, and intellectually brainwashed individuals, and are widely condemned by proper Muslims.
Akhenaton tried the first Monotheist experiment that I've heard of, in preTutankhamen Egypt. The old priests were dead against it, and in the end they won. Then came Moses, backed up by Jesus. Then Muhammad. Moses was clear that the Jews were a singular chosen people; Christianity, via Paul, became a more fluid and democratic religion (although it later 'petrified' itself into a rigid Roman power base); and Islam is perhaps the most democratic and fluid of all, with no central control and no reserved pews. It is also famously racially tolerant, at least in theory, but also broadly in practice. Traditionally, a Jewish priest came from a narrow priestly social caste. A Christian priest is chosen by the broader 'Church'; Islam has no regularised priesthood at all. The Jewish Temple was run by priests and hoi-polloi didn't get a look in; the Christian churches employ vicars to communicate 'on behalf of' the flock; Islam cuts out the middleman completely (which
was always bound to put it on a collision course with the mighty and monolithic Roman Church). Thus, over the 2,000 years or so between Moses and Muhammad, the monotheistic movement has clearly been towards greater democratisation, fluidity, and personal responsibility, it seems to me.
Hence why Islam can't control its more murderous and ignorant 'representatives'. There is simply no centralised means of doing this: no pope or archbishop to dictate policy. Each Muslim must take what advice he chooses, and then decide for himself: personal choice.
The yogic/esoteric Understanding is confident that sooner rather than later, a new Religion will emerge. It will follow the established trend, as above, and increase fluidity and democratisation to the point where nobody will care what 'idols' you choose to throw tomatoes at, or how many times you tell God he is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or wear a hat or not. In fact, the emerging Religion will be indistinguishable from Philosophy. I can see the Yogi beaming from here.
A little more on this in Chapter 26.
*** This notion of ever-increasing fluidity caused me to think once again of the yogic/esoteric claim that we humans once experienced Life in previous forms. 'I was once a stone then a plant etc', as the Sufi poet put it (see Chapter 17). Ridiculous.. of course. but it does not jar with the inner logic of the yogic/esoteric Understanding of the overall scheme of the universe, or with the premiss of Idealism. So maybe
It would also explain my wife's conviction that I was a dog in a previous incarnation, and why I'm still not allowed on the sofa.
And we certainly do note increasing flexibility of physical form and greater fluidity of mind as we progress from plant to animal to Man. Coincidence? I guess it also increases commonality, as this 'stone to Man' perspective reminds us that all of physical creation is one, and all made of the same 'dust and ashes', as it were, and Men, of whatever colour, creed or culture all use a common Mind... meaning we do not exhibit extraordinarily different ideas of logic or humour or compassion; animals share this
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common Mind to a limited extent as well, and the more so from mixing with Man. *** It thus seems to me that DarwinPlus fulfils all the requirements of a new paradigm in science. Will anyone listen? Hell, no! Why not? Why do you think? More in Chapter 28. Meanwhile it's now a good time to look at the further implications of DarwinPlus. Onwards to Chapter 26
'All is flux; nothing is stationary.' Heraclitus
***
Footnote: Nobody can have failed to notice that Science has a terrible time deciding between whether the universe runs according to 'Causality' or 'Randomness', and seems to insist that both are right. For example rockets, evolution, and computers rely on Cause/Effect, but quantum physics seems to require Randomness. Causality and Randomness are two quite contradictory propositions, however. Only one of them can be correct as the ruling base principle of the universe. The fundamental principle of scientific procedure, and our own everyday life, are both based upon the requirement of Cause leading to Effect. Anything not following this pattern is called 'magic', 'non-sense' etc. So if the prime force in the universe is Randomness as Heisenberg and the quantum world seem to require, how did the 'nonquality' of Randomness alone create the observed Law of Cause and Effect out of itself alone (and 'at random', what's more)? In fact, how can 'randomness' create anything except more of its own chaotic self? It's paradox again: non-sense. If, on the other hand Cause and Effect is the prime force in the universe, then there is no paradox. All we need to admit is that 'Randomness' does not actually exist. It just appears to exist as a mathematical/physical Hypothesis of the quantum world, brought about by the underlying (and quite unconscious) insistence on maintaining a Materialist 'explanation' at all costs. Quantum theory is simply incomplete, as Einstein always claimed. Once it is complete, then the Randomness it requires will be replaced by yet another, deeper, layer of Cause and Effect, as the base paradigm of physics broadens yet again. Remembering that Idealism requires Mind or LMC to lie behind and to include every particle of the universe, then clearly Mind must be in charge, and Mind always has intent and purpose; thus 'randomness' is again shown to be an illusion (generated by the worship of the false and irrational Dogma of Materialism). ('Randomness' in the world of Mind means madness: and the universe is clearly not mad or you would not be able to understand this sentence.)
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Part Four It all Seems to Fit.
How the world will change once Materialism is rejected in favour of Idealism and something like DarwinPlus.
Some predictions.
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Chapter 26 Other Implications of DarwinPlus
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view iii) this is true but quite unimportant iv) I always said so
JBS Haldane
(i) Religion
Religion cannot be opposed to the intellect
Tolstoy
The less we believe, the more we are likely to discover

Quentin Charles
My greatest headache in writing this book has been the recurring problem of where to put what. So much of the material over-laps and inter-locks that I rarely feel satisfied with my placements. Thus, I'm sure there will be odd gaps in the flow, for which I apologise, and also occasional repetitions, for which I also apologise but rather less so, as sometimes it is necessary to repeat a notion to establish its connection with another thread, and anyway, a bit of repetition helps a 'new' idea to integrate. Please bear with me If I have explained DarwinPlus clearly, it will have struck you that this is a paradigm that will affect not only science, but the whole of society, as we and all our institutions, from the law to education, politics, economics, commerce, the arts etc, have all been thoroughly drenched in Materialism for so long that it is considered normal. So 'normal' in fact, that nobody even knows it's there. I am constantly surprised that I had to dig so hard to discover its existence and how powerfully it imprisons our society.
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I'd always considered myself to be better-informed-than-average about the status of society and science. I was actually quite disturbed when I first realised what was going on deep down, and how I hadn't previously had a clue about it.
If a person or institution doesn't know of this imprisonment, he, she, or it will most likely react to a liberating idea with incomprehension, disbelief, and scorn, in that order. I know... I've witnessed this process at first hand many times, even among intelligent people, when trying to explain the essence of this book. But this liberation will come in the end, as logic, and with it (relative) Truth, will eventually out. *** Top of the list, of course, particularly for this book, is the effect DarwinPlus will have on religion (being the modest acceptance of the existence of Higher Powers), Religion (the acceptance of a certain, sometimes 'exclusive', set of Beliefs) and religiosity (the bellowing of an exclusive set of Beliefs). Briefly, I suspect the effect will be 'very little' to the latter two, as people do tend to become fixated on Beliefs (see Chapter 28) and to regard disagreement as heresy, rather than an opportunity to expand the Mind via the process of considered examination.
This stasis will also pertain in our current dogmatic-Belief-based Science, I have no doubt. Hence the need for fifty years before the basic idea of DarwinPlus is seriously adopted, to allow the current grandees and gate-keepers to die out. This is normal, unfortunately (see Chapter 28).
One problem for Religion is that its adherents 'know' that their Truth is the One and Eternal Truth. Thus, if it is eternal, it can not be changed, can it? And they have a point, if their premiss is correct. But if their premiss is only partially correct (as most premisses are), then there is what theologians call 'wriggle-room'. The key to this problem is the basic principle of DarwinPlus: that Man is evolving mentally. Thus: if Man is evolving mentally, then his ability to understand things apparently ineffable will gradually increase. Thus more 'occult' aspects of the Truth may be gradually revealed, one way or another. Thus Religions
can evolve and develop, to keep pace with Man's own mental progress. Not just 'can', but 'must'. As far as I can see, the Desert Religions (which all favour Belief over Understanding: see Chapter 8) are not yet doing this, which is why attendances are falling in the C of E for example, while Buddhist groups are growing. Buddhism speaks more to the Mind and Understanding than Christianity does, and Man (in Europe, say) is now ready for this. *** There are many people who feel the 'urge to religion', or who find militant atheism unsatisfying somehow, or who are just plain old open-minded or curious, and who are open to interpretations and new expressions of old ideas. I hope DarwinPlus will be of interest to them, especially as it predicts a move towards One Religion-Philosophy. DarwinPlus is a paradigm which accepts physical (somatic/body) evolution as fact, but does not regard this as terribly important, as the real issue is evolution of the Mind.. the Inner Man the Ghost in the Machine the 'I' and its awareness. The religiously inclined will be happy with this, I think.
A Reminder DarwinPlus rejects the idea that Man 'is' an ape of any sort. His body may be, but he is not.
DarwinPlus also insists that, as Mind lies behind the universe, Man must, as religions have always claimed, live and breathe and have his being within that Mind, as there is literally nowhere else to be, live, breathe, etc.
I'm steering clear of the word 'God' here, as it has so many unhelpful dogmatic warts attached to it. Is there a 'personal God', as Belief-religions claim? You decide. Yogic/ esoteric philosophy is clear that intelligent beings of all levels are keen to help each other to progress along the mental-ethical evolutionary path, and that there is some sort of unknowable Ultimate Creator Mind behind the whole set-up. Bearing this in mind, we might make some sense of angelic support, visions, and all the huge variety of positive paranormal contact that has been consistently reported down the centuries.
DarwinPlus thus recognises that all the creatures, atoms, and entities in the world (and who knows what other worlds and dimensions) have been
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created, somehow, by (Super)Mind, and that all the patterns and designs we perceive at all levels are the result of intelligent Mind at work. What of Creationism, so called? It's not easy to make sense of the 'debate' between Religion and Science in this area as it seems to always be conducted at the level of abuse or sneering, shouted through a megaphone, or a gigaphone if available. This is because both parties are absolutely convinced of their own selfrighteousness, a condition that is never conducive to reasoned discussion.
'Great minds doubt; lesser minds spout.' Chris Affing
I hope this book has showed that the problem here is the unexamined dogma that both parties have lumbered themselves with. If they were to both take a minute off from the bellowing and look within, perhaps they could accept that there simply is no problem, and no huge difference between them, if they drop the dogmas. Broadly, Science should drop Materialism in favour of logic; and Religion should abandon all the nonsense and get back to basics: ie, an understanding that there is a Higher and benevolent Mind behind the universe and that the Golden Rule is a rational derivative of this.
Remember that the Golden Rule, of 'Treat others as you would like them to treat you' is central not just to Christianity but also to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, and every other religious ism I've ever come across, including, believe it or not, Paganism. And Socrates was very keen on it too.
Everything else can be safely dumped, as toxic residue, to the benefit of all. What, for example, might an enthusiastic Muslim and a dedicated Christian have to squabble about if they accept these two basic principles, common to both religions, and dump the rest, or at least not wave stuff at each other as 'proof' of something or other that cannot be proved in such a way, and which is ultimately irrelevant anyway?
In medieval times, people got terribly excitable over such issues as 'Was Jesus the Son of God or only partly the Son of God? Or both God and Man? Or mainly Man but also partly God? Clearly, there could be no possible sensible answer to such pedantic nit-picking until Man gained access to panmentia. And bearing in mind the fact that Christian doctrine holds that The One created The All do any of those disputes have any point to them at all? We seem not to be too worried about such nonsense these days, but other similar petty squabbles have replaced them, causing endless schisms, and actual brawls amongst the 'holy men' of Jerusalem.
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Believe it or not, there is a ladder propped up against a wall of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has been there since 1852 because the various Men of (the same) God can't decide whose duty (or right?) it is to move it. For pity's sake. Until Man can claim access to panmentia, all such disputes are simply a question of irritating vanity versus arrogant stupidity.
Was Jesus a prophet or a Son of God? Was Muhammad the last prophet? It doesn't matter. What does matter is their essential common message, and how we choose to act upon it. That's it.
Please refer back to Chapter 12 if it seems important (Briefly, the Koran thunders on and on about the need to choose to be nice; Jesus asks, rather more gently, exactly the same thing).
If religions can raise their eyes from their graven (or printed or chanted or ) images for a moment, and instead spend their energies on practising the Golden Rule, then Peace on Earth can be achieved virtually overnight, through sheer simple good manners, consideration, and kindness. The New Jerusalem, and Heaven on Earth and so forth, may thus be fulfilled, as soon as we choose.
I can hear your hysterical laughter from here, dear reader. And you have good cause. When did a zealot (or a bigot) ever drop a dogma? It's the only thing they have to hang on to in their fearful lives. But the logic is there, I think. And some brave and thoughtful people will recognise it, and some of them will act upon it. That's the best outcome possible. The world has always changed one person at a time, and always will, especially if it really is a Truth that each one of us is in charge of his own destiny. As an example, this journey has changed me. This book based upon my journey might help another person to question, think, and act to change in some way.
I realise that 'Creationism' covers a broad spread of Beliefs, but I would hope that DarwinPlus might help some Believers to realise that nothing is lost by admitting that not every word in the Bible is literally true.
All that matters for Christians is Jesus's central message of 'Choose To Be Nice To Each Other'.
That really is all that matters. It's OK to accept that you can't reconcile 'an eye for an eye' with 'turn the other cheek'. It doesn't matter.
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But by the bye, if you are a Christian it's the New Testament 'turn the other cheek' which counts. 'An eye for an eye' is pre-Christian, and designed for more savage times. Most modern Jews don't take it literally, either.
And you really don't need to agonise over all the other contradictions in the Good Book. As just one example: if Adam and Eve were literally the first man and woman, how could their sole surviving child, Cain, have gone off to marry and found a city? Who could possibly have been his wife? And a whole new city would require incest on well.. a 'biblical scale', would it not?
Genesis 4:16-17 'And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.'
Something has gone awry at some point in the copying/translating/editing process (of which there was a huge amount in the development of the Bible) in order to produce such a nonsensical bit of script. But IT DOESN'T MATTER! Believing every word of the Bible has nothing to do with being a good Christian.
Christian is as Christian does ..and that means following the Golden Rule which means 'taking up your cross' and bearing the pain of self-responsibility, and abandoning revenge and selfishness of all sorts. tolerating the prats and bigots (who are just people like yourself, struggling with their own karmic burden the best they know how; think of them as 'karmic guides', come to help you learn patience!). you get the drift. And Bible-thumping is just a distraction.
There is a wonderful French proverb which should be stencilled on the forehead of every self-righteous bigot in the land: 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner'. It translates as 'To understand all is to forgive all'.
And you don't need to worry that the book of Genesis is currently thought to have been written by three separate authors, rather than Moses alone. One of these authors refers to God as 'Yahweh' ('He Who Is'), and another as 'elohim' which is actually a plural word, technically meaning 'gods'. There are great mysteries here, but they do not need to concern a person of religion, whose sole purpose should surely be an ethical one. A person of religion needs only the Golden Rule and a purpose for the Golden Rule.
DarwinPlus recognises this purpose and explains it ('that we are all mentally evolving towards ever greater personal power, autonomy and awareness; and we are ultimately all aspects of One Supreme Ethical Being'.) Or at least, it seems so to me, according to the logical path I have been treading.
You might like to take another look at Chapter 4 and the alternative translations for 'Our Father', and consider how difficult it must be for any translator to carry the total meaning of a phrase across from Aramaic (or Hebrew or Greek) and into English. Note as well how closely those alternatives in Chapter 4 tally with the ideas central to DarwinPlus: such concepts as 'resonance' for example. Perhaps one day someone will translate a 'DarwinPlus Bible'. If I had the money I'd fund them myself.
*** I hope also that DarwinPlus will help Believers of all sorts to regain some of their confidence which must have taken a battering over the past few decades of assault by noisy Skeptics and Fundamentalist Atheists. I suspect that many 'biblical fundamentalists' know full well that every word of the Bible cannot be literal truth, and that many of the stories are metaphors or parables to explain and encourage the practice of the simple Golden Rule. But when you are assaulted by huge institutions like Big Science, and its popularisers, the Big Media, and its unquestioning fans, like comedians, government, Big Business, novelists, Hollywood, the pop music world, pornographers of all stripes, economists, columnists it must surely generate a Back to the Wall mentality. The Alamo! Dunkirk! Stalingrad! We must take an absolute stand against the anti-Christ! This is an understandable position, but it is, I think, based on a lot of fear and a little ignorance, which is not a good place to be. And most of this fear derives from various priesthoods, not the message of Jesus. DarwinPlus should help here, I hope. It is bigger than its Materialist predecessor, and shows via simple logic that Materialism is simply nonsense, and that the triumphalist scientistic Skeptics are also simply wrong, and should learn some humility, or at least some manners. All else will follow. Once Science accepts the ideas behind DarwinPlus (and it will, one day) all the over-enthusiastic Skeptics will readjust their thinking (or maybe truly think for themselves for the first time) and stop the abuse. Darwin and Wallace discovered what has come to be thought of as the 'law' of speciation via Natural Selection.
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DarwinPlus would of course agree that this 'law' is simply an observation of Cause and Effect in operation: suitable environment leads to survival; unsuitable environment leads to extinction.
Darwin knew he needed a Creator. He was not an atheist, and thus not a Materialist either. Wallace took a positive role in investigating mediumship and 'The Other World'. He was not a Materialist. DarwinPlus expands upon this, declaring that evolution is the key to the universe, so to speak: but on an enormously vaster scale than Darwin (but not necessarily Wallace) ever imagined (..as in 'Ye are Gods' John 10:34). Mind.. Mind Mind upwards and onwards. So I hope 'Creationists' of all kinds might now be able to relax a bit, and admit that one or two previously rejected ideas might actually be acceptable.
'Evolution' (as in 'DarwinPlus') does not mean Man is a monkey.
And I hope that scientists of all sorts will be able to admit that 'Creationism' of whatever sort, is quite separate from the issue of 'Intelligent Design'. Each should be treated separately. Naturally, DarwinPlus agrees with Darwin in insisting that of course there must have been a Creation of some sort. Whether it happened precisely according to (our present translations of) the biblical version(s) is a separate issue. Some things are just unknowable, this side of panmentia. And all the Designs of the universe and within our own bodies are clearly the Effect of Intelligent Cause, as Mind lies behind all forms and apparent realities. *** I can't really duck this one any longer: Is there a God? Well, any Mind capable of creating a universe or pandimensional polyverse, or whatever, must surely qualify as such. But is this God the normally accepted Christian image of God, who is on the one hand avuncular and forgiving, and on the other hand vengeful, spiteful, and out to get you? This was part of what Darwin had a big problem with.
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Clearly, as Big Mind created all, Big Mind is closer to us than our own heartbeat, as someone once said. This is simple logic, as everything must be of and in this Big Mind, including our own lesser Minds. I personally find the 'Christian God' to be confusing, and if mixed in with Yahweh, contradictory. Instead, I have come to favour the yogic/esoteric/ Buddhist view that this issue is not worth getting over-excited about, as there are layers upon layers of Mind in the Universe at Large, and the Original Cause is so far beyond our possible comprehension (this side of panmentia) that it's much more rational to just obey the Golden Rule, and thus find happiness in the moment. Job done. You'll find out more in a Higher world after you've graduated from samsara. Be patient.
There is a Zen story about a monk who spent his whole life cutting wood and carrying water. After decades of living selflessly, he achieved Enlightenment and the secrets of the universe were thus revealed to him. What did he do then? He carried on cutting wood and carrying water. Some people might find this disappointing. No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? But what it really means is that each one of us has our own path to tread (own 'cross to bear', based upon our own personal karma), and sooner or later we will complete our current duties and move on to higher things. Patience, persistence. being in the moment. There is a biblical comment that would seem to support this: 'Let us also rejoice in our tribulations; knowing that tribulation worketh patience.' (Romans 5:3).
This brings us back to Karma and Reincarnation. Mainstream Christianity and Islam might have problems with this, but Muslim Sufis and Druze are happy with it, and there are a couple of hints of it in the Bible, and quite a lot of modern non-dogmatised Christians have already come to accept it as reasonable. Judaism seems to be pretty relaxed about it, and Hinduism/ Buddhism regards it as essential. DarwinPlus might encourage a few more people to cut themselves a bit of slack from the 'graven image' of dogmatic orthodoxy, and think it over. Does Karma + Reincarnation make logical sense? Does it seem to explain a few things previously inexplicable? (Check the list in Chapter 13.) And does it in any way run counter to the basic requirements of Christianity: ie, that there is a Higher being, so be like him and be nice? No, it does not. It is entirely compatible. It would even help to make sense of the currently strange and rather sadistic Christian idea that we are all 'born sinners'. Just substitute 'karmic debtors' for 'born sinners', and reason, balance and 'niceness' return. In fact the whole notion of 'original sin', which has baffled believers and non-believers alike for centuries, may be elegantly replaced by the more rational notion of personal karmic progress and responsibility.
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Christ: One sticking point with Christians I've met has been the notion that you can only get to heaven via Christ. A couple of points: firstly, DarwinPlus is clear that Heaven and Hell lie within. Christianity is also clear about this:
Jesus was asked where the kingdom of Heaven is and he said, 'Within you'. (Luke 17:21).
They are conditions of Mind. A clear conscience is the key to it all, and that comes from choosing to obey the Golden Rule. Living by the Golden Rule gives peace of mind, which is 'Heaven'. 'Hell' is what you choose for yourself by the bad decisions you make every minute of every day, as witnessed by your conscience. When you die, you are not pitchforked into an alien Hell by demons. You simply gravitate, by a sort of magnetic attraction, to beings and surroundings of a similar vibe to yourself, and in which your predominant thoughts and feelings rule your existence. You choose your own 'mansion', and will remain there, suffering your own wretched state of mind, and comparable company, until you choose to move on. Choice! Still freedom to think and choose, always. Of course your karmic debts must be served, whatever, so no doubt you will be reborn into conditions suitable for you to suffer or repay the pains you once laid upon other people. So, in this sense, no, one single person (here meaning Jesus) does not literally 'take you' to Heaven. But you will find a guide en route The Higher beings seem not to be as limited in 'time' and space as mere mortals are, so they may be in many 'places' at once (a 'place' here meaning a Mind of a suitable vibe. As an earthly parallel, this is how a radio broadcaster 'speaks to' thousands of people at once. All they need to do is to tune in.). Cause and Effect.. Will.. Expectation.. and Vibe seem to be the important factors in determining what occurs at 'death'. So if you expect Jesus to meet you and welcome you, then that will/might/must happen. Similarly with Muhammad, of course. Or Buddha, etc. But try this: it is a part of yogic/esoteric wisdom that there are infinite levels and grades of Mind and Morality. The higher you rise, via your own choices, the more Mind and Morality merge. A Buddha, for example is a being whose Mind and Morality are perfectly integrated, and he has thus passed out from the samsaric cycle of birth and rebirth, to the Higher level, called Nirvana. 'Christ' is seen in the same way, as a condition, like Buddhahood, to which all Men aspire and will eventually reach. In other words 'Christ' is not just one singular particular person, but an integrated level of being, accessible
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to all. And nobody can achieve the Higher world ('enlightenment': reaching 'the Light': 'the Light of the World') without personally making the effort and achieving this level of 'Christhood' for himself. Thus, one can reach Heaven only via 'Christ' but not in the traditionally understood way. This is hinted at several times in the NT, for example in Galatians 4:19: 'My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you.'
If 'Christ' is an elevated level of existence, rather than one particular person, then one awful predicament for Christians is immediately removed: ie, what happens to a devout and kindly Hindu/Pagan who does not 'Believe in Christ'? Is he doomed to Hell? Clearly not, if DarwinPlus is correct, as there will be many other 'Christed' Beings to help him along. However, at the end of the day, you will only reach Real Heaven (Nirvana/The Higher World/The Light proper), as opposed to a temporary samsaric Heaven, after you yourself have perfected yourself and become Christed yourself, through your own efforts.
Do we have 'souls'? Again, this is a word I would prefer to avoid as it is encrusted with all sorts of historical accretions, but DarwinPlus is clear that Life is forever, and Man (or any other life) can not die. He simply evolves, via his own choices, from his present caterpillar state to full butterfly, and beyond. Evil: Religious people can get very wound up about sin and evil and guilt. DarwinPlus can help here. Forget 'sin' as something you have to weep and wail over forever until an angry God pitchforks you into Hell. This is all stuff made up by priests to keep you under their power, or at best, to concentrate your flighty and irresponsible mind for your own good. First of all, what is a sin? It's a mistake you made. That's all. And who suffers by it? The person/s you harmed, and yourself. That's all. The Law of Karma will sort out the rebalancing procedure automatically, so you don't need to worry about it. Ever. If you make a mistake (and your conscience will constantly remind you of the Golden Rule, don't worry..) then all you need to do is say 'Woops.. that was wrong' and then apologise if possible to the offended party, and also to yourself. Then you choose to make good the harm, if possible, and choose to never repeat the error.. and stick to this. That's all you need to do. Bit by bit you will perfect yourself, will you not? And each time you take a further step, by your own actions, towards the Christhood that you so long for.
As in 're-ligare' or 'yoga'.
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And every step of the way you will be in 'Heaven', meaning a state with no guilty conscience, and a happy and positive view of the world, knowing you are making genuine progress. You are 'saved' because you are 'safe'. The big issue, of 'evil' is very simple indeed, according to DarwinPlus. All the 'evil' in the world is caused by the actions of people who are not acting according to the Golden Rule. Just think about it. Look at this list of offences, which go from the trivial to the ghastly and ask 'Which of these acts are 'evil'? And 'At what point does 'evil' arise?....' Not replying to an email Keeping someone waiting Dropping litter Spitting Vandalism Speeding Bullying Robbery Theft Rape Paedophilia Murder Terrorism Genocide DarwinPlus says 'evil' is in all of these acts, in that they are all selfish.
'Evil' is selfishness. If this is an idea new to you, try applying 'selfish' to each item on the list. It fits them all, no? Not replying to an email is selfish. The person at the other end might be depending upon some response from you, and this response might be a part of a chain reaction, possibly involving a dozen or a hundred people, unbeknown to you. By ignoring the email you might be inconveniencing, or even harming, a lot of people. Keeping someone waiting is saying very clearly 'I'm more important than you are'. Speeding: my desire to go fast (for whatever reason) matters more than the safety of you or your children.
Rape: my animal urges matter more than your right to consent. And so on right down to the abyss of terrorism and genocide: MY Beliefs and my utterly selfish desire for 'Paradise'/World Domination, or my Aryan/tribal/religious/racist fantasy, matters much much more than your right to even exist.
There is a saying in The Church, deriving from the Book of Ecclesiastes 'Vanity vanity.. all is vanity'. I reckon that about sums it up.
Occam and his famous razor would agree with the above rationale, that we simply don't need to invent a 'devil' to account for all the evil in the world. We just need people making bad choices, meaning 'selfish choices'; and we might wish to add the possible influence of roaming 'thoughtforms' set up and constantly reinforced by selfish thoughts on a particular theme/vibe. Remove all selfishness from the world and what do you have? A world full of selfless people, meaning a world full of saints. No evil. Everyone happy. Heaven on Earth
What about so-called 'natural evil', as in earthquakes etc? You may not like this bit any more than I do, but I don't think you'll be able to deny the logic: the doctrine of Karma claims that we don't only have personal karma, but family, regional, national and global karma, as we each affect the all to a greater or lesser extent via the karmic ripple effect, and thoughtforms. Thus each act (and word; and thought) we make affects the locality, the nation, and even the whole globe, at levels we currently don't ever consider. Thus, as the Earth is itself in some way a living being (as everything in the universe has life of some sort, yes?) then a large build-up of bad karma, brought about by Man's selfishness, particularly in matters concerning the well-being of the Earth itself, via pollution, deforestation, general destruction of resources etc, will need to be balanced out somehow. Hence the occasional cataclysm. (This seems to tie in quite nicely with the Gaia Theory, mentioned in Chapter 20.) No.. I don't like it either, but it is a rational extension of Idealism and the principle of the Law of Karma. The only alternative 'religious' explanation I have heard is that God hates us. Well, maybe He does, (and frankly, who could blame Him?) but all the great religions do seem to claim the opposite. You choose. There is another point I like even less, but can't deny the rationality of it If the Law of Karma is correct, then all those beautiful innocent children who get killed and maimed in earthquakes are quite likely to have been the thugs and torturers who were so hated, possibly by you, in a previous life. Now they are paying the price. That hurts, doesn't it? But might it just be true? By what reasoning might it not be? You choose. What's more, the karmic web is so vast and subtle that the death of a child might be for the karmic benefit of its parents (or others) for them to experience the grief they once gave someone else. After all, the 'dead' child is no such thing. S/he has merely returned to the Higher, where s/he will be appropriately welcomed. It is worth considering here that 'evil' acts, ie, errors of selfishness, will also act as lessons and devices for focussing the attention upon the moral choices one makes in the
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future. One's conscience may be finally stirred into action by something you did that you know was mean, for example. Hence 'evil' may have long-term positivity derive from it. Hence the expression 'There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so', as Hamlet explained to Shakespeare.
What about suicide? Well, obviously DarwinPlus says this is just tragic, as nothing good can be achieved by it. You came to this life to meet certain karmic challenges, and to thus repay some debt you owe, and to thus grow in stature. But when the challenge arrived, you ducked it. You now have a further debt to repay, for wasting a precious monkey suit that somebody else could have made good use of. The good news is that you are not cast into a pit full of screeching demons. You just have to return one day, knowing you've just delayed your progress a little, not least by the extra karmic debt you incurred for the harm you may have caused others by your act. Death? No big deal. Unless you are hit by an accident (if there is such a thing, in a world where Karma is king) you gradually detach from your physical form. Memory fades, energy fades, your priorities shift you may have vivid dreams or visions of loved ones who have previously 'died'. Slowly you drift apart from your physical entity and then it seems you do one of the symbolic things reported by Near Death Experiencers. You cross a stream, or go through a gate, or down a tunnel.. to meet old friends and loved ones. And you will indeed meet 'a being of Light' en route. There's no room for more here, but there are a lot of helpful books out there if you are interested.
The obvious one is Life After Life by Dr Raymond Moody.
NO devil NO pit (unless that is your own personal expectation: you create your own reality of Heaven and Hell, remember?).. No judgement, even, except for the judgement you yourself make upon yourself, as everyone reportedly does after the 'transition' when your 'whole life passes before your eyes' to remind you of your successes and failures. After all, it's your gig, and you are personally responsible for every aspect of your personal growth, in This world and the Other.
Not many people like this bit.
And you will always be helped by others. Which compensates a little!
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Clearly, the thoughtforms set up by excessive mourning of a death are likely to hinder the deceased on his journey, and not help him. Sacrifice? DarwinPlus suggests that the only meaningful 'sacrifice' one can make is of Lower, monkey-world stuff (ie, selfishness in the guise of animal passions like anger and rampant greed) in favour of Higher elements like kindness, respect and sharing. The traditional word 'pride' covers most of these selfish elements, although general 'lust' would seem to be just an animal/monkey, (ie 'Lower') behaviour. The traditional Christian call for God's blessing is connected with the French word 'bless' meaning 'to be injured'. The injury in question is to one's selfishness or egotistic pride. In other words, a blessing is a prick to one's pride or selfish animal instincts, thus clearing the way for greater growth. This all fits with the yogic/esoteric Understanding.
Is 'anger' selfish? Yes it is (as are seven of the ten behaviours that the Commandments warn us against). 'Anger' arises when one of our endless (and ultimately unsatisfiable) desires or expectations has not been satisfied. It's that 'Me me me ' element again as in covetousness, envy, (rapacious) lust, etc.
A sacrifice must be a personal choice, and must involve joyfully rejecting some selfish (as opposed to 'personal') pleasure, however small. It should be perceived as a positive step and not a negative one. The puzzling translation of Matthew 5:3 (reporting on the Sermon on the Mount) as 'blessed are the poor in spirit' should be seen in this light: 'spirit' meaning 'pride' or 'egotism'.
This principle of sacrifice came to be grotesquely perverted to the point of sacrificing thousands of animals in many cultures, or thousands of prisoners in others; even of grooming youngsters for ritual murder. This still goes on in the tragically selfish Hellworld of the suicide bomber. Murder is still carried out for 'religious' and for (selfish) witchcraft purposes in Kenya, Benin, Tanzania and South Africa. Possibly elsewhere.
*** As St Peter put it: 'add to your faith, virtue; and to virtue, knowledge' (II Peter 1:5). Muhammad's version was 'Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every Muslim'. DarwinPlus would seem to offer a little extra knowledge, while explaining the point of virtue(!). The danger of blind Belief alone, including blind Skepticism, is addressed in John 8:32: 'Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.' To the
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same end, Buddha said 'The only sin is ignorance' (meaning ignorance of how the universe works and why, because once you understand a little of this you will begin to see the point of treading the selfless path towards the proper communion of Humanity). DarwinPlus offers a reasoned and logical approach to learning something of this Truth. At least, so it seems to me. As ever you choose. *** One last thing on the religious front I think I asked earlier how you understood the word 'apocalypse'? Death and destruction? Mayhem? Aircraft carriers belly-flopping onto the White House courtesy of an unseasonal tsunami? At the very least, fire and brimstone, surely? No.. all wrong. The word actually means the gentle act of 'unveiling' or 'revelation' (from the Greek 'kalyptein' 'to cover', and Latin 'velum', 'a veil').
The book of Revelation was originally called Apocalypse but, I was surprised to find, the word 'apocalypse' does not appear anywhere in the Bible.
This struck me as yet another extraordinary coincidence. Remember the yogic/esoteric mention of the 'veil' that separates This world from the Other? And how bad LSD trips or occult experiments can lead to a weakening of this veil, resulting in incomprehensible or even frightening 'psychic' experiences? And remember Dr Wickland successfully treating hundreds of schizophrenics/psychotics as people possessed (ie, as people with weakened 'veils' who have been elbowed aside by other, discarnate and ignorantly selfish people)? What was most shocking to me when I first came across this was how horribly our aggressive culture has distorted the original gentle apocalyptic act of revealing a hidden (occult) Truth into
The End of the Goddam World!!

