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AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE for 09/26/2005
Vol. 2, #178
Come to think of it, what's so special about Superman. A strange question? Not really. So he flies and defies gravity. I know people who can go instantaneously from one end of the world to the other. The process is called "remote viewing." The Russians started practicing it back during the Cold War and the CIA took it up too. And they found that it works.
Thousands of people commune daily with mysterious personalities who teach and offer guidance and provide information about past and future events. And it's called "channeling", although it's been going on for centuries, communications with mysterious, invisible beings from other dimensions, and today, even among very many scientists, the so-called hard materialists who don't believe anything unless it can be sensed, touched or apprehended in some way by instruments (we used to call them positivists), channeling is gaining acceptance not only as a fact but as a source of information.
Now most academic scientists will deny this, because the official paradigm hasn't changed yet, not enough to accept spirits and non-material happenings. So grants and jobs are at stake, and no one really wants to risk that. But gradually, the old positivist walls are crumbling. Reality itself has taken quite a beating as quantum physics becomes more and more mysterious. Although, way back when superheroes first started, in the 1930s, quantum physics was only just beginning to shake up the scientific world, even shaking up Einstein quite a bit, as I've mentioned in this column before. But only a handful had any idea of the scientific revolution that was just starting, so the stuff that superheroes did looked pretty great---especially after many decades of materialist scientific hegemony that saw a world advancing by something called "natural selection" that gave the best competitors among living things all the power in the material world. That was Darwinism which, for so long, went unrecognized as no more than part of the superstructure of an economic system called "mercantilism", also known today as "capitalism" where the "survival of the fittest" really got its start.
Now while the churches didn't really cotton to the whole evolutionary idea, they had, for the most part, found their strongest supporters among the mercantile elite. It was capitalist accumulation that kept the modern churches going, patched up their old cathedrals, built new ones, maintained the various styles of priesthood and saw to it that God remained respectable and opposed to nihilists, anarchists and various kinds of immoralists, thus helping to keep society orderly and business flourishing. Yes, of course, they got into this tiff with science about evolution and came up instead with intelligent design, but if you lift up the curtains and peer in backstage, you'll see soon enough that basically the idea is the same. Even though "intelligent design" isn't a theory like evolution which is always more tentative and less absolute. But these are minor details, such as what goes on behind the back of "The Ten Commandments"among our business elite---that only muckrakers and troublemakers would make a fuss about anyway.
Now notice too that when scientists began asking questions about evolution themselves--- questions like, as we get more and more perfect, and acquire more and more luxuries, and even our brains keep growing, how come there seems to be just as much misery and unhappiness as ever, which even going to church regularly doesn't seem able to do much about. How come we've got global warming, crooked businesses, atomic bombs, monster famines, people blowing each other up more and more in religious wars---and, in fact, everything really going to hell in a handbasket faster and faster? So what, exactly, are we really evolving into?
Now scientists are mostly guys trained to ask questions, and this sort of question is beginning to be heard more frequently.
Even to the point where the acquisition of superpowers---and surely our computers, instantaneous communication, our ability to circle the globe on ordinary holidays, not to mention putting men into space, all this stuff doesn't make for more happiness, more peace, more understanding?
So the questions are starting to change. Scientists are getting more interested in things of the spirit, in ways that the older churches with their establishments are afraid to touch.
We are, in fact, on the verge of a new paradigm. The signs of it are everywhere. And they're turning up in all sorts of places.
One of the very special signs is a movie called: "What the Bleep Do We Know?" Any of you comics fans ever heard of it? And the books and papers that are coming out of it? And the new kinds of questions? Well, just to get you started, when you finish this column today, punch in http://whatthebleep.com/reality/bleepbook.shtml
Have a good look around, then come back to the Round Table and tell me what you think.
-- Alvin
<< 09/19/2005 | 09/26/2005 | 10/10/2005 >>
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