Dilemma: Mind or Materialism
Dilemma: Mind or Materialism?
by Lanascopic
I have always adored both the sciences and the examination of the great mysteries. The first big book I read from cover to cover in one sitting was Childcraft encyclopedia number four, Earth and Space, which captured my fascination at age seven. Yet, as an adult, I have contemplated how modern science often appears to dishonor itself, flashing its closed mind around like some shiny badge of superiority, dismissing the mysteries. I’ve considered how, as a result, some people experience internal conflict that causes an uncomfortable hesitance to believe that mind, soul, and anomalous phenomena could possibly exist.
It’s no surprise that many conservative religious communities prefer to limit the mysteries as if they were taboo or objects of foolish contemplations. Clearly, from a religious perspective they often promote a closed-circuit sort of biblical Occam’s razor, wherein assumptions outside the simplest biblical bases are deemed complex, unnecessary, and weird, thus not allowed as food for expansive thought.
But science? The original science was more philosophical, perhaps to a flaw, yet philosophy is called the mother of all sciences. Philosophy nurtured science until the time for materialism to lead science came— and went. We get it: there are bits of matter, and we can see or detect them. Great. Lesson learned; concepts founded. Yet why does materialism continue to linger center-stage after its task is done, and as dictator?
I believe its task was to inform our evolving souls, not to guide them into doubt. Yet it overstays its welcome as guest speaker at the head of the table and increasingly, many of the residents of this planet kindly ask it to see itself to its chambers. Its scandalous refusal is making beloved science look bad.
So, I considered the universe, how massive it is. I thought of how infinitesimal, how hollow the scientific community can be in the great scheme of things. I imagined its medical equipment’s questionable calibrations and recalibrations. And I saw how it’s select bits of knowledge really are too limited in the overall scheme of things to result in whole human wellness. I saw that its message is unhealthy for society.
I tried to think of words to describe the way I see the universe; how inaccessible the nature of its reality is to humans despite attempts to dissect it using the material-based knowledge that we have extracted from it. Materialism has clearly formed a perpetual reflection of human limits in the mirrors of human research. I wondered how long the universe would remain impermeable to such feeble advances on its secrets. I strongly suspect we’ll never control even our own galaxy, much less that big universe. Instead, I suspect it will always resist this widespread modern science, which is beyond extreme in its dismissive objectivity, through which lens necessarily objectifies all.
The universe will not be objectified.
So, I considered this: If the Universe is held together by God, then it’s composition is likely well-guarded against all intelligent beings. If given the chance they’d try to disassemble it into teeny parts, exploit its features, reducing it to rubble even on a mathematical level, and this could persist for thousands of years. I questioned if that thought was realistic, even if this modern science continued to develop until humans were not even recognizable, being weird cyborgs ten thousand years into the future.
I doubt that even our future selves could mine, disassemble, or reproduce even a single star in the long-evolving universe even if we advance over five hundred thousand years. It’s never going to remain static and wait for them like a person posing for a photo. It will keep advancing itself to remain far beyond the reaches of science. It’s undoubtedly aware of the human tendency toward folly and the blindness of scientific overreach, its awareness being vaster than our earthly awareness. It could lend itself yet never will to any significant degree. We’ll only be able to travel through less than a percent of it because even as science grows that percentage shrinks each second as the universe stretches out. No, she will not let the children ride on her shoulders.
I saw this fact as evidence of the insincere basis of modern science, which does not recognize any soul anywhere and prefers not to. Like a caveman who has captured a beautiful woman, science does not know what it is to do with this marvel called the universe. He wants to explore her, take her apart and play with her components. Eat the liver. Wear the skin. He is shallow.
So, I considered that, perhaps in a million different ways God prevents this folly and always will. If so, he holds the universe together himself, somehow. How, I wondered. Words flooded into my mind. Adjectives, one after another. I read that there are one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand words in the English language, and even if all those words could somehow describe God’s grip on our universe, then we still couldn’t express all the ways God holds it together unless we made a bunch of compound words, compound-compound words, and hybrid borrowed words.
Though, considering many of the dynamic, potent, and elusive features associated with the universe I did think of several adjectives for how God keeps the universe overall stable, over a hundred. And I wrote them down. Though here I’ll just give these:
Gravitationally. Magnetically, thermally, spectrally.
Radiantly, invisibly, evolutionarily. Mechanically, acoustically, soundlessly, logically. Disruptively.
Chemically. Biologically. Multidimensionally. Blindingly, deafeningly, unavoidably.
Irreversibly.
Consciously.
