The Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, or world view, of atomistic, dualistic, mechanistic reductionism, is a very recent, 400 year old delusion, a recent blink of the eye, and is now crumbling as an ideology, world view or paradigm. It is also by no means “scientific”. The evidence now refutes it. It is detritus, delusion, dogma, now refuted by quantum physics – and therefore, a thoroughly unscientific, lingering, but slowly dying, quasi-religious pseudo-science, clung to by dogmatic secular fundamentalists. Stop calling it scientific.
*
We could say, of course, that the 400 year old paradigm, or way of viewing the world, which is materialist reductionism, did have some degree of validity and usefulness – and that is true, of course. It divided the world, *in our minds*, into myriad, ever smaller pieces, giving rise to an explosion of knowledge about the way natural phenomena arise, change, and pass away. But knowledge is not understanding, much less wisdom. And dividing the world in our minds has ultimately proven disastrous – nay, catastrophic – leading us toward the brink of self-annihilation, while destroying and despoiling life on Earth at ever increasing speeds, and while producing great and increasing conflict, strife, alienation, inner hollowness, a terrible loneliness, sense of meaninglessness, and an insatiable hunger to fill the resulting inner void, leading to endless consumerism, materialism, escapism, addiction, voyeurusm, vicarious living, perpetual restlessness, anxiety, depression, mental illness and compulsive entertainment addiction, thereby accelerating the downward spiral, into further alienation, hollowness, and insanity. Clearly, this must change.
The world view of materialist-reductionism could also be described as a mental map, which all theories, dogmas, paradigms, philosophies and ideologies are. Some are more usrful or more destructive than others. Nazi idrology is incredibly destructive. Materialist reductionism, which is foolishly still referred to as “science”, is only slightly less destructive – and perhaps even more destructive.
Moreover, aside from usefulness versus destructiveness, a mental map, philosophy, paradigm or world view can be assessed based upon its degree of relative accuracy, in its ability to accurately describe the nature of reality. By that measure, as well as being incredibly powerful, in ways that have in some senses been useful and beneficial, and simultaneously, in other ways, being incredibly destructive, the materialist-reductionist paradigm has, of course, some degree of accuracy or validity. We know what molecules and atoms are, how metalurgy works, etc. But its accuracy is severely limited, as a mental construct, lens, map, or way of viewing the world. What we can call this Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, which is atomistic, mechanistic, dualistic, and materialist-reductionist, is in some measure accurate, useful, and valid. But it also grossly distorts our perception of reality, life, the cosmos, and the nature of being and reality.
Imagine if you wanted to travel the world, and you had to choose between a map made in ancient Greece in 500 BC, and a map made in the 21st century using satellite imagery. Which one would be more accurate and more useful? Clearly the 2,500 year old map had some accuracy, validity and usefulness, but it was extrenely limited, with enormous blind spots, and enormous distortions of the real world. Well, our maps are outdated, once again. And the mental map which is the Newtonian-Cartesian, materialist-reductionist paradigm or world view, is now worse than outdated and obsolete – it must be abandoned, in light of the now mountainous and undeniable evidence, and it must be abandoned now, before our extremely distorted view of the world, destroys us all. Fortunately, this is exactly what is in the process of happening, as we speak.
*
A paradigm shift is underway. And the awakening has begun. Now, perhaps, we can begin to combine knowledge with wisdom, thereby saving ourselves from a self-made hell on Earth, and a self-generated final oblivion.
Reality is non-dual. Being is One. And thou art that.
But don’t take anyone’s word on things. Examine things for yourself. See for yourself.
Question everything. This is the path to enlightenment – and to a new renaissance, and a rebirth of our world.
JTR,
February 3, 2024,
Villa Samadhi,
Uruguay
(See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions; Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces; Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy; Alan Watts, The Book; Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self; and Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality.)
It’s good to see some of the millennia-old illusions about history being slowly peeled away. To speak of the Roman Empire as, “the world’s greatest killing machine” is refreshingly honest. But to refer to it as bringing “civilization” continues the perpetuation of old delusions. A millennia-old Stockholm syndrome is just one part of that. The Roman Empire was a slave empire, based on mass murder, looting, rape and pillage, oligarchy, and mass theft of riches, culture and land – hardly civilized, but rather, starkly barbaric.
To begin to cease to talk of Celts and other non-Roman and non-Greek cultures as barbarians, is a great improvement, however. And to see medieval, ancient, and earlier peoples in a more human and less pejorative light is likewise a refreshing progress, out of the nearly universal modern delusions of inevitable linear “progress”.
But to refer to “experts” continues the anti-empirical, anti-science, scholastic habits of automatic and unthinking, slavish veneration and deference to imagined authority figures. How about using the more neutral term, scholars?
Moreover, why on Earth do we continue to call mass murderers and slavers, such as Constantine, for example, as “The Great”? Staggering delusion, that is.
Terms and concepts need a radical questioning and re-examination, in terms of history, anthropology, sociology, social theory, politics, and broader usage. The terms and concepts, including, civilization, barbarians, progress, and the like, all require a radical re-thinking. Terms such as “experts” are best dropped completely, replaced by reference to scholars, researchers or thinkers. Refering to power elites as “important people”, is yet another delusional habit, exemplifying a general and nearly universal case of mass Stockholm syndrome. Refer instead, simply, and more accurately, to the business, religious or political elite (elite in terms of being a power elite, not a moral or intellectual elite, of course), or refer to the landed aristocracy (not “nobility”), or simply call them the priviledged classes, ruling class, or the power elite.
Likewise, the term anarchy needs to be used with precision: it stems from the Latin, an-archos, meaning simply, the absence of an overarching or centralized power. To use the term anarchy as a synonym for chaos simply reveals that you are completely ignorant of political-economy, political philosophy, history, anthropology and sociology. Only the ignorant and the deceitful use the term in such a manner.
Terms such as terrorists, freedom fighters, rebels, populists, nationalists, and many more, require a careful, thoughtful, critical re-assessment. Dogma must die. Words have power. Therefore we must, of course, question them, and think critically about them. Naming is powerful. It can be spell-binded and blinding, fetters and shackles and chains for consciousness, nations, peoples and lives, leading to a conquest of minds, and a resulting mass delusion and subjugation; or it can be clarifying, and an act of liberation. Choose your words carefully, therefore.
Illusions, delusion, prejudice, dogma and self-deceit are beginning to be peeled away, but we can do well to accelerate the process.
Confusion, illusion, denial and delusion, remain the norm, both inside and outside of academia, to this day. Let’s change that, shall we? It’s high time for a new renaissance.
– J. Todd Ring,
Author of Enlightened Democracy,
The People vs The Elite,
The Failure of Propaganda,
Importing from China,
When Liberals & The Left Lose Their Minds,
The Collapse of the West,
And
Slavery Or Rebirth
December 14, 2023
Here is the generally well-done documentary that sparked this set of further musings on history, its uses and abuses:
My response to the lovely doc, above:
Excellent documentary – but you are still talking about “the glory of Rome”, and the “civilization” of Rome? Come now. Delusions die hard, but die they must.
(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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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!