in huge Hollywood Orange flames and CGI and the smell of napalm in the morning.
Yes.. alright the biblical Revelation set the trendIt's not all Hollywood!
***
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In a little more detail: Will DarwinPlus affect established religions at all? Very little, I would say. They have generally become such enormous and self-satisfied edifices that very little extra light will penetrate them. Remember Galileo? The papal legates apparently even refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter for themselves. 'We know the truth; don't go bringing facts into it.' And poor old Bruno had been quite literally 'a candidate for burning'. Things have changed, of course, and the possibility of change itself has improved a little; but only a little.
Interestingly, the fastest growing sect in the world is Pentecostalism, a group which lays great store on people being taken over by the 'Holy Spirit', and occasionally 'speaking in tongues' and convulsing on the floor. This it shares with voodoo, which claims the possession is by gods. Note the word 'possession'. DarwinPlus looks at both of these sects in a similar light. The 'Alpha Course' in Christianity is also keen on people 'speaking in tongues', without explaining precisely why this is a good thing. DarwinPlus suspects that speaking gibberish and rolling about on the floor has little to do with God and has more to do with weakening the protective veil and letting the riff-raff in. On the other hand, maybe catharsis (or God) moves in mysterious ways. Again, you choose.
Clearly, there is much more that could be said concerning DarwinPlus and its implications for religion, including the fact that it seems to me that every Christian 'heresy' that I've ever come across, from Docetism to Arianism and Pelagianism to Gnosticism can all be happily accommodated within the DarwinPlus model. but this book is already long enough. Over to you
(ii) Philosophy etc.

You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in
Oliver Edwards
Western philosophy seems to be a sort of academic bull run, in which originality is all, even if one's writings are incomprehensible to most people (and here, that means 'me', obviously). While I was trying to make sense of the big philosophers I coincidentally came across a Tibetan proverb: 'It is possible to be so clever that you miss the point entirely'. At the time, I smiled at this, as a sort of oriental irony,
but the more I struggled with the great thinkers, the more the proverb came back to me as having literal truth to it; rather like our own home-grown version of 'being too clever by half'. Then yet another penny dropped. If there is only one Ultimate Truth (and there can be only one Ultimate Truth) then what matters is knowing how to access it, rather than dreaming up inadequately sourced arguments for or against some other inadequately sourced argument. Short of panmentia, all such dispute was bound to be humbug or vanity, or both. Or possibly, gook. As I came to grips with the yogic/esoteric Understanding, and how it had been arrived at, and why, it became clear to me that here was the only sensible explanation I'd ever come across, presented in dozens of slightly different forms, but all barking up the same tree. This made sense.
There is only one Philosophy.
It truly is possible to be so clever you can't see the wood for the trees, meaning here that the endless distractions and conceits of the world of Lower Mind obscure the Singularity of the world of Higher Mind.
I'm reminded of the Big-endians and Little-endians in Gulliver's Travels who killed each other in the thousands over the issue of whether one should knock the top off the big end or the little end of the breakfast egg.
The Idealist/yogic/esoteric/DarwinPlus philosophy brings back the selfresponsibility that Materialism abandoned on our behalf, which is bad news for all those who think that sex, drugs, profits, and rock 'n' roll is all there is, so self-indulgent bingeing and trashing of the Earth is OK, as quite literally 'Who cares?' And what possible reason could there be for caring? More on the appalling effect of Materialism on society in Chapter 27. If DarwinPlus is correct, we will one day see the translocation of professional philosophers from the bottom-curve of individuality, to the upcurve of synthesis/unity (see Chapter 21a) because, when you think about it, 'originality' is absolutely no guarantee of Truth, but is definitely a guarantee of confusion.
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The Paranormal Clearly, Weirdo Studies will become a hot subject once the (mainly very old) ideas in DarwinPlus have been digested by the scientific world and the Establishment that science informs. People will be able to get grants for ESP research at last. Telepathy will be seriously investigated, and mediums will again be rigorously examined, as they once were by brave and principled men like Crookes and Wallace. Spooks and ghosties will be contacted and helped (as they already are by 'rescue mediums', for example) rather than bullied, or exploited as tourist attractions, just as the mad and demented used to be in asylums, and animals used to be for 'sport'. Near Death Experiences (NDE's) and Out of the Body Experiences (OOBE's) will take their place alongside lucid dreaming and channelling as means of further investigating the dimensions 'beyond the veil'. Finally 'the paranormal' will be subsumed into 'the normal', where it has always belonged. Medicine Fifty years from now (2011), as the principles of DarwinPlus and its close companion, the yogic/esoteric Understanding, become more widely acceptable to cautious medical men, medicine might be rather different from today. This process will begin with the Materialism vs Idealism debate being explored by every single medical student, and ultimately by every science sixth former. Most importantly on the practical level, I think we can expect 'death' to be treated more realistically, as a sort of temporary samsaric condition, and not as an awful failure of medicine leading to bleak despair. We all grudgingly accept that 'death is a part of life', but DarwinPlus (or its ilk) will develop that phrase into an actual Truth, as we come to accept that 'death' is really but 'a move into another room', and a temporary move, at that. No longer will dying people be forced through the indignities of forcefeeding by tube, and invasive ventilation. The doctor, or a specialised assistant, will become a 'facilitator of transition', a mentor, ready to explain and comfort, when it is clear that recovery is impossible. The patient's informed wishes will become paramount. And perhaps the colour of Christian mourning will shift from the (let's face it.. 'hypocritical') black of negativity to the positive hue of white; or maybe multi-coloured and festive, which would make a lot of sense to the DarwinPlus way of thinking. We may also see a shift in management cost analysis. At the moment it costs 50,000 to keep a terminally ill patient in a hospital bed for a
fortnight. He is not going to get better, and that money might be more 'effectively' spent on treating healable people. That is the hospital's dilemma. Once Idealism has replaced Materialism, and it is understood that death does not mean failure, a different sort of care will be offered to dying people. No doubt it will still be labour intensive, but will need less hi-tec gear, and will ease the financial dilemma. I guess this means an extension of the hospice idea, and new variations on the theme. Many other changes will occur, most importantly in a dynamic recognition of the power of Mind on body. The placebo effect will be brought out from behind the cupboard and intelligently set to use;
I was stunned to read (in Thirteen Things that Don't Make Sense by Michael Brooks) that in 2003 the anti-anxiety drug diazepam (Valium) was shown via a carefully designed trial to be no more than a placebo. In 1978 alone, in the USA alone, 2.3 billion doses of Valium ('mother's little helper') were prescribed. Now it seems that sugar pills may well have had the same effect.
hypnotism and cellular memory will be properly investigated, instead of avoided; 'weirdo' treatments like homeopathy and acupuncture will get honest and un-Skepticised examination; 'time spent' will take precedence over 'pills dispensed';
Not least because it is well-known in the medical world that many other prescribed pills (ie, not just Valium) are actually no more than authorised placebos. A consultant in psychological medicine at Guy's Hospital in London is quite sure that half the people treated with Prozac for depression (and who are not helped at all by the pills) are actually not technically 'depressed' at all, but are lost and bewildered as a result of our current near-global philosophy, loudly supported by Materialist Science, which claims that humans are nothing but a 'biological accident with no purpose or goals'. The World Health Organisation estimates that depression and related illnesses will become the greatest source of ill-health in the world by 2020. I think we can blame Materialist nihilism, as above, for an awful lot of this.
the various forms of massage (including its equivalent at the various levels of 'Aura') will be exhaustively examined as cellular memory is explored; and talking cures will replace many of the chemical treatments still used in current psychiatry.
In the 1950's (that period when Science was going to solve everything for us) psychiatrists were confidently predicting the end of mental illness by the year 2000, thanks to all the splendid new psychotropic drugs. ('This living object is a chemical machine, so we can fix it with more chemicals.')
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The splendidly-named 'psychoneuroimmunology', which currently links emotional states with changes in the immune system, will become the basis for a school of 'positive psychosomatic' healing, already being developed via various cognitive therapies. And, of course, problems like Multiple Personality Disorder, schizophrenia, and psychosis (and maybe even neurosis) will be at least considered in terms of obsession or possession.
Wilson Van Dusen, the eminent clinical psychologist, would support this direction. See the chapter on 'Hallucinations' in his The Natural Depth in Man.
Even 'miracle cures' might become considered as less 'miraculous' than 'caused by some form of mental input', be it determination, prayer, the extraordinary phenomenon of 'absent healing', or some sort of 'supernormal' (but still 'unmiraculous') intervention. The findings of the CIA agent Cleve Backster, that plants can react emotionally to the shock suffered by hurting animals, and much more, will be integrated into medical diagnosis one day, as will the findings of Kirlian photographers and their predecessors (see Chapters 17 and 18). Means will be found, probably via the writings of those early pioneers, to make the various Auras visible and examinable for diagnostic purposes. Light itself has already been used in healing processes. Its use will develop and expand, along with other forms of vibe and the principle of resonance. Perhaps researchers will begin to turn to the ancient texts again to see what light they may cast upon the mysteries of healing. For example:
'Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.' Buddha
This claim is purest nonsense to a Materialist, but to a thoughtful Idealist there may be useful clues here to follow up on. On a more day-to-day level, I'm sure we'll see meditation being not just accepted, but prescribed. Already we are seeing it quoted by medical researchers as being effective in reducing blood pressure by ten or even twenty points.
I have a small wad of newspaper reports of medical research that shows meditation to be a Really Good Thing for all sorts of ailments, from depression, hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder, to chronic pain control and even helping to regress cancers. The major contribution of meditation lies in reducing stress, and encouraging people to be in the moment, the Now, where Reality takes place, rather than fretting about the past or future.
We may even see Happiness Centres being established. (See Chapter 30.)
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What is meditation? It is simply any means of stilling the incessant Lower mental chunter so that whispers from the Higher might get through, now and then. At all times, and by whatever method, it simply calms, relaxes and recharges us. If you've never tried it, you might one day. You could start today. There are thousands of books on how to do it, but all you really need is to sit quietly somewhere for fifteen minutes, then stop thinking and hold onto an alert sense of positive receptivity (not a zonked-out blankness). Easy, eh? Probably not so easy. First of all just finding somewhere quiet for fifteen minutes can be difficult. And then, the chunterer hates being told to shut up. Don't struggle. Just smile and say 'No more chuntering just now thankyou', and go back to sitting quietly. It helps to have a focus of some sort: perhaps a mantra (a word to keep in mind, but not to mindlessly chant) or yantra (an abstract image to gaze lightly upon) or an icon, or a prayer, or a candle, or a little statue, or a kind thought. Or just a word with uplifting significance to you. Just keep it in mind don't obsess over it.. just let it arise and fade if it wants to. But use it to gently replace that pointless neurotic chuntering whenever it arises. Gradually, your mind will calm itself. And gradually you will find the benefits. It may take a while, or even a long while.. months or years. But patience is a natural virtue in a timeless universe, wouldn't you say? And every expert in the field says that no practice, however small, is ever wasted. They say (here meaning advanced Yogis, for example, often called 'rishis') that after a suitable period of meditation, you actually experience elements of the Higher, and how it all works. Hence their Knowledge (as opposed to guessing, Believing, or even Understanding) of Higher realms. They explain this process in terms of the 'third eye' opening. This seems to mean being able to experience, either fully or partially, the reality of Life in the Astral, or 4-d, plane. Greater rishis (Maharishis) may be able to access even Higher realms and dimensions, 'beyond the veil'. I leave it to you to find out more if you want to. Yogi Ramacharaka's books are a good introduction.
I also repeat that I do NOT recommend forcing any of this stuff. Read.. think. But DO NOT practice anything you do not thoroughly understand. Your aim must always be an ethical one and not sensational. Meditation must be aimed towards some state of being, or a Being, which you consider to be of a superior spiritual quality.
Again, there is much more that might be said about future medicine, but space is short. I'll leave you to ponder. If Mind is king what then? If it bothers you that medicine might be interfering with a person's welldeserved karmic suffering, then bear in mind that the Golden Rule is
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paramount at all times. The Laws of Karma are complex but will resolve themselves, somehow, somewhen. Your Law is simple be the kindest you possibly can, physically, emotionally and mentally.
'Kindness' might sometimes include 'tough love' of course. Judgements.. choices but all made with the well-being of the other person in mind. Intention is all.
Ecology If the transition from Materialism to DarwinPlus is rapid enough, we will be able to save the planet. Man will gradually realise his role and purpose in the world and will act responsibly towards his sustaining environment. Man very often already acts surprisingly responsibly even when Materialism constantly tells him that Life the Universe and Everything is pointless, so when he finally has a rational philosophy to get a grip on, he may do great things. I would go further and say he will do great things. Education, as ever, is the key. Get the basic paradigm/premiss right and all else will follow. Education Once Materialism has been booted into touch, and Man finds Purpose then he is going to be very sure that his children should find out about it as soon as possible. Kids with a sense of proper purpose will become a gigantic force for good. I can even see syllabuses being re-organised to ensure that at the top of the list for every child is a study of The Philosophy (or 'The Religion' if in a faith school). This will not be an arduous mess of turgid sophistry, but a simple explanation of the key points. And, of course, 'understanding' must always be the aim, not 'brainwashing'. Next on the list (and arising within it, of course) will be a study of elementary logic. This whole book has been based on the simplest logic imaginable but I know that an awful lot of people will simply not notice this. Most people have never been told what logic is and how it works... so they are confused, and don't know where to turn or how to react when faced with an idea that seems to threaten their Churchy or Sciency 'certainties'. We can fix that, and very rapidly. I'm certain a competent teacher could teach a class of ten year olds the basics of logic in a balanced week. Teenagers would need a day (or a month, depending). As an unavoidable extra, kids will be carefully taught how to separate emotional loading from fact, and how to de-grease slippery language. There is a lot of Materialist gook to practise on.
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The spin-off effect of this will be enormous. We might even see a few advertising agencies going out of business, and kids knowing how to resist the sleazy and nihilistic 'values' that magazines, the pop and fashion world, television, adverts and Hollywood pump at them. Economics This is a long shot but as we eventually discover that 'morality' is not for suckers, but for Life, I'm sure we'll see more and more co-operative and people-based models of commerce and economics springing up. The pioneering work of Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank is a good example.
And the John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose are already the envy of the commercial world, as they consistently perform well. Their staff are all partners in the firm, and consequently loyalty and involvement is very high. I think we will also see the return of 'mutuals' and 'credit unions' following the grotesque failure of Thatcherist 'deregulation'.
The socially disastrous creed of 'Greed is Good' unleashed in the 1980's was welcomed by materialists with a small 'm', but its fall-out has been ghastly. Increasing homelessness, poverty, rich-poor gap widening, increased pollution, and, by natural extension, the entire collapse of the banking system, as avarice came to absolutely dominate what little sense extremely clever bankers appear to have. I've seen it claimed that the 'top' 400 Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the population. The greed culture is mainly down to Thatcher and Reagan, who got it via an economist who was convinced that people only work for material bribes. A vapid and cynical Materialist view if ever there was one. Teachers and nurses don't work for bribes; neither do most other people. Only a few greedy people like bankers do, backed up by economists. The man behind this de-humanised and bleak view of mankind was a mathematician called John Nash, who worked on 'game theory': a reductionist maths-based view of how people behave in games: ie in strictly competitive circumstances. 'Social' game theory similarly assumed that everybody, in all circumstances, is out only for number one, as in 'games': a premiss that is simply not true. Game theory was taken up by economists, unsurprisingly, and no fewer than eight of them have won Nobel Prizes for Economics. When the Nash-based theories were tested for approval on a range of people, the only two demographic groups which approved of them were economists and psychopaths.
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From what I can understand of social game theory it seems to be obsessed with the idea that Man is solely a competitive being (according to the perverted 'social darwinist' creed of 'survival of the one with the sharpest elbows'), who constantly seeks more rewards (meaning, to a Materialist economist 'more stuff'), and whose behaviours may thus be tidily predictable. Give them more stuff, or make them compete for more stuff, and you can control them and keep them docile. The advertisers will be your close allies in this, as will any commercial medium like tv or the press. Make them want more stuff, because after all it's making and consuming more stuff that matters more than anything else to a materialist. Certainly it matters more than looking after the planet, or our health or our wisdom or happiness. Ask any economist.
Or politician.. (sigh) This whole aggressive attitude towards human motivation and behaviour is a logical extension of extreme left-brain dominance, as witnessed in people whose jobs require a lot of collating and classifying and abstract linear thinking: scientists and economists, for example. 'Selfishness-as-normal' derives from this, as 'empathy' is an alien concept to the left-brain. (See The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.) Clearly the 'selfish gene' mode of thought applies here too, as does the essentially selfish view of human nature consistently required by standard (Materialist) evolutionary theory, whereby all acts and attitudes are contrived to aid one's own personal (selfish) advantage and survival. More later.
DarwinPlus claims that Man is not a competitive animal (in an aggressive or violent sense), but a more or less rational and caring being, doing his best to cope with trying circumstances. For most people, competition arises when cooperation fails or is not an option (for any of many reasons often the destabilising greed of a few others). And the reward most people seek is not 'stuff' but happiness. And people run their lives as if they matter, not as any sort of 'game'.
The tragedy is that Materialism has even hi-jacked the concept of 'happiness', and nobody has even noticed.
*** Surely economics is a branch of psychology, and is thus not susceptible to mathematical analysis? People have failed for decades to draw up mechanical/mathematical formulae to predict the next move of the stock market. DarwinPlus sees that all such attempts are doomed, as every micromovement is the result of an individual human choice based upon a myriad of factors.
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Yes, 'choice' again.
It's a 'chaos' system en masse, and 'rational' only at the fundamental micro level where individual choices are made. Once the implications of DarwinPlus have trickled down even to economists, we will look back upon the last thirty years' economic models with shame, and perhaps begin to recall the fact that money, like fire or a scientific Theory, is a tool: a power in potential. A good servant but a terrible master.
Is it true then that 'The love of money the root of all evil' (see Timothy 1 6:10)? I would say 'no': Our problem is the fearfulness and yearning for security that gives rise to that greed and selfishness which manifests itself as the love of money. It's all 'fear', in the end. And we can choose to set ourselves free from this fear by adopting the rational requirements of DarwinPlus. 'Collective security' is the only sort there is.
History This might look like an odd entry, but I think that this new paradigm of DarwinPlus is so radical that it will affect every aspect of our lives. History is, after all, written from a point of view, and the current over-riding point of view is generally based upon material progress.
Obviously not all, but in a general sort of way.
This is not surprising, of course, as 'progress' is a man-made condition, and one of which he is justifiably proud, even if he finds it hard to define at times. For example is throwing away a billion plastic bags a day 'progress'? 'Disposable' clothing? Bigger traffic jams? Is more and more cheap everything, at any cost to the environment, progress? Really cheap heroin and alcopops? From the point of view of The Higher, 'progress' makes no sense, unless it is for the benefit of all and to the detriment of none, including the planet.
This is, of course, entirely in accord with the Golden Rule.
What does make sense to The Higher is the personal mental/moral evolution of each individual being, and its effect upon the groups of which s/he is a member. I guess we might see this as a relation of 'progress' but the underlying principle is quite different from the idea that Science (as adopted by technology, industry, and 'stuff') is the only way forward.
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DarwinPlus would say that balanced material progress and undogmatised (Idealist) science is fine; and will be even finer once allied with The Philosophy, and a sense of genuine collective purpose is accepted.
I guess you might say that 'history', like the stock exchange and the weather, is a 'chaotic system', being made up of yottaplexes of tiny individual choices and decisions, which play with and against each other, altering and shimmying, until some of them coalesce into moods or movements, of which some eventually erupt into world-altering acts, like a Reformation or a war; or a global consensus on abandoning Materialism(!) I can see some histories one day being written from this slightly different perspective. Some authors like James Michener and Edward Rutherfurd seem to be already playing with this. The Arts I've been dreading this bit. The older I get the more pointless 'The Arts' seem to have become. Once (under The Church) Art was created for the greater glory of God, although, frankly, I'm not sure what that means.
There are times when it seems to mean 'For the greater glory of The Church', as God surely does not need gold leaf and marble everywhere. But I can see the possible value of this, nevertheless (in terms of 'sacrifice'. The motive is all, in this as in all things).
Since Materialism took over, God and Ultimate Purpose are out, and greed and fear, (the bull and the bear: the only logical alternatives, if you think about it) are in. And Art, without a sense of proper purpose, has degenerated into the world of signatures and labels, as beloved by the ultramanipulative fashion/sex industry. A BBC presenter once 'jointly' drew a skull with Damien Hirst. 'Whose work is it?' the presenter asked. DH signed it. It is now worth 1,000,000. 'And it is hideous', the presenter said, knowing that if he had signed it instead it would be worth 5 at most, and only to some poor lost soul who actually wanted to have something very ugly on his wall. The movie world seems to turn out a disproportionate number of grisly slasher and vampire schlockfests, often dressed up as grittily significant for a post-'apocalyptic' world, but with lots of destruction and orange flames guaranteed. The Materialist nihilist credo is very obvious. I've not read a novel for years. Again nihilism and misery, along with lots of compensatory but ritualised and pointless sex, seem to be de rigueur. There was even a genre in the 2000's called 'mis(ery)-lit'. And at
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the moment there is an annual Bad Sex award, which says more about the state of current literature than it thinks. Modern music's squawks and tinkles don't impress me either. Just a personal thing. What does impress me is the quality of music that was written by people who had a deep reason for writing it.. which almost always seems to have been a spiritual reason. Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and an increasing number of modern singersongwriters. How will DarwinPlus affect the Arts? Literature might be the quickest to see the point and explore its implications. 'Art' won't, as everyone from 'artist' to gallery owner has too much to lose in its current trillion dollar back-log.
'Art is anything you can get away with'; attributed to Andy Warhol, John Cage or Marshall McLuhan. As clear a statement of Materialist pointlessness as you are likely to find.
But one day, someone will notice that that scrawny drippy daub really is ugly and pointless, despite all the gook the dealers and critics come out with. I look forward to the day when art really does once more rely on skill and vision and has something uplifting and truthful to say. And maybe even beautiful. Remember 'beautiful'? And it will happen one day, I'm sure. But not as long as Materio-nihilism is our sad little god. The Quest This has been an over-long chapter and I apologise for that, but there is one more thing I think we ought to take look at, deriving mainly from literature, and connecting it closely with The Religion (or The Philosophy if you prefer). There is a recurring theme in all literary forms, of Man Seeking Redemption. Cowboy films are full of it, cops and robbers, adventure stories all kinds. Even a lot of gritty movies like Things Exploding in Orange Flames VII!, and, of course an awful lot of love stories. The theme is of unhappy Man (and sometimes 'Woman') who finds final Happiness after trials and despair. Star Wars.. Indiana Jones you know the formula well. I've not seen the Harry Potter films, or the Lord of the Rings stories, but I am guessing that they too have this in common. Do they? This theme is often called The Hero's Journey, and it is the mainstay of computer games, although a lot of these seem to confuse rapacity and ruin
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with redemption, taking their cue from the dominant Materialist code of nihilism. The theme also turns up in dreams quite a lot, as we are faced with 'unlikely' challenges to resolve; perhaps confrontations with monsters or what have you. Of course, in our ordinary daily lives, our karma persistently insists on us facing up to things we would rather not deal with. We all make ourselves into heroes by our own choices to be brave. The physical pilgrimage to Rome or Santiago or Glastonbury, or the Hajj to Mecca, all reflect this Journey: the need for dedication, effort, attention and consistency in order to reach a worthy goal. If taken to a (literally) higher level, the Hero's Journey is called The Quest, and it has a long tradition in literature. Such stories as The Pilgrim's Progress, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Arthurian legends are all concerned with Man striving to reach the Truth of the Higher World. This Truth is sometimes represented by the Holy Grail (the cup of righteousness and wisdom/panmentia which will fill and fulfil you). Perfection is the goal, and is perceived in transcendental terms. A Buddhist would recognise The Quest as the Path towards Enlightenment. An esotericist might describe it in terms of the Pilgrimage towards Christhood. A Gnostic, for whom This world is a cruel illusion, would see it as a striving for the Reality which lies beyond the, well veil. I believe Wagner's Parsifal fits in here too.
I can't say for sure as I've never felt the urge to hear it in full. Wagner seems to have held some very esoteric views: 'time and space are merely our way of perceiving things, but otherwise have no reality...' (In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, in August 1860). And apparently the film The Matrix is at least partially based upon Parsifal.
You, dear reader, will be able to add many more examples, I'm sure. Ancient myths of all cultures have their own versions. The Labours of Hercules is an example. Jason and the Argonauts is another (the golden fleece representing.. guess what?) And of course, all the legends of dragon-slaying heroes are the same tale again, with the monstrous dragon representing the Lower Self, as are more than a few fairy tales and pantomime plots.
Rapunzel.. Jack and the Beanstalk..
All of them parables to guide you and me towards the path of what used to be called 'salvation', but which DarwinPlus would call mental evolution
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the path from Belief to Understanding and beyond, to Direct Knowledge: the Way, the Tao, Dhammapada: the path of the Seeker. Even the humble maze began as a metaphor for Man's Quest, and has roots in all the major religions. And snakes and ladders started life as an ancient Indian game called 'Salvation or Rebirth'. (Note the 'or'.) In parallel with these literary parables we see The Quest in personal practical action, under the banner of 'crusader' or 'pilgrim' or 'jihadi', or the American shamanic version of 'warrior', as in the Toltec tradition and in the books of Carlos Castaneda. In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the warrior-quest of Arjuna is spelled out as a physical battle between symbolic armies.
Carlos Castaneda apparently spent many years learning about Native American sorcery and magic from a local practitioner. His books The Teachings of Don Juan, and A Separate Reality (and others) are very readable. You might like to check out how DarwinPlus relates to them.
These are all variations on the same thing and are essentially concerned with Man's need to become a Hero by 'fighting the good fight' and 'doing battle' with his Lower weaknesses, and rejecting them, by his own choice and effort, in favour of Higher attitudes and Higher Mind in general. Unfortunately, 'crusade' and 'jihad' have often both been distorted to mean 'murder committed in the name of one's own greed, half-baked ideas, and/or self-righteous intolerance'. From High Mind to Low Behaviour just like that. We'll look at this phenomenon again in Chapter 28.
Things are never that easy, of course. For a medieval peasant a crusade would be seen partially as an opportunity to do The Quest/Pilgrimage, both physically and mentally. Jerusalem was the Holy City, the city of Christ. It would take sacrifice to get there, which he thought would stand him in good stead when he died, and to be in such Holy Land would automatically mean being closer to God. En route there would be prayers and possibly periods of contemplation at shrines. Eventually he would have the opportunity of cleansing the Sacred Place of the evil and heathen Saracens. Good stuff all round. Obviously there would be opportunities for a bit of rape and pillage en route, and why not? Fair's fair Not surprisingly, the Muslims saw the crusaders as the heathens, not least because of at least one well-documented case of mass slaughter and occasional acts of cannibalism that they committed.
As the ideas proposed here as 'DarwinPlus' slowly percolate around the world, this perversion will gradually fade. But don't, as they say, hold your breath. Fanaticism and shouting are more fun than smiling and sharing,
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especially if you get to fire an AK-47 into the air a lot and don't have to pay for the bullets. DarwinPlus will gradually infiltrate into The Arts. We can eventually expect to see the nihilism fade as hope returns, via the logic of The Philosophy. Once science accepts and actively propagates DarwinPlus, things will really start to rattle along. Fifty years, I would say maybe forty. Or, given the accelerating rate of information exchange that the internet now offers, we might possibly cut this to thirty. Exciting times. Stay tuned
Some literary tales are clearly karmic in theme. The most obvious one is Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It seems to me that this story is eternally popular as it reinforces what people have always suspected intuitively: the inevitability of karmic justice, backed by the very positive message that you can always choose to alter your ways and begin your personal growth (ie, take charge of your own mental evolution) and thereby achieve your own redemption and happiness. Maybe DarwinPlus will encourage more writing on a more overtly karmic theme, perhaps involving the principle that Man has four stages of Consciousness: first, the Unconscious state of infancy (plant-like); then Consciousness of external things (animal-like); thirdly, the Self-Conscious stage ('normal'-human); and then.. SuperConsciousness! (fully human: up up and away!).
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Chapter 27 The Price We're Paying

