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Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber
Imre von Soos, architect, civil engineer, research scientist, philosopher and writer is a Hungarian born, Hungarian and Australian national. His anti-communist activities have forced him to escape from Hungary, and he lived and worked since in Australia, France, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, Brazil, the Czech Republic and now again in Austria. Read more...
.
COnventional Wisdom
of the
DUmiNant Group
From my book: Science, Religion, Education and a lot of Bull
Imre von Soos
The "world of science" and the "world of religion" are at clash on the question whether the dogmas of the one or the dogmas of the other should be brainwashed into the young through the teaching establishments, especially through the American and some other western schools, and thus into the public consciousness and subconsciousness of the present generation, perpetuated hence also for the future ones. And the scientific and religious fundamentalists join hands in their fight against natural spirituality originated in expanded consciousness and rational thinking: active perception, active intelligence and active ethics.
I had to put the two terms between quote-marks, because both are self-styled definitions of the mainstream of their exponents, where "world" bombastic as it may sound stands in both cases for squabbling sects of opinionated onhangers to ossified convictions, each producing its own what C.H. Waddington, the famous biologist, genetist and epigenesist well characterized as the Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group and pregnantly acronymed for "COWDUNG", which so Waddington
"is memorizable, appropriate and accurate enough. During most of this century [20th], the conventional wisdom of the dominant group about the nature of living organisms has been a rather exaggerated form of the 'thing' view; and when this applied to man and his social affairs, it seems, to me at least, to fall appropriately under the heading COWDUNG. It argues that the world and everything in it is constituted from arrangements of essentially unchanging material particles, whose nature has essentially been largely, if not entirely, discovered by the researches of physics and chemistry. These physico-chemical entities are supposed to constitute the whole of objective reality."
The two "worlds" fight for the domination of thought, truth and reality as if these were dominable objects through dwarfing imagination and eradicating individual thinking, the qualities which have spread the human race over a larger intellectual spectrum than the rest of creation represents on this planet from the simplest virus to the mediocre Homo sapiens. What both "worlds", joining hands also with the "worlds" of commerce and politics, are united on, is the proposition, that what is to be promoted and preserved in this runted species is the flat-foot in body, mind and spirit knowing well that from small followers no great thoughts or manifestations can arise, but for that so much more bovine subservience.
And exactly this flatfoot in body, mind and spirit is what western, and particularly American societies are proliferating through their educational systems, as can be read in John Taylor Gatto's prise-winning book, The Underground History of American Education:
"The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit. . . The truth is that America's unprecedented global power and spectacular material wealth are a direct product of a third-rate educational system, upon whose inefficiency in developing intellect and character they depend. If we educated better we could not sustain the corporate utopia we have made. Schools build national wealth by tearing down personal sovereignty, morality, and family life. It was a trade-off."
Thus, as Lewis Mumford has expressed it,
"We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeblemindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end."
"Today our best plans miscarry because they are in the hands of people who have undergone no inner growth. Most of these people have shrunk from facing the world crisis and they have no notion of the manner in which they themselves have helped to bring it about. Into every new situation they carry only a fossilized self."
Every being has the natural, intrinsic necessity to have an underlying rational reason for existence, which is why philosophy and general culture has preceded science in the history of every human community. To satisfy the innate need, spirituality and organised religions have evolved. The latters are, however, not the further developments of spirituality, but branching offs, spirituality and religion ending up quasi antithetic to each other.
The difference is fundamental. Organised religions have rationalised their belief-systems into dogmas and answer with them, from the outside so to says, and as with a compact belief-package, the questions of the inner search of their followers, often with a compulsive, incontestable force. By their very nature, they can be only dualistic, portraying an extrinsic Deity, an almighty Monarch, anthropomorphic in form and expression to boot, existing somewhere where the wheeling systems darken, from where He is managing, ruling, deciding and judging over earthly humanity, preferably and mostly through the particular priesthood, His self-appointed divine representatives.
On the other hand, spirituality is budding from the intrinsic being of the searcher of inner growth, self-developed through expanded consciousness and intuitive and intellectual processes into a dynamic fusion of knowledge and awe, built on a God Within, a differentiated fraction of the Summa Universe, of Its Life, Mind and Consciousness. Being self-generated, it cannot be organised, it can have no priests.
