Scientific heresy: "All energy contains consciousness"; that'd change the world!

[inavalan]

It is fairly easy to recognize the ways in which organized religion discouraged vigorous intellectual speculation. It is more difficult, perhaps, to see that science fears the unofficially directed intellect quite as much as it does the unofficially directed intuitions.

In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature. Art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be "not real." It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard, to see how a story or a painting is constructed—or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs, that appear behind, say, the poem or the work of fiction.

When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told "this is how things are." Science's reasons are given as the only true statements of reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations of counter-versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can safely channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. They can say "This is after all merely imaginative, and not to be taken seriously."

(9:36.)This is the reason why some scientists who either write or read science fiction, are the most incensed over any suggestion that some such ideas represent a quite valid alternate conception of reality. In a fashion, at least in your time, science has as much to fear from the free intellect as religion does, and (with irony) any strong combination of intellectual and intuitional abilities is not tailor-made to bring you great friends from either category.

Science has unfortunately bound up the minds of its own even most original thinkers, for they dare not stray from certain scientific principles. All energy contains consciousness. That one sentence is basically (underlined) scientific heresy, and in many circles it is religious heresy as well. A recognition of that simple statement would indeed change your world.

[inavalan]

Now: particularly to Ruburt. The following sentence:

You do not have the responsibility to change the world for the better. That is, changing the world for the better is not your personal responsibility. You have a natural need to impress your world—to act through it, with it, and upon it, to illuminate it with your own vision, in which case you automatically change it for the better. The original prerogative is the creative one, from which all benefits automatically flow.

If you think that it is your personal responsibility alone to change the world, then you are always bound to feel a burdening sense of failure. The world is being changed through our work—but because that work is primarily a creative endeavor in the fullest, deepest meaning, now, of the word creative. When you hold the attitude I have mentioned, however, you begin to insist upon immediate creative results in the way that the shoemaker does, again—and again, we are not making shoes.

[Bora137]

I'm doing a psychology degree at the moment and the demand for the application of scientific method to back up every single line of an essay you write is utterly suffocating. Anything you state must allow itself to be empirically proved wrong so it must be physically observable. Pretty hard to physically observe beliefs held in people's heads, therefore you can't talk about people's beliefs because what you say cannot be proved. Science keeps us in a cage, a small one with no windows.

[Deb]

Great session. To me it really applies to the fiasco of covid. Science is constantly evolving as technical abilities and knowledge change and yet "science" has been weaponized and touted as static and carved in stone. Peoples lives have been crushed, careers ended during the pandemic due to daring to think outside the box. I don't understand this rigid way of thinking.

Science has become a religion—I'm thinking of the origin of the word heresy. Maybe it always has been.

[inavalan]

Procustes the scientist!

Procrustes, also called Polypemon, Damastes, or Procoptas, in Greek legend, a robber dwelling somewhere in Attica — in some versions, in the neighbourhood of Eleusis. His father was said to be Poseidon. Procrustes had an iron bed (or, according to some accounts, two beds) on which he compelled his victims to lie. Here, if a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched him by hammering or racking the body to fit. Alternatively, if the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off the legs to make the body fit the bed's length. In either event the victim died. Ultimately Procrustes was slain by his own method by the young Attic hero Theseus, who as a young man slayed robbers and monsters whom he encountered while traveling from Trozen to Athens.

The "bed of Procrustes," or "Procrustean bed," has become proverbial for arbitrarily — and perhaps ruthlessly — forcing someone or something to fit into an unnatural scheme or pattern.

[inavalan]

Great session. To me it really applies to the fiasco of covid. Science is constantly evolving as technical abilities and knowledge change and yet "science" has been weaponized and touted as static and carved in stone. Peoples lives have been crushed, careers ended during the pandemic due to daring to think outside the box. I don't understand this rigid way of thinking.

Science has become a religion—I'm thinking of the origin of the word heresy. Maybe it always has been.

Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization. The term is usually used in reference to violations of important religious teachings, but is also used of views strongly opposed to any generally accepted ideas. A heretic is a proponent of heresy.