Every delusion is a poison. There are, therefore, no harmless delusions
Schopenhauer
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail
Abraham Maslow
We're nearly at the end of the journey that has taken me twenty-something years. Just two points remain to be poked at. First, I would like to take a proper look at the depth of the Materialist morass we are currently mired in; and then how we came to get there. After that, I'd like to finish the book with a few cheery predictions, because, believe it or not, I am very optimistic about the future of mankind. But first the bad news What do you think of the proposition that the cult of Materialism has caused more death, mayhem and misery, and more harm to the planet (on land at sea and in the air) than all the natural disasters like famine, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, put together, over the last five thousand years; and all in the space of two or three centuries? Outrageous? Maybe, but worth a little thought. Let's begin with politics. Materialism first really appeared as a political force with the French Revolution, when 'Reason' officially supplanted 'Superstition'. 'Reason' or 'Rationalism' actually meant for many 'antiChurchism', which pretty soon transmuted into 'Materialism'. The first of many lexical hi-jacks.
All subconscious, of course. No conspiracy. More in Chapter 28.
The Jacobins carried out the first mass murder in the name of atheism, killing 170,000 men women and children in western France alone, often systematically drowning them in naked masses in specially constructed boats, sunk in the Loire. Some put the figure at 450,000. Sixty years later, Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party, an attempt at tabulating history into predictable boxes (cf the efforts of game theorists and economists in the previous chapter) according solely to societies' economic progress. This programme was held to be 'scientific' and was also famously atheistic, as in 'religion is the opiate of the masses'.
Marx was a great fan of Darwin, whom he saw as an ally: 'Although (On the Origin of Species) is developed in the crude English style, this is a book which contains the basis of natural history for our views'. Darwin kept his distance, and his 'crude English style' remains more comprehensible than Marx ever was. I know this.
The numerous European revolutions of 1848 saw some interest in Marxism, but it was the Bolshevik Russians who developed it and distorted it into a battle tank for class warfare, backed up by relentless terror, torture, slavery and genocide. 'You have nothing to lose but your chains', Marx had claimed. Stalin disagreed, murdering tens of millions of his own people in the name of 'progress', and shackling the rest.
Stalin was once returned as Communist Party delegate for Moscow with 115% of the popular vote. 'Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.' Stalin. Compare with 'Vote early and vote often.' Al Capone. Thus do good ideas become depraved. More in Chapter 28.
The flame was carried on by Chairman Mao who made Stalin look like Willy Wonka. Mao killed an estimated fifty to eighty million of his own people. Again.. all in the name of 'progress', and all under the banner of Materialist/atheist certainty. Then there was Pol Pot, who killed you if you wore spectacles. In a purposeless universe, human life loses all value.
You might argue that Religion has caused, or been involved in, an awful lot of bloody wars (not least the Thirty Years' War, the Catholic revenge on Protestants), and you would be quite correct. But Religion has not indulged in the casual mass murder of its own citizens/members, and on this sort of scale. Even the medieval witch hunts and Inquisitions accounted for 'only' a few tens of thousands of killings. Not worth Mao getting out of bed for. (In fact, the executions carried out by Inquisitions were relatively fewer than those carried out via other processes of law. Brutal days.)
The Russian revolution occurred during the First World War, itself brought about by a general Materialist-based policy of expansionism and Empire. The war led to some 35,000,000 deaths.
Note that 'Materialist' here does not mean a deliberate atheistic policy. It means a non-Idealist policy: ie, taking no genuine account of the genuine (Idealist) roots of religion. Lip-service was paid of course. God famously held up the trousers of German troops, Gott Mit Uns being inscribed on the belt buckles even of the men who opened the taps on the poison gas bottles.
Then we have Hitler's contribution, beginning with his eugenics programme which began by 'mercy killing' some 200,000 'defectives', and forcibly sterilising more than 400,000 more. This process of 'social darwinism' was based upon the Materialist misreading, deliberate or
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otherwise, of Darwin's idea of relentless competition in Nature, and the 'survival of the fittest'. But before we get too self-righteous about Hitler, we should remember that eugenics was a hot topic in Europe and the USA at the time and was taken seriously by respectable people. Forty thousand forcible sterilisations were carried out in the USA, for example.
Devotees included Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, and four once and future American presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson and Hoover. Also Linus Pauling, the eventual double Nobel Prize winner. And John Maynard Keynes, the economist. And Winston Churchill: 'The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life' (1899). He went on to draft the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which defined four grades of 'Mental Defective' who could be confined for life. US eugenicists also wanted to restrict immigration from nations with 'inferior' stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of Eastern Europe, and wanted to sterilise insane, retarded, and epileptic people.
Would an Idealist society sanction eugenics? Of course not. And even Religions (as the only large, if flawed, Idealist organisations we have so far experienced) have always been to the fore in setting up hospitals, schools, orphanages and clinics, not euthanasian ovens and fertiliser factories. DarwinPlus is completely opposed to any sort of inhumanity.
Of course we must not forget all those 'religious' witch hunts; but they were individual prosecutions, not industrialised slaughter.
Let's be clear: eugenics is the natural child of Materialism, arising thus: there is no purpose to the universe, thus there can be no purpose to life, and no definitive moral code. We know we must fight to survive. Thus you, who are a cripple, are an economic drain on me and my sort who are the true breed. You might as well be 'dealt with', tidily, as a weed.
The word 'eugenics' was invented by Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, in 1883 and was based in part on Darwin's own work, adopting, for example, the phrase 'the struggle for existence'. Darwin, however, says he meant it in 'a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another'. He also adopted Herbert Spencer's phrase 'survival of the fittest' in the same sense, to mean 'most suited to the environment', and not 'most brutal'. This did not stop paranoid tub-thumpers like Hitler, and some of the notables above from misinterpreting his ideas and words to support the programme of genetic cleansing. Darwin did not favour eugenics, on the grounds that it would endanger the instinct of sympathy, 'the noblest part of our nature'. He was thus not a 'social darwinist'; and he would certainly not be a neo-darwinist either, as I hope we have already established.
Backed up by the 'science' of eugenics, Hitler then felt free to murder as many untermenschen ('subhumans') as possible; notably Jews, but also
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gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, communists, trade unionists, lots of Christians, and, on a colossal scale, Slavs. Including the systematic killing of foreigners, reprisals, slave labour, etc, the Nazis murdered some 20,000,000 people (see http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM ), not counting those killed in battles.
That twenty million includes some 200,000 Freemasons; a little known fact.
All scientifically defensible in Hitler's eyes, and partially so in the eyes of many in the western world. Obviously Churchill and co would not have descended into industrialised barbarism, but the common mind-set was there in the background. I feel dreadfully sorry for people who grew up in the 1930's, when the social options were polarized between the eugenicist Right, and the Materialist Left who turned out (unsurprisingly) to be equally barbarous. Between them they slaughtered tens of millions of each other's citizens, taking many more millions across Europe with them. Apparently Stalin's final total for murder comes out at some 60,000,000, so he did give Mao a run for his money after all. These numbers are all approximate, probably confused to some degree, and equally probably, underestimated here and there. Precise figures are understandably hard to agree upon. But the point is made: Materialism, in its many guises, means that systematic murder becomes acceptable to many people. I don't have any figures to hand, but I think you really could make a case for Materialism having caused more human death and misery via war and eugenics-based terror alone, than all the earthquakes etc for several millennia. But Materialist misery comes from many quarters, not just from megalomania *** In the early twentieth century Behaviorism was just getting into gear. Pavlov did his famous experiments with dogs, showing how they could be programmed into 'conditioned reflexes' by associating food with the ringing of a bell. Eventually they would salivate just to the sound of the bell. As a Materialist, he thought, and all his admirers agreed, that Man was similarly just a box of mechanical causes-and-effects (stimuli and responses). People were thus completely plastic and trainable: an ideal philosophy for social engineers like the Soviets. Naturally, Pavlov was convinced that all mental illness was essentially physical. As we are all just material physical machines, he thought, then if
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the machine creaks in any respect then the fault must lie within the physical material of the machine'Mind' was not an option. As 'science' gradually shifted in meaning from 'the systematic search for understanding', to becoming synonymous with 'Materialism', more overtly Materialist principles emerged. For example, the American, John B Watson, wrote in his influential book 'Behaviorism' (1924)
'Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist holds that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.'
Frighteningly stupid stuff, I would say.. and one can't help wondering how the unconscious (or, to be fair, 'non-conscious') Mr Watson ever realised what he was talking about, or whether he existed at all. And why did nobody else seem to spot the crass absurdity of it? Science became a big fan of Behaviourism, which I find pretty creepy and a caution to us all. It would seem that the triumph of shaking off centuries of Church oppression had produced a sort of blinkered euphoria that was proof against even common sense. 'Consciousness (equates with) superstition'? Jeez.
Watson later found his natural home in the world of advertising, the industry which underpins pointless consumerism, and which owes its raison d'tre to Materialism and most of its techniques of manipulation and persuasion to Behaviorism.
But this baloney was very widely (and to my mind very alarmingly) accepted in the Scientific world, and this respectability gave legitimacy to the 'scientific' butchery of the C20 tyrants. Blame Materialism, and its adherents, like the scientist Julian Huxley, whose view of 'defectives' was: 'It would have been better for them and the community as a whole if they had never been born'. Who is to decide what a defective is? The floodgates were opening
Materialism Eugenics Auschwitz
Moving on All the horrors of the industrial revolution, as documented by Engels, Mayhew, Dickens etc, can't be strictly placed at the feet of Materialism, but I think the abandonment of all other values in sole favour of profit and productivity certainly can be. Hence the gross exploitation of the workers,
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frequently by greedy materialist-capitalists who went to Church on Sunday, but who clearly had no Christian charity about them,
These are the men who 'prayed on their knees on a Sunday and on their neighbours for the rest of the week'.
and the pollution and disregard for the single world ecology that makes our existence possible. This process continues to develop exponentially to the present day, with no sign of stopping, tacitly supported by the unspoken creed of Materialism, which all 'growth economics'-driven governments support, knowing of no other. A dog that messes on its own doorstep is immediately corrected. Humanity will be corrected too, if it doesn't wise up very quickly. The irony is that everyone knows this; and also knows that endless consumerism is stupid.. but won't consider reining it in, so wedded to 'infinite growth' and 'more and more stuff' have we become, as we have completely replaced Idealist values with Materialist no-values. We are drugged and stupefied by our Materialist god to the point where we refuse to wake up from the nightmare of our own making, and carry on despoiling the planet as if theory and practice, never mind Cause and Effect, have nothing in common. Unbelievable stupidity 'Infinite growth' on a 'finite planet'? We would already need three more comparable planets to plunder if everyone on Earth were to live at the current American standard of wastefulness. Would an Idealist society securely based upon the Understanding of DarwinPlus carry out such infantile acts of self-destruction? Obviously not, as there would now be a rational need for 'morality', and a rational explanation of the whole cosmic set-up (well.. 'partial'!) and a proper understanding of Cause and Effect, as mediated by the Law of Karma. There would be hope. Under Materialism there is no hope of any hope. How could there be? For hope, you need purpose. And for a Materialist there can be no purpose so grab the 'stuff' while you can. And yes.. chop down that last tree. I will pay you for it with the last fish in the ocean. How about medicine? I've already mentioned this, but I keep wondering about the harm done by Materialistic Freudian analysis. No doubt some good has come of it some of the time, but if it's based on a duff premiss. I wonder how many suicides, and how many decades of misery, suffered by people written off as 'untreatable cases', were actually caused by the treatment? What of the people who had had confusing psychic experiences and whose only help was to be told that they were delusional or psychotic?
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And I'm mighty bothered by dreamers of unpleasant dreams being told that all the ugliness was 'wish-fulfilment' when the yogic/esoteric Understanding is that alarming dreams are symbolic reminders of ugly karmic debts due for settlement: quite the opposite of 'wish-fulfilment'. And how many schizophrenics and psychotics have been left to welter in their sea of madness because the Materialist 'philosophy' of the day will not countenance the very idea that maybe these unfortunates are obsessed or possessed, despite the work of Dr Wickland being available for all to study? I would guess at hundreds of thousands of people. Only a guess. And how many non-clinical suicides and drug and drink addictions have been caused by being brought up in the misery of a society that has no hope, as there is no hope? How many people have been traumatised by being contradicted when they reported hearing voices, or seeing visions? Or worse, been locked away and Prozacked into a stupor? How many people presenting at surgeries and clinics are in a state of 'panomie'?
Sorry.. yet another new word. I've coined 'panomie' as a composite of 'pan-' (everything) and 'anomie' (a sense of 'rulelessness' or lack of belonging or purpose). 'Panomie' means 'a sense of absolute detachment from values that people cannot formulate well enough to reject and hence move on from'. In other words the condition of nihilistic bewilderment and total lack of purpose or cause for morality, brought about by Materialism.
The consultant at Guy's Hospital (see Chapter 26) was in no doubt that the number is high. On a more immediate level, why do so many young people choose oblivion over companionship on a Saturday night (and Friday.. and Sunday )? Not a month goes by without some scare over a new 'designer' drug that is cheaper even than loss-leader alcohol, and which is likely to cause serious mental and emotional damage at some future date. Why do kids ingest this poison? It's so they can get 'off their face', they say. Why do they want to do this? Is it just because these drugs are cheap? I don't think so. I've seen a group of students who are already in debt being interviewed on television, and each of them spends more on alcohol in one night than my wife and I spend on groceries for the week. It's not about money; it's about anguish and need. The 'war' against drugs will not be won until we squarely face the fact that drugs will continue to be available and hugely abused as long as people are unhappy, and feel the need to get off their face because they can't face their unhappiness.
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Why are so many people unhappy? I think you might guess the answer I am going to suggest, based upon the evidence in this book: it's because idealistic young people (along with most of the rest of us) have found no purpose in their life. Materialism has washed it all away. Their 'education' has offered them only tick-box exams to feed them into the wage-slave system, with trashy consumerism as the compensation for a pointless job, assuming they can even get one; all backed up, as ever, by economists whose job is to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. A prospective life of purpose has been replaced by an existential void. The media are almost all capitalist ventures, whose sole purpose is to make as much money as possible. So they will always support any Materialist/ consumerist stance. Magazines, the fashion/pop/sex industry, television programmes all advertise air-brushed Materialist solutions to what are essentially profound spiritual problems and the kids don't realise this, let alone that there may be a real answer, such as that offered by the implications of DarwinPlus. Why don't they realise this? Because society as a whole is so overwhelmed by Materialism that it doesn't even realise it's there, and thus doesn't even realise there is a question to be asked. Science has said 'No'. And Science knows best. Mine's a double. And another one. We can put down a lot of the misery of alcoholism and drug addiction to the pointlessness of everything, as preached by Materialism. And we can add the misery of the bulimic and the bloated: why bother taking care of yourself when there's no point to taking care? Mine's a double superwhopper. Many people will think this is all a terrible exaggeration. But just ask yourself 'If society in general adopted the Understanding that DarwinPlus offers via a bit of simple logic. Would we have nearly as many suicides, addictions, clinical depressions, and the millions of lives lived in a panomic state of 'quiet desperation' as someone once put it?' If society were to see that Materialism is simply wrong, and that the alternative is NOT Churchy waffle and/or hysterics but a comprehensible and rational philosophy of kindness.. then surely many people would then find a point to their lives? You may disagree, and indeed, maybe I am wrong in this. But I think not. I have faith in people's will-to-reason, given half a chance. One day we will see
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Economics and Politics

