We all have the desire to climb, to surmount, to overcome. To rise above the clouds, and to soar upward.
These are flights of the real and the imagination; hike up the mountain with nothing but a backpack and sturdy shoes; fly on the wing through the sky, scaling the limitations of this hardened world. The flight occurs at its most basic level when we are young and uninhibited; the pad on the table is blank − we have the chance to write our own story, and the sky is here truly the limit; nothing stops us from using the words that come to mind: shall I place myself in a story where I become a writer, an actor, writer, doctor, or even an angel gliding through the air?
With a free imagination we set a trajectory to life that shoots upward to the vast reaches of outer space − and never stops, a life eternal, the forever now. But over time the psychological pressures of our modern world push us down, telling us this planned climb of ours is futile; the flight to the sky is a flight of fancy, leading nowhere. Better just pack up and go back down.
When young we see the shape of the mountain slope from only one side and believe it heads upward to the heavens; and so we begin the climb, not seeing the peek, hidden above the clouds. But then we enter the raging river of materialism, this view of the world saying that nothing exists but particles in motions; only stuff is real; and so the river drags us along with its power. These particles control us, the cells of our bodies age, neurons degrade, seasons pass, time moves steadily forward; pressing us down; we discover the endless mountain slope was a figment of the imagination; we grow older and learn, much to our dismay, that the slope heads down faster than we thought. The power of materialism, supported by leading scientists and thinkers, infiltrates the collective mind, suppressing our hopes and dreams, changing the trajectory of our lives from an endless journey upward to the far reaches of the sky, to a free-fall to Earth. An avalanche of doubt drives us down the mountain. We replace visions of peace, with the brute reality of separateness and division.
But then one day we stop to ask the big question: what is pressing us down anyway? What force is stopping the upward ascent? It is only something in our social setting, our cultural, the intellectual climate; magnified peer pressure, saying we can go no higher; we are doomed to ride the other side of the slope down into our graves.
We dwell in pool of doubt; a matrix of negativity, pressing us down, inhibiting us from writing the story we have in mind, the one where we are always seeking the higher ground, where life is a series of chapters in a story that never ends. It is the downward force of materialistic science that stops the climb, this view of the world teaching us that only what is outside of us is real, that matter came first; your spirit is an emergent property= an off-gas = of the dumb stuff, we came from the dust and will return to the dust. We are in the end machines, doomed to rust, decay, and to crumble into a heap.
Materialism flashes the constant message, conveyed implicitly through the media and explicitly through leading scientists that, “You are mortal creatures, doomed to fade away deep into a lonely grave. Give up the climb now.” But materialism is wrong and it is time we throw it to the side, and begin the climb anew.
Our task, our only goal, is to break through the barrier of doubt and continue the climb we began long ago, when dreaming was much easier. The materialistic paradigm impedes the quest to realize our potential as unlimited spiritual beings; it prevents us from living longer, healthier lives; of staying younger longer, of making peace among the world’s religions, and of finally joining science with spirituality.
It is time we let loose of the intellectual chains binding us to materialism, and allow ourselves to fly away freely. To break free of materialism we must begin the process of exposing its irreparable flaws and then convincing those who are advancing these ideas that it is time to give up the fight and move on to something more productive.
This will not be easy, as the materialistic paradigm is deeply engrained in college curriculums, science textbooks, and the media. It is the “system,” the highest authority; Big Brother. But as we only have one life and one world, it would do us good to get the problem fixed now, and not be burdened by those who say the task is tooifficult. If we don’t do it now, then the next generation will, and if not that one, then the next. Why wait?
The fatal flaw of materialism is that it is based upon an unproven and unnecessary assumption. This assumption is that a real material world exists independently of our inner states — our will, dreams, emotions, and thoughts – and that this material world, not these inner states, controls our destiny.
