Morten Tolboll

The hermeneutics of suspicion

2012-01-30T00:17:00.000-08:00

In my article The Matrix Conspiracy, I show how all these tendencies - postmodern intellectualism, management theory and New Age - today is working as one, global spreading ideology, though it can be hard to discover it, because many of the viewpoints within it seem to disagree in between. You could call it Consumer Capitalism, but there is a danger that this might melt together with Chinese Communism in a strange Matrix Hybrid, which will be the end of democracy and human rights (read futher in my articles The Sokal Hoax, Management theory and the self-help industry, and Six common traits of New Age that distorts spirituality).

You can very well say that this ideology also has a kind of Thought Police, what I call The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

In this article I will show what this precisely means, and I will focus on two concepts: ideology and anger, which somehow is interrelated.

1. Ideology

What is an ideology?

Ideologies have always been a reflection of time, which manifests ifself in the thoughts of human beings, specially the thoughts´ direction towards the future. The collective manifestations of the future have either appeared in form of rigid religious believe systems, or ideologies such as nationalism, national socialism, communism and liberalism. They all function with the implied assumption, that the supreme good lies in the future, and that the end therefore justifies the means. The goal is an idea, a point out in a future, projected by the mind, where the salvation comes in some form – happiness, satisfaction, equality, liberation, etc. It has not been unusual that the means to get there have been to make people into slaves, or by torturing them and murdering them here and now.

The ideology today is consumerism, or consumer-capitalism, and the supreme good in the future is constant increasing production, constant increasing consumption. The thought-system behind this ideology comes from the so-called Management theory, which again builds on New Thought, Humanistic psychology, New Age and Postmodern intellectualism - and their relativism and subjectivism.

That a thought-system has developed into an ideology shows in, that it is a closed system, which is shared by a large group of people. Such a closed system has especially two distinctive characters: 1) It allows no imaginable circumstance to talk against the ideology. 2) It refuses all critique by analysing the motives in the critique in concepts, which is collected from the ideology itself (an ideology always thinks black and white, and therefore always has an anti-ideology, an enemy image, which it attribute on to everyone, who don´t agree).

An ideology is therefore characterized by, that it is not able to contain, or direct refuses, rationality and critical thinking. We all know how dissidents have been killed, jailed and tortured under totalitarian ideologies.

Ideologists can be called Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has referred to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” encouraged by writers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. What people think, and the reasons they produce, may not be the real reasons at work. It then becomes easy to become suspicious of the motives of everyone, whether as the representative of an economic class or the purveyor of a morality, or just as an individual with psychological problems to solve.

The last mentioned is a typical trait of the management theories and their use of coaching and psychotherapy (for example Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP – see my article Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) in leadership theories and personality developing courses. In this way they end up in concealing power relations at the workingplace, they lead to difficulties assigning responsibility towards children in the schools, they reduce our spouses to means for our personal development, and remove political incitation and social responsibility by disguising social problems as personal/psychological problems.

I have personally several times been attacked by NLP-coaches and psychotherapists for no other reason than being a philosopher; that is: a person who uses rationality and critical thinking (which is Old-thinking in their point of view). I have even, several times, been advised to seek NLP-psychotherapeutic treatment, in order again to be able to think new, and be flexible and willing to change (to claim that I have psychological problems, without any justification, and without being in a treatment-situation, is actually a very serious insult).

They call it personal development, which again is one and the same as adjustment to society, and therefore to the ruling ideology. An advice that don´t differ much from the theories behind the re-education institutions in

China

. A direct Stalinistic approach, which almost all companies today is using more and more (see other kinds of insults in my article The Sokal Hoax).

As mentioned in the start I actually thinks, that there is a danger that this ideology, in its fascination of economical growth and consumerism (personal power, success, and so-called NLP induced self-imagined X factor (=I am a fantastic superhuman), might melt together with Chinese Communism, which more and more is importing Western Consumer Capitalism, is growing more and more as an economical power, but which still is a totalitarian ideology, that doesn´t accept democracy and human rights.

We more and more see how Western theorists of all kinds are praising China, how they more and more talk about what we can learn from China, but without mentioning China´s violation of human rights. That we in the Western world gradually will accept the violation of human rights is now seen in how we for example have subjectified and relativized the freedom of speech, so that it can be used as a means of offending other people (see my article The new feminism and the philosophy of women´s magazines). It is also seen in the treatment of the unemployed – “defect consumers” – who are treated as a kind of criminals. Their rights have in many cases directly been taken away from them, and they are put in re-education institutions, and work-training camps, precisely as in China.

The approach of The Hermeneutics of Suspicion is to attack the character of the person with whom they are arguing rather than finding fault with his or her argument. This move is within philosophy well known as arguing ad hominem (Latin for “to the person”). It is a technique of Rhetoric (communicative swindle), since discrediting the Source of an argument usually leaves the argument itself intact. Shifting attention from the point in question to some aspects of the arguer´s personality or behaviour are irrelevant to the point being discussed (see my article A Dictionary of Thought distortions).

To try to have a normal conversation with, for example, an NLP-coach or psychotherapist, can be an odd experience. Have you ever met a person, that to everything you say, answers: “I can see, that you mean something else, than what you say – and that is what I mean to see, because I am a coach!” Then you might answer: “No, I meant what I said!” Then the person answers: “When you say no, I see that you with that answer means something else, and that something else is what I mean, because I am a coach!”? Well then you probably have met one of our days thousands absolutely, complete brain-dead idiots, who name themselves NLP coaches (you see the same in other pseudoscientific, anti-spiritual New Age psychotherapies – for example the so-called Giraffe language – see my article Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror).

But how can they know this? How can they play the role as someone who know who you are better than yourself, at the same time as they totally denies and renounce what you think, and the reasons you produce; that is: your experiences, your education, your arguments, your articles, your books?

Well, the only way they then can get their knowledge from, is from their own theories (which are without psychological, scientific, and philosophical foundation – see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism). It is pure prejudice. Prejudice is a belief held without good reason or consideration of the evidence for or against its being true. The funny thing is that philosophy - that is: rationality and critical thinking – precisely is opposed to prejudice. We are all riddled with prejudices on a wide range of issues, but it is possible to eliminate some of them by making an effort to examine evidence and arguments on both sides of any question. Human reason is fallible, and most of us are strongly motivated to cling on to some beliefs even in the teeth of evidence against them (for example wishful thinking); however, even making small inroads into prejudice can transform the world for the better.

But these people do the opposite. They try to remove rationality and critical thinking through the hermeneutic of suspicion. And they have succes. As already mentioned, then a whole time-tendency within school, folk high school, universities and continuing education, focus on so-called ”personal development – self-help”, which are inspired by them.

But you don´t only meet the problem of the hermeneutics of suspicion within high developed theories. You also meet it within the so-called common, mediocre life (see my article The new feminism and the philosophy of women´s magazines). For example the whole of Karen Blixen´s life is a rebellion against this mediocrity of the common life, which tried to clip her wings in her childhood. It is a human abuse. I will say that this is probably the biggest wall you will meet on your spiritual journey. And it is much more painful when you also meet it from friends and family.

But to stand up against these influences, and keep your philosophical integration intact, will for certain create a spirit of greatness. In some cases it is best totally to avoid these people, because they will clip your wings if they get the chance for it.

Do as Epicurus, treat people with friendliness and compassion as long as it is possible, but withdraw to your garden when they try to lure you into the world´s noise and political quarrels, because they think that this is a part of being “normal”. When you in peace are cultivating your garden you can also keep on cultivating your philosophical integration and the refined pleasure in this. But not without being critical! I will return to this under the concept of anger.

The removal of genuine rationality from the stage leaves open the possibility of accusations of rationalizations for ulterior motives. This form of analysis (leading us to think of groups or individuals “what is in it for them?”), is not only corrosive of trust in society. It is bound eventually to undermine itself. Why are such views themselves being propagated? What are those spreading them going to gain?

I think it is time for rebellion against this tendency in society, and especially within leadership theories. If we shall save our democracy and welfare society it is absolutely necessary, that we in relation to democracy-parasitic ideologies become philosophical rebels like Socrates, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Krishnamurti – a kind of spiritual anarchists.

2. On anger

In that we of course have to deal with the question of anger, not only the anger, which is implicit in an ideology, but also the anger in the critique of an ideology. Because ideology should be critized, but not end up in debate, and eventually violence.

There are three kinds of anger: the philosophical anger, the painfull anger, and the mix between the two.

The philosophical anger

The philosophical anger is the anger over prejudice, hypocrisy, manipulation and injustice, which philosophy is in opposition to. This anger is controlled through objective thinking, critique and argumentation.

Objective argumentation is an ethical way to convince others about your views, because it in reel sense shows what is appropriate or inappropriate about a case. Objective argumentation contains some of the following elements: summary or abstract, informations, description, reason, concrete choice of words, nuanced objective statement.

The hallmark of philosophy is exactly to use objective argumentation, and to show the untenable aspect of painful anger, subjective argumentation and inappropriate assumptions. This is the essence in using philosophical dialogue.

In the philosophical dialogue you focus on, what cooperation and conversation require of you in order to that you at all can exist: that you speak true (don´t lie), that you are prepared to reach mutual understanding and agreement (don´t manipulate), don´t make an exception of yourself (but treat others as equals). From this rises the eternal moral values (as for example that it is wrong to lie), and generally our ideas of right and justice: the so-called human rights, the idea about the individual person´s autonomy and dignity: you shall treat the other not only as a mean, but also as a goal.

Many NLP-coaches and psychotherapists, as already mentioned, often misunderstand the philosopher´s rationality and critical thinking as a symptom on a problem with anger – on the contrary, it consists in love to wisdom.

Jesus said that anger is a sin, yet himself got angry, for example in the temple. Is he a hypocrite, or is he a man with psychological problems, which have to be solved by a NLP-coach? Of course not. The anger of Jesus is the philosophical anger.

The painfull anger

The painfull anger is coming from the emotional painbody. A thoughtpattern can create an enlarged and energycharged reflection of itself in the form of a feeling. This means, that the whole of the thought´s past also can create a reflection of itself in the body. And if this past is filled with pain, then it can show itself as a negative energyfield in the body. It can nearly be seen as an invisible, independent creature.

The painbody is the inner demon, or the devil in the heart. Some painbody´s are relatively harmless, some are anxietyfilled or angry, others are directly malicious and demonical. They can be passive or active. Some are passive 90% of the time, others are active 100% of the time.

This anger is controlled through neutral observation, and flexible (critical) thinking (also see my article The emotional painbody and why psychotherapy can´t heal it).

The mix between philosophical and painfull anger

Often this mix is coming to expression in the culture of debate (débat, from débattre, struggle, quarrel). The culture of debate is especially seen in politics, but is the common used form of communication in the whole of society.

In debate people all the time work against each other and are seeking to show each other's flaws. They often only listen to each other in order to find flaws and defend their arguments. They more and more harden their own perspectives, because they are so busy judging the positions of others. They defend their own positions as the best solutions and eliminate others´ solutions. They fundamentally seen have a closed attitude, which is due to a fixed decision to be right. They wholehearted invest in their own conceptions, and they therefore calculate others´ positions, without being aware of feelings or relations, yes, they even often happen to play down and offend the other person.

But is this not exactly what the philosophers´ critical thinking and objective argumentation also do? No!

The debating attitude is unethical, and leads to violence and war, where the painbody suddenly also is released. Why? Because it is based on subjectice argumentation. Subjective argumentation is an unethical way to convince others about your views, because it doesn't show, what in reel sense is appropriate or inappropriate about a case, but manipulates with it.

Subjective argumentation contains some of the following elements: innuendoes, distortions, generalizations, over-/understatements, sarcasm, satire, irony, postulates, emotional affections, coloured choice of words, choices and exclusions, subjective style.

Each and every time you, in this way, feel anger, then remember the virtues of philosophy: objective thinking, critique and argumentation. Avoid subjective thinking, critique and argumentation, because you in that case would be a hypocrite (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions as a manual).

