Plagues of Modern Thinking
by Chris Ott
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Usually we are taught the seven deadly sins: lust, greed, anger, sloth, gluttony, envy and pride. Meher Baba often simplifies these to lust, greed, and anger. And sometimes Baba has said that it is all reducible further to greed. However, in the Prayer of Repentance, written by Baba, he lists numerous sins and sub-sins.
The sins are the age-old eternal failings of the spirit to overcome its limitations and frailties.
But here I want to talk about something we don't normally hear about. These are not eternal personal failings, but cultural misunderstandings that are leading us to terrible collective misery and preventing us from creatively solving our world problems.
First, though, I want to talk about the mind itself in relation to Meher Baba.
Baba emphasized bhakti (devotion and love) and did not emphasize the mind (thinking, intellectual understanding).
I want to talk about this.
First of all, while Baba emphasized bhakti and deemphasized intellectual understanding, he at the same time gave enormous hints to spiritual thinkers. So it seems an exaggeration to say that the problems of the mind are outside the scope of his work.
I myself have wondered why Baba so emphasized devotion when we live in a time of such spiritual ignorance. And then it came to me.
When a person has no love, he loves nothing (but perhaps his body and his family which he sees as an extension of his body). This lovelessness castes itself in all directions. He has no love for truth, for purity, for God. He feels no compulsion to sacrifice anything carnal to attain something more transcendent. So of what avail would be spiritual discourses to such a person? They would fall on deaf ears.
So love has to awaken first. With love, understanding is unnecessary but inevitable. With intellect alone, neither love nor understanding are possible.
So Baba emphasizes love. With love understanding will come, for love of truth will awaken once again.
The gift of understanding is more precious than any other attribute of Love... It is the Divine fruit of Pure Love, the rare fruit or flower of the Universe. (Meher Baba in a letter, The Ocean of Love, Delia DeLeon)
Now in our time we normally blame our problems on some policy of government or business. Rarely do we venture to find the underlying root cancer causing these surface conditions. For what is the cause of such policies?
Baba teaches us that most fundamentally what causes cruelty is ignorance and what causes ignorance is sanskaras. Right now the sanskaras are most unnatural. And we have these problems.
Here I want to go over something that lies somewhere between these underlying root sanskaras and the policies they cause that foster misery. I want to talk about what I see as plagues that are so pervasive in modern thinking.
Unnatural sanskaras cause diseased mind (plagues) that cause horrible policies that cause horrible suffering for all of humanity. This applies not only on an institutional level, but also on an individual level. These gross misunderstandings stand in the way of cultural healing. From a practical point of view these plagues are what is undermining the development of our spiritually crippled culture. They fester in the mind and help men to justify their emptiness. They need to be rooted out.
Scientism
There is a famous book and 1963 movie titled Lord of the Flies. In it some juvenile boys are shipwrecked on an Island. Cut off from their Christian culture, they set about forming two clans, one small one and a larger one that evolves its own religion – the killing of the pig (a name for taking a human sacrifice).
The God of the Island, "the lord of the flies," is a pig's head. At the end of the film, the last righteous boy falls at the feet of a Portuguese sailor who has unexpectedly come ashore to rescue them. The bad boys, chasing the last good boy, drop their spears in shame at the sight of the adult man.
The point of the 1954 book the movie was made from (released one year before God Speaks) was that, removed from their spiritual religious cultures, most men digress into pagan religions. This is actually historically often true and likely is the reason that the Avatar has to come again and again to rekindle the light of the major religions of the time that serve as a kind of spiritual incubator for souls on the Earth waiting to enter tariquat (the esoteric paths).
Now scientism is no different from this historical point of view. I will try to briefly give its background.
In the modern age, beginning around five hundred years ago, there were some important developments in thinking. Such a sudden revolution in science threw into question much of the past assumptions about God, reality, and man himself. Copernicus expelled man from the literal 'center of the universe' and Descartes questioned the very notion of a thinker and God. Darwin of course took us further from our anthropocentrism, and what we were left with was a crisis of faith in anything at all that was sacred. The old religions looked dated and irrelevant, and in fact maybe they were.
We must add to this several endemic eternal problems in human thinking capacity such as the tendency to read effects into causes, a very tough time sorting the objective from the subjective, and a general tendency toward boondoggling for metaphysical answers in the imagination rather than from a guru or Avatar.
The results were various, including relativism (a confusion over objective/subjective distinctions), nihilism (the entire loss of belief in truth of any kind), eugenics (misunderstanding of the purpose of evolution), etc.
