The Slumber of Materialism
Surely we have been mesmerized by science. There is a fascination about it. It is compelling in its scope and depth. I have certainly been there and done that, and I can easily recall the years of struggle that it took me to break free of its subtle and not so subtle bonds.
But everyone of us who can find our way through the labarynthine bowels of science and out into the sunlight will leave a trail that will make it easier for the next ones to follow. The present trickle will become a stream and then a flood. Hallelujah! Would it be far fetched to compare the aquarium with cosmic ex lax? That may not be what Jerry Falwell has in mind for the second coming, but only the father knows for sure.
There is a truth to science, but it is a fatally flawed truth. What God hath brought together, let no man put assunder. Rene Descates thought he knew better than that and separated subject from object, quality from quantity. If you allow that, then science follows as logically as night follows day. But there is a new dawn.
We have become the psychological captives of a few dusty dinosaur fossils, and of the displacement of spectral lines in stellar photos. It is impossible to argue with rocks, but when we do find our tongues once again to tell the true story, the rocks and the stars will not talk back. They can only listen.
Science is a house of cards, one puff of wind and it all falls down. Materialism has no flexibility. It is iron clad. No chinks, no exceptions allowed. The mere existence of consciousness is a big enough hole in materialism to drive a Mack truck right through it, but until the last couple of years that hole was the blind spot of science. The rediscovery of the mind in the 'consciousness movement' ought to be comical, but it is a deadly serious business that is about to have us bump right into the eschaton.
Ex materialists now pray earnestly for a dualist, Cartesian solution to the mind problem, but I am afraid their prayer rugs are pointed in the wrong direction. Don't they know that their mecca is in the East, where lies immaterialism?
Yes. We shall borrow our immaterialism from the East, but let them keep the mysticism. There is a rationale to all this and it has to do with concealment and revelation through human history. History never existed in the East. It was only cycles within cycles. Now they have western apocalypses coming out their ears. Better late than never.
The slumber of materialism is not terminal. I testify to that. You can awaken and not lose your mind. The telephones will still work and the airplanes will still fly, but the next time you go to the airport you will look at your fellow travellers a bit more closely to see if anyone else is getting the joke. Yes, there are a few of us out there who know that the eschaton is when we all die of laughter.
But life is a serious game, and indeed it is. The people who are starving hardly see anything funny. But if more of the billionaires and generals could see the joke, then there would not be anyone starving, would there be? The exception is Bill Gates who must keep his nose to the grind stone until we get this friggin' web finished. When we all have websites, we will no longer need the web to communicate. Get it? When you see me selling Microsoft, it is time to head for the hills.
Do not get me wrong. History was no joke, it was no illusion. The unfolding and enfoldings of history served a vital cosmic function of renewing and recycling the cosmic energies. History is a compost and we were the earth worms. The joke comes not within history but at its end, and surely the angels will be laughing with us.