As the incontestable and rational scientific facts more and more contradict the dogmas that the organised religions are built on, the inner stability of rational existence of their followers is shaken, leaving a vacuum, soon to be replaced with the materialist credo of purposeless chance-existence and pointless life, of compulsory hedonism and consumerism, and the apotheosis of the ego through the apotheosis of the pack.
The struggle for equalization, massification, internationalization, globalization and centralization, and against upright morality and family life, inaugurated by Marx and metastasised by the communo-socialist sub-species, is thus being perpetuated now by the so-called western democracies, misbranded as "advanced civilizations", through the ego- and clique-centrism of the exponents of their organised systems of science, religion and education, under the cajoling but deceiving dictum of "social justice and nation-building". Thus the "terrible organizers" of mainstream science work, in the service of this Zeitgeist, by promoting materialistic tenets about a purpose- design- and causeless, purely mechanistic blind-chance universe, removing with it purpose, moral values and responsibility from particular and social reality, while religious orthodoxy, by insisting on the literal truth of mythological fables that contradict all quotidian knowledge and reason, discredits even its own spiritual philosophies; both serving, by using misguided education, the short-term-interests of commercio-politics, against the long-term-interests of the present and future life of this planet, and consequently also of the evolved human generations.
Let us examine this paradoxically sounding situation, while comparing the credos of the paradigm-sharing communities of the mediocre with the products of the great individual minds, heading it with four apposite statements:
"The state exists for man, not man for the state. The same may be said of science. These are old phrases, coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value. I would hesitate to repeat them, were it not for the ever recurring danger that they may be forgotten, especially in these days of organization and stereotypes." Albert Einstein
"We may take very seriously the principle that the State exists in order to make possible the development of individuals as free and responsible persons." Aldous Huxley
"Where there is nothing with independent life outside the State machine, civilization must loose all power of healthy growth. It is from minorities, small groups and individuals that fresh life has always come." George Trevelyan
"Current trends of standardized education today tend to turn young lives more and more towards sterility. Elimination of creation in favour of any clichι that will best serve mechanization. Mediocrity serves it best because mechanization best serves the mediocre." Frank Lloyd Wright
The word science, deriving from the Latin word 'sciencia', stands for the concept of knowledge. "Knowledge so Heraclitus consist in comprehending the all-pervading harmony as embodied in the manifold of perception." Manifold perception refers here to both sensory and intuitive super-sensory perception material as comprehended through logical mental processes.
"Knowledge" in our vocabulary, confirmed by the Oxford dictionary refers to "a person's range of information". But there is a world of difference between "a person's range of information" and "a person's range of comprehension". Information any imbecile can have, while comprehension understanding is the result of the exercise of a superior mental attribute, the intellect. Until an information is worked through the mental process of comparison, reasoning and rational acceptance into one's integral dynamic reality built on understanding, it remains but a belief-item within a cockeyed reality reflected by a memory-storage of heaped-up information fragments, fixed and instinctualised concept-inputs, with little more practical value than sectarian dogmas. All ultimate knowledge is rational and so is Truth. While reason is the foundation of certainty in knowledge, faith is a dynamic state of thought in development towards knowledge, expressed on its course in theories founded on self-reliance in its thought processes.
The definition of science as "reliable methods for obtaining knowledge" is most subjective, because the concept of "reliable method" is the function of the intellect and the scope of consciousness, which are highly individual qualities, covering a rather wide range even within the scientific community.
Both intuitive perception the content of expanded consciousness and comprehension through logical mental processes are the functions of the intellect. The intellectual spectrum of the species Homo sapiens spreading between IQ50 and IQ220, with IQ100 as the mean, no generalizations can be applied. According to scientific studies made between the populations of developed nations, well above 90% cannot think but in terms of effects; only a fraction is able to reason and has the ability to conceptually connect thought processes. It can be said that one man's knowledge is another man's ignorance.
As none of the informational entries can be accepted as absolute knowledge on relative face-value, all must be analysed, processed, understood and assimilated through logical argument discursive reasoning. All outside information should be considered as a proposal to be developed through logic into a sound, by the individual currently incontestable dynamic fact, to be tested, strengthened, sustained, modified or rejected at subsequent occasions. Intellect, mind in its cognitive and cogitative aspect, is the mental tool for the logical inter-connection of new entries and related, processed and understood but dynamic and never static and dogmatic memory-material, that produces in the process a new subjective, intellectual reality. Evidently, the sensory perceptive material of the physical universe can only serve as a base for effectual knowledge related to the physical plane, while intuitive noetic material, the content of expanded consciousness, that is, expanded perception is the base of all creative endeavour and all-involving understanding: wisdom. Science in practice is, or rather should be, the dynamic state of development of the open mind in ignorance towards understanding knowledge, as against effectual knowledge full of conditioned limitations.
