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The Way Back To Paradise
Restoring the Balance Between Magic and Reason
By JOSEPH M. FELSER Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 Joseph M. Felser, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61283-196-1
CHAPTER 1
"I Fell Asleep Under the Tree"
The diversity and Twinness of the Forked Tree is Natural and gives Power to the Human to endure in every kind of circumstance and challenge. When the Power of either of the two branches of the Great Tree is suppressed or ignored, the Tree will die.
—Hyemeyohsts Storm, Lightningbolt (1994)
The Missing Link
Ten years ago my mother lay in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. My father and I kept a constant vigil by her bedside as we struggled to accept the inevitable end. At one point, Mom leaned closer to me. In a conspiratorial stage whisper, she confided that she saw someone standing at the end of her bed.
I looked, but saw only the blank wall and the plastic bin for recycling medical waste. The tone of her voice told me she understood that this someone wasn't "really" there.
"Don't worry," she said, as she patted my hand in reassurance, "it's not Jesus!"
We both laughed at the joke. Even on her deathbed, Mom retained her sense of humor and unflappable composure. Dad and I marveled at her bravery.
"It's Ben Casey," she added weakly.
Doctor Ben Casey, from the old television show. He was a brash but talented neurosurgeon who never gave up on a patient, a super-doc with compassion. Intuitively, I understood why Ben was making his rounds at my mother's bedside. Her own doctor had fled the scene, conveniently slipping out of town to attend a medical conference. He would not return until after she died, early the following morning.
Next to his Hollywood prototype, the flesh and blood doctor was a pale imitation. In spite of my anger, however, I realized that this was not entirely his fault. Something is very wrong when a society's healers can no longer perform their sacred task and their only recourse is to throw up their hands in resignation or hide under the nearest rock. Something much larger than one man's character is amiss.
The situation is analogous to what happened to the American Indians when they were hit with smallpox, influenza, and other hitherto unknown European diseases and plagues. All their tribal shamans could do was shake their heads in disbelief. Healing—the art of making a person whole again—was no longer possible. Balance could not be restored. The world had shattered into broken bits and pieces.
Nearly fifty years ago, in the shadow of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell predicted that if the West did not overcome its own cultural and social fragmentation, we would bring ourselves "only nearer to irretrievable disaster." Russell was a man of strict logic and science; his faith lay in reason. Yet he despaired that knowledge alone is not enough. (Surely mere data—our own deity of the hour—is not enough either.) What we need is the wisdom to use the knowledge (and data) properly for humane ends, and to get this wisdom, we must experience the world and ourselves as a whole. We have to be able to see the connections between means and ends, just as a great eagle can survey a vast territory from high above in the sky. Not only that, but we have to be able to feel the unity of all things. Absent this mystical sense, Russell warned, we will destroy ourselves.
This is an old story. An ancient Greek myth says that when Zeus, the king of the gods, created humans, he grew worried that he did too good a job. Eventually, we might become too powerful and overthrow the gods. So Zeus split us right down the middle, like a ripe cantaloupe (see the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, sec. 191 a). Each of us is only half a self. Sadly, we aren't even aware of our infirmity. We've forgotten what it is like to be whole. Afflicted with a strange longing we cannot even name, we yearn for our lost integrity, our missing other half.
This story is more than a quaint old tale. I see it as a useful metaphor for the dangerous path we have been treading for the past several thousand years in what we proudly call "civilization." Our own jealous gods of religion and science have cut us off from our natural bonds to Earth and Spirit. We have lost touch with both our inner world of dream, imagination, and intuition and the outer world of nature—the animals, plants, and elementary forces that sustain us. Indeed, this is no accident; to become alienated from the one is to become estranged from the other, for they are ultimately one and the same.
Our fate is to feel at once disembodied and dispirited, floating in a nowhere zone. We are detached from everything outside the narrow rut of our increasingly meaningless and empty daily routines of commuting, computing, and consuming. We have been reduced, as the philosopher R. G. Collingwood lamented, to mere "wrecks and fragments."
So what, exactly, is the missing link?
As Bertrand Russell understood, our heart life has not kept pace with the growth of our intellect. We are exceedingly clever but lack the wisdom that comes from feeling a part of life. How else can we explain the collective madness of recent genocides, from Rwanda to Yugoslavia? Daily we commit the unspeakable crime of geocide, murdering entire species of animals, plants, and perhaps even Mother Earth herself. The evidence of our heartlessness lies all around us, from school shootings, terrorist bombings, and "holy" wars to the pathetic dishonesty and corruption of our political, business, and religious "leaders."
It's an awful mess, as anyone can see.
I'm afraid that the only way out of this mess is for each of us to confront our own personal craziness, to experience it and suffer through it, firsthand. Only when I did this could I come to see my own misery as a symptom of a much larger imbalance. Only then was I ready and able to receive the gift of insight: The real connection is never lost.
