Dis-covery: The Science of Babel

I. The Fallacy of Modern Science

.

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

.

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

—Bob Marley

.

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 for the human mind? Why was there no history of consciousness? How did biology not study the perceptual depth of lifeforms? And how had so much 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.

Meanwhile, I developed my sense of spirituality. 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?

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).

Wait...

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

...with us?

Not exactly. The modern concepts provided by mainstream science grow out of the belief that subjectivity is not "real", so we must ignore it to get to the "real" truth.

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 personal experience, and the ensuing and unconscious exclusion of our human existence from the dominant culture's conception of nature.

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

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 existence: anything we can, ever have, and ever will say about reality is contingent on our cognitive activity, and to leave that fact aside can only be considered naïve.

For why the urge to leave ourselves out of the picture? Wasn't the whole idea to make sound judgments after our observations?

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.

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?

Now it all made sense: the scientific enterprise had not answered my question because it had dismissed it from the outset. My 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 we're uprooting it Now.

.

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

.

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

Can you say existential exile?

Philosophical "realism" is nothing new, it is the intellectual expression of man's fundamental delusion, the root of all deception: the fear of dying, the sense that 'I' must exist apart from 'world', and therefore our being has no place in our understanding of the world.

As we become aware of our existence, we become aware of death—a fact too hard to bear, too hard to face without a context with which to understand it, so we cover ourselves. We hide our existence because we cannot account for it; our body is obscene because we are responsible for it, and we don't know why.

It is the undigested evolutionary trauma of self-awareness, 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.

"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 inability to consider that being—perceiving—just might be an intrinsic element of the universe.

And so we get definitions of life 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 realize its existence. Because the only "unifying principle" the sciences share right now is that sacred dogma: the abnegation of awareness.

Wait—what?

An "epiphenomenon".

Who are we kidding?

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

Contemporary science is an incoherent picture of the world; a disjointed collection of patterns and relationships; 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, thoughts, feelings and clamors—our actions and decisions; our loving and hating; our myths, memories, values, cultures, dreams and desires; our "qualia"—that consciousness, all knowledge itself, that because it is subjective, is not part a 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 human question. Modern knowledge has not unified because it has banished its own existence; it has refused to see itself as an actual event in "the real world".

So the scientific spirit keeps searching for the truth denying its own searching, and humanity advancing the construction, blind to its constructing. How much longer will we hope that we're side-effects of some yet-to-be-found physical law?

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

How does a culture strive for moral integrity and social responsibility when its common knowledge negates the "reality" of experience? How do we promote environmental values, the 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.

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

A tower to the heavens without I AM.

A theory of world aiding and abetting the global matrix of unconsciousness responsible for the social, environmental, and existential quagmire of the day.

.

III. "To Bring Forth the Capstone"

.

The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.

—Psalm 118:22

.

But are we bound to a world-myth made 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 fundamental law won't be unearthed in bio-tech labs or billion-dollar particle colliders: the dis-covery 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 perception; with the fickle reality of conscious experience. With the possibility that life might "really" have a purpose, even if we're not sure of it.

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. For we are no longer innocent—we are guilty of being, and we can never go back. Whether through fig leaves or intricate rationalizations, we will never get rid of our self-awareness, so let us extirpate this parasite and heal the modern myth from its in-sanity, that great deceiver—the intellectual pathology of censoring our being.

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

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

.

"I AM THAT I AM"

.

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 the demon.

To redeem ourselves from that original delusion.

And subvert the starting blunder of our 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.

.

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

Gustave Doré. Adam and Eve Driven Out of Eden, 1865.

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

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