Let’s begin with a wisdom story for children. An eagle came and sat on a grandmother’s fence while she was working on her yard. The bird looked strange to her; so, she asked, “What kind of creature are you?”
The eagle said, “I am an eagle.”
“What is an eagle?” The grandma had never heard of eagles.
“Eagle is a bird,” said the eagle.
The grandmother had seen birds—pigeons and crows. She thought to herself,
“Oh my, this creature does not look anything like a bird. It must be suffering from birth defects.” She was quite sympathetic.
“I see. Other birds don’t accept you because of your disfiguration. Your beak is all bent, your claws are too long, the feathers on the top of your head are all messed up, and your wings are too large. But no worries. Let me help you.”
With that before the eagle could protest, she carried the eagle to her house. She found clippers to trim his claws down to proper size; she pulled hard on his beak until it became straight. She brushed the feathers at the top of the eagle’s head down to quite flat. Finally, she cut the wings down to normal size.
“Now look at you. Isn’t that better, like a proper bird. Now you will have no problem socializing with pigeons and crows.”
As the old granma let him go, the eagle tried fly high to the mountain top but couldn’t. He had to settle to a low treetop that eagles seldom use. The eagle felt very sad with his disfigurement.
Word got around and eventually the wise eagle of his community came to visit.
When he heard the eagle’s sad story, he said:
“My dear, the original figure will grow back, don’t worry. Your body has the needed wisdom. But you have to cooperate. Don’t wallow in your sadness. Soon you will fly high again.”
Being a children’s story, it has happy ending. The eagle did grow back his original form and abilities.
Unbelievably, this story is playing out in modern times. It is about scientists of our time; the greatest among them live in the Eastern seaboard of USA and are intellectuals although their critics call them ivory tower pointy heads. Recently they have claimed that their research has figured out everything about the world. The world is made of matter and material interactions—living beings are mechanical as well like robots, nothing else.
Initially, there were skeptics in the liberal media—the messaging component of modern scientific society. The skeptics asked, “Surely us humans are not inert like matter nor are we unconscious like robots; what about us?” But the wise materialists have an answer ready.
“Yes, humans seem to be conscious, they talk in a first person “I”, don’t they? Please notice that behaviorally, the “I” they posit to denote that they are experiencers, they are different from objects, that “I” is really a me—an object—a mere thought. The I is fooling itself; it is an illusion. We must cancel that idea. We are thinking machines, just like robots.”
Skeptics still won’t be quiet. “But how about emotions? Surely robots cannot emote.”
The pundits have answer for that too. “Our emotions are undeniable, and robots do not emote, all true. However, humans evolved from single cell creatures because of survival necessity over billions of years, don’t forget. Evolution and survival necessity produced those brain circuits of negative emotions.”
More skepticism. “But how about emotions in the body? Aren’t you denying love that people feel in their heart?”
“Yes, we are. The love-talk is myth. It has to be cancelled. Love is a dress up for sex which brain initiates just as “I” is a dress-up for our “me.”
Much of the liberal Media now became solid believers. Still, some skeptics speak up. “But there is creativity—the discovery of new meaning of value like beauty and truth—the archetypes. How can you guys deny creativity and archetypal values?”
The intellectuals chuckle. “Beauty and truth, nay, all so-called archetypal values are the products of old mythical-mystical thinking from the East. They are human-created values, ideals that nobody can keep up with. Get real. Human behavior is not lofty, but nasty.”
The liberal media now seem to be convinced. Almost. One fellow was still standing. “Are you suggesting that values should be cancelled. Can we live without values?”
Again, the pundits chuckle. “You have a point. We have a make-over for the values. Yes, though unreal, we do need them. We say, values do not exist, but we must pretend. Values are to be treated as pretend-values. Of course, we back them up with laws, human-made laws.”
Now all the skeptics were convinced, and the liberal media people bought into the matter-is-everything worldview.
***
People talk about crisis today a lot: global climate change, war and terrorism, and all that. But the biggest crisis is due to the denial of consciousness, of emotions in the body, and especially, of archetypal values. Without experiencing the archetypes of what we call human values, we cannot satisfy our higher needs of flying high in consciousness just like the eagle.
The eagle’s story ended happily. Will our story end happily? We don’t know. This much we do know: If not resolved soon, this crisis of values created by scientific materialism threatens to destroy human civilization itself.