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference
Harry S Truman
Germany's descent into madness began when Bismarck said, less than a decade after Origins came out, that 'The weak were made to be devoured by the strong'. Hitler built upon this, adding the equally spurious 'darwinian' eugenic strain to support the Master Race nonsense. He then also added the enormous cult of personality ('The world is there for the man who takes it') to the point that his right-hand man, Martin Bormann, once said that 'National Socialism is what the Fuehrer wills it to be'. All ethical light had been expunged as the descent into moral anarchy arrived at autocratic Realpolitik: brute force, claiming to be 'scientific', but actually just ethics-free Materialism reduced to its essence.
Marx, meanwhile, preached a 'scientific' inevitability in human history, based upon an economist/atheist misinterpretation of poor old Darwin. 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.' Friedrich Engels Stalin and Hitler were closer to each other than either thought in their shared distortions of a great man's big idea.
The essential point is that apart from giving support to genocidal maniacs, the universally accepted creed of Materialism has meant that we no longer have politicians with a sense of vision. They have been replaced by professional Financial Managers, as politics has come to be seen almost entirely in terms of economics, which means 'stuff'. 'It's the economy, stupid.' Of course, money and trade are important, but nobody apart from Bhutan seems to have twigged that what people actually want is not more stuff but more happiness.
Bhutan's government operates according not to the usual consumerist GDP (Gross Domestic Product) index, but to the GNH (Gross National Happiness) index. GNH insists upon sustainable development, the preservation of cultural values, the conservation of the natural environment, and the establishment of good governance. Bhutan is a small Buddhist country, but the idea of the GNH index could transfer to any other country if the will was there, rather than the cynical laughter any mention of it will currently evoke in any country with a Materialist-based economy, like, for example.
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You might say it's not the government's job to supply happiness, to which the obvious retort is 'Who says so?' And 'Who says it's the government's job to supply more stuff?'
Interestingly, a BBC poll recently found that 80% of the UK population agree with the statement that 'A government's prime objective should be to achieve the greatest happiness of the people, not the greatest wealth'. Is anybody listening?
In other words, we are again so soaked in Materialist 'stuffism' that we can't see anything other than 'stuff' as the solution to all social ills, and ignore the fact that it is this very stuffism which is supporting or even causing these ills. How so? By encouraging dissatisfaction with perfectly good things, thus encouraging greed, envy, waste, insecurity and all the rest of the negativity that goes with consumerism. Ever more money-stuff does not equate with more happy; just cheaper booze and cheeseburgers, and more landfill sites, the destruction of more millions of hectares of habitat, ever-increasing pollution of the land, the sea and the air we breathe, and more misery. The average Briton has never been so rich or so unhappy, according to many surveys. It has been calculated that increasing wealth brings increased happiness up to a certain point, after which it brings problems and unhappiness. The current example given is the wealth level of Portugal. Enough is enough, and good. More is too much, and bad, especially when rabid consumerism (ie a deliberate programme of waste) is promoted by a massive advertising industry. Once we had only disposable wellingtons and broken crockery. Now we have disposable nappies, made of complex materials, many of which will not rot, 'disposable' cotton clothing (cheap in money cost but actually very expensive in ecological terms [a 'disposable' T-shirt requires 2,000 litres of precious water to make over a dozen bath-tubs full] but far away, in China, so invisible), and are bombarded by advertising into the notion of disposable armchairs and sofas (which are designed to last for only a couple of years anyway), and by endless television make-over programmes, into the idea of whole kitchens and interior designs being disposable fashion items. The whole world of consumer electronics exists on planned obsolescence, and creating a lust for the latest pointless gimmick. And what happens to the old stuff? Junked, mainly if it hasn't already broken down. And 'junked' means pollution of land, sea and air via toxic landfill, poisonous run-off, and biologically-dangerous aerosols from incinerators.
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We have been unwittingly duped into thinking that buying new stuff will make us happy. But it doesn't, does it? If it did, we wouldn't keep needing to replace it, would we? People run up enormous debts on credit cards just to get the latest stuff, and have been so swept up in this gigantic con, that they seem to have lost even the sense they were born with: that if you ain't got it, you can't spend it. Why do they keep doing it? Because they are seeking happiness, the only way that our Materialist society allows them to be 'happy': by getting more stuff. It's a drug, and 'the system' is the pusher. Mr Big, in the background, never seen or even known about, is Mr Materialism: who whispers over and over 'More Stuff is What You Need' so 'Just Buy It' and 'Now Buy It Again.' And nobody knows of any other way to 'happiness' Politics has swallowed the Materialist/Behaviorist nonsense of John Nash (ie, that people are motivated only by selfishness and material reward) so deeply that I've seen it seriously suggested that people should be paid for walking their children to school, as opposed to driving them in their 4x4's and thus clogging up the roads and poisoning the air. And nobody seems to be screaming from the rooftops at how demeaning and debasing this is, and of how it is actually a horrifying assault upon individual common sense, personal responsibility, and the very notion of kindness and consideration for others which is what holds a society together. We see Nashness at its most venal and nashtiest in the bonus culture that is increasingly ripping the element of service or duty and even human dignity out of society. It is demoralising us all.
Poor Mr Nash developed paranoid schizophrenia as a student, and later thought he was receiving messages from outer space. One wonders if this might have coloured his thoughts and studies. One also wonders why anyone other than psychopaths and economists ever took his ideas seriously and extended them into social policy. I'm thinking of Thatcher and Reagan here, of course.
The great tragedy here is that the Nash approach has become a selffulfilling prophecy. Offer people money to walk their kids and they'll take it. Why not? Everyone else is grabbing everything they can (should we mention the unprincipled world of bankers/usurers here? And politicians' expenses?), so why not me? After all, more money means success, status, and happiness, doesn't it? Everyone says so It's a tragedy on an appalling scale. The old adage of 'When in a hole, stop digging' cannot possibly apply because nobody even realises we are in a hole: it's so big. It's the void that all those falsely-Prozacked patients and millions of other desperate and depressed panomics are constantly staring into: the miserable void of hopeless Materialism.
'Education Education Education' In 1997 New Labour came to power amidst huge sighs of relief after the squandering of the public silver by Thatcher and co, and the depressing credo of 'Greed is Good'.
And that famous social darwinist phrase 'There is no such thing as society'. I wonder who the Grand Lady thought paid her wages?
But what did we get? More of the same, all based upon the sterile (and hugely inaccurate) theory that personal gain (ie, 'money') is the only motivation for people to do things, and competition is the means to do this. Hence the stealthy and gradual privatising of the health and education systems and the postal service. 'More efficient' 'Competition is the Key!' Drive up Standards by Imposing Checklist Targets! Turn Health from a care system into a massive labyrinth of hugely expensive and competing bureaucratic empires where ticking boxes matters more than putting food within reach of patients or washing bacteria off your hands. Impose more and more pointless tick-box exams and targets onto schools until good staff crack and can't carry on, and you can't get applicants for headmasterships because nobody became a teacher in order to fill in pointless directives and forms for fifteen hours a day. Let's pit school against school, and boost this one and close that one; let's make this one a specialist in science and that one a sink. Then let's tell people that thanks to introducing ever more competition they now have more of the magic Materialist/consumerist/stuffist mantra: CHOICE! And never mind the fact that for huge numbers of people the choice offered is of the same order as between dining at the Ritz and sleeping on a park bench.
Ah!.. Choice! But not as DarwinPlus or the yogic/esoteric philosophy would recognise it. The real choice is between accepting this gigantic Materialist confidence trick of pseudo-choice and genuinely choosing something healthier and more rational.
Even the word 'choice' has been hi-jacked by Materialism.
Why is it so hard for politicians to realise that what people want is not more and more pointless and largely counterfeit choice, but simple quality? And above all, what people want is to be happy.
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A Stanford professor who has researched these things says: 'Choice is not an unalloyed good. Choice can also produce a numbing uncertainty, depression and selfishness.'
This of course would mean a radical re-think of what government is all about, and nobody wants to bite that particular bullet, except in Bhutan. *** The word 'education' derives from the Latin 'educere', and means 'to lead out (something which is already within)'. It is concerned with developing a child's mind, via logic and reason and observation and all those other good things, like clear judgement and selfconfidence, to enable him to eventually make use of his own Inner-tuition and to thus learn how to gradually become wise. But over the centuries, and particularly over the recent decades in the UK, it has been debased to the point where, as a BBC news reporter recently put it, 'a degree is a passport to higher earnings', meaning 'access to more stuff'. Scan the airwaves and printed media, and you are unlikely to see the words 'education' and 'wisdom', or even 'understanding' in the same item. A degree once meant that you were on the way to becoming a rounded personality. Now it means you have been aimed down a particular alley to get 'higher earnings' and more stuff. Education? No.. the Materialist con again.
But with nobody to blame, of course. It's the national, or near-global, mind-set that is the con, not any person or group, although advertisers do know perfectly well that they are in the brainwashing business. Their karma awaits them.
Meanwhile, Materialism has been so profoundly absorbed that I have been unable to find a single case of it being required for discussion against Idealism on a science syllabus at GCSE, 'A' level, or degree level. The nearest we get to this is an occasional challenge from some sort of Creationism not the same thing at all. What this amounts to is that students at all levels are actually being indoctrinated in Materialism (ie, an irrational and unevidenced dogma) without anybody, staff or students, realising. And the dogma that does not state its name is consistently confused with 'rationalism', 'reason', 'Darwinism', and even 'science' itself. This is very serious stuff, and can only lead to ever greater confusion and despair in society. What is 'culture' if not what is passed down in our education? What is actually being passed down? The kids deserve better. So do you. So do we all.
The Arts
The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.
Jawaharlal Nehru
I think these two pictures sum up the influence of Materialism on the arts rather well. Both are concerned with death, although one of them might just be concerned with schlock shock. One profoundly moving. One vapid. One a work of extraordinary art and craftsmanship. One involving sticking on sequins. One genuine. One cynical. One dignified. One vulgar. One priceless. One valued at fifty million pounds. One Idealist. One Materialist. Damien Hirst is the prime example of what Materialism has meant for art. The skull above is called For the Love of God. Does the title mean anything apart from being a glib soundbite? If it carries the exasperated overtones of 'Oh, for pity's sake' then it makes sense: a skull, the death of humanity, tarted up with thousands of diamonds, the very symbol of pointless material greed, to give it some sort of superficial glamour and imitation of life. Is this DH's intention? Unlikely, I would say. DH's sole motivation (apart from money) seems to be to shock, via extreme ugliness and pretentious pseudo-philosophical and gooky titles. And the public has been so demoralised and brainwashed by the thumping background message of Materialism, via politics, economics, advertising, the media, and Science itself megaphoning our pointlessness and thus our inability to ever have an opinion worth anything that we accept this crap as 'Art'. Gook is king, in the Arts as much as Science. One day perhaps I'll enter a completely blank canvas to an exhibition, entitled The Emperor's New Clothes, but heaven help us, it might be taken up as a masterpiece.
I did once send an empty shoe box tied up with baler twine to the Director of Interpretation at the Tate Gallery. I called it Is This an Empty Box? and wrote a long page of pretentious and facetious gook to go with it. Weeks passed, then it was returned to me, in a nicer and bigger box, along with a letter praising it. They are bomb-proof.
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You might consider the fact that a gallery thinks it needs a Director of Interpretation as significant in itself.
Does all this matter? Yes it does, because Art has always been associated with truth and beauty, and that has all been hacked out of it by the Materialists, so that all that remains is the shell of expectation but with no satisfying contents. We are all losers here, as the currency has been so debased by the charlatans and admen that nobody knows what art is any more. Add to that the shtick that 'interpretation lies in the eye of the beholder' and you have the perfect con... you can't even call the 'artist' a charlatan any more because it's all your own fault you don't find his pile of maggotridden sheeps' heads with a plastic dildo jammed into one eye-socket, deeply meaningful on several levels. Briefly: Idealist art is uplifting; Materialist art is depressing. Not necessarily because of the contents (some C17 Spanish Idealist art is alarmingly gory) but because of its essential lack of any meaningful content, and its consequent assault upon the judgement of the individual.
The gory Idealist Spanish art was meant to engender sympathy for and thanks to Jesus for his suffering on our behalf. As a contrast, the ugliness of, say, Francis Bacon's work does not engender any such thing. It is the nihilism of the bleak and the lost, begun in the early C20 by the dada movement, surrealism, and the theatre of the absurd: all movements reflecting the incoming Materialist wave of no-purpose, no-standards, and no sound rock to build anything upon. We've ended up with (at the moment) such observations as: 'Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.' Quentin Tarantino. 'Fun'..
We need to take a deep breath, regain confidence in our own judgements, and refuse to be manipulated by the dealers and galleries whose only interest is in making money from the gullible: if it looks like a grubby unmade bed, then that's what it is. Hold your nose and move on.
Biology and Similar As a result of the dead-end that all of science has led itself into by adopting the Materialist dogma, biology (and its associated disciplines like ethology, psychology, etc) has fallen into what might be called the 'adaptionist trap'. This means that every single anomaly or curiosity in living creatures is always explained in terms of 'Darwinian adaptation to environment'. No doubt this is true much or even most of the time. The Galapagos finches are the obvious example, but I really don't see how it can apply to wildebeest
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and zebras which trot up and down Africa together. One is dull and dun, the other gaily striped in Op Art ticking. How can both be 'adaptive' to the identical environment? And I don't see how the humble robin or blue tit can have 'adapted' into their colourful livery as a matter of simple survival. Brown sparrows do that better, surely? Macaws? And then there is that peacock's tail, which troubled Darwin so much as it clearly has nothing to do with adapting to its environment. Biologists are obliged by the adaptionist trap, to say that this tail can only have come about as a sort of second order adaptation, being a survival 'strategy' for the male to get himself selected to breed above his competitors 'in order to' pass on his genes. There may, of course, be truth in this, despite the abuse of language (precisely who or what holds and operates this 'strategy'?), but DarwinPlus would clearly open up the field to other guesses or suggestions, the obvious one being that the lady likes a nicely turned out sort of chap (although it seems that females in general tend to prefer nurturing males to show-offs peacocks included).
But I guess the adaptionist version is saying the same thing in the end: that the female chooses on the basis of the display, and must thus have an aesthetic sense, and of quite a high and discriminatory order at that but I've never heard a biologist say this out loud. Well.. a Materialist couldn't, could he?
Why should animals not have aesthetic senses to go along with their demonstration of love, altruism, intelligence, creativity etc?
Clearly, Materialism has a terrible struggle with 'altruism'. Simple kindness and selfsacrifice for the sake of another person is inconceivable to The Dogma, although we can be certain that every card-carrying Materialist himself/herself regularly behaves altruistically as a spouse, parent, teacher etc. To be a Materialist is to live a paradox. I have often been struck by how altruism inevitably surfaces in a big way whenever there is a disaster. After the 9/11 outrage thousands of people put themselves out on an enormous scale to help strangers. It happens all the time, across the world. The obscenity of war also brings as a positive the opportunity for altruism, and its echo, heroism. Charity appeals regularly raise millions of pounds, again to help strangers: altruism. And at the end of the day 'altruism' is just the Golden Rule of 'doing unto others' writ large. Darwin, that wise and careful thinker, does not mention altruism at all in any of the editions of Origins. His concern was with the simple mechanical morphological aspect of evolution, and he kept shtum about matters of the Mind or 'life itself'. Meanwhile, one of our closest primate relatives, the bonobo, regularly shares food with others and generally prefers sharing to dining alone, according to Current Biology, March 2010.
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DarwinPlus would have no trouble with that possibility, based upon the fact that we are all One Life, as demonstrated by Darwin and Wallace, and we are all slightly different, people and animals, as we all know. And it would seem that we are all evolving along the line of Mind and awareness; and 'awareness' definitely includes 'aesthetics'.
A touching example of animal individuality was recently reported when two migrating Bewick geese, which normally mate for life, turned up with new partners. Unheard of. Materialist biology would say 'Each chose a new mate to spread their own selfish genes'. DarwinPlus would say 'They tried; yes, they tried.. but in the end found they were incompatible'. Of course the third option is that one was sterile or had lost vital equipment in an encounter with a fox, but being geese, and not noted for their intellect, one partner hadn't noticed. Or something.
Thus is Materialism holding back evolutionary studies. It is also having a malign effect on an area of biochemistry which is still doggedly pursuing the Hypothesis of abiogenesis, or biopoesis, which claims, as The Dogma rigidly insists, that Life arose from mud and lightning or some other concoction of chemicals and energy.
These new names are just a re-branding of the old 'spontaneous generation' theory which was disproved by Redi, Spallanzani and Pasteur, and has hence become an embarrassment. Best give it a new name But even so, some Top Scientists seem still to accept it 'Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.' Stephen Hawking.
Still no evidence has been found for this, of course, and a lot of people are puzzled by the consistent refusal of the rabbit to appear in the hat, but The Dogma shows no mercy. It has enslaved thousands of worthy chemists and biologists and is very very tenacious. Most will battle on until retirement, and will play their final rounds of golf still baffled, but preferring bafflement to re-evaluating their basic premiss: the Dogma of the Absolute Truth of Materialism.
Language Perhaps the most damaging effect Materialism has had on daily life is the way it has distorted our language. I've already mentioned how words such as 'rational', 'Darwinian', and even 'science' itself have been gradually whitewashed over so that they all now mean 'Materialist', to the great confusion of a lot of people, not least many scientists.
Also, in Chapter 4 we looked at how Richard Dawkins chose words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean ('Words are our servants, not our masters'), so that eventually 'design' came to mean 'no design'.
We also have the problem of the 'selfish' gene. RD wants to make it clear that he means this as a sort of metaphor: 'If we allow ourselves the licence of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool.' But hang on. are genes 'selfish' or not, in 'respectable terms'? If they are, then we have the nonsense of a chemical having an agenda, which RD apparently agrees is nonsense, despite insisting that they are 'trying to get more numerous'. But if genes are not selfish then what on earth does the phrase 'selfish gene' mean? No.. really? What? And if 'the selfish gene' is 'a sort of metaphor' for something else that is selfish then the whole 'selfish gene' notion is nonsense all over again, as the author really means 'the selfish something-which-is-not-a-gene'. Humpty Dumpty gook again. But millions of people still take it seriously. I am baffled. RD really does insist that genes have agendas: 'Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs.' (from The Selfish Gene). He definitely means that these chemicals are 'up to' something and have 'designs', meaning 'plans': which means he is talking about chemicals with mental attributes which are also teleological (purposeful). He also suggests that 'we' are separate from our genes, in that we can challenge them; while at the same time insisting that the genes are in charge: 'They (genes) are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside.' Hmmm So who is this 'we', and where did 'we' come from? 'From genes' or 'not from genes'? And what of our mental capacities? Were our genes so careless as to develop them for us only to see us turn them against them? Such cruel and inept chemicals! Another quote: 'However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge.' Make of that what you can. I can make no sense at all unless he means what the words in the sentence mean: that chemical genes drive us to selfishness for their own ends. Ie, that mindless chemicals deliberately set out to undermine 'our' interests to replace them with their own, with no explanation at all of who this 'we' might be or of how chemicals can have 'interests'. This line of paradoxical unreason is held to be a masterpiece of rationality by people who think that chemicals spontaneously organised themselves into Life and then into Mind and Consciousness, and hence to the Self-Consciousness which allows them (ie,
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the people) to claim that their own minds are subservient to those of a little group of (abiotic) chemicals. RD is by no means alone in thinking this nonsense: 'The body is a device constructed by the genes in order to produce more genes', John Maynard Smith, Emeritus Professor of Biology, Sussex University. You will find hundreds of similar quotes in popular science books and in television programmes. Keep your ears sharp STOP PRESS: I have just discovered that in 2006, thirty years after The Selfish Gene was published, Professor Dawkins declared that genes are cooperative rather than egotistic. Splendid news! Welcome back, Professor! But so much damage to repair
On top of this we have to cope with a whole raft of other slippery misuses of words. I hope you felt uncomfortable at two points in the paragraphs on Biology and Similar above. Did the phrase 'survival strategy' strike you as somehow suspect? If so, you have definitely been paying attention to the thrust of this book. A 'strategy' is a mental plan.. which is quite the opposite of a simple mechanical adaptionist process of 'survival by natural selection', yet you will see this sort of phrase used all the time by Materialists. 'Oh it's a sort of shorthand', they will explain '..like a metaphor'. No it is not a metaphor. It is misuse of language and can only display or lead to sloppy thinking. And how about 'in order to pass on his genes'? Again, you will find this phrase 'in order to', misused all the time in Scientific writings. It actually means 'with the purpose of' a definite mental planbut not when a Materialist evolutionist uses it, as for him there can be no such thing. Sloppy stuff, leading to confusion in the mind of the writer and especially in the reader.
Similarly with the phrase 'so as to', or even just 'to', as in 'the Arctic Squackling Tern adopts a yellow and blue chequered plumage (so as) to blend in with its surroundings.' 'To' and 'so as to' both mean 'with the purpose of..' To use them to mean something else is misleading and sloppy. Note also the word 'adopts' here. It means 'chooses', but not to a Materialist. For him it means 'does not choose'.
And then there's the paradoxical nonsense of how Life spontaneously 'emerged' from non-life etc. Everyone knows what 'emerged' means.. or we used to, until Materialism turned it into meaning 'magically self-created itself'. We've been so battered by this Materialist onslaught that we no longer know what our words mean, never mind what Art is. I think that's probably enough on this subject, although I could fill ten pages with quotes from writers like RD and television presenters of science
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and nature programmes who all consistently misuse the language and thus fuddle the meanings and mislead the viewers. I'm sure it's not done with this purpose in mind, of course. It's just that they are so sure they are right about everything (ie, anything deriving from the Truth of Materialism) that they think they can be a little more relaxed about the precise meaning of the words they choose. Sorry no you can't. Not if you're concerned with precision and looking for real truth, anyway.
As just one example, all of the following misuses come from a BBC2 Horizon programme, of January 2010: '.. rabies virus causes dogs to bite, so they can pass it on.' '..flu virus has engineered a way of transmission by causing you to sneeze..' '..the HIV virus attacks the cells, which are designed to fight invasion.' 'HIV has a particular strategy of mutation.' '.. a quick and dirty strategy that the virus likes to use' My italics. Or another, from BBC News Aug 30 2010: 'The Indonesian mimic octopus often uses a daredevil strategy of making itself more conspicuous to predators. Scientists believe the behaviour evolved to scare other animals.' 'Uses'? 'Strategy'? 'Making itself'? And, of course, that innocent little 'to', as in 'to scare' Or what about these lines from What Man Might Be, written by GR Harrison, the once Dean of the School of Science, MIT: 'Plants that learned to use energy from the sun to put themselves into states that attracted additional atoms got ahead faster. Long after the cell was invented, plant cells learned the advantages of mutual cooperation. Plant cells have learned the advantages of specialisation & cooperation, developing cells especially adapted for leaf and root and fibre.' I counted eight inappropriate uses of language in these three sentences. Maybe nine. Just one more: 'Evolution is cleverer than you are.' Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner for determining the structure of DNA. Note: FC is a Materialist, so for him 'evolution' is a blind process of natural selection. In other words 'evolution' is a 'process observed', and not a force, never mind a 'clever' one. Thus 'evolution' does not exist as a force of any sort. Thus FC is claiming that something that does not exist is 'smarter than you are'. Bet you didn't know that.
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Everyday Misery After Darwin and the triumph of Materialism, philosophy took a nosedive into a mess of over-lapping and confusing constructs like Logical Positivism and, wait for it, 'Epiphenomenalism'. The first refused to accept the relevance of anything 'metaphysical' or subjective; the second declared that mind was made by brain, essentially. Deconstructionism challenged the existence of objective truth or meaning in language, and led via Poststructuralism, to Postmodernism which seems to concern itself with the fragmentation of belief or philosophy in modern times. I say 'seems to' because it's hard (for me) to pin down precisely what each of these (and many other) similar philosophical schools are actually saying. Two things struck me as I made the effort: one was the old Tibetan proverb I quoted earlier about how it is possible to be so clever that you miss the point entirely (meaning here the key issue of the irrationality of Materialism). And the second was that in my superficial examination I never once saw the word 'Materialist' mentioned, although every one of the isms above seem to take Materialism as their base paradigm. The dogmatic truth of Materialism is again the unquestioned premiss, in philosophy as elsewhere. The current mess of 'Relativism' in which we find ourselves, in which there are no fixed or agreed standards for anything, from quality in Art, to Truth itself, all stem from this complex mash of Materialist philosophies. Our society is philosophically rudderless, and all because Science, which has replaced dogmatic Churchism as the guiding light of our society, has adopted dogmatic Materialism as 'Truth'.
You might say that Relativism is Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum' writ large, meaning we can know nothing as true except that we can think. Someone has pointed out that the modern version might be 'Tesco ergo sum': 'I shop therefore I am'. I'm desperately trying to raise a smile at this.
Once we adopt Idealism and something like DarwinPlus, all the moral mess and intellectual masturbation that Materialism has generated will gradually fade away, along with all the other over-clever nonsense, and we will start to re-assemble our thinking into a single rational and meaningful unity.
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As a metaphor: if you take a sponge and liquidise it into a temporary slew of cells, it will eventually reform, as the individual cells detect and move back into the sponge 'form' (as posited by Plato, Sheldrake etc). This does not work with a Victoria sponge.
If you find the above paragraphs over-provocative, for heaven's sake don't take my word for it, or reject it out of hand either. Try it for yourself. Pick one of the isms above and test it against the Materialist/Idealist split. If Idealism is true (as I maintain it must be by elementary logic) can any of the isms above be true also?
Existentialism is an interesting hybrid, which stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts, but in a pointless universe. Hence by logical extension, nothing you choose, responsibly or otherwise, can have any ultimate point to it. Materialist paradox again, but at least the emphasis on personal choice and responsibility is there: a theme shared with Christian 'pilgrimage' and Islamic 'jihad', and with Nietzsche's 'superman', and with the aimed-for conditions of 'yoga' of Yoga and the 'enlightenment' of Buddhism.
Fear Rules So what? Well, like it or not, these depressing philosophies filter down into society at large from the clever people who dream them up, usually in universities. The inherent nihilism gradually becomes 'official' and 'true' since The Church has been pretty well side-lined and there is no other well-exposed Idealist system on offer which could counter it. And once nihilism is at large all manner of social ills ensue. I've already covered many of these ills, but there is a bit more to add. If you feel you've already got the hang of all this, please feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 28. *** Consider the proposition that everyone wants security, and just about everyone fears death. Idealism + the yogic/esoteric philosophy + DarwinPlus offers security via a rational Understanding of What (some of ) It's All About plus the mechanism of absolute justice moderated by the Law of Karma plus the fact that you choose your own Heaven or Hell plus the fact that you (as in the inner 'I') are actually immortal.
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As somebody once put it: 'We are the gods, and they are us'. As somebody else put it: 'This is the other world'.
What security can the current social paradigm of Materialism offer? None: only confusion and pointlessness, as propagated by the isms above. All it can offer is 'stuff' and distractions which don't work. People deep down know that 'stuff' and 'money' do not bring them security. Thus they remain fearful. And fear breeds need. Need breeds greed.. but for what? The only 'security' available: 'stuff and money'. Hence the consumerist spiral and enormous personal debts run up in recent years, and hence also the rampant greed in all sectors of the commercial world, the obscene bonus culture, and the rapidly increasing ruination of the planet.
The whole idea of 'Cryonics' deep freezing 'viable tissue' (almost-dead people)... until such time as science has progressed far enough to revive it/them is based entirely upon this Materialist-induced fear of death, and the Materialist misunderstanding of the nature of Life. So too are the weird cults that spring up with depressing regularity. 'We are here to be brainwashed' said a member of the Heaven's Gate cult which committed mass suicide in 1997. The despair in that sentence. and the mental confusion behind it caused this woman and her friends to sign over their free will to a totalitarian system. The fact that they thought of themselves as a UFO 'religion' is irrelevant. They had retreated from their meaningless Materialist society into a fantasy: a self-willed psychosis. We must have 'meaning and security' at any cost, even if it's an irrational and vain invention.
At an apparently more trivial level we have body obsession: all a part of the Materialist stance: 'no purpose; just physicality and selfish genes'. Shelves full of magazines have appeared, all encouraging us to pursue the body beautiful. Sex appeal and activity is all that matters in a material world, and never mind the bulimia, anorexia and neuroses that this entails, along with botched operations and botox mutilation. The commercial world sees no problem with any of this, just as long as you are worried and feel the need to buy their awful tripe, and lots and lots of pills and glossy books and DVD's and silly devices and gimmicks for only 19.95! Because, of course, in a consumerist society, where we the citizens have been reduced to sheep-like 'consumers', what matters is not the message of 'Be Slim and Beautiful!' by eating more veg and walking the kids to school, but the message of 'Feel Bad About Yourself Because You are So Fat and Disgusting!', and of course 'Buying More Stuff Will Solve This!' The average woman's magazine is something like 80% adverts and lightly-disguised adverts for stuff which will make you feel less disgusting and depressed simply by buying it. No it won't. And everybody knows this, but they keep on buying it because they're worth it. Now that's what I call depressing.
Children are being commercialised and sexualised ever earlier by advertising, magazines, the pop world and television.
Particularly by endlessly promoting the desirability of over-priced 'labels', thus appealing to children's need to conform to their peer group's snobby and expensive 'values', all generated by the commercial media and tolerated or even supported by parents whose capacity for independent judgement has been emasculated by the enormous sub-woofer pressure of Materialism which constantly reinforces the message that there is no ultimate point to anything, so 'Go buy stuff NOW! Then you'll feel better... '
Will good come of this? Of course not. Apart from anything else, our kids will simply now be sucked even earlier into the 'I'm Fat and Inadequate ' industry, and become neurotics in the making several years sooner, rather than enjoying life as a child should. En route, they will be weaned into ever more premature commercialised sexuality, and will eventually have a tough time distinguishing love from pornographic debasement. This Materialist-Reductionist gutting of human complexity to body flash is reflected among women in the cult of the fake tan, and never mind the cancer; the spray tan, and never mind God knows what; the slut fashions; botox trout-pout; ever more unlikely implants; the screeching Saturday nights out in skirts that came from a Christmas cracker; the promotion of pole-dancing classes as a 'keep-fit' pastime; the rise of prostitution as an acceptable source of pin money; the enormous rise in drink problems. Much of this is a result of the influence of internet pornography and the squalid effect it has on young males' minds and the women's response in order to 'compete'. I'm not advocating a return to Victorian prudery but this current exaggeration is surely pathological, and a direct result of the mass adoption of physicalism only (as promoted by Materialism at the end of the day) and the rejection of what we might call Mind: intelligence and finer feelings. What now matters is the form, not the content; the shadow, not the substance. It is truly desperate stuff, and 'desperate' is 'misery in waiting'. Kids cut school in increasing numbers. They mug each other for a pair of over-priced trainers, produced for pennies in an Indonesian sweat shop ('Made by kids for kids') and sold for 100 to mug punters here, who will pay anything to feel some sense of worth and purpose, even if it only achieved by buying stuff that relentless advertising has promoted to True Worth and Esteem ( and there's no other option anyway, is there, for an awful lot of kids whose 'education' has not even given them 'a passport to higher earnings', never mind a sense of worth and a purpose to their life?)
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Not only has Materialism hijacked a lot of words ('science', 'rational' etc) and the notions of 'happiness' and 'choice', but even the profoundly important notion of 'self-worth'. .. and nobody seems to have noticed.
Materialism has hijacked even the notion of 'self-worth'.
'Heroin chic' is at the end of the long red line that starts with Materialism. So are grim Hollywood films; obsessional pornography; the uglier heavy metal bands; video nasties; 'shoot-em-up' games. Happy people with a proper sense of self-worth do not need drugs. Our current obsession with celebrity-for-the-sake-of-it is a natural extension of the rejection of content in favour of flash. However, film stars, rock idols, and super-sportsmen know that fame and fortune do not bring happiness. They know they've been conned. Below are a few comments and statistics, mainly from the USA (population ~300 million), the most aggressively individuated country on the planet, which all others apart from Bhutan (and sometimes France!) seem to want to emulate. A country with a happy and purposeful populace would not produce such statistics. Would they? 60 million people have been sexually abused. 75 million lives are seriously affected by alcoholism. 15 million families are violent. 60% of women, and 50% of men have eating disorders. 13 million people are gambling addicts. The average boy will witness 26,000 murders on tv before the age of 18. These murders are largely committed by men. Every year 17,000 people are killed and a million injured in drink drive incidents. The UK is not much better: Every year, out of a population of ~60 million, 250,000 people are reported missing. And this quarter million are only the ones that actually leave. How many more must be miserable without leaving? The vast majority return within 2-3 days. But what a lot of misery this represents in a 'rich' and therefore 'happy' Materialist society.
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There are 5,000 UK suicides per year. That's thirteen per day, of which nine are men.
Annoyingly, this suicide rate is much the same in Happy-Oriented Bhutan. Nothing's easy, is it?
Worldwide sales of cocaine generate more money than the sales of Microsoft, McDonald's and Kellogg's combined. That's a lot of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and misery. *** Obviously, it would be nave to blame Materialism for every one of these tragedies. For a start, the Law of Karma must act out somehow, and for many this will mean tough times, even in Bhutan. But the despair, the pandemic of hopelessness, the panomie I think Materialism is to blame for an awful lot of the world's misery, all the way from the murders of eugenics to the way it has scrambled the minds of millions of people who find themselves made ill or suicidal by the constant message that there is no hope or purpose in the universe and thus none in their own life, and their only saviour lies in drugs, prescribed or otherwise. Dreadful but it is simply the logical extension of the illogical premiss of Materialism itself. I rest my case. Over to you. *** As a final Materialist paradox: according to Materialism, everything that is comes from Matter/Energy (remember the 'everything is mineral' conversation?). Thus, logically, all evil must come from Matter/Energy, as there is nowhere else for it to have come from. In other words, one way or another, all the aimlessness, nihilism, misery and evil in the world must come from chemicals and Matter/Energy, according to Materialism. Naughty old chemicals. Did you ever hear anything so daft? A report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA claims that 'genes for empathy' can be inherited. What they mean is 'genes associated with empathy': 'chemicals associated with a mental/ emotional condition'. ***
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If you need reminding of the grotesque environmental effects of unrestrained materialism (the natural son of Materialism), and the trouble we are building up for ourselves, consider the North Pacific Gyre: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/5208645/Drowning-inplastic-The-Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-is-twice-the-size-of-France.html *** In the 1960's Waddingtons packaged and released the Ouija board as a family board game. It was withdrawn after widespread protests. I mention this to underline how deeply Materialism has soaked in. The Ouija system is not a toy. *** When I read about how the Nazis reduced thousands of Jews to bars of soap, I was reminded, with a faint shudder, of my old biology teacher.
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Chapter 28 So Who's to Blame?
A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe
Henry David Thoreau
The present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate the necessity of revising their convictions
TH Huxley ('Darwin's bulldog') Or, as Max Planck so neatly put it: 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
You may remember, hundreds of pages ago, that I thought Richard Dawkins must be guilty of deliberately misleading his readers by his eccentric reading of Darwin, and his rumbustious use of language and logic. I soon realised that Mr D was quite innocent of the charge of deliberate deception; but I then thought it must surely be a more general conspiracy of scientists who were defending the irrational for some nefarious and unfathomed reason. Here too, I was glad to see that I was wrong (although I do still wonder why anyone would want to re-publish the first, as opposed to the last, edition of Origins).
It's more of a clubbable thing, on the lines of: 'We are all scientists and men of reason; we must stick together in the face of Religious mania and unreason; thus we must defend Materialism at every turn'. Materialism is so deeply ingrained, as was The Church dogma for medieval priests, that it is not only unquestionable, it is actually invisible. Does the sun rise? Yes. Is Materialism valid? What? What are you talking about? Materialism has reached the status of Mom and apple pie. Totally unquestionable for most. However, some scientists are troubled by doubt but don't know where to turn to achieve greater clarity, as they find The Church's explanations unpersuasive, and they can conceive of no other. I hope DarwinPlus may help.
So I moved on to Religion as being the cause of the Materialist tragedy, in that it was Religion's centuries-long oppression of free thought and reason
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that forced scientists into their folie million in rejecting everything with a whiff of the paranormal about it. But no any folie must surely have been of the scientists' own choice. Just because you are a big-endian, I am not in any way obliged to thus become a little-endian. So who was to blame for the irrational and heartless Materialist mess we find ourselves in? Somebody, surely? I was several years into my researches before the answer struck me. I'm sure you will have got there before me.
It's the fault of all of us