It all began for me more than twenty years ago, during my first few months of graduate school, when I was slaving away on my doctorate in philosophy....
"So, You Want to Be a Wise Man?"
The cold, grey Chicago autumn was rapidly slipping into an even colder and greyer Chicago winter. Having only recently moved there from the East Coast, the city and the university campus were still new to me, and it all felt strange. I had worked hard in college. While my friends were partying, I was in the library, studying. I had been determined to get into a good graduate school. Now that I was there, I felt ill at ease. Something was wrong, though I could not put my finger on it. I felt like the poor fool who had climbed to the top of the ladder, only to discover that it had been placed against the wrong wall.
One afternoon after class, I stopped by a campus coffee shop located in one of the academic buildings. With its dark wood paneling and carpeted floor, the room resembled my fantasy of the dining room of a private club. Groups of students were congregating around tables and benches, smoking cigarettes and chatting away over steaming mugs of coffee and greasy doughnuts. I saw several familiar faces and went over to say hello.
Someone introduced me to Josh, whom I knew by reputation as a brilliant scholar far along in his graduate studies. Josh was sitting cross-legged on one of the wooden benches. With his curly black beard and half-lotus posture, he looked every inch a combination of Zen master and Hasidic sage. He smiled warmly as we shook hands.
"So, you want to be a wise man?" Josh asked, nodding.
I realized, of course, that he was referring to the literal meaning of "philosophy," the ancient Greek word for "the love of wisdom."
"Yeah, I guess so," I replied.
Josh threw back his head and exploded into hearty laughter.
I joined in, to pretend to my own knowing cynicism—the accepted posture of intellectual sophistication. Yet I had answered truthfully. I wanted something more than a mere degree or an academic position. But I was reluctant to say so. Perhaps I felt naïve. By mocking the idea that we were in pursuit of real wisdom, Josh and I were being astute aspiring professionals. It was all a kind of game. Only this game was no fun.
Not long after the incident with Josh, I was sitting in the class of a world-renowned philosopher. Professor Scott, as I'll call him, combined intellectual precision and rigor with an easygoing manner. His battered brown Volkswagen sported an "I'd Rather Be Sailing" bumper sticker. And you could almost believe it. He was gifted with a rich, soothing baritone voice, not to mention a deft, dry sense of humor. He was a campus star.
On this occasion, someone had asked the professor if he agreed that human beings were basically intelligent "meat machines," as a professor from M.I.T's famed artificial intelligence laboratory had recently suggested. And what if the silicon-based machines could eventually outthink the meat variety? Did that mean they would be superior to humans?
"Hell, give them the vote!" Professor Scott quipped merrily. He leaned back and basked in the boisterous eruption of approving laughter that greeted his clever remark.
A student in the back of the room timidly raised her hand. Helen, as I'll call her, was a shy, quiet person who hardly ever spoke in class. Professor Scott, grinning broadly, nodded in serene acknowledgment of her question. All eyes turned to Helen.
"But why would we we want to think like that?" she asked earnestly.
The room grew eerily silent. Time itself seemed to slow down, like when you're in a car accident and it feels as if events are unfolding in super-slow motion inside of a soundproof cocoon.
At last Professor Scott appeared to be saying something. Oddly, his mouth was moving, yet no words were coming out. It took me a moment to realize that he was not winded, but rather, quite uncharacteristically, stuttering.
"Wwwhhhyyy?? Bbbbeeeccccaaauuuse it's TRUE, that's why!!" he spluttered.
Like so many before him, when challenged by a real question, Professor Scott could only retreat into a stubborn affirmation of the unquestionable articles of his (philosophical) creed.
To cast off the solid moorings of accepted answers means departing the security of familiar shores and sailing into uncharted waters, the open sea of questioning. Beliefs are like broken pieces of clamshells and driftwood washed up on the beach. At best, they're the tacky souvenirs of someone else's trip to the seashore, snapshots of yesteryear. People wind up fighting over these worthless trinkets. Answers are possessions, the cause of divided hearts and partial perceptions. They inspire pride, envy, fear, and righteous indignation.
Real questions force us to undertake our own voyage into the wild heart of an undiscovered country. Why should we think of ourselves as mere meat machines? Is the Earth really flat? Is Jesus truly God? Why should I give away all my personal power to a guru? True inquiry is a magical act, directly linking us with the living source. It is what the late physicist-philosopher David Bohm called "the dance of the mind." Our dance partner is reality itself.
Professor Scott, alas, was not a dancer; he was a collector. I could see that on that day in class.
Helen was silent. She asked no more questions (at least not out loud). I, however, began asking myself many questions.