One big symptom of this crisis is the so-called cancel culture. The current cancel culture is one in which every fraction of the culture—materialist or religionist–wants to cancel past history and even current events that do not suit them, that do not serve their pursuit of power. Oh, there is always reason–the facts were reported prejudicially is the most common reason given.
For past history, the facts can be challenged because there were other cultural factions whose interests were ignored or misrepresented. As in the case of the greatness of Thomas Jefferson because he had negro slaves. If you look at things from the black point of view, how can Jefferson be great when he supported enslaving negros?
But of course, the prevalent culture in power playing the game in the eighteenth century USA was white and negro slaves were a small minority. Yes, the interests of the black fraction of people were grossly ignored, their case was badly misinterpreted, agreed. But does that automatically mean that all history recorded by the white majority has to be cancelled?
In fact, the biggest shortcoming of the one-sided facts of history is that the female of our species has always been ignored through most of written history. Should we cancel all history then?
Democracy is in trouble. For any current political election, the facts can be challenged because of “wide spreading fraud”. As in the case of the 2020 election in the USA.
Opponents say, “But there is no evidence of large-scale fraud”. “How do you know? Nobody was watching every vote.” The argument goes on. A conflict is created, a polarization.
Yes, it is true that one cannot keep track of every vote, so we do it via statistics. To deny the use of statistics is not practical in this case.
But it is not always that simple. The biggest example of cancellation is how current science is treating spirituality and the concepts of meaning, purpose, and archetypal values like love and justice—they are all humbug that must be debunked. Why? Because religions who profess these ideas ignore or misrepresent nature in the form of materialist ideas of living—for example that we are me-centered, our brain is loaded with negative emotions and pleasure circuits and therefore we indulge in these things. We tend to “eat, drink, and be merry” because that is our nature. In view of this base-level human condition which is easily explained with the metaphysics that everything is matter and the result of material interaction, there is no spirit, no meaning, no values. There is no purpose to phenomena; all are the results of material interaction.
The opponents can say, “But that base-level human nature does not hold for everyone! There have been in history and now there are ever more people who try to live values and succeed in going beyond the limitations of the base-level human condition. In fact, that is how we get civilization.”
This is the problem with statistics. While statistically speaking it is true that a majority of people live the base-level condition, it would be a tremendous mistake to use statistics indiscriminately to decide “facts”.
Is there another way? Fortunately, there is. Instead of our natural tendency of me-centered way of canceling the opponents which, face it, is not practical either, why not try to accommodate all views—majority and minority, with due respect.
Ok, that, too is nothing new. This is what a brand of scientists called cultural anthropologists preach. In fact, the current cancel culture may have something of a backlash to our feeble attempts at tolerating different views. But in this case materialists are right; this is against the nature of the base-level human condition.
How to save civilization then? Existential philosophers have a solution that suits the materialist faction of the divide. Pretend values. Values are not scientific, but we pretend them anyway because without them civilization itself breaks down, along with such coveted institutions such as democracy and capitalism that took centuries to develop.
The institutions of democracy and capitalism, after materialists have done some tweaking, agree with materialists’ quest for power which is really the issue here. But of course, opponents do not see it this way. The fact is, after materialist tweaking, democracy and capitalism have also become elitist like the old religious-aristocracy oligarchy; it is the elitism of meritocracy, those who can use the materialist knowledge to gain power have all the advantage.
There is a lesson here. That eventual fall of the religious oligarchy-aristocracy collusion happened because Christianity became a cancel culture; it tried to cancel all other competing religions of the time. This should be a reminder to the materialist scientists as well.
In the early days of the Roman empire, Christians touted their monotheistic one God metaphysics as superior to the polytheistic many gods of the competing religions and won a political victory. But in truth, the many gods are only representations of the archetypes, aspects of one God. And one God still smacks of dualism—God and the world separate—but this is not Christ’s God. Christ’s God, as the God in any other spiritual wisdom tradition (to be distinguished from religions), is One and Only; “kingdom of God is everywhere,” because God’s creation, the world, is not really separate from God. The separateness is an illusion.
Today the cancel culture of scientific materialism tries to debunk all post-materialist expansion of science to include meaning and values by calling these ideas as conspiracy theories and much of the liberal media spread their misinformation (just as the conservative media icon Fox News spreads the ludicrous conspiracy theories of Trump followers; read the article titled “Is a new kind of religion forming on the Internet?” published around December, 2021 in Vox).