It's the fault of every single person who has ever swallowed dogma of any kind, unquestioned, or accepted some other party's Belief as his own, without first checking it for veracity via SPIT or some similar process.
One last time:
1. Reason and logic must apply at all times. 2. Any 'law', if applied at all, must be applied universally. 3. No paradox is ever acceptable as 'explanation'. 4. Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic. 5. No dogma of any kind is acceptable. 6. All 'evidence' is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori. 7. Until proved to be wrong, all 'evidence' is to be kept on hold. In the centuries that we have been blindly accepting other people's fantasies we have built up a cloud of superstition and ignorance, and paradox and half-truth, and miasmas of mutually contradictory Beliefs, which remain like a fog around us, without rational resolution, to the confusion and befuddlement of us all. Many cultures have struggled hard for a free press, but freedom of speech is no substitute for freedom of thought.
The yogic/esoteric/occult philosophy would suggest that this notion of a 'fog' is quite literally true, citing the power of thoughtforms built up over generations which can percolate our personal mental world, and which require constant personal alertness and awareness to see our way through clearly.
Hence, for example, my original puzzlement at why my peers mocked me for 'believing in' ghosts. Belief.. Belief When the issue was certainly not
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a matter of belief, but of fact, one way or the other. And yet nobody seemed interested in pursuing the facts: not my peers; not the chaplain; and certainly not the biology teacher. They were all content to drift along in their dim little clouds of selective Belief and 'certainty' rather than seek out the bright sky of Truth that must surely be out there somewhere. Why had they all accepted these Beliefs as being adequate, when they were quite clearly inadequate when tackling questions requiring evidence and facts? Leaving the notion of 'thoughtforms' aside, they had clearly been taught these scraps of Belief or picked them up here and there, and had somehow come to accept them as worthy information. The biologist and the parson had both been 'educated' (ie, unwittingly brainwashed) into their contradictory certainties, whereas my schoolboy peers had picked up their attitude from society at large, meaning mainly their family and what they had scanned in from newspapers and the media of the day all heavily in awe of Science ('Materialism' rather than 'science', of course, although they would not realise this). Why were they content with this? Why did they not feel, as I did, that here was a profound mystery which required proper scientific investigation? Again, it could only be because of the overwhelming social acceptance of the Truth of Science (of course unwittingly meaning 'The Truth of Materialism'), and nobody was supplying them with the mental analytical tools to challenge the paucity of their 'evidence'.
Meaning no evidence at all: just hearsay, half-baked theorising, and slick cynicism learned off their ignorant elders, who had themselves been unwittingly brainwashed by the unquestioned and unquestioning Materialist slant in the media. This was in the 1950's, remember, when the Labour Party had finally become a political force, and Labour was a grandchild of 'the Revolution', and more or less atheist and Materialist on principle. (The Tories, of course, were largely uncritical traditional Religionists). The 1960's began the slow change we see developing today as the alternative society, New Age, etc.
A proper education, meaning absolute insistence upon understanding how to think clearly, how to stick to one thing at a time, how to separate opinion from fact, how to separate the particular from the general, how discussion does not mean defence, how 'winning' is not the point, and how to listen! and how to know what you can trust and what you can't and the vital importance of valid premisses and the unacceptability of any form of sloppy gook to any discussion This sort of education would have knocked Materialism on the head decades ago. Perhaps we'll one day put 'How to Think' modules at the top of every syllabus from infants to degree, and be amazed that we didn't think of it before.
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But meanwhile, I must confess that I have no great hopes of this book being treated seriously. Personal experience has shown me over and over that even when people accept the logic of the case face to face, that they will revert to their previous confused mix of Beliefs and second-hand opinions later. It seems to be extraordinarily difficult for some people to change their mind or to admit that a long-held Belief might be faulty in some way (particularly scientists, oddly. More below). Somebody once said 'There is nothing as dangerous as a new idea'. I would extend this to 'There is nothing as difficult as even getting a new idea a rational hearing'! And the 'new idea' I'm referring to here isn't even a new idea: it is simply an insistence on elementary logic. It is our general lack of appreciation of the true power of clear thought, and our own personal power to think things through for ourselves, which has led us into the nihilistic mess we are in.
It is the previous authoritarian nature of The Church, and the self-righteous overconfidence of the present Materialist forces which have knocked our sense of our own power out of us, despite the gains that have been made via universal (partial) education. It is this conflict, between the slight uplifting force of our feeble education and the overwhelming downdraught of Materialist dogma which has led to the current wash of bewilderment and panomie.
Left to our own devices, and without the proper mental tools to help us, it seems to be an unfortunate aspect of human nature that we are likely to pick up a fragment of truth (or near-truth, or even folly or outright lie) without proper critical questioning and then to latch onto it and defend it as in our desperate quest for certainty and security at any price. If it has been drummed into us in a seminary or madrassa or yeshiva or whatever, then the fragment becomes far more powerful, as it has been delivered as by someone whose credentials to actually know the truth we would never consider questioning. Hence the endless stream of religious maniacs, convinced of their righteousness even when they bomb or gas, or throw acid at girls who dare to go to school.
And quasi-religious maniacs of slightly different stripes... I've seen several very touching interviews with ex-members of the Hitler Youth, who had committed appalling atrocities in Russia decades previously. They had been brainwashed throughout their childhood and had no concept that butchering people was in any way wrong as long as the victims were officially labelled 'sub-humans'. The interviewees looked genuinely distraught. 'How could we have believed it?' they asked. 'We had no way of knowing.' The key to Hitler's power was this relentless brainwashing of the youth of a complicit Volk, whose culture had been polluted by the myth ('Truth') of militaristic racial superiority ever since the days when they defeated the Romans when nobody else could.
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I do feel for these people, even the Islamist terrorists and suicide bombers. They sincerely believe that they are holders of Truth and are doing God's will. They are genuine people (although no doubt tainted with a selfish desire for Heavenly Bliss or Seventy-Two Virgins, or whatever). The criminals here are the liars who have filled their heads with hate. But are they criminals? Maybe, if motivated by some personal desire for power or unquestioned self-righteous contempt for anyone not sharing a Belief identical to their own. But often these 'teachers' are themselves victim of mindless indoctrination.. and so on, back up the line.
Stanley Milgram, in some famous experiments in the 1960s found that an awful lot of ordinary decent people could be very easily persuaded to inflict severe electric shocks onto another person, just because the procedure was carried out in a 'laboratory' and authorised by a 'scientist'. In fact the shocks were not real and the victim was an actor, but the point was made: that if you are given an order in a society or milieu which approves of it, you are likely to obey. Hence the industrialised slaughter carried out by the Nazis: all 'just obeying orders'. The real point of Milgram's experiments is not that the 'experimenter' was forcing the people to administer shocks; it was the overriding culture of Scientific Materialism that was in charge. 'He's a scientist so I can trust him. It must be OK.' Of course, the 'scientist' in question (another actor) represented the sort of cruel depths that social darwinism and Behaviorism had become reduced to, and which had become accepted as, well 'acceptable' in society at large. It's the identical pattern to the Hitler Youth experience which led to the twenty million murders that they and their masters carried out.
The problem is that in our deep-felt need for certainty and the security it brings, that we develop self-protective 'blind spots' to the faults and paradoxes that our Belief contains. We are desperate, so we simply refuse to see them thus ignoring the inevitable process of:
limited info blind spots closing of mental options confusion, bigotry, zealotry or fanaticism
A narrow mind sharpens the tongue and the sword. We all too easily accept the crumb for the slice, and may then go on to declare that we have the whole cake. It seems to me that a suitable word for this universal failing is 'psychosclerosis': 'a hardening and narrowing of the mental arteries', leading to the all too familiar arrogance that infuses Materialist spokesmen, as in:
'I'm interested in dialogue in the sense of stamping out religion.'
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and
'What's wrong with arrogance if you're right?' Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University. 'Psychosclerosis': another new word, I'm afraid, but probably the last. Can you think of a better word? I guess one might define it as 'the near-universal capacity for upgrading long-standing habit into Truth', and might then define 'stupidity' as 'the choice to act upon partial or distorted information as if it were the complete picture': psychosclerosis in action. Archbishop Usher's heroic calculation of the age of the Earth would seem to fit well as an example here. He apparently consulted some 10,000 other books en route, but still ended up with a pointless answer because he was working according to the unquestioned psychosclerotic Belief that the Bible must be literally true in every jot and tittle. 'GIGO', alas (see Chapter 11).
Psychosclerosis leads, in a Materialist society, to the distortion of language that I've been so preoccupied with in previous chapters, as psychosclerotic certainty sees no contradiction in using the word 'design' to mean 'no design', and 'emerges' to mean 'spontaneously creates itself' (and of course has no problem with perverting words like 'rationalist', 'scientist', 'Darwinist' etc to mean 'Materialist'). The rationale works thus, as ever: The Dogma can not be wrong; therefore it must be right, no matter how weird and irrational its extrapolations and derivatives might appear to you, you poor benighted and ignorant (ie, undogmatised) outsider. It also leads directly to the shameless distortive behaviours of the Skeptics for whom the fact that an embarrassing experiment in, say, ESP can be faked means that all such experiments must be faked. They know for absolute certain that they are right and therefore, blah blah and thus the ends justify the means, and we will discredit your investigations by all means possible because your explorations are wrong, heretical and well, just be grateful we're not going to burn you at the stake, as you so richly deserve, but there appears to be some new pinko-liberal by-law forbidding it.
As an example, I'm thinking here of the experiments done by Jacques Benveniste, a respected French immunologist, who claimed to have definite proof that homeopathy works. Nature published his paper but then sent in what can only be described as a three-man hit squad to rubbish his results. One was the editor of Nature, the same man who advocated burning books he didn't approve of, another was a specialist in winkling out fraud in science, and the third was a professional conjuror. All three were dedicated Materialists, which is the point here. Not surprisingly, these less-than-unbiased experts found that Benveniste's results were indeed erroneous. Were they erroneous? All of them? Under all circumstances? Perhaps they were, but why would a rational person take these men's judgements as definitive, or even valid? Impartiality is the key to fair judgement, and it was clearly lacking here.
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At the more buffoon end of the spectrum, we saw in 2010 a mass demonstration against homeopathy, in which dozens of people took 'overdoses' of homeopathic pills ('even Arsenic!') to 'prove' that they were ineffective nonsense, or at very best a placebo. They clearly had no idea of the way homeopathy is prescribed and used. Their argument is (wait for it) that the theory is wrong, so the practice must be wrong, and never mind the empirical fact that people sometimes seem to benefit from it. For example, in 2009 the NHS treated 54,000 people with homeopathy in the four NHS hospitals that use it. Does this mean that these properly qualified NHS doctors are all stupid? 54,000 times? Are they so stupid that they are deluded into seeing cures where none can possibly exist? If so, I think the buffoons and Skeptics should bring some prosecutions, and as soon as possible. They should also prosecute the 400 GP's who use alternative therapies in some way. These people are clearly a menace to the public, wouldn't you say? Why are they allowed to continue? I'm sure I've already mentioned that I know two farmers, both successful, neither gullible nor stupid, who use homeopathy on their very expensive cattle. They are quite sure it works, and saves them a huge amount in vet bills. One might ask how a placebo might work on a cow, who has no knowledge (we assume) of what the treatment is and how it works (or can't work). Please Skeptics take the proper empirical scientific route and work backwards from the known effects, rather than the anti-scientific approach of 'It Can't Work, Therefore it Doesn't'. And if homeopathy does turn out to be effective, even just now and then, you will have the fun of working out why. Everybody knows it can't be a normal* chemical effect. So what is it? Put your energies to positive use, eh? *(although work at the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology does suggest that chemistry might yet apply. See Daily Telegraph Nov 8, 2001.)
The tragedy of all this is that these people are not wicked in themselves, any more than the religious maniacs are. They absolutely believe that they are defending Truth against Madness. But what they have not realised is that they are all victims of the Materialist fallacy, and have compounded its overwhelming influence by not questioning their own scraps of Belief seriously enough, via the acid test of the Materialist/Idealist split. And Religion? (sigh) For 2,000 years and more, religions ('The Religion', or 'The Philosophy' ultimately) have been shrivelled and distorted by psychosclerosis. 'Show me a fragment of The Truth and I will batter the world into submission with it!' might have been a motto for the Roman Church at various times. 'Convert or I will kill you!' has been the 'Christian' message more than once, echoed by Islam. The personal inner Quest of 'crusade' ('Take up thy cross daily', Jesus, quoted in Luke 9:23) and 'jihad' has been perverted over and over into psychosclerotic massacre. Islam once valued highly the concept of 'ijtihad', or 'effort', meaning the duty of Muslims to strive for their own independent understanding of the way to be. It was this independence of thought that led to the brilliance of
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medieval Islamic science. Where is it now? 'Imitation' ('taqlid') has replaced it. Instead of seeking a broader knowledge, many Muslims seem to have allowed themselves to be forced into narrow-mindedness and psychosclerotic intolerance. 'Al-jihad al-asghar', the lesser jihad (against external enemies) has become dominant over 'al-jihad al-akhbar', the greater jihad (the struggle against one's own base desires). This is of course an enormous generalisation, but there is truth in it.
Try The Trouble With Islam Today by Irshad Manji, for a lucid account of this process.
A wonderful example of the power of psychosclerosis is the madness that surrounds the cult of Abraham, the 'father' of the three Desert Religions. Jews, Christians and Muslims all revere Abraham. You would think that this would mean they could live in peace, wouldn't you? No no no Jews say Abraham gave rise to their nation via his son Isaac; Muslims say he gave rise to their people via his son Ishmael. Christians side with the Jews, somehow. Result shouting and hatred all round, and all as a result of an unverified report of events that are supposed to have happened thousands of years ago. 'Give me a fragment to Believe in and I will defend it to the death. Preferably, your death.' Unbelievable. I have every sympathy with Richard Dawkins and the humanists in their despair at this sort of fratricidal nonsense. And as for those brawling witnesses to the Lamb of God in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, well, words really do fail me. More obvious examples of the power of psychosclerosis are the dozens of intra-faith wars and murders between Catholics and Protestants, and Shias and Sunnis. Obviously, all of these are closely entangled with manipulative politics, but a lot of the foot soldiers see no problem in slaughtering their fellow worshipper of the One True God if his Belief Set is ever so slightly different from their own.
'Follow the sandal*!' 'No, follow the gourd!' If you've never seen The Life of Brian, it is essential viewing on this subject. *Possibly 'shoe'. It's a while since I've seen it.
I guess we can add to this list the universal tendency for good ideas to be destroyed within a generation or two of their genesis, as the substance gets replaced, via psychosclerosis, by the shadow, usually heavily tainted by past customs. The monotheism of Akhenaton lost out to the old guard; the Jews reverted to worshipping a golden calf even while Moses was collecting some helpful commandments on their behalf, and then got bogged down in professional priestliness and the animal sacrifice business;
Christianity killed off dissenters from the start, and eventually set out on its murderous crusades, culminating in the sacking of Constantinople, the Eastern capital of Christianity itself; Islam, 'submission to the will of Allah the All-Merciful', has become reduced to perverting children into committing mass murder, quite often of their brother Muslims. All down to psychosclerosis, one way and another. You might even make a case for all of Theology being psychosclerosis in action: constant back-referencing to human interpretations of things we can barely comprehend the fringes of, but expound upon at great length.
From time to time the sclerosis becomes so serious that something has to be done. This frequently occurs as a Reformation of some sort, for example the Protestant and Non-Conformist revolts against a stagnant Catholicism, or the Buddhist, and later the Sikh, reformation of an over-ritualised Hinduism. (Guru Nanak was a contemporary of Martin Luther*). Has Islam had a similar reformation? Not that I know of, but the selfobsessed and intolerantly aggressive sects that seem to have taken international control of it suggest that the conditions are right. Alternatively, according to the Indian religions, a Reformation is brought about by the appearance in the world of an Avatar, a Being of high consequence who tries to steer a great religion (in whatever nation or location) back onto course. Such figures as Krishna or (possibly) Jesus would be examples. True? I don't know.. but it would be quite compatible with Idealism and the general yogic/esoteric philosophy. Interestingly, all the great religions expect an Avatar any day soon. For the Jews this is the Messiah; for Christians, 'The Second Coming'; for Muslims, the Mahdi; for Hindus, Kalki; and for Buddhists, the Lord Maitreya. This seems to me to be an extraordinary coincidence of doctrine and expectation, especially as all of them are expected to precede a gigantic, and dare one say it, 'apocalyptic', development in human affairs (See Isaiah 25:7 'And he will destroy the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations.' Note 'all nations'; and there's that 'veil' again.) *Luther took 'protesting' and personal responsibility very seriously. He once smuggled a dozen disillusioned nuns out of a convent in pickle barrels.
Communism, the humane idea that we should all share, giving according to our ability and taking according to our needs, rapidly degenerated into, yes, mass murder, genocide etc etc, as the psychosclerotics misinterpreted the original ideas to suit their own narrow and selfish ends. Placemen, yesmen, apparatchiki, jobsworths, bureaucrats the dystopias of Kafka and 1984 were inevitable when a Grade One principle slid into the bloodless hands of Grade Five careerists.
See also Acts 2:44-45 'And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.' No sign of bishops' palaces here But very definite signs of.(gasp!) 'communism'.
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Where did the palaces come from?
And poor old science a brilliant idea, that we should trust only what is rational, reasonable and trustworthy, that has now become the arch supporter of a dogma which requires the very essence of anti-science: ie, the spontaneous self-creation of Life from non-life etc, even breaking at least two of the most basic laws of science in the process. Albert Einstein is alleged to have said that 'Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.' He was, I think, referring to psychosclerosis here (if he ever said it at all). Science does indeed have a bad record in the psychosclerosis department. Just about every new idea you can name in the scientific world has been ignored or mocked by the experts of the day. Railways will never work; iron ships will never float just months before the Russians launched the first satellite the Astronomer Royal pronounced that the idea of space travel was 'utter bilge'; twelve years later men were on the moon. It's the same old story every time the old guard, armed with their little scrap of knowledge or prejudice, defend it as Truth in the face of clearly rational new theories, time after time. It's psychosclerosis in action, and in the world of reason and science where it should never get a look in. All going to prove again that a Theory, like fire and habit, is a good servant but a bad master.
In 1900, the great scientist Lord Kelvin famously stated 'There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.' Five years later, Einstein published his first paper on relativity, and quantum theory lay just around the corner. Lord K over-reached himself more than once: 'I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible'; and 'Radio has no future'. The most outrageous example of psychosclerosis in medicine must surely be the case in the 1840's of Ignaz Semmelweiss, who encouraged medical students to wash their hands when moving from the dissection of corpses to the obstetrics ward. The rate of mothers' deaths from septicaemia immediately plummeted from 18% to 1% and remained at a low level thereafter. Was he feted? Promoted? No, of course not. He was abused and harried by the senior medical men and even had to leave Vienna. He eventually had a breakdown which may have led to his insanity and death. What mattered most to the seniors was the Dogma of the Day and not the facts of the matter or the lives of the young mothers. Anti-science. Normal. Perhaps most alarmingly in a 'non-scientific' context, and given the urgency of the situation, was General Haig's judgement on the machine gun in 1914. 'Make no mistake, this weapon will change absolutely nothing.'
Darwin and Wallace's first lecture on Natural Selection was ignored by their peers; Mendel's pioneering work on genetics was ignored for fifty
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years; the painstaking work of Wallace, Crookes, and thousands of others in the world of the paranormal has been abused and ignored for over a century, and counting. The current prime victim is the work of Rupert Sheldrake on morphogenetic fields and other not-strictly-Materialist areas. He is derided by the dinosaur-experts of the day. Perhaps the most arrogant example I can think of occurred when a peasant took a rock to show Antoine Lavoisier, the heroic French experimental chemist, at the time of the French revolution. The peasant said the stone must have fallen from the sky, as it was a very odd stone, such as he had never seen before, and it hadn't been in the field the day before. Speaking as a smallholder/peasant myself, I know every stone on my fields, and so would this man have done. Did the great scientist consider this? No.. secure in his own unshakeable knowledge of what could and couldn't happen, he said. 'A stone cannot fall from the sky there ARE no stones in the sky.'
Another prime example, which I quoted earlier, occurred when President Kruger continued to be a flat-earther even while speaking to a man who was literally sailing around the world. Psychosclerosis is the 'driving' force, if that's the right word for something so dim and un-dynamic, behind a lot of political and social conservatism and reaction. Ibsen's Ghosts was derided at first, as was Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake; Bizet's Carmen, too, which went on to become the most popular opera in the world. Whole artistic movements like the Pre-Raphaelites were scorned by the old guard, and the name 'Impressionist' originated as a term of abuse. I guess you can add a thousand other examples yourself, all the way from 'A pyramid, your pharaohship?? You gotta be kidding' to Bob Dylan going electric. Unbelievably in retrospect, blinkered executives from not just Decca but also CBS, RCA, and Capitol all originally turned down the Beatles, and 23 publishers, including TS Eliot, chief editor at Faber and Faber, rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm. Generally speaking, people do not like to think outside the box.
Every Materialist is an expert who knows that anything paranormal can not happen, and therefore does not happen, and to hell with the libraries full of evidence which show that they do happen. Anti-science
A rather worrying note: as science is a profoundly left-brain activity, being largely concerned with systematically ordering data and categories, it is also prone to the problems of left-brain functions, which include the tendency to overlook awkward or embarrassing data which do not fit into the standard pattern (or dogma) of the day. Hence, Man's most rational investigative tool carries within itself the seed of its own fallibility including a tendency towards a purblind intellectual arrogance. (For more details of left-brain and right-brain functions see The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist). Professor Dawkins' blindness to Darwin's 'Creator' is an example.
And one must wonder whether actual fraud in science has itself been encouraged by Materialism? Ie.. if there is no Purpose, no Point and this
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is a world of mere Materialism, in which greater purpose has been replaced by personal gratification: well, maybe selfishness becomes more acceptable, even to the point of egotism and falsification. I wonder if it is a coincidence that the instigator of the rampant greed of Thatcherism was herself a chemistry graduate?
'The fundamental purpose on earth is to improve your own human nature and disposition. You can only do that by doing things for others.' Margaret Thatcher. Of course, but how does that tie in with all that anti-social greed you encouraged?
It's been a wearisome chapter, this one. No-one to blame but ourselves for the mess we're in, according to the same principle which states that we all get the government we deserve. You might like to consider these two principles in karmic terms of endless threads of cause and effect, each initiated by an individual, including the conditions and behaviours he colludes in, and how he votes.
'What luck for rulers that men do not think. ' Adolf Hitler
The positive side, of course, especially from the DarwinPlus perspective, is that as it is the fault of us all, including you and me, then we can use our new-found understanding of how we landed in this mess and can ally it to our own free will, and then act to choose to change things. All we need to do is to take nobody's word for it; to examine all Beliefs and replace them with Understanding, even if this takes years; to not be afraid to say 'Don't know', or 'Not enough evidence'; to make sure we have always defined our terms; to stay open; to trust our own power and develop it; to remember that if it is paradoxical it cannot be (the whole) truth; to be very aware of slippery language; to learn to keep strictly separate the general and the particular; to avoid pointless argument; and, above all, to remember there are no real villains: just people like you and me who are doing their best with what they have, but who have made the error of not doing all the things above thoroughly enough, just as you and I have in our time.
It seems to be the case that only psychosclerotics subscribe to conspiracy theories. Some are religious obsessives who get lost in a fantasy land of paranoia; others are hopeless Materialists. Is it the case that, for these latter folk, just as misery seeks company, so nihilism becomes not just a habit, but a need? to see negativity everywhere, as there cannot possibly be positivity anywhere according one's own bleak and unsatisfying worldview?
***
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So we find ourselves in a depressing existential mess today, following either the cross or the test tube or nothing at all, when there is absolutely no need for this division if we drop our dogmas. There are no villains: just human fallibility and folly. Most of us are positively working on our own personal follies, and the yogic/esoteric philosophy tells us that we will all get as many chances as we need, in as many lives as we need. It is all part of the system, as tangentially perceived by DarwinPlus. As we pay attention, so we learn. As we become more aware, so we evolve. By knowing this, we can choose to pay closer attention and thus find reason, and with it happiness and that elusive security we all long for, a little faster. And the path from (rational) Understanding to (post-rational) Knowing is always open to us.
We all, as ever, want some certainly that we matter, and are not just nuclear waste or a blob of plasm or a few kilos of chemicals, as the Materialists try to tell us. Hence even the tawdry cult of celebrity we are undergoing at the moment. Anything to get noticed.. which will give us the fleeting feeling of being important and mattering.. of having some purpose in our life, currently denied us by the Materialist cult.
It's up to us. It's all a matter of what choices you and I make, every day. It all ties in with the Theory of Karma. If we wander round like automata, unthinking, allowing ourselves to be brainwashed by advertisers and maniacs and overweening institutions, then we are bound to reap the negative rewards of this. If on the other hand we choose to wake up, stop being lazy, and hunt out some truth for ourselves, then our lot will improve. How could it not? Cause and Effect: Karma: as you sow, so will you reap: seek and ye shall find, etc. It is psychosclerosis that has enabled Materialism to develop its current stranglehold. It's up to each one of us to examine Materialism thoroughly for ourselves, and if we find it as irrational as I have come to find it, then to reject it, and work out the implications of accepting Idealism instead. This book has given a few pointers only. There is far more to be developed.
'Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.' Albert Einstein
He's talking to you, brother; and you, sister, and every other great spirit, who may not yet know it. ***
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Dogma.. Dogma. the enemy of all. Luckily, given its roots in logic, Science has only one dogma to shake off: the pernicious cult of Materialism, which crept in in a moment of triumphalist weakness after the 'triumph of Darwinism'. Religion, however, meaning The Church in all its phases and divisions, and all other similar manifestations, has thousands of dogmatic fetishes to chuck out. Wearing a hat in church or temple? Female bishops or mullahs? Blessing with two or three fingers? Bowing or sitting? Flagellation or burning 'idols'? All irrelevant to the fundamental esoteric Truth behind them all. All distractions from the point, and encouraging to the psychosclerotic error. All The Religion requires is the Golden Rule and a rational understanding of the yogic/esoteric philosophy, at even a basic level, meaning the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation, plus the fact that you are not alone and do have purpose and value, and are your own master. All the rest is a nuisance. In fact, all the rest of the dogmas and accretions, every single one of them, are what the Commandment to Moses was referring to when it mentioned 'graven images': chasing after the shadow and forgetting about the substance. All The Philosophy requires is the same as The Religion. It's easy. Abandon all the dogmas; think for yourself, past the rules and laws until you find the principles. Then 'realise' that all principles merge into the single Golden Rule. *** Sticking with the Old and not even considering the New
'People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid.' Soren Kierkegaard
In its commonest and most chronic form, psychosclerosis gives rise to the greatest and most poisonous enemy of clear thinking: blind prejudice. I've lost count of the number of times I've begun explaining what this book is about, only to be met with a phrase which indicates that the other person has already made up their mind that the book is either anti-science or atheistic, or that I personally am a crank or a religious fruitcake. I am embarrassed for these people, and am sorry that they have chosen to isolate themselves from open enquiry. It's a horribly common condition, and it seems to me that an awful lot of us are happy to stay that way. Thus do old, outdated, or simply dogmatic and stupid ideas take a generation or two to pass away.
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*** The issue is simple ultimately. For a rational transcendental philosophy/ religion, everyone matters. For an irrational purely physical one, nobody does. There are many ways up the mountain, and we must all find our own way in our own time, if the rational transcendental philosophy/religion is correct.
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Chapter 29 A Few Conclusions
All great truths began as blasphemies

