PERCEPTION: FACING REALITY
The Blinders of Inexplicable Arrogance
Scientists, based on their own experiments, have come face-to-face with great mystery. Modern scientific ways of understanding the Universe are proving insufficient to explain observable phenomena. While humility would seem to be the natural response, this encounter with not knowing has led to a heightened sense of ego among those who believe that modern science is the only valid lens. They propose that science is what makes us special; perhaps we are a uniquely talented species only existing on Earth. In the face of so much uncertainty, claiming this specialness seems strange. And it places frightening blinders on our perceptions.
Scientists have increased their perceptual abilities with new technologies, but even these advances reveal only infinitesimally small bits of information relative to the unfathomable dimensions of the Universe. New telescopes, space probes, and computational methods are revealing a cosmos whose dimensions approach infinity—true cause for wonder. In the face of these astonishing discoveries, instead of wonder and humility, most scientists hang onto their traditional ways of understanding, known as scientific materialism. The world can be understood in terms of current physical laws of time, space, energy, and matter. These laws are being challenged by increasing evidence from their own experiments, as you will read here. But in order to hold onto the existing paradigm, theoretical physicists are proposing outrageously fanciful theories, none of which meet a primary rule of science, that hypotheses be testable.
I am not condemning science nor devaluing its superb contribution to our understanding of how life works. I wouldn’t be writing this book based on scientific understandings if I felt that way. What I am speaking out against is the common practice among scientists to condemn and exclude other ways of knowing at this time when science itself is in a deep struggle to understand how this Universe works.8
There are other ways of knowing reality, reliable methods that have served humans and earlier hominids for millennia. It is the arrogance of our science that denies their existence and their usefulness.
Years ago, I realized that in all human cultures—all of them—there were ways of knowing beyond the five senses that supported their survival and manifested in their cultural expressions and rituals. They knew there is more going on than what our five human senses reveal, and usually they named other senses, such as intuition and consciousness. They had detailed maps and complex practices that enabled them to work with the order inherent in the world.
I am not speaking of spiritual beliefs. I am noting that human cultures have developed their own sciences for interacting with the elements, the planet and the Universe. Western science dismisses this vast body of human wisdom by labeling it magic, ignorance, or science illiteracy. But our science is just the most recent means to make sense of reality. Its arrogance is neither justified nor helpful.
It is in our nature to ask questions of existence. And also predictably, as soon as we discover what appears to be an answer, it becomes orthodoxy, the only belief system tolerated. Too many scientists now believe that their answers are the one true answer. And their answer to everything observed is materialism. If phenomena can’t be explained by physical manifestations, they don’t exist. If we can’t locate a function such as intuition or consciousness in the brain, it doesn’t exist. But the most troubling consequence of materialist thinking is this: If it is found to exist in the brain, if the brain can be stimulated to create that experience, then it only exists in the brain. Once physical evidence exists, scientists conclude that everything comes from brain activity—there is no reality beyond the physical.9 This is perhaps the greatest threat from neuroscience, the reduction of the numinous and mysterious to a specific site in the brain, thereby denying any other reality.10
This reductionism denies the experience of those who claim other ways of knowing and working with reality, myself included. I have benefitted immeasurably from working with the worldview of Tibetan Buddhism and from the wisdom traditions of many indigenous peoples. In 2014, I wrote How Does Raven Know? to introduce people to a world of forgotten companions, known in all wisdom traditions.11 Whenever I read a scientist who mocks things like intuition or who wants to educate us poor deluded ones, I either feel angry or sad. (Sad is the more compassionate reaction, of course.) How lonely it must feel to shrink the world into five meager senses that can perceive only 1–2 percent of the light spectrum.
What hasn’t shrunk is a giant ego expression known as the Anthropic Principle. One aspect of this theory postulates that the Universe has created us as conscious beings because it needed a way to reflect back on itself. Let’s think about this for a moment.
In 2016, using new computational methods and new telescopes, the number of probable galaxies rose from 200 billion to 2 trillion, each of which would contain 100 billion stars.12
We humans live on a medium-size planet rotating around an average-size star. And we’re the ones that the Universe has tasked with consciousness? (Comedian George Carlin believes the Universe created humans so it could have plastic.13)
I think I can understand the source of such arrogance (some days I can; some days I can’t). It comes from the fear that our ability to comprehend the Universe is failing us. This is what made Einstein fearful: if separated particles, no matter how distant they are from each other, act as one inseparable unit, this would make the Universe incomprehensible. And it does, as you’ll read in Section Six, Interconnectedness.
