The De-fetishization of Matter

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed.” - Albert Einstein

Alchemy Ancient and Modern (1922) by H. Stanley Redgrove

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The first time I meditated it was the year 2002. I was a young adult and a wobbly Jehovah’s Witness. I had heard of meditation in The Watchtower magazine. The official position was roughly that all forms of meditation are satanic except for meditation on biblical content. I still bought a "meditation for dummies" type of book and tried one of the exercises. It worked! I very much enjoyed it until I felt a presence in the room. Someone was sitting in the chair across from me. I opened my eyes, looked directly at that chair and the sensation didn't subside. It was a violently unignorable and troubling experience. 

I quit meditating and tossed the book immediately. 

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The west’s relationship to empiricism and scientific materialism starts with theological thinkers assuming that God’s wisdom could be understood via the study of stuff. This religious technique was pioneered by Giovanni di Fidanza[1a]. 

Fidanza, a leader in the Franciscan order appears in history as a more moderate character than his colleague Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis’ theology is a decidedly narrowed bandwidth but his contribution to the valorization of poverty[1b] as a mode of faith was key in that era’s re-dignification of the pastoral class[2].  Francis’ poverty theology (monasticism) was wielded by sectors of the society as activism against a lazy clerical class who indiscreetly wandered from their vows and levied fees for services which were intended as a service to the community. The protest worked to an extent. Ultimately monasticism was integrated into the institutional structure, providing support for the survival of mysticism and its “churchless” theology.

Bonaventure (the nickname Saint Francis gave Fidanza) for his part valorized other religious pursuits, one of which being the ever-increasingly precise study of the observable world. Bonaventure proposed that one could find God (an expression interchangeable with finding meaning) via what is essentially the scientific method in its larval stage. Without much strain, some scholars see in Bonaventure’s theological claim the seeds that bloomed into a full flowering empiricism in the west[3]. Science then is a human innovation intended as tool for the pursuit of God. 

Those skeptical of this sort of my religionizing of science should take a moment to appreciate that the scientific pioneer Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar from the scholastic school (among a number of other precursors to modern science) while (and a bit after) Bonaventure moderated activities within the Franciscan order. To me it seems natural to conclude that Bacon’s and his colleague’s scientific endeavour was influenced in no small part by Bonaventure’s insistence on a granular understanding of God’s creation. In addition to this, the lineage of legendary scientific figures betrays a rather deep “under the iceberg” commitment to religious pursuits. The overwhelming majority of Newton’s interest was in alchemy and occult studies. Whereas his scientific work was of less importance to him[4a]. Science historian, Richard Westfall’s analysis of Newtonianism led him to conclude that modern science is “the result of the wedding of the hermetic tradition with the mechanical philosophy”. Robert Fludd, another scientific pioneer believed as his colleagues did, in a grand reformation modeled after the alchemical transformational process. He advocated for a profound study of occult sciences by way of study of the microcosm (a very Bonaventurian idea). His aim: A deeper understanding of self via knowledge of matter. Another figure in the Mt Rushmore of science: Descartes, one day sat in an overheated room and had visions which he deemed to be of divine origin. These visions led him to conclude that the pursuit of science was equivalent to the pursuit of wisdom (there is direct overlap with Bonaventure’s theology here). In a very straight-forward manner then, Cartesianism (ie. the “reason” undergirding modern science) sprung from a visionary experience, an ecstatic state induced by ordeal. You don’t read this in high school text books perhaps because it firmly plants the beginnings of science within the realm of mysticism (not to get conspiratorial about it). The quest to understand the mechanism of the world was born of a pursuit of the spirit of meaning within it. 

In the following centuries of insistence on the precise understanding of stuff as a pursuit of meaning, I see the inevitable emergence of scientific materialism currently gripping the West. We are a stuff obsessed world. We tirelessly dig up the earth and extract fuels and gems. We find the tiny critters that cause disease. We split open the smallest units of matter we can. Sometimes with explosive results (atom bomb). We routinely smash particles against one another in what strikes me as an amusingly juvenile attempt to answer deeply troubling questions: “what does this thing do?” “I don’t know, bang it against that other thing and see what happens!”. In the past, entire cities mobilized and expended staggering amounts of resources to build cathedrals. We do the same in dedication to things. This is not surprising when one considers that science was born out of a worldview that tended heavily towards monotheism. We[4b] delude ourselves in thinking we have de-religionized science while worshipping at its jealous altar.

What if in some truthful way the worlds was indeed shaped by generation after generation carrying out Saint Bonaventure’s quest? Or that of the alchemists? What if this quest leads us to its anticipated destination: the discovery of meaning? What will we do with the meaning we discover after having assumed its non-existence for the last few hundred years? Are we prepared to assume the responsibility thrust upon us by a world that responds to our actions? As if we are being watched by a judgemental father? Or perhaps propelled forward into the future by the spirit of our ancestors? Have we lost sight of the goal of this holy quest in favour of the fetishization of the mechanisms by which we pursue it? Are we aware of what we are looking for enough to recognize it when we find it?

