Jumping Through Hoops

"Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when."

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York, Basic Books, 1995)

 I'm finally ready to call bollocks on this ...this way of thinking.

I'm not disputing that science has created some wonderful toys for us, or that it predicts the consensus reality to a T- almost every time.
 But that's just it, you see - the consensus reality is scientific materialism. And if you don't go along with the consensus, well you're obviously mad.

 Science, lest we forget, is a method - one we created and have used for the past few centuries. Or 6,000 odd years, if you prefer. It is a way of interrogating the 3-D world so that the answers seem to make sense, justify our equations,and repeat themselves on command.

 It's a collapsed waveform. Or, as Derrick Jensen puts it, a gun held to our heads.

I'm not saying that truth is relative. I think that there are many kinds of truths, and many levels for them to operate on. But once a truth is accepted generally (and by generally I'm tending to the mathematical usage of the word , meaning universally) on a level, it will hold on that level - and maybe on a level or two in close proximity to it - for as long as that acceptance goes unchallenged.

And while it holds, those of us cleaving to that level of reality will maybe find something of the rock-solid comfort of fundamental religion in statements like Dawkins'. I know, for I have been there, too.

But when the consensus is challenged - by any of us starting to remember Who we are for example - the truth seems not to hold quite as firmly. Other truths start breaking through and touching us deeply on entirely different planes of Being.

Plants communicate with us, in dreams or waking consciousness. Beloved family members come to say goodbye as they are dying. Birds become comic geniuses. Ancestors speak.

And we realise that we are not, as the distortion would have us, off our rockers. We are not making all this up, or hallucinating (an odd concept in scientific materialism!) or trying to fool others or ourselves.
These pure personal experiences - these knowings, these gnoses - are the marks of wider realms and other levels knocking on the doors of our souls.

We can cling to the arrogance of materialism and believe we are cracking up, and so never get up to answer the door, or we can open up, explore these other states with all their richness of communication, and leave the kindergarten of science(with all its wonderful toys) behind.

Pic: from Total Translucency