But one of these is called scientism. This view is most like Lord of the Flies in that it does not entirely abandon the ambitions of religious inquiry (such as determining man's origin), but supplants old-time religion with a man-made quasi-science-religion.
Here is where you literally have people without any kind of spiritual development inventing religion whole-cloth from imagination and calling it "science."
But it is absolutely nothing like science. It is religion. Isaac Newton was a scientist (and an alchemist interestingly), but scientism has nothing at all in common with the careful osbservation and quantification of Newton (or Tyco or Kepler or Galileo).
Here are the kinds of beliefs one could assign to scientism.
Spacetime, originally a fabrication of symatics conceived to make sense of mathematics that could not be understood through the lens of cheesy materialist metaphysics, has become reified within sicientism as an invisible quasi-substance. Many scientists now speak with sincerety of the 'fabric' of the universe. Antimatter, strange matter, dark matter, the God particle, scientism concepts every one of them, reified from misapplied mathematics. What such spooky concepts do psychologically for people is to fill the gap created by a world of only material and efficient causes that has been stripped of the sense of magic that religion supplied. In other words such concepts are filling purely psychological needs - the very criticism that Freud made of religion.
At the throne of such magical thoughts is the recently fashionable posit of panspermia, the idea that life migrates from one planet to another the way seeds are polinated in the wind. This polination of planets is believed to sometimes happen on the backs of meteors, but the holy grail of scientism is fast becoming the anticipated breakthrough of discovering that life on Earth was seeded by extra-terrestrial aliens - the real gods that made us. See where this is going? Most of the so-called research that adherents to such ideas occupy themselves with is directed at sifting through data in search of evidence that their beliefs are at least possible - not unlike theological anthropologists who search for a piece of wood from Noah's Arc to uphold their fledgling faith in the flood. They need to prove it's possible because they're worried it's not, never stopping to notice that possibility is philosophically trivial. To uphold the notion of extra-terrestrial panspermia, scientists spin vast and imaginative mathematical formulas to "prove" the possibility of faster-than-light motion, time travel through objectified wormholes and so forth.
Other increasingly beloved enterprises include proving that life "could have" existed on Mars, or raising funds to listen for a radio beacon from outer space. Such beliefs have become sacred. Frustrated quests for evidence are dismissed as nonconclusive. All that seems to establish possibility is seen as progress. Now understand that real science attempts to do the precise opposite, i.e. to disprove its hypotheses. But scientism is geared toward upholding beliefs and no amount of failed experiment carries any dissuasion.
So what, if not evidence, is the source of the assumptions of scientism? The simple answer is science fiction. Nineteenth century books like From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and War of the Worlds (1898), as well as Giovanni Schiaparelli's drawings of canalis on Mars, were some of the first inspirations for scientism. The many incarnations of Star Trek seem to substitute something like holy scripture.
Of course the point of scientism is to explain where life comes from. But note there is no attempt in scientism to explain how life evolved out of inorganic material, only "where" in space it was delivered here from. It also shows no curiosity in knowing how the first aliens evolved. It is entirely noncurious. It is a belief system and the "science" is only its means to prove its beliefs, not unlike theologians who make expeditions to Iraq to find a plank from Noah's ark and call it archeology.
Interestingly, not so uncoincidentally, Baba's book God Speaks and other books by him address the very issues that scientism attempts to solve with its made-up alien gods.
Much of the "new science" that you hear about is an extension of scientism, including string theory, wormholes, black holes, time travel, faster than light activity, bent space, anti-gravity, extrasensory dimensions – all this is scientism.
So where is the trouble in this? Somehow scientism has so successfully attached itself to real science in the public imagination, that people have been duped into all kinds of false notions. One is that 'scientists know' all sorts of things we can't understand. While much of the mathematics of real science is difficult, it is not impenetrable. The theories of scientism are on the other hand unintelligible purely because they are devoid of rational sense. Few people, for instance, are aware that string theory is a set of 'metaphors' which have no correlating mathematics to them. It is an unquantifiable set of possibilities conceived in imagination. It can't really be understood because it is incomprehensible, except as metaphor.
There is a mathematical formula for how many planets have communicative intelligent life capable of sending and receiving radio signals. It is called "the Drake equation." It is a set of assumptions that have absolutely no basis other than the personal taste of the man Dr. Frank Drake who invented it.
Considerable disagreement on the values of most of these parameters exists, but the values used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were:
10 stars form per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy
half of all stars formed will have planets
stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of supporting life
100% of these planets will develop life
1% of which will be intelligent life
1% of which will be able to communicate which will last 10,000 years
Where did Drake get "1% of which will be intelligent life"? Why not .0002%? He just made it up.
