(Some people will think that talk of things such as feng shui is frivolous. To them I say, bracket that distaste – feng shui is a very small part of this discussion, which covers very important ground in terms of philosophy, the philosophy of science, history, anthropology, sociology, political-economy, ecology, science and scientism, and the state of modern industrial society. Please read on.)
Many people who think they are scientific, and even think they are scientists, have an out-dated view of the world, based in a pre-Einsteinian and pre-quantum physics paradigm of materialist reductionism. They are actually the great majority of “scientists”, doctors and academics. They are over a century behind. And they are stridently dogmatic in defending their dying materialist ideology.
Things like feng shui, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), or yogic, Buddhist or Taoist philosophy, are branded heretical and unscientific by these medieval high priests. But in fact, all these things fit perfectly well in the new paradigms, or models, arising out of modern science itself. (Science is the slow man in the race, and is only now catching up with the mystics.) These things don’t fit with the old materialist reductionist model of Newton and Descartes. But that 400 year old model is dying now, and that model itself does not fit with modern physics, ecology, systems theory, epigenetics, or recent mind-brain research.
How then, should we view these things that were previously thought heretical or taboo? Firstly, we must clarify that there is no linear causality. That means control is an illusion. It also means that the position of the stars or the design of your home, for example, do not singularly cause or determine your fate. They are an influence, among many other influences. If we are intelligent, we will take a holistic or full systems approach, and try to maximize positive systems influences and dynamics, while reducing or mitigating negative influences or dynamics. That is what yoga, Ayurveda, TCM, t’ai chi, chi gong, meditation and feng shui seek to do; exactly as permaculture or intelligent systems design seeks to do. The principle applies to ecosystems, landscapes, gardens, farms, homes, buildings, communities, relationships, study, work, spirituality, prosperity, resilience, and health. This is the logic behind feng shui, for example: intelligent design of systems for maximum harmony and well-being.
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E=MCsquared. Energy = mass x the speed of light squared.
What does that mean? Among other things, it means this. Einstein showed matter and energy and inter-convertible. In fact, both Einstein’s famous equation and also quantum physics show that matter is, in reality, condensed energy. Hence, not only does every living being have an energy field, and every thing, and every material substance, has an energy field, but all beings and things are in fact energy fields. Materialist reductionists quiver and foam at the mouth at such talk, but modern physics proved what I am saying over a century ago, and the materialist reductionist world view or paradigm is crumbling now, in any case.
Feng shui, like Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda and yoga, is based on a knowledge of how various patterns or formations of energy interact. If we are intelligent, we will be curious, and look into these bodies of knowledge, with an open mind and some serious humility, since they fill out the radically incomplete, grossly inadequate, and dying modern Western model or paradigm of science, and of health.
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There is no longer any question that acupuncture works. (See David Suzuki, The Nature of Things) Western conventional medicine has been forced to acknowledge it works. It has been used successfully for addiction recovery, and has been used as a replacement for anesthetics for surgery, so it definitely is proven to work. That should logically lead us to conclude that the medical model of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is sound, since that is the basis of acupuncture. TCM is based in Taoist knowledge and philosophy, acquired through meticulous empirical observations from more than 2,000 years of field experiments. That should then give confidence, logically, that Taoist knowledge and philosophy is sound. Feng shui is also based in Taoist knowledge and philosophy, and hence, we should have confidence that that system is also sound.
The hubris of modern Western society must be shattered, and now. Time to grow up. We have been boisterous and arrogant adolescents for far too long. It is a much bigger world than we were taught to believe. Our minds must now become open to the East – and on an equal basis, as Bertrand Russell urged decades ago – along with the Global South, indigenous knowledge, and knowledge from the past, particularly from the Enlightenment, the Romantics, the Renaissance and the ancients. Clearly and undeniably, the modern Western and Westernized world is drunk with power, suicidal, ecocidal, imperialist, and hell-bent on a course leading to the collapse of our civilization (sic). Our hubris will be our self-destruction if we carry on like this any longer. It is time for a little humility, and a good deal more open-mindedness.
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Science did not begin in Europe in the 17th century. That is a conceit that needs to be laid to rest. The Islamic, Arab world preserved science from ancient Greece, and further developed it, before passing it generously to Europe (which was still by and large in an anti-intellectual dark age) through Moorish Spain, in the Spanish Renaissance of the 8th to 13th centuries, and then, 500 years later, to the Italian Renaissance. We owe, not the birth, but the rebirth of science, therefore, to the Spanish and Italian Renaissance, and to Islamic, Arabic society, and only secondarily to people like Newton, Bacon and Descartes. A little humility now will save our skin. It cannot be emphasized enough.
