6. ABOUT RELIGION AND THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT

 

WTM FAQ 6.7  How can a scientific explanation ever hope to account for and encompass the great ‘spiritual’ dimension we know exists in life? / Isn’t ‘spirituality’ beyond a purely rational explanation? / How do you account for ‘extra sensory perception’ (ESP) such as telepathy?

 

Jeremy Griffith’s response:

In FAQ 6.2 it is explained that the theme or purpose or meaning of existence is the ordering or integration of matter, however Integrative Meaning has been such a terrifyingly condemning truth for us divisively, not integratively behaved humans that we couldn’t face it. And so, to avoid facing it, we deified the integrative theme and purpose of existence as ‘God’, thus making it something separate and superior to us, not connected to us in an earthly, practical way. In FAQ 1.26 I explain that we have an all-sensitive, all-connected and all-loving, ideal-or-Godly-behaviour-expecting moral part of ourselves, which is our species’ original instinctive self or soul, and which we have also lived in denial of because it has confronted us with the unbearable truth that we have become horrendously corrupted from that original innocent, all-loving state.

Like almost all humans, scientists have lived in fear of the human condition, and so have been unable to confront it, and if you can’t confront a subject you’re in no position to think truthfully and effectively about it, and so there was no ability for science to acknowledge, let alone explain, the lost realm of sensitivity, beauty and oneness that we humans have become so alienated from. Furthermore, this fear of the human condition has meant that scientists have had to avoid the overarching, truthful whole view of the integrative meaning of existence, adopting instead a reduced view that focused only on the details of the mechanisms of the workings of our world—it has been what’s called ‘reductionist’ and ‘mechanistic’. This denial-based approach, while necessary until we could explain our corrupted condition, has meant that science has been stalled, completely unable to make any sense of the greater meaning of life. (You can read more about the limitations of mechanistic science in chapter 2:4 of FREEDOM.)

In my book A Species In Denial, under the heading Where is the Spirituality in negative entropy?, I have explained that the so-called ‘spiritual world’, which is a truly loving and sensitive and all-magnificent existence and dimension and potential for humans, does seem like another universe completely unrelated to us resigned, alienated, soul-corrupted humans, but it is not. We humans are now able to understand, in first principle scientific terms, that we 2-million-year corrupted humans are actually a totally legitimate and meaningful part of the integrative, Godly process. We are part of the integrative loving world after all. There is a ‘spiritual’, a truly loving and truly sensitive and all-magnificent, dimension to existence that we haven’t felt part of but we can now understand that we are part of. Ideality and our seemingly non-ideal reality have finally been reconciled! The magnificence of Integrative Meaning/​God and our seemingly God-defying-and-destroyed condition have been reconciled.

I further explain that the demystification of our world doesn’t mean the specialness or extraordinariness or spirituality of our world is removed, rather it actually means that specialness is made more tangible. Mechanistic science, by denying Integrative Meaning and the truth of our species’ original sensitive innocence, has stripped so much of the truth and beauty from the world whereas the denial-free explanation of our world restores all that truth and beauty. It allows humans to live with a full awareness of, and ability to savour, the beauty of integration. It is alienation that is devoid of spirituality, not the truth.

Yes, it is only from the perspective of our current extreme alienation from the all-loving and all-sensitive world that that world seems to us unworldly, mystical and spiritual. There are many parts in FREEDOM that describe just how innocent and alive and all-feeling we once were, and how being aligned with integration is the most natural and normal of all states. They include the section on near-death experiences in paragraph 997 of FREEDOM and also paragraph 995 which explains the ‘powers’ of some savants, which seem like magic to us, but are actually another phenomenal example of the immense potential of our soul.

In paragraphs 998-999 of FREEDOM, I also describe the ‘shattered defence’ access psychics, mediums, channellers or people with ‘telepathic’ connections can have to our soul’s world. To quote:

“Sometimes when people became extremely upset/​corrupted, their alienation, their mental blocks, their defences, became disorganised and through this ‘shattered defence’ the soul occasionally emerged; ‘mediums’ or ‘psychics’ or ‘channellers’ are examples of such individuals. Of course, such shattered-defence access of the soul’s true world was not the natural, secure, balanced access that unresigned people have. For those people, whom we have historically referred to as prophets, the soul’s world has always been an ultra natural place, not something apparently mystical or supernatural.

The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was describing the ‘shattered defence’ means of accessing the soul when he wrote that ‘the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact mind of many sane people whose minds are closed’ (The Divided Self, 1960, p.27 of 218). Interestingly, Laing immediately continued to say that the existentialist Karl Jaspers was of the opinion that the biblical prophet Ezekiel ‘was a schizophrenic’. While some biblical prophets may have accessed the soul’s true world through a ‘shattered defence’, those who had full and natural access to the soul and were prophets in the true sense were exceptionally sound rather than exceptionally exhausted, alienated, separated from their true self, or schizophrenic. It should also be mentioned that when people prayed or chanted mantras or counted rosary beads they were trying to shut down their alienation-preoccupied mind in order to let through some of the truthful world of the soul. They were, in effect, trying to shatter their own defence. Fatigue, meditation, fasting, hallucinatory drugs, despair and faster-than-thought physical activities, such as scree-running, are other ways of achieving this breakthrough to the world of the soul.”

Yes, now that we can solve the human condition and end the underlying insecurity that has been crippling the human race we are going to be astonished at how much sensitivity we have lost, and therefore how much sensitivity we can regain. Unable to admit the truth of our 2-million-year corrupted all-sensitive and all-loving instinctive self or soul we have been unable to directly recognise how much sensitivity we have lost access to. But we do intuitively know that we are immensely split from or separated from or alienated from that original all-sensitive instinctive state, and so do indirectly and superficially recognise that alienated state when we talk of humans having seeming magical powers like extra sensory perception (ESP) and telepathy. We sense something is incredibly out of sorts, or out of kilter, with us, but we’ve never been able to confront and talk truthfully about what that distortion in us actually is, so we come up with all manner of sensationalised descriptions of humans having seeming supernatural powers. When the extraordinarily truthful thinking South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post said that the relatively innocent Bushman ‘seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.21 of 253), he was conveying some idea of how much sensitivity we have lost on our species’ heroic 2-million-year journey to find understanding of our corrupted condition.

The following extraordinary quote from the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky is a wonderful intuitive remembrance of just how wonderfully sensitive our species’ time in an alienation-free, all-sensitive and all-loving state of innocence was: ‘The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers. Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the people of this happy land. They came to me of themselves, surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were!…​Their faces were radiant…​in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy…​It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned…​They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours…​but I could not understand their knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves…​and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all nature like that—at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love…​There was no quarrelling, no jealousy among them…​for they all made up one family’ (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877).

So yes, we have been horribly separated from, alienated from, estranged from, blocked-out from, the all-sensitive and all-loving seemingly mystical, ‘spiritual’, seemingly other-worldly state that we did once have access to, but now we can know we are actually part of it and so can resuscitate our access to it.

As I wrote in paragraph 123 of FREEDOM, R.D. Laing recognised just how alienated we are when he wrote that ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus [God has absconded]. Or [more precisely] we have absconded [from God/​the integrative ideals] [p.118] …​The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116] …We are all murderers and prostitutes…​We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another’ [pp.11-12] (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of the human condition lies] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.105).