But people don't know this. They think that the scientists are really smart and we no longer need silly primitive superstitious ideas like God. We are beyond that now.
We are about to go to Mars and explore the final frontier while our chemists and engineers are working on killing us through neglect of basic ethical considerations. The Earth is dying and we think we have arrived at some kind of summit where God is irrelevant.
Enough on scientism. People are duped. Scientists know nothing. All the good things we enjoy such as running water and electricity are due to applications of 17th and 18th century developments in basic physics long before the rise of scientism. The moon shot was due to Newtonian physics, not wormhole theory. It saddens me to hear even Baba lovers allude to what our scientists now know – as if science is starting to have a glimpse of what Baba is saying. I promise you; they aren't. Not yet.
Nihilism
Nothing could be more frightening than nihilism, yet it inflicts the hearts not only of our institutional leaders, but also their subjects. It is pervasive.
Nihilism is the post-modern view that spiritual truth is a nice idea but a human fantasy. There is no supreme transcendent reality or truth – no such thing as God, divine love, purity, a soul, anything divine. All there is is matter. And since there is nothing really worth attaining, the only thing that is logical to strive for is sensory pleasure.
For nihilists, it is only logical to hurt anyone or anything or even everyone, if you can get away with it and it leads to you having some pleasurable sensation such as an orgasm, taste in your mouth, fun, etc. In fact, part of the pleasure for a pure nihilist is laughing at the stupidity of those who are willing to sacrifice their own pleasure for the pleasure of others when there is nothing in it for them to gain. They see all that Baba sees as good as childish nonsense.
These people not only would, but do, when they have the chance, take human slaves, abuse child prostitutes of either sex, harvest organs from the poor, etc.
Out of nihilism you get eugenics.
Eugenics
Eugenics is the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. In its milder form it includes forcibly sterilizing people with undesirable traits. In its full-blown form it includes killing people with undesirable traits in order to improve the gene pool and control population growth.
Don't misunderstand. Eugenicists are not cynical; they are sincere. They think they are being "logical." They are trying to fix what they see as a problem – all these people around them they don't like knowing are there and imagine they are taking care of.By the way, the Nazis didn't invent eugenics. The Americans did in the 1920's. The Nazis were following American eugenics experiments.It is hard to go into the details of the eugenics that is currently being tried as it would so alarm people. Just know that where you think that some of the greatest philanthropy is occurring, eugenics is actually being secretly applied.One example: There is a drive by certain people who formed certain institutions to help children in Africa live longer with HIV AIDS. The reason that the children are targeted for the life-extending AIDS medications is to see that they live to sexual maturity and then spread the disease through the institution of prostitution prevalent among the poor in starving countries.
Under the cloak of many good deeds is eugenics in the form of mass murder.
The conditions of the people that the eugenicists are so offended by and believe are the result of weaker gene pools are very often conditions caused by those very eugenicists. This would be complicated to go into. But a simple example is the horrid dirty conditions of the Jews in Berlin's ghetto right before Hitler decided to ship them to extermination camps. The filthiness and wretched condition of the people was caused by the eugenicists. There was nothing really wrong with the "gene pool" as we now know. 37% of American Nobel Prize recipients between 1901 and 2008 were Jewish.
Baba actually addressed the problems that eugenicists worry about. First of all, Baba says what numerous great people have said, that genetic problems are solved by the races freely intermarrying. This naturally solves genetic problems, without forced sterilization or mass murder.
About the population, Baba said this:
Selfishness, multiplied by population, results in wars, exploitation, persecution and poverty. Selflessness, multiplied by population, brings about peace and plenty. All the modern fads that are stalking the world today, in the guise of politics, economics, materialism, communalism, nationalism and socialism, have to be judged on the criteria of selfishness or selflessness. (Lord Meher, online version, p3162)
Many social scientists and economists agree with Meher Baba. They argue that the problems such as hunger blamed on high populations are actually caused by other social problems.
Population control and eugenics are always selfish concepts. None of these people suggests that the elite be killed or sterilized. It is pseudo-science.
In recent years, eugenics has come to include the notion of genetic manipulation. This new field is almost too dark to talk about. It is not science, it is misapplied technology.
Relativism
Relativism we have all heard much of. This is the view that each person has his own truth (about EVERYTHING) and thus there is no such thing as objective truth. This view holds that one's truth is a real truth, but it does not apply to anyone else. There is no truth that holds for all people. People choose their truth based on their personal taste and preference.