If by science, we mean an empirical method of investigating life, then science began in ancient Greece, and India and China, and probably in many other places, thousands of years ago. Modern science, which is a mere 400 years old, has produced great knowledge, and powerful technology. But we are foolish in the extreme and dangerously deluded if we equate technological power with wisdom, or even understanding. That surge in scientific knowledge and technological power has made modern society arrogant and filled with hubris, presuming we understand more than we do. That is error number one.
Science requires an open mind, and that requires humility. Dogma kills science, and dogma is what we have descended into. That is not science. It is scientism: which is the dogmatic and anti-scientific clinging to presumption, orthodoxy, high priests, official doctrines and an official canon.
Scientism is a form of medieval scholastic dogmatism, which is an ideology, a form of secular fundamentalism. That is what reigns now, not science. That is the second error: to take our over-confidence, and turn it into a religion, and a cult.
The third big error was to adopt Cartesian dualism. The fourth was to adopt a Newtonian mechanistic, atomistic, materialist reductionist model, paradigm or world view.
The fifth great error of modern science was to elevate that which can be measured, to the status of the only things worth investigating. The sixth was then to assume that what cannot be measured is either unimportant or unreal, non-existent.
These six errors, plus the common problems of (7) group-think, (8) egotism and careerism – it is more important to defend one’s ego than to value the truth, (9) corruption by conflicts of interest – science is overwhelmingly controlled by big business and the state, both of which have their own agendas, and truth is not high on the list; and (10) cultural bias, cultural arrogance, or simple racism – modern Europeans know best, therefore indigenous knowledge, Eastern knowledge, ancient, medieval and Renaissance knowledge, must all be worthless… These ten errors, we can now count and list, have blinded science, and have blinded the great majority of scientists, academics and intellectuals, and have blinded modern industrial society more broadly. That blindness will be our downfall, if not corrected immediately.
Again, humility and open-mindedness are imperative, and urgently needed. We are myopic blind men, quarrelling in the dark over shadows on a cave wall. And we will remain so, until and unless we redefine empiricism more broadly, and more thoughtfully, and until we admit our ignorance, so that we can once again learn.
Remember Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy. Socrates famously said, “I am the wisest person I know, because I am the only one who realizes his ignorance.” Begin with an open mind, and an admission of ignorance, or at least, an admission that what we think we know, could turn put to be entirely wrong. Otherwise, we are not practising science, nor are we even practicing basic intelligence.
There is a Zen story worth conveying here. A scholar comes to a Zen master and asks to be taught. The Zen master offers the scholar some tea. The scholar says yes. The Zen master pours the tea into the scholar’s cup, fills the cup to the top, then keeps on pouring. The scholar exclaims, “Stop! My cup is full!” The Zen master replies. “Precisely. Your cup is full. You mst empty your cup before it can be filled.” We are that bombastic scholar, heads too full of preconceptions to learn anything, or even to see or to hear.
As geneticist David Suzuki said, we really have very little understanding of life. He was talking about modern science. But ancient, Eastern, mystical and indigenous knowledge traditions have a great, immense understanding of life, in vast scope and tremendous depth. Modern science, by comparison, is obsessed with the dust on the lens as it peers obsessively through a microscope at the molecular structure of the bark of a single tree. “What is this forest you speak of? Sounds like flakey, voodoo mumbo-jumbo to me!”
Watch Mr. Magoo. That is modern science. Too narrow, too myopic, and therefore, stumblng blindly along. We must take a step back, and broaden and deepen our perspective. As Shakespeare said, “There is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy.”
To abandon science would be asinine, to put it bluntly; but to worship what we narrowly define as science, and hence, to turn science into a quasi-religious cult of scholastic dogmatism, which we have done, and to presume that what we narrowly define as science is the only valid means of acquiring knowledge, and the only valid body of knowledge, is even more asinine.
Science, to be truly worthy of the name, must be empirical, not dogmatic. But science, even then, can only tell us how the world works, and even that in a very limited and superficial degree. Science, even when practiced well, which means empirically, cannot tell us how to live, what is meaningful, what is ethical or virtu or what is wise or unwise to do. Science offers no values, only facts, or more pften, presumed facts and partial truths. Science therefore, even at its best, must be subservient to philosophy. And philosophy, to be practiced well, must be subsevient to experience, and to a radical empiricism. This is not a circular argument: it is taking empiricism to a much deeper level.
