What We Leave Behind: The Science of Babel

I. The Fallacy of Modern Science

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A grapevine has been planted outside of the father, but being unsound, it will be pulled up by its roots and destroyed.

—Gospel of Thomas 40

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If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.

—Bob Marley

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I went to college to study the nature of life but found that the topic was not very popular. So I studied philosophy and the sciences and hoped for the best.

But how did cognitive science not have a model of the human mind? Why was there no history of consciousness? How did biology not study the perceptual depth of lifeforms? And most importantly, how had all this knowledge still not formed a unified picture of the world?

So I looked into the nuts and bolts of the construction of our knowledge. I dug into the philosophy of science. I studied the development of the method and the nature of scientific revolutions. I learned of the ontological foundations and epistemological underpinnings of our civilization's greatest achievement.

All the while I dove into religions and developed my sense of spirituality. I came to know various ways of apprehending the transcendent, exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness and learning the value of discipline and ceremony. I studied the heritage of pre-Columbian cultures and experienced other realms with Amazonian shamans. I gained a new understanding of my body through the teachings of Hinduism and a new view of existence from the Jewish tradition.

Somewhere along the lines, I discovered the beauty and power of language. I learned the meaning of myth and came to know the nature of perception. I left my culture behind and saw the likeness in all people—I became aware of the human predicament.

But if I'd finally made sense of my existence, how could modern science be so lost in itself? How did it still have nothing to say about what it means to be alive, and why was it farther than ever from its basic goal of unification? Would we ever grasp the underlying order of nature, or had we dropped the whole project and quietly moved on?

Is modern man necessarily bound to an incoherent myth of disconnected stories, or is there a deeper problem? Something beyond method and experiment—something we missed... some foundational fallacy?

Reading Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics", I found the answer I'd been looking for, and it was the very question.

I caught the founding premise of this monumental construct stripped of fancy language: "[To] give an account of reality as it would be in our absence" (Smolin, 6).

What?

I thought the idea was to understand reality as it actually exists.

...with us?

It turns out all of mainstream science grows out of the belief that we are not real. Apparently some very deep thinkers looked into the question and found that without a doubt human existence was for no reason, so we had to ignore in order to get to the "real" truth.

It's hard to swallow, but this is the bedrock of the global myth. It's a view cynically called "philosophical realism", and it claims that the perceived world exists independently of our perceiving.

Nothing "scientific", this is an inductive assumption; the a priori ontological stance which has historically informed the development of all the concepts and entities of our universal language. Hence the "scientific" effort to build a world-model with no mention of our subjectivity, and the ensuing—and unconscious—exclusion of human experience from the dominant culture's conception of nature.

In fact, Lee Smolin's quick defense of "realism" shows him at his least eloquent in an otherwise fascinating piece of work: "We are accidental descendants of an ancient primate, who appeared only very recently in the history of the world. It cannot be that reality depends on our existence" (Smolin, 7).

Except, yes, our perceived reality does depend on our perceiving.

Wasn't the whole idea to make sound judgments after our observations?

Now Smolin is not a philosopher, biologist, or psychonaut, and that's exactly what makes his account so perfect. Philosophical "realism" is a constrained opinion; a belief based on irrational assumptions; a forced rationalization of the insignificance of life. All in an effort to do away with the "problem of perception", i.e. the problem of existence.

Now it all made sense.

The scientific enterprise had not answered my question because it had dismissed it from the outset. What abomination to attempt an understanding while denying understanding!

For how do we build a world on the premise that we're not part of it?

And what does it mean when a civilization leaves itself out of its creation story?

My childhood intuition had led me in the right direction; humanity's afflictions have no external basis—the root of all evil is psychological in nature.

And the uprooting is Now.

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II. The Exile's New Clothes

It is not so much that we need to be taken out of exile. It is that the exile must be taken out of us.

—Menachem Mendel Schneerson

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Now I saw the disconnect between my search and science: the existence of consciousness is not addressed within the modern myth because it is not part of its definition of reality.

Can you say existential exile?

This is a "philosophy" grown out of the main psychodynamic of mankind, the fear of dying:

The philosopher asks, 'what's real?'
'I will surely die, but the world has always been here.
Therefore, my existence can't be of the essence.'

So the scientific mind keeps searching for the truth, blind to its own searching; humanity advancing in its construction, denying its constructing.

It is the undigested trauma of self-awareness, now bubbled up to concrete and abstract language, ready to be eradicated as the last obstacle to wholiness:

"realism": [ree-uh-liz-uhm]

-psychopathology

1. faith in our perceptions while ignoring our perceiving.
2. the belief that reality is what we perceive while not THAT we perceive.
3. the rationalization of a psychological incapacity to consider that being—perceiving—just might be an intrinsic element of the universe.

Philosophical "realism" is nothing new, it is the intellectual manifestation of man's fundamental delusion, the source of all deception: the sense that 'I' exists apart from 'world', and therefore our being has no place in our understanding of the world.

It is the last stronghold of the ego, the veil of confusion shrouding human history, and still the foundation of the global myth—all of mainstream science's concepts, theories, and entities stem from that plot.