That theories, attempts to speculative explanations, follow, or even quasi co-emerge with every new observation, belong to unavoidable and natural mental processes; to delimit and precondition any further observation to fit into and confirm a prematurely adopted theory, is a grave mistake. Ossifying pet theories into certainties in knowledge, and using them further as the cornerstones for further theories, are the most committed pitfalls of scientific modus operandi.
"The core of science so Werner Heisenberg is formed, to my mind, by the pure sciences, which are not concerned with practical applications. They are the branches in which pure thought attempts to discover the hidden harmonies of nature. Mankind today may find this innermost circle in which science and art can hardly be separated, in which the personification of pure truth is no longer disguised by human ideologies and desires. ... You may, of course, object that the great mass of people has no access to this truth and that it can therefore exert little influence on the attitude of people. But at no time did the great mass of people have direct access to the centre and it may be that people today will be satisfied to know that though the gate is not open to everyone there can be no deceit beyond the gate.
There are many ways to this centre, even today, and science is only one of them. Perhaps we have no longer a generally recognized language in which we can make ourselves intelligible. That may be the reason why so many people cannot see it, but it is there today as it has always been, and any world order must be based on it. Such a world order must be guided by men who have not lost sight of it.
Take from your scientific work a serious and incorruptible method of thought, help to spread it, because no understanding is possible without it. Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak."
The pure thought attempts to discover the hidden harmonies of nature were characterizing the discussions between David Bohm and Krishnamurti, between science and spirit, developing into Bohm's ideas about the implicate and explicate order, where mind and matter are not separate substances but different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement; ideas that no mainstream paradigm-follower has got the guts, and not even the cranial capacity, to follow.
For there is deceit even if it is not coming from beyond the gate. In its actual misuse, self-appointed "science" became a personified causative agent that defines, supports or restricts certain directions of studies, and stands behind theories mostly based on specialized and reductionist research and reasoning, with so much less known than unknown that they belong more to faith than to science, and are often even ossified into dogmas in the process, like religious belief-systems do. The concept of "science" became synonym with the Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group, or with the dominant group itself, governed by human ideologies and desires, being extensively exploited for these uses with great predilection and arrogance.
Scientific study should represent the striving towards the ultimate knowledge and truth towards the understanding of Reality through the systematic study of all that Reality does, appear or might contain. Without integral, unrestricted study no knowledge of reality can arise. Theories based on partial and even suitably selected informations might promote temporarily some forced out scientific careers, but are valueless in the definition of scientific Truth. Consequently, the content of theology, the science of religions, and the study of the nature and effects of all that is conveniently considered by average intellects to be "supernatural" and therefore arbitrarily discarded, should form as much an integral constituent of scientific research, the discovery of the hidden harmonies of nature, as are all those considered to be opportune by the collective judgment of the paradigm-sharing communities. Nothing can be beyond the scope of science, of knowledge, and so nothing should be beyond the scope of scientific investigation, research and consideration, to be rationally proved or disproved, especially because what is considered supernatural by the many, might very well be natural for some higher intellects of expanded consciousness.
"Thus wrote Robert Oppenheimer it is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn. This is one reason it is the decisive organic reason why scientists belong to universities. It is one reason why the patronage of science by and through universities is its most proper form; for it is here, in teaching, in the association of scholars and in the friendship of teachers and taught, of men who by profession must themselves be teachers and taught, that the narrowness of scientific life can best be moderated, and that the analogies, insights, and harmonies of scientific discovery can find their way into the wider life of man.
"Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it; both always, as the measure of their creation, have had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos."
All that exists in the Universe whether it is contained or not in humanity's actual summa knowledge is its natural, intrinsic constituent. "Supernatural", in the actual scientific context, is a label for all and everything that mainstream science is unwilling to handle because it is incapable to do so. The unwillingness can be due to the limits set by the particular scientific belief system e.g. materialism and atheism of the paradigm-sharing communities; by the mental capacity of the exponents of these communities; political or commercial pressure e.g. grants received for restricted and directed researches for reaching predetermined ends; or to the bilateral non-interference pact of "nolite tangere circulos meos" between the "world of science" and the "world of religion", that is, between the organised knowledge-systems and the institutionalised belief-systems, both forcefully conditioned. And all are reality-eclipsing and truth-castrating in the self-interests of their exponents and their paradigm-sharing communities.