If you in your anger all the time remember objectivity, you will discover, that you have to withdraw from, or avoid being involved in, many confrontations.

And a last advice. Always take a night´s sleep before you give expression for your anger.

The four philosophical hindrances and openings

2012-01-19T05:43:00.000-08:00

In my first book Meditation as an art of life – a basic reader, I presented what I call the four philosophical hindrances and openings in towards the Source. I presented them in order to show what I think characterizes the spiritual practice, as it exists in all the traditional wisdomtraditions. Ever since I have become increasingly puzzled over, how the self-help industry - which claims to work in accordance with spirituality - is turning this upside down. The paradox is that while the self-help industry is claiming to create the authentic, autonomous, resource-filled and competent human being, at the same time is doing the exact opposite: it is making people dependent of therapeuts, coaches, others ideas and ideals; making them modeling and imitating so-called successful people, etc., etc.

The self-help industry is today often calling its method positive psychology. It has especially three sources of inspiration:

1) The American New Thought movement, which is the subjectivistic belief, that your thoughts are creating reality, and that by focusing on what you find positive, and avoiding what you find negative, you can create your life in accordance with your wishes, feelings and needs (see my article The New Thought movement and the law of attraction). The “positive” is identified as success, money, sex, personal power, material glory, etc.

2) Humanistic psychology is the belief, that if you focus on your emotional experiences, needs, will and wishes, you will find your authentic self, which is claimed to be more or less divine. Religion has in that way been reduced to psychology. Humanistic psychology is a central inspiration for management theory (see my articles The value of having a religion in a spiritual practice and Management theory and the self-help industry).

3) The postmodern intellectualism, which supports the subjectivistic and relativistic idea, that there doesn´t exist any objective truth. Truth is something we create ourselves, either as individuals or as cultures, and since there doesn´t exist any objective truth, there doesn´t exist any objective scale of truth. Therewith it also says, that we live in a Matrix, a dream/fantasy, a kind of virtual reality, we have created ourselves, and that there is no chance of getting out of this. Therefore the best is to be interested in finding ways of getting on in this world, rather being interested in finding ways of discovering the truth (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy).

The five main programming technologies of this conspiracy are Management theory, New Age, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), The law of attraction.

It is on the background of these sources of inspiration, that the self-help industry is turning the philosophical hindrances and openings upside down, so that the hindrances are considered as positive, and the openings are considered as negative. I call this the 666 aspect of the Matrix conspiracy. In the following I will present the philosophical hindrances and openings, and explain the 666 turn further:

The philosophical hindrances are:

1) A rational where you take your assumptions, conceptions and values for absolute truths (hereunder subjectivism and relativism) and hereby end up in a contradiction between your thoughts and lived live (spiritual teachers preaching simple life, and living a life in luxury; spiritual teachers, coaches, psychotherapists, etc., etc., who have taken a New Age education that doesn´t give any spiritual, philosophical or scientific training; NVC consultants)

2) A life-philosophical, where you are circling around your own past and future (regression psychotherapies, past/future life therapy, clairvoyance, astrology, prophecy, channeling, etc.) and hereby create a closed attitude, inattation, absent-mindedness and ennui.

3) An existence-philosophical, where you in your opinion formation and identity formation strive towards being something else than what you are, where you imitate others, are a slave of other´s ideas and ideals, and where your actions are charactierized by irresoluteness and doubt (Hypnotherapy, hypnosis, personal development, coaching, NLP, etc.).

4) A spiritual where you are identified with your lifesituation, are dependent on political or religious ideologies, and where you hereby exist on a future salvation (success coaching, law of attraction, New Age).

According to the traditional wisdomtraditions these four hindrances constitute a malfunction in the human mind. And it is this malfunction, which is the cause of the ignorance of the source of life. Ignorance is again the cause of suffering. In this way spiritual practice becomes a practice, which seeks to correct this malfunction. And therefore the two main concepts in spiritual practice are ignorance and suffering. In that way you get the four philosophical openings in towards the source:

1) A rational, where you examine the validity of your assumptions, conceptions and values, and search for coherency between your thoughts and your lived life.

2) A life-philosophical where you are present in the Now, and hereby achieve that self-forgetful openness and absorption in the world, which is a condition for love, spontaneity, joy of life and wisdom.

3) An existence-philosophical, where you in your opinion and identity formation are yourself, live in accordance with your own essence, and thereby achieve authenticity, autonomy, decisiveness and power of action.

4) A spiritual, where you aren´t identified with your lifesituation, and where you, independent of religious or political ideologies, live from something deeper: The source itself; the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Such a spiritual practice can again be said to contain three aspects:

1) Critical thinking (spotting thought distortions, created by dualistic unbalance – see my article A dictionary of thought distortions)

2) Investigating the shadow (ignorance, the unconscious, the painbody, the cause of suffering, your own dark side, the ego – see my articles The emotional painbody and why psychotherapy can´t heal it, and Suffering as an entrance to the Source)

3) The spiritual practice (going beyond all ideas and images – see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with the spiritual practice)

The reason why the self-help industry considers these three aspects, and therefore the four philosophical openings, as negative, is as follows:

1) There is no objective scale of truth that can decide whether something is positive or negative; it is entirely your own subjective feelings, that decide what is positive or negative. Therefore thought distortions can be seen as positive means of getting on in the world.

2) The positive psychology of the self-help industry is avoiding and ignoring all negative; that is: your shadow, your ignorance, your painbody, your suffering, your dark side.

3) It is not possible to go beyond your ideas and images. The only thing you can do is to change them into what you find positive.

The new feminism and the philosophy of women´s magazines

2012-01-16T03:17:00.000-08:00

In an article from Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1995, the American female philosopher Noretta Koertge, writes about her worries for the development of feminism.

She writes that a Rip Van Winkle of feminism, who might have fallen asleep in the 1970s, would have been astounded over the opposite attitude, which is dominant among academical feminists today. The thick-skinned and strongly armed Rosie Riveters (reform feminism) have become replaced by moralizing Sensitive Susans (radical feminism), who individually are trying to find new ideological splits in the so-called “patriarchal, racist, colonistic, eurocentric, cultural dominion discourse”.

They are in progress with a systematic undermining of the intellectual values of the free education. Young women are being made alien towards science in many ways. One of the strategies consists in redefining, what counts as science. Instead of for example telling about great female researchers such as Emmy Noether, Marie and Irene Curie and Kathleen Lonsdale and their struggles – and triumphs, the radical feminists, in their account of the history of science, now accentuate the contributions to it from midwifes and from the claimed arts of healing, which herbal cultivators and witches mastered. Instead of motivating young women to prepare themselves to a line of technical subjects by studying science, logic and mathematics, they now teach the students in womens studies, that logic is a tool, which men use to dominate with.

These women refuse rationality and critical thinking, and claim that this is inconsistent with ”womens way of knowing”. These feminists characterize themselves as ”subjective knowers”, who are characterized by ”a passionate rejection of science and male scientists”. These ”subjectivistic” women regard the methods, which you use in logic, as ”alien territory, that belongs to men” and consider ”value-intuition as a more safe and productive path to truth.”

I claim, that all this is a part of a much more superior totalitarian ideology, which is about to become introduced in all educations on EU plane. I call it The Matrix Conspiracy (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy). In my article – The Sokal Hoax - I describe the tragic consequences of the feminist postmodern intellectualism on the universities.

And it is a tragedy to see the devastating effects, which you see in all the young women (and a great deal of men also), who follow radical feminists´ attack on rationality and science.

Just to give an example: traditional feminists (reform feminists) often talked about the misogynistic elements in Freud´s theorizing, and pointed out weaknesses in his methods – the case Dora was a typical example on, how Freud was bullying his clients in his attempts on discovering the repressed memories, which he ”knew” where there.

There is a painful irony in the fact, that our days feminists so uncritical have affiliated the methods, which hypnotists and psychological counselors pretend can uncover repressed memories from childhood about sexual abuse and more bizarre things such as satanic rituals, cannibalistic orgies, alien abduction, past lifes etc. (see my articles Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the art of self-deception, The devastating New Age turn within psychotherapy, and Regression Psychotherapies).

I know no better demonstration of, how dangerous the naive faith in subjective attitudes and rejection of scientific methods and content can prove to be for all, who are involved in these things.

You can mention a vast number of other crazy New Age therapies, which are taken at their face value (see my article Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality). Or just try to follow an Oprah Winfrey show. These people are often breathtaking in their combination of self-confidence and absurdity, where they with no hesitation are bullying highly educated experts and scientists if they are critical. Subjectivism and relativism namely opens them for the danger of magical thinking and Ego-inflation (see my article The ego-inflation in the New Age and self-help environment).

The worst is, that the symptom is seen within the whole of the so-called personal development movement (the self-help industry), including the whole of the mix of New Thought, American Humanistic Psychology, Management theory, Nonviolent Communication, New Age, Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), The Law of Attraction; all that, which I under one concept call The Matrix Conspiracy.

A long line of these theories and methods are approved on EUs list of education, lifelong learning, and pedagogic altogether. Personally I know, that there on the Danish social and health-educations (which traditional is an area of women) directly is teached and examined in Nonviolent Communication and NLP, and it is on the whole impossible today to be trained, and have a permanent work, without being more or less forced to work with all this. It is a philosophy, which especially many women more or less are advocating, because it also is the main philosophy of women´s magazines.

Subjectivism and relativism create an attitude, which says: “What people think, and the reasons they produce, may not be the real reasons at work!” Then it is easy to become suspicious on the motives of everyone as being individuals with psychological problems to solve. The removal of genuine rationality from the stage leaves open the possibility of accusations of rationalizations for ulterior motives. This form of analysis (leading to think of groups or individuals as “what is in it for them?”), is not only corrosive of trust in society. It is bound eventually to undermine itself. Why are such views themselves being propagated? What are those spreading them going to gain? – read more in my article The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

Daphne Patai is a feminist scholar and author. She is a leading critic of the politicization of education, in particular of the decline of free speech on college campuses as programs conform to pressures from feminists and other identity groups.

After spending ten years with a joint appointment in women´s studies and in Portuguese, Patai became highly critical of what she saw as the imposition of a political agenda on educational program (The Matrix Conspiracy). Together with the above-mentioned philosophy of science professor Noretta Koertge she wrote the book Professing Feminism (1994). The book analyzes practices within women´s studies that the authors felt were incompatible with serious education and scholarship – above all, the explicit subservience of education to political aims.

Patai´s thesis is that a failure to defend the integrity of education, and a habit of dismissing knowledge and research on political grounds, not only seriously hurts our students but also leaves feminists helpless in trying to defend education against other ideological incursions.

Prominent among Patai´s concerns are what she sees as draconian sexual harassment regulations as implemented in the academical world. She argues that contemporary feminism is poisoned by a strong element of “heterophobia”: a pronounced hostility to sexual interaction between men and women and an effort to suppress it through micromanagement of everyday relations. This thesis is developed at lenght in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the future of feminism.

Daphe Patai is the inspiration to my thesis about the development of a new Puritanism, where traditional religious confession-techniques have been transformed into psychotherapy. This new Puritanism has from Christianity inherited and taken over a very characteristic religious worldimage. Sex is sin. Sex is in the highest a necessary evil. Therefore the destructive, the subversive, again is becoming overlooked. But because it is such evident a fact, the radical feminists have to do something about it. Like in Christianity they have therefore suitable handed the destructive over to the Devil. And in this worldimage they have got the Devil, the evil, the destructive, and the sexual weaved together (read more about this my book Dream Yoga in the article Sympathy for The Devil).

As mentioned there are namely a painful irony in the fact, that our days feminists so uncritical have affiliated the methods, which hypnotists and psychological counselors pretend can uncover repressed memories from childhood about sexual abuse and more bizarre things such as satanic rituals, cannibalistic orgies, alien abduction, past lifes etc. In this way they paradoxically come to remind about earlier times´ Christian inquisitions.