I hardly need to explain how easily this view slides into nihilism – the belief that there is no actual significant truth at all. It is hard to distinguish between "my truth is just as good as any other" and "the only thing worth doing is satisfying my own personal sensory cravings regardless of what others feel about it."
I have tried to explain ideas about perception to some Baba lovers and they have so misunderstood that I later find them saying, "There is no you; only me." I can hardly think of any more horrible nonspiritual position. This is NOT what I mean by any of my philosophy. That is a GROSS MISUNDERSTANDING. That is NOT what Baba means by saying we are all God.
This mental disease, that is closely associated with narcissism and solipsism, has to be cured quickly.
Without analyzing further, I think I'll just state some basic metaphysical facts for those who might be this confused.
Baba tells us there are an infinite number of souls – not just yours.
People count, and their feelings are as real as yours.
There is objective truth (true for everyone), objective facts (spiritual and material ones).
While some things are true for the individual (such as favorite color) many many more are true for everyone, such as that everything that goes up must come down.
Relativism is a primitive belief, as primitive as the belief that EVERYTHING IS OBJECTIVE and there is a "BEST COLOR" for everyone to favor if they wish to be correct.
This leads us to the next plague, fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is the opposite to relativism and is, at least in modern times, generally a reaction to relativism. It is the view that there is no room at all for subjective interpretation for ANYTHING. This view holds that there is a right answer and a wrong answer for every question, including your favorite color and favorite movie star, and furthermore holds that this view is known only by an elite ruling or dominant group.We find fundamentalism manifested in terrorism, in inflexible political ideologies, in scientism, and even in atheism and libertarianism.Fundamentalists hold positions "no matter what." They have decided on their position and furthermore decided not to examine reality or listen to anyone who does.
Fundamentalism is at the heart of book-burning, censorship, edicts about appropriate and 'unimportant' areas of study. Fundamentalists are keen to prioritize, clarify, limit, and finally dictate all sorts of mad inventions about speech, writing, dress, architecture, art, behavior, methods of worship, methods of eating, methods of sleeping. There is no limit to the imagination of the fundamentalist elite mind/body police. The guiding principle for this elite is their own behavior that week. If they happen to be doing it, it is right for all people for all time.
Meher Baba was, not surprisingly, neither a relativist nor a fundamentalist. Nor was he a political pragmatist in its cynical post-modern sense of doing whatever makes you get your desired selfish outcome. He was forever for waking up and staying alert, being kind and aware and observing and guessing. Meher Baba was never ever for falling asleep behind the wheel of some weak philosophy.
There was, for Meher Baba, absolutely no substitute for awareness and continuous virtuous vigilance.
Because I said a thing once, does that mean a law has been laid down for all time? You are profoundly mistaken if you think so! (Meher Baba, Lord Meher, online version, p667)
Solipsism
Solipsism is the view that your experience is all that exists and other people and their experience do not. It is sort of an extreme form of narcissism, though its cause is philosophical rather than infant trauma. In relativism and nihilism the other person's experience is considered irrelevant, but in solipsism it is considered not to exist at all.
Let me give some examples of solipsism.
I have met two Baba lovers who were confused by their reading of certain books in combination with drugs and wound up thinking they were the center of the universe. One told me that she thought her husband didn't really exist. The other I showed the chart below and she located her experience as being from the eye on the left (God!) as being her experience.
I'm not sure what's going on with these people. I think perhaps they are confusing their belief with their experience. Such a person is called an ideologue.Now there is another type of solipsist called a behaviorist. This is a philosophical position that people don't have internal conscious states, they only appear to. The behaviorist knows that he experiences pain and emotion, but he takes the position that others don't. Behaviorists were used at Guantanamo Bay to write white papers on why torture that doesn't damage organs that could lead to death is not torture. A behaviorist professor once told me that a corpse who's mouth is turned up is just as happy as a living person who is smiling.
Looking further for causes
All of these, I think, are closely related. Fundamentalism is a backlash to relativism. Nihilism and solipsism are simply extensions of relativism taken to its conclusion. Eugenics is, of course, the logical implication of evolution in the mind of a nihilist. Scientism is a reaction to nihilism's rejection of the sacred sense of awe.
If we trace all this back what do we find at the root? A confusion over the objective and subjective distinction.
Now it is a development (a maturation of the mind) to discover that many things are relative, i.e. that they depend on who is viewing them. For instance it is an important revelation for High School students to discover that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or that many of our social assumptions only make sense in the context of our unique culture and may not hold true in another.
But to conclude that EVERYTHING is in the eye of the individual is a gross misunderstanding. Let me give some examples.
