6. ABOUT RELIGION AND THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT
WTM FAQ 6.7 How can a scientific explanation ever hope to account for and encompass the great ‘spiritual’ dimension we know exists in life? / Isn’t ‘spirituality’ beyond a purely rational explanation?
Jeremy Griffith’s response:
In FAQ 6.2 it is explained that the theme or purpose or meaning of existence is the ordering or integration of matter, however Integrative Meaning has been such a terrifyingly condemning truth for us divisively, not integratively behaved humans that we couldn’t face it. And so, to avoid facing it, we deified the integrative theme and purpose of existence as ‘God’, thus making it something separate and superior to us, not connected to us in an earthly, practical way. In FAQ 1.26 I explain that we have an all-sensitive, all-connected and all-loving, ideal-or-Godly-behaviour-expecting moral part of ourselves, which is our species’ original instinctive self or soul, and which we have also lived in denial of because it has confronted us with the unbearable truth that we have become horrendously corrupted from that original innocent, all-loving state.
Like almost all humans, scientists have lived in fear of the human condition, and so have been unable to confront it, and if you can’t confront a subject you’re in no position to think truthfully and effectively about it, and so there was no ability for science to acknowledge, let alone explain, the lost realm of sensitivity, beauty and oneness that we humans have become so alienated from. Furthermore, this fear of the human condition has meant that scientists have had to avoid the overarching, truthful whole view of the integrative meaning of existence, adopting instead a reduced view that focused only on the details of the mechanisms of the workings of our world—it has been what’s called ‘reductionist’ and ‘mechanistic’. This denial-based approach, while necessary until we could explain our corrupted condition, has meant that science has been stalled, completely unable to make any sense of the greater meaning of life. (You can read more about the limitations of mechanistic science in chapter 2:4 of FREEDOM.)
In my book A Species In Denial, under the heading Where is the Spirituality in negative entropy?, I have explained that the so-called ‘spiritual world’, which is a truly loving and sensitive and all-magnificent existence and dimension and potential for humans, does seem like another universe completely unrelated to us resigned, alienated, soul-corrupted humans, but it is not. We humans are now able to understand, in first principle scientific terms, that we 2-million-year corrupted humans are actually a totally legitimate and meaningful part of the integrative, Godly process. We are part of the integrative loving world after all. There is a ‘spiritual’, a truly loving and truly sensitive and all-magnificent, dimension to existence that we haven’t felt part of but we can now understand that we are part of. Ideality and our seemingly non-ideal reality have finally been reconciled! The magnificence of Integrative Meaning/God and our seemingly God-defying-and-destroyed condition have been reconciled.
I further explain that the demystification of our world doesn’t mean the specialness or extraordinariness or spirituality of our world is removed, rather it actually means that specialness is made more tangible. Mechanistic science, by denying Integrative Meaning and the truth of our species’ original sensitive innocence, has stripped so much of the truth and beauty from the world whereas the denial-free explanation of our world restores all that truth and beauty. It allows humans to live with a full awareness of, and ability to savour, the beauty of integration. It is alienation that is devoid of spirituality, not the truth.
Yes, it is only from the perspective of our current extreme alienation from the all-loving and all-sensitive world that that world seems to us unworldly, mystical and spiritual. There are many parts in FREEDOM that describe just how innocent and alive and all-feeling we once were, and how being aligned with integration is the most natural and normal of all states. They include the section on near-death experiences in paragraph 997 of FREEDOM and also paragraph 995 which explains the ‘powers’ of some savants, which seem like magic to us, but are actually another phenomenal example of the immense potential of our soul.
The following extraordinary quote from the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky is a wonderful intuitive remembrance of just how magical our species’ time in an alienation-free, all-sensitive and all-loving state of innocence was: ‘The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers. Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the people of this happy land. They came to me of themselves, surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were!…Their faces were radiant…in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy…It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned…They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours…but I could not understand their knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves…and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all nature like that—at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love…There was no quarrelling, no jealousy among them…for they all made up one family’ (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877).
So yes, we have been horribly separated from, alienated from, estranged from, blocked-out from, the all-sensitive and all-loving seemingly mystical, ‘spiritual’, seemingly other-worldly state that we did once have access to, but now we can know we are actually part of it and so can resuscitate our access to it.
