Gaia's Schizophrenia III

III. "When you make the two one"

When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then you will see the son of the living One, and you will not be afraid.

—Gospel of Thomas 37

Some proudly proclaim that religion is the root of all evil, but when God's name is "I AM THAT I AM", denying God's existence is denying our own.

And that is exactly what materialism has done. Modern science has failed to form a coherent picture of the world because it has banished to oblivion an entire field of observation, a very real part of the universe: itself.

Science and religion are not incompatible, they are incommensurable: they are two different stories told in two different languages, and their terms are not interchangeable. Yet they are very much concerned with the same thing—reality—but they spring from the antipodes of that old question: what is reality?

Science has historically said matter, while religion answers mind. But how could we possibly measure this force?

The idea of a life-force has been around since Aristotle and has not left the biological imagination since. Yet this concept of an entelechy—the ultimate cause and effect; holding one's purpose within —has not been realized into any concrete theory either. We looked for that underlying element in the development of lifeforms but found nothing mysterious, just chemicals. We tore nature to pieces and were left empty-handed.

Of course we will not find the vital component when we negate its existence.

The entelechy is not hidden, it is dreadfully explicit. It is what we call "us": "you" and "I"—intention itself—and it is nothing physical.

People say that life is just matter and then go to great lengths to defend their perceptions. But the materialist mentality cannot perceive the meta-physical element of perception because it is nowhere to be seen, it is seeing itself.

The notion that life is no more noteworthy than dirt can also be understood in religious terms. The story of the Old Testament is a story of bondage and liberation, of exile and return. The subjugation of the believers can be read as literal narrative, or interpreted as spiritual allegory.

Orthodox Jews call this moment in history 'galut', which means exile. The disconnected state of our society and indecipherable world chaos coming from a single source, a spiritual malady, a psychological bondage removing Man from his essence. The belief that he does not believe; the awareness that there is no awareness; the intention that denies intending.

Are we willing to reconsider the main tenet of religions, look inside, and ask: does perception want to perceive?

For the good news is that in this story, the exiles return, the captives are liberated, the error corrected. And "the world shall be filled with the awareness of God as the waters cover the ocean floor" (Isaiah 11:9).

So what if we join the premise with the method? What if we declare intention, emotion, and perception to be "real" parts of the universe? What if we allow ourselves back into our picture of the world?

When the scientific eye stops overlooking the fact that it can look; when it ceases priding itself of having deposed anything; when we are willing to let go of our most sacred assumption, then we may truly call ourselves scientific.

When we take a look back at the questions that generated our vast understanding; when we acknowledge the fact that "the familiar universe of matter and energy" comes together only through our faculty of mind; when we are ready to embrace Eve's dis-covery and stop hiding from ourselves, then the vitalist stance might offer fertile ground for a theory of life, a theory of intention, a theory of everything.

And when science finally finds the answer to existence, may we all be so amazed as to collapse in tears and reverence.

Bibliography

Feyerabend, Paul K. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London, UK: Verso, 1975.

Freeman, Tzvi. Bringing Heaven Down to Earth: Meditations and Everyday Wisdom from the Teachings of the Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1996.

"Gödel's incompleteness theorems." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 2004. 08 Dec. 2008.

"Religion." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Dictionary.com. 07 Dec 2008.

"Science." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Dictionary.com. 07 Dec 2008.

Scott, Eugenie C. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.

Images by William Blake.

The Great Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed In The Sun, c. 1805.

Behemoth and Leviathan, 1825.

Jacob's Ladder, c. 1800.

Gaia's Schizophrenia: A Mytho-logical Crisis

I. Knowledge and Reunion.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

—Genesis 3:7

Science and religion have been at odds for centuries, but why are they still in conflict? Why hasn't one won already? Could it be that they each hold what the other desperately needs?

Science has allowed man to peer into the deepest workings of the universe and to do things we never imagined. The usual school lesson is that we now know how things work, and that the quaint myths of primitive cultures lay bare the fact that they did not know any better. We hold our rational mindset to be absolute and inerrant, our technological society being evidence of intellectual supremacy.

Why then do these old myths still captivate the minds of most people?

The problem lies in the opposing philosophies that underlie the two bodies of knowledge. Modern science has historically built on the ontological theory of realism or materialism—the belief that reality is entirely physical and it exists independently of life—while religions are all based on what has been termed mentalism, idealism, panpsychism, etc—the belief that reality is primarily non-physical, the basic substance of the universe then being the soul, spirit, or mind.

While materialism is not a necessary component of scientific knowledge or methodology, is incompatible with religious or spiritual knowledge. Thus if there is any quarrel between the religious and the scientific, it is this ancient philosophical debate about the nature of reality.

The question is a muddy one: what is reality, mind or matter? Are we a purposive force or just dust and water? The dichotomy hints to no easy answer as the two extremes seem to be inescapable facts of our experience, hence the two birthing hypotheses of our protagonists.

Religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs" ("Religion").

Religion declares an overarching law responsible for human life and everything in existence; the meta-physical source of our being from which we can derive guidance and counsel through the intricacies of our personal experience.

Monotheism is the consummation of the mystical mentality responsible for all the myths of our ancestors: from spirits to gods to God, the spiritual belief in more than matter evolved into the story of Oneness that has not left the human mind since. It has been a source of meaning, answers, and strength for humanity for several thousand years.

But Man was more curious than that. If we were all brothers and sisters and everything was for ultimate good, why was there still war, famine, slavery, disease? We still had problems and questions, and the struggle for survival meant a fight for knowledge. Human reason still had plenty of patterns to decode and the ongoing observation of the cosmos and our selves culminated with the distillation of our very decoding process.

The scientific method offers a systematic procedure for finding a question, postulating an answer, and testing for validity, producing what we now know as science: "a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws" ("Science"). Science generates explanations about our observations; it is an ever-growing collection of patterns and relationships that allows us to apprehend and navigate our world.

The discoveries of the scientific method revolutionized our understanding of the universe as well as our daily lives; it was clear that in matter was where the answers lay. Ignorance and superstition forever exposed by this new approach—the method—philosophical materialism would soon deliver its final verdict, the new overarching law, the Theory of Everything.

Not exactly. The search for a physical theory to answer all questions ran into a stone wall in 1931 with the publication of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which show that any mathematical system is self-referencing and thus inconsistent or incomplete ("Gödel").

The hopes for a unified theory in our hardest of hard sciences vaporized with our increasing observation of the universe, and reality now consisted more and more of genocide, slavery, torture, war, addiction, corruption, disease, moral degradation, economic ruin, and an existential void unlike anything man had ever seen.

What happened?

Pt II