"The organized political, social, and religious associations of our time wrote Albert Schweitzer are at work to induce the individual man not to arrive at his convictions by his own thinking but to make his own such convictions as they keep ready made for him. Any man who thinks for himself and at the same time is spiritually free, is to them something inconvenient and even uncanny. He does not offer sufficient guarantee that he will merge himself in their organization in the way they wish. All corporate bodies look today for their strength not so much to the spiritual worth of the ideas which they represent and to that of the people who belong to them, as to the attainment of the highest possible degree of unity and exclusiveness. It is in this that they expect to find their strongest power of offence and defence. Thus, his whole life long, the man of today is exposed to influences which are bent on robbing him of all confidence in his own thinking. The spirit of spiritual dependence to which he is called on to surrender is in everything that he hears or reads.
the truths and convictions which he needs for life must be taken by him from the associations which have rights over him. The spirit of the age never lets him come to himself.
Thus the circumstances of the age do their best to deliver us up to the spirit of the age.
It will ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great in its achievements in discovery and invention, could fall so low spiritually as to give up thinking."
Incomprehensible, however, it is not, if one considers that that particular part of our generation, "which has shown itself so great in its achievements in discovery and invention" and, I may add, in philosophy and the arts, represents an evolved subspecies, which is not to be confused, in spite of the morphological similarities and the present pathology of equalititis, with the conglomeration of a decadent subspecies of vast numerical superiority, which "could fall so low spiritually as to give up thinking" and I may add life-competence and responsibility. The key to the enigma rests in the progressive evolutionary split of the species Homo sapiens, that makes the concept "our species" a rather vague one; evolutionary split: a taboo subject even between biologists, in spite of their knowledge that the whole evolutionary history is characterized by evolutionary splits, and that the present human species are the descendants of those who came down from the trees, while leaving the majority of their brethrens hugging, and still hugging, the branches.
The paradigm-sharing conglomerations are not grouping around the originators of the thoughts they are following; they are formed after the originator is dead; after he cannot elaborate them further and cannot alter on them any more; after his thoughts can be ossified into dogmas and even reduced to the onhangers' cranial capacity; and after he cannot object any more to the misrepresentations of the products of his mind.
Because, as Bertrand Russell has expressed it,
"achievements, it is true, have been those of exceptional men, and have very frequently met with hostility from the herd."
Who is a man of the herd? The simplest definition would be: a 'blind follower'; an adherent who identifies himself with the herd, and submits himself unquestioning and unconditionally to its belief-system and to any authority that leads it. It is generally believed that laws, rules and regulations form a herd of people into a society, which laws, rules and regulations are not to be questioned, only obeyed. But, in fact, laws, rules and regulations form a bunch of people only into a herd. A herd is not a society; herd behaviour is not the evolutionary, constructive, organismic behaviour of interacting individuals towards higher aims and achievements, but the degenerative herding into self-righteous groups of dependent personalities, with their utilitarian ethics and their majority principle, directed towards uniformisation and dogmatisation of acquired belief-systems. In the context of this discussion, as the exceptional men of science and philosophy have met and are meeting with the hostility of the above characterized members of set scientific and philosophical belief-systems, the concept 'herd' refers to the particular paradigm-sharing communities. And, of course, as Albert Einstein has put it, "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"Ideas, as Locke said belong to man, as man and not as a member of society." This statement, confirmed for me by long experience, refers to any kind of society or association, because nobody, who is following the trend of his paradigm-sharing community, has the capacity to have, or dares to come up with new or different ideas.
"No great scientific advancement has ever been made by anyone whose thinking has remained kosher. wrote Physicist Mano Singham The problem is, the intelligentsia is dominated by danger zone IQ holders (125-140), a species capable of enough reason to be useful in maintaining an accepted model, but utterly useless in formulating new ones. Good stewards make crappy iconoclasts. It takes a solid paradigm inventor to shake things up. Given some years after any old model is replaced with a better new model, the stewards defend the new model as rapidly as they defended the old one."
But in the meantime they are the infertile zealous defenders of the old religious or scientific faiths against the creative thoughts of the new paradigm inventors, against the creators. Like with the 'Castles in Spain', it is the paradigm inventor who thinks them up, but those are the sterile stewards who move in with all their petrified preconceptions. I always wondered what kind of company frequented by Albert Einstein has made him come to the statement, that "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I am not sure about the universe."