Thus the scientific imagination has been kept from bridging the phenomenon of existence with that of our existence, because its historical assumption has rejected beforehand the possibility that subjectivity—being, perceiving—might be of any 'real' significance.

And so we get definitions of lifeforms such as "complex assemblies of physical particles"; subjective experience explained away as "an epiphenomenon of physical processes"; a universal myth defining life as survival, and a humanity that refuses to real-ize its existence.

Because the only "unifying principle" the sciences share right now is that sacred dogma: the abnegation of awareness.

Wait—what?

AN "EPI-PHENOMENON".

...who are we kidding?

To what arduous lengths has man gone to renounce his conscience!

Let's face it, the modern myth is a incoherent picture of the world, a disjointed collection of laws and patterns, an increasingly specialized set of isolated fields growing like tumors on their one shared assumption: that we don't exist.

That our passions, our fears, our thoughts, feelings and clamors—our loving and hating, our myths and memories, our values, cultures, dreams and desires, our "qualia"—consciousness, all knowledge itself, that because it is subjective, is not a part of the "real world".

Isn't it time we revisit our most sacred assumptions?

For the problem of unification is not one of technological limitations, experimental evidence, or cosmic meaninglessness—it is a philosophical question. Modern knowledge has not unified because it has shut off its own existence, it has refused to see itself as an actual event in the "real" world.

How much longer will we hope that we're side-effects of some yet-to-be-found "physical law"?

Neither are human suffering and exploitation caused by scarcity or inefficiencies—the state of global affairs results from a psychological dis-ease, an existential vertigo shared by the entire species at this stage of development.

For as she conceals her own perceiving force, the mind binds herself to worshiping fragments of reality, continuously idol-izing creations before its creating, perpetuating the psychological bondage keeping the consciousness from truth, and humanity from liberty.

For how does a culture strive for moral integrity and social responsibility when its official knowledge negates the "reality" of experience?

How do we promote environmental values, humane treatment of animals, and universal human rights when our truth author-ities assure us we´re not "real"?

Philosophical "realism" is the biggest lie in history. It is the philosophy that disowns Sophia, the belief that there is no believing.

Thus the behemoth of contemporary science is a world-conception that denies conceiving; a collection of extrapolations with no common thread; a construction of world without its keystone.

A tower to the heavens without I AM.

A theory of world aiding and abetting the global matrix of un-consciousness responsible for the social, environmental, and existential nightmare of the day.

Because defining life as survival ensures we aspire to nothing more, and seeing ourselves as consumers makes sure we become just that.

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III. "To Bring Forth the Capstone"

The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.

—Psalm 118:22

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Is the modern myth bound to remain a loose collection of isolated stories with no unifying platform?

No—science will deliver its complete theory, when it is willing to reassess its most fundamental assumption.

Talk about a shift in consciousness!

For the scientific story will never unify under the self-denying chains of philosophical "realism". The fundamental law won't be unearthed in biotech labs or billion-dollar particle colliders: the discovery of the one entity and unifying principle happened a very long time ago, before we had "science"—if we could but stop hiding it!

So let it be heard:

The first premise of mainstream science is false.

The "realist" hypothesis has been falsified.

And what is that dreadful alternative?

To build an understanding that includes all the facts, no matter how uncomfortable: to understand reality as it actually exists—with us. With this embodied experience; with the fickle reality of consciousness. With the possibility that life might "really" have a purpose, even if we're not sure of it. For we are no longer innocent—yes; we are guilty of being, and we can never go back.

So what if we build a science of perceivers instead of inert particles? What if we step into the fact that we're a force of nature—the creative force?

The new paradigm will be a conscious one, for a humanity that is truly self-aware.

Many cultures around the world have grasped the divine order of this fundamental energy and left us stories and teachings to aid the global evolution. Now we are all privy to the secrets of the prophets, sages, and shamans—now we revisit and integrate the myths, because they are all different expressions of the same thing. Now we unify all knowledge and birth a unified humanity.

So let us extirpate this parasite and heal the modern myth from this in-sanity, that great deceiver—the intellectual pathology of censoring our being. Because whether through fig leaves or intricate rationalizations, we will never get rid of our self-awareness.

And as the fallacy is apprehended and rejected, the findings of modern science will be found to contain all the pillars on which the world community can re-cognize divinity.

All that's missing is the capstone, that which the builders refused:

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"I AM THAT I AM"

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So let's end this exile.

Let's uncover our selves.

Can we bear this existence?

Can we bare our self-awareness?

Let's uproot these vines of self-denial.

Let us lift the veil and exorcise this demon.

To redeem ourselves from that original delusion.

And subvert the hidden dogma of the universal language.

May we dis-cover the keystone, and let the light unite our holy temple.

Alas, it is the path of every individual, and the undercurrent of human history—the hair-narrow bridge between self-awareness and the consciousness of One.

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Bibliography

Smolin, Lee. The Trouble With Physics: the rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Images by

Cornelis Anthonisz. Fall of the Tower of Babel, 1547.

Robert Macoy. The Masonic Manual (p144), 1867.