That'll Be Five Senses (Only), Please
I soon came to understand that it was an unquestionable article of faith among my professors that philosophy must be scientific. In practice, this meant it was inconceivable that humans might be something more than mere "meat machines" that happen to think. Professor Scott could no more question his belief than the pope could question the unique divinity of Christ. What was an obvious fact to Professor Scott was, in Helen's more fertile imagination, only a mere possibility—and a dismaying one at that.
But according to scientific philosophy, it is precisely the fertile (or rather, fevered) imagination that gets us into trouble. It lures us away from "hard fact" and on up into the airy clouds of fantasy and speculation. Ironically, here scientific philosophy agrees with its mortal enemies, the defenders of religion. For example, Saint Augustine (354–430 c. E.), the medieval Catholic thinker, condemned the imagination shorn of dogma as a prostitute that leads the faithful astray. The English writer Edmund Gosse observed that his mother, a strict Protestant fundamentalist, refused to allow any kind of storybook or fictional work into the house out of fear that young Edmund's mind might be stimulated beyond the authoritative bounds of the Bible (just as today's fanatics burn Harry Potter books and crusade to have The Wizard of Oz removed from public libraries). No thinking outside the metaphysical box allowed! That is the great bogey of dogmatic religion and science alike.
I discovered that the bible of sorts of the scientific philosophers was a book entitled, appropriately enough, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), by Professor Hans Reichenbach Professor Reichenbach bemoaned the way that thinkers from Plato to Hegel had been seduced by "an imaginary world of pictures, which can become stronger than the quest for truth." True scientists resist all so-called extralogical motives. They stick to reason, whose job is to process incoming data provided by the five physical senses. Those who believe that mind or consciousness (or "soul" or "spirit") is something apart from measurable brain activity are like the poor deluded rube who took apart his car engine hoping to find the tiny galloping horses. Just as "horsepower" is only a colorful metaphor for engine performance, so "mind power" refers to physiologic brain function. Reality is what can be seen with our eyes, felt with our fingers, heard with our ears, and so forth.
Most, if not all, my teachers tacitly assumed something like this. Yet I realized that Professor Reichenbach was doing much more than presenting a rarefied philosophical theory of interest to only a handful of academics. In fact, he was articulating some of our basic cultural assumptions, including those that inform our systems of education.
Many years later I read with great interest and empathy New York artist and psychic Ingo Swann's account of his struggles growing up in what he derisively calls "the Age of the Five Senses Only." In the 1970s, Ingo Swann was a pioneer research subject in remote viewing, which is clairvoyance at a distance performed under controlled conditions, whereby an individual can acquire information about a physically distant object, place, or event by means other than the ordinary physical senses.
But even as a child, Ingo knew things that others insisted he could not know. On occasion he had inklings of future events. Also, he could sense what he calls "invisible 'energies' and 'thought-forms' flowing or jumping between people, animals, plants, and even buildings and geophysical objects." To young Ingo, the world was a single, living, breathing form of energy-consciousness.
As time passed, however, Ingo learned that such perceptions were socially awkward. So, little by little, they ceased occurring to him. One such "learning experience" occurred during his Sunday school class when he innocently asked his teacher how it was possible to know the future:
She held up a Bible and thunderously and fearsomely exclaimed in front of the Sunday school class, and in the best Salem witch-hunt style, that seeing into the future was the work of the devil. "Do you want to become a minion of the Devil?" she asked with visible emotion. Indeed, I did not, and I was nearly frightened to death of the possibility—as well as being mortified in front of my Sunday school peers.
Like the young Ingo Swann, I, too, had my share of "unorthodox" perceptions before they went underground (see chapter 2). I therefore knew from my own experience that the premises of so-called scientific philosophy were false. There are most definitely nonphysical senses. But "empiricism" was a fraud in any case. No one, least of all my teachers, was interested in hearing about my personal experiences. In truth, there was no such thing as the culture of the Five Senses Only. We were not taught to base our reasoned conclusions on our own direct sense experience; we were taught to accept someone else's interpretations of other people's ideas of their sense experiences. In other words, we were being indoctrinated, pure and simple. Think for yourself—only do it just like me. Too much of our educational system is little more than a propaganda machine.
To educate one's senses, it is necessary to exercise them—outdoors. But children are housed all day long inside stuffy classrooms. When I attended primary school, anyone caught dreamily staring out the window at the trees or sky would incur the wrath of the teacher. (I can still hear my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Ludlum, screaming at poor Jeffrey Brown at the top of her lungs.) But at least we had recess! Today there is pressure to eliminate recess and make school days longer and more numerous. There is no time for our overscheduled, pressured kids to loll around by the local creek catching frogs, as I did with my friend when we were young. The solitude and leisure essential for inner (and outer) development are viewed by the competitive overachiever mentality as a waste of time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Way Back To Paradise by JOSEPH M. FELSER. Copyright © 2005 Joseph M. Felser, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
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