George Bernard Shaw
Education education education...

Tony Blair
Very little in this book is original in any way. People have been whispering variations on its theme from numerous rooftops (out of hearing of The Church) for centuries. But after Darwin seemed (to many thinkers less careful than himself) to have finally blown The Church and therefore all non-Materialist principles out of the water, the world has been in thrall to the Materialist zealots, who have hi-jacked words like 'sceptic', 'rationalist', 'Darwinist', and even 'scientist' to mean Materialist, and most of society has gone along with this, for a hatful of reasons. But now I think the tide is turning and people are more ready to see the crucial faultline that runs through the Materialist 'philosophy'. In fact, I feel confident enough of this to risk a few predictions *** There are two classes of predictions: those based upon dogma, ignorance and prejudice; and those based upon reason and observation. The former (psychosclerotic) class includes the school of thought which knows for a fact that iron ships won't float and aeroplanes will never have any place on the field of cavalry and that acupuncture can not work and that ghosts do not exist because they cannot exist. The other class of predictions includes those based upon consideration of all available evidence (via SPIT, or similar), and via all the truly great discoveries of science, including Darwin and Wallace's breakthrough, if interpreted correctly.
Remember eugenics? Social darwinism? Neo-darwinist atheism? Epiphenomenalism! All based upon a misinterpretation of Darwin.
DarwinPlus, based as it is upon a simple piece of logic (and SPIT, of course), invites predictions in the 'reason' camp, especially in challenging some of the wilder prognoses that 'Mindless' Materialism allows but which
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Idealism sees as absolute nonsense. This is going to be fun. See what you think My number one prediction is that:
Within fifty years of writing this (2011) science in general will have abandoned irrational Materialism in favour of rational Idealism
and, by extension, will favour something very similar to what I have called DarwinPlus in this book. Perhaps someone will think of a less clumsy name. Once Materialist Science is replaced by Idealist science, and reason is reclaimed, then the world will change enormously. For a start, all manner of previously forbidden areas of puzzlement will be enthusiastically studied at last. One day we might see teaching hospitals running modules on diagnosis by aura. Actually, I'm sure we will see this. Perhaps some currently outraged Skeptics might apply their creative energies to this field, once they can see the rationality of it. Idealist science will also lead to a huge revival of interest in religion (or 'philosophy', as the Yogis would call it) in a more rational form, which will even end up in the education system one day. As science finally admits that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than it previously claimed, then people will feel free at last to explore these other possibilities without fear of mockery.
The fear of violent persecution by The Church has long since passed, mercifully, largely thanks to the impact of reason via science.
Churches, temples and mosques will remain as focus points, but claims to exclusivity will gradually fade, and ecumenism will expand; the esoteric will gradually become exoteric, and more and more common to all. Thought-ful, non-dogmatic, Buddhism will continue to rise at the expense of Belief-ful Old Time Religion, and what Eddie Izzard the comedian notably called 'mumbling in cold buildings'. And as people begin to understand the yogic/esoteric 'perennial' philosophy, so archaeologists and ethnologists will be more able to put themselves into the place and the minds of the societies they are studying. I've several times noted that activities and symbols of ancient or 'primitive' groups which the academic experts find 'puzzling' are sometimes less
puzzling if viewed through the yogic/esoteric lens. Rituals, myths, certain rock markings and juju are examples. Gradually the crass materialism of the C20 will decline as people see the point of the Golden Rule and come to understand the Law of Karma, and internalise the fact that true happiness and a sense of purpose is achievable, but only via their own creative choices and kindly actions towards other people, and not via owning stuff or wielding power. The greed of bankers will be seen as laughable and deeply anti-social; banking will change. Capitalism will be reconsidered and will very slowly be adjusted to retain its strengths while controlling its greed and irresponsibility.
Even US President Herbert Hoover, a great fan of the free market, once said that 'The trouble with capitalism is capitalists: they're too damn greedy.' And Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, once wrote: 'I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies..'.
Pointless stuffism and consumerism will change along with it. Cooperatives and credit unions will revive, and be cherished and protected. Small scale and local investment will increase. 'Small is Beautiful' may even get a look in at last, after decades of being ignored. 'Happiness' will become the target of more and more people rather than seven Ferrari Priapos and a matching set of ulcers. Farming and food production will change. More people will want to grow their own wholesome veg, and farms will begin to let off sections of their land to allotmenteers. Perhaps planning laws will be adapted to break up some of the currently (2011) redundant half a million acres of East Anglian prairies into groups of inter-relating smallholders and craftsmen, creatively repopulating the countryside en route.
See More Scenes from a Smallholding for a brief discussion on this point.
Organic growing will burgeon, as will research into how to do it best, as people realise that current forms of chemical farming are unsustainable and ultimately (and increasingly rapidly, via de-naturing and hence erosion of all kinds) destructive of the soil itself, never mind the environment. Insects and birds will return from the brink, and we will all be the better for it. If we act quickly enough, the bee may be saved from extinction, and lots of us along with it. We will reject genetic engineering in plants for two reasons: firstly, we will acknowledge that Scientists know an awful lot about molecules and
nothing about Life Itself; as evidence, we will point out a few of the catastrophic examples of GMO's escaping from their planned plots and wreaking havoc across the countryside as cross-pollination with other varieties and even species inevitably occurs.
I also suspect that nano-technology will be reined in after a wonderful love affair, as we realise that this is a quite alien technology which will not respect the traditional protective barriers and membranes of biology. It is possible, I think, that its effects may soon be seen in the same light as radiation damage. Perhaps I'm wrong. I hope so.
We will also see vegetarianism increasing, as people think through the nature of animals and the way we treat them, and the link between cheap burgers and the destruction of the rainforest, etc.
Water is set to become scarce and expensive, as everybody knows. It seems it currently takes 2,500 gallons of subsidised water to produce one pound of meat in the USA.
I know I'm repeating myself here, but in the world of medicine, placebos will be creatively reinstated
Placebos can be astoundingly powerful. They have been successfully used to treat (which does not mean 'to completely cure, every time') among many other conditions, hypertension, diabetes, radiation sickness, asthma, cancer, multiple sclerosis, the common cold, and autism. They can also, amazingly, mimic the effects of birth control pills. In one blind experiment reported on the Discovery tv channel, placebos 'claiming to be' chemotherapy chemicals caused 30% of patients to vomit and lose their hair. Food for intense thought here, I would say. It can get even stranger. Take a look at these videos if you can: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=4115610193400691959 http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6942125248944933588&hl=en&emb=1
and depression will be increasingly treated by relaxation and meditation techniques, 'guided' lucid dreaming, and simple discussion of the principles touched upon by DarwinPlus.
At the moment, some 20% of people on anti-depressants suffer increased anxiety. Other medicines increase thoughts of suicide by a factor of eight. In 2009 eight drugs were withdrawn for actually causing suicides (and heart attacks). How many more..?
A clear understanding of DarwinPlus should clear up a lot of the despair associated with panomie, without needing drugs at all. Understanding..
It would be nice if this could happen in time to help Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London, who has long been plagued by depression.
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The good Professor is a strong Materialist, and I do sometimes wonder whether Materialists are more prone to depression than Idealists. Logic would suggest that they must be, as surely the feeling of panomie cannot be far away when there is ultimately no point in anything for you.
Greater understanding of the 'subtle bodies' (etheric, astral, etc) will one day mean that schizophrenia will finally be at least considered as a weakness of the structure of some sort which allows unwelcome infiltration. And a long time into the future perhaps all forms of psychopathology may be viewed in the light of the Higher (obviously including its own lower echelons) intruding on this Lower world that we regard as 'normal'. And the work of 'spiritual' healers will be carefully studied, and developed more widely. Using the services of psychics will become more 'normal'. In 2008-9 the British Astrological and Psychic Society said it had witnessed a dramatic increase in high-flying businessmen consulting their members, unsure of the financial future just before the great banking scandal.
Consulting psychics in the business world is nothing new: 'Millionaires do not use psychics; billionaires do.' JP Morgan.
Greater understanding of 'thoughtforms' and the power of visualisation will eventually lead to advances in self-healing, probably deriving from hypnosis and then self-hypnosis. This process will be linked with the placebo effect and built upon as a positive feedback system.
A study in Munich in 2010 found that acupuncture works as well as drugs do for sufferers of migraine. Intriguingly, 'sham acupuncture', meaning needle treatment, but not along the traditional acupuncture meridians also works well, but not as well as proper acupuncture. Much to explore here.
Hypnosis, and later, self-hypnosis, will be used increasingly in place of chemical anaesthetics.
In a nutshell, the role of the Mind in all areas of healing and pain will be given serious priority.
Perhaps most importantly, medicine will rescue itself from its current obsession with measuring everything and the impression it gives of thinking that a printout tells all that needs to be told. In previous times a
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bedside manner and holding someone's hand was valued more highly than it seems to be these days, and for good reason, DarwinPlus would suggest.
And science will gradually realise that just because you can measure something it does not necessarily mean that the measurement has any importance; and that the really important things in the universe, like love, kindness, humour and intelligence will remain the most important things in the universe whether you attempt to measure them or not; and the fact that love, the most important thing of all, can not be measured; and that nobody but a psychopath (certified or academic) would ever want to try. An example of the confusing effect that misapplied method can cause is Zeno's paradox, which states that if you fire an arrow at a target, it will at some point have travelled half the distance; then half of the remaining distance; and then another half; and so on. Thus, paradoxically, it can never actually reach the target. This has bemused great minds for millennia. Google it and you get 20,000 entries, mainly from mathematicians suggesting that there can be no resolution. However. We could try applying this paradox to the Wet Fish Test, if we can find a volunteer. Will he accept the proposition that the fish will never theoretically actually contact his chops? I think not. Even speaking statistically, fish will slosh chop 100% of the times it is swung. Where is the paradox, then? The problem lies in the misapplication of the tool. The 'endless halving' approach simply does not recognise reality, and the conclusion it comes to is thus unreal by definition. If unreal, then untrue. If untrue, then no paradox. I sometimes wonder how much misapplication of tools goes on. The current excitement generated in some biological circles by fractal geometry seems to me to be an example here: a mistaken Materialist attempt to reduce the subtlety of organic form, driven by Mind and Cause and Effect, to the mechanical iterations of a mechanical equation, similar to Richard Dawkins' biomorphs in Chapter 3. Another example of the application of an inappropriate tool is Hamilton's Rule, much quoted by Professor Dawkins, which seeks to explain the mystery of altruism (a profound irritant to a Materialist, who can not consider 'kindness' as an option, but only blind and random genetic shuffling) via mathematics that remains unproved, and which even many of his peers cannot follow. For an Idealist, of course, altruism is not a hopeless problem at all, and in the yogic/esoteric philosophy, it is entirely natural, explainable.. and a fundamental principle of Being. No maths required. Mathematicians sometimes seem to be troubled by the nature of their calling: Benjamin Peirce, a C19 Harvard mathematician once said of a formula known as Euler's Identity: 'Gentlemen, e(i)+1 = 0 is surely true (but) it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be truth.'
DarwinPlus is clear that Mind, including somebody else's mind, can influence body very powerfully, and that the will to self-cure can be a real force. Once this has been deeply accepted I hope we will see more oldfashioned personal nursing, and a little less 'target management'. All in proportion, of course. Perhaps 'mental focussing' or prayer groups will be encouraged in hospitals, and meditation/visualisation classes prescribed for all (suitable) patients before their release into the wild.
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Do I remember rightly that nurse was recently reprimanded for offering to pray for a patient? Only in a Materialist world
As people regain confidence in their own judgement, we might expect to see less willingness to blindly follow orders. I would be happy to predict that a re-run of the Milgram experiments fifty years from now would turn up fewer people prepared to seriously shock another person just because a (Materialist) expert says it's OK.
On what would seem to be more trivial level: as confidence increases, people will feel freer to reject the conspiracy theories put about by such writers as Dan Brown, who openly slur fact, factoid, and fabrication with such confusing ease. Instead, we will look with interest at the pedigree and connections that link such schools of thought as the Essenes, Hermeticists, Illuminati, Gnostics, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Alchemists, Martinists, Templars etc, and realise that they are all speaking dialects of the same language. Only paranoid Materialists see conspiracies in these groups. Idealists see something very different, and will perceive the clear links to the philosophies of Sufism, Kabbalah, Buddhism and Yoga, especially regarding the dangerous doctrine of reincarnation: dangerous because The Church didn't like it as it threatened its own power, and would persecute any group openly proclaiming it. Remember the 'crusade' against the Cathars?
As Materialism is finally accepted for the nonsense it is, more scientists will feel free to admit to their own paranormal experiences.
Some already do 'own up' to suitable people. Dr Brian Weiss in Many Lives, Many Masters (p128) mentions four senior scientists who have spoken to him. One regularly talks to his 'dead' father, and another inexplicably already knew her way round Rome when she first visited it.
Currently they dare not, for fear of being mocked or denigrated by the Materialist big shots, especially powerful editors and holders of purse strings. But when a few people have got it started, a snowball of personal truth and experience will thunder down the hillside of knowledge, building in volume and power at it goes, to finally flatten the lath and plaster bunker of Materialism at the foot of the slope.
Sometimes a way-over-the-top and ill-thought-out comedy metaphor is completely irresistible. But no more of them, I promise. Meanwhile, a 2007 survey in Nature found that 40% of US scientists believed in an 'immortal soul' and that a Creator was somehow involved in evolution. Despite all the blustering diktats of the Skeptics, rational or independent thought will keep breaking through.
There are already signs of rational research in the academic world. The University of Wales, Lampeter is home to the Religious Experience Research Centre which holds and studies thousands of individual accounts
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of 'Anomalous' individual experiences: http://www.lamp.ac.uk/aht/Personal_Stories/personal_stories.html Another likely outcome: as the logical links between Idealism, the yogic/ esoteric philosophy, and DarwinPlus become more apparent, I think we will see a redirection of scientific emphasis from looking for 'life out there' in the cosmos, and instead switching to 'life in here' within the higher levels of the astral and mental words.
Remember ISSOL, which is dedicated to finding the origin of life? After failing to discover any origination on Earth, it is now looking to outer space. DarwinPlus predicts that ISSOL will fail to find a Materialist origination there, too.
And it could just be that the 'life in here' that DarwinPlus sees as a logical requirement of Idealism is more interesting than 'life out there', as in 'The proper study of Man is Man', as somebody very smart once said.
Quite lot of very smart people, in fact. At last, we are about to appreciate what these people meant, I think. A recent surprise for me: I saw a tv programme about a Masonic temple, which included a tablet inscribed 'Know Thyself'.
On the technology front: we can finally and rationally accept that computers are NOT going to take over the world, unless used, as explosives and words are used, by unprincipled deviants. Materialists have been claiming for decades that one day computers will become 'smarter than people' (all based upon the deep breath epiphenomenological fallacy that brain makes mind: that Matter makes Mind). No they won't. Computers make earthworms look smart.
Darwin reasoned that worms must indeed be smart as they always pull leaves into the earth by the stalks. Thus, they must be able to distinguish one end of a leaf from the other. This would be an enormous challenge for a computer (see 'umbrella' below).
Remember GIGO? Garbage in, garbage out? That is the level at which a computer 'mind' works. It's a supercharged abacus on steroids, with NO mind of its own at all, and needing to be fed and coddled by intelligent outside forces (that's you and me) at all times. It can be 'trained' to make sophisticated selections when the choices are clearly input, but it is completely lost when faced with a something genuinely open-ended or novel. As an example, on a recent BBC Horizon programme (2010) an MIT expert said a computer 'might' be able to recognise an umbrella (meaning 'from any angle and in many circumstances') in the next five to ten years.
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Compare with the optimism of the 1960's when two experts were quite sure of the future of AI: 'Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.' HA Simon, and 'Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.' Marvin Minsky. I'm reminded of the supreme confidence of Crick and Watson who claimed to have discovered the secret of Life Itself in the structure of DNA. All wrong. Materialism is never short of the sort of confidence that comes with a faulty premiss. The current Big Thing is that we will all be getting microchip implants in our brains within a decade or two. These implants will give us enormous memory power and will boost our intelligence to unheard of levels, they say. But I wonder how, in principle, a living holistic system based upon Intuitive-Mind is going to integrate with a digital system based on electro-mechanics? How will memory-on-a-chip relate to the non-local memory of a living brain? And how can you digitise (ie, reduce to 1's and 0's) 'The ability to see the point' (a useful definition of intelligence)?
As for the current claims that we can program a computer to have emotions this is just more Materialist fantasy. We might well be able to fake a pseudo-emotional response, but it will be bogus, and easily detectable as such. I hope all this has not come as a surprise to you, dear reader, after getting so far in this book. If it is a surprise, just consider the truism that nothing is obvious to a computer. Computers will never have 'the ability to see the point'. You know this. It is proved to you several times a day, as you clear out your spam. You and I can spot spam a mile off, but a computer can't. To it, all alphanumeric strings are equally valid. Hence, it's pointless blocking any incoming mail containing the string 'Viagra', as the computer will happily accept 'viaggra', via'gra', 'Vviagra', viagza', 'via6ra' etc, ad infinitum.
A couple of decades ago this was shown very forcefully to me via a demonstration of a primitive robot that had been programmed to stack four or five small wooden blocks into a modest pyramid. This was an enormous challenge for the programmers, 'teaching' the robot to 'recognise' shape, size, distance, relationship, and no doubt many other parameters. They pressed 'Go' and the arm slowly swung into action, grabbed its first block, positioned it accurately, and released it. The block bounced off the table. There was a snag: the robot had begun forming its pyramid from the top. The programmers said they had learned two profound lessons from this: firstly, that common sense is alien to a silicon chip; and secondly, that in order for a robot to do something that a two year old child takes in his stride, it is necessary to program into the chip all manner of unexpected information, like the effects of gravity, say.
Neither will computers ever be programmed to have a moral sense, as the concepts of 'good' and 'evil' are not programmable.
Some sort of fudge will occur, no doubt, but it will be a fudge.
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Neither will true Artificial Intelligence ever be designed/programmed/ created. There is a standing prize of $100,000 still waiting to be won after 20 years for anyone who can successfully deceive a judge into believing that an AI program's responses to an enquiry were created by a human being and not a computer.
Something that would baffle a computer would be to ask it to convert the novel expression 'We must draw the fangs of those red herrings which are bottling up the wheels of progress' into proper English. You and I can do it. A computer can't. unless specifically 'trained' to. Another useful question would be 'What is the value of pi?', with the intonation carrying the question of 'What is the point of pi?' I am constantly bewildered by how scientists seem unable to see the basic flaws in their own metaphors. I have a recent report by the Daily Telegraph's science editor on a computer program called Tierra, which, he claims, is doing exciting work on 'how to create a genuine artificial life form'. A program, 'some 80 instructions long' is set to run, and it 'evolves' according to those instructions, just as Richard Dawkins' biomorphs did. The writer claims that this man-made program is 'Tierra's equivalent of single-celled sexless organism'. He then says that 'the "creature" ..a set of instructions that also formed its body.. would identify the beginning and end of itself () and then divide'. BUT.. The program is devised/designed/created entirely by Man's Mind; thus it must run according to Man's instructions and it is in no way comparable to a real singlecelled organism. For a start '80 instructions' are entirely bodiless and have no objective connection with reality. 'Single-celled'? With no cell membranes to construct and maintain and no organelles within? How can any rational human being make such comparisons? It's beyond me.
Neither will the dreaded 'nanobots' take over the world, 'grey goo'ly or otherwise. For something to self-replicate, it needs information on a colossal scale (see Chapter 22), plus endless access to absolutely suitable raw materials, plus a power supply, plus a complex command and control system, plus some sort of programme of purpose, plus a means of carrying out that purpose plus.. plus.
See http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl again for the Command and Control algorithm for the operation of a single human cell, and remember that the cell dies immediately without the 24/7/365 backing of the even more complex algorithm of nutrition, supply, and excretion that the whole bodily system (plus Mind) provides.
It won't happen. Human input (ie, intelligence, purpose, will etc: MIND) will be necessary every step of the way. Sleep well. And I'm afraid helpfully self-motivated robots like Star Wars' C3PO aren't going to happen either, despite enduring and enormous optimism in the Materialist camp. The more scientists try to reduce human complexity to mechanically reproducible fractions, the more some are realising that the level of complexity required for a robot to go and make a cup of tea in a
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random strange kitchen is utterly beyond possibility. Remember the umbrella, above? This also means, mercifully, that huge battalions of autonomous robotic soldiers aren't going to happen, either. For a start, what would they do when confronted by a terrorist opening and closing half an umbrella between his legs? Or when confronted by a mirror?
Non-autonomous versions may be made, however, although it would be interesting to see how such a technological giant would cope with a smart kid with a slingshot, never mind a group of experienced guerrillas in rough terrain.
While we're at it, Star Trek-style teleportation won't ever happen, despite the mysteries of quantum entanglement.
Which involves two tiny particles being virtually in two places at once.
The obvious problem is of pattern again. If one could reduce a human being's body, say, to its constituent atoms, and then somehow pipe these atoms to a far place, how would the pile of atoms ever get reconstituted into a human body? Again, take a look at the 'expasy' website (http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl). and remember that the whole of that enormously complex algorithm refers just to the operation of one single cell, never mind how the cell is constructed in the first place and then cooperates with trillions of others; and never mind the enormous extra complexity of a tissue, an organ, a system or a whole body, able to see and interpret the world 'out there' despite not apparently having adequate means to do so (see Chapter 19). For once, my biology teacher would be correct in saying that 'You are nothing but a kilo of this and hatful of that', as spewed out at the teleported destination. Your Mind would have very wisely long departed before its monkey suit was pured in preparation, of course. And for the same reason, along with many others I'm sure you can provide yourself, the whole principle of cryogenic storage and revival is complete nonsense. It ain't going to work. Ever. In similar vein, you need no longer fear The Curse of the Clones. Even if the technology can be made to work reliably, which is by no means certain, the cloning process generates only the physical body.
Dolly the Sheep followed upon 277 failed attempts. One problem with cloning is that during the development process all sorts of modifications inexplicably occur within the DNA. So a clone isn't 'identical' anyway, and there is a definite risk of the cloned beast being a 'less fit and more disease-prone' too, according to the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at UCSF.
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And on the subject of 'identical', it is statistically common for one 'identical' human twin to be gay while the other is straight. At the very least, 'identical' twins, with identical DNA, will show variations in tastes and talents. The problem for Materialists here is that their dogma insists that ultimately only (chemical) DNA can account for behavioural and taste differences. Hence there must be a 'gay gene', for example, even when the identical straight twin has identical DNA. Yet another paradox. Even substituting 'a genetic package' for 'a gene' does not resolve this paradox. Obviously, none of this is a problem for Idealism/DarwinPlus which acknowledges the need for some sort of purposeful mental control over genes and their switching.
