Never forget that 'reasonable' science was founded… by an Angel… in a dream…
The following is from Terence Mckenna's Tree of Knowledge:
"…Till recently, I thought that that was the end of the story but there is a coda that is very amusing, if nothing else. In that Hapsburgian army, there was a young soldier of fortune, only 19 years old, still wet behind the ears, knowing nothing, happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe while he decided what to do with himself and his name was Rene Descartes, a Frenchman. Descartes, in his later years, reminisced about his period as a soldier in this army and I like to think that it was Descartes who actually murdered Maier. One of my ambitions is to write a play or a novel in which these two confront each other in a back alley of burning Prague and carry on a debate about the future of Europe before Michael Maier falls to the sword of Descartes. That may be apocryphal, but what is not apocryphal is that this Hapsburgian army, having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom, began to retreat across Europe that Fall and by Mid-September was camped near the town of Uolm in Southern Germany. By a strange coincidence, Uolm is the birthplace of Einstein some hundreds of years later.
But on the night of September 16th, Descartes had a dream and in this dream an angel appeared to him, this is documented by his own hand, and the angel said to Descartes, "The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number." And that revelation lay the basis for modern science. Rene Descartes is the founder of the distinction between the res verins and the res extensia, the founder of modern science, the founder of the scientific method that created the philosophical engines that created the modern world. How many scientists, working at their workbenches, understand that an angel chartered modern science? It’s the alchemical angel which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples toward an unimaginable conclusion."
This page is not attacking science, this page is attacking materialist science which is serving as the New Inquisition against anything that doesn't support their fundamentalist materialist belief system. We are aiming to join mysticism and science again as they are one and the same.
Robert Anton Wilson about the The New Inquisition: Our dogmatic materialist mainstream scientific community.
DAB: One of your recent books is The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about this book.
RAW: I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic. I thought it was a fascinating paradox: irrational rationalists. Later on I found out I didn't invent that. Somebody else who wrote an article on CSICOP, that's the group they all belong to: Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Somebody else who wrote about them also used the term irrational rationalism. It's a hard term to resist when you think about those people.
I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity, I had done enough of that in my other books. I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical. All fundamentalism is comical, unless you believe in it, in which case you'd become a fanatic yourself, and want everybody else to share your fundamentalism. But if you're not a fundamentalist yourself, fundamentalists are the funniest people on the planet. The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational!
DAB: They call themselves skeptical.
RAW: Yes, but they're not skeptical! They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college, which was about 1948-53, somewhere in that period. If you go back and study what was being taught in college in those days as the latest scientific theories, you find out that's what these people still believe. They haven't had a new idea in 30 years, that's all that happened to them. They just rigidified, they crystallized around 1960.
(Taken from a 1988 Interview)
Robert Anton Wilson on Science and Mysticism
"In (Gordiano) Bruno's day the 3 terms were divided up differently, you had science and mysticism on one side, and religion on the other side. Science and mysticism are alike in their struggle against religion. They were both based on experience and respect for the individual. The idea of science and mysticism was go out and discover for yourself. Find out what works, find out how the universe is actually structured and how you relate to the structure of the universe. And so there were basically 2 areas of scientific exploration, the external and the internal. But they were both pursued by the same method, the experimental method."
Science… it's not all it's cracked up to be folks.
Science claims to be reasonable, quick to dismiss would-be-paradigm-shifting pioneers to be occupying themselves with "Pseudo-science" a term that gets thrown around way too loosely. How reasonable is our science and its current overly materialist worldview and the governments it influences? A few examples of the unreasonableness of the materialist government controlled scientific community:
• Was it reasonable to jail Wilhelm Reich, destroy his lab and burn books of his, get his books off the market and let him DIE IN JAIL (where were his collegues?!) for his Orgone work that would have only bettered humanity? (His influence is felt in modern psychotherapy. He was a pioneer of body psychotherapy and several emotions-based psychotherapies, influencing Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His pupil Alexander Lowen was the founder of bioenergetic analysis, etc)
• Was it reasonable to jail Timothy Leary for years in solitary confinement for 2 planted joints because of his groundbreaking research and philosophy with psylocybin, LSD and other hallucinogens?
• How about Michael Harner whose academic reputation was destroyed cause he "went native" and actually learned something about Shamanism compared to other anthropologists.
