Freedom of Science

Here’s a draft for a proposal to John Templeton Foundation. (Read the Proposal to Perimeter Institute.) Templeton Foundation supports research on spirituality¹ so I am emphasizing the spiritual side of Freedom of Science.

1. Spiritual places

I am interested in understanding for myself what spirituality means. Let’s go to a place I visited a few years ago called Didyma. Sitting at the porch of Oracle Pansiyon (visible on the background in the picture) you would be looking at three historical sources of spirituality: An Apollo temple, a Greek church and a mosque.

Is there more to these spiritual places than marketing? What is left if we remove the marketing?

2. Marketing

Marketing is the fundamental process of nature as proved by animal and plant interactions, i.e. flowers as billboards for insects. Then it is not surprising that the process of marketing is fundamental to consumer society devised by humans.

Marketing is what Apple, Inc. does so well. But if we remove all the marketing from Apple marketing we still end up with a product, say an iPod, which is a branded MP3 player. 

3. Branding and functionality

Can all branding be removed from functionality? An Apollo temple without its functionality is nothing more than a tourist attraction. Where did spirituality go? “Elvis has left the building” says the sign on the door of Hard Rock Café on 57th Street after their relocation. Is spirituality something like that?

The organism who built the trio of temples above, organized religion, also offers a branded product. What religion markets is spirituality. Spirituality is an ingredient of human life as crucial as water. Religion packages its product to please and awe its constituency.

4. Marketing and design

Marketing is also design. When Cleopatra creates an artificial image by decorating herself with impressive jewelry and paints her face and wears queenly clothing to meet Julius Caesar she is marketing herself as a mysterious Egyptian Queen. As intended Caesar perceives a mysterious Egyptian Queen. Cleopatra without all that marketing is just an inbred woman of no particular beauty. 

Cleopatra has survived death because he has become spiritual, a brand. She keeps living, like Elvis, in its representations. There were six Cleopatras before Cleopatra VII but no one remembers them. Same with MP3 players without Apple marketing.

5. Perception

We see what does not exist — fame, the projected image, the implied design. In fact, we only see the invisible.² We cannot see what is visible unless it is made invisible. And this is the definition of spirituality.

6. Religion

According to this reasoning there is more to spirituality than its relation to religion. The connection of religion to spirituality is accidental. It is like the relation between teaching and science. A bad combination, detrimental to both. The connection exists because throughout history people who wanted to study theoretical questions such as spirituality had to seek the protection of religious entities. In the so-called dark ages of Europe the Jesuit priests were the most accomplished astronomers. The continuity of scientific record were assured by monks working under the auspices of religious institutions. Copernicus was an employee of the church all his life. Yes, but religious entities also required a price in the form of conformation to the views of the protectors.  

The reason for the lack of a concentrated attack on theoretical questions was that society was divided into two sections, professionals and laborers, and only a small professional class protected by unhuman organisms were allowed to study theoretical issues. Rulers funded theoretical studies only if it helped their own purposes.

Today, amateur investigators of theoretical questions enjoy more freedom but not financial independence. Templeton Foundation in this regard appears to be a new source allowing independent investigation of theoretical questions without a requirement to pledge allegiance to any existing dogma. This must be a worthy mission to further human knowledge.

7. Newtonism

Going back to perception of spirituality. The fact that we can only perceive what is made invisible is connected to the current global religion, Newtonism, and its materialist worldview. I reject this Newtonian atomic materialism. 

Without atomic materialist dogma there is no material/spiritual duality, and the distinction between bodily and spiritual disappears. A whole new vista of spiritual perception opens up.

The Newtonian materialist worldview does not give a proper picture of the observed world. Newtonism must invoke an occult notion of force and fictional absolute point particles to explain motion. We are not living in a discontinuous world of “mass” and “matter” interacting by way of Newton’s Soul but in a density continuum. What we perceive as matter is density differences.

8. Unity

This brings me to the concept of unity. (”Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things.” –William James) There is only one and we only perceive representations of one. We perceive representations, maps, or databases or observations. The observed is continuous;³ representations of the observed are discontinuous and made of points. The continuity is manufactured by connecting the points.⁴ Scientific pragmatism excludes Newtonian atomic materialism.

Similar thoughts about unity of things have also been developed long time ago by philosophers of the Sufi vein. As noted above, separation of investigations of spirituality from the religious context will be fruitful in this case as well. So, I want to look into this tradition of rationalism for inspiration.

9. Spirit of spirituality

My interest does not lie in organized religion which is a form of marketing. I am interested in finding out what is left if rituals, ceremonies, creed and marketing associated with organized religion is removed. We can only arrive at the “spirit” of spirituality by distilling ideas by eliminating scholastic labels much the same way Marie Curie distilled pitchblende to reveal its essence. What is left should give clues about the essence of spirituality.

I might also add that as an amateur I am above the traditional enmity between Doctors of Theology and Doctors of Philosophy the physicists. It is unfortunate that the concept of spirituality had been dependent on the professional career decisions of Doctors of Philosophy and Theology. These two types of rival doctors invented two fictitious academic lands called “Religion” and “Science” and have been fighting a scholastic war of egos for as long as scholastic profession existed. Therefore, as professionals these doctors can only confirm their official doctrine and cannot cooperate or collaborate to conduct original investigations into spirituality because they cannot see beyond their professional faith. Their professional allegiance forbids them to even consider the other point of view.

10. Faith

Faith, too, must be untangled from its religious associations and be made general. Faith is a standard. And standard is the thing. So what we call faith makes a religion such as Christianity a corporation. A corporation is an organism held together by faith. Faith may be “profit” and registered in Delaware or it can be “soul” registered in sacred scriptures. Everything that we perceive as matter exists as faith. As standard. Therefore, things that we do not perceive as things, like Google, like the Internet, and corporations are as things as stone and steel. There is no difference between software and steel as far as their function is concerned.

Consequently, spirituality is not an absolute but it belongs to the individual.

11. Research method

These are rough ideas. But I think that there is a good idea underneath that needs to be developed and polished and made manifest. In my research I have always tried to identify and eliminate professional labels and hidden assumptions and to fight to remove the barriers around knowledge built by professional doctors, namely, the priestly middlemen the physicists. This method always leads to new discoveries buried by professional doctors as part of their scholastic practice.

1. Among other subjects, e.g. this blog about Infinity which has the best definition of infinity I ever saw. [↩]
2. This is not related to the eye. Helen Keller may have had better perception of spirituality than anyone else. [↩]
3. Not sure about this. [↩]
4. ”If you don’t know anything at all about some data, what you do is fit a curve to it. If you are more sophisticated, you fit a symmetry to it. So that is what modern physics does, basically sophisticated curve fitting.” –Carl Brannen [↩]

ShareThis