The Baby-Steps of Science: Our Gradual Independence From Materialism
A toast to the next dimension! As it approaches, closer and closer, to the thin surface which divides us from the inner worlds and their perception. The number of words required to describe a graph of higher dimensionality outweigh the ef
fort of simply drawing it, to be seen. The effort required to draw this graph outweighs the simple act dropping within one's self and experiencing the perception it represents, perhaps with the aid of a guide of one sort or another.
On the hazy outline of the room, itself, revealed with eyes closed in the hypersensitive consciousness of meditation or out-of-body experience, is where consciousness research should focus first, as we will not want to stray far, initially, from physicality and its confirmation and material measures. Yet, the technique of inducing and maintaining this hypersensitive state of consciousness, if harnessed and mastered, could change, not just the medical model, but our culture’s very understanding of human potential.
I like to think of athletes of a different type, extraordinary supermen who prove their mastery, not in mere physical strength or by competing in a sport, but by diving within, deeply, and retrieving information from a great inward distance, by directing intention with such pure and steadfast focus as to change events, environments, or orchestrate coincidences in time, heal the sick by perceiving and manipulating the energetic signature of disease, or receive and transmit thought with others, like a radio. The return of the yogi! The reexploration of sainthood, made, in baby steps, by a scientific culture! Or perhaps leaps and bounds? Who can define the future of a culture with our degree of technological growth, or with any certainty predict the potential progress of the exponential development of these machines of ours? The lonely singular observation which, to me, suggested the expansion of the perceptual limits of this materialistic culture would be baby-stepped was the sheer distractibility of the typical American; the poverty of attention span and focus which has spread through the generations since the advent of television, for instance. This Western epidemic of attention deficit disorder, that poverty of attention, seems mirrored in a poverty of spirit, as the subtle aspect of life in which the spiritual is contained can not be sensed beneath the blaring of radios or the screaming explosions of home theater systems. The spiritual side of our lives is very quiet, revealing itself, if we are lucky, in rare moments of meditative focus, or in other exceptional states of consciousness, induced via countless other methods or situations.
Our minds are not well, they are as flabby and undisciplined as we are. Knowing has been overwhelmed in our culture by crude sensate gluttony and the celebration of Hedonism, excessive indulgences in carnality. The sense of abandon and self-ignorance with which the average American embraces and shamelessy satiates their fickle material desires is tied by direct means to their feelings of unfulfillment, purposelessness, anxiety, depression, and that peculiar feeling of having some very basic, deep life need which isn’t being met, some hole in one’s centermost being which cannot be filled, even with all these credit card purchases.
I am sorry if I sound bitter. If it is any consolation, the bitterness is mostly self-directed, as I have, in full knowledge of the fact, ignored my most basic spiritual needs for years, out of simple undisciplined laziness and my gorging on distraction, the taste of which was made a tinge bitter by the shame I added, like some fancy condiment I had no choice but to slather on. With time, even a taste for this bitterness can be developed, and savored as some guilty pleasure.