Yuval Harari is a shallow thinking dogmatic materialist who swallows whole and uncritically the dominant pseudo-scientific paradigm of mechanistic materialist dualism, which of course is an extremely bleak view of the world, and he is also steeped in an equally uncritical post-modernist nihilism; and he tries to wed that sordid mess to Buddhism. But he represents bad Buddhism. If you want to understand Buddhist philosophy, read Allan Wallace, Ken Wilber, Alan Watts, Joanna Macy, Chogyam Trungpa or the Dalai Lama. If you want to misunderstand Buddhism, read Yuval Harari.
JTR,
April 22, 2021
Post-Script: If you want to know the core message and vision for humanity of Yuval Harari, listen to this. Bleak is an understatement. It is dystopian. He is openly calling for a global dictatorship – his words. This interview, by the way, is probably the most important thing you can listen to, watch or read this year, if not ever in your life.
Here are thoughts on a short video linked below, but I would frankly assert that the thoughts presented here in this reflection or meditation are more interesting and more useful than the talk that they are commenting on.
This seems to me an unnecessarily obscure talk (linked below), even though the subject is admittedly challenging.
The question is, or one of the central questions is, what is the relationship between our perception of reality, and reality itself. It is extremely useful to state the problem, and the subject, clearly from the outset.
And we should remember what the brilliant philosopher Alan Watts said: “Most metaphysics are unconscious metaphysics, and unconscious metaphysics are bad metaphysics.”
Then you may, at some point, explicitly state what you are definitely not saying, or not intending to say, at least. That is, I would say, for myself, I am not asserting a philosophical position or world view of nihilism, eternalism, dualism, materialist-reductionism, atomism, or a mechanistic view, nor solipsism, Skepticism, Sophism, Interactionism or Idealism.
What that leaves is non-dualism, or some other cruder approximations to it, such as an ecological world view, a systems theory world view, or pantheism, panpsychism or monism. I am asserting non-dualism is the reality, to be clear and precise.
But then you must clarify further.
Here Chomsky seems to agrees with the dominant view in science, which is to take Hume’s challenge to our assumption of a correct, accurate or valid relationship between our thoughts, mental constructs or perceptions of reality and reality itself, seriously enough to refuse to say anything about reality, but to speak only of our perceptions of reality. Of course, that is solipsism, or radical Skepticism, and is unlivable in the real world of daily life. So in practice, we pay lip service to Hume, if we pay any attention to him at all, but then disregard him completely. That utterly anti-empirical and anti-science, utterly unfounded mode of thining and of relating to the world, is what we erroneously call science, philosophy, and common sense.
In short, neither science, in general, though there are some scientists who differ, nor philosophy, nor the common view of life and reality, has any firm basis in reality. Who answers Hume adequately? Only Nagarjuna, the preeminent philosopher of Buddhism, and the Middle Way view of Buddhist philosophy, I would strongly suggest, and state flatly.
Chomsky is brilliant in political analysis, though not infallible, brilliant in political philosophy, and brilliant in linguistics. He does not seem so brilliant in terms, of metaphysics or the philosophy of science, but more run of the mill, and mistaken.
Below is a high level talk by a theoretical physicist, which I will critique here. Yes, that is audacious, but not unfitting. Here are my thoughts.
Really wonderful and lucid talk that is presented here by Michio Kaku, aside from the frankly naïve view of technology as inevitably liberating; however, there is another major oversight and flaw. This is the view of the dying scientific paradigm of Newton and Descartes, in essence: despite the talk of string theory and quantum physics, it is still locked in the paradigm of mechanistic materialism – it is based in an atomistic, mechanistic, dualistic, materialist reductionism, which quantum physics – bravely addressed – along with ecology, systems theory, chaos theory, epigenetics, and mind-brain research, all show is obsolete and out-moded.
Yes, Newtonian mechanics still work as useful equations, but the world-view underlying it is what is out-moded. The underlying mechanistic and materialist bias and paradigm, makes the entire narrative akin to how we today would view a Ptolemaic scholar talking about the nature of life and the universe. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, as the great historian of science Thomas Kuhn called it. In the near future, when the paradigm shift is complete – and these things take decades and sometimes centuries – if we survive, we will look at this presentation of the nature of the cosmos as woefully inadequate and utterly crude.
It is time we embraced a non-dualistic, holistic and organic view of life and the cosmos. Yes, as Einstein said, consciousness is the hidden variable, the fifth force – and simply because we have not yet mathematically or by measurement verified that, does not change the fact that that is the sole logical conclusion from the evidence we have clearly seen. The science is clear, and the evidence is conclusive. We – other than a minority of scientists, sages, thinkers and others – have simply not yet made the shift in consciousness to accord with it.
Einstein, Schrödinger, Wheeler, Bohm, and Allan Wallace, point to the way ahead. As brilliant and accomplished, and affable, as Michio Kaku may be, and is, he does not represent the leading edge either in science or in philosophy. As Einstein said, “We must cease to talk about the particle and the field. The field is everything.” And, “The perception of a division between subject and object is a kind of optical delusion.” When we realize the non-dual nature of consciousness and matter, subject and object, and all phenomena, that will be the breakthrough that makes the Copernican Revolution look like a child’s tea party. And that is coming fast. We are moving in that direction – although it seems painfully slow – in reality, with great speed. This is the revolution of the mind that we have awaited, and that we urgently need.
We have confused wisdom with power, and quality of life with quantity of money and material goods. Until we correct that deep confusion, modern industrial society will be, and will remain, doomed to destroy itself. Cutting through illusion, therefore, is not a luxury for philosophers, scientists, monks and mystics alone. It is an urgent necessity for us all.
As Plato said, everyone has opinions, but few have knowledge. It is important that we keep that in the back of our minds, if not the fore.
Two levels, there are, in everything: there is the question of how to live, and how to construct a society that is just, good, or intelligent, which is the worldly aspect, pertaining to moral, social and political philosophy; then there is the ultimate question of the true nature of being and reality. Extremely few people do a good job in addressing either one, only a handful have done a good job in addressing both. This is an important thing to realize and to bear in mind.
In terms of moral, social and political philosophy:
No man is an island, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. That means, we are all interconnected and interdependent. That means that kindness, compassion and mutual aid are not only virtuous, but also a matter of basic intelligence, or enlightened self-interest.
From that flows an ethos of compassion, community, solidarity, cooperation or mutual aid. And from that flows an ethos, a value of, and a profound respect for, liberty or freedom, since it is certainly experienced to be a violence, an act of aggression, and a cruelty and great suffering to be made someone else’s slave, or to have our freedom unduly constrained, and to be dominated by any man, woman, or system.
Taking compassion and freedom as our core founding values, or community and freedom, or liberty, equality, solidarity, the founding values of the Enlightenment, however you may prefer to say it, will produce a just, equitable, and eminently sane society, and in the relative sense of the term, an enlightened democracy. That is all we need to know and to remember in order to build a better world, and to resolve the great social, economic, political and environmental crises which we face now. But we will have to be bold about it, and swift. Remember that Jesus did not drive the money changers from the temple with a limp piece of leaf lettuce, but with a whip. Remove the money changers from power. Only then can we seriously begin to address the urgent problems confronting us.
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As to enlightenment, in the absolute or ultimate sense, or the nature of knowledge vs opinion, and the true nature of being and reality, we can say this.