The personality is not made via cloning, but enters the body later, if the yogic/esoteric philosophy is correct, which I think reason insists it must be. Thus there is no reasonable chance of 'resurrecting' dear old Bonzo, I'm afraid; but neither need we fear rampaging hordes of Little Hitlers bred from a single moustache cell in darkest Paraguay.
Back in the 1990's, before I started writing this book, and while urgently trying to find fault with its core logic, I was startled by a news report that seemed to claim that scientists had cloned a human ear and were growing it on on the back of a mouse. This was a thunderbolt. If true, then all of my tentative conclusions were wrong. But I needn't have been alarmed. It was just another case of 'journalitis': 'bigging up' an interesting story to the point of untruth. In fact, the 'ear' was manufactured (by human will, purpose, and intelligence) from bovine gristle cells grown onto a biodegradable ear-shaped mould. It was nothing to do with genes and cloning, didn't involve 'a human ear', and didn't use any human cells at all. So my immediate impression that cloning had taken place was quite wrong. How could I possibly have got this wrong impression? Only through the dogmatised news media. An awful lot of people still think that that 'human ear' was cloned, thanks to what is sometimes called 'journalistic geno-porn'.
Dr Craig Venter, one of the heroes of the human genome project, is convinced that he or someone else will soon create Artificial Life. DarwinPlus says 'artificial nuts!', if by Artificial Life we mean Life created from raw chemicals alone, according to Materialist 'origin of life' dogma, and not some sleight of the test tube involving such mysteries as cytoplasm, chopped-up chromosomes, mitochondria, and other cellular organelles or membranes.
I've recently heard a biologist comparing the complexity of a single cell to the complexity of the entire human body. That 'expasy' website would be good evidence for this apparently outrageous claim, backed up by Prof Wolpert's claim that 'For their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe', as previously quoted.
If we're going to make Life, let's do the job properly and begin with my biology teacher's flasks of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and a block of carbon, along with a few grams of phosphorus, sulphur and whatnot, and traces of copper, selenium, boron, molybdenum, zinc etc, and 'enough iron
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to make a small nail', all available from industrial chemists. Make Life from that, and I'll believe it. It's not going to happen, is it? You can bet your Life on it.
Borel's 'law' of probability claims that if the odds of an event happening are worse than 1 in 1050, then that event will simply never happen. (Obviously 'never' can't ever be used in statistics, but I think we can all see what he means. Imagine one single chance in ten-followed-by-fifty-zeroes) And remember that Dr Harold Morowitz, former Professor of Biophysics at Yale University, estimated that the probability of the chance formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 1 in 10340,000,000. If you have a few decades to waste, try writing that out in full. Start with '10', then add 340 million zeroes. That figure is so well beyond certain to 'never happen' that words cannot begin to describe it. (For example, it is estimated that there are only about 1080 electrons in the whole universe: and that is an absolutely gosmackingly gigantic number.) In 1973, Dr Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist (and Materialist), considered that the probability of a specific human genome self-assembling completely by accident on a planet such as Earth would be about 1 in 102,000,000,000. That's 10, followed by two thousand million zeroes. Anyone who says 'Ah but life started off much simpler than this!', is presumably saying that Morowitz's odds of 10340,000,000 are a more realistic reflection of How It All Began. It is worth repeating that if something never 'happened by chance', but rather 'happened by intention', then no odds of any sort against it happening are applicable.
On the downside, it also means we are not going to see grown-fromchemicals 'artificial organs' for transplants, either, although some sort of replication of tissues may be worked out. How can organs, which are by definition complex and heavily featured, be grown from scratch, without the key, the plan, the design to use to build in their features and complexities in the right position, size and sequence? Even the humble nostril is complex and featured, and would require an enormous amount of plotting and planning to create from scratch... and it's not even an organ. A liver needs to be constructed so it can carry out 500 different functions, and to be able to completely replace itself, error-free, every two years. We may also safely predict that DNA will gradually lose its current mystique as being Life Itself or the Secret of Life, etc. Read Why Us? by Dr James Le Fanu for a clear account of how the most recent findings of genetic research have confirmed beyond doubt that DNA is not the sole and ultimate power in heredity.
We might thus predict a win for Dr Sheldrake in his bet with Professor Wolpert: 'By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.'
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Wolpert bets 'yes'. Sheldrake bets 'no'. The winner will receive a case of fine port. I'm seriously tempted to put a fiver on the outcome myself. I wonder what odds I'd get?
I think it is very likely that Lamarck's ideas on evolution will be resurrected and reconsidered, as more evidence will be found for the '100th monkey syndrome' by impartial observers, unlike the current rubbishing it receives from Skeptics who feel obliged to deny even the possibility of anything that doesn't accord 100% with the Materialist fantasy. The question is: as a particular learning or understanding is shared by more and more individuals... does there come a quantum tipping point, where so many individuals have learned (that's where the '100th monkey' comes in) that the item learned moves through a thought field, or whatever, to become common property... ie part of the species 'mindset'? As an example might the '100th monkey' explain how the billions of organisms in a coral reef know to release their milt and eggs at precisely the same time? (And similarly, might this sort of thoughtform help to explain the mysteries of 'instantaneous' turns made by flocking birds, or the migrations made by butterflies who have never made one before, or the mysterious emergence of millions of 'periodical' cicadas virtually overnight after living underground for thirteen [or seventeen] years?)
See also Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance (Chapter 18) http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html or try the comment on quantum theory, below.
Maybe Lamarck's 'inherited characteristics' will finally complete Darwin's own theory (see Chapter 22).
'I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive, means of modification.' Charles Darwin. Since Darwin's day DNA has become the focus for the inheritability of characteristics, via random mutation at the genetic level. DarwinPlus suggests that while some mutations may be random, Mind must be considered as the major, if not the only, ultimate power behind mutation.
If so, the implication would seem to be that a gene is a kind of link to information to be used in future constructions, maybe via the resonant 'tagging' suggested earlier. We might safely predict, I think, that the genome will eventually be seen not as a powerhouse in itself (after all, it is just a big chemical), but as a vector via which complex Karmic Law designs a particular physical body. Along with this, I suspect that no single gene or even combination of genes
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will ever be found which is absolutely the 'cause' of a particular behaviour or aptitude in all persons (or other creatures).
Which is not to say that we won't find that certain complex assemblages and sequences of gene switching are associated with certain aptitudes or traits. But I doubt whether we will ever find a neat and tidy one-size-fits-all correlation. After all, every plant and animal, and every fingerprint and voice-print are unique.. so why not every genetic system?
I imagine that the unexplained genetic shuffling encountered during the cloning process (see above) might come in here somehow. A little further into the future, DarwinPlus predicts that Time will finally be reconsidered, and split into 'Measuring Time' and 'Experienced Time'. This distinction, will, I suggest, lead to new insights. And the current world of 'probability' that quantum physics deals with will eventually be accepted as being not a random system, but an extreme case of 'chaos', meaning 'rational and law-abiding, but far too complicated to analyse mathematically', like the movement of all the molecules in the oceans of the world. The input of Mind will be seriously investigated, without the current embarrassment scientists feel as the hangover from the hyper-reductionist nonsense of Behaviorism. In other words, the quantum world will change (as will the genetic world) from its current 'random-Materialist' form into 'caused-Idealist'. This will simply mean that Cause and Effect will be reinstated to its prime position as the foundation of science, but with Mind at the helm, somehow.
'and you will find someday that, after all, (quantum theory) isn't as horrible as it looks.' Richard Feynman, 1965 (but, to be fair, he wasn't talking about DarwinPlus.)
At a more general level, as it becomes accepted that brain and genes are associated with thought and aptitudes rather than the cause of them, science will re-adjust its thinking on what is Cause and what is Effect in the whole Mind-Body puzzle.
This list of predictions is not complete. You might enjoy adding to it. What of the future role of carefully developed psychometry in archaeology, for example? (It's already been tried on a casual basis, but with no great success). And in forensic police work? There are cases of success here already. And what of history being reconsidered from a DarwinPlus point of view? Education? Criminology? Sociology? Other ologies? Lots of innocent fun to be had here.
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We will one day accept the rational claim that Reality is multi-levelled. At the lowest end we have the physical, our current environment, in which it is possible to say with an element of truth that we are '99.9999999999999% nothing' 'Stardust', as all the chemical elements of our bodies seem to have been forged in stars at some point Or 'nuclear waste', if you prefer 'Nothing but a few kilos of carbon, oxygen and phosphorus' etc 'Merely animals' 'The naked ape' 'Chemical scum on the surface of a moderate-sized planet' .and all those other Materialist claims. They are obviously contradictory and paradoxical even to a Materialist, so they are none of them satisfactory. To an Idealist, however, they do make some coherent sense, but only in terms of the various levels of analysis of the physical mode of our existence (ie, at the 'sub-nuclear', 'physical', 'chemical' and 'biological' levels). Our real Reality, to coin a phrase, lies within each one of us, in our mental world of learning, wisdom, and meaning. En route, we have another world in the Astral/Emotional, in which we dream another Reality. Upon death, it seems we quit the physical 'dream' and accept the Astral Reality. Above the Astral Reality lie ever higher realms of ever-increasing Reality to which we gradually aspire. We may possibly come to eventually 'realise' that the only Really Real Reality is Unified Consciousness ('yoga'; the 're-ligare' Quest completed), and that all the lower Realties are dreams, thoughtforms, Platonic forms, created by Mind in order to experience things that need to be experienced, for reasons known perfectly only in the realm of panmentia, locus uncertain (to most of us, but apparently not to all), but revealed to us (eventually) via the practice of the Golden Rule.
As a matter of interest: if we adopt the Golden Rule as our normal guide, do we need even the concept of 'ethics'? Is 'Ethics' another distracting Materialist fabrication?
This acceptance of 'relative realities' should come as welcome news to all those scientists who at the moment tread an uneasy boundary between Materialism and Christianity. Medicine will one day address illness with this 'hierarchy of realities' in mind.
Meanwhile, science has drifted from a being a system of impartial analysis to an irrational belief system in thrall to an unhealthy dogma. It is as overdue for a Reformation as any dogma-clogged Religion ever was. *** In terms of that curious 'Circle of Life' I mentioned in Chapter 21, the human race in general would seem to be now at or approaching the bottom of the curve and about to begin the long climb upwards, coming together via cooperation rather than the compulsion of the downcurve, and the fragmentation of the bottom curve. The signs of the world beginning to come together are everywhere, although we are generally so lost in nihilistic depression brought on by an overdose of Materialism that we tend not to notice the extraordinary movement there has recently been towards a global way of thinking. Very briefly: if we compare the attitude to 'out there' in Victorian Europe with the current one, we already see a huge difference. Where Victorians saw Empire (to plunder at worst, to guide at best), we are beginning to see One World (to share and try to understand). Yes, of course that is a glib over-simplification, but there is truth in it, don't you think?... and it does seem to expresses the tendency of the age. After all, we are more likely to speak of the 'international community' these days, rather than 'foreign powers' or 'Johnny Foreigner' of previous decades, or the 'Spanish Dogs' of Captain Drake's era.
In 1455 Pope Nicholas V licensed Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce the inhabitants of Africa 'to perpetual slavery', as 'enemies of Christ'. Definite improvement here, at least.
You might say it began with the League of Nations, which was then followed by the United Nations; the World Health Organisation; The World Bank and the IMF (for all their ills); the Olympic movement, and other global-thinking organisations, now including of course, the incalculable power of the Internet. And then there are the thousands of international charities and other less obvious internationalising movements.
Just a few: the Boy Scouts and Guides; the Secret Policeman's Ball and the Concert for Bangladesh, followed by Live Aid, Band Aid and Comic Relief; Oxfam; the British Council; CNN; Amnesty International; the BBC World Service; Mdicins Sans Frontires; Blue Peter (raising millions for eg leprosy aid); Cafod; the Red Cross and Crescent; communication satellites; the jet; package holidays; ROCK & ROLL; music generally; containerisation; the telephone system; the international postal system; collaborative science and technology; Japanese industries in Europe, leading to better industrial relations in GB, by being less confrontational; silent movies; Benny Hill!; Coca bloody Cola; English as the international language of shipping and airlines, and the massive economic power of USA leading to English slowly becoming a World
Lingua Franca; Yoga & Buddhism entering the West from the East via Theosophy at the end of C19, and now flowering rapidly; postable videos & DVD's, not to mention mp4's and videophones; Facebook, Twitter, and similar, including the burgeoning influence of Avaaz; SOCCER; the World Cup; the influx of foreign footballers leading to gradual breakdown of racism; the UN's attempts at policing.. eg Bosnia and Rwanda; the ICC in the Hague.. showing that the world in general no longer accepts genocide or mass murder as reasonable behaviour (compare with the routine atrocities carried out in Roman times; the spiking of heads in the English Civil War; the Indian Wars in the USA; and of course the Nazi outrages); Hollywood!; sport in general; and, oddly, war, in that a) people go abroad and realise that the enemy are mainly more-or-less decent civilians like themselves, and b) efforts are made after wars to prevent repeats which is precisely why we have a United Nations now. War means chaos, and chaos rattles and concentrates the mind. Crisis precedes growth. And of course the European Union. Riddled with flaws it might be, but whoever would have thought just three generations ago that such a coming together between so many traditional enemies would have ever been possible? Our great-(great?)grandfathers witnessed, and probably even cheered, the great empires of France, Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey as they squared up to each other, in their ridiculous and pompous uniforms of stars and feathers, for the greatest mutual slaughter of their young men, ever. It seems impossibly remote and savage to modern Europeans, wouldn't you say? And then there's the remarkable collapse of the Iron Curtain and the release into the rest of the world of all the nations of the former USSR; and, astonishingly, British, American, French, and Polish troops joining in the parade to mark the 65th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis, in Red Square And China re-engaging with the world. (A work in progress, but begun.) And democracy beginning to surface in Arabia And the poor old right-brain, so long neglected and abused will, I think, thus come back into its own, enabling our Intuition towards empathy, cooperation, and internationalism, to flourish at last. I think we will one day perceive human history as having begun with a long period of right-brain domination, when superstition and then Belief in Big Religion ruled us all, and reason was irrelevant. The positive residue was a vague feeling that there is more to this life than is apparent and that we should be nice to each other, somehow. The negative residue was fear and ignorance and enduring superstition. There then followed a few centuries in which the left-brain rose to the fore, via science and technology. The positive residue is a better standard of living and a respect for reason and logic and Understanding. The negative is the selfishness and arrogance that over-stimulated left-brains are associated with, and the ensuing record of exploitation and ruination of the environment. But as the ideas re-presented by DarwinPlus gain acceptance, so the right-brain will slowly regain its rightful place as a working partner of the left, to the benefit of all. Gradually, the Intuition that is associated with the right-brain will lead to greater Direct Knowing. When the process is complete, the 'Wheel of Life' will have fully turned, as a yogi might put it. And we might finally seriously accept the fact that civilisation is what happens despite Great Men and History.
***
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Once people realise that there is purpose to their life, we will be able to relax more, knowing that Being (kind) is the key, and not Doing (stuff). We won't be so easily distracted by silly novelties and will value our time more highly for making things like music and individual craft work. Gardening; carving; painting; beautifying; co-operating on social projects; building links; caring; creating. We won't be so sheepishly seduced by 'fashion'
Fashion: the enemy of quality. Fashion Victim: someone whose insecurities drive her (usually a 'her', alas) to comfort-by-conforming. Fashionista: someone who doesn't yet realise she's in despair.
and the brain-numbing curse of 'shopping'. 'Choice' won't impress us so much as we see through the advertisers' and propagandists' ploys. We will insist on simple high quality services and goods instead, so the ghastly pollution and waste of consumerism will automatically fade away, along with 'labels', flash trash, throw-away clothes. We will become.. happier. Socialism, in its finest sense of 'fairness for all' will become possible (..and then inevitable? Was Marx right on this one?) when we work 'with detachment' (ie, work for the sake of 'doing it right'), intending its benefits for all, rather than for our own fearful selfish 'reward'. Buddhists have been recommending this approach to life for 2,500 years, as have followers of the yogic/esoteric philosophy in general. New ideas take a while to get established, eh? After all, all anybody has ever wanted throughout history is fairness, and the Golden Rule, flying whatever flag you choose, is the key to delivering this 'simple' wish. *** When I first started writing this book, a friend asked if I realised I would be offending 90% of my readers, who would thus rapidly become non-readers. My response was that I was recounting my own personal voyage of discovery, explaining it in my own terms as they had occurred to me. Tact is fine, but when a Belief is just plain wrong it must be pointed out as such. Most Beliefs are questions of opinion, of course, and a dogmatic stance either way is foolish, but just now and then there is a non-disputable point to be held firm. The Earth is not flat, and no amount of seeing the other guy's point of view will alter this fact. Similarly, Materialism is just plain wrong, as it requires
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what amounts to magic, in that chemicals are supposed to have spontaneously created themselves into Life, Mind and Consciousness, from themselves alone, without either containing the seeds of LMC within themselves, or evoking other forces to provide the patterns, construction algorithms, and supply chains required for LMC. Again, I can see no way of seeing the other guy's point of view on this one fundamental point. My problem here has been that as Materialism is so profoundly buried in our culture
Or 'in our DNA' as journalists and commentators are fond of saying with no trace of irony, of course!
I have felt the need to batter away at one or two points, repeating myself several times en route, to try to ensure that I have approached the issue from several different angles, and am not misunderstood. It is a fact of human nature that we read new information through the prism of our own certainties, and Materialism has become one of those certainties for an awful lot of people who have never had the opportunity of even realising that it is questionable at all, never mind entirely fallacious. Sometimes one needs to shout. I apologise if I've sometimes deafened you. In the course of the writing, I have had conversations with a number of people and have found a pretty general level of negativity. Some people just find the whole thing boring and me a total bore.
Quite true, alas. I have no small talk any more. Best left alone with a small sherry and a dog to pat.
The Scientists I have spoken to have been almost entirely dismissive. The strong impression that comes across is of 'I am a scientist; I know what's True. You aren't and don't.' They are not prepared to listen, let alone judge impartially or reconsider. Again, please note that I am not here lambasting all scientists. I am only reporting as I have found. There have been other scientists who have been interested and not instantly dismissive, and even positively helpful. But the balance is well towards, alas, psychosclerosis. This was true also of almost all the Religionists I spoke to. Non-scientists/religionists have generally responded with either lack of interest or, to my surprise, a sort of fear. They didn't wave a calculator or a crucifix at me, but I could immediately sense that they were prejudging what was coming: here's some sort of crank or Bible-thumper, or another conspiracy theory, or somesuch. After a few of these experiences it was clear that the fear came from lack of information with which to refute my
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comments. People are astonishingly ignorant about science, and even more so in even elementary logic. I was very conscious of the irony that I was trying to offer them the very tools they needed to challenge my comments, but it is impossible to engage with someone who has decided against engagement. I gradually realised that I was on a hiding to nothing writing this book, but I felt it needed to be done, because somebody somewhere would see the point, and would tell other people about it. These people would, by definition, be the very people I wanted to reach. Bigots and Skeptics are likely to ever remain so, but agnostics, doubters, and wo(men) of reason would think DarwinPlus! through and decide for themselves. That would do just fine. I hope it has been clear that I have great respect for all seekers of wisdom, in whatever sphere they operate, be it science, religion or philosophy. And I've found that the more I discover, the more I realise that all seekers have far more in common than most of them seem to realise. I hope DarwinPlus! will supply a tool or two to increase this mutual understanding and respect. Until a person learns to think for him- or herself, s(he) can only perceive the world in terms that s(he) has been instructed in. which is almost always some sort of ill-considered or paradoxical dogma. Sometimes the fear I mentioned above comes along with the dogma. In extreme cases it is quite valid. A Muslim in certain communities might be genuinely in fear of his life if he chooses to become a Buddhist or a Hindu, let alone a Christian, his brother in Abraham. I hope that DarwinPlus! might encourage a few people to seriously question whether the habits, behaviours and dogmas they have been spoonfed as 'religion' are irrational, paradoxical, or plain stupid. Nothing will be lost by careful thought, I guarantee. It is a truism to say that one's actions, all of them, are based upon one's ideas: Beliefs or Understandings, in the main. All the slaughters and atrocities in the world that poor old God has been blamed for are the result of people acting upon what their (usually inherited) ideas tell them is right. Mass murder is fine as long as the other party can be labelled with the idea of being an infidel or a subhuman. The good news is that we can choose to change our own ideas and hence our future actions.
'All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.' Buddha
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One's deeds can never be greater than one's ideas, in other words. If the ideas you have been stuffed with condone cruelty, oppression, exclusiveness, or any other form of unkindness, then one is doomed to a life of relative selfishness, and hence unhappiness, unless one makes a true effort to break free. DarwinPlus offers a tool, I think. In the Materialist West we tend to worship knowledge and take little note of wisdom. The two words are regularly confused and academic badges and medals are taken to automatically mean a better candidate for the job, whatever it might be. But I and no doubt you, dear reader, have met a number of people with a lot of academic qualifications, or endless reams of knowledge, who are far from wise. Even cleverness itself, as reflected in a high IQ score, is no use if a sound premiss or common sense is lacking. DarwinPlus will, I hope, help to re-establish our preference for (rightbrain) wisdom over (left-brain) knowledge. As I say, I have no high hopes for high readership of this book, and no expectation of rational reviews, even.
In a mad-house no-one can hear you scream, as I'm sure somebody must have said.
But there will be a few clear minds, probably young and undogmatised, who will see the point. Some will be the future movers and shakers in physics and biology and the spiritual world. Hence, via this book, and the others like it which are certainly already in the pipeline somewhere, will come the rejection of Materialism in favour of Idealism, in some thirty to fifty years' time, as these readers reach their peaks in their professions. It has struck me more than once that the species of Mankind is in a teenage phase at the moment. We've rejected the Faith of our Fathers in favour of Reason, and have begun to think for ourselves. However, we are not yet expert enough, or aware enough, to realise that 'Reasoning' means thinking things through properly. We've only got half the story at the moment, and think we know the lot. 'The arrogance of ignorance' is the result, bringing pollution, destruction, industrialised murder, etc in its careless wake. I hope DarwinPlus will be a guide towards a little more Reason and little less crowing. More reason will bring more wisdom, and more wisdom means more happiness. Which is all any of us wants, non? I predict a bright future: but each one of us has to choose it for every one of us.
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Chapter 30 At Last!
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than the establishing of a new truth or fact
Charles Darwin
Only a life lived for others is a life worth while

