It’s strange how as one nears the dying of the light, the inner light becomes stronger. It does.
For me, my whole life seems a journey taking me away from materialist beliefs, the hollow view that everything is just made of atoms governed by immutable laws (some we know, some we are still to discover) and essentially meaningless. Existence a mere accident. Man just a machine, beautiful but still just a machine.
To me, as with the narrator in the video above, it all just seems a little implausible and “thin”.
Starting with the pandemic and the time it afforded me (sometimes a crisis truly is an opportunity) - I begun an intense study of the “stuff of life”, the nature of existence. I will cover that in another post or three. Suffice to say, I continue and I’m convinced as ever that we know so little yet pretend to know so much. Social, cultural hubris.
Materialism informs so much of our intellectual knowledge and cultural view of the world. Thus, it is a paradigm that forms the society we live in. A world of numbers, the church of science, dominion over the world, steps to success, YouTube gurus, technological optimists, environmental tinkerers, eugenics (yes, it is still here with us - just well hidden. Think epigenetics, genetic screening and the science of creating a “better” man.). I could go on and on …
As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
—Diane Frolov
People now find their “mate” through profiles and matching. We truly believe we know how much of everything works. Yet, my own view is that we know shit. Very little. Nobody can tell me where a memory is in the brain. Nobody knows where the 80% of matter that is missing resides, yet is completes universal laws and formulas? Nobody knows why pigeons and butterflies return to the exact same spots, year after year? Nobody knows what came before the big bang and how we get something from nothing. Nobody knows even who we are, this consciousness that is everywhere but a total mystery to those who it fills.
In this excerpt of a talk, Rupert Sheldrake outlines precisely how I feel these days. Slick salesman all around, even in academia, selling the secrets to the universe. Listen to the whole talk.
The greatest scientists have always looked on scientific materialism as a kind of religion, as a mythology. They are impelled by a great desire to explore mystery, to celebrate mystery in the universe, to open it up, to read the stars, to find the deeper meaning. - Edward O. Wilson
I wrote this poem for my collection on the Holocaust and it outlines my thinking of how we’ve become very autistic as a society, seeing beauty even, as a piece of meat.
I hope to share more thoughts, more “humane” thoughts in the coming weeks and months, countering the dominant paradigm of materialism.
Esoteric Erotica
I study
your pendulous breasts,
two suns buoyant
pointing to fertile orb below.
I enter
through valleyed loins,
both phallus and heart
magnetized by sensual expectancy.
I leave
through tangled limbs
quiet in relief,
washed by the breath of life.
I study
your twisted reclining mass
wondering if,
Joseph Mengele would see the same.
It All Seems A Little Bit Thin