In short, and to put the matter as succinctly as possible, we are born, as Kant rightly said, with innate frameworks of thought, an innate latticework or architecture of inborn thought constructs, through which we view and experience the world. As Descartes and Locke rightly said, we know that we are thinking, and we believe we are accurately percieving things as they truly are, but the accuracy of our perceptions is radically in question.
Thought relates to thought, and while we believe we are directly relating to things in the world, when we examine our minds closely, we see that we are relating directly, only to our own ideas about things, and not directly to phenomena or things themselves. That is, everything we percieve, think or experience, is filtered through an unconscious and habitual set of mental constructs, a set of filters and lenses, as well as social conditioning and indoctrination. We do not, therefore, relate to anything directly, but only to our own unconscious mental architecture of preconceived thought constructs, lenses and filters.
To put it in Buddhist terms, all phenomena (beings, things and events) are viewed by our minds with an unrecognized mental imputation. We think we see separate, concrete, divided beings and things; but while being exists, and Descartes was right on that, the “I” is imputed, and has no valid basis in reality. We impute or project a separation, permanence and division to phenomena, beings and things, where none exists in reality. As Einstein said, “The field is everything.”
Remember what Alan Watts said. “Most metaphysics are unconscious metaphysics. And unconscious metaphysics are bad metaphysics.” Question everything.
Descartes famously began modern philosophy, 400 years ago, by trying to go back to first principles, trying to make zero assumptions or unsupported premises (philosophy and science both are riddled with unconscious and unsupported assumptions) to see what we can know for certain, and then to build a coherent philosophy on that firm ground or foundation. He did not assume that any given authority is 100% certain in its reliability, nor was he willing to assume that any idea, theory, philosophy, ideology or theology is necessarily 100% reliable. That left only radical empiricism (and let us not fetishize an obsession with numbers and measurement, solely, any longer). In short, we must examine things for ourselves: that is, as the Buddha also urged, to not resort to simply taking someone’s word on things, as being the infallible truth.
Descartes said, What if I am dreaming? When I dream, things in the dream seem real, but when I awake, I realize I was only dreaming. How do I know I am not dreaming now? How do I know my perceptions of reality are accurate? Maybe they are 100% accurate, or 90%, or 1%, or completely illusory and delusional? How do I verify what is actially real or true?
Without seriously addressing this question of perception vs reality, and the problem of imputing realities to reality – as Hume asked, in his landmark work which radically transformed the entire landscape of Western philosophy, in 1776, and which no one yet has satisfactorily answered, in the West at least – there can be no sound foundation for either science or philosophy, and we will be wildly speculating, and completely unscientific and anti-empirical, without even knowing it.
And we are!
(Most scientists have never seriously addressed Hume, or this question, the problem of inference or imputation, which is foundational to any true, genuine, or valid empiricism, or any truly scientific or philosophical approach; and hence, do not really merit being called scientists. The same goes for great majority of philosophers, religious leaders, politicians, pundits, scholars, and social or political commentators: their words and views rest on thin air. They have all the reliability of quacking ducks, and so, their statements should be taken with a train load of salt.)
Descartes then realized, I am thinking, therefore I know, at least, that I exist. Cogito ergo sum. But he was mistaken, and radically so. And to my knowledge, no one has yet realized or pointed out his error – until now.
If there is thinking, and we do directly experience thinking, so we can confirm that much, then there must be consciousness, and existence or being, of some kind. The “I” in Descartes’ famous, “I think therefore I am”, however, is simply a habitual, unexamined, and utterly unsupported assumption – an unconscious mental imputation or projection, with no valid basis in reality, and no sound evidence to support it.
We then have:
A. Thinking is present
B. Therefore:
i, consciousness of some kind is present;
and
ii, being or existence of some kind is present.
We know therefore that there exists consciousness and its contents, being or existence of some kind, and space. There is no basis for presuming or imputing duality, permanence or division of any kind, however. And we should remember, distinction is not the same as division. The crests and troughs of waves on the ocean are distinct, but there is no real division between crest and trough, or between waves. The waves are a formation or movement of the ocean, but the ocean while ever changing, remains essentially unchanged, and one. Reflect deeply on this, and the nature of all phenomena will become clear.
The assumption or imputation of a separate self, an “I”, a self that is a separate island in a vast cosmos, is wholly unsupported, and pure, anti-empirical and unscientific conjecture, speculation, or mere superstition – no matter how firmly or habitually we may believe it, and no matter how many others may believe it. The imputation or assumption of a duality between self and other, or any kind of duality of being, is similarly unsubstantiated mental flotsam, without any sound basis or empirical support whatsoever. The burden of proof rests on those who assert a positive claim of some entity, attribute or thing, by the way, and not on those who deny it, for lack of evidence. (See Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy.)
Remember, it was only yesterday, in the long view of human history, that everyone “knew”, and was absolutely certain, that the Earth was the centre of the universe. It just so happened that everyone was wrong.
Not long ago, slavery was thought to be natural, normal, ethical, and just. Virtually everyone, from Aristotle and emperors, to popes, priests, “learned men”, scholars, scientists and the common people, knew that slavery was natural, normal and just. But everyone was wrong.
In both cases, what was assumed by everyone to be unquestionably true, turned out to be flatly and completely mistaken and wrong. It is the same with the nearly universal belief in duality. We are, as Plato said, dwellers in a cave of shadows. But enlightenment, or waking up to reality, is entirely within our reach.
Enlightenment, it should be added, does not mean floating off into space, on some mystical cloud. It means, quite simply, waking up. It means seeing reality clearly, for the first time, and abiding in that awareness of the non-dual nature of emptiness and form, being and reality, with universal compassion, indestructible peace, and natural, spontaneous, intelligent responsiveness, as the naturally arising result, of simply being fully and truly awake.
*
Does this mean nothing exists? No, that is nihilism, and it is a delusion, as the Buddhists have also made clear – and a dangerous delusion. Does that mean everything exists in the mind, and that only the mind exists? No, that is philosophical idealism, or in Buddhist terminology, the Mind Only school; and that, while closer to the truth than nihilism, is also a misperception with regards to the true nature of reality.
Does that mean that the dualism of Descartes, and his materialist bias, along with Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe, should be rejected? Yes.
Newtonian mechanics still work, as crude approximations which have their uses in technology, for example, but the non-dualist view of Spinoza turns out to be far more accurate as a theory, paradigm or world view, and will lead us to better experiments, new discoveries, and most importantly, better judgement and better actions and policies, leading to a better society, and a better world.
Does it then mean we should adopt an interactionist view of mind and body, consciousness and matter? No. That would be vastly superior to the dualistic, mechanistic, materialist-reductionist world view which we now accept as “knowledge”, as “scientific”, “empirical”, as “educated” opinion, or as common sense. But that would be an ecological view, a holistic or organic view, which is vastly superior, more accurate and more sane, but still subtly imprecise.
No, it means that a non-dualistic view is the only view supported by either a radical empiricism, a thorough-going empiricism, a genuine empiricism, an authentically scientific approach; or by the philosophers and sages who wrote, spoke and elaborated the view of non-duality, in what has been called the Perennial Philosophy.
