Science vs. Immortality

Immortality and Positivism

 Dogmas and Science

Scientists have been stung by the dogmas of orthodoxy since they began to look at the stars. The Greek astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, was murdered by a mob of Christian zealots at the instigation of Cyril of Alexandria, founder of the Orthodox Church.

Saint Cyril didn’t suffer the criticism of women. His dogma had no room for heliocentrism or the doctrine of transmigration taught by Plotinus and explored by Hypatia in her lectures. The price for her heresy was death.

Copernicus kept his heliocentric theory secret, escaping excommunication only by publishing his findings posthumously. Galileo published proof for the Copernican revolution and was put on trial by the Church. Among other things, Galileo found that he could observe the orbits of the moons of Jupiter with his telescope. If the moons of Jupiter don’t orbit the earth why would the rest of the solar system be geocentric? For such dangerous ideas Galileo was found guilty of heresy. The heliocentric theory was silenced by the preachers of dogma.

Dogma has a Chilling Effect

Wherever it is enforced, dogma has a chilling effect on truth-seekers. And when truth-seekers are silenced we are left with myth and superstition. How ironic, then, that the same scientists who seek to protect us from doctrinal thinking have fallen victim to their own dogma. To shield themselves from superstition, science sequestered itself in the laboratory of positivism. By accepting an epistemology which demands evidence for everything, they sought to protect truth-seeking from dogma and doctrine. “Dogma and doctrine are the enemy of science which relies on facts,” they told us. Science staked out its territory and protected itself, armed with facts.

But subtly, science developed an ideology, the ideology of positivism. By accepting the framework that only “useful truths” can be admitted, discarding what is not “pragmatic” the scientists killed the soul. Hailing the Death of God as the great achievement of the 19th Century, they proceeded to go about murdering the eternal soul in the 20th Century.

Positivism in the Fact-free zone

But a second glance at this epistemology demonstrates that most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only fragments of facts.

And now, a full century and a half after the advent of positivism, facts have come and gone. We live in a fact-free zone, a world of fake news where “perception is reality.” The leader of the free world has one opinion today and a different one tomorrow, all substantiated with facts and statistics. Nothing could be more quintessentially American. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who exhorted his students to “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.” Today, through various media outlets, we hear rivers of hard words calling us to action in the morning and a different and contrary action in the afternoon.

American Philosopher and Writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

This goes beyond Emerson to Orwell. In Orwellian language, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." The purpose of propaganda is to control the story both of the past and the future. As enraged mobs riot in the streets and loot stores the President tells us that all is well. Low wages and cheap labor is beneficial. Higher prices will bring prosperity. When rich people get richer it is for the benefit of the nation. Dissident voices must be silenced for the good of the public. We are at war with Russia. Russia is our friend. We were never at war with Russia. We are at war with Mexico. Mexico is our friend. We are at war with Russia. Or as Orwell put it, “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. 69 years later his fiction is reality. We volunteer information to the telescreeens, allowing Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Skype, Messenger and other social medias to chart our every action, to map our every move by GPS, to know and catalogue our every like in order to send us thousands of advertisements and political messages calculated to keep us in line. As American writer Joseph put it in his novel Catch-22, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

Orwellian Dogma of Positivism

If Positivism was an ideology based on facts, facts no longer matter. If the scientific epistemology of the last century was “useful truth,” truth no longer matters. A full century and a half after the advent of positivism, facts have come and gone. We live in a fact-free zone, a world of fake news where “perception is reality.” We are not interested in facts or “useful truth.” Truth has been devalued. It isn’t what it was cracked up to be. “What is useful” has replaced “What is true.” In this sense, Hawking is right, philosophy is dead. Philosophers are no longer “useful.”

What is “useful” is what serves the paradigm of the ruling class, the powers that be. And so alternative medicine is rejected and common medical knowledge was once thought axiomatic is now dismissed as mere superstition. With greater powers of observation and newer technologies the facts have changed, we are told. What is “useful” is science that serves corporate interests. “Corporate agriculture is good,” we are told, “it will benefit our nation and feed the hungry; organic agriculture is for dangerous hippies.”

Orthodoxy of Science
Where scientists like Copernicus once cowered before religious orthodoxy, spiritual truth-seekers are cowed down by the orthodoxy of science.

We have seen that the pragmatic epistemology of science has brought us horrors like napalm, weaponized small-pox, global warming, and a contaminated environment. And yet we are addicted to the ideology of exploitation and the epistemology of “useful truth” promoted by Hawking and company. The ideology of positivism continues to captivate; its propaganda is relentless. But the psychology of positivism is not as “useful” as it appears to be. It does not ultimately bring us the “comfortable life” promised by technology. The psychology of exploitation is not only dangerous to the life of the mind. In the end it is life-denying, soul-denying, and negative.

The Living Universe

Physicists tell us that consciousness is not an interesting question, it is neither “useful” nor practical. How strange that we occupy a living universe, and yet science is life-denying. Life is poetry. Philosophy used to be an attempt to reconcile the poetry of life with the hard reality of existence. But philosophy is dead, we are told. Since the advent of positivism, scientists have been determined to destroy the poetry of philosophy. By repeating the half-truth that consciousness is nothing but brain activity our so-called “investigators” objectively restrict themselves only to the study of conscious “states,” to the study of the effect of consciousness. By studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself has disappeared. But the disappearance of the soul is the very project at the heart of positivism.

Consciousness and Reason

Why can’t we study spiritual consciousness through the use of reason? A crime lab studying DNA must burn the tissue sample containing DNA in order to study it. In the examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical compounds, the reagents destroy the very body it was to examine. All that is obtained by this study is the product of decomposition, the remnants a dead organism. This is something like what happens when science applies its analysis to consciousness. Trying to study the soul by the use of metacognitive reason is like going outside your house and looking inside the window to see if anyone is home. Since the subject and object of study are one, nothing is learned. It is an exercise in the kind of espejismo celebrated by Jorge Luis Borges in his story, The Library of Babel.

As the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno puts it in A Tragic Sense of Life, materialists fail to find the self, since they are looking for states of consciousness and not the soul itself: “Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is like asking him about his body.”

The nature of the self, or the undying consciousness, may be intuited, of course, through the persistence of memory, of continuity in time. Memory study is another area by which we may try to discover the innate characteristic of the living entity. The persistence of memory, then would appear to me to be indisputable evidence that “who I am to-day” derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago.

This is echoed in the ancient teachings of Krishna in the Gitopanishad where the soul is defined as an eternal being, withstanding the changes of time:

“As the embodied soul continually passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. The self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change...For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.” Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, transl. A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmī, 2.12,20