Albert Einstein
It has been a long journey, hasn't it? But I think it needed to be, as the ideas I've been trying to explain are so alien and outrageous to the current social paradigm that I thought they needed spelling out as carefully and thoroughly as I was able to do it. Darwin and his Origins, following Copernicus and the other giants of science, released Man from the dead hand of the fabricated orthodoxy imposed by The Church. It released us to think for ourselves about the nature of Life, and to fully and dispassionately explore the extraordinary world we find ourselves in. In a word, it forced us into being responsible for our own knowledge and thus our own thoughts and our own behaviour. You might say it was thus a logical conclusion to the Reformation. All this was good, and Man has benefited hugely from the discoveries of science and their practical implementation via engineering. But it's cut both ways. Through no fault of the great man himself, Darwin's ideas have been grossly misinterpreted by lesser minds and vested interests, resulting in eugenics genocide and the despairing fog of panomie that much of the world now finds itself in. The nihilism that Materialism inevitably promotes has sunk down roots so deep as to grip the body of the world like a black cancer. There is no hope. Science has spoken. The largely ancient ideas re-presented in this book are equally as worldshaking as those in Origins. But they go further, and release Man not just from the dead hand of Church dogma, but also from the quite mad dogma that science ('Science') has adopted too. DarwinPlus really is the call to complete freedom to shake off our mental chains; to think for ourselves, as Saint Paul ('Test everything') and the Royal Society ('Nullius in Verba') recommend, and to rejoice in the fact that the universe is not pointless, but an enormous school in which we and we alone control our own individual
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destinies. There would seem to be no limit to our potential. All we need to do is to 'Know Thyself'.
Man's only enemy is his ignorance, and his bigoted defence of it.
Socrates always seemed to get to the heart of the matter: 'A life unexamined is a life not worth living'.
*** The fact that you have slogged your way this far, dear reader, means not just that you are a remarkably persistent and tolerant person, but also that you must have found the ideas in DarwinPlus as persuasive as I did or you would have long ago abandoned them in favour of worming the cat. Thus you must also have a proper sense of logic and an open mind. Put all these together, and you will already have realised that DarwinPlus is not just another bunch of dry academic theoretical stuff: it's a programme for living: 'vital' in every sense of the word. It might just be the very thing you've been looking for for years, as it was for me. But no idea is worth a thing unless it is acted upon. I urge you to make sure that you have internalised the full essence of DarwinPlus and to then incorporate its principles into your own life without delay. It's so simple: just be nice. Give, don't grab. Smile, don't frown. Share a little more. Bring balance back into your life: don't work too hard or play too hard . just find a sense of proportion. Do you really need more money? Or 'status'? Wouldn't you rather be happy? After all, if all the stuff in this book is moderately accurate in its conclusions, then you are literally immortal, and what matters for your own personal evolution is what sort of person you are and not what big daft car you own. Don't go overboard, dishing out flowers to everyone on the bus (Remember buses?) they'll just think you're nuts. But do give up your seat to someone if they need it more than you; and graciously allow people 'After you'. Yes, some will take advantage of you. Don't worry about it. That is, quite literally, their problem. But mainly, you will find people respond with grace and generosity, and you will thus have literally spread little more happiness where once there was none. After a while, you will begin to
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develop a strange inner glow. and, unseen by you, so will the other people whose lives you have touched, and who will have gone on to spread a little more happiness elsewhere, unseen by your own example. This is the power of the principles in DarwinPlus. If you engage with them actively, they will change your life as they have changed mine. You will enjoy that single glass of wine more than the previous desperate half bottle (or case?) a night. You will find vampire films, the latest 'art' sensation, gimmicky commercialism, and much of 'modern culture' unspeakably bereft and corrupt and hence not worth your attention. Love for your fellow beings, even the prats and weasels, will slowly blossom, especially as you internalise the fact that you are not superior to them, and that they are engaging with their own karmic struggles in their own way and at their own pace, just as you are engaging with yours. Even Hitler thought he was doing what was right, remember. Forgive.. always forgive (which does not mean 'always abjectly surrender') and you will become at peace with the world. Life will welcome you instead of frightening you. I know this. As a powerful rule of thumb:
Never resist a generous impulse
And remember, your life is your choice. If you live for the greater good as you perceive it you will be invigorated and find true purpose in your life and happiness as an inevitable byproduct. *** If you would like a handy source of constant inspiration, make up a little card and place it in full view for when you wake up and go to sleep. Write on it:
LIFE IS WHAT I
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*** A couple of final points. First an apology for having subjected you to so many new words (panmentia, gook, DarwinPlus, psychosclerosis, panomie) but I thought they were needed. Just one more to go, although it's not vital: GEIST. GEIST stands for the Global Electronic Institute for Synthetic Thinking, and it's a dream I've had for some time. With the arrival of the www it may now be possible to implement it. At the moment, scientists are amazingly specialised in their work. Someone in one laboratory might quite literally not know what the man in the next door lab is doing, let alone someone working in a separate discipline. This enormous specialisation brings problems. There are now googolbytes of data and information theoretically available in thousands of subject areas, but it is all so scattered that there is no way to bring it all together, to see the whole, or even to find useful connections. What GEIST would aim to be is a web-based store room and clearing house for anomalous and curious information of all sorts, from all disciplines, including 'embarrassing' information as reported by writers like Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson, and making it available to researchers of all persuasions. It would thus aim to be the ultimate in cross-disciplinary resource centres, enabling unexpected connections to be discovered and investigated. It would aim to 'synthesise' and promote new research and development in all areas of knowledge. Users would upload their own odd or curious discoveries, or would pose their question and ask if anyone had any odd bits of data from other disciplines that might be of interest. Perhaps a civil engineer might pick up something of interest from a plant breeder or a spiderologist, for example.
Another new word, alas, despite my promise. Quite unnecessary, this time, too. It just sounds so much more 'spidery' than 'arachnologist'.
It is quite impossible for a specialist to even keep up in all aspects of his own area (eg genetics) and he has no chance of ever approaching the relative omniscience of Renaissance Man. He is essentially isolated at the end of a technical nanotube. What finding in, say, crystallography, or topology might help some poor isolated geneticist with his current intractable problem? Maybe someone somewhere has discovered a curious fact about 3-d chemical bonds in the
507
world of paint development, or ultrasound generation, which might be absolutely the thing for our geneticist. The point is, he will have absolutely no chance of ever hearing about it under normal circumstances. GEIST might help with this. The paint researcher would upload his curiosity or anomaly, and the geneticist would then have at least a chance of discovering and applying it to his own work. Has someone discovered an unexpected Fibonacci sequence in an insect antenna that might interest a radio engineer? Has someone else done a run of apparently identical experiments and come up with one absolutely rogue but genuine result that cannot be explained away? Has someone discovered that the tides seem to correlate with patterns of crystallisation in supercooled liquids? Has someone, perhaps you or I, noticed that a certain combination of orange peel, peppermint and garlic keeps carrot fly at bay? Or that your psychometric intuitions are more powerful on certain days of the month? You get the drift GEIST would offer open access to curios for all to investigate and, hopefully, to use and report back upon. Perhaps it's even time for a little less generation of data, and a little more synthesis of existing data, followed by deductions arising therefrom. The Greeks got a very long way on very little data indeed, helped along by a lot of careful rational thinking. Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth to within a few percent of modern accuracy some 2,200 years ago with little else than a couple of twigs and some smart reasoning. Unless we do re-engage with some sort of synthesising, we will end up with a nasty case of 'the more you know, the less you understand'. Of course GEIST would be based on the Idealist paradigm and not the Materialist one.
Let's not forget that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, Wallace, Mendel, Planck, Einstein, and many many other truly great names in science were all Idealists, in that they were not absolute Materialists so there's nothing to be frightened of in the idea of 'Idealist science'. 'I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research.' Einstein.
As far as I know, nothing quite like GEIST exists at the moment. All it needs to get going is a highly skilled (and committed) programmer/web designer, and the cash to pay him/her.
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Or 'it', if DarwinPlus is wrong about Artificial Intelligence. Just kidding.
I guess it might need a handful of people at some point, if it takes off. I don't have that sort of skill or money. Maybe you do? Or maybe you'd be interested in helping to find someone? I can think of one or two web giants who might find this sort of thing appealing. Perhaps we could arrange for any patents deriving from GEIST connections to pay a modest percentage to keep the show on the road? Over to you. *** To repeat myself for the last time: The principles of DarwinPlus will only have any value if they are acted upon. It will be via such positive actions that more and more happiness will slowly build up in the world as more and more of us see the rational point of morality and kindness and sharing, and at last feel free to abandon the fear-ridden and life-hating creed of Greed is Good. We will enjoy our new-found sense of purpose, and our own responsibility for our own future.
There is an old and rather glib-sounding maxim that is full of truth: We are 'human beings', not 'human doings'. What matters is the way we are, in the small stuff of everyday life, our small acts, kind words and positive thoughts, not whether we 'rise to the top' or have six tarty handbags with someone else's name on them. Socrates again: 'Beware the barrenness of a busy life'.
To help this process along, I would like to see set up a chain of centres, each one a branch of the Happiness Institute (motto 'HI!'). HI would begin on the web, and would incorporate the rational findings that this book has explored. It would not be a comedy club, but would provide a philosophical explanation of why happiness is natural and desirable and absolutely achievable by simply following the logic of DarwinPlus. It would run courses, and mix lectures with practice, to give people who have been so locked up in fearful defensiveness 'permission' to let go and trust others and share: to relax and enjoy. But it would not be like those brittle 'team-bonding' schemes sold at high prices to corporations. Only people who wanted to be there would come. And they would be expected to put the effort in. No effort.. please leave, and come again another day. Staff
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would be paid by a combination of modest student fees topped up by voluntary donation. After establishing a suitable web presence, HI would open its carefully chosen first centre, funded by someone who both saw the point and could spare the money. When the first centre had been around for long enough to iron out the teething problems and to discover how best to approach the practicalities, then a second would open, possibly being staffed by people who had attended the first centre. And so on. The growth would be both organic and exponential, but never at a pace beyond the capacity of HI to keep everything firmly grounded. We are not talking world domination here, but personal and sensitive facilitating. The world changes one person at a time. The website would keep everyone in touch with new ideas and 'teaching aids' and so forth. Costs would be kept very low, and ways found to self-fund as much as possible. As soon as reasonably possible, it would buy properties suitable for longer and specialist courses, with enough land to grow organic food for home use and for local sale. So if you know of a millionaire who is looking for something worthwhile to spend his money on have a word with him, or treat him to a copy of this book. Yes, I know he can well afford to buy his own, but be nice. I wish you great joy. Drop all your dogmas, and I am sure you will find it. *** If you think you might benefit from a day-by-day handbook to accompany the general practical philosophy of DarwinPlus, you might like to try Guide Yourself to Happiness. This book is designed to be a key workbook for HI. Available soon as a download, or perhaps one day as a hard copy if required*, from www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk . *In theory at least. Not arranged yet. Please pester me if necessary.
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Bibliography
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have laboured hard for Socrates
A few books you might enjoy, as mentioned by Chapter 2 Mysteries by Colin Wilson Poltergeist by Colin Wilson Supernature by Lyall Watson Lifetide by Lyall Watson The Romeo Error by Lyall Watson Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife by John G Fuller The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort Lo! by Charles Fort The Reach of the Mind by Professor JB Rhine The Infinite Hive by Rosalind Heywood The Origin of Species (6th edition) by Charles Darwin 3 The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins 4 The Hidden Gospel by Neil Douglas-Klotz 5 Teach Yourself Logic by AA Luce 6 A Short History of Biology by Isaac Asimov Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov An Encyclopedia of Evolution by Richard Milner 7 Why Us? by Dr James Le Fanu
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10 A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble The World of Ted Serios by Dr Jules Eisenbud 12 The Bible (King James Version) In particular The Torah/Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), especially Genesis or Exodus The Four Gospels Ezekiel Revelation The Koran The New Testament Apocrypha The Bhagavad Gita The Dhammapada 13 Richard Hittleman's 30 Day Yoga Meditation Plan Fourteen Lessons in Yogic Philosophy by Yogi Ramacharaka An Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy by Yogi Ramacharaka Gnani Yoga by Yogi Ramacharaka Raja Yoga by Yogi Ramacharaka The Book of Enoch 14 Discourses by Meher Baba Voices of the first Day by Robert Lawlor The Kybalion Reincarnation: the Phoenix Fire Mystery by Joseph Head and SL Cranston. 15 Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by S LaBerge and H Rheingold 16 Seven Experiments that Could Change the World by Rupert Sheldrake 17 Life before Life by Helen Wambach Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr Brian Weiss The Link by Matthew Manning
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18 The Airmen Who Would Not Die by John G Fuller Glimpses of the Devil by M Scott Peck Thirty Years Among the Dead by Carl Wickland The Elements of Ritual Magic by Marian Green True as the Stars Above by Neil Spencer A New Science of Life by Rupert Sheldrake The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird Secrets of the Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird Biodynamic Gardening by John Soper 19 The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist Hands of Light by Barbara Brennan 20 The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley An Outline of Theosophy by C W Leadbeater Raymond, or Life and Death by Oliver Lodge 21 The Findhorn Garden by the Findhorn Community The Magic of Findhorn by Paul Hawken 22 In Search of the Double Helix by John Gribbin Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense by Michael Brooks 23 About the Fourth Dimension by Charles Hinton Flatland by Edwin A Abbott 24 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn 26 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda Life After Life by Dr Raymond Moody The Natural Depth in Man by Wilson Van Dusen
28 The Trouble With Islam Today by Irshad Manji *** And a few more, not by chapter Betrayers of the Truth by William Broad and Nicholas Wade The Occult by Colin Wilson Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross On Life After Death by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra The Silent Path by Michael J Eastcott The Pilgrim's Companion by F Aster Barnwell Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm A Search in Secret India by Dr Paul Brunton The Secret Path by Dr Paul Brunton A Search in Secret Egypt by Dr Paul Brunton The Quest of the Overself by Dr Paul Brunton Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga by Dr Paul Brunton From Intellect to Intuition by Alice Bailey Parting Visions by Dr Melvin Morse World Scripture, Paragon House, 1991: excellent for showing the commonality of all religions. And a terrific little book I've just read, called.. The Challenge of the Mind by Ryuho Okawa ..which explains the whole Philosophy in the simplest and most elegant terms. If you haven't been persuaded by my own blundering efforts, Mr Okawa is your man. ***
If you think DarwinPlus! has something worthwhile to say please note that copies may be bought at
http://www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk/darwinplus/
Why not treat an open-minded friend, or startle your local bigot?
***
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike Albert Einstein.
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DarwinPlus!

Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Nullius in verba (Take nobody's word for it)

Why This Book?

We can do better than that.

Part Two So that's the problem! Now what?

Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20

137 159 181 202 220 240 259 281 302

Part Three A Solution?

Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25

342 363 384 395

Part Four It all Seems to Fit.

Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30

440 467 482 504

A Word to The Reader

Part One Problem? What problem?

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Chapter 1 Spooks or No Spooks?

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Chapter 2 Darwin's 'Creator'

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

I turned to the final sentence, and read:

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Chapter 3 Some Puzzling Logic

Evolution via Natural Selection + Mendelian Genetics = Neo-Darwinism

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

A little further on, still on page 2, he says:

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Chapter 4 Why Materialism?

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

There is no mention of Materialism in this definition of 'science'.

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

Chapter 5 A Positive Alternative

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal

DarwinPlus: Evolution, Science, Religion and the Paranormal