The Undivided

Ideograms can in some ways be thought of as maps which show the flow of energy at a target. Trace your ideograms and try to both see and feel the flow of these energies.

The green overlay shows some of the energy flows of the fish, the blue overlay shows some of the energy flows of the water

Click to view the target

“To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not–body, feelings, thoughts ,time, space, this or that–nothing concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand on the level of mind that you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realize you are the limitless being”

~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

What is the source of moral knowledge? Moral knowledge and direction come from mans sense of who he thinks he is and from what he considers his purpose (or lack of purpose) to be.

The only questions that have really ever mattered are, “Who are we?” and “Why are we here?” The answers to these questions are the whole point of philosophy, (although Bertrand Russell once remarked that “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”)

Where does mans sense of who he is and what his purpose is come from? Francis Bacon summed up the principal sources of this knowledge in, “Novum Organum”, his treatise on intellectual fallacies. Bacon classified these sources as Idols because of human tendency to give these sources more veneration than they actually merit. All of these sources are tainted with false notions. He named them, Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Marketplace and Idols of the Theatre.

The Tribe consists of our parents, extended family members, teachers and all other members of our particular tribe in whom we trust for knowledge and guidance. Nietzsche spoke about this topic with his statement that “ The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

The Cave refers to our individual minds and how our perception of the world is colored by our own temperament, education, habit, environment, accidents and personal experiences of the world. Plato used the Cave metaphor as well in referring to this concept. In his allegory of the cave, prisoners have been chained since childhood deep inside a cave and are immobilized so that they can only see a wall in front of them. Shadows are projected on the wall and since the prisoners never see anything else, the shadows become the only reality that they know. Plato remarks that if a prisoner were set free and led outside the cave into the sunlight and could see the world as it truly is, he could never again return to the cave and accept shadows as reality. Such is the nature of enlightenment.

The Marketplace refers to words themselves and their power to form opinions in the minds of men. In our day we can add pictures and movies to the list. A good example of the impact of the marketplace on our beliefs can be found in the world of Advertising. Coke is the “real thing” and with Nike shoes we can “just do it.”

The Theatre includes the field of theology, philosophy and science and is so designated because according to Bacon, “all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion”.

In more modern times, Thomas Kuhn has written extensively on the history of science and the fact that science does not progress in a linear fashion towards ultimate truth. Instead it works under a particular paradigm or world view for a time and then periodic revolutions take place in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. Except for the periodic revolutions, science works under a particular world view or paradigm with boundaries which define both what the universe contains and what it does not contain.

Kuhn wrote that a scientific community is “an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigm contains.” Normal science is specifically not interested in innovation. Revolutionary advances and normal science are not really compatible because to seek the discovery of new phenomena unaccounted for by the paradigm, or to attempt the breaking of new theoretical ground, would threaten the paradigm.

It seems evident to me that religion functions in exactly the same way. Any particular religion works under a fiercely guarded world view and is not interested in any discovery that threatens its own particular viewpoint or paradigm.

Philosophy itself does not appear to be immune from paradigms. Frederick Nietzsche appears to be an interesting example of a philosopher strongly impacted, perhaps even created by a scientific revolution that led to a change in paradigms. In his case, Darwinian evolutionary theory led to the demise of the biblical Genesis paradigm. Its new materialistic world view appears to be the impetus behind Nietzsche’s philosophies and his famous proclamations such as “God is dead” and “Morality is herd instinct in the individual.”

It’s easy to see how such paradigm shifts lead men to rail against the inadequacies of human intellect and make statements such as “ In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” If this is the case, then we also see how mans concept of morality is strongly impacted by his view of who he is and what his purpose is.

With Darwin, the world suddenly became a place without purpose so why should morality have a purpose either? Purpose is now barred from science but as Alfred North Whitehead said, “Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.” The paradigm that nature is purposeless is however becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

Darwin believed that nature moved from simple to complex. Mankind evolved from simple single celled organisms….only this has proven not to be the case. We now know that” life is based on machines­—machines made of molecules. Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along highways made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes, and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves, Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim using machines, copy themselves using machinery, ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.” ( Michael J. Behe, “Darwins Black Box”, pages 4-5).

