Earth Walker
May 21st, 2001, 11:54 AM
Everyone, if they live past a certain age (say 10), has skeletons
in their closet. Behind the closet door lurk things that do not fit
our preferred views of self and world, that we would like to
keep out of sight forever -- even from ourselves.
Since the Scientific Revolution of the 1500s and 1600s, we have relied on scientists to judge the nature of reality and to escort
unseemly assertions off the premises. Let us be clear: modern science is not just another belief system, a church among churches. It is a unique alloy of logic and observation that permits
us to screen the possible against the actual. But let us also be
clear about this: science, no matter how complex or sublime, is
always conducted by apes. Researchers are primates too --
instinctive beasts with biases of thinking over millennia on the
African savanna. In the past few centuries, the naked apes of science have tucked their share of bones in the closet, often for
apish reasons. And those bones are restless.
The company in science's closet has been grand. Mind, soul,
spirit, consciousness, Goddess -- thay all have done time there among the cobwebs and unpaired mittens. But the first notion
to be closeted by science is scarcely known today, though its
pedigree is primal. Sages of old dubbed it Imaginato vera, "true
imagining". People since the Stone Age have felt that the mind's
eye can peer past the mind's navel, beyond mere introspection,
into the heart of truth.
One of the "true imaginers" was Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus,
a Swiss doctor of the early 1500s. The medical knowledge of his
age was largely worthless, he believed. To vex his detractors, he
would make public bonfires of medical texts.
Turn away from the writings of fusty figures like Aristotle, he
would exhort, and read the Book of Nature, using all your senses!
But Paracelsus included among "the senses" an interior organ:
imagination. He taught that the essence of each thing in the cosmos lies hidden inside us; through visionary meditation we
can discover nature's workings from within.
Another protoscientist, Giordano Bruno, was among the first to
champion Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that the earth and planets
orbit the sun. But Bruno saw deeper than Copernicus did.
Past the orbit of Saturn, the Copernican solar system was enclosed in a gigantic beach ball with stars painted on the inside.
Beyond that globe were the angels and the lord. Bruno punctured the ball. The stars are suns, he proclaimed, infinite
lights in infinite space. Many of those alien suns are ringed by
planets, and some of those planets teem with life! How did a
16th-century man, without rocket or telescope, glimpse the
universe known to those of the 21st?
Via imaginato vera. But Bruno left no room for god. Bad move.
Damned for heresy, he was roasted at the stake by the
Inquisition.
In the 1600s, the Scientific Revolution entered its adolescence.
Teen apes like to see themselves as everything their parents
are not, so mainstream scientists insisted they owed nothing to
the wisdom traditions (aka superstitutions) that had gone before.
Alchemy and magic, science's ancestors, deployed true imagining
to plumb the mysteries.
Science apologists of this ear would have none of it. Francis Bacon was the first writer to define scientific inquiry. He equated
imagination with grime on the mirror of the mind. A scientist's
awareness should be spotless to reflect accurately the objects
under study. Imagined things aren't objects at all, but figments.
For 300 years, Bacon's exorcism held -- science was officially
objective, not imaginative. By the 1950s, scientific psychology had
embraced behaviourism, declaring consciousness (including
imagination) unmeasurable and thus irrelevant. Then came the drugs. In 1947, the first scientific article on the effects of LSD was
published. Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, in which he
recounts his mescaline trips, came out in 1954. Two years later,
Humphrey Osmond coined the word psychedelic. By the early
'60s, consciousness expansion had become a cultural force in
North America. From the psychedelic angle, the mind seemed much vaster and more multidimensional than the rats-and-mazes
set had let on.
Among those at the forefront of the psychedelic movement were
a trio of psychologists: Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later
renamed Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner (editor of Psychedelic
Review, first published in 1963, and a speaker at the May 11 to
13 Entheobotany 2: Shamanic Plant Science conference at
Whistler). These mavericks were given the bum's rush from
academia. But the closet door was now ajar. A 1964 issue of
American Psychologist featured a landmark article by Robert
Holt. Entitled "Imagery: The Return of the Ostracized", it welcomed the imagination back as a proper tool for research.
And what of imaginatio vera?
Could it, too, regain a role in the scientific vision? The greatest
scientists always doubted the dualism of science and imagination.
Take the undisputed titans of physics, Isaac Newton and Albert
Einstein. Newton founded modern physics as a sideline. His
passion was alchemy, the mystical probing of matter with true
imagining. Einstein noticed that physics is based on mathematics
and that mathematics is, in fact, a species of omagination. The
eyes of flesh have never viewed a perfect triangle or the number
nine. These things are imaginary. Yet the success of mathematical
science proves that such "figments" are cryptically entwined with
reality's roots. Einstein, with no inquisitors over his shoulder,
wrote that "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
It seems plain that in their monkey zeal to be special, 17th
century scientists hid their own identity from themselves: modern
science is not the opposite of true imagining, but its truimph.
in their closet. Behind the closet door lurk things that do not fit
our preferred views of self and world, that we would like to
keep out of sight forever -- even from ourselves.