I came without prejudgements, like Homeros,
And if my name will reach the later ages;
Then all should know, that I became a Heros
Because cared naught about the other sages.
von Soos freely after Francois Villon
This seeker is primarily characterized by not belonging to any scientific belief-system or adherent-community, but generates his own thoughts, truth and his particular reality freely, founded on his own perceptual, intuitive, intellectual and creative resources. The criterion of "success" for him is the extent to which he has made use of his superior abilities.
"With success, writes e.e.cummings as any world or unworld comprehends it, he has essentially nothing to do. If it should come, well and good: but what makes him climb to the top of the tent emphatically isn't 'a billion empty faces'. Even success in his own terms cannot concern him otherwise than as a stimulus to further, and a challenge to more unimaginable, self-discovering ... One thing, however, does always concern this individual: fidelity to himself. No simple (if abstruse) system of measurable soi-disant facts, which anybody can think and believe and know or, when another system becomes popular; and the erstwhile facts become fictions can unthink and unbelieve and unknow has power over a complex truth which he, and he alone, can feel."
In contrast to this flying spirit, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, while admitting, that
"creativity and insight are what help make science such a powerful way of understanding the natural world", also restricts its scope by stating ex cathedra, that "in science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from confirmable data the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based on empirical evidence are not a part of science."
And further pronouncing, that "the statements of science are those that emerge from the application of human intelligence to data obtained from observation and experiment", while at the same time rejecting all "data obtained from observation and experiment" of superior scientists and "substantiated by other [superior] scientists" , who have the mental capacity of experiencing expanded consciousness and thus perceiving what is for them confirmable data, and also have the intellectual capacity to infer from them a much wider compass of Reality, but whose findings are inconvenient for, and do not fit into the narrow spectrum, limited even further by the ideology of "methodological naturalism", short materialism, of the paradigm-sharing communities. The ex-cathedra definition ignores the fact that "creativity", "insight", "understanding", "inference", "substantiation" and "intellect" are functions of the mind, and manifest themselves radically differently at IQSD4+ than at IQSD2-, limiting thus, quite obviously, the "application of human intelligence" to the latter. The exponents also ignore that "science" is universal and free, and cannot be arbitrarily restricted by particular paradigm-sharing professional associations in order to suit their own limitations, and above all not by United States federal court judges by declaring that "Methodological naturalism is a 'ground rule' of science today", exercising thus their totalitarian power, even if only over a narrow fraction of the scientific world-community.
"Unfortunately there are very many persons as Aldous Huxley characterised their kind to whom the admission of ignorance is intolerable. Laying claim to certainty in spheres where certainty is impossible, to infallibility concerning matters where even a Pope admits that he can err, they rationalize faith, passion and self-interest into a simulacrum of knowledge."
"I reject the naturalistic view: wrote Karl Popper It is uncritical. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma. This criticism of the naturalistic view applies not only to its criterion of meaning, but also to its idea of science, and consequently to its idea of scientific method."
Creativity and insight are mental qualities of the paradigm inventors non-material assets, irreducible to material origin , but not those of the good stewards, the secondhanders of the old models of the scientific status quo, who not only rationalize, but glorify their impotence in thought and action. The paradigm inventors are creators, knowing very well, through personal experience, that their achievement is not due to blind chance but to expanded consciousness, transcendental knowledge and understanding, and even to some help from somewhere, the existence of all of which the others lack and therefore negate. These qualities are, no doubt, observable through their effects, but can not be experimented with nor experienced on the rest of the species and substantiated by most other scientists; nor can they be fathomed by the followers; and yet these qualities are concrete qualities of the creators who are the quintessence of science. The creators produce wisdom, but if this wisdom represents, after transmitted, only set information-input, or full intellectual understanding, depends on the related qualities of the receivers.
Within this context Descartes comes to my mind stating, that
"We shall not become mathematicians, even if we know by heart all the proofs that the others have elaborated, unless we have an intellectual talent that fits us to resolve difficulties of that kind. Neither, though we have mastered all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, if we have not the capacity for forming a solid judgement on these matters, shall we become philosophers."
Paraphrased to fit into this context and the following arguments, my Cartesian parastatement expressing a Natural Law asserts, that
"No individual organism shall reach an evolutionary state even if he possesses and enjoys all the material benefits characteristic to that state that others have conceived and elaborated, unless he has an intellectual talent that fits him to conceive and elaborate them, to resolve related difficulties and form solid judgements on these matters."