Let us say that there are two neighboring planets that have not developed space travel but have developed telescopes and radios. One day the astronomers of planet X notice a giant triangle shape approaching from outer space. They radio planet Y only to learn that the astronomers of planet Y see a giant circle approaching them from the same direction. An argument ensues, each side calling the other a liar.
Finally, after musing on the problem for some time, the wise men of both planets come to an agreement that the object is actually a cone, seemingly a circle from one angle and a triangle from the other.
Relativism holds that each person has his own truth and there is not one truth for everyone. This is false. Each person has his own appearance (illusion), but there is a truth about the state of things – what Baba calls "real illusion." In this instance the truth is that there is a cone coming from outer space that looks one way to some people and one way to the other.
Now this principle of the objective and the subjective applies also to societal ideas of beauty, customs, etc.
In this regard in Discourses Baba says,
The mental processes are partly dependent upon the immediately given objective situation, and partly dependent upon the functioning of accumulated sanskaras or impressions of previous experience... From the psychogenetic point of view, human actions are based upon the operation of the impressions stored in the mind through previous experience. (Discourses, 1967, Vol. 1, p. 54)
I'll give an example that expresses this.
Imagine a rich girl and a poor girl walking along a path together when they come upon a ten-dollar bill. The poor girl says with excitement, "What a lot of money!" And the rich girls sneers knowingly, "No, you silly girl, it's hardly any money at all." Each is seeing it through the lens of their accumulated past experience, and interpreting it in relation to those impressions. Their evaluation of the relative value of the money (a lot or a little) is a subjective judgment.But now let's take the story one step further.Imagine the poor girl then says knowingly, "Oh, don't you see? It seems a little to you and a lot to me because of our different past experiences. By itself it is simply whatever it is."And to this the rich girl, getting very upset that the poor girl is being uppity, blurts, "Oh you stupid girl! You have it all wrong. It is a little as I told you and you know nothing at all about money. I am right and you are wrong."Now something has shifted – the kind of statement made by the girls has shifted subtly. Now it would be false to say that both girls are right, in this instance, from any point of view. In this later case the poor girl is entirely right and the rich snobbish girl is entirely incorrect. One is right and the other is wrong. This truth does not depend on the seer. There is a fact about the given situation, and a fact about the nature of seeing.
This distinction is critical to get. There must be room made for the subjective AND the objective. Otherwise there is no end to the confusion caused by accepting only one and not the other. In accepting that ALL things are subjective you wind up with relativism, and ultimately nihilism. And if you accept that all is objective you wind up with fundamentalism. Both lead to repression, restriction, and a general narrowing down of the scope of life.
So how did something so simple and obvious get so distorted? How did relativism, and then nihilism, get started?
The answer is in the problems in the post-modern system of belief known as materialism. Very few people understand what materialism is. Materialism is so impotent at accounting for human experience that it is hard to articulate. Materialism is the view that there is an invisible substance that things are made of, and this material organizes itself in a way, that no one has been able to ascertain, so that subjective experience arises.
Now this stuff, this matter, is suppose to take the place of God. It is suppose to be all that is necessary to explain our experience – the beginning and the end. Yet no one has ever even postulated how it does so.
Matter is described as inert. That means it has no volition, no intention, no direction, no objective, no power of action.
in . ert -adjective
[in-urt, i-nurt]
having no inherent power or action, motion, or resistance (opposed to ACTIVE): inert matter. (Dictionary.com)
Since the underlying 'reality' has no volition, will, or intention, it has no reason to act, nor any way of acting. Yet it does, in an organized creative and efficient way – and this makes no sense. The poverty of this logic is so disturbing even to the materialist on a subconscious level that it causes a mental rebellion. The vacuous meaninglessness of materialism, the pure pointlessness and incoherence of it, causes in men the desire to supplant a meaning back into life. This is done in various ways. First by focusing on one's own physical pleasure, through consumerism or thirst for power, while regarding the resultant condition of others as a matter of less significance. This is nihilism. And if eugenics comes up as a means to fulfill these aims that is okay too. After all, sensation is the primary motivation of men in a Godless world. Then add to this the natural need in human beings to have a sense of awe and wonder, and you of course have things like scientism and various quasi-religious beliefs. At the Bohemian Grove in California, which has played host to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, they pay their homage to a statue of an owl.
Relativism arises from materialism because there is no 'sacred truth or value' in matter as it is. Thus any that is perceived must be a human fabrication and thus relative (for each as good as any).
These are the intellectuals of our time. Baba, I think, has deemed they have ruled long enough. It is time to come back to the fold, truth, at least for a few of us. By finding a perfect master.
Image from the final scene of Lord of the Flies.