Has there ever been a machine without a purpose? Are we to suppose that all machines have been created for a purpose except the one that is the most unfathomably complex of them all?

I’ve been to the zoo and seen apes that look curiously similar to people I’ve seen and I’m not challenging the fact that things evolve but the current paradigm does face challenges and the need for revision on several fronts. Another scientific revolution is brewing.

In the current paradigm, man is just a bunch of molecules that have blindly built a machine. But why stop with molecules? Molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of nuclear particles and nuclear particles are made of light. Therefore Man is not just a bunch of molecules; he is in truth a creation of light.

Quantum physicist, David Bohmn, a close associate of Albert Einstein stated that all matter is essentially “frozen light” and that the universe is in some sense a holographic structure. This is not a metaphysical statement but a scientific observation.

Matter has in fact been created from light in the lab and we know the precise amount of energy it takes for instance to create an electron from light. (see http://www.hep.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/e144/nytimes.html). Light, the real substance of which man is made, exhibits many strange properties. For one thing, at the speed of light, time stops. It also has no rest mass, so it has no space. It exhibits a property known as nonlocality wherein photons of light paired and then separated by any distance remain entangled (connected) with each other. Change the properties of one photon and the other will instantly change as well. Man it seems, is made of a substance that breaks all the rules of the current paradigm.

A large and growing body of evidence shows that like light, consciousness itself exhibits non-local properties. Some of the best evidence comes from “remote viewing” experiments carried out under the direction of the Pentagon, the CIA, and other U.S. Intelligence Agencies which show that man is capable of perceiving objects and events even if physically separated from them in time and space. If you’ve followed this blog you have read of my own experiences with Remote Viewing. The program itself was supported for over a decade at the highest levels of government (including at least two U.S. Presidents). The results of these consciousness experiments were so convincing as to elicit this comment from Major General Edmund R. Thompson, the U.S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, 1977-81. He said, “ I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework”. (“Remote Viewers”, by Jim Schnabel, Dell Books 1997).

Nobel Prize winning scientist Cambridge Professor Brian Josephson is just one of many top ranking science professionals who have concluded that human consciousness is capable of nonlocal awareness, even while the scientific community in general continues to deny it.

As Thomas Kuhn indicated, radical scientific advancements threaten the existing paradigm and are therefore strongly repulsed by “normal” science. These types of advancements in knowledge must wait for another scientific revolution to occur before they can be accepted by the community at large. What does all this have to do with moral knowledge? Let me explain.

I was once a mentor in the “12-step” program held at a state prison. The purpose of this program was to assist prisoners in overcoming problems with alcoholism and drug addiction. In virtually every case, it was their problems with alcoholism and drug addiction that had led them to commit crimes which then ended with their incarceration. One day I told a group of prisoners the same story about light being the real base element of man as I have recounted above. The following week when I returned to the class, I noticed that the class was much larger than the previous week. One of the prisoners said, “We want you to tell us again what you told us last week about being made of light.” The men had been immensely impacted by what they had heard. They had been writing home telling family members about it. They had been discussing it and writing about it in their personal journals. It had challenged and changed their own personal paradigms concerning who they were as human beings and had done so in a very positive way. You could even say that in some way they had left the cave and come out into the light.

Morality and purpose are inseparably linked. We can’t have one without the other. What man sees when he looks inside is reflected in his actions in the world outside. It is the answers that we individually give to ourselves to the questions, “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” that guide our individual moral choices and actions. Science itself is indicating that it’s time for man to reassess its own answers to those questions, for it has found that man is far more than it has imagined.

Frederich Nietzsche spoke the following words many years ago, at the dawn of the materialistic world view brought about by the findings of Charles Darwin. They are relevant again today at the sunset of that vision. The dawn of a new day has extended forth its first light and in that light men see with awe and wonder a universe full of purpose. “every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an open sea. “