*
Note that quantum physics – if we are not unscientific about it, and anti-intellectual, or irrationally averse to drawning conclusions, based on clear and unequivocal evidence (a few “scientists” fit that description, and a very few “philosophers”) – demonstrated over a century ago, that the atomistic, mechanistic, dualistic, materialist-reductionism which we fell into, as in a bog, along with Netwon and Descartes, a mere four centuries ago, is a radically mistaken paradigm, theory, ideology, philosophy, or view of reality. What modern physics shows us, is not that elaborate conjectures of multiple universes or dimensions (all speculative conjecture) are necessarily the reality, but more pointedly, and of profoundly more importance, that the imagined duality, separation or division between subject and object, self and other, mind and body, and consciousness and “matter”, is entirely fictional, and does not exist.
As Enstein said, “The perception of a division between self and other is a kind of optical delusion.” “We must stop talking about the particle and field. The field is everything.”
Or as Schrodinger, the godfather of quantum mathematics, said, perhaps even more strikingly, “The number of minds in the universe is one.”
Note that Einstein said he believed in Spinoza’s view of God. That is, there is only one substance in existence, and you can call it God, or you call it nature, but it is One.
As the last of the ancient philosophers, Plotinus said: the many are One; the One manifests as many.
Or as the Tao Te Ching says, “Naming is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
Or as the Heart Sutra, the Heart of the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom, says:
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.
Form is not other than emptiness; emptiness is not other than form.”
This is explicitly stated to be a refutation and a denial of both nihilism and eternalism. The true nature of reality lies in the middle way between those two extremes, both of which are delusional.
How do we come, to first conceptually, and then experientially, and deeply, understand and then directly see and realize the non-duality of being and reality? Begin with reflecting deeply and often on the interdependence of all beings, things and phenomena. That will lead to higher awareness, liberation and enlightenment, and will avoid the terrible rotting bog, which is the mental prison, of nihilism.
Then examine the labelling process of the mind. That will finish the job of removing all remaining traces of doubt and dualistic delusion.
*
Spinoza and Plotinus, in the West, along with Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Mathew Fox, Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Joanna Macy, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Allan Wallace, Einstein, Shrodinger, Wheeler, Bohm, and myself; and Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Shankara and the Buddha in the East, to make a very incomplete list, have all expressed the perennial philosophy of non-duality. We would be wise to at least look into it, and to keep an open mind.
But above all, think for yourself. Question everything. And as the Buddha said, examine things for yourself, see for yourself.
As Shakespeare said, “There is more to heaven and earth than is contained in your philosophy.” “Life is rounded by a little sleep.”
And as Thoreau said,
“There is more day yet to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
We are not smaller or lesser than we had imagined, but infinitely more. Being and reality is basically good. The world is in a dark and terrible state because it is ruled by illusions. Illusion is the root of our problems. Uproot that, and we can live in peace, and in lives, and a world, more beautiful than we dare to imagine.
Compassion, and the unceasing search for truth: these are our best guides, and our sole concerns, if we are aware enough to live in ways that are truly sensible and intelligent. With compassion and the pursuit of truth (not the dogmatic presumption of truth) as our beacons, the future is brighter than our dreams. Without them, we are lost.
The choice, as always, is ours to make.
J. Todd Ring,
March 28, 2021
Post-Script:
It has become the fashionable norm in Western philosophy, in the past few centuries, for philosophers to write great tomes of books, often hundreds of pages long, and in the most arcane and obscure language possible. There is a good reason for this. It is to hide the fact that most philosophers have little or nothing to say. (The fetish is also for maximum footnotes, since ideas are not judged on their own merits, as all good science or philosophy does, but are judged by how well they can be entangled upon the architecture of presumed authority. We are thoroughly scholastic as a result, pre-Enlightenment, and more medieval than the medievalists.) In fact, aside from Socrates, Spinoza, Plotinus and Hume, and a handful of others, most of Western philosophy is the finger-painting of preschoolers. It is not worth the paper it is written on. That certainly includes all of post-modernism, which has virtually lobotomized intellectuals for the past fifty years. (Replace all the post-modernists, existentialists and phenomenologists with a study of Emerson, Blake and Thoreau, and we would be getting somewhere – beyond our present state, which is parked in a cul de sac.) In a few short words, we have said here what thousands of books on philosophy and politics have not, and could not, because they lacked the clarity, and the depth, to be able to do so. The importance of a work is not measured by its volume of words. The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the UN Charter of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, and Henry David Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, are short, pithy works, of unsurpassed importance. Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience is just fifteen pages, and the Heart Sutra is just two pages; but they are the most important political and philosophical tracts, respectively, ever written. Do not be fooled by wordiness and verbosity, or by esoteric and arcane language. Most of it is nothing but hot air – a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
See also:
The Hero With A Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
World As Lover, World As Self – Joanna Macy
Choosing Reality – Allan Wallace
The Holographic Universe – Michael Talbot
Mysticism and The New Physics – Michael Talbot
Dialogues With Scientists and Sages – Rene Weber
Dreamtime and Inner Space – Holgar Kalweit
The Way of Zen – Alan Watts
Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts
The Mother Of The Buddhas – Lex Hixon
The Perennial Philosophy – Aldous Huxley
No Boundary – Ken Wilber
Stolen Continents – Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress – Ronald Wright
Year 501: The Conquest Continues – Noam Chomsky
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control In Democratic Societies – Noam Chomsky
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
A Game As Old As Empire – John Perkins
Class Warfare – Noam Chomsky
The Power Elite – C. Wright Mills
Giants: The Global Power Elite – Peter Phillips
The New Rulers Of The World – John Pilger
Ancient Futures – Helena Norberg-Hodge
From The Ground Up – Helena Norberg-Hodge
The Chalice and The Blade – Rianne Eisler
The Ecology of Freedom – Murray Bookchin
Mutual Aid – Peter Kropotkin
The Empathic Civilization – Jeremy Rifkin
Elders’ Wisdom – David Suzuki
The Wayfinders – Wade Davis
The Great Turning – David C. Korten
Oneness vs The 1% – Vandana Shiva
Enlightened Democracy – J. Todd Ring
*
Here is a good introduction to epistemology, ontology and metaphysics, or the question of what is the true nature of appearances versus reality, in the short video below. It is only an introduction, however. Russell does not answer the question here, but merely sets the stage for the investigation, which is itself important, though incomplete. See Plato’s Parable of the Cave, Descartes, Spinoza, and finally, the Buddha and Nagarjuna.
Note that BR is among the best in terms of political philosophy, and among the worst for metaphysics. But he at least introduces the question of perception vs reality well.
Or start with my book, Enlightened Democracy, which synthesizes the best of East and West, North and South, ancient and modern, science and spirituality, the philosophical and the political, long term vision and immediate action. Then read Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Allan Wallace, Joanna Macy, Ken Wilber, Murray Bookchin, and the other major figures listed above.
(This ought to raise the hackles of the fundamentalists – both secular and religious. But I don’t write for the narrow of mind anyway, so I am not concerned about that.)
Now here is someone who knows what he is talking about: Rabbi David C. Cooper explains what non-dualism is, from the perspective of Kabbalah, which is the Jewish mystical tradition.
(Radio recording of talk is linked below.)
