written 30 July 2023
published 6 August 2023
Last week, ocean temperature off southern Florida hit 101°F. Phoenix, which endured 30 days above 110°F, and lows above 90°F, was declared the "first city uninhabitable without AC". Two days of grid blackout would send millions to the emergency room and kill thousands. Algeria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey are all battling deadly wildfires, while 4" diameter hail injured 100 in northern Italy. July 2023 is hottest month ever recorded, but this will be remembered as the coolest summer of the rest of our lives.
After the Protestant Revolution, the absolute power of the Church diminished. The European Renaissance reviving ancient ideas and Western science began to flourish. Because the Church still killed people who challenged their dogma, science steered clear of anything spiritual, and focused on the objectively measurable, with confirmation required. Despite this limitation, scientific understanding flourished and powered the industrial revolution, transforming society and the planet.
Originally, matter was understood to be only a part of reality, and Newton wrote extensive commentaries on the Bible. This quickly shifted to the idea that matter is the foundation of reality, and consciousness was relegated to an "epiphenomenon", an artifact of highly complex matter, limited to humans. "Meaning" in life had no place in orthodox science. The body was a meat machine, and medical learning proceeded like any mechanic describing and maintaining a mechanism.
Darwin focused exclusively on competition, postulating evolution as survival of the "fittest", which quickly became survival of the "strongest". The scientific assumption of a "meaningless" material reality, combined with a validation that "might makes right", encouraged, and justified, the economic exploitation of the Earth, where all activity was designed to further limited human goals.
Scientist are people, subject to the cultural limitations of people. In our misogynistic culture, women scientists are still a minority, typically ignored for decades before their findings are validated and accepted. Strong scientific egos often held up progress, and big changes in thinking had to wait until key scientists died, or whole new fields of study brought more information to bear.
However, there is an integrity in the scientific method which constantly seeks the deeper reality of the world, and unlike rigid religious dogma, scientific dogma changes over time, with further research. A little over a century ago, the world changed significantly. Psychology showed a powerful subconscious shapes human perception. Relativity added time to the consideration of matter. Quantum physics introduced the understanding that all matter is actually energy, which can act as a particle or a wave, depending only on how it is viewed, putting consciousness central to material form.
Being a culture of domination and separation, the first use of this new physics was destruction, ending the world war 78 years ago. But it also brought the computer revolution, which continues to change the world. I bought my first computer 40 years ago, and the machine I am using to write this article is 9 years old, almost obsolete, but orders of magnitude more powerful than my first machine. The World Wide Web began 30 years ago giving global access to information. The first iPhone hit the market 17 years ago. Now 86 percent of the world has a smartphone. This rapid social transformation is unprecedented.
Because we are still a culture of domination, trauma, and separation, these powerful changes have a dark side as well. Traffic on the web is 90 percent porn or spam, and social media is a destructive addiction. Online hackers threaten everything from individuals to entire civilizations. Cyberwar is ongoing.
As consciousness has taken on more importance, we see humans are not just meat machines. The assumption of the primacy of matter is a Western science bias, as Eastern science assumes consciousness is primary, eliminating the problem of "how does consciousness arise in dead matter". Fifty years ago, the Institute of Noetic Sciences held medical conferences for the study of psycho-neuro-immunology: how what the mind thinks shapes the health of our body. This is now a recognized field of medicine.
The wave nature of the quantum world describes a unity world. Einstein said "either everything is sacred, or nothing is". We now know that cooperation is as biologically important as competition. Our technologies are expressing the fundamental unity into a global culture stunted by centuries of belief in separation. The social upheavals we are experiencing are the growing pains of healing that conflict.
