Movement
Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions
Oliver Wendell Holmes
‘Eppur si muove…’
..as Galileo is alleged to have murmured after being forced to deny that the Earth went round the Sun. It was a pantomime moment, best translated as ‘Oh yes it does….’ in response to the Vatican’s ‘Oh no it doesn’t’.
The old paradigm, suggested by Aristotle 2,000 years previously, imagined the Earth as the centre of a ball of 55 concentric spheres, each supporting a world: the Moon, then Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, etc, each patrolling the heavens, embedded in their own ‘crystal sphere’.
§ These spheres were made up of aether: the fifth element or ‘quintessence’, being the Higher relative of earth, water, air and fire. Modern cosmologists have revived the word ‘quintessence’ as a name for a hypothetical fifth primal source of mass, popularly known as ‘dark energy’, which is apparently causing the universe to expand at an ever-accelerating rate. Why a form of mass should expand is unclear, to me at least.
Beyond the spheres lay the Prime Mover, who kept the whole show spinning. His concern for humanity was such that he put the Earth at the very centre. The Church adopted this idea, turned it into dogmatic ‘truth’, and placed Heaven ‘up there’ with the Prime Mover, now called God. As a metaphor, perhaps the PM did put Man at the centre of all, but as a guide to the skies, this schema didn’t work. The planets kept wandering about and no matter how they fiddled the ‘spheres’ the problem could not be solved. ‘God’s perfection’ (as defined by The Church), was endangered by Galileo’s evidence, especially when ‘perfect’ circular orbits had to be replaced by wonky elliptical ones and four moons were proved to be orbiting Jupiter while Church dogma insisted that everything in the heavens orbited the Earth. Worse yet, the ‘perfect’ moon was found to be as pockmarked as a medieval cleric’s conscience.
Copernicus and Galileo supplied the tipping point for the first huge paradigm shift in modern science. The Earth moved.
§ However… if the universe is infinite in size, as is currently assumed, then the Earth is the centre of it (as is every other point in an infinite system). Also: if something is endlessly expanding, it must be expanding to somewhere, and is thus not infinite.
However, if the universe is a Higher dimensional construct, then our current 3-d concept of ‘infinite’ will be inadequate, and we are left with something ineffable that is never going to be convincingly effed by Lower mind. This suggests a limit to the knowable, but also a rational solution to the paradox, possibly referring back to the hypercube model of the fourth dimension.
What Copernicus and Galileo had done was to admit movement and fluidity into a previously fixed model of the universe.
The second huge paradigm shift came with Darwin and Wallace. From the Greeks onwards, people had suggested ‘evolution’ to account for the similarities between plant and animal forms. D&W’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection seemed to confirm that theory, as did the mass of gigantic fossils that had begun to emerge, but it also did something else. It introduced movement and fluidity into biology. Out went species formed ‘fixed and perfect’ by God, and in came a sliding scale of body-shapes. Ultimately, D&W said (or at least implied) there is just one Life, expressed in multiple and ever-changing ways.
§ Yogis had been saying ‘one Life’ for millennia. Historically, religion seems to have moved from multiple gods to ‘one Creator with many facets’, and now D&W were saying not multiple lives, but ‘one Life with many facets’. The logical Idealist extension of this is that I am thus indeed my neighbour’s brother. I wasn’t expecting that.
And if we ally ‘one Creator’ with ‘one Life’, we are beginning to approach the unification concepts of ‘yoga’, ‘re-ligare’ etc. I wasn’t expecting that, either.
Meanwhile, a little before D&W there had been the paradigm shift in geology which proved that the world was millions of years older than Church dogma claimed. This shift, too, brought more ‘movement’ into the world, via the concepts of huge geological processes like earthquakes and sedimentary deposition.
All three of these shifts did two things: they challenged absolute Church dogma, and in replacing this rigid dogma they introduced movement and fluidity into previous fixed and ‘perfect’ conceptions of the universe.
Every paradigm shift increases fluidity.
But it seems that a new paradigm does two other things as well.
It introduces elements of commonality or ‘democracy’, and re-emphasises the supreme role of Cause and Effect.
- Copernicus introduced the idea of the commonality of heavenly orbits, and the idea that the Earth was not unique. The discovery of galaxies, some 300 years later, confirmed this commonality, and the eternal movement of all heavenly bodies in ever greater orbits and relationships, all rotating to the eternal waltz of Cause and Effect.
- Lyall, the geologist, showed how a commonality of processes, like tides and weathering, lay behind all the mountains, chasms, beaches and rivers of the Earth’s surface.
- Darwin and Wallace introduced fluidity to species’ body-forms thus admitting the commonality of Life itself.
The very Laws of Nature, so intimately connected to Cause and Effect, and so painstakingly uncovered over a period of some three hundred years, all underlined the theme of ‘commonality’, as they were found to be (beyond reasonable doubt) quite literally universal. Thus the chemistry of Venus is confirmed to be the same as the chemistry of Earth. The universe seems to be made of the same ‘common’ stuff, everywhere.
The Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy showed that previously ‘separate’ entities can be transmuted to each other: weight can be converted into electricity or motion, and back again. Essentially, all matter-energy is one common entity, shifting according to the Laws of Cause-Effect (although Quantum Theory is still lacking a deep Cause to account for ‘form’ rather than ‘no-form’).
What is a Paradigm and what is just a Theory? A rough rule of thumb is the metaphor of ‘the box’. Someone working on Quantum Electrodynamic Theory is working in a box, which is working inside the bigger box of ‘Quantum Theory’, itself nesting within the paradigm of the Laws of Physics, which currently (and erroneously) resides in the Big Box (super-paradigm?) of Materialism.
A new paradigm arises when we begin to think ‘outside the (Big) box’.
§ To repeat Albert Einstein: ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.’
He adds: ‘The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know why or how. The only real valuable thing is intuition.’
Below are a few Theories which we might consider to be Paradigms, because of their breadth and importance. When they arrived, they all added fluidity to the previous paradigms, demonstrated greater commonality, and emphasised the vital role of Cause and Effect:
- Tectonic Plate Theory set the ‘fixed’ continents moving, and showed that all land came from a common subterranean source.
- Anatomy showed that all living creatures are built of common components, down to the cell and beyond.
- Germ Theory showed that creatures of all sizes interact, due to the commonality of their structures. Virology has even shown how genetic elements can be exchanged from virus to mammal, etc.
- The DNA revolution introduced yet more fluidity into inheritance, and the notion of a common chemistry in all biological things.
- The Big Bang theory claims that everything-that-is derived from the same ultimate energy/ies.
- Relativity Theory set the universe moving as never before. Points previously thought static are actually ‘relatively’ moving and interacting. Nothing in the universe is fixed, but fluid, and relating according to Cause and Effect.
- Atomic Theory showed how mutation between chemical elements is possible, and demonstrated the commonality of component parts.
- Quantum Theory shows that a particle is not a solid, but an energy packet. All is energy. The (near) ultimate commonality.
- Neuro-plasticity showed that a damaged brain can reorganise itself: ie, its areas are not permanently specialised, but flexible/’moveable’.
- Chaos Theory connected the butterfly in China with a hurricane in the Caribbean. Everything in the global weather system is connected within immensely complex webs of basic forces: Causes and Effects. The shape of every tree and twig in the forest is the effect of the forces that have acted upon it: forces of such complexity and subtlety as to be undecipherable by Man the Measurer.
If Mind is behind the whole system, then all our current paradigms will eventually be found to contain at least the seeds of error, as none of them acknowledges the role of Mind (except to a degree by Quantum Theory, which, being historically based on Materialist principles, is frequently baffled by its own implications).
It seems to me that D+ is on the right track, not just because it is rational while Materialism is not, but because it also recognises more fluidity and commonality in the universe than Materialism does when it (D+) claims that Mind and Matter have a fluid and causal relationship. D+ also insists upon the Law of Cause and Effect, which Materialism does not, with its repeated calls for spontaneous creation (of the Universe, then Life, then Mind, then Consciousness). D+ derives from the Idealist principle that Matter/Energy is made, somehow, by Mind, and as there is ultimately nothing else but Mind then Matter/Energy must also be of Mind, as numerous philosophers, and many thoughtful scientists have surmised. Yogis have been saying so for millennia.
***
The revealing of ever greater depths of commonality in things and processes from geological processes to life-forms, the cell, atoms, electromagnetic fields and hence to Mind, looks like Materialist Reductionism. The difference is that Reductionism confuses the component with the whole, and thinks that by investigating the structure in ever-increasing detail it will somehow come closer to the Truth about The Whole. D+ says that this is the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, and sees The Whole as being assembled for a purpose, by Mind, via will, form, etc, building upwards from components of ever-increasing complexity. D+ could never claim that DNA is Life Itself, or that a brain cell can tell us anything about thought, or that Life ’emerged’, all by itself, from abiotic chemicals.
Darwin and Wallace’s Theory led to the conclusion that there is ‘one Life taking many forms’, although science seems not to have thought through what that implied. The Hypothesis of DarwinPlus (D+) leads to the conclusion that there is ultimately ‘one Mind, taking every form’; and, of course, the Hypothesis of Karma-Reincarnation-Samsara adds enormous fluidity to the last bastion of Church dogma of ‘There-is-but-one-life-at-random-then-death-forever’.
The universe, to DarwinPlus, is a mega-vast and constantly modulating mesh of Cause and Effect, powered by endless levels of Mind and mediated, it would seem, by the Law of Karma and personal choice.
Our future lies in our own hands.
So does the future of ghosts!
Other Implications of DarwinPlus
There are more things in heaven and earth….
W Shakespeare
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence
Nikola Tesla
I can’t duck this one any longer: Is there a God? Well, any Mind which can create a universe or pandimensional polyverse, or whatever, must surely qualify as such. But is this God the normally accepted Christian image of God, who is on the one hand loving and forgiving, and on the other hand vengeful, spiteful, and out to get you? This was part of what Darwin had a big problem with.
Nearing the end now. If you’ve found any of the ideas in Bad Dogma! worth thinking about, please spread the bad-dogma.org link on the www as widely as you can so other people can explore them too. Thanks!