Action begets reaction. If you support dogma, other dogmas will backlash against you; it is that simple.
So again, there is backlash to the liberal/materialist scientist’s view because make no mistake—matter is all, archetypal values do not exist, these ideas are dogma. The current wave of dictatorial revolt against science and meritocracy in America, Brazil, and India are examples. Furthermore, it may not be true that the current tweaked form of capitalism needs democracy to thrive. Communist China has shown for some time (occasional setbacks notwithstanding) that capitalism may work even better under autocracy than meritocratic democracy another name of which is socialism.
Cultural anthropologists’ prescription is halfway right. The problem is unless the base-level human condition is overcome, one cannot tolerate different views. One has to deal with the constriction of consciousness that me-centeredness, negative emotions, and pleasure addiction lead to. Without an expansion of consciousness to see through the constriction dogma creates, materialist scientists will never see beyond their dogma. Nor will religionists.
The spirit of science as practiced by Newton, Darwin, and Einstein is free from all dogma. These people’s work developed what we call classical science today that was dogma-free. We call the science they created “classical science” to distinguish it from the currently developing quantum science (which is also dogma-free) that is replacing classical science.
Unfortunately, although classical science was developed in a dogma-free way, it is a science of matter, its worldview is compatible with the materialist dogma. So, when the dogma was added, most scientists went along with it. Fortunately, quantum physics and quantum science are not compatible with any dogma.
What is so special about quantum physics and quantum science (ideas that will be properly explicated in the beginning chapters of this book, no worries) is that it gives us a dogma-free worldview of complete inclusivity right away by forcing us to conclude that Consciousness is the ground of all being; all objects of our experience, sensing (matter), feeling (vitality), thinking (meaning), intuiting (purposeful values in the form of what we call archetypes), and the experiencer/subject-self—all are possibilities of consciousness to choose from.
Can we choose an expanded open consciousness to live rather than the base-level constricted consciousness? Yes, we can. The catch is, we cannot do such choosing from the constricted ego; ego’s choice is limited by conditioning. We have to make effort and be creative, then expansion, then new choice, then integration of competing ideas that all have grains of truth.
How do we know truth? Science started with a very good idea: experimental data and technology, that’s how. All scientific ideas should be verified by objective experiments, and be useful to us, should have application. Quantum science does one step better: experiment (objective verification), experience (subjective verification that are objective because of a substantial experiential consensus—this is called weak objectivity; quantum physics itself is only weakly objective), and usefulness.
Are these ideas of verification enough to lead to infallible criteria for discrimination? It is so. Let’s give an example.
All is matter as a basis for materialist science developed in the nineteen sixties, but the idea became a cinch, an acceptable dogma for all academics when phenomenologists claimed to have “debunked” metaphysics altogether (never mind that all is matter philosophy is also metaphysics). Phenomenologists claimed that all our experience, however refined they may be, being based on deep states of meditation and expansion of consciousness, are nothing but fingers (experiences) pointing to the moon (oneness). Why? Because experience implies the subject-object split, an experience of an object always comes with an experiencer! In contrast, Oneness has no second, no observer to observe the Oneness; it seems that it can never be verified.
But you know what! Spiritual wisdom teachers by the hundreds if not thousands over its seven-thousand-year history, have all been claiming “experiences” of Nirvikalpa (Sanskrit for without separateness)—an existence of Oneness without the separateness of a second.
It does seem like a paradox—the wise people’s claim. However, the paradox is now solved by the concept of “delayed choice”, an idea that has been experimentally verified both objectively by physicists and subjectively by cognitive experiences of weak objectivity in another context—near death experience. The details are beyond the scope of this book; however, read Amit’s book, See the World as a Five-Layered Cake. All details are given there.
Additionally, quantum science has found wide applications in health (preventive medicine, quantum healing), psychology (of both disorder and happiness), in businesses in the form of a new expanded conscious capitalism—quantum economics, in politics in the form of participatory democracy and leaders of moral authority, and so forth.
The best part of this new quantum dogma-free paradigm of science is that it revives the archetypes, the human values living which we become inclusive capable of expanded consciousness and become civilized in the interaction with each other without needing pretension. We have been there before albeit in small scale; we can be there again.