"For only the man as Lama Govinda has put it who has conquered, gained this world spiritually, whose consciousness has reached this stage of knowledge, is capable of using sensibly the forces derived from it without misusing their power. Only such a one is entitled to use them. This discrepancy between perfection and power of the means created from a higher dimension of knowledge and the level of consciousness of those using them, must in the end result in schizophrenic civilization in which man no longer controls these means because he no longer understands the power at his disposal. He then resembles the magician's disciple who is no longer able to hold in check the powers which he has conjured up, because he is not related to their nature, he does not really know them."
Only after the complete knowledge and understanding of his actual world is a man qualified to transcend it, proceeding to the next one.
The most outstanding difference between "a solid paradigm inventor" and the "good stewards" is, that while the one, having a dynamic and creative mind and is profoundly understanding his subject, will naturally change and develop the new paradigm as his thoughts develop around it, the others, lacking the above qualities and consequently not being at the height either to perceive or to understand its essence, will stick to a for them convenient variety of it in form of fixed input data of irrefutable knowledge, "facts of science". While they state, and maybe even believe in a religious sense of the word that "understanding in science means relating one natural phenomenon to another and recognizing the causes and effects of phenomena", by ignoring or negating for whatever reason even the existence of most of the phenomena, they paint a cockeyed, senseless un-world, founded mostly on reductionist principles.
Reductionism, the pathology of science, the innate but anti-natural upshot of specialisation, is a worm's eye view, dwarfing reality to testable and measurable static structures. Its practitioners ignoring that the microscope, the telescope and all the other intricate instruments of scientific research are there to widen horizons and not to replace them insist to define, through studying the properties of a fractional constituent, the properties of the whole; as if through the studying of a hydrogen atom, the oceans could be known; or like the common garden-variety kind, who specialises in the secret sexual life of the mitochondria, insisting subsequently to extrapolate his findings on galactic emergence, development and metabolism. The specialist can only analyse and extrapolate within the limits of his specialisation, as he has no wide-spectrum information to interconnect with and integrate into his reality. He is incapable to synthesise. There is nothing wrong with specialisation in science, as long as the specialists restrict themselves to their narrow subjects and bring them to rational conclusion at their own levels, but do not insist on producing universal theories on the strength of their fractional findings and explain these fractional findings on the base of their universal theories; while also defining as a gimmick to get around their own cognitive limitations the "scope of science" and their scientific investigations the way that best supports their work and their theories, and remove from it any and all fields that would interfere with them.
The crux of the trouble within the highly specialized and compartmentalized science is, that theories and arguments are based on minusculous particulars, not on holistic studies. Each specialist, being limited by his specialty, and in the scope of his inquiry beyond it, by the frame given to him as facts, is essentially a reductionist, and sees and argues his subject as a closed system. Evidently, antitheses can be presented only within the limits that have already confined the theses. Thus the whole evolution of life on earth is being discussed on the level of the protozoon and around the question if a flagella attached to it could have developed by chance or only through "intelligent design"; its outcome deciding whether we live in an irrational or rational universe, or, even worse, if materialistic chance-happenings or Moses' biblical fables should dominate scientific thought.
"More and more our life has been governed by specialists, wrote Lewis Mumford who know too little of what lies outside their province to be able to know enough about what takes place within it: unbalanced men who have made a madness out of their method. In accepting this partition of functions and this overemphasis of a single narrow skill, men were content not merely become fragments of men, but to become fragments of fragments
each man tended to nourish in himself, not what made him a full man, but what made him distinguishable from other men: mental tattooing and moral scarification were supposed to have both high decorative value, and immense practical efficiency. To the very extent that the perversion of specialism are accepted as inevitable, the civilization that clings to them is doomed. Specialism is hostile to life, for it is the non-specialized organisms that are in the line of growth; and only by overcoming the tendency of specialization can the community or the person combat the rigidity that leads to inefficiency and a general failure to meet life's fresh demands. We cannot achieve wholeness, either intellectual or personal, merely by uniting in their present specialized forms the existing body of men and institutions. Such an encyclopaedic massing of specialisms will not produce synthesis in thought, any more than an assemblage of specialized functionaries within a community will produce a whole and balanced society. Such mechanical cohesion, whether promoted arbitrarily by the state or through more private initiative, can only produce a state of arrest: not to be confused with the state of dynamic integration."