There is another aspect of this, which might seem like an opposition to the New Puritanism of radical feminism, but which is a part of the same Matrix Conspiracy: because those of the New Age worshippers who today call themselves witches or sorcerers are often anti-Christian, pagan, and woman-centered, or satanic. New Age often exalt whatever the Church condemned (such as egoism and healthy sexuality in adults whether homosexual or not) and condemn whatever the Church exalted (such as self-denial and the subservient role of women).

The problem is, that the reductionist aspect of The Matrix Conspiracy does, that no one will take the responsibility for their part of the sexuality, and therefore for their part of the destructive (see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind).

So the Ego, the desire, the violence and the power, are combined in the dark collective primordial images and fantasies: incest, sado-masochism, homosexuality, group sex, cannibalism, sacrifice, death-images – all these archetypes lie underneath the common sexuality, and constitute the dark astral underground in the collective time. Often illustrated in the Gothic tale, first by Edgar Allan Poe in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), later by for example Henry James in his The Turn of the Screw (1898), which dealed with the corset tight Victorianism. I will also whisper my own favorite: Karen Blixen. Today we perhaps see the works of Tim Burton as a respond to our time´s Puritanism.

When you bind yourself in the one pole of an opposition, yes, then you create a resistance, and therefore a force to, and a dependence of the opposite pole, which causes, that the mind, the sexuality, is becoming anchored in, and determined by these basic mechanisms. And finally the energy will swing over in its opposition, the evil, the wrong, in order to balance an imbalance. Compensatory karma.

An effect of this is that we perhaps now see a direct suppression of boys in the school system. So believes the editor-in-chief for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen, Anne Knudsen. She directly speaks about the outragerous condition of boys in a school system, which appreciates, promotes, praises, expects and rewards a behaviour, which corresponds fine with the special identity markers of girls, and in return with hard hand fights behaviour, which marks the typical boy.

This systematical discrimination has grown in the later years without any actual opposition. In 1993 it was only every third boy, who continued in the school after the public school. And already in 1996, 70 percent of the new students in the gymnasiums (senior high schools) were girls. Now 14 years later the girls have educations and jobs, while the boys are fighting with unemployment.

And the tendency becomes worse and worse, without any changes.

As Anne Knudsen says, then it is obvious that the boys escape from a system where they shall pretend they don´t compete, while competition in reality just happens after rules, which not are formulated; where they shall lay bare their feelings on the slightest occasion, and where they in the name of equality shall tolerate collective bullying under the head line ”typical boys!”

The school system is arranged, so that it is a handicap to be a boy, and this handicap is even understood as a self-inflicted, moral defect; therefore the system don´t need to take this social problem into consideration.

What they have introduced in the pedagogy is namely the so-called Nonviolent Communication, which follows The Matrix pedagogy about, that cognition and moral not only have to become psychologized and subjectified, but also emotionalized, since it is the individual´s feelings, which determines the moral quality of something. Moreover that the moral has to be therapized, so that it can be considered to be a personal defect, and not a social problem, if you don´t do precisely as the pedagogy says (see my article Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror).

This pedagogy claims about itself to be a “loving, tolerant, nonjudgmental, therapeutic permission to be different.” Peculiarly, since boys precisely not are allowed to be different. The problem is that ”the theory” (which in reality is hard bitten ideology – in lack of better I call it The Matrix Conspiracy) in extreme black and white way directly has made lists about what is good and bad behaviour, and in the schools they arrange so-called giraffe-language groups, where the children get hats on, either as giraffes or wolves. And guess who is sitting with the wolves-hats?

In this way stupidity goes its triumphal progress in the schools of today, and no one dares to protest in fear of collective bullying.

The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas claims, that an instrumental reason (technical reason) today has conquered territory from a communicative reason (a philosophical/spiritual reason). An aspect of this consists in, that we in connection with human problems treat each other as means or as items, which have come on the wrong course (the treatment society).

It is interesting, that New Age, which actually should be a spiritual alternative to this, and be an advocate for a communicative reason, on the contrary is one of the most aggressive advocates for the instrumental reason. This is due to their psychologizing of philosophy. They are possessed with all kind of self-invented forms of treatment, and with pseudoscientifical attempts to justify them as science. Often they manipulative use instrumental/scientifical inspired terms about their methods, but which are without any scientifical meaning at all. It is just a rhetorical trick to persuade people to pay the fee.

It is also interesting to compare the characteristic traits of New Age with Aldous Huxley´s novel Brave New World. This novel foresees the end of democracy in a pseudoscientifical, technological fixated meritocracy. The novel is about a totalitarian state, which keeps psychological and genetic control with everybody, so that they surrender to the claimed “blessings” of the progress of the instrumental or technical reason; that is: through the reductionisms of psychologism and biologism.

Everything, also humans, and human problems, are treated instrumental or technical. Psychology and genetics are controlling people down to the smallest details, children are being born and “growed” on bottles, brains are being trimmed, characters are being converted after the needs of the dominant state. (Notice the similarities with the New Age product called NLP - see my article Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)), which are about programming your brain so that you can become a success in society; that is: so that you work in favour of Consumer Capitalism.

The people in this meritocracy are considered as being happy. If they experience some kind of negativity, they are in large quantities supplied with the drug Soma, which makes them “happy” again. All religion, philosophy, literature and art have been removed. Science is strictly political controlled. The entertainment is so-called sensitivity-entertainment. You can go to sensitivity-parties, or you can watch sensitivity-movies, etc. Everywhere the people are meeting sensitivity-influences.

Somewhere in the novel there is a discussion between the main character Johannes and the President about the lack of truth and beauty in this society. The President argues that it might very well be that there isn´t any truth and beauty, but the people are happy. Johannes objects, and says that the whole society is completely meaningless. The President continues: “Yes, but the people are happy!”

When I read this novel I remember the quote from a nonviolent communication coach, whom I had a discussion with: “Would you rather be right, than happy?”

The politicians in Denmark – which is one of the most secularized, management-oriented and coaching-controlled countries in the world – have had scientists to make an investigation, that shows that the Danes are the most happy people in the world. A bit of a paradox, because other investigations also show, that they are the largest consumers of Prozac in the world. Prozac is in Danish called “lykkepiller”, which directly translated to English means Happiness-pills.

The fact is that every society always is runned by some kind of ideology. An ideology is a malfunction in the human mind, which function with the implied instrumental assumption, that the end justifies the means (Machiavelli´s notorious assumption), and where the means to get there is to make people into slaves for this goal. Today people undoubtedly are being made into empty consumer machines. There are no doubt either, that we are being supplied with some kind of virtual reality through psychological theories, that seems to justify Machiavelli´s famous and notorious assumption – for instance through elimination of critical thinking.

It is a fact, that we today see an ideology behind the democracy, where true spirituality, philosophy and science systematical are seeked destroyed; that is: the destruction of the best tools Man has in his love for wisdom, and quest for truth.

The main theory of this ideology is relativism. There both exists an individual version of relativism, and a collective version. The individual version is called subjectivism. This version is often connected with a right-wing liberalism. The other version is a collective relativism, cultural relativism, which often is connected to a left-wing socialism. However both are common in distorting both science and human rights. Both are demanding “alternative” views of science, and for example also human rights. And both are introducing intellectual apartheid in different ways, by seeking to eliminate critical thinking.

Both subjectivism and relativism claim, that there doesn’t exist any objective truth. Truth is something we create ourself, either as individuals or as cultures, and since there doesn’t exist any objective truth, there doesn´t exist any objective scale of truth. Therewith they also say, that we live in a Matrix, a dream, a kind of virtual reality, we have created ourselves, and that there is no chance of getting out of this. Therefore the best is to be interested in finding ways of getting on in this world, rather than being interested in finding ways of discovering the truth.

To teach people this, is the main job of what I call the Sophists of the Matrix Conspiracy: Management theorists, New Age coaches, Nonviolent Communicators, Neuro-linguistic Programmers, Law of Attraction gurus.

In the following I will examine some consequences of the two versions of relativism separately, and end the article by showing how a combination of them is beginning to develop into a new kind of global accepted fascism.

The individual version of relativism: subjectivism

Human rights are ethical tools. In ethics you focus on, what co-operation and conversation require of you in order to, that you at all can exist: that you speak true (don´t lie), that you are prepared to reach mutual understanding and agreement (don´t manipulate), don´t make an exception of yourself (but treat others as equals). From this rises the eternal moral values (as for instance that it is wrong to lie), and generally our ideas of right and justice: the so-called human rights, the idea about the individual person´s autonomy and dignity: you shall treat the other not as a means, but as a goal.

The society-ideology of today doesn´t live up to this, because it increasingly makes people into means for the constant production of consumption in the future. And this despite, that it believes, that it is an advocate for freedom, peace and human rights, yes, that it even can use war under those slogans. So the communicative (philosophical) aspect of human rights (treat the other not as a means, but as a goal), has been turned into an instrumental (ideological) way of treating humans as means for own goals (Machiavelli´s notorious words: “The end justifies the means”).

Today we especially see this in the use of the freedom of speech as a justification for insulting other people, and as a way of promoting own (un-intelligent) viewpoints, or (un-talented) goals as a person or an artist. We have seen it in the controversy with The Jyllands Posten Muhammed Cartoons. And it has become so “natural”, that talented artists, and other, more intelligent, people, or institutions, who do not want to use their freedom of speech precisely in this way, are being collective bullied, even from highest political levels. They are for instance called cowards.

The reason is that human rights today have been turned upside down by The Matrix ideology and pedagogy. They have not only become psychologized and subjectified, but also emotionalized, since it is the individual´s feelings, which determines the moral quality of something. Moreover has this moral been therapized, so that you think you can become whatever you desire.

Human rights have also been submitted the reductionist aspect of The Matrix Conspiracy, so that no one can be said to have responsibility for anything they do (neither Muhammed cartoon publishers or terrorists). All this causes, that you can use human rights as a weapon in any ideology. And ideologies always think black and white. They are a psychic disease.

The cultural editor on Jyllands Posten, Flemming Rose, has recently published a book about the controversy with The Jyllands Posten Muhammed Cartoons, The Tyranny of Silence (Tavshedens Tyranni). Here he once again has published the cartoons, and thereby he has intensified the risk of terror on you and me.

Flemming Rose says, that he can´t understand why people are so focused on the Cartoons, since they only form a small part of the book. Well, maybe because the book was published precisely on the fifth anniversary day of the first publishing of the cartoons? But that is maybe only a coincidence?

Flemming Rose won´t take any responsibility for his actions (as no one will in the reductionist ideology). On the contrary he is seeing himself, and one of the cartoon drawers, Kurt Westergaard, as great fighters for freedom, and all critics as silenced victims of anxiety. He compares himself and Kurt Westergaard with the great Danish cultural critic Poul Henningsen, and with the death-sentenced author Salman Rushdie. But the art of these people is precisely not ideological controlled – and that is a quite central difference. Contrary to Flemming Rose they are critics of ideology as such; that is: their art is not controlled by any ideology, religious or political, Christian or Islamistic, left or right wing.

We can discuss the difference in intelligence and talent, but why is the militant priest Terry Jones - who recently was about to perform an “Art Happening”, by burning 200 Korans on the ninth anniversary of the terror attacks on USA 11-9 - being suppressed by everyone, who obviously are silenced victims of anxiety? Why should he not be honoured with a Freedom prize (as Kurt Westergaard recently has been)? Why should he not be admired as a new Salman Rushdie?

Who is to judge, when you have removed philosophy from the stage of debate, and replaced it with political and religious ideologies?

Flemming Rose says: “In a society where the fundamentalism of offence has been put on the agenda can any expression in principle be criminalized, if just those in power state that it is an offender. It is therefore, that it in a democracy is so important to insist on the right to offend.”

Besides that Flemming Rose´s statement, in his fight for the freedom of speech, is self-contradictory, because it also implies the right to offend the freedom of speech, then it is also wrong. Among those in power is namely Flemming Rose himself. It is, among other like-minded, Flemming Rose, who puts on the agenda.