We can call it mysticism, or prophetic vision, but I prefer the term, radical empiricism, borrowing from William James and Allan Wallace. This means we take figures such as Jesus, the Buddha, Shakara, Moses, Meister Eckhart and Hildegaard of Bingen, Mohammed and Lao Tzu seriously. And we take our own experience seriously. Science now proclaims itself empirical, while invalidating direct experience. The radical self-contradiction is not perceived, but that is the root of our blindness in the modern world.
If you want to understand where science went wrong, read William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion. And read Emerson and Thoreau, America’s two greatest philosophers, for good measure. Until we admit our mistake, and radically expand our conception of empiricism and valid sources of knowledge, both science and modern “scientific” industrial society will remain blindly destructive, and we will continue to be on a collision course with reality, with full steam ahead.
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This short essay began as a brief musing on feng shui, but then I remembered that many people are very narrow-minded about such things, so I wrote a short preamble. That preamble has taken on a life of its own now. But that is ok. Let’s continue.
As I have said before, and written before, the old paradigm, model or world view of Newtonian-Cartesian materialist reductionism, is dying, and we are in the midst of a paradigm shift which has been going on for over a century. (Old dogmas die slowly.) But… What is wrong with the old paradigm? Well, besides the fact that it no longer fits with the scientific evidence, the mechanistic, materialist world view has been blamed for being one of the root causes of our destruction of nature, and for the growing environmental emergency we face. That indictment holds water, and can scarcely be denied, since the mechanistic, materialist world view reduces all living beings, ecosystems, plants, animals, forests, wetlands, oceans, rivers, and human beings, to the level of mere objects, mere things, to be exploited and harvested, and disposed of at will.
For the same reason, the materialist world view has led to a deep alienation between humans and nature; which means, between ourselves and life. That alienation is in turn driving people into mass addiction, addictive consumerism, compulsive escapism and perpetual distraction, mental illness, suicide, anxiety and depression. So yes, for many reasons, aside from purely scientific reasons, the old model needs to be discarded, post haste.
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One example of the utter failure and disastrous results of the grossly flawed model, paradigm, or world view of mechanistic, materialist reductionism, is the growing environmental crisis, as I have said, and as many have pointed out. Another example is the tremendous failure of modern “scientific” medicine. Despite all our much-vaunted scientific knowledge, we still have essentially zero success in treating the skyrocketing prevalence of chronic degenerative diseases, or mental illness and emotional distress. We can and do push freight train loads of pharmaceutical drugs, but these treat only the symptoms, and even those with patchy and poor success. The underlying causes remain largely ignored, because they require a holistic perspective, and that contradicts the official cannon and dogma of materialist reductionism. People are living longer, yes, but they are in general deeply unhealthy, both physically and psychologically, and they are living longer while saddled with multiple pharmaceutical dependencies, each of which has its own, often serious side-effects.
For context, a couple of figures that are not widely known, should become known. the US government has reported that 80% of pharmaceutical drugs have not been adequately tested for safety or effectiveness. That should be alarming. But why would this be the case? How could this be the case? It is the case because the big pharmaceutical companies are driven by concerns for profits, over and above public health. And it is the case because the pharmaceutical industry took over the medical colleges and the medical industry a century ago. It is corruption above, and dogmatic group think and indoctrination below – in the medical health field, and in our very much business-run society more broadly.
Worse yet, according to the US government, in the US alone, every year 200,000 people die from taking pharmaceutical drugs – correctly prescribed and correctly taken. That’s the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every day. The US government report never made it on the news media, and the governments and the corporate and state media don’t mention it, because Big Pharma is too powerful to cross. Meanwhile, the much-decried natural health and traditional Eastern (TCM and Ayurveda) medical-health methods produce zero documented deaths per year. This is one of the many reasons why conventional Western pharmaceutical-obsessed medicine is in crisis, and is furthermore seeing an exodus to natural medicine and Eastern methods.
Andrew Weill is right: the future of medicine is integrative medicine. That means, we take the best of modern Western conventional medicine, and integrate it with the best of natural and Eastern medicine. The faster the dogmatists accept the fact, the better off we will all be.
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Now, to briefly discuss feng shui – from a layman’s perspective.