“The idea that we have of God as some being, as some thing, in essence, as a noun that we relate to – it’s me and God, or the creation and the creator – is really not the way mystical Kabbalah looks at the divine. It relates to God in what they term Ein Sof, which can be translated as boundlessness, which has no characteristic and no description, and is constantly present everywhere at all times, and is not some *thing*. So, the closest that we can come to, is describing it as a process, and this is the reason for the idea of God as a verb.”
(Note the similarity and congruence with Whitehead’s concept of the cosmos and all that is within it, and reality itself, as being a *process*, and not an assortment of things. We should look again at Whitehead, and Einstein, and Schrödinger, and Wheeler, and Bohm, because they are each saying something very similar to what the mystics have said for millennia – and are still saying, if any have ears to hear!)
“In the end, the East and West come together in the deepest meditative practices” – Rabbi David Cooper
And what Rabbi David Cooper says, is perfectly in accord with what Meister Eckhart said – and Meister Eckhart is the archetypal Christian mystic:
“There is nothing that I can point to that is not God. God is within me, and God is all around me.” – Meister Eckhart, 13th century Christian Dominican theologian, philosopher, and Germany’s greatest mystic (along with Hildegard of Bingen, who in turn, inspired St. Francis, and Da Vinci, and the Renaissance).
The New Testament Bible also sheds light on the subject, when the story is told of the disciples asking Jesus when the kingdom of heaven would come. (Everyone was expecting it any day.) And Jesus answered:
“It will not come by waiting for it.”
(There is a shocker that should make people stop and think.)
And Jesus continued:
“If the kingdom of heaven was above you the birds would have preceded you. If the kingdom of heaven was beneath you the fish would have preceded you. Rather, the kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Remember, we are created in the image of God. And moreover, how can all-pervasive mean anything other than all-pervasive? All-pervasive means, unless we are deeply neurotic or deeply indoctrinated into mumbo-jumbo double-think, quite simply, non-duality. All-pervasive is all-pervasive. That means there is nothing that is outside of God. God is the very fabric of reality, as the Jewish mystics have said: “God is the only reality.” And that is not a philosophical idealism which is being presented, but a non-dualist view.
How do evil and suffering arise? Evil arises from dualistic illusion – namely, the clinging to the illusion of a separate self, or ego, and all the greed, conflict, anger, lust, possessiveness, hubris and hate that arise out of self-cherishing and egocentricity. Suffering likewise arises out of not knowing who we are or even what is real. Suffering arises from the illusion of duality, the illusion of separateness and lack. This is precisely why the ancient Greeks held the highest maxim to be “Know thyself”, and why the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates, had that maxim written on his tombstone. Know thyself. Become awake. Seek enlightenment. They are saying the same thing. Wake up! Seek and ye shall find. “Let those who have eyes see.”
And in the Old Testament, God spoke, saying, “I AM that I am.” The clear indication was and is that God is beyond all names and forms, and all of our ideas or concepts, utterly transcendent – and the mystics, and Jesus, both avowed, imminent as well as transcendent. And when the sacred is both imminent and transcendent, and is not limited by any specific form, that is non-dualism, by definition.
Which is why Meister Eckhart could describe God as “the ground of being”. This is based in Biblical teachings, as well as his own direct experience as a mystic. Again, the maxim of Socrates and the ancient Greeks now makes perfect sense: know thyself, and all shall be revealed – because the true nature of your own being, is the true nature of Being itself, the Being of beings, as Heidegger tried to get at. Or as Bob Marley said, “Open your eyes, and look within.”
And that non-dualistic view echoes all the great sages, as I have said. In the Upanishads, the sacred texts of India, it is said, echoing Jesus, when it is said in the Bible, “The kingdom of heaven is within you”, and echoing the Old Testament passage, where God says, “I AM”, the Upanishads puts it directly: I am that I am – “And thou art that.”
The central teaching of the yogis is, Tat Tvam Asi, which translates as, Thou art that. Meaning, there is no duality between God and the cosmos, or between you and God.
The dualistic illusion is represented mythologically and allegorically, in the PARABLE, not to be taken literally, of the exile from Eden. We exiled ourselves, by falling into the (false) “knowledge” of duality. We fell into dualistic illusion, and hence, suffer for our illusions, and because of our illusions. We have lost our sense of home, and of paradise, because we have become blind, by way of falling into the spell of illusion – the illusion of duality. But the Book of Genesis has been taken far too literally for 3,000 years – and that is precisely why we are lost.
The Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist mystics all have understood this. It is high time we did too.
(See: Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces; Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality; Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self; Karen Armstrong, A History of God; Rabbit David Cooper, God Is A Verb; and Mathew Fox, Original Blessing, for important, further reading.)
We can be free, and awake, if we choose it. Grace is present. And duality, is an illusion.
As the Dalai Lama said, the universal religion is love. So on the outer level, the level of social and ethical teachings, there is a basic accord between the major religions: love thy neighbour. And when you get to the spiritual depths, to the mystic heart essence of the major religions, there too, you find accord: being and phenomena, reality and the cosmos, are non-dual.
Only the blind quarrel over what stands before them. One blind man says it is like a rope – feeling the elephant’s trunk. One says, no, it is like a pillar, feeling the leg. One says, no, it is like a broom, feeling the tail. One says, no, it is wrinkly – like a crumpled rug! And so they argue, and argue, and argue, and argue…..
As the Quran also says, everywhere you look is the face of Allah. Again, non-dualism is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world, as all the greatest religious scholars, such as Joseph Campbell, have also realized. And again, only the novices quibble.
(Meanwhile, the atheist materialists miss the banquet altogether, and stuff themselves on their own hollow dogmas, which never truly satisfy – which is why they tend to be so thorny and full of venom!)
The majority have a pre-school version of religion, and that is perfectly fine, but that is not all there is to spirituality – it goes much deeper than that.
Faith is not belief. There is a critical thing to understand. Faith, if it is sensible, is confident trust. When you put your food in the refrigerator, you have faith it won’t rot. You have confident belief, or confident trust. That is reasonable, sensible faith. Faith is not dogmatism, however. That is idiot faith. That is egotism, false pride, hubris, arrogance, narrowness, parochialism, prejudice, presumption, or smallness of mind.
Faith is confident trust, or confident belief. But when you SEE, you no longer need to rely on mere belief. Belief is the crutch of the blind – use it only until you learn how to see for yourself, and regain your lost sight. Then, belief becomes teaching – not a crutch, but a gift, freely given, to those who still remain sightless and blind, so they too can find their way. But “one who has seen”, does not cling to belief as though belief is salvation. No, belief does not save. Faith saves, and faith is not belief.
Realize who you are, and you will see. Then belief no longer enters into it. Belief is a raft. When you get to the other shore, you don’t carry the raft on your back. You put it down, and leave it for the next person to cross to the other shore.
The Renaissance caught a glimpse of our true nature, which is a spark of the divine – and it was that glimpse that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages. And that glimpse, and the resulting Renaissance, is exactly what we need again today.