If the musician is to rise to the challenge of stewardship of states inseparable from the religious domain (i.e. ecstatic states) he must first shed the deflated worldview of materialism and dive into the underworld where the ancestors live. They have plenty to teach about meaning, being and the pursuit of mystery. An arms-length appreciation will not suffice. Direct Personal experience is the surest initiatory route. We must reclaim the competences we used to have when we thought of the world as, and lived in a world teeming with meaning. Perhaps science can make us better mystics instead of better toothpaste?

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Many years after my initial experience with meditation and after picking it up again I found myself in a meditative state, 16 years away in the past sitting in a chair across from myself witnessing my first attempt at meditation and noticing a presence in the chair across the room, where I was now sitting. A big ol' 16 year time loop. It has to be said that my life performed a complete transformation in that cycle. I consider this a data point of evidence in support of the ancient "as above so below" axiom. If the future is alive in potential and communication with it is not impossible then the future necessarily must appear to us as “higher” plane[5]. No part of this fits in a linear world made exclusively of matter. Materialism completely fails to properly model key data points of experience.

If my time travel report is clunky it's partly because the vocabulary of modern parlance is inadequate for the expression of this sort of phenomena. Fortunately, I've dedicated 25 years to the learning of a language I think is better suited to describe this than words. You and I are at the spearhead of a vast ancestral undertaking. And like our ancestors we have strange experiences launching us into the pursuit of mystery and meaning. You do you, but I call this “the Quest”. 

[1a]Merciade Eliade, History of Religious Ideas Vol.3 § 296.
[1b]The emphasis on poverty is a form of apostolicism and a nostalgia for the paradisal state. Monks were admired partly for their facility with animals. This resonates with the widely disseminated shamanic characteristic of animal communication.

[2]The history of religious ideas (and religion in general) oscillates between two poles: private and public, pastoral and institutional, syncretistic and doctrinal. Which in turn is a reflection of the religious mind’s discovery that Being itself oscillates between chaos and order. Chaos being the domain of unmanifested potential and order being the domain of observable actuality. Compare this against the Vedic idea of darkness as unmanifested light. An idea elegantly encapsulated in the figure of Ahi the serpent god, an echo of the archaic serpent/chaos mytheme.
[3] Following the same line of reasoning, China can be said to have discovered empiricism via Taosim’s firm focus on harmony with nature. One also sees the valorization of matter as container for spirit in the pursuit of Alchemy. While other branches of human religious thought, despite dismissing matter as a profane prison for spirit (gnosticism) still betray their intuition of a matter/spirit relationship.

[4a]According to economist J. M. Keynes, who purchased and studied Newton’s alchemical works “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians,(...) His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric.(...) He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”

[4b]By “we” I probably mean the liberal educated middle class of the western world. 

[5]Not such a strange idea considering the most recent theories of relativistic as outlined in Bryan Greene’s “Fabric of the Cosmos”. Also, See “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin A. Abbot

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Further reading required:

God Particle - Lean Lederman
The Construction of Modern Science - Richard Westfall
Life of Isaac Newton - Richard Westfall
The Architecture of Matter - Stephen Toulmin, June Goodfield
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
Worldviews - Richard Dewitt
A Brief History of Science - Thomas Crump
The Myth of Disenchantment - Jason A Josephson-Storm
The Noetic Universe - Dean Radin
Entangled Minds - Dean Radin
The Conscious Universe - Dean Radin
Real Magic - Dean Radin (re-read)

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Further exploration for the inclined

Alchemy was intended as a valorization of the spirit in matter. The necessity was, as with Fidanza, to discover spirit in matter through intimate understanding of matter. The “making gold” goal was really a distracting metaphor on the path to discovery of the philosopher’s stone. The stone was conceived as a substance capable of producing miracles. The alchemical science became chemistry downstream in history. Chemistry did end up producing the philosopher’s stone and produced miracle cures for all sorts of ills. And through the deep understanding of matter and our ability to manipulate it, we have reshaped the world according to some sort of vision. We have the entire world at our disposal, communication at a distance is a mundane reality, the printing press is available to virtually all and it prints not only words and images on paper it can print virtually anything object.

What I’m anxious about is that where alchemy had a built in transcendent spiritual compass, chemistry and materialism do not. Humans can not avoid being religious creatures. This is highlighted in a lot of very old stories. The golden calf myth and the tower of Babel myth are brilliant encapsulations fo the natural propensity for humans in a mob to create for themselves distorted forms of religion when left without a clear transcendent “up” direction. Moses, the spiritual leader exiles himself to the mountain (a potent symbol for said “up) and the mass of people quickly begin to stir and assume “up” has abandoned them. So they innovate one. But instead of a transcendent invisble end point, they erect a glittering facsimile of an animal that provides material sustenance. Babel underlines the same lesson, men want a transcendent “up” and will stop at nothing to get there. The tower, as in the tarot, however does not reach heaven. Matter, as the alchemists surmised (righty in my view), though an important substance is insufficient as a stand in for transcendence. Man does not live of bread alone.