• How about the ignoring of Neuro-linguistic programming and any steps forward into psychology just because blaming it all on sex and childhood makes for longer and more expensive therapy sessions fueling the 'industry of psychology' instead of you know… helping people.
• How about outlawing research or putting insane regulations on it, is it not absurd to disallow or severely restrict research into the human mind with psychedelics? Even disallowing peoples right to expand their own consciousness? If "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" means anything at all?
• The ignoring of the Out-of-Body Experience by the mainstream scientific community, here we have the means of astral travel, of reaching other dimensions, forms of intelligent life and so on, and science is dead quiet about it? Why!?
• Or ignoring research pertaining to the paranormal like the experiments of Joseph Banks Rhine?
• The general public remains mostly ignorant of the potential of psychedelics or meditation or anything pertaining to consciousness, even quantum mechanics pioneers get ridiculed by a mostly ignorant public again using the term pseudoscientific. Most 'scientists' keep ignoring these fields aswell. Why? Because a paradigm shift would mean they'd have to adjust their careers, read up on a hell of a lot of new stuff they don't agree with, risking their futures. In other words their reasons are laziness and cowardice. Do you know what it means if some areas in science simply do not get acceptance? It means DOGMA has crept into science, reason… has no dogma.
• And then you have the scientists who can be bought in the cases of global warming, stem-cell research, and many other cases.
• Interesting to note that the leading (materialist)'Skeptic' Michael Shermer used to be a fundamentalist Christian, now on a reactionary mission to devalue anything that threatens his new materialist belief system. Hilarious.
9 dumbass reasons why consciousness isn't researched by mainstream science
Taken from TTC University course: Philosophy of Mind by John R. Searle, D. Phil.
These are reasons M. Searle heard that are excuses to not have mainstream scientific inquiry into consciousness, they are all easily refuted!
1. There is no 'satisfactory' theory of consciousness. Consciousness 'cannot' be defined.
answer: Distinguish analytical from common-sense definitions. Analytic definitions come at the end, not at the beginning of investigation. We can get a common-sense definition of consciousness easily at the outset.
2. Consciousness = Subjective. Science = Objective.
answer: Distinguish epistemic sense of objective-subjective distinction from the ontological sense. Consciousness is ontologically subjective, but that does not prevent an epistemically objective science.
3. We could never explain how the physical causes the mental (An attempt would be impossible because of the unclear distinction between neuron activity and feelings)
answer: We know it happens. Our puzzles are like earlier problems in the history of science such as explaining life and electro-magnetism.
4. We need to seperate qualia from consciousness and leave the problem of qualia on one side. (Qualitative touchy-feely stuff can't be discarded easily to keep the objective stuff)
answer: There is no destinction between consciousness and qualia. Conscious states are qualia down to the ground.
5. Epiphenomenalism: Consciousness can not make a difference to the world. Even if we did have a science of consciousness it wouldn't matter because consciousness is epiphenomenal
answer: Consciousness is no more epiphenomenal than any other high level features of reality.
6. What is the evolutionary function of consciousness? It plays no role. (eg animals aren't conscious (lol! ahem!))
answer: Even our most basic activities, eating, procreating, raising our young, are conscious activities. If anything, the evolutionary role of consciousness is too obvious! (See 8-circuit model or Integral/AQAL theory for instance)
7. The causal relation between brain and consciousness implies mind-body dualism.
answer: This objection confuses event causation with bottom-up causation.
8. Science is by definition reductionistic. A scientific account of consciousness must reduce it to something else.
answer: We need to distinguish explanatory reductions from eliminative reductions. You cannot eliminate anything that really exists and consciousness really exists.
9. Any scientific account of consciousness must be an information processing account.
answer: Information processing is observer-relative. Consciousness is intrinsic, observer-independent.
So thank you mystics! Thank you Timothy Leary! Thank you Ken Wilber! And everyone else who researches consciousness!
Quotes:
mainstream science is like pop music
"Magicians and scientists are, on the face of it, poles apart. Certainly, a group of people who often dress strangely, live in a world of their own, speak a specialized language and frequently make statements that appear to be in flagrant breach of common sense have nothing in common with a group of people who often dress strangely, speak a specialized language, live in … er …" :p
Terry Pratchett
"I loathe science and am always keane to attack it in most situations (…) but I love reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference."
Terence Mckenna
a: "It's nonsense," b: "It is not important," c: "I always said it was a good idea," and d: "I thought of it first."