Specialists, self-limited within their narrow fields of specific knowledge, are able to study only states of arrest, only static structures, ignoring and even negating the existence of dynamic processes.
In the holistic concept each natural entity is a holon that incorporates the process of being constituted by holons of a lower order, being an individual element in its own right, and being an active constituent of a holon of a higher order. The self-organizing part of this trinity is the individual element, that forms out of its constituting elements of a lower order "more than their sums", and that expresses transcends itself by being a harmonious constituting element of a holon of a higher order.
The self-organizing part of the individual element processes its constituting elements holons of a lower order into a structure, with their particular functions orchestrated into an integrated one; and its self-transcending part enters this structure as a constituting element into the process of the self-organisation of the higher element holon of a higher order , completing with it its function in the process-structure-process flux of the multidimensional chain of the Natural System. It must be stressed that the holon is a process in its own right and not a static structure as a part of hierarchically superimposed static elements; it is a dynamic element within the fluid interconnections, interdependences and interactions of dynamic elements of spatially descending and ascending orders, where each element is an individual in its own right and responsibility, and at the same time an integral constituent of and essential to the whole. I called it an Integrarchic System integrity within integrality of the Self-configuring Open Natural Order, or short SONO. (von Soos 1984, 1987, 1995, 2001, 2004, 2006)
The specialists perceive out of the dynamic flux of an open system only a specific still-life, a closed system of static structure, which, because not perceiving any connection of it to anything else, is reasoned to have been able to come to existence only by chance; like, for instance, is the case of the chance-mutation caused evolution in biology, or the into a "pointless universe" itself big-banging dimensionless singularity in cosmology.
The holistic worldview demands synthesising cohesive knowledge and understanding that transcends the particular knowledge-quantums of the assemblage of specialized functionaries, and renders the assemblage more than the sum of its parts. But the overwhelming majority of people is not able to mentally hold and analogically correlate multiple events, not only because of the lack of mental and intracranial capacity, but also because of the lack of dynamic-elastic storing and thinking potential, judging ab ovo each particular event independently against an already fixed instinctualised ideological concept-input, most of the events not even reaching the possibility to be correlated with each other. The specialists are the pampered and supported darlings of all the religious, scientific, commercial, socio-political and state-political pressure-groups alike, because they can be and are used by them to support scientifically their particular pet dogmas, while, as far as any rational contradiction is concerned, they are, due to their limited perspectives outside their narrow specialization, as harmless to them as are all the rest of the common people kept in the cimmerian ignorance.
In opposition to the dualist and reductionist stance of mechano-materialistically predisposed groups of scientists, who aspire to establish the Grand Unified Theory of Nature, while contemplating their own self-limited world through the worms-eye-view of their speciality and refusing to even consider its underlying and thus unifying principles, the great individual sages of science are maintaining that the universe cannot be defined and understood in terms of its observable parts, but only as an indivisible whole, in which the so-called parts are not "things" but "processes" in interwoven and interdependent dynamic system-relationships, where what matters is not what each is, but what it does and why it does it. For them the universe is alive as a Being, and is self-motivated, self-activated, self-organised and self-constructed upon logic and harmony, expressed in each and all of its manifestations, on all levels of its interwoven complexities.
"Narrowly conceived evolutionary theory writes David Deutsch considers us mere 'vehicles' for the replication of our genes or memes; and it refuses to address the question of why evolution has tended to create ever greater adaptive complexity, or the role that such complexity plays in the wider scheme of things. Similarly, the (crypto-)inductivist critique of Popperian epistemology is that, while it states the conditions for scientific knowledge to grow, it seems not to explain why it grows why it creates theories that are worth using."
And I extend this enigma even further by asking why have appeared again and again in the evolutionary history ever greater, at their times non-adaptive and even counter-adaptive complexities, which have always played the greatest role in the wider scheme of things; which, in fact, epitomize evolution.
The studies of the principles of the general systems of microcosmic and macrocosmic existence have been around since timeless times, on which religious and philosophical theories were built by scattered tribes and great cultures. These theories were based on their observational and intuitive knowledge of Nature, trying to arrive to how the world is being constructed, giving it even an infinite quality. They didn't involve themselves and their social systems in this study and centred their judgements on them. These were the approaches which characterized also Ludwig von Bertalanffy's work, who has founded his General System Research on the study of natural laws to be found in the natural sciences.