But if we reverse this picture and view the world not as a creation of external forces, but as an expression of our internal states, our dreams do have a chance of coming true. And this is not some type of utopian fantasy. Rather, the worldview of materialism, like one of its new particles, ultimately degrades into a world of dreams.
Here is a summary of how and why materialism is collapsing:
1. Materialism has no explanation of how something came from nothing in the Big Bang but must assume the universe full of matter miraculously arose from the void. This is a fatal problem because without an explanation for where all this stuff came from, the entire materialistic paradigm collapses. In assuming that something came from nothing outside the mind, materialists then assume that these things control us. Thus, they have assumed a mind-independent world controls us, when they have never proven that such a world can exist in the first place.
2. Materialism has no explanation for how this gigantic explosion led to the order of the natural world, or how order was created from chaos. Without an intelligent guidance force, which is taboo in science, science must assume as given the laws and constants nature; but what is the source of the laws of nature? Two of the greatest thinkers who ever considered this question concluded that the laws of nature are actually needs of the mind (David Hume), or part of structure of the mind (Immanuel Kant). Materialists ignore these conclusions and instead assume that the regularities of nature are part of the outside world. If this is true, then how did dead matter become programmed with the mathematically precise laws of nature? Hume and Kant were right: these laws are imposed from the inside outward, not from the outside, in.
3. The universe is considered perfectly in balance, where the gravitational pull of the stars cancels out the repulsive force of the big bang. We live in universe, cosmologists say, sitting on a pencil point: if there was more matter, the universe would have already collapsed upon itself; if less matter, the stars would have long ago flown away to a distant black void. How is it possible for these two impersonal forces to have so precisely balanced our each other?
4. Biologists have no credible explanation of how life, or the intricate code of the DNA molecule, arose from the dust.
5. Quantum theory shows an unbreakable link between the mind and the physical world. The tiny particles making up the world turn out not to
have a defined existence outside of us. We see not ball-bearings but wave packets; bundles of energy; shadowy things that change their character depending upon how they are perceived. Two quotes among many: “The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.” (Bernard d’Espagnat, “The Quantum Theory and Reality,” Scientific American (Nov. 1979); “The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. . . .The universe is entirely mental.” Richard Conn Henry, “The mental Universe,” Nature (July 2005). The rise in consciousness, spoken of x to realize we are one spirit is equivalent to physicists finally coming to terms with the notion that consciousness creates reality.
6. In lucid dreams and powerful hallucinations we see the mind of one person conjuring up an external physical setting mistaken for the world at large. Does anyone doubt that hallucinations and dreams happen?
7. The long history of the paranormal, parapsychology, mind over matter, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and other events, show a connection between the mind and the world, and the minds of other people. What are the odds that in the entire history of the world, not one paranormal event has ever occurred? If only one has occurred, it shows that we are part of a unified consciousness.
8. The placebo effect and holistic medical cures show a connection between internal states and the physical health of our bodies. How can beliefs and our internal energy beneficially affect the body if these internal states are simply “off-gases” of material particles?
9. Scientists marvel over the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the world but have no idea over the source of this order. Clearly, if a mind is at the root of the physical world, an explanation for the mathematical order of the world becomes readily apparent.
10. The idea of God is in our minds, and won’t go away. The idea of a better world, a heaven, hovers at the far end of the imagination, up there buried beneath the doubts imposed by materialism. This thought is true because it is real.
In the end, we are neither products of a random, impersonal explosion, nor simply mortal creatures doomed to live a short while and then fade away. Rather, we are unlimited spiritual beings who have been fooled into thinking we dwell in the imprisoning world of materialism. We are actors in the story of God rising to the realization that together we dream the world.
You don’t have to follow this track. You can register your vote for materialism and let materialists write the story of your one life. You can go with someone else’s flow and head back down the mountain. But for those who desire to write their own stories and to continue the upward ascent, it is time to release ourselves from the bonds of materialism, and continue the upward journey that began long ago. It is time to learn how to fly.