Since the Scientific Revolution of the 1500s and 1600s, we have relied on scientists to judge the nature of reality and to escort
unseemly assertions off the premises. Let us be clear: modern science is not just another belief system, a church among churches. It is a unique alloy of logic and observation that permits
us to screen the possible against the actual. But let us also be
clear about this: science, no matter how complex or sublime, is
always conducted by apes. Researchers are primates too --
instinctive beasts with biases of thinking over millennia on the
African savanna. In the past few centuries, the naked apes of science have tucked their share of bones in the closet, often for
apish reasons. And those bones are restless.
The company in science's closet has been grand. Mind, soul,
spirit, consciousness, Goddess -- thay all have done time there among the cobwebs and unpaired mittens. But the first notion
to be closeted by science is scarcely known today, though its
pedigree is primal. Sages of old dubbed it Imaginato vera, "true
imagining". People since the Stone Age have felt that the mind's
eye can peer past the mind's navel, beyond mere introspection,
into the heart of truth.
One of the "true imaginers" was Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus,
a Swiss doctor of the early 1500s. The medical knowledge of his
age was largely worthless, he believed. To vex his detractors, he
would make public bonfires of medical texts.
Turn away from the writings of fusty figures like Aristotle, he
would exhort, and read the Book of Nature, using all your senses!
But Paracelsus included among "the senses" an interior organ:
imagination. He taught that the essence of each thing in the cosmos lies hidden inside us; through visionary meditation we
can discover nature's workings from within.
Another protoscientist, Giordano Bruno, was among the first to
champion Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that the earth and planets
orbit the sun. But Bruno saw deeper than Copernicus did.
Past the orbit of Saturn, the Copernican solar system was enclosed in a gigantic beach ball with stars painted on the inside.
Beyond that globe were the angels and the lord. Bruno punctured the ball. The stars are suns, he proclaimed, infinite
lights in infinite space. Many of those alien suns are ringed by
planets, and some of those planets teem with life! How did a
16th-century man, without rocket or telescope, glimpse the
universe known to those of the 21st?
Via imaginato vera. But Bruno left no room for god. Bad move.
Damned for heresy, he was roasted at the stake by the
Inquisition.
In the 1600s, the Scientific Revolution entered its adolescence.
Teen apes like to see themselves as everything their parents
are not, so mainstream scientists insisted they owed nothing to
the wisdom traditions (aka superstitutions) that had gone before.
Alchemy and magic, science's ancestors, deployed true imagining
to plumb the mysteries.
Science apologists of this ear would have none of it. Francis Bacon was the first writer to define scientific inquiry. He equated
imagination with grime on the mirror of the mind. A scientist's
awareness should be spotless to reflect accurately the objects
under study. Imagined things aren't objects at all, but figments.
For 300 years, Bacon's exorcism held -- science was officially
objective, not imaginative. By the 1950s, scientific psychology had
embraced behaviourism, declaring consciousness (including
imagination) unmeasurable and thus irrelevant. Then came the drugs. In 1947, the first scientific article on the effects of LSD was
published. Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, in which he
recounts his mescaline trips, came out in 1954. Two years later,
Humphrey Osmond coined the word psychedelic. By the early
'60s, consciousness expansion had become a cultural force in
North America. From the psychedelic angle, the mind seemed much vaster and more multidimensional than the rats-and-mazes
set had let on.
Among those at the forefront of the psychedelic movement were
a trio of psychologists: Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later
renamed Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner (editor of Psychedelic
Review, first published in 1963, and a speaker at the May 11 to
13 Entheobotany 2: Shamanic Plant Science conference at
Whistler). These mavericks were given the bum's rush from
academia. But the closet door was now ajar. A 1964 issue of
American Psychologist featured a landmark article by Robert
Holt. Entitled "Imagery: The Return of the Ostracized", it welcomed the imagination back as a proper tool for research.
And what of imaginatio vera?
Could it, too, regain a role in the scientific vision? The greatest
scientists always doubted the dualism of science and imagination.
Take the undisputed titans of physics, Isaac Newton and Albert
Einstein. Newton founded modern physics as a sideline. His
passion was alchemy, the mystical probing of matter with true
imagining. Einstein noticed that physics is based on mathematics
and that mathematics is, in fact, a species of omagination. The
eyes of flesh have never viewed a perfect triangle or the number
nine. These things are imaginary. Yet the success of mathematical
science proves that such "figments" are cryptically entwined with
reality's roots. Einstein, with no inquisitors over his shoulder,
wrote that "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
It seems plain that in their monkey zeal to be special, 17th
century scientists hid their own identity from themselves: modern
science is not the opposite of true imagining, but its truimph.