Arthur C. Clarke explains the four stages in the way scientists react to the development of anything of a revolutionary nature.
"See first, think later, then test.
But always see first.
Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.
Most scientists forget that."
Douglas Adams
"There’s science and then there’s reason and science has at times used reason although at times its conclusions have been fairly unreasonable. Reason is a universal method for dealing with information, whereas science is an extremely culturally conventionalized method. I think there’s a role for reason and the razors of logic but this is a branch of formal philosophy, not a branch of science; science appropriates everything to itself and then we tend to genuflect before it but what we really need is a relativistic approach to the true scope of science which is considerably less than it has claimed for itself. In the 20th century, it’s claimed to be the arbiter of truth in all domains when in fact it’s simply the study of those phenomena so crude that the restoration of their initial condition causes the same thing to repeat itself, and that’s a very small part of the sum total of the phenomenal universe."
Terence Mckenna
"Dreams have also inspired important scientific advances. Perhaps the most celebrated of these is the inspiration for discovery of the molecular structure of benzene by Kekule. The Russian chemist Mendelev discovered the periodic table method of classifying elements according to atomic weight while dreaming. Elias Howe completed his invention of the sewing machine while dreaming. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity came to him partly in a dream."
From "Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light" by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. (How does this add up with 'pure reason'?)
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Albert Einstein
"Logic will get you from A to B, but Imagination will get you everywhere."
Albert Einstein
"It's not that I'm so much smarter than other people, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
Albert Einstein
"Analyzing is equal to murder, we murder the vitality of the experience, murder the spirit and deny the soul, when we desire that everything works according to the logical functions of the left brain."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,
in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
Carl Sagan
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
Carl Sagan
"European scholarship regards human civilization as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander, and ending today with Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily half savage culture. It is a superstition of modern thought that the march of knowledge has always been linear. Our vision of 'prehistory' is terribly inadequate. We have not yet rid our minds from the hold of a one-and-only God or one-and-only Book, and now a one-and-only Science."
Shri Aurobindo Ghosh - Indian Philosopher
"In our civilization the chasm that stretches between mind and heart yawns deep and wide and,
as the mind flies on from discovery to discovery in the realms of science,
the gulf becomes ever deeper and wider and the heart is left further and further behind."
Max Heindel
Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence!
letting the reigns go to the unfolding is faith, faith, faith, faith!
SCIENCE HAS FAILED OUR WORLD!
SCIENCE HAS FAILED OUR MOTHER EARTH!
SPIRIT GOES THROUGH ALL THINGS! SPIRIT GOES THROUGH ALL THINGS! SPIRIT GOES THROUGH ALL THINGS!
System of a Down
"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact and theory and, when successful, finds none."
Thomas Kuhn
"Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen…"
Alan Watts
"The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
Stephen Hawking
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science."
Albert Einstein
The very notion of selfhood is an attacked idea, necessary for the mechanisms of advanced capitalism to function as they do. In 'Inventing our selves: psychology, power, and personhood', Nikolas Rose (1998) proposes that psychology is now employed as a technology: one that allows humans to buy into an invented and arguably false sense of self. It is said freedom, Rose writes, that assists government and exploitation rather than the antithesis of it.
"What the thinker thinks, the prover proves."
Leonard Orr
"I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But when I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!' Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds."
William James
"Explanations are never the most interesting part of science."
Fritz Leiber
"What the flying saucers are doing is erroding faith in science, they are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe."
Terence Mckenna
"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
Niels Bohr
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny…'"
Isaac Asimov
"Hypnosis exists on all levels of human society, and very few scientists can remember that their favorite models started out as metaphors."
Robert Anton Wilson
"Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
Max Frisch
"The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. A model, a hypothesis, or a myth is a way of rendering the invisible. Because the unconscious is outside time, it can perceive transformations beyond the limits of the ego. These unconscious internal linkperceptions are expressed in art or mythologies. We ourselves are living in an age of cultural transformation, but if you went to the experts to ask for a description, they would tell you nothing. You have to go to those who are at home in the unconscious and in the subconscious, the artists and prophets: through myth and symbol in art, internal linkscience fiction or religion, they will describe the present by speaking about the future."
William Irwin Thompson
>>2060Did you read Angel Tech?
There are some interesting bits in the book. I enjoyed the chapel perilous ideas.