"The pioneers shared and articulated a common conviction: the unified nature of reality
They developed a trans-disciplinary perspective that emphasised the intrinsic order and interdependence of the world in all its manifestations." Bela Banathy.
The pioneers comprehend through insight the unified nature of reality; their followers ride on the scattered fragments, which they are able to grasp while being integrated into the actual social self-deceptive reality. "Few people remarked Albert Einstein appositely are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are not even capable of forming such opinions." Did the mass-character of saying only what is in accord with the Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group acronymed with the already mentioned waste material being discharged out of the alimentary canal of Waddington's cow infect even the highest learning institutions? Or did it, in fact, originate there by passing around that of her male partner?
"Indeed, writes David Bohm to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.
"But let me emphasize that to have an approach of wholeness doesn't mean that we are going to be able to capture the whole of existence within our concepts and knowledge. Rather it means first that we understand this totality as an unbroken and seamless whole in which relatively autonomous objects and forms emerge. And secondly it means that in so far as wholeness is comprehended with the aid of the implicate order, the relationship between the various parts or sub wholes are ultimately internal. Wholeness is seen as primary while the parts are secondary, in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in the light of the whole. And perhaps I should also add here that in each sub whole there is a certain quality that does not come from the parts, but helps organize the parts. . . The quantum theory implies that ultimately the relationship of the parts and whole of matter in general is understood in a similar way. This approach of wholeness could help to end the far-reaching and pervasive fragmentation that arises out of the mechanistic world view.
"In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. .. The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mind-like already with the electron."
By introducing into the Schroedinger equation a wavelike information field called the superquantum potential, Bohm established a theoretical instance within physics, demonstrating, that science can remain rational and coherent while involving the realms of the underlying principles, what he called the implicate order.
Erwin Schroedinger, another far outstanding nuclear physicist of the twentieth century supports Bohm's thoughts:
"Let us now return to our ultimate particles and to small organizations of particles as atoms or small molecules. The old idea about them was that their individuality was based on the identity of matter in them...The new idea is that what is permanent in these ultimate particles or small aggregates is their shape and organization. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet so simple and so clear: "Tat tvam asi.", this is you...and not merely "someday" but today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over, for eternally and always there is only now, and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."
And neither has it a beginning, and is thus the womb of the infinite becoming that is manifested in substance, accident and mode structure, event and process; in the movement, change, and the spatial, chronological and causal order of energy and matter, while matter itself is not a conglomeration of "things" but consists of by its underlying principle ordered "processes" in interwoven and interdependent system-relationships of energy-quantums.
Albert Einstein, David Bohm, Erwin Schroedinger and Werner Heisenberg are of the small number, but intellectually most pungent sages of science, who implicate the underlying principles of all phenomena they contemplate, not, however, in the form of the extraneous anthropomorphous creation of the theomorphous western man, but as an all-inherent and all-transcendent Reality.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. stated Albert Einstein It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
"According to Bohm writes William Keepin The implicate order is the fundamental and primary reality, albeit invisible. Meanwhile, the explicate order the vast physical universe we experience is but a set of "ripples" on the surface of the implicate order. The manifest objects that we regard as comprising ordinary reality are only the unfolded projections of the much deeper, higher dimensional implicate order, which is the fundamental reality. The implicate and explicate orders are interpenetrating in all regions of space-time, and each region enfolds all of existence, that is, everything is enfolded into everything. .. Bohm's work in physics is unique in that he built a spiritual foundation into his theories that gives them a profound philosophical and metaphysical significance while rigorously preserving their empirical and scientific basis."
And this spiritual foundation I might add together with the thoughts and work of these kind of giants does the actual narrow-minded materialist scientific community disregard as if non-existent, and arrogantly declare to be "supernatural construction that is beyond the scope of 'science'". In their self-inflicted ignorance they are incapable to comprehend, that the looking at the world with a prodigious intensity and love, and on oneself as being an integral part and reflection of this world, is the unique way towards wisdom and understanding. They are too blind to recognize that as the consciousness and the vision expand, the knowledge of the Universe and of the Self is becoming more comprehensive and ever more profound. Only through the process of reason-seeking followed by method-seeking can true scientific thought make use of materials produced by scientific findings; only by using also the thoughts of philosophers, poets, thinkers and writers, saints and sages, fractions, expressions and contributors to the rhythmic breathing of Universal Life, can valid scientific theories be developed; through the deep comprehension that Life is not created: Life IS, and It is the Life of the Universe, self-configuring into infinite manifestations.
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