As a paradigm exhausts its sense-making capacities, people always grasp onto it more desperately, insisting that it still works, that it can and will answer all questions. As physicists search to understand their experiments, they are trapped inside their paradigm. They can only seek physical explanations no matter how crazy these are. There is a distinction between theoretical and applied physics. Applied physicists don’t understand why things work, but they make things that work. They keep producing new technologies from which we benefit (for now). It is theoretical physics that is facing the great questions—the existence of space, the meaning of time, questions of infinity. As they struggle to understand the quantum world—of a participative Universe in which particles seem to know what has happened before and what will happen next—they have gotten lost in conjectures that are so incredulous to contemplate that “weird “ does not begin to describe them.14
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli as he judged a theory: “This is so bad it’s not even wrong.”
This phrase has been used to describe the current state of cosmological thinking in physics. Roger Penrose, one of the great physicists of our time, has recanted some of his earlier fancies in a new book, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. He states that most of the current fantastical ideas about the origins of the Universe cannot be true (possibly including the Big Bang) but that an even wilder reality may lie behind them.
I’m not disturbed by what theoretical physicists are dreaming up; I’m content to let them get lost in their mathematics and imaginings to explain action-at-a-distance. But what feels important to me is to call out how they discredit all other forms of knowing, which harms all of us as we try to understand this world.
Let’s not dismiss the hundreds of thousands of years of human wisdom that gave the capacity to create, decorate, and know a world far richer in powers and capacities than materialistic science can ever fathom.
If we want to understand who humans have been, including earlier hominids that predate our species, there is stunning evidence from archeology. We and our early ancestors have been far more creative, caring, and knowing than any neuroscience can ever explain.15
The first evidence of a stone implement carved, never used, and offered as a gift in burial, is 300,000 years old. It is a very beautiful object of two-colored rose quartz, material transported from 75 miles away. Thirty-two bodies were carefully buried at this site.16
Flutes tuned to the pentatonic scale (the most common scale among humans) were skillfully carved from the wing bones of birds 40,000 years ago. These flutes can still be played today.17
The Chauvet cave paintings in France are about 32,000 years old. They have a level of artistry not seen again until the Italian Renaissance. They painted in this sophisticated way continuously for 22,000 years.
Bone necklaces worn in both northern and southern Africa date from 100,000 years ago. It is assumed such objects indicate social stratification or clans.
How hominids have created culture and community for at least half a million years is purely wondrous. Our most favored explanatory lens, scientific materialism, cannot begin to explain what’s been going on here for hundreds of thousands of years. To reduce all these manifestations to crass survival strategies is ridiculous. To believe that we have now achieved superior status from our ancestors is worth questioning.
Our perceptions of who we are and what we are capable of need to be expanded, not contracted into demeaning or fanciful explanations. We need to know far more about our species and this Universe we inhabit. We cannot afford the luxury of arrogance that denies other ways of knowing.
I began studying prehistory and anthropology a few years ago, at the same time that I was studying the patterns of collapse of civilizations.
As I spent more time reading about what was going on here so very long ago, I realized that anthropology had become my escape literature. It was a wonderful way to shift my attention from all the painful things I was observing daily.
And yet, over these years I’ve come to realize that my familiarity with what has gone before gives me a strange comfort. Standing in the past, honoring the wonder and not-knowing, acknowledging early ancestors—all this has led to my deepening commitment to make this Now as meaningful as possible.
Why not? What have we got to lose?
Other Ways of Knowing
all living beings through all time
have needed to know the world well
knowing life depends on this
most peoples throughout time
have seen beyond the visible world
they and still we rely on
symbols objects rituals
to summon forces of protection and plenty
knowing to respect and evoke
the unseen world with offerings
modern culture is an anomaly
to the pattern of human cultures
withdrawing from everything
except our five material senses
arrogant with vision that sees
about 1% of what
the light spectrum reveals
seeing so little we grow more
frantic to know what is out there
yet push aside those who see
no wonder we are fearful of
being harmed as we harm the world
scared humans scarring sacred world
Margaret Wheatley, How Does Raven Know?