“We are stardust, we are golden,We are caught in a devil’s bargain,And we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.” – Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
Alan Watts – who was an Anglican priest, but then decided it was too narrow of a space for him to be in, and who did his Masters of Divinity, and studied extensively and in great depth the philosophies and spiritual approaches of both East and West, and is probably the single greatest interpreter of Eastern philosophy for the Western world, and of Western religious philosophy for the Western world, which generally understands its own traditions and their richness not in the slightest – has many brilliant writings and many brilliant witticisms to convey. (He gets a bit gooey at the end, and resorts to what seems to me to be a much too laissez-faire approach, which for most people, simply induces torpor, sloth, self-indulgence, and a dreamy perpetual distraction – and a perpetual waste of time and of life, as a result. But his books which I have referenced here are extremely good, and extremely worthwhile to read. Only a rare few can match them.) In any case, he once said that there are “prickles and goos”. The prickles like to be very precise, or at least like to think of themselves as being very precise. They imagine they are being very scholarly and very scientific, but really, they are in general completely unable to see the forest for the trees. They never get beyond the mere surface of things. This, they bombastically pronounce to be “knowledge” – usually with a capital K. And wisdom, they believe, doesn’t exist. They are pretentious, blind fools, and Jesus and the Buddha would tell them the same.
The goos, on the other hand, like to reduce everything to a rosy vagueness – think, New Age pop psychology – and by doing so, they really do very little other than hang out, trying to look cool.
Precision is needed, in sum, but open-mindedness is needed too. Book learning is useful, but inadequate in itself. Experience trumps theory. Remember that.
Only novices squabble over doctrine. The mystics may engage in debate, may clarify important points, but they don’t attach such a great importance to words and belief, to doctrine and dogma and the written word, as has impaled the Western mind since the Book of Genesis.
We suffer from an idolatry of ideology in the West, and have for three millennia. (I am borrowing that phrase, from my favourite poet-musician, because it fits.) Our neurosis in the West is to think that our pet theories, dogmas and ideologies are THE truth. We are lost, precisely because we cling so tightly to our ideas.
Remember what Thomas Aquinas said after finishing the dictation of his Summa Theologica, his master work, which became the guiding text, along with the Bible (and unfortunately, along with the heresy of Augustine’s dark and jaundiced world-view, which came to overshadow the words and teachings of Christ, tragically). When he was finished, he put his head in his hands and wept, and said, “All that I have written is chaff compared to what I have seen.”
Remember what the very first line of the Tao Te Ching says:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”
Words and ideas and texts are very useful, but they can never contain the full, complete or ultimate truth. Language and concepts simply fail to capture, much less convey, that which is without bounds.
Shankara, the mystic and philosopher of Advaita Vedanta, from the yogic tradition of India, spelled this out quite clearly, when he says that language and human thought are dualistic by nature: they compare this to that – and inherently dualistic language and thought, therefore, cannot possibly ever capture or convey that which by nature is non-dualistic.
Plato’s Seventh Letter echoes the same essential point: language, concepts and words can never capture or convey the ultimate truth. The same message is related in the Lankavatara Sutra, from the Buddhist teachings, and it is again echoed in the Taoist teachings, which say:
“When the rabbits are caught, the snares are forgotten.When the fish are caught, the nets are forgotten. When the truth is caught, the ideas are forgotten.”
The Tao Te Ching gets straight to heart of things, with one crucial line:
“Naming is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
Peel away the names, the labels, which our mind projects onto reality, imagining or imputing a division which does not exist, and in that open space of perceiving or seeing without dualistic thought projections, the unified field of being becomes self-evident. That realization of the non-dual, inseparable nature of being and reality, is what is called enlightenment. But no theory can deliver it. You must see for yourself. Words cannot convey it, nor can concepts, theory or ideas capture it.
As the Lankavatara Sutra says:
“All of the scriptures are like a finger pointing at the moon. If you mistake the finger for the moon, you will understand nothing.”
This is the problem with fundamentalism. Not only are fundamentalists forever fighting with one another, quarrelling, bickering, engaging in hubris and false pride perennially ad nauseum, sowing war and division and strife. There are deeper problems even than that. Fundamentalists are like people trying to climb a ladder, but they are so in love with the ladder, that they cling to the rungs, and are frozen – not realizing they are not rising at all, but are simply stuck to the ladder, like imbeciles.
The ladder is a tool, a part of the journey – it is not the destination. As Alan Watts said, if you want to go to Paris, you don’t climb the sign post that says, “Paris”. Or as he also put it, in his humourous sort of way, rascally Zen master as he was: “Intellectuals commonly make the mistake of eating the menu instead of the meal.”
Don’t be anti-intellectual. That is not helpful. That is foolish. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that theory is the same thing as experience. And it is experience that matters above all.
A scholar is not necessarily a sage, and usually is not. A pandit is not the same as a rishi, in Indian terms. One has knowledge; one has wisdom – and the two are categorically different.
Second hand information is only useful up to a certain degree. You have to walk the path for yourself. Only you can walk through the door – no one can walk through it for you. Grace is real. Help is available. But you still have to undertake the journey for yourself. No one can walk it for you. You put one foot in front of the other, and you start, naturally, where you are, wherever you happen to be.
“Knock, and the door shall be opened.” But you have to choose to walk through the door once it is opened! Having a fervent belief, or “faith” as it is erroneously called, that this door is a very good door, and maybe the only door, is not enough. No matter how fervently you believe, believing in the holiness of the door is not the same thing as walking through the door!
Study, reflect, actively seek out wisdom teachings, meditate and pray, and discuss (humbly! and with an open mind) – but remember, that which you seek cannot be contained within any limited, finite space – whether that be concepts and ideas, philosophical doctrines, theories, dogmas, ideologies or words. Truth is far bigger than that.
Empty your cup, so that it can be filled. Empty yourself of your self, so that you can be filled. Compassion empties you – and there is the secret. Empty yourself by giving, and by compassion, and the imaginary separate “self” the ego, dissolves into the space of pure Being, whereby, you become naturally filled, without even seeking anything. Compassionate action matters, but it is the emptying process that comes with true compassion which is most liberating. By that emptying of the self of the self, grace enters.
“He who saves himself will lose himself. He who loses himself will find himself.”
Confidence and dignity are virtues, and are useful, even necessary, but so too, is humility, and an open mind and open heart. Meditate on the true nature of being and phenomena, which are impermanent, and meditate on death – not to be morbid, but to really realize that all things are fleeting, and so, become truly open to life. These two meditations, combined with universal compassion, will open the door to the heart, and to wisdom.
Remember that all phenomena are impermanent, and fleeting – and this life is fleeting. Death is a certainty, and the hour of death is totally uncertain. Therefore, there is not a second to waste. This life IS a precious opportunity – to discover the sacred, here and now, in this life, in the midst of the world, or apart from it, for a time, in the heart of your own being.
Do not sprint to win the race, as the Tibetans say, and, “Don’t be sporadic.” Be patient, be persevering, but seek the truth with energy and vigour!
Remember what the Upanishads advise – and urge: “You should seek the truth like a man whose hair is on fire jumps into a lake.”
Enjoy the journey, and try not to be side-tracked or too distracted. Solomon was right: everything in this world is fleeting; therefore, chasing after things of this world is like chasing the wind. Do not do that. That is foolish, and a waste of your precious time. As Solomon advised, love God, and live a simple life. But do seek the truth, and seek it with a passion!
Again, it must be re-affirmed, and it can’t be emphasized enough:
Practice compassion, live with compassion to every extent of your power, and:
Open letter to Russell Brand, regarding a video (linked below) titled,
Dualism vs Monism EXPLAINED!
Russell, who the hell are you interviewing?! The guy is clearly talking out of his ass. (Sorry for my directness and occasional bluntness. I was heavily influenced by Chomsky, Trungpa and Thoreau, and can’t seem to help it.) He says, “I’m a firm dualist….That’s a very Buddhist view.” No, sorry, flatly 180 degrees wrong.
In Buddhist philosophy or spirituality, the aspect of our own true nature, which is also the true nature of being, which is Wisdom Mind, or Universal Mind, or infinite wisdom, is depicted in visual form as Manjushri. Manjushri is shown seated on a lotus flower, holding a flaming sword in his right hand – which never harms any living being, but is used only to cut through illusions – and holds in his left hand a sacred text. That text is the Prajnaparamita Sutra, also known as the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom. That tells us everything we need to know about the heart of Buddhist teachings. And the teaching is expressly, non-dualist.
Buddhism is expressly and explicitly non-dualist, as is expressed in the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom, and as is expressed in the Hriydaya Sutra, the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, commonly known as the Heart Sutra – which is recited daily in Zen monasteries across the world – which states, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form.”
Then, after radically misrepresenting Buddhist philosophy, your guest goes on to misrepresent Plato as a dualist as well. Plotinus certainly understood Plato better than most modern commentators, because he was the last of the ancient philosophers (leaving out Augustine, since he was not a serious philosopher); and because he was a student of Plato’s philosophy, who said that he had nothing to add to Plato, but was simply clarifying Plato’s message – the core of which is: the many are One; the One manifests as the many. Again, your guest is flatly and radically wrong, and is misrepresenting yet another philosophical school of thought.
Then he completely contradicts himself. First he said that Buddhism is a dualistic philosophy. Then he says, “The Eastern religions, they go one step further by arguing that there is no matter at all, that mind is the only thing that exists.” Wrong again. First he says Buddhism is dualistic, then he says it is monist. Do you realize that these two philosophical views are utter opposites of each other?
So, which is it, buddy? Is Buddhism a dualistic philosophy, as you say first, or is it a monist philosophy, as you say later? Clearly he doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about. A first year philosophy professor would have to give him a D-, at best, for both grossly misunderstanding two major schools of philosophy, and worse, for flatly contradicting himself. (YouTube sets extraordinarily low standards.)
Then he goes on to enlighten us on the philosophy of science, with similar results. He says, again with the certitude of Moses coming down from the mountain, with the word of God written on stone, “You can go with science, which is materialistic, which says that everything is physical.” And again, he is 100% wrong. There was this recent event in science, dude, maybe you heard about it, a new discovery, a radically new approach and understanding of science, called, “quantum physics”. It’s a brand new scientific paradigm, just discovered about a century past, which radically undermined and in fact shattered the old paradigm (see Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) of Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic, atomistic, materialist-reductionism. But then again, you can’t be expected to keep up with everything. After all, quantum physics only arrived on the scene 100-some years ago.
Then he goes back to misinterpreting and misrepresenting Buddhism – which he says, states that, “everything is mind. There’s no such thing as a physical reality.” Wrong again. Again, he is contradicting himself: first saying Buddhism is dualist, then saying it is monist. And secondly, he is flatly wrong in saying Buddhism is a mind-only (idealist) philosophy (eg: Berkeley). In actual fact, the Buddhist teachings explicitly say that the Mind-Only School is a close approximation to the truth, but is subtly mistaken. The Dalai Lama, or any other qualified Lama or Zen master, can correct him on that. Nagarjuna, the preeminent philosopher of Buddhist philosophy, makes it explicitly clear that dualistic views are mistaken, and so too are nihilistic and philosophical idealist views also mistaken – the true nature of being and reality being non-duality. If he wants to argue with the Dalai Lama or Nagarjuna, I say, good luck. He is clearly out of his depth, and is in way over his head.
As the Mahayana texts state clearly, “Nirvana and samsara are one.” How much more explicitly non-dualist can it be? Buddhism therefore, is not about exiting, leaving, or escaping the world – it is about waking up, and being fully aware of the true and profoundly rich nature of being.
The way the guest here presents dualism, as interactionism or interdependence between mind and body, or consciousness and matter, is actually one of the few accurate things he has to say. Interactionism is a more intelligent view than materialist monism, or materialist reductionism, as it is more commonly called, but it is still not the Perennial Philosophy of non-dualism, which has been expressed by all the great mystics, East and West, throughout the ages, nor is it the view of Eastern philosophy, and nor is it, to be specific, the view of Buddhism, Taoism, or the Advaita Vedanta teachings of the yogis. Again, other than accurately depicting what interactionism is, he is pretty much 100% wrong on everything he has talked about here.
Ken Wilber – someone who is an actual scholar, and who does not talk out of his ass, put it well, when he said that Western philosophy for 5,000 years has been a battle between what he called “the ascenders and the descenders”. (Ken Wilber is out of his depth and deeply mistaken in terms of political philosophy, but otherwise is a simply stellar polymath and truly brilliant philosopher and scholar – one of the dozen or so greatest scholars of the past 100 years, along with Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Joanna Macy, Rianne Eisler, Murry Bookchin, Erich Fromm, Mathew Fox, Thomas Merton, Einstein and Noam Chomsky.)
The ascenders view the world, nature, the body, and life on Earth, as unreal, illusory, or less real and less important, than the transcendent realm of pure spirit of consciousness. (The Earth is a waiting room, and everything in this world is inferior and also depraved at its core, and heaven is what we are waiting for., while we suffer through this dismal, sordid, pathetic material plane. World-hating dualists, is what they are.) They are dualists, in essence, who devalue, or occasionally deny the existence, of one pole: devaluing the imminent, the Earthly and the material, while valuing the spiritual and the transcendent. The descenders are the materialists, who want to devalue, or more commonly deny, the existence of the spiritual, the transcendent, or of consciousness or spirit. (They are materialist-reductionists, and epiphenomenalists, clinging to a worldview that is a century out of date, and thus are anti-empirical and unscientific, at least since the discovery of quantum physics.)
The real truth, the true nature of phenomena, being and reality, as Ken Wilber rightly points out, is what the great mystics have all said, and which quantum physics is now corroborating: which is non-duality. But this guest of Russell’s is no scholar – either of religion, of philosophy, or of science.
I mean, he seems an intelligent lad, but he is a novice, clearly, speaking as if he has the pontificate, and is delivering the Sermon on the Mount, the Answer of all answers, when he says definitively and with an air of utter authority, what Buddhism, Plato, Eastern religions, and science are all about. And he got it wrong on all four counts.
Russell Brand, by contrast, your approach is refreshingly humble, yet filled with a very legitimate and indeed important spirit of dignity and confidence – and with humility and confidence in balance, as they should be, and need to be, if we have any good sense, as you clearly do. Your guest, by contrast, is filled with presumption, and what the ancient Greeks would call, hubris. Or flatulence and hot air, to be more direct.
People should bear in mind that it was only recently, in the long view of history, that we humans knew, with full and absolute, unquestionable certainty, that the world is flat, and the Earth is the centre of the universe. Everyone knew these things to be true, and unquestionably true. And everyone was wrong. In fact, when people dared to question the holy dogma of the Earth being the centre of the universe, they were met with the Inquisition, and the serious threat of being burned at the stake for heresy.
How similar to the world we live in today.
Another thing to bear in mind is that, in truth, you are more likely to be struck by lightning seven times in a single life, than to find truly reliable information on youtube, the internet in general, or the media, or for that matter, from academia – to say nothing of pop culture icons, such as your very presumptuous guest.
In fact, unless what you are hearing, reading or watching comes directly – and I mean directly – from a Buddhist, Taoist or yogic master, the odds are that the information being presented is partially or wholly mistaken; and more than likely, not a little mistaken, but more commonly, radically mistaken, if not flatly either propaganda or delusion. People need to learn to have far more discernment, and to separate the wheat from the chaff – and the drivel, pap, dross and dung, from the gems.
I listen to what Russell Brand has to say, quite often, because he is generally very lucid, as well as good-hearted and highly intelligent, and highly articulate, not to mention often witty, and always has something interesting to say. His guests, however, are very hit and miss, at best; and sometimes, I’m sorry to say, simply full of shit.
Russell, when you said, “I feel that we are experiencing the limitations of our current models”, you were bang on. Yes, we have been in the midst of a scientific revolution, a shift in paradigms, or world-view, which began over a century ago. (These things take time – and a century, in human history, is but a blink.) Moreover, we have been in the midst of a cultural awakening of humanity since the late 1950s (the Beat poets, for example, along with the Civil Rights movement), which blossomed in the 1960s, and which did not die out, but has quietly grown and accelerated over the past 50-60 years, and continues to accelerate and to grow world-wide.
I would offer what Leibniz called The Perennial Philosophy – which Aldous Huxley wrote about very well – as a major clue as to where we should look for a better understanding of what reality really actually is. And the Perennial Philosophy echoes the recent findings in quantum physics, which show that the supposed material building blocks of all matter, do not exist – at least, not in the way we had imagined. (“Where is the matter? No matter. Where is the mind? Nevermind.”)
Again, non-dualism is the heart of the perennial philosophy, the heart of the mystics’ teachings, East and West (see Meister Eckhart, for example), the heart of Buddhist, Taoist and yogic teachings, and the heart of what quantum physics and modern science is now confirming.
“Science” – and it must be placed in quotation marks, since there are few who are truly empirical, and hence, few who are truly scientific – is the slow man in the race; but is beginning to catch up, despite the foot-dragging of the pseudo-empirical, quasi-scientific majority of “scientists”, who, like Dark Age priests, cling to the old Newtonian-Cartesian materialist paradigm like it was the Holy Grail itself.
Western philosophy, as is widely acknowledged, is at an impasse. I would say a cul de sac is a better description. Academic Western philosophy, and most of what passes for “intellectual culture” alternates between the nihilist morass of polysyllabic post-modernist psychobabble, and the equally nihilistic myopia of stridently dogmatic materialist flatlander anti-science. We need to go back to fundamentals, retrace our steps, and re-think and re-examine our first principles and basic assumptions. We got off on the wrong track with Descartes’ dualism, 400 years ago, and with Newton’s mechanistic materialism, and with a largely unconscious assumption of certitude, which Stephen Toulmin unearths in his important work, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, and which, to a frightening and very real, and very large degree, threw us back into the dogmatic quasi-religious, pseudo-science of the Dark Ages. Uncover and examine these three grossly delusional assumptions which underpin the modern world, and we will be getting somewhere. Then only, will the fog begin to clear.
Until then, we have three main options in the West: post-modernist nihilism; materialist nihilism; and pop culture pap – all of which have the merit and the intellectual rigour of a dung ball. It is time to think more critically, and to take a fresh look at things. Then we will experience a new Renaissance – which is, by the way, emerging now, despite and maybe because of the darkness of the times – and not before.
Overcoming the absurd and grotesque hubris and supreme arrogance of the modern Western world, and rediscovering a little true humility and open-mindedness, would do wonders as well, and is absolutely imperative and essential. As Bertrand Russell said, we will have to allow the East into our thoughts, and on an equal footing. And we must allow the global South, as well, into our thoughts, and also on an equal footing. And further, we must overcome this grandiose smugness, which silently or sometimes aloud proclaims, foolishly, that we have nothing to learn from the ancients, from the “primitive” indigenous peoples of the world, from the medieval world, or from the first Renaissance. What assumptions we make – and what darkness we live in, as a result. When we broaden and deepen our perspective in these ways, then sparks will fly, and the new Renaissance will be secure, and will truly and rapidly blossom, to the great and profound benefit of all.
J. Todd Ring, March 13, 2021
For a scholarly perspective on Buddhism and non-dualism, Eastern philosophy, and the philosophy of science – and not a gross misrepresentation of them, as was presented here – see:
Choosing Reality – Allan Wallace
World As Lover, World As Self – Joanna Macy
The Hero With A Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
The Perennial Philosophy – Aldous Huxley
The Way of Zen – Alan Watts
Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts
Psychotherapy East and West – Alan Watts
The Holographic Universe – Michael Talbot
Mysticism and The New Physics – Michael Talbot
Dreamtime and Inner Space – Holgar Kalweit
The Tao Te Ching – Jane English translation only
The Gospel of Thomas – Marvin Meyers translation only
The Heart Sutra – with commentary by Thich Nat Hahn
The Prajnaparamita Sutra – see Lex Hixon’s, The Mother of the Buddhas
The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-neng – Shambhala Classics edition
The Uttaratantra – see Buddha Nature: The Mahayana Uttaratantra Shastra
And anything and everything by the Dalai Lama, Chogyam Trungpa,
or my own teachers, Lama Zopa, Lama Tharchin and Kirti Tsenchab Rinpoche
And to this short list of seminal, core texts, I would humbly, and frankly, offer my own work, as an overview of philosophy, within a broad historical and global perspective, and within the context of sociology, political-economy, culture and ecology, and as a vision for the way ahead: Enlightened Democracy, and, The People vs The Elite. Both are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble now.
My sincere apologies to your guest, Russell, but a person cannot grossly misrepresent Buddhism and Eastern philosophy without being called and corrected on it. He needs to study far more before speaking with such an air of authority. It is inappropriate, grossly misleading, and frankly juvenile.
Atheism is decidedly unscientific, and anti-empirical, because it dogmatically asserts a claim that it cannot possibly prove or even empirically support. If they were truly empirical, or truly scientific, they would at least be agnostic. But they are neither empirical nor scientific. Besides that, and more importantly, atheism is the rantings of the venomously frustrated and disillusioned, based, in every case and example I know of, in a supreme lack of scholarship or erudition. I have yet to encounter a single self-proclaimed atheist who has done any serious study of world religions, world mythology, religious philosophy, or any philosophical inquiry in any real depth, and nor, clearly, have they ever plumbed or delved in any real depth into the philosophy of science, or into modern physics. They are an anti-intellectual bunch, essentially, passing themselves off as scientific, well-read, and well-informed. They are anything but.
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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