Science and the intellect belong “below stairs” serving the master, intuition. That is their proper role and when they are given profound tasks inappropriate to their capacities, disaster is the likely outcome. Listen to a typically intellectual response to the problem of sustainability facing humanity. “One generation of intensely focused investment, research, and redevelopment—redesigning our energy systems, overhauling our chemical industries, rebuilding our cities, finding better substitutes for wood and replanting lost forests—could transform the world as we know it into something far more beautiful, satisfying, and sustainable.” The focus here is on the world of form and the two processes of translation and transformation.
Translation is intellectual understanding and rarely affects human behavior in a profound way. In other words we can understand the causes of global warming but that doesn’t stop it from occurring. “‘Transformation,’ according to the author Alan Atkisson, ‘is the name we give to the extremely accelerated adoption of existing innovation, together with the acceleration of innovation itself.’” Innovation and technology have never been accelerating faster but are not creating sustainability and certainly not getting us any closer to an experience of Simple Reality. Also note that Atkisson’s transformation is not referring to any change in human consciousness or behavior which is how we would define transformation in the context of Simple Reality.
Science is not only dependent on the senses and the world of physical form and ideas as form, but is defined and limited by the dominant human worldview and state of consciousness. Given that form is impermanent, having no substantial reality, and that most people, including our scientists, have decidedly delusional identities, we cannot believe that the human intellect is going to create a sustainable narrative, a healthy human identity or alter destructive human behavior. By delusional identity we mean deriving one’s identity from the body, mind and emotions rather than from one’s connection to the totality of Creation (Oneness).
Certainly science has helped get humanity to its current state of evolution. “History is full of examples … Global history since the Renaissance, with all of our remarkable transformations in technology, economics, and culture, is largely a product of humanity learning to take seriously the evidence of its senses.” That’s the problem! We have taken the “evidence of our senses” far too seriously and need instead to take the insights of our intuition seriously, and our ability to “feel” the profound reality of P-A which we must claim as our new and sustainable narrative.
Then we can send the scientists and technocrats back to the basement to prepare dinner, which they are very good at, and the rest of us can get on with clearing the air of all the smoke and hot air left over from pompous egos blowing smoke.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality Trilogy
by Roy Charles Henry:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