In the Mass Media they have closed down the professional editorial offices, where there were people with knowledge about their areas. In the Mass Media the level of entertainment is higher valued than objectivity, so that all points of views are seen as equally good, and the contempt for professionalism goes from top to bottom.

In his New Years speech the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (current Secretary General of Nato) thus said, that you shall not believe in experts, and today the public debate is characterized by coarseness and vulgarity from people without education, knowledge or experiences, who nonetheless uncontrolled express themselves about everything from quantum mechanics to medicine.

The result is that any professional, who dares to express himself in public shall be prepared for collective bullying. We don´t see any dialogue anymore. Any attempt on reply are looked at through the eyes of the hermeneutics of suspicion (for example Flemming Rose), where the thoughts you think, and the reasons you produce, can´t be taken seriously, because there must be some other real reasons at work, reasons which the Matrix Conspiracy itself have produced. Knowledge is stamped as snotty. Prejudice is confused with liberalism.

There is a need for a dialogue from where there can be talked with authority. Such a dialogue has been removed. The platform, from where the public debate is being lead, is controlled by the Matrix Conspiracy.

As already mentioned: In a true dialogue you focus on, what cooperation and conversation require of you in order to that you at all can exist: that you speak true (don´t lie), that you are prepared to reach mutual understanding and agreement (don´t manipulate), don´t make an exception of yourself (but treat others as equals). From this rises the eternal moral values (as for example that it is wrong to lie), and generally our ideas of right and justice: the so-called human rights, the idea about the individual person´s autonomy and dignity: you shall treat the other not only as a mean, but also as a goal.

In such a dialogue you use objective argumentation. Objective argumentation is an ethical way to convince others about your views, because it in reel sense shows what is appropriate or inappropriate about a case. Objective argumentation contains some of the following elements: summary or abstract, informations, description, reason, concrete choice of words, nuanced objective statement. You use critical thinking in order to explore, re-structure and change thought distortions.

But this dialogue has been replaced by a culture of debate (débat, from débattre, struggle, quarrel). The culture of debate is the common used form of communication in the whole of society today. Just try to follow the American Fox News, the new feminist Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement.

This debating attitude is unethical, and leads to violence and war. Why? Because it is based on subjectice argumentation. Subjective argumentation is an unethical way to convince others about your views, because it doesn't show, what in reel sense is appropriate or inappropriate about a case, but manipulates with it.

People who use subjective argumentation don´t hesitate using thought distortions in order to manipulate, for example using adhominem moves, hermeneutic of suspicion, Giraffe language, setting up a strawman, etc., etc. (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions). Personally I have stopped having face to face discussions with this kind of people, and I am withdrawing as soon as I sense this kind of communication. In my article The Sokal Hoax, you can read about the kinds of abuses I personally have faced. I also really feel sorry for the husbands/boyfriends of the numerous number of women, who have adopted the whole of this philosophy of women´s magazines/the Matrix Conspiracy.

The collective version of relativism: Cultural relativism

It have to be repeated, that I don´t discriminate between individual oriented subjectivists, or cultural oriented relativists, or between biologism and sociologism (right-wing or left-wing). I think the heredity and environment ideology as a whole is our main problem today, because it removes philosophy (rationality) from the culture of debate, and justifies any ideology (again: see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind).

In the following I will therefore show how left-wing radical feminists, and other cultural oriented relativists, for example support extreme Islamists, and therefore can be seen as a part of the threat against freedom of speech, and the rise of terror.

These relativists are fighting against Western science and human rights, which they consider as an expression of a patriarchal, racist, colonialistic, Eurocentric, cultural dominion-discourse. Why? Because subjectivism and relativism claim, that there doesn’t exist any objective truth. Truth is something we create ourself, either as individuals or as cultures, and since there doesn’t exist any objective truth, there doesn´t exist any objective scale of truth. All truths are therefore equally true and equally valid, and if one person´s truth, or one culture´s truth, try to intervene in the truths of other individuals or cultures, then this is considered as an aggression.

This ideology is penetrating everything. Today, after the celebration of the 100 year of womens´ day it is interesting to see how this ideology also has penetrated Western feminism, which must be considered as playing a leading role in the Matrix Conspiracy.

Political freedom (the right to vote, to run as candidate for election, and to express yourself freely), economical freedom (the right to education and paid work) and sexual freedom (womens´ right to conduct the privacy they want) are the conquests, which traditional feminism achieved for the women of the Western worlds. This kind of feminism could, as mentioned, be called reform feminism. The conquests were achieved rather quickly in the previous century.

But the progress, which the large majority of women in the West enjoy, is standing in glaring contrast to the different reality, which women without the West live in. In the Arabic-Muslim world most women are refused access to an education. The figures for womens´ reading ability are depressing low. Their sexuality is controlled by a patriarchal system, and they have only limited possibilities for achieving economical independence.

Many places in Asia the prejudices against girl children still flourish, and the result is that embryos of girls are miscaried, or that small new-born girls are put out. Moreover Asian girls and women in disproportionate degree are suffering under the discusting sex traffic with women – the modern kind of slavery.

Poverty and civil wars affect girls and women in Africa in ways, which men are spared from, because mass rapes lead to unwanted pregnancies and infections with hiv and aids. Moreover a shocking large number of girls die under births, because their bodies not yet are mature enough to give birth, or because disfiguration of their genitals causes, that they die of a birth fistula, one of the most painful ways to die in, that you can imagine.

Here there seems to be a giant task for Western feminists. Unfortunately there is completely silence, because the Matrix Conspiracy (both through education and the propaganda of women´s magazines) has programmed them what to think. They have now, as mentioned, become what you could call radical feminists. Reform feminists have become replaced by moralizing Sensitive Susans, who individually are fighting against Western science and human rights, which they, as mentioned, consider as an expression of a patriarchal, racist, colonialistic, eurocentric, cultural dominion-discourse.

The radical feminists (for instance Sandra Harding – but also New Age worshippers of all kinds) see themselves as liberal givers of charity to their non-western sisters/non-initiates. They see their charity towards their sisters/non-initiates as a loving, tolerant, nonjudgmental, therapeutic “permission to be different”. They try to “decolonize” the minds of their sisters by trying to make them repudiate Western science and human rights. But their invitation to be different is in reality an expression of intellectual apartheid, and a justification of intellectual apartheid. They dehumanize their sisters by denying them their ability to critical thinking, and this has, as expected, already contributed to a rather uncritical adoration of the nation and its traditions in many parts of the Third World.

Scenario 1, India: Frederique Apffel Marglin has recently declared that the eradiction of smallpox from India using the modern cowpox-based vaccine is an affront to the local custom of variolation, which includes inoculation with human smallpox accompanied by prayers to the goddess of smallpox, Sitala Devi.

Ashis Nandy has branded those who protested a recent incidence of widow immolation (sati), as modernized Westernized elites who denigrate authentic folk practices. Not surprisingly this has found a sympathetic audience among right-wing Hindu fundamentalist parties.

Scenario 2, Pakistan: Though the Matrix Conspiracy systematical is trying to eliminate critical thinking and science, then it, in its manipulation, is extremely scientifical, technological and instrumental fixated. As it says, then modern science must be replaced with so-called “alternative” sciences. This has caused a boom in all kinds of pseudoscientifical theories; what I call the “Illuminati” aspect of the Matrix Conspiracy. One of these “sciences” is for instance the “investigations” of the biology of Western Men; investigations, which sounds like Fascism (read more below). And so-called “investigations” have concluded, that womens pain under birth is a social construction created by Western Men, and that it thereby is necessary to eliminate this construction.

In Pakistan and other Islamic countries, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia, we now see the state-sponsored movement of “Islamic Science” (for instance around Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakistani émigré living in Britain, and Munavar Ahmad Anees, a US-based biologist and Islamist).

This movement tries to “Islamicize” science, and create a new universal science in which the facts of nature would be different, derived solely from the conceptual and ethical categories of Islam. They find attempts by modern science to bring modern science to bear on specific values and problems of Muslims as misguided, if not actually a crime against Islam. Explicitly they are citing the work of Western radical feminists.

In turn, Sandra Harding cites Sardar and associates among the “progressive” postcolonial critics of science.

Recently, demands for specifically Islamic (and also Hindu, Confucian, and African) conceptions of human rights have also been put forth.

Scenario 3: China: The protesters at Tiananmen Square demanded democracy, human rights and science together. Tragical for the dissidents, the Chinese government saw it differently and sent in the tanks. The Deng regime, though anxious to cultivate modern science and technology for economical development, treated any attempt to relate scientific ethos to antiauthoritarian politics as a sign of the “spiritual pollution” of China´s socialist values – using the same phrases as the Matrix Conspiracy.

Especially China is gradually adopting this rhetoric (which could be taken out of George Orwell´s novel 1984), and are demanding special Chinese interpretations of science and human rights, where scientists and advocates of human rights must be civil obedient; that is: state sponsored. For instance we already see some special state sponsored versions of NGOs. And when China discover how the “spiritual” education-instruments of the Matrix Conspiracy are supporting their ideas, we will probably also see a state-sponsored kind of “New Age-spirituality”, which will cause a boom in followers. But all kinds of civil disobedience will still be eliminated.

Add to this, that China now has adopted Consumer Capitalism into its own ideology (Communism), whereby it has created a curious hybrid, you could call The Matrix Hybrid. In the Matrix Hybrid the two ideologies have economical interests in common, and therefore we might gradually see how the West more and more is allowing China to violate human rights.

The future scenario is that Consumer Capitalism and Communism are melting together. The West might gradually be more and more fascinated by China´s growing consumer culture (right now especially seen in Shanghai), and might adopt it more and more. And then we have the Illuminati scenario: a “New World Order” where all countries are led by a global government, which will try to create a world with no class barriers and religions.

With this Matrix Hybrid we have something, which could develop into Aldous Huxley´s Brave New World.

The fascism of the Matrix Conspiracy

My concept of Illuminati is, as mentioned, based on the rise of pseudoscience. As suggested, there are especially two kinds of pseudoscience: 1) the pseudoscience of New Age, which demands “alternative” sciences with spiritual content. 2) The pseudoscience of reductionism, which connect their “sciences” with certain atheistic and/or political views (see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).

It is unfortunate that the reductionisms are so accepted, because it is them that have created distinctions such as “Jewish” and “Aryan” physics; “bourgois” and “socialist” biology; IQ tests; Personality typing systems; etc., and a lot of other political inferences from science that have had catastrophical consequences.

Where New Age pseudoscience typically is based on occult and religious viewpoints, then the pseudoscience of reductionism typically is based on atheistic and/or political viewpoints.

Both are a part of The Matrix Conspiracy because they both support subjectivism and relativism, which are a fundamental philosophy of this ideology.

What can be a serious problem in the future, is that a new kind of pseudoscience is trying to unite New Age pseudosciences with some of the pseudosciences of reductionism.

When you today ask: what is a human being? Then most people answer, that Man ”is a product of heredity and environment”. This has become a whole ideology in the Western world, and a fundamental part of the Illuminati aspect of The Matrix Conspiracy. It is actually a kind of sociobiology, or social Darwinism.

Social biology became notorious in 1975, when the American biologist Edward O. Wilson published a major treatise on the subject: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Accusations of sexism and racism were leveled because Wilson suggested that Western social systems are biologically innate, and that in some respects males are stronger, more aggressive, more naturally promiscuous than females. Critics argued that all social biology is in fact a manifestation of Social Darwinism, a nineteenth-century philosophy owing more to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, than to Charles Darwin, supposedly legitimating extreme laissez-faire economics and an unbridled societal struggle for existence.

But the search for a synthesis of the heredity and environment split, a holism, is common in the pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism.

The main problem with all the above theories, are that they, in different ways, reduce consciousness to heredity and environment.

