We have now come to the end of this journey; one with more questions than answers; more possibilities than solutions; more ideas than conclusions. Yet it is my hope that it has been a valid journey, for before one can focus one’s gaze on a narrow set of possibilities about the nature of reality, one must first step back and look, open mindedly, at all possibilities, especially those that contradict one’s own preconceptions, cultural biases, and prejudices. Finding out what may be true is, in a way, a more instructive and artistic endeavor than finding out what is true. The latter is elusive and slippery; the former abounds in riches. It is only the culture-induced stupor we live in that prevents us from raising our gaze and seeing the signs right in front of us. Have you ever paid close attention to where your thoughts wander during an after-lunch nap? Have you ever made an effort to consistently remember your weirdest dreams and associated impressions? Or the funny images and feelings that pop into your mind at night, in the dark, after perhaps a few days of camping on a quiet beach or mountain? Have you ever had a calm conversation with a schizophrenic, listening attentively to his or her views on reality while maintaining a sincerely non-patronizing attitude? Do you remember your own inner life as a young child? In all these things, dare I say, may lie hints to the possibilities of reality.
Ours is a curious culture. We discover an important and useful rule of thumb like Occam’s Razor – the idea that the best explanation tends to be the one requiring the fewest new assumptions – and then extrapolate and abuse of it beyond the scope wherein it is reasonable. Whoever said that nature operates according to the simplest mechanisms that we, mere primates with opposing thumbs, can make up with the three pounds of grey goo in our heads? We discover an effective method for informing our efforts to leverage the materials and energies of nature – namely, the scientific method – and then elevate that utilitarian method to the level of supreme judge of the ontological truth. Whoever said that what works is what is? We eliminate mysteries merely by giving them names. We do not know what lies at the heart of matter, but we give it a few names – quarks, leptons, photons, gluons, mesons, etc. – and presto, we feel like it has all been explained. Do not get me wrong: the serious scientists that model and discover these things know full well the extent to which they do not know what is going on. But our psychology rewards us with a fuzzy warm feeling the moment we all start using the same name for something fundamentally not understood. Somehow, the magic of the mystery vanishes simply by the collective, almost ceremonial act of labeling it. This absurd mentality is so pervasive in our culture that we even teach our children by giving them the names of things instead of explanations. We tell them that objects fall because of “gravity.” Fine, but what is gravity? How does it do what it does? Do you know?1
We seem to have collectively descended into a highly restrictive, cynical, disenchanted frame of mind. We developed the worst and most pernicious of all illusions: the illusion of knowledge. Of all unproductive fantasies, this is the worst in that it makes one believe that one can stop searching and questioning. How it happened that we came to this point, I do not pretend to know. I am not a historian, anthropologist, or psychologist. But that it did happen seems obvious to even a casual observation of our civilization. Yet we see some tentative reactions to this at the so-called fringes of our culture. We hear calls for the “re-unification” of science and spirituality in a kind of new-age-styled epistemological rebirth. My own view is that we must be exceedingly careful with our wishes here; for, if realized, they may leave us without both a working science and a fulfilling spirituality.
I believe the aspiration for a holistic view of reality is legitimate. But the integrative approach it entails does not need to deface the building blocks of the whole it seeks to build. Those building blocks may be complementary to one another the way they are. To construct a holistic worldview one does not need to rob science of the objectivity and skepticism that make it effective. Neither does one need to ground spirituality on matter – mysterious quantum matter as it may be. What one does need is to integrate the messages of both science and spirituality, open-mindedly but also critically, in a holistic but personal worldview that the individual him or herself is ultimately responsible for. What we need is to be thoughtful, critical, honest with ourselves, and to make up our own minds about what all the stories we hear might mean to us, whether these stories come from scientists, philosophers, mystics, clergymen, bloggers, the evening news anchor, or the bloke down the pub. A call for top-down cultural reform, legitimate as it may be, is no substitute for personal initiative and responsibility in determining one’s own worldview. Ultimately, it all starts and ends with the individual.
This holistic worldview must, in my current opinion, be an additional tool of cognition that enriches our toolbox of models and methods without artificially pruning off existing options. It must be an integration of viewpoints at a higher level of understanding; a level where paradox, contradiction, and cognitive dissonance are productive steps towards greater insight. This holistic metaphysics does not require the defacement of the methods we already have, and which have proven useful. That said, it does require – and this is a crucial point – that we look upon these methods with the correct perspective, for everything has its proper place and applicability. Ontology transcends science, so to look to science for all ontological answers may be misguided. Science may just not be the right tool for the job. Similarly, spirituality transcends matter, but when one appeals to spiritual forces to explain material phenomena for which more reasonable explanations exist, which better fit the evidence at hand, one may also be using the wrong tool for the job.
I am not suggesting here that we go back to the Cartesian divide between matter and spirit. No. My own personal philosophy is a monistic one – that is, one where all planes and aspects of existence are seen to be part of a unified whole. But it is, in my view, an observable fact that each of the methods we currently have at our disposal is, in isolation, insufficient to cover all potentially valid avenues of investigation. The dualism I may be implying is thus not one of substance, but one of method. Earlier, I highlighted how science starts from the premises that reality is objective and individual observation unreliable. A form of subjective exploration of nature that starts from the opposite premises – that is, that reality is subjective and our own individual observations are all we have – seems to me to be a necessary and complementary ingredient of any thorough and honest investigation of nature.
The value of subjective exploration for understanding reality may actually go beyond that of methodological completeness alone. As Carl Jung masterfully argued in his magnificent little book, “The Undiscovered Self,”2 only the anchor of inner, transcendent experience can protect the individual from submersion into what he calls “mass-mindedness.” Mass-mindedness, as embodied in the set of cultural values and reality models reigning in a society, replaces individual experience – which is the only carrier of life and reality – with conceptual averages. Jung went further to point at scientific education, when elevated to the position of ultimate ontological authority, as an enabler of mass-mindedness by imparting an unrealistic worldview based on statistical truths. This, he argued, blurs the patterns and nuances of reality into those – ultimately unreal – conceptual averages.
The mysteries are thus many. If there is anything I can conclude with certainty from my own subjective explorations, it is this: there is a lot more to reality than we think. Whatever this uncharted territory may be – whether it is purely in the brain or exists outside of the brain – it is profoundly significant to one’s own life and perspectives. It is the territory we, somehow, have come from but have since forgotten. An effort to chart this territory may entail a return to one’s forgotten but true home and a re-acquaintance with one’s forgotten but true self. As Jacques Vallée noted in closing his mesmerizing classic, “Passport to Magonia,” “we cannot be sure that we study something real, because we do not know what reality is; we can only be sure that our study will help us understand more, far more, about ourselves.”3 I cannot think of greater adventure.