Why did I think of all those words? Because I wanted to express that the universe can never be disassembled, harnessed, controlled, altered, or destroyed by humans any more than an ant can disassemble a car engine or build a bomb. I believe that the complete universe is incomprehensible to us because it is the nature of God to expand, and while God could adjust our understanding to grasp it all like he does, God keeps the universe incomprehensible to us so we can’t tamper with reality. God simply isn’t interested in supervising every grabby impulse of ours. So instead of popping toddlers’ little hands every three minutes all day long, he just keeps the intricate ceramics up on high shelves.
Who am I, though, to have the gall to make such points as if I constantly keep them in my back pocket? I’m not some anti-science religious fanatic. Far from it. I grew up in love with science and distrustful of church. Some people grew up the other way around, apparently, bonkers for church, scared of science. Church aside, neither science nor God is scary to me.
Never had I experienced any distrust of science in the past. I embraced it like a best buddy, old pal, old friend. In childhood I often played with science, with intentional subtleness. I attempted quiet little experiments like drinking from an open cup while the car accelerated— balancing the liquid to prevent a spill. On my bicycle and as the only child outside I dared hop at high speeds down then back up the sidewalk’s tall curbs frequently to quietly prove to myself this motion was possible. I tinkered with dead minnows from the ditch, suspended my innocent terror of bugs to rescue a drowning bee, then a wasp, dug up the neighbor’s flowerbed to see the tips of the roots and to examine the hidden depths of the dirt, took music boxes, radios, and toasters apart to see what was unseen, and preoccupied myself with a host of other courageous expressions of curiosity I sometimes got in trouble for. I was timid, either a geek or autistic, which I say in all sincerity because I honestly suspect in retrospect that I was a high-functioning autistic geek kid, interested in testing the limits to see if they were just illusions. Whatever I was, that was my angle; to separate truth from myth.
To know. To be unblinded. I was no doubt a contemplative child and remain a contemplative adult.
My truth mining habits yield vibrantly colored knowledge to my eyes, yet the subtle realities which they indicate strike chords of reluctance in the programmed fitter-inners of the world, who close their eyes to the greater beauty of it all. For much of my life I wanted to be a scientist, to professionally play this enlightening show and tell; however, my social disabilities led me to suffer from imposter syndrome for decades, plus life happened, and I was caught up in the drama of having unfortunate though beautiful kids I wasn’t socially fit to care for. I felt robbed by much of my life as a result, as anyone would in my shoes.
One thing life couldn’t steal from me was my tendency to examine reality, existence, the world, the universe, God, and myself from forbidden or unheard-of perspectives. I often kept my observations to myself in the Deep South of my youth because revealing them led me to get accused of being wicked or weird or confused. I still see things others can’t, and I’ve been diagnosed with PMDD and depression in the past but never delusions or anything else. I am, at last, a sane oddity. Good to know.
Around 2010, as I grew past forty, I started to see that modern science behaved in blinder ways than unreformed civil justice. In certain fields, it’s since become as bad as religion in being offensively dogmatic, perhaps worse because it claims to be like me- open minded. Well, I can assure you science is not like me and probably hasn’t been since sometime before the new millennium.
I’m not impressed with the deviation of scientists into the quicksand of the status quo. They, unlike me, became arrogant and calloused, and science, unlike me, has become narrow, stiff, and specialized to a flaw. Some branches of science are staving off this tendency, but the vast majority of science disciplines represent a blinding territory where a human being can go and live in an echo chamber as a product of the era. Scientists say, “We’ve got established laws that we recognize and established methods, we have established equipment designed to detect things which we have established to be of interest to us.” * What an establishment indeed.
Scientific knowledge is an exclusive sphere, inviting only select bits of knowledge while most other bits are rejected without a real examination of the new perspectives that they offer. It seems this isn’t science but more like ‘project-science’ ascribing itself to specific large projects solely and not allowed to expand or branch off to encompass anything anomalous. How do you know if an anomaly really is so anomalous until you study it? To a person like me this oversight is quite literally the death of a knowledge-seeking period.
Look inside my mind a moment: When I envision the overall scenario, I imagine the symbols and themes that clarify how the resulting scientific ‘project knowledge’ has all the features of some alternate knowledge-police-reality. In that strange place, a lobotomized scientist establishes a knowledge base for his urban subjects. He spends one year programming facts, filtering ideas, tweaking truths, and trimming evidence to remove all quality of, and evidence of, soul from knowledge. Then he embodies it inside an android, which is appointed town judge over the gaslighted, obedient citizens. The citizens aren’t allowed to cry over death, free injured animals from traps, or speak of déjà vu experiences. This filtered-knowledge program, excessively selective, is a fake loosely originating from intangible organic consciousness and isn’t endowed with the prohibited humanness. In the meantime, the cut and trashed organic bits of written and observed knowledge are outlawed, banished, dumped into a paper pile in the desert where the last existing human soulfulness with which they were written wills itself to incarnate from the dusty pages. These incarnations rise from the dust to their feet as the last whole human beings with real, living souls. Desperate, thirsty, they battle extreme gusting sandstorms that keep them miles outside the city for a couple of long, treacherous days before they become blinded, dehydrated, and finally extinct.
Other people know stuff, not just scientists. There is truth in some lore of yore as well, but modern science dismisses it with convenient labels that blaspheme both the rejected bits of knowledge and the Conscious Universe by calling them myths of old closed cases, dismissed and flushed, thus now taboo within the exclusive bubble of accepted drone-like bits of sterilized, washed-out knowledge. Human inspiration is charged with the crime of creating happiness and broadening perspectives.
I think there is a psychological syndrome that affects many modern individuals who worship science. It’s almost like narcissism, except its object of control is literally scientific knowledge. It’s as if they craft these idols then worship them, and if they chisel any changes into the form of their idols then the idea for the change must come only from themselves, as they regard the rest of us as dummies. At least it looks that way from here. We are a them-kind which they have designated us to be, and they are the us-kind among themselves alone. There is a pathology in that outlook, but this pathology is the subtle though official creed among many fields of science. Especially neurology, biology, and even my personal favorite, physics.
No, scientists don’t outright announce their position. Instead, they let the oblivious outsiders define it for them by way of natural social selection. In other words, the people who blindly put their faith in science, submit to science, and believe that there can be no accurate knowledge outside of science, poor soulless things, those unwitting android-like subjects, speak as a majority voice which constantly votes the authority of science into the seat of power over all human perspectives. It bleeds into the human identity. It has the power to approve or dismiss perspectives, as a matter of fact. And the voters are innocent fools, just trying to protect themselves from a world where religion or law or politics fights to take the seat of the highest power over human thought.
I can understand it. It’s like voting for some new politician just to keep all the old ones out. But the new one turns out to be more of the same. Nothing changes except the decorations in the scene of humanity’s objective awareness- instead of gavels and robes, instead of bibles and churches, instead of suits and fake smiles, we now have lab coats and microscopes to obscure large chunks of the truth with.
As with religion, law, politics, consumeristic extremism, and other beasts that have had their turn at ruling the world, humankind is thrilled with the apparent magnificence of science. They especially honor medical science, which is practically the face of science for many insurance-consumed citizens who keep going back, believing in the power of this pure white coat. They’re devoted to fiercely defending the word of the stethoscope and even memorizing medical passages and prescription codes and sections. You are not allowed to question this god. This is love, pure unadulterated loyalty and obedience. It’s sheer self-sacrifice resulting in the exaltation of the white coats. They are educated in the antiquated white man’s un-holistic, unholy, materialistic, and compartmentalized stomping ground, earning degrees in how to transform themselves into clones of exactly what the problem is in the world. Except with different faces in many cases, those of the world’s international ancestors and the faces of women. These are beautiful faces, but their presumed monopoly on accurate knowledge and fundamental truth makes them not so pretty. No, they aren’t all this naive. Some science-based professionals manage to retain their souls through it all. It can’t be easy with peers like that, though, and they deserve a medal.
But yes, science is intruding into the region of fundamental human truths without a justified presence there despite the many warrants its layman audience has written for it to flash at the door. This activity taints the waters that all our minds and spirits float in, and the water boils with various artifacts of science’s tall monopoly such as agnosticism, atheism, arrogance, skepticism, disillusionment, depression, loneliness, addiction, and worse.
At their core people are way realer than this, they are far more grounded than they appear or care to confess. I’m sorry, with a tangible teardrop, I am so, so sorry for every one of us, who are all disfigured by the seeming invisible hand that blesses the anti-science, the impostor of science, giving it the throne of authority over every living thing.
To be accurate though, science as a whole is not anti-science. It’s an anti-science and real-science hybrid. Still, the outcome of combining these two qualities of the fields of science remains a borderline social dictatorship, literally.
Literally.
The influence, privilege, endorsements, and affluent presence on the world stage is clearly in the spotlight. No one gets through a day anymore without the mention of some scientific perspective, however misquoting the layperson may be. Yet there are mysteries that can’t even pique the curiosity of those laypersons. Is curiosity dead? Did someone solve all the mysteries while I wasn’t looking? Where is this grand update-without-a-doubt? And what qualified soulless soul solved said puzzle? Did she get the Nobel Prize?
Why exactly are we dismissing anomalous phenomena as products of kooky things going on inside the brain? We are a civilization obsessed with the products of science to such degree that we react to them as if they are new insights on the freshest scene of prominent thought. And they are touted as that. I see them as mere illusions that dance in the spotlight saying, “I’m the solution to everything wrong with the society.” Eat it up with popcorn because it is a tantalizing show, though a mere circus whose popularity is concreted in our identification of such scenes as new. It’s, sadly, love at first sight for so many people raised in homes where the household worldview was either superstitious, conservatively void of reason, or applauded the loftiest schools of thought as the pinnacles of human potential.
I, too, was brought up in one of these environments: You must listen to your government, you must listen to religion, you must submit to traditional authoritative ideas by suppressing whatever you think you know. Or else you’ll get run over by the powers that be like wild animals in the highway, your reputation pulverized into roadkill and left to stink unimportantly as you suffer from alienation.
The new powers that be are more of the same, and anyone who dares examine the mind-warp their idol worship has resulted in will see that it’s left them to deny their honest contemplations in fearing that thinking such wild thoughts means there is something wrong with them. They may prefer not to venture daringly into deeper questions or imaginings because their damage is such that doing so makes them feel unacceptable to the world. Even intuition is not safe from censorship.
We are social creatures. Feeling unacceptable to the world is a big injury to one’s personal identity and confidence. I too have struggled, not with possessing a fair and open, curious nature but with the zeitgeist’s requirements of me. I felt obligated to censure my healthy, open beliefs. So, with willful, self-imposed persuasion I aligned my values to reflect those of the popular climate, which held science as fully correct about everything.
Yet I did so with the vague awareness of modern science’s innate tendency to appear both right and wrong simultaneously. It’s inclination toward that elusive flavor does invite personal dilemmas for the contemplative and the holistically curious explorer. You tell me to believe we are all material things? You want me to believe the nature of humanity is like the immorally oppressed slave who was deemed mere property? Things? I am a thing? Is anyone?
Oh, but wait. They will, they must, soothe you by saying, “But you are a meaningful thing.”
So, to them I’d say: I’m little or nothing more in your view than an android that you didn’t happen to personally create, and you are also like an android that no human created, thus we are peers, siblings, and I’m supposed to hear you talk to me and believe what you say, void of my own evidence of it? And while I’m at it I can imagine my existence as a material object. It possesses such fine complexity that it leaves me to choose rationally to feel either good or bad in the context of my narrow existence then die like a lost cell phone immersed in water and forgotten.
This belief is not even the natural resting position of my mind. Instead, I must subject my head to all kinds of unappealing contortions only to wrap it around a thorny blowfish as if my mind were a desperate, starving, deep-sea diver. There is plenty of fodder in the deep, no need to reduce the quality of my life through such unnecessary pains, really. I mean, what need is there? I’m balanced, I’m fine, I’m kind to people when I believe as humans have always believed: in something beyond.
Why, guys? Why do you want me to believe that? What is it about the undeniably planet-wide and era-wide intuitions regarding the mechanisms of eternal existence and God’s existence and the consciousness permeating the whole universe that pains you so exceedingly?
Are you terrified of looking wrong in someone’s eyes? Are you scared of ruining relationships that are easy to maintain if you just agree with them?
Are you riddled with such attachments? Are they as well, like echoes of you?
Or are you terrified of your mean aunt Gretchen being right? Are you afraid that if you were to admit that you, like her, really do believe in things that aren’t proven by science to exist, then you’d be validating that unkind woman’s every perspective?
Now wait— I too am familiar with catastrophizing in these and other ways, like you are. I’ve examined the idea that we cease to exist at death, and how dumb I’d look to the post-modern world if that idea were to be proven materialistically— no I dare not use the term scientifically when materialistically is far more specific. And proven how? Perhaps through the most compelling evidence of all, some weird, advanced imaging equipment that can lock onto the signal of your materially identified consciousness and then see what it may see at your death, when the screen would show all the material world going black in your now non-existent experience.
Yet that picture is no more rational than the one of me taking the opposite stance, claiming that consciousness survives death in sentient forms. Yet you judge yourself as more evolved than I am simply because your idea is newer?
Are you disconnected, my friend, from your intuition entirely? Do you not feel its waves of discovery swirling and expanding ever so subtly in the back of your head anymore?
I’m deeply sorry for your loss, I give you my sincerest condolences, and I embrace you in your dizzied transformed state, urging you to break away from all of technology and modern life to go off, be alone on a mountain awhile, in the woods, on the ocean, to clear your being of all these modern pollutants, which I do not doubt have numbed the spirit senses of the most highly urbanized modern people in our developed societies.
That’s what I’d say to them.
Who hasn’t considered what products of modernity have escaped their ancient and persistent earthly stay in oblivion, along with the spread of electricity, to lurk among all these societies? There is much good in our current civilization, yes, we have some good medicine, good technologies, yet our congested cities suffer from the epidemical pollution of free radicals and particulate matter. What chemicals are many citizens breathing when they go outside?
What is one breathing when she moves into a brand-new home, co-rooming with the circulating smell of adhesives, paints, and textiles, which collectively emit a dozen toxic chemicals around her for years?
The pollution problem is but a single source of humanity’s hyper-exposure to a brave new world void of soul. Surely, I do not attribute all differences in how we look at the universe to building-chemicals and air pollution alone. Instead, I hope pointing out one of the many problems that may have altered human awareness, or how we think about it, hits on some serious question-bones.
Yet consider this: Swathes of so-called science minded people will resist the suggestion that their lovely new houses in crowded cities could contribute to the plague of cognitive dissonance despite the science that identifies these pollutants as a cause of neurodegenerative conditions, anxiety, depression and the like. They will adamantly dismiss the odds rather than investigate them as diligently as they examine any evidence that could contribute to the validity of any of their selective bits of knowledge. Some defensive science-focused folk would even have the gumption to call the pollution statement and its messenger crazy, misguided, or overzealous— anything but interested in uncovering the hidden.
Who can reasonably defend such a tendency to disregard perfectly good ideas and to instead clutch only the few that are established? We all know at least one person who suffers from the ‘right for the sake of being right’ syndrome. It isn’t productive, is it?
People like me are compelled towards balance, yes, we still exist. Anyone reading this is probably among us. We look into the details of both sides to find palatable solutions for our experience of living as whatever we must conclude we are when the truth remains elusive. We know that depression comes from a hunger which is unsatisfied by a one-sided material science that ironically leaves you feeling double-minded. Interesting how one-sided things do that to people. It is the conscience resisting, insisting that this is all wrong.
People like me are not hysterically distrusting toward the most complex piece of equipment we own, our own good brains, our unreproducible minds, and their honest, patient thoughts. If you can’t know by thinking for yourself, then no university degree is gonna save your soul from the silent dilemma arising between the recently established accepted knowledge and long-evolved intuition.
Perhaps a productive practice would be one in which the material-minded stop looking at the intuitive people, imagining that their minds are composed of a thousand delusions like mental mutants with axes chipping away at their brains and skulls, and instead look inward.
That is all any can ask benevolently of another here within the sea of souls where we all drink this material-tainted water together.
Can science please stop dismissing anomalous phenomena and stop constructing artificial knowledge based purely on materialism?
Set my science free.
The subconscious mind is no liar, though it has been blasphemed. Go to it, please.
The effort is diligent. Some have gone there once in their youth in search of self, in the hope of solving some identity crisis, and found a chaotic mess that only confused them more. To them I say revisit now. See if your capacity to experience your depths is more evolved now that you’re older.
This time you aren’t searching for your own identity. All you seek is a living soul.
Peel away from our last two centuries of progress in favor of examining success, and peel away from the smothering overstay of materialism in favor of seeking true science.
How can we dismiss questions just because they may initially seem elusive to the greatest most complex examination tool ever known to exist, being your mind? I suspect that the fear that one cannot solve a puzzle leads the competitive type into materialism.
If we defy, deny, or invalidate our own minds then what is left but a material machine.
Isn’t it time to heal.
It’s time to put the sorrows of one of the most common personal dilemmas in the history of humanness away in favor of proactive examination. This will dissolve this illusion from these world waters. Then, if light breaks through the cracks of our dark material prison let people agree that we will demolish the walls that exude vapors of uncertainty so all people can discover the source of that apparent light of consciousness.
Or still they could just clinch the status quo and, like blind worshippers let it continue to spread depression through the world at record pace, and just keep going about the crummy materialistic work-a-day life blaming dullness on everything except for the main culprit, the very status quo which many worship. Although, I want no part in that sadness.
I’ve already seen it tip my nose and topple my head. Yet I’m not through seeing, or looking, or contemplating, or examining. With my open mind, I’m living in a science of my honest experiences. I only wish to share this liberation. In the end, though, only those inclined will seriously question things or diligently investigate the answers. Mind is all we really have. Why is that so scary?
I’m not afraid to find God. No, not religion. I said God— that ocean of all consciousness in which I have discovered that anomalies absolutely do occur, but the realness of soul is no deviation from the norm.
I go now to continue my search with my science mind, still up to no good in favor of the truth. And I feel fine.
This is a trademark of awareness.