If Man only is a product of heredity and environment, then he has no longer any responsibility for his actions. Even the murderer, who is standing accused in court, is able to defend himself with, that he basically can´t help, that he has committed a murder. Firstly he was born with some unfortunate genes, which made, that he wasn’t all too clever. Therefore he was bullied in the school, and thereby he was developed to become aggressive and hot tempered. All this caused, that he in a certain situation committed a murder, but this he could not help. Heredity and environment led him precisely to this situation. Guilty? No, many people would say today, he is no more guilty, than a person is to blame, that he came to cough in a place filled with smoke. No, on the whole it is society and environment, which are to blame for the murder.

When you are advocating a reductionism and are claiming, that Man is nothing else than for example a product of heredity and environment, then concepts such as responsibility, guilt and duty loose all meaning. And it becomes meaningless to talk about human ideals. Why admire people, who have achieved something great? They have only good genes and a beneficially environment. Why condemn people, who spoil and break down society? They can´t help it.

Typical enough (foolish enough), then heredity and environment also are being used as a political tool. Often with followers on the respective sides of the extremities. In the dispute between heredity and environment it is for example considered political progressively (”left wing”) to think, that the environment is more or less the sole decisive factor. The environment (upbringing, social conditions) is people themselves in the principle able to control and change through political actions. This is also background for, that Lamarckism in the form of Lysenkoism – which almost completely refuses the biological genetic meaning – got monopoly on engaging themselves with heredity in Soviet.

About how these thoughts today are continued in the left-wing feminist/postmodern intellectualism, see my article The Sokal Hoax.

Similar it is regarded as political reactionary (”right wing”), if you believe, that the hereditament (genes) of the individual is the most important factor, which determines its actual development. Ideological this is connected with, that in that case a social reformatory policy is not for a lot of benefit: the biological inheritance has so far been a destiny, which you have to tolerate. Right wing politicians have for example claimed, that aggression or competition is inborn in the biological nature of man. Therewith the assertion can be used to justify, that specific social conditions, for example warfare or the capitalistic, economical system, is ”natural”. Evolutionism ”proves” that the unlimited competition is as natural, as the survival of the best fitted. Moreover we know Nazism´s use of biological theories.

In Hitler´s Germany in the 1930s there were developed a so-called Aryan physics, represented by, among others, Philip Lenard and Johannes Stark, which was set up as an opposition to Jewish physics, which main representative was Einstein. Einstein´s theories were consequently condemned and taken out of the physics curriculum on the universities. The deeper reason was, that the genes of the Aryans (the true Germans) and of the Jews were different, and that the thinking and perception in the two ”races” therefore also had to be different, but that the Aryan race was the true. The radical feminists of today claim something, which fundamentally seen is the same. Since women have two x-chromosomes, where men have one x- and one y-chromosome, then the female perception, thinking and picture of the world et cetera, are different from, and truer, than the masculine. A pure example of feminist fascism.

As mentioned, the combination of the two extremeties – the heredity and environment ideology – looks like a kind of social Darwinism. Before we go further it is important to mention, that evolutionism – also in its most modern Neodarwinistic version – is a natural historical report, and not a natural scientifical theory. Neodarwinism can – as all other historical sciences – only retrospective explain the development up to now in a rational way. This appears clearly from the fact, that it can´t give any scientific well-founded prediction of the future development. It is not possible with any reasonable precision to predict the future biological development on the background of the theoretical foundation of evolutionism.

Until today Man has not been able to do anything in order to change his genes. This has been changed with the modern genetic engineering, which already in principle has made it possible to change the genes of our gametes. In the future the problem about conscious changing peoples´ genes in order to improve certain characteristics is not any technical difficulty. It is in turn a serious ethical and political problem about setting limits and about, where these limits have to be set.

As mentioned in my article The fascism of theosophy, then the reductionism of Theosophy is due to the attempt of synthesizing spirituality and science. Theosophy is especially inspired by Darwinism, and its theories about human evolution. And the idea continues today in New Age and Ufology, where spirituality, apart from Darwinism, furthermore is sought synthesized with new developments within psychology, psychotherapy, natural science, especially biology and quantum mechanics. The whole thing is presented as an ideology with a lot of attempts to predict the future evolution of Man, often connected with eugenics: the applied “science” or the bio-social movement (social Darwinism) which advocates the use of practises aimed at improving the genetic composition of people, usually referring to human populations.

Although Fascism is considered to have first emerged in France in the 1880s, its influences have been considered to go back as far as Julius Caesar. Thomas Hobbes, Niccoló Machiavelli, and Hegel have also been considered as influential, as well as contemporary ideas such as the syndicalism of Georges Soral, the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the nationalist and authoritarian philosophy of Oswald Spengler and the conservatism and Social Darwinism of Enrico Corradini.

The synthesizing of authority, hierarchy, race, eugenics, purity, unity, spirit, within these influences, is shared by Theosophy, where reductionisms such as biologism, psychologism, sociologism and historism go hand in hand. And the tendency continues in New Age and Ufology, heavily influenced by the works of Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber. The newest example of clear fascism within the UFO religions, is the so-called WingMakers story.

Fascism is often mischaracterized as “extreme right”, although writers have found placing Fascism on a conventional left-right political spectrum difficult. There is a scholarly consensus that Fascism was influenced by both left and right. Some fascists have themselves promoted their ideology as a “third way” between Capitalism and Communism.

And here we precisely have the heredity and environment ideology, which includes reductionisms, that support respectively right-wing and left-wing political point of views. And combined with New Age, and especially the UFO religions, we have a new kind of Fascism.

As mentioned: the danger of the Matrix Conspiracy is the scene, where Western Consumer Capitalism, and Chinese Communism, might melt together in a new totalitarian ideology, which will be the end of democracy and human rights; something that reminds about Aldous Huxley´s novel Brave New World. The whole thing will be supported by this new fascism of the Matrix Conspiracy, which gradually will be more and more integrated and accepted.

Latest news!

Strasbourg, April 7, 2011. The 47 Member States of the Council of Europe are close to finalizing a new convention that defines “gender” as Social Construct.

So, a quite certain trend within a quite certain single branch of science (Sociology), shall from now on define what a human being is. This trend is called social constructivism (or social contructionism), and is the latest craze in reductionism; that is: a pseudoscientifical point of view with a political agenda. It belongs on the left-wing environment side of the heredity and environment idelogy (read more about this reductionism in my article The Sokal Hoax).

So, we see, that my theory about the Matrix Conspiracy is very well alive and in progress.

The devastating New Age turn within psychotherapy

2012-01-16T03:00:00.000-08:00

Philosophical counseling (true spiritual counseling), claims that our problems are due to a separation of the observer and the observed (see my article Philosophical counseling as an alternative to psychotherapy). In its practice it directs itself away from the observed, towards the observer himself. And its questions become of existential, conceptual, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical kind.

Psychotherapy is a branch of psychology, and therefore something scientific, which directs itself towards aspects of the observed, that can be empirical tested. Therefore it must not contain philosophical and/or religious theories. An example on such a scientific based psychotherapy is Cognitive Therapy, which also has shown to be the most effective kind of psychotherapy.

Today it has become an integrated part of management theories and the self-help industry, that they draw on the New Age movement. New Age is a name of a spiritual movement, which draws on many different religious traditions: Astrology, Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, different techniques of Prophecy – which all are seeked integrated with Western psychotherapy. You may say, that psychotherapy, in this combinationform, has become a new religion for the modern Western human being – a religion, which the management theories adds the ideals about being a success. In fact the term New Age is today one and the same as a mixture of spirituality, management theory and psychotherapy. If you go into a bookshop, you can often see, how books about spirituality and management theory today stand on the same shelfs (see my articles Management theory and the self-help industry and Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality).

An example: today most people within school, folk high school, continuing education and business community, have met the concept Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). Both in education, as well as at work, you will almost unavoidably be forced to work with NLP-theories, which is a directly offence of the rights for people, who don´t advocate the New Age movement.

NLP is a therapeutic method, which picks inspiration from many different directions within psychology: gestalt therapy, hypnosis therapy, body therapy, neurology, shamanism etc. Some NLP-practicians claim, that it is a method, which is based on a scientific way of thinking, and refuse the connection with New Age. But this rejection is paradoxically enough a trait, which is quite typical for the New Age movement, where concepts such as research and science all too often become mixed with spiritual concepts. An example of the lack of ability to understand oneself as philosophy/spirituality/religion, and not science (see my article Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)).

For example has there within the New Age movement almost gone inflation in the thought distortion Research has shown that… A phrase, which often is used to convince the listener about, that the one who speaks can substantiate what he says with concrete empirical proof. But this could be an example of subjective argumentation, a form of unethical manipulation (often based on wishful thinking), because it is extremely vague to claim that ”research has shown” anything, unless you can substantiate the assertion with specific details about the claimed research. Who has carried out this research? Which methods were there used? What exactly did they found out? Have their results been confirmed by others working within the area? (see my articles A dictionary of thought distortions and The Pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).

However there are also NLP-practicians, who fully acknowledge the connection with the new spiritual movements. If you look at the NLP-consultants´ web pages on the internet, they often present themselves with a spectrum of educations, including astrologers, clairvoyants, shamans and healers.

Today you can almost draw such “spiritual” educations in an automat, if only you have money enough. They are typical taken in a few weekends, after which you get yourself some homemade title as coach, psychotherapist, therapist, shaman, healer, clairvoyant or spiritual teacher of one or the other kind. There almost seem to be speculated in creating new peculiar titles. But such educations can of course not give the sufficient competence, neither spiritual or educational, and there is no doubt about, that there on the grey, alternative market (including the whole of the circus of management theory and coaching) rules a wild growing, uncontrolled market of quackery and scientific/philosophical/spiritual misguiding.

If we for example take the title psychotherapist, then it is very important to be aware, that this title is not a protected title. Anybody can call himself psychotherapist, and one should therefore be on the alert with people who sign themselves psychotherapist. Competent psychotherapeutic treatment is usually in charge of University-educated psychologists and psychiatrists. For both of these groups of experts it is possible to achieve licence as psychotherapist. But on the so-called grey market there exists, as mentioned, a line of alternative forms of treatment with affinity with mysticism and religiousness, which do not live up to the professional demands, which lie in the authorization arrangements. These people also title themselves as psychotherapists, and it is a deep problem that precisely these people of the grey New Age market practically have patent on personality developing courses in almost all companies.

I will repeat: Philosophical counseling (true spiritual counseling), claims that our problems are due to a separation of the observer and the observed. In its practice it directs itself away from the observed, towards the observer himself. And its questions become of existential, conceptual, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical kind.

Psychotherapy is a branch of psychology, and therefore something scientific, which directs itself towards aspects of the observed, that can be empirical tested. Therefore it must not contain philosophical and/or religious theories. But this is precisely what New Age psychotherapies do, and in neglecting the observer, they are misguiding their clients philosophical and spiritual. New Age psychotherapies are for example therapies such as Rebirthing, Reparenting, Past life regression, Hypnotherapy, Alien abduction, Recovered memory therapy, Satanic ritual abuse, Primal Therapy, Gestalt therapy, Holotropic Breathwork. Also Nonviolent Communication, coaching, NLP and The law of Attraction, must be seen as kinds of New Age psychotherapies (see my articles Regression psychotherapies, Cathartic psychotherapies, Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the art of self-deception, Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror, The New Thought movement and the law of attraction).

A common thread is the belief that a person having problems is not likely to be responsible for those problems. This is due to their root in reductionism (see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind). Another thread is the belief that the patient must discover the cause of his or her problem to be helped. These causes are built into the psychotherapy itself, and are therefore pure prejudice. It is causes such as inadequate parents, sexual abuse, satanic rituals, cannibalistic orgies, past lifes, alien abduction, possession by entities, etc.

In the best Sophist way the therapists are planting such causes in their patients minds. They give their patients books to read or videos to watch. They plant them during hypnosis, group sessions, etc., and then these planted causes are “recovered” and offered as validation of their therapeutic techniques and theories (see the thought distortion Communal reinforcement in my article A dictionary of thought distortions).

