From: Walter Starck [mailto:ggoldend@bigpond.net.au]
SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM SHIFTS AND PRIMACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, a paper by Henry Swift, dealing with “a new science based on the primacy of consciousness,” is well worth reading. [This seminal article maps the progression from one paradigm shift to another — from Round Earth to Copernicus to Newton to Einstein to Quantum Mechanics to Science Within Consciousness. The intro says, “Paradigmatic shifts in the panorama of past scientific revolutions have both expanded the domain of science and forced major shifts in man’s view of himself. They have affected both his view of his place in both the world, and his spiritual life.”….ST]
Although the imminent war with Iraq is now consuming world attention it is only a temporary distraction from the real issues we face. All of human history is a story of wars; one more or one less will matter only to the victims. A war between an impoverished nation of 22 million people with obsolete, poorly maintained military technology, and the richest most powerful nation of 290 million people with vastly a superior military, will be a short one. Afterwards we will awake to find terrorism still lurking, Muslims still hating America, Palestinians and Israelis still at one another’s throats, Pakistani nukes still one heartbeat away from extremist hands, North Korea still as paranoid and unpredictable as ever, the U.S. economy still in a slump, and both state and federal governments with growing budget problems exacerbated by huge ongoing expenditures on defense and domestic security.
Your idea of making war not an option thus forcing some creative new solutions seems valid but I don’t think such a notion can be grafted onto the existing foundation of belief. It must instead emerge as a natural consequence of fundamental new beliefs and understanding. The foundation knowledge & ideas for such new understanding already exists. What we need now is a synthesis into a new paradigm.
In the Swift article, he points out that each major paradigm shift in science has required a new geometry, each has started with denial of unexplained phenomena and then their incorporation into a new understanding, each has been more counterintuitive and inclusive of consciousness than the last. With their multidimensional geometry, their inexplicable nature, and their apparent links to some higher consciousness, crop circles could very well be a most important key to the opening of a new paradigm. Perhaps such could become the underlying focus and direction for The Conversation and a crop circle magazine.
Suzanne to Walter
There was one of those odd synchronicities in reading your email after what I’d happened to read just before that. There’s a book that’s been in my stack for awhile, and I wondered this morning if I should return it to the person who loaned it to me, so I took a look. It’s The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby. A review on Amazon says, “One of the most important books this century.” It’s complimentary to Brian Swimme in its postulation of the aliveness of the Universe in some intelligent/conscious way, versus the prevailing theory that everything has been accidental in the course of the emergence of life. I flagged three separate quotes in the next to last chapter, “Biology’s Blind Spot.”
“My hypothesis suggests that what scientists call DNA corresponds to the animate essences that shamans say communicate with them and animate all life forms. Modern biology, however, is founded on the notion that nature is not animated by an intelligence and therefore cannot communicate.”
“The materialist approach in molecular biology went from strength — but it rested on the improbable presupposition that chance is the only source of novelty in nature, and that nature is devoid of any goal, intention or consciousness. Jacques Monod, also a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, expressed this idea clearly in his famous essay, ‘Chance and Necessity’: ‘The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective.'”
“In the middle of the 1990s, biologists sequenced the first complete genomes of free-living organisms. So far, the smallest known bacterial genome contains 580,000 DNA letters. This is an enormous amount of information, comparable to the contents of a small telephone directory. When one considers that bacteria are the smallest units of life as we know it, it becomes even more difficult to understand how the first bacterium could have taken form spontaneously in a lifeless, chemical soup. How can a small telephone directory of information emerge from random processes?”
I feel like this whole loop you’ve made has got the key to a context for understanding everything, to the extent that things which still contain mysteries beyond the veil can be understood. But that the veil hides consciousness as the source of life is the story. We are in a vast intelligence, not in an accidental evolution, and everything changes when we understand that.
The Swift piece is a marvel of reportage on the paradigm changes that have occurred, where each time we take another gulp to incorporate what couldn’t fit before, we come closer to accepting the idea of supra-consciousness — wherever it came from — being the biggest box. That you are suggesting crop circles as a doorway to the next acceptance is almost more than this brain of mine can embrace without becoming incoherent at the awesomeness of my sense that we are making the biggest kind of sense. Here are a few quotes I picked out from what Henry Swift says:
“The metaphysical implications of Quantum Mechanics [QM] are a drastic change, relative to Newton’s mechanics. The regular and predicable universe of Newton was replaced by a world with uncertainty at its core, and the observer is intimately involved in what is observed.”
“The introduction of consciousness into QM as an essential element has spiritualized science, enabling it to no longer be limited to phenomena of the material world of inert matter. It now provides guidance in fields of the life sciences as well as in the spiritual realm.”
“4) ACCEPTANCE OF THE PRIMACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS FACES EGO RESISTANCE.
a) If materiality is a secondary reality, our material bodies are not as “real” as we thought — An ego threat! b) If Consciousness is making all choices in the universe, then what place for the ego? Free will is then only an illusion. Ego on red alert!c) A revolution is required not only in concepts, but also in the psyche — toward spiritual awakening…
5) SCIENCE WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS, BASED on PRIMACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, SUPPORTS A UNIVERSAL RELIGION BASED on SCIENTIFIC REASON RATHER THAN BLIND FAITH. SUCH A NEW RELIGION COULD INSPIRE A SECOND RENAISSANCE, FREEING THE WORLD FROM ITS CURRENT SPIRITUAL DARK AGE. “
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