It seems to be the case that Western feng shui is a modern Western pop culture, New Age invention, and is not in accord with classical feng shui. So, if you are going to use feng shui, which in essence is a practice of harmonizing energy in homes and buildings and landscapes, make sure it is classical feng shui, not fast food feng shui. Second, it must take into account the specific home design, compass orientation, and natal charts. I’d say this is too complex to do on your own. Get a consultation with someone knowledgeable in classical feng shui. Otherwise, it can be like wiring up your own electrical breaker panel – too risky for novice hands. Consult a pro.
Normally I’d say you can do everything yourself. You can design and grow a garden, and grow your own food if you want to. You can build your own home, design it and build it yourself, even wire it, if you study up. But for wiring a breaker panel, get an electrician. It is out of bounds for laymen and novices. And for feng shui, consult someone who knows what they are doing. Otherwise, you could cause disharmony and harmful negativity when you wanted to do the opposite.
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I would offer the same advice with regards to yoga and meditation: stick to the classic methods, tested and proven to be effective for over 2,000 years. When you are fully enlightened, then you can invent your own style. Until then, bow your head before the true masters, and humbly learn what they have to teach.
(Be wary of New Age MacThis and MacThat. It is far too unreliable, to hit and miss, too much a case of Russian roulette, to entrust your health or spirituality to it – even though there may be, and are, some gems among that heap.)
For yoga, I know of two schools that are definitely reliable, who teach classic yoga: Sivananda and Kripalu. Other approaches or styles may not harm you, but you may not get the same depth or benefit, either.
For meditation, I would stick to Zen, Theravada, or one of the four traditional schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Again, New Age meditation teachers may not do you any harm, but you may simply be wasting your time, and likely are.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Not in this case. Not with yoga or meditation. Those systems and methods are based on thousands of years of experience. Stick to the classic techniques that have been developed over millennia. Avoid the fluff.
Modern society is addicted to novelty and newness. Everything must be the latest fashion – even in spirituality or health. But this is foolish. The best things remain unchanging. Only the superficial things change. Do not be superficial. Stick to what works. In home design and construction, sometimes in technology (though not always) and in many fields, new ideas are sometimes better ideas. Not when it comes to yoga, meditation, or spirituality.
Remember the saying from Aikido: “Big lake, but shallow. Small lake, but deep.” It is depth you should be looking for, not novelty. This is not a shopping mall approach. Find a path that works for you, and that is not based in some New Age egotist’s self-aggrandizement scheme, and stick to that. Find novelty elsewhere in your life. (Plant a garden, and read widely.) When it comes to health and spirituality, you need to focus, and you need depth. Don’t jump all over the place. Don’t dig shallow wells. Study broadly, think broadly, discuss broadly – but pick a spiritual or health approach that works for you, and go deep. That will produce results. Skittering across the surface of things will not.
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For clarity sake, let me add this. While it is now imperative that we allow the East into our minds on an equal footing, as Bertrand Russell urged many years ago, and do the same for indigenous knowledge, the Global South, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and the ancients – because if we do not, modern Western, and Westernized industrial society, will most likely destroy the very basis of life on Earth; that does not mean we must have a mass conversion to Eastern or native spirituality. We must become renewed in our confidence, our dignity, and also our humility, yes. But we can still keep our own spiritual traditions, or our secular traditions, if that is what you prefer. It simply means that we must, of necessity, now broaden our minds.
The stakes now, are not only our wisdom, or capacity for wisdom, or our health, happiness or well-being, but our very survival. We need to draw upon the best of human knowledge and wisdom, from across the world, and across the spans of time. It is truly that imperative. And it should be exciting. No doubt this is a very challenging time. But it is a very exciting time, as well. We are witnessing nothing short of a rebirth of our world. And that is both painful, and also joyous.
JTR,
July 3, 2021
For more up to date scientific models than what the dogmatic materialists are offering, see:
Einstein, Schrodinger, Wheeler, Bohm, Vandana Shiva, Joanna Macy, Ken Wilber, David Suzuki, Rupert Sheldrake, Rene Weber, Michael Talbot, Thomas Kuhn, and Allan Wallace, as a foundation.
Unfortunately I am too new to feng shui to give specific references on that subject at this point, sorry. But stay tuned! I am always learning, and you should be too! That is, after all, the true scientific mindset, and the only intelligent approach to life. Shun dogma. Stay open-minded. And… Keep learning!
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
Wisdom from the East, Clarified: Paradigm shifts, dying ideologies, and real feng shui vs fast food feng shui
Posted in Uncategorized with tags anthropology, Ayurveda, environment, environmental economics, environmental philosophy, environmental policy, environmental theory, feng shui, health, history, meditation, paradigm shift, philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, political philosophy, science, scientism, social analysis, social commentary, social philosophy, social psychology, social theory, sociology, TCM, wisdom of the East, yoga on July 3, 2021 by jtoddring(Some people will think that talk of things such as feng shui is frivolous. To them I say, bracket that distaste – feng shui is a very small part of this discussion, which covers very important ground in terms of philosophy, the philosophy of science, history, anthropology, sociology, political-economy, ecology, science and scientism, and the state of modern industrial society. Please read on.)
Many people who think they are scientific, and even think they are scientists, have an out-dated view of the world, based in a pre-Einsteinian and pre-quantum physics paradigm of materialist reductionism. They are actually the great majority of “scientists”, doctors and academics. They are over a century behind. And they are stridently dogmatic in defending their dying materialist ideology.
Things like feng shui, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), or yogic, Buddhist or Taoist philosophy, are branded heretical and unscientific by these medieval high priests. But in fact, all these things fit perfectly well in the new paradigms, or models, arising out of modern science itself. (Science is the slow man in the race, and is only now catching up with the mystics.) These things don’t fit with the old materialist reductionist model of Newton and Descartes. But that 400 year old model is dying now, and that model itself does not fit with modern physics, ecology, systems theory, epigenetics, or recent mind-brain research.
How then, should we view these things that were previously thought heretical or taboo? Firstly, we must clarify that there is no linear causality. That means control is an illusion. It also means that the position of the stars or the design of your home, for example, do not singularly cause or determine your fate. They are an influence, among many other influences. If we are intelligent, we will take a holistic or full systems approach, and try to maximize positive systems influences and dynamics, while reducing or mitigating negative influences or dynamics. That is what yoga, Ayurveda, TCM, t’ai chi, chi gong, meditation and feng shui seek to do; exactly as permaculture or intelligent systems design seeks to do. The principle applies to ecosystems, landscapes, gardens, farms, homes, buildings, communities, relationships, study, work, spirituality, prosperity, resilience, and health. This is the logic behind feng shui, for example: intelligent design of systems for maximum harmony and well-being.
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E=MCsquared. Energy = mass x the speed of light squared.
What does that mean? Among other things, it means this. Einstein showed matter and energy and inter-convertible. In fact, both Einstein’s famous equation and also quantum physics show that matter is, in reality, condensed energy. Hence, not only does every living being have an energy field, and every thing, and every material substance, has an energy field, but all beings and things are in fact energy fields. Materialist reductionists quiver and foam at the mouth at such talk, but modern physics proved what I am saying over a century ago, and the materialist reductionist world view or paradigm is crumbling now, in any case.
Feng shui, like Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda and yoga, is based on a knowledge of how various patterns or formations of energy interact. If we are intelligent, we will be curious, and look into these bodies of knowledge, with an open mind and some serious humility, since they fill out the radically incomplete, grossly inadequate, and dying modern Western model or paradigm of science, and of health.
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There is no longer any question that acupuncture works. (See David Suzuki, The Nature of Things) Western conventional medicine has been forced to acknowledge it works. It has been used successfully for addiction recovery, and has been used as a replacement for anesthetics for surgery, so it definitely is proven to work. That should logically lead us to conclude that the medical model of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is sound, since that is the basis of acupuncture. TCM is based in Taoist knowledge and philosophy, acquired through meticulous empirical observations from more than 2,000 years of field experiments. That should then give confidence, logically, that Taoist knowledge and philosophy is sound. Feng shui is also based in Taoist knowledge and philosophy, and hence, we should have confidence that that system is also sound.
The hubris of modern Western society must be shattered, and now. Time to grow up. We have been boisterous and arrogant adolescents for far too long. It is a much bigger world than we were taught to believe. Our minds must now become open to the East – and on an equal basis, as Bertrand Russell urged decades ago – along with the Global South, indigenous knowledge, and knowledge from the past, particularly from the Enlightenment, the Romantics, the Renaissance and the ancients. Clearly and undeniably, the modern Western and Westernized world is drunk with power, suicidal, ecocidal, imperialist, and hell-bent on a course leading to the collapse of our civilization (sic). Our hubris will be our self-destruction if we carry on like this any longer. It is time for a little humility, and a good deal more open-mindedness.
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Science did not begin in Europe in the 17th century. That is a conceit that needs to be laid to rest. The Islamic, Arab world preserved science from ancient Greece, and further developed it, before passing it generously to Europe (which was still by and large in an anti-intellectual dark age) through Moorish Spain, in the Spanish Renaissance of the 8th to 13th centuries, and then, 500 years later, to the Italian Renaissance. We owe, not the birth, but the rebirth of science, therefore, to the Spanish and Italian Renaissance, and to Islamic, Arabic society, and only secondarily to people like Newton, Bacon and Descartes. A little humility now will save our skin. It cannot be emphasized enough.
If by science, we mean an empirical method of investigating life, then science began in ancient Greece, and India and China, and probably in many other places, thousands of years ago. Modern science, which is a mere 400 years old, has produced great knowledge, and powerful technology. But we are foolish in the extreme and dangerously deluded if we equate technological power with wisdom, or even understanding. That surge in scientific knowledge and technological power has made modern society arrogant and filled with hubris, presuming we understand more than we do. That is error number one.
Science requires an open mind, and that requires humility. Dogma kills science, and dogma is what we have descended into. That is not science. It is scientism: which is the dogmatic and anti-scientific clinging to presumption, orthodoxy, high priests, official doctrines and an official canon.
Scientism is a form of medieval scholastic dogmatism, which is an ideology, a form of secular fundamentalism. That is what reigns now, not science. That is the second error: to take our over-confidence, and turn it into a religion, and a cult.
The third big error was to adopt Cartesian dualism. The fourth was to adopt a Newtonian mechanistic, atomistic, materialist reductionist model, paradigm or world view.
The fifth great error of modern science was to elevate that which can be measured, to the status of the only things worth investigating. The sixth was then to assume that what cannot be measured is either unimportant or unreal, non-existent.
These six errors, plus the common problems of (7) group-think, (8) egotism and careerism – it is more important to defend one’s ego than to value the truth, (9) corruption by conflicts of interest – science is overwhelmingly controlled by big business and the state, both of which have their own agendas, and truth is not high on the list; and (10) cultural bias, cultural arrogance, or simple racism – modern Europeans know best, therefore indigenous knowledge, Eastern knowledge, ancient, medieval and Renaissance knowledge, must all be worthless… These ten errors, we can now count and list, have blinded science, and have blinded the great majority of scientists, academics and intellectuals, and have blinded modern industrial society more broadly. That blindness will be our downfall, if not corrected immediately.
Again, humility and open-mindedness are imperative, and urgently needed. We are myopic blind men, quarrelling in the dark over shadows on a cave wall. And we will remain so, until and unless we redefine empiricism more broadly, and more thoughtfully, and until we admit our ignorance, so that we can once again learn.
Remember Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy. Socrates famously said, “I am the wisest person I know, because I am the only one who realizes his ignorance.” Begin with an open mind, and an admission of ignorance, or at least, an admission that what we think we know, could turn put to be entirely wrong. Otherwise, we are not practising science, nor are we even practicing basic intelligence.
There is a Zen story worth conveying here. A scholar comes to a Zen master and asks to be taught. The Zen master offers the scholar some tea. The scholar says yes. The Zen master pours the tea into the scholar’s cup, fills the cup to the top, then keeps on pouring. The scholar exclaims, “Stop! My cup is full!” The Zen master replies. “Precisely. Your cup is full. You mst empty your cup before it can be filled.” We are that bombastic scholar, heads too full of preconceptions to learn anything, or even to see or to hear.
As geneticist David Suzuki said, we really have very little understanding of life. He was talking about modern science. But ancient, Eastern, mystical and indigenous knowledge traditions have a great, immense understanding of life, in vast scope and tremendous depth. Modern science, by comparison, is obsessed with the dust on the lens as it peers obsessively through a microscope at the molecular structure of the bark of a single tree. “What is this forest you speak of? Sounds like flakey, voodoo mumbo-jumbo to me!”
Watch Mr. Magoo. That is modern science. Too narrow, too myopic, and therefore, stumblng blindly along. We must take a step back, and broaden and deepen our perspective. As Shakespeare said, “There is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy.”
To abandon science would be asinine, to put it bluntly; but to worship what we narrowly define as science, and hence, to turn science into a quasi-religious cult of scholastic dogmatism, which we have done, and to presume that what we narrowly define as science is the only valid means of acquiring knowledge, and the only valid body of knowledge, is even more asinine.
Science, to be truly worthy of the name, must be empirical, not dogmatic. But science, even then, can only tell us how the world works, and even that in a very limited and superficial degree. Science, even when practiced well, which means empirically, cannot tell us how to live, what is meaningful, what is ethical or virtu or what is wise or unwise to do. Science offers no values, only facts, or more pften, presumed facts and partial truths. Science therefore, even at its best, must be subservient to philosophy. And philosophy, to be practiced well, must be subsevient to experience, and to a radical empiricism. This is not a circular argument: it is taking empiricism to a much deeper level.
We can call it mysticism, or prophetic vision, but I prefer the term, radical empiricism, borrowing from William James and Allan Wallace. This means we take figures such as Jesus, the Buddha, Shakara, Moses, Meister Eckhart and Hildegaard of Bingen, Mohammed and Lao Tzu seriously. And we take our own experience seriously. Science now proclaims itself empirical, while invalidating direct experience. The radical self-contradiction is not perceived, but that is the root of our blindness in the modern world.
If you want to understand where science went wrong, read William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion. And read Emerson and Thoreau, America’s two greatest philosophers, for good measure. Until we admit our mistake, and radically expand our conception of empiricism and valid sources of knowledge, both science and modern “scientific” industrial society will remain blindly destructive, and we will continue to be on a collision course with reality, with full steam ahead.
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This short essay began as a brief musing on feng shui, but then I remembered that many people are very narrow-minded about such things, so I wrote a short preamble. That preamble has taken on a life of its own now. But that is ok. Let’s continue.
As I have said before, and written before, the old paradigm, model or world view of Newtonian-Cartesian materialist reductionism, is dying, and we are in the midst of a paradigm shift which has been going on for over a century. (Old dogmas die slowly.) But… What is wrong with the old paradigm? Well, besides the fact that it no longer fits with the scientific evidence, the mechanistic, materialist world view has been blamed for being one of the root causes of our destruction of nature, and for the growing environmental emergency we face. That indictment holds water, and can scarcely be denied, since the mechanistic, materialist world view reduces all living beings, ecosystems, plants, animals, forests, wetlands, oceans, rivers, and human beings, to the level of mere objects, mere things, to be exploited and harvested, and disposed of at will.
For the same reason, the materialist world view has led to a deep alienation between humans and nature; which means, between ourselves and life. That alienation is in turn driving people into mass addiction, addictive consumerism, compulsive escapism and perpetual distraction, mental illness, suicide, anxiety and depression. So yes, for many reasons, aside from purely scientific reasons, the old model needs to be discarded, post haste.
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One example of the utter failure and disastrous results of the grossly flawed model, paradigm, or world view of mechanistic, materialist reductionism, is the growing environmental crisis, as I have said, and as many have pointed out. Another example is the tremendous failure of modern “scientific” medicine. Despite all our much-vaunted scientific knowledge, we still have essentially zero success in treating the skyrocketing prevalence of chronic degenerative diseases, or mental illness and emotional distress. We can and do push freight train loads of pharmaceutical drugs, but these treat only the symptoms, and even those with patchy and poor success. The underlying causes remain largely ignored, because they require a holistic perspective, and that contradicts the official cannon and dogma of materialist reductionism. People are living longer, yes, but they are in general deeply unhealthy, both physically and psychologically, and they are living longer while saddled with multiple pharmaceutical dependencies, each of which has its own, often serious side-effects.
For context, a couple of figures that are not widely known, should become known. the US government has reported that 80% of pharmaceutical drugs have not been adequately tested for safety or effectiveness. That should be alarming. But why would this be the case? How could this be the case? It is the case because the big pharmaceutical companies are driven by concerns for profits, over and above public health. And it is the case because the pharmaceutical industry took over the medical colleges and the medical industry a century ago. It is corruption above, and dogmatic group think and indoctrination below – in the medical health field, and in our very much business-run society more broadly.
Worse yet, according to the US government, in the US alone, every year 200,000 people die from taking pharmaceutical drugs – correctly prescribed and correctly taken. That’s the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every day. The US government report never made it on the news media, and the governments and the corporate and state media don’t mention it, because Big Pharma is too powerful to cross. Meanwhile, the much-decried natural health and traditional Eastern (TCM and Ayurveda) medical-health methods produce zero documented deaths per year. This is one of the many reasons why conventional Western pharmaceutical-obsessed medicine is in crisis, and is furthermore seeing an exodus to natural medicine and Eastern methods.
Andrew Weill is right: the future of medicine is integrative medicine. That means, we take the best of modern Western conventional medicine, and integrate it with the best of natural and Eastern medicine. The faster the dogmatists accept the fact, the better off we will all be.
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Now, to briefly discuss feng shui – from a layman’s perspective.
It seems to be the case that Western feng shui is a modern Western pop culture, New Age invention, and is not in accord with classical feng shui. So, if you are going to use feng shui, which in essence is a practice of harmonizing energy in homes and buildings and landscapes, make sure it is classical feng shui, not fast food feng shui. Second, it must take into account the specific home design, compass orientation, and natal charts. I’d say this is too complex to do on your own. Get a consultation with someone knowledgeable in classical feng shui. Otherwise, it can be like wiring up your own electrical breaker panel – too risky for novice hands. Consult a pro.
Normally I’d say you can do everything yourself. You can design and grow a garden, and grow your own food if you want to. You can build your own home, design it and build it yourself, even wire it, if you study up. But for wiring a breaker panel, get an electrician. It is out of bounds for laymen and novices. And for feng shui, consult someone who knows what they are doing. Otherwise, you could cause disharmony and harmful negativity when you wanted to do the opposite.
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I would offer the same advice with regards to yoga and meditation: stick to the classic methods, tested and proven to be effective for over 2,000 years. When you are fully enlightened, then you can invent your own style. Until then, bow your head before the true masters, and humbly learn what they have to teach.
(Be wary of New Age MacThis and MacThat. It is far too unreliable, to hit and miss, too much a case of Russian roulette, to entrust your health or spirituality to it – even though there may be, and are, some gems among that heap.)
For yoga, I know of two schools that are definitely reliable, who teach classic yoga: Sivananda and Kripalu. Other approaches or styles may not harm you, but you may not get the same depth or benefit, either.
For meditation, I would stick to Zen, Theravada, or one of the four traditional schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Again, New Age meditation teachers may not do you any harm, but you may simply be wasting your time, and likely are.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Not in this case. Not with yoga or meditation. Those systems and methods are based on thousands of years of experience. Stick to the classic techniques that have been developed over millennia. Avoid the fluff.
Modern society is addicted to novelty and newness. Everything must be the latest fashion – even in spirituality or health. But this is foolish. The best things remain unchanging. Only the superficial things change. Do not be superficial. Stick to what works. In home design and construction, sometimes in technology (though not always) and in many fields, new ideas are sometimes better ideas. Not when it comes to yoga, meditation, or spirituality.
Remember the saying from Aikido: “Big lake, but shallow. Small lake, but deep.” It is depth you should be looking for, not novelty. This is not a shopping mall approach. Find a path that works for you, and that is not based in some New Age egotist’s self-aggrandizement scheme, and stick to that. Find novelty elsewhere in your life. (Plant a garden, and read widely.) When it comes to health and spirituality, you need to focus, and you need depth. Don’t jump all over the place. Don’t dig shallow wells. Study broadly, think broadly, discuss broadly – but pick a spiritual or health approach that works for you, and go deep. That will produce results. Skittering across the surface of things will not.
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For clarity sake, let me add this. While it is now imperative that we allow the East into our minds on an equal footing, as Bertrand Russell urged many years ago, and do the same for indigenous knowledge, the Global South, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and the ancients – because if we do not, modern Western, and Westernized industrial society, will most likely destroy the very basis of life on Earth; that does not mean we must have a mass conversion to Eastern or native spirituality. We must become renewed in our confidence, our dignity, and also our humility, yes. But we can still keep our own spiritual traditions, or our secular traditions, if that is what you prefer. It simply means that we must, of necessity, now broaden our minds.
The stakes now, are not only our wisdom, or capacity for wisdom, or our health, happiness or well-being, but our very survival. We need to draw upon the best of human knowledge and wisdom, from across the world, and across the spans of time. It is truly that imperative. And it should be exciting. No doubt this is a very challenging time. But it is a very exciting time, as well. We are witnessing nothing short of a rebirth of our world. And that is both painful, and also joyous.
JTR,
July 3, 2021
For more up to date scientific models than what the dogmatic materialists are offering, see:
Einstein, Schrodinger, Wheeler, Bohm, Vandana Shiva, Joanna Macy, Ken Wilber, David Suzuki, Rupert Sheldrake, Rene Weber, Michael Talbot, Thomas Kuhn, and Allan Wallace, as a foundation.
Unfortunately I am too new to feng shui to give specific references on that subject at this point, sorry. But stay tuned! I am always learning, and you should be too! That is, after all, the true scientific mindset, and the only intelligent approach to life. Shun dogma. Stay open-minded. And… Keep learning!
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