A third thread is the arrogance and incompetence of the therapists. They are very seldom educated psychologists, most often they are hopelessly uneducated. It doesn´t matter if they can show a diploma from one or the other private “New Age” education, which normally consists in a few weekend courses. As shown in a documentary by Ofra Bikel “Divided Memory”, they are oblivious to how they are demonstrating the monstrosity of their pseudoscientifical and self-deceptive work. They talk freely about how uninterested they are in the truth and how indifferent they are to the families they help destroy. They are uniform in their dismissal of critics as being in “denial.” Patient after patient is paraded forth by the therapists as evidence of their good work, yet none of the patients seem better for the therapy and many seem hopelessly ill.

This is due to the subjectivism and relativism in the New Age environment.

These therapists call themselves spiritual counselors. But the karmacially talk and experiences of these “experts” and “clients” remove their energy-investments in the actual reality. When focus is displaced backwards or forwards in time, then the collective time has taken over and spiritual seen there therefore happens an escape. None of these people and theories can therefore be said to work spiritual. And when they use the karma idea in that way, it is no longer a spiritual help, it is a collective displacement of the focus backwards in time and therewith out of reality and into the unreality of the collective time.

New Age psychotherapies are not just useless, they are harmful.

Cathartic psychotherapies (Primal therapy, Gestalt therapy, Experiential psychotherapy, Holotropic Breathwork, Energy breathing)

2012-01-16T02:50:00.000-08:00

Cathartic psychotherapies are based on the notion that if you express your feelings you will purge yourself of your troubles. We have probably all heard this because psychotherapy today have spread far out over its disciplinary limits, and have become a part of an ideology, that thinks it have to take care of, not just psychological problems, but also philosophical, political and religious problems. In schools and in workingplaces we are for example forced to lay bare our feelings on the slightest occasion. Cathartic psychotherapies are therapies such as Primal therapy, Gestalt therapy, Experiential psychotherapy, Holotropic Breathwork, Energy breathing, etc., etc.

Psychotherapy is a branch of psychology, and therefore something scientific, which have to be empirical tested. The problem is that there is no evidence for the notion that you will purge yourself for your troubles if you express your feelings. On the contrary. The notion seem disproved by experiments with children, which find that rather than sublimate aggression when encouraged to be aggressive, the children become more aggressive. Why is that?

The problem is that cathartic psychotherapies are neglecting the importance of thoughts. Feelings are the body´s reaction on the mind (the thoughts). Feelings arise where the mind and the body meet. They are reflections of the mind in the body. Feelings can also be a reflection of a whole thoughtpattern. A thoughtpattern can create an enlarged and energycharged reflection of itself in the form of a feeling. This means, that the whole of the thought´s past also can create a reflection of itself in the body. And if this past is filled with pain, then it can show itself as a negative energyfield in the body. Eckhart Tolle calls this the emotional painbody. It contains all the pain you have accumulated in the past. It is the sum of the negative feelings which you have ”saved together” through life and which you carry. And it can nearly be seen as an invisible, independent creature. Therefore we also could, as H.C. Andersen does in his fairy tale, call it the Shadow.

The painbody is the inner demon, or the devil in the heart. Some painbody´s are relatively harmless, some are anxietyfilled, depressive or angry, others are directly malicious and demonical. They can be passive or active. Some are passive 90% of the time, others are active 100% of the time.

The painbody is the expression of suffering itself, as well as an expression of violence (see my articles The emotional painbody and why psychotherapy can´t heal it and Suffering as an entrance to the Source).

The painbody is activated in the same moment as specific challenges activate the inappropriate basic assumptions, which have been created by bad experiences in the past. And they are being maintained by the vortex of negative automatic thinking, which follows from these basic assumptions. In other words it constitutes a rather particular reaction-pattern, a manuscript, which gets you to play the same role (or the same roles) again and again. That will say, that specific situations will continue to activate it, so that your actions become an eternal repetition of the same. It takes control over you, so to speak.

Therefore you should of course not seek to activate your painbody, as the cathartic psychotherapies believe you should, because they thereby also activate the negative thoughtpattern behind the painbody. The painbody lives of, that you are identified with the negative thoughtpattern behind it. In this way the painbody gets your energy. And for that reason you also give energy to your negative feelings, when you activate your thoughtpattern. Negative feelings will in other words increase if you express them. And the painbody is, through the inner evaluating ego, which the painbody is constructed around, connected with the more dangerous dephts of the collective history of the astral plane. The energies found here are unfathomable, and when you direct them into your painbody, you are really facing problems (see my article Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena).

Instead you should relate completely neutral in relation to your painbody, and through critical thinking seek to explore, re-structure and change the inappropriate basic assumptions, rules of living and thought distortions, which are the thoughtpattern behind the painbody. That is how philosophy and true spirituality works (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions).

Also read the philosophical question What are feelings? in my book Meditation as an Art of Life – a basic reader.

Regression psychotherapies (Rebirthing, Reparenting, Past life regression, Alien abduction, Recovered memory therapy, Satanic ritual abuse, Hypnotherapy, Holotropic Breathwork)

2012-01-16T02:44:00.000-08:00

The cause of suffering is in philosophical counseling (true spiritual counseling) due to a separation of the observer and the observed (see my article Philosophical Counseling as an alternative to psychotherapy). The investigation is directed towards the observer (the form of consciousness: the one who evaluates, who says yes and no, who accepts and denies, who compares with earlier and hopes/fears something else), and not the observed (the contents of consciousness: feelings, thoughts, experiences, sense impressions, memories, wishes, hopes, fears, lusts) as in psychotherapy. The main question is therefore in its essence philosophical: Who am I?

Regression psychotherapies are based on the notion that if you discover the cause of your troubles you will be cured. These psychotherapies are (like other New Age psychotherapies) partially attached to science (they often use a lot of pseudoscientifical technical jargon without any meaning at all – most extremely this is seen in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP)), partially to spirituality (the therapists often call themselves spiritual counselors). In this confusion they are oblivious to the observer, and are lost in the observed. Therefore they are ignorant about the one who creates the causes. The causes become built into the psychotherapy itself, and are therefore ideological worldviews, or just pure prejudice. It is causes such as inadequate parents, sexual abuse, satanic rituals, cannibalistic orgies, past lifes, alien abduction, possession by entities, etc. Take your pick. Often they use a one-size-fits-all explanation of every emotional disorder.

These therapists are, in the best Sophist way, planting such causes in their patients minds. They give their patients books to read or videos to watch. They plant them during hypnosis, group sessions, etc., and then these planted causes are “recovered” and offered as validation of their therapeutic techniques and theories. Patient after patient is paraded forth by the therapists as evidence of their good work, yet none of the patients seem better for the therapy and many seem hopelessly ill. The reason is, that it is not that to feel better, which is the cure, but that to have “discovered” the cause (see my article Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the art of self-deception and the thought distortion Communal reinforcement in my article A dictionary of thought distortions).

Rather than helping clients to become stronger and more independent, most regression psychotherapies, and in particular the rebirthing-reparenting sort, induce in the client an abdiction of responsibility and a state of sickly dependence on the therapists.

Contrary to what they claim, then regression psychotherapies create a philosophical hindrance for the opening into the spiritual source, namely an existence-philosophical, where you in your opinion formation and identity formation strive towards being something else than what you are, where you imitate others, are a slave of others ideas and ideals, and where your actions are characterized by irresoluteness and doubt (also seen in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)).

Past life regression is considered “pure quackery” by the American Psychiatric Association.

The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind

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The sciences ask limited questions about Man, or questions about specific sides of the human life. Such questions are then solved by experimenting, collecting systematical observations and from them draw up theories. The sciences collect systematical experiences and throw out theories, that can be tested through new experiences, or serve as the best explanations.

So, one crucial principle in science is, that a certain theory has to be testable. Another crucial principle is the use of abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation).

Is it testable whether God exists or not? No! Is it testable, that the human consciousness only consists in some physical-chemical reactions in the brain, or that it only is a social construction? No!

Is the best explanation for crop circles, that they have been made by extraterrestrials? Although it is undoubtedly true, that strange patterns are sometimes found in cornfields (crop circles) - it doesn´t follow that they must have been made by extraterrestrials. There is a wide range of far more plausible alternative explanations of the phenomenon, such as that they have been made by pranksters.

Pseudoscience is philosophical, political, religious/occult theories, that seek legitimacy by claiming, that they are scientifical theories, while the fact is, that they either not is testable, or that they abuse the use of abductive reasoning.

Pseudoscience is for example seen in the New Age environment, where they demand so-called “alternative sciences”, such as Intelligent Design, Cryptozoology, Dianetics, Eugenics, Graphology, Homeopathy, Morphic Resonance, Perpetual Motion, Astrology, Personology, Phrenology, Theosophy, Physiognomy, Pyramidology, Quantum Mysticism, Quantum biology, Radionics, Time Cube, Ufology, Vitalism, and many more.

New Age pseudoscience is always based on some kind of religious or occult viewpoint (read more in my articles The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism, and Quantum mysticism and its web of lies).

More accepted pseudosciences is seen in the intellectual environment in form of reductionisms, where they for example claim, that Man fully can be described and explained with the methods of natural science. This happens in various forms of Naturalism, Positivism and Behaviourism. Or they claim, that psychology, sociology or history can give the total and superior understanding of, what a human being is. These viewpoints are described respectively as Psychologism, Sociologism and Historism.

But all this is not testable. Often the reductionisms then claim, that their theories are the best explanations. The reductionisms observe Man from fragmented viewpoints, for example as organism, as physical-chemical system, as society being, as psyche, as producer and user of language and meaning. But what becomes of the wholeness? What unites all this knowledge to a total image of Man? The reductionisms´ explanations of this always end up as philosophical shipwrecks. Reductionisms are philosophical viewpoints, which under cover of being science seek to answer the question of Man, or reality as such. But no single branch of science gives anything else than a limited perspective on Man or reality. If the reductionisms should be taken seriously, then they shall contain a unifying perspective on all knowledge about Man.

It is unfortunate that the reductionisms are so accepted, because it is them that have created distinctions such as “Jewish” and “Aryan” physics; “bourgois” and “socialist” biology; IQ tests and eugenics; and a lot of other political inferences from science that have had catastrophical consequences.

Where New Age pseudoscience typically is based on occult and religious viewpoints, then the pseudoscience of reductionism typically is based on atheistic and/or political viewpoints.

What can be a serious problem in the future, is that a new kind of pseudoscience is trying to unite New Age pseudosciences with some of the pseudosciences of reductionism (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy).

Both New Age pseudoscience and the pseudoscience of reductionism are common in sharing some kind of scientism; that is: they overestimate the importance of science, for example by claiming:

1) that philosophy and religion need to be founded in science

2) that certain single branches of science can give an explanation of everything

3) that certain single branches of science are self-sufficient and that philosophy and religion are superfluous.

In New Age it happens in the demand of “alternative sciences.” In reductionism it happens in the form of pseudoskepticism.

Pseudoskepticism is an important concept in my work as a paranormal investigator, because pseudoskepticism usually is used in opposition to an assortment of questionable claims (from UFOs and paranormal phenomena to alternative medical practices to religious ideas). Pseudoskepticism refers to arguments which use scientific sounding language to disparage or refute given beliefs, theories, or claims, but which in fact fail to follow the precepts of conventional scientific skepticism.

The term “pseudoskepticism” has gradually been expanded to include any unsubstantiated invalidation of a theory.

The term was coined by professor in sociology, Marcello Truzzi. Truzzi attributed the following characteristics to pseudosceptics:

1) The tendency to deny, rather than doubt.

2) Double standards in the application of criticism

3) Tendency to discredit, rather than investigate

4) Presenting insufficient evidence or proof

5) Assuming criticism requires no burden of proof

6) Making unsubstantiated counter-claims

7) Counter-claims based on plausibility rather than empirical evidence

8) Suggesting that unconvincing evidence is grounds for completely dismissing a claim

Truzzi characterized true skepticism as:

1) Doubt rather than denial; nonbelief rather than belief

2) An agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved

3) Maintains that science need not incorporate every extraordinary claim as a new “fact.”

4) As a result, has no burden to prove anything

5) Discovering an opportunity for error should make such experiments less evidential and usually unconvincing. It usually disproves the claim that the experiment was “air tight” against error, but it does not disprove the anomaly claim.

An example of pseudoskepticism within reductionism is the British ethologist Richard Dawkins. He is well known for his criticism of religious pseudoscience such as creationism and intelligent design, but is himself, in his atheistic faith, ending in the pseudoscience of reductionism (biologism), for example in his book The God Delusion.

Other examples of the pseudoscience of reductionism is the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who in his book - with the ambitious title Consciousness Explained - seeks to explain consciousness, partially through computer analogies, partially through neurology and psychology.

Personally I am supporting true skepticism within science, but my method is in itself not building on science, but on philosophy. I am using critical thinking, but I am not a scientific investigator, who has to follow the precepts of conventional scientific skepticism. This is due to, that I have experienced spiritual crises and paranormal phenomena (therefore I can´ t be an agnostic), but I am at the same time critical towards how to describe and behave in relation to such phenomena (read more on the About page).

Reductionism and philosophy

Along with the development of the sciences the so-called reductionisms have got status of whole research programmes. After Darwin many thought, that everything could be explained biological. In Logical Empiricism materialism lived onwards in the form of Physicalism, which was about, that all sciences eventually can be reduced to classical physics – or eventually to ”the intersubjective controllable language of things”. Psychologism was one of the other ravaging reductionisms in the twentieth century. Freud and Jung thought separately, that they had the key to the understanding of diverse cultural phenomena because of the storeroom of the unconsciousness. Moreover there was Historism, which followers thought that they could generalize hermeneutics also to include the exact sciences. The latest craze in reductionism is Social Constructivism.

Surely – many are the people, who become seduced by the reductionisms. Maybe not so strange after all: all reductionisms imply a simplification, a manageable solution to all problems, a key, which saves the supporters for having to think fundamentally over the philosophical questions – which after all only a few are capable to.

What is reductionism? Science can´t give answers to the problems of lifeviews and view of values. Single branches of sciences can´t out of hand answer questions about values or moral standards.

However this they nevertheless often do, but then it ends in reductionism. And there has not been a lack of trying to understand Man from one or the other single branch of science. As already mentioned: They have for example claimed, that Man fully could be described and explained with the methods of natural science. This happens in various forms of Naturalism, Positivism and Behaviourism. Or they have thought, that psychology, sociology or history can give the total and superior understanding of, what a human being is. These viewpoints are described respectively as Psychologism, Sociologism and Historism.

These viewpoints are forms of reductionism; that is to say: they reduce or devaluates Man to a phenomenon of a single type. The problem is then to lead all other sides of Man back to this single type, for example to explain ethics, politics and mathematics as pure historical or psychological phenomena. Here the reductionisms always end in various forms of explaining away, which often is direct absurd.

The reductionisms observe Man from fragmented viewpoints, for example as organism, as physical-chemical system, as society being, as psyche, as producer and user of language and meaning. But what becomes of the wholeness? What unites all this knowledge to a total image of Man?

The reductionisms view themselves as scientific approaches, but they are not. It is here the fundamental invalidity in the reductionistic viewpoints arises, since their basis not is building on argumentation, but on the claim, that they are founded in science. But science is as mentioned not able to answer problems of lifeviews and values. Reductionisms are philosophical viewpoints, which under cover of being science seek to answer questions of values or moral standards. No single branch of science gives anything else than a limited perspective on Man or reality. If the reductionisms should be taken seriously, then they shall contain a unifying perspective on all knowledge about Man.

Our wonder over Man becomes philosophy, when it reaches the question of Man as such. Philosophy throws out answers to the question, argues for the answers and investigates their consequences. This happens first of all by reflecting and meditating over the things, not by experience-scientifical way.

Philosophy is in that way a deepening of our everyday understanding. It is a reflection over well-known subjects. Its answers lie in continuation of our immediate knowledge and understanding. Similar you can say, that philosophy is a deepening of the forms of understanding, which lie in for example science, art and religion.

Philosophy seeks for oneness and coherence. This means, that it both ask for the fundamental trait of the essence of Man, and for how all other traits of Man is connected therewith. The answer to, what the essence of Man is, has to throw a light of transfiguration over everything we know about man.

Philosophy asks the most universal question about Man, the common or universal which all of us have part in, in spite of the fact that we can behave so different and be studied in so many various ways. Here it is about what, we can call the essence of Man, and the question is solved, not by experimenting, collecting systematical observations and from them draw up theories. It is only solved by reflecting and meditating over everything we already know about Man, and by searching for oneness and coherence in it.

The sciences ask limited questions about Man, or questions about specific sides of the human life. Philosophy asks the most universal question about Man. The sciences collect systematical experiences and throw out theories, that can be determined by new experiences. Philosophy uses alone the tool of reflection and meditation.

Reductionisms are philosophical viewpoints, because they seek to answer the question about Man as such, but as philosophical viewpoints they are cognitional and ethical shipwrecks.

Let us first try to look at the cognitional shipwreck. The truth, which philosophy seeks to achieve, is a truth that raises over human views, yes over the whole of the human existence. That something is true means in philosophical sense, that it is true independently of, who claims it, and when it is claimed. And independently of, whether anybody at all has claimed it, thought it, believed it or knows it. Truths are therefore, in philosophical context, both time-independent and idea- and consciousness-independent.

Since all philosophical views qua views claim to be true in precisely this sense, then it should be clear, that views, which try to reduce or cause explain all views, are self-refutating views.

A self-refutating view can´t be saved by saying, that it shall apply to all views except itself. For in that case you have to accept, that there exists at least one scientific and/or philosophical doctrine, which are independent of what you seek to reduce everything to, and this is precisely what the understanding itself claims, that there isn´t.

It seems to be a common trait of the self-refutating philosophical views, that they pull the carpet away under themselves, because they seek to reduce fundamental concepts such as ”meaning”, ”truth”, and ”validity” to something factual, for example physical, biological, psychological, social or historical. Herewith they at the same time claim, that if these conditions had been different (because they are changeable), then all our concepts about meaning, truth and validity also had to be different. But therewith they deprive themselves the possibility for being regarded as meaningfull, true or valid.

Let us now try to look at the ethical shipwreck, which the reductionisms lead us out in.

My concept of Illuminati is based on the rise of pseudoscience. As suggested, there are especially two kinds of pseudoscience: 1) the pseudoscience of New Age, which demands “alternative” sciences with spiritual content. 2) The pseudoscience of reductionism, which connect their “sciences” with certain atheistic and/or political views.

Both are a part of The Matrix Conspiracy because they both support subjectivism and relativism, which are a fundamental philosophy of this ideology. In the following I will concentrate about the reductionism.

The heredity and environment ideology and the problem of mind

As mentioned, then both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett advocate some kind of sociobiology. Social biology became notorious in 1975, when the American biologist Edward O. Wilson published a major treatise on the subject: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Accusations of sexism and racism were leveled because Wilson suggested that Western social systems are biologically innate, and that in some respects males are stronger, more aggressive, more naturally promiscuous than females. Critics argued that all social biology is in fact a manifestation of Social Darwinism, a nineteenth-century philosophy owing more to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, than to Charles Darwin, supposedly legitimating extreme laissez-faire economics and an unbridled societal struggle for existence.

But the search for a synthesis of the heredity and environment split, a holism, is common in the pseudoscience of reductionism.

Within the pseudoscience of New Age the American physicist Fritjof Capra, has in his book, The Turning Point, outlined an ideology, where he combines quantum mysticism with reductionism, especially reductionisms such as historism and sociologism (read more in my article Quantum mysticism and its web of lies).

And, since the first publication of his ideas at the age of 23, the American New Age guru, Ken Wilber, has also sought to bring together the world´s far-ranging spiritual teachings, philosophies, and scientific truths into one coherent and all-embracing vision. This integral map of the Kosmos (the universe that includes the physical cosmos as well as the realms of consciousness and spirit) should then offer an unprecedented guide to discovering your highest potentials.

Wilber introduces his vision by saying, that during the last 30 years we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world´ s cultures are now available to us. In the past, if you were born, say, a Chinese, you likely spent your entire life in one culture, often in one province, sometimes in one house, living and loving and dying on one small plot of land. But today, not only are people geographical mobile, we can study, and have studied, virtually every known culture on the planet. In the global village, all cultures are exposed to each other.

Knowledge itself is now global, Wilber claims. This means that, also for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us – the knowledge, experience, wisdom and reflection of all major human civilizations – premodern, modern, and postmodern – are open to study by anyone.

Wilber asks: What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential – about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth – and put it all on the table? What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us? What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world´s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?

Wilber asks: Sound complicated, complex, daunting? In a sense, it is, he answers. But in another sense, he continues, the results turn out to be surprisingly simple and elegant. Over the last several decades, there has indeed been an extensive search for a comprehensive map of human potentials. This map uses all the known systems and models of human growth – from the ancient shamans and sages to today´s breakthrough in cognitive science – and distills their major components into 5 simple factors, factors that are the essential elements or keys to unlocking and facilitating human evolution.

Ken Wilber calls these 5 elements quadrants, levels, lines, states and types; that is: quadrants of development, levels or stages of development, states of consciousness, and a human personality typing system, a typology. All of these elements are, right now available in your own awareness, he claims. These 5 elements are not merely theoretical concepts; they are aspects of your own experience, contours of your own consciousness.

What is the point of using this integral map or model, Wilber asks. First, whether you are working in business, medicine, psychotherapy, law, ecology, or simply everyday living and learning, the integral map helps make sure that you are “touching all the bases.” If you are flying over the Rocky Mountains, the more accurate a map you have, the less likely you will crash. An integral approach insures that you are utilizing the full range of resources for any situation, with the greater likelihood of success.

Second, if you learn to spot these 5 elements in your own awareness – and because they are there in any event – then you can more easily appreciate them, exercise them, use them...and thereby vastly accelerate your own growth and development to higher, wider, deeper ways of being. A simple familiarity with the 5 elements in the integral model will help you orient yourself more easily and fully in this exiting journey of discovery and awakening.

In is very popular in New Age, inspired by Theosophy, and writers such as Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber, to term their positions as “Holism”. But both Theosophy, Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber´s systems, can be seen as substantive philosophies of history; that is: searches for overall meaning in human history; searches for models of everything (read my articles Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr and The fascism of Theosophy).

In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christianity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible ratinally, morally, and (for Augustine) theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident.

In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in the process.

Marx, too, claimed to know the laws – in his case economic – according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of Decline of the West.

The main problem with all the above theories, are that they, in different ways, reduce consciousness to heredity and environment.

As mentioned in my article The fascism of Theosophy, then the reductionism of Theosophy is due to the attempt of synthesizing spirituality and science. Theosophy is especially inspired by Darwinism, and its theories about human evolution. And the idea continues today in New Age and Ufology, where spirituality, apart from Darwinism, furthermore is sought synthesized with new developments within psychology, psychotherapy, natural science, especially biology and quantum mechanics. The whole thing is presented as an ideology with a lot of attempts to predict the future evolution of Man, often connected with eugenics: the applied “science” or the bio-social movement (social Darwinism) which advocates the use of practises aimed at improving the genetic composition of people, usually referring to human populations.

But it could also be, that it is wrong to say, that Man only is a product of heredity and environment. Has science really proven this assertion? No, it hasn´t. Firstly science till today has not been able to give any explanation of, that we have a consciousness, that we are conscious about ourselves and are able to reflect and meditate over our own wishes, actions and doings. In natural science all explanations are quantitative; that is to say: they are given within the frames of, what can be measured, scaled and counted. It speaks from an outside-and-in perspective on Man. But when we speak about everything, that the word consciousness covers – thoughts, feelings, considerations, pains etc. – then it seems quite clear, that it is not something that is quantitative. When we are using an inside-and-out perspective and describe our states of consciousness and our experiences of, what we think is beautiful, ugly, attractive, repelling etc., - then we use a completely other language than the quantitative language of natural science. So how should one be able to reduce everything to natural science?

The interesting is however, that the more science develops, the more you have to give up backgrounds, which once occured evident to everyone. In nuclear physics and the quantum mechanics we have learned, that there exist processes, which is not cause determined, and which do not follow the old rule about, that everything has to be continuous. Brain functions are in a wide extent quantum mechanical, and since the quantum mechanics breaks with the principle of causation and determinism, then the human brain is not fully a cause determined system. And then you can´t up from the ground explain brain processes from genetical and environmental factors.

(Read more in my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr, where I also present, not an ontological dualism, but an epistemological, a so-called gnoseological dualism. Unambiguous description has the distinction between subject and object as a necessary precondition. And the fact itself, that we have to discriminate between subject and object in order to communicate unambiguous, actually indicates, that both materialism and idealism (subjectivism/relativism) are mistaken points of views).

Just as inexplicable is it, what an ”I” or a ”Self” is. I wake up in the morning, and I know, that I am the same as yesterday or ten years ago, in spite of the fact that my body since then has changed look and that the content of my thoughts in many ways has become something else. What is this ”Me”?

It is not my body, because then I should each morning go out in the bathroom and look in the mirror, in order to find out who I am. Nor is it the content of my consciousness, my thoughts and my memories, because then I first had to evoke a line of memories each morning, before I knew who I am. The whole of the total science has no explanation of, what a ”Self” is, or what personal identity is.

In this there also lies another factor, namely the question about the free will, the possibility of Man consciously to decide on his own present condition and within some limits to make a free choice.

Meanwhile I mean, that the concept of free will and free choice is unfortunate concepts. In my understanding the will is the will to power, and belongs to the Ego, which makes it choices on background of the past, and which therefore is determined by both its personal and collective history. Therefore the Ego always strives towards being something else than what it is, it imitates others, are a slave of others ideas and ideals, and its actions are charaterized by irresoluteness and doubt. A more fortunate concept would in my understanding be the freedom that lies in the existential concept of being yourself; that is: where you live in accordance with your own essence and thereby achieve authenticity, autonomy, decisiveness and power of action. I will therefore use the concepts of freedom of action and freedom of decisiveness.

The assertion that Man is nothing else than a product of heredity and environment, has become an ideology, a part of the planlessness of our welfare society, where no one is responsible, where no one can help anything, where everything is to blame the genes or the society. However facing this reductionism you can place a more true understanding, which has science on its side: Man is a product of heredity and environment, yes, but also of your own consciousness about yourself.

I am born with some specific genes, which to a high degree put limits for, what I am able to and not able to. In some ways I have had good growing up conditions, in others bad. But I have since my childhood been conscious about myself and my surroundings, and have more or less freely been able to decide on something, rather than something else, within some limits. So therefore I am not only a product of heredity and environment, but also a person, which has become what I am, due to a line of decisions, which I have made through life.

It is a viewpoint between two extremes. On the one hand we have the assertion, that no one can help, that he is as he is. No one is able to change himself. My answer is: yes, you can. You can within some given limits work with yourself, and conscious decide to reflect and meditate over your background, your past, your environment, the whole of your character. You can decide to start a spiritual practice, which you know in longer term will change your outlook and way of being. In a spiritual practice you can change yourself quite considerably.

On the other hand we have Sartre´s assertion about, that a person’s life is determined alone by all the choices, he makes; that is to say: by the evaluations, which the inner thinker makes by saying yes and no, justifying and condemning, accepting and denying. But this is an overstatement, which sounds a bit too much of ”everyone is the architect of his own fortunes”. Moreover there is the problem with the Ego and its thought distortions (see my article A Dictionary of Thought distortions).

It is therefore not true, that freedom lies in choosing to become what you want to. You can for example without guilt become beaten down by an assailant, so that you have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Here it is so so with being the architect of your own fortunes.

Truth lies in the middle of these extremes. Heredity and environment put some limits for, what we can do and not can do. But our self and our consciousness, which scientifically seen can´t be explained alone from heredity and environment, makes us capable running to decide on, how we want to react in a lot of the situations, life puts us in. Therefore you can in some situations talk about a personal responsibility.

Quantum mysticism and its web of lies

2012-01-13T03:44:00.000-08:00

Quantum mysticism is a pseudoscientific version of quantum mechanics. The pseudoscience shows in two ways:

1) That Einstein´s theories of relativity, and quantum mechanics, prove that relativism and subjectivism are valid points of views.

2) That Quantum mechanics and Einstein´s theories of relativity prove that classical physics (the age of enlightenment, rationalism) is not valid anymore.

1) That Einstein´s theories of relativity, and quantum mechanics, prove, that relativism and subjectivism are valid points of views.

Subjectivism and relativism claim, that there doesn’t exist any objective truth, or reality. Truth, or reality, is something we create ourself, either as individuals or as cultures, and since there doesn’t exist any objective truth, there doesn´t exist any objective scale of truth. All truths are therefore equally true and equally valid, and if one person´s truth, or one culture´s truth, try to intervene in the truths of other individuals or cultures, then this is considered as an aggression.

There both exists an individual version of relativism, and a collective version. The individual version is called subjectivism. This version is often connected with a right-wing liberalism. The other version is a collective relativism, cultural relativism, which often is connected to a left-wing socialism. However both are common in distorting both science and human rights. Both are demanding “alternative” views of science, and for example also human rights. And both are introducing intellectual apartheid in different ways.

In the pseudoscience of reductionism you see both versions in the so-called heredity and environment arguments, where the right-wing version typical supports the heredity side, and the left-wing version supports the environment side (read more in my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind).

In New Age pseudoscience it is not (yet) so much a political agenda that distorts science, but occult and religious point of views (read my article The pseudocience of New Age and reductionism). In the works of Fritjof Capra, though, you see the beginning of the combination. Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College.

Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), and The Turning Point (1982). Quantum mysticism seems to have originated with Capra in his book The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. The book´s first two parts are excellent expositions on ancient religions and modern physics. The third part, which tries to connect the two is an abysmal failure. Nevertheless, it has been this third part, which has influenced numerous New Age advocates to claim that quantum mechanics proves the reality of everything from chi, prana, ESP, etc., etc., – to time travel.

His other book, The Turning Point, shows the ideology in it, where he combines quantum mysticism with reductionism, especially reductionisms such as historism and sociologism (though he is very aware of the reductionism of the “old” mechanical worldview).

The use of relativism and subjectivism in management theory (“it is not facts, but the best story, that wins!”), can be seen in a new trend within New Age: storytelling. This can be seen in New Age movies such as The Secret, What the Bleep Do We Know?, and The Living Matrix.

In my article The New Thought movement and the law of Attraction I have examined The Secret.

What the Bleep do We Know combines documentary-style interviews, computer-animated graphics, and a narrative that describes the spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness. The plot follows the story of a deaf photographer; as she encounters emotional and existential obstacles in her life, she comes to consider the idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world. Her experiences are offered by the filmmakers to illustrate the movie´s thesis about quantum physics and consciousness.

The Living Matrix claims to bring breakthrough information that will transform your understanding of how to get well and stay well. Dynamic graphic-animation is woven with interviews with leading researchers and health practitioners as they share their discoveries on the miracle cures traditional medicine can´t explain. These experts reveal how energy and information fields – not genetics – drive human physiology and biochemistry, and illustrate the benefits of integrating conventional and alternative health care. What is introduced is the new paradigm in biology: Quantum biology.

The producers of the above mentioned films probably believe in their ideas, but there is an even newer trend within New Age, where you fully conscious are creating a hoax. This is seen in the so-called WingMakers´ Project, which is a website, that has created a modern mythology; a synthesis of science fiction, ufology, parapsychology, quantum biology, theosophy and conspiration theory. It is created like if you were writing a science-fiction novel, or producing a science-fiction movie. The hoax consists in, that it claims to be a true story. Check it out yourself on www.wingmakers.com

Critique

It is a sophistication to assert, that Einstein´s theories of relativity should imply, that there is no objective or true description of the physical reality. This is a confusion of physical relativity with epistemological relativism, which corresponds to a similar misunderstanding of quantum mechanics as subjectivistic. Quantum mechanics is not subjectivistic in the sense, that it is the human consciousness, which produces the phenomenons. It is not the consciousness of the physicist (the subjective), which makes the electron behave as a wave. It is the macrophysical (material) experimental devices, which affects the electron in such a way, so that you unambiguous know, that if you work with this type of apparatus, then the electron will always behave as a wave.

In the same way the theories of relativity, epistemological seen, give no background for any relativism about, that ”everything is relative”. The seen does not depend of the eyes that watch when it comes to physical phenomenons, neither in quantum mechanics, nor in relativistic physics.

But it is actually possible to use quantum mechanics to support both philosophical and spiritual point of views. The creator of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, is in his philosophy very inspired by Taoism. His coat of arms is showing the yin and yang symbol. The paradox is, that his philosophy/spirituality, which of course is grounded in quantum mechanics, directly pulls the carpet away under quantum mysticism. Quantum mechanics shows namely, that it is the order of nature that decides how we shall use our thoughts and language, it is not us that can create in reality as it fits us.

This confusion in quantum mysticism (and in the New Age environment as such) arises because it is neither quantum mechanics, nor spirituality, that are the background for the theories, but the postmodern intellectualism, today especially represented by social constructivism (see my article The Sokal Hoax).

2) That Quantum Mechanics and Einsteins theories of relativity prove, that classical physics (the age of enlightenment, rationalism) is not valid anymore

This misunderstanding is especially based on an misunderstanding of Thomas Kuhn´s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he shows the development of physics – implemented in the concepts: normal science, anomalies, crisis, revolution and the creation of a new paradigm.

I will explain Thomas Kuhn in relation with how he is abused in Neuro-linguistic Programming (see my article Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)).

NLP is founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

John Grinder denies, that his and Bandler´s work is an eclectic hodgepodge of philosophy and psychology, or that it even builds from the work of others. He believes that what he and Bandler did was “create a paradigm shift.”

The following claim by Grinder provides some sense of what he thinks NLP is:

My memories about what we thought at the time of discovery (with respect to the classic code we developed – that is, the years 1973 through 1978) are that we were quite explicit that we were out to overthrow a paradigm and that, for example, I, for one, found it very useful to plan this campaign using in part as a guide the exellent work of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in which he detailed some of the conditions in the midst of paradigm shifts. For example, I believe it was very useful that neither one of us were qualified in the field we first went after – psychology and in particular, its therapeutic application; this being one of the conditions which Kuhn identified in his historical study of paradigm shifts. Who knows what Bandler was thinking?

As a comment to this the critical thinker Robert T. Carroll says: “One can only hope that Bandler wasn´t thinking the same things that Grinder was thinking, at least with respect to Kuhn´s classic text.”

Kuhn did not promote the notion that not being particularly qualified in a scientific field is a significant condition for contributing to the development of a new paradigm in science. Furthermore, Kuhn did not provide a model or blueprint for creating paradigm shifts! His is an historical work, described what he believed to have occured in the history of science. He made no claim that anything similar happens in philosophy and he certainly did not imply that anything NLP did, or is doing, constitutes a paradigm shift.

But the use of the concept of paradigm shifts is very popular in the postmodern intellectualism and its more common spiritual movement New Age, where a lot of different “spiritual” systems (new-thinking), often contradictory, are claiming, that it from now on is impossible to think in “old” ways anymore, without accepting their systems. The failure is due to their constructivistic ways of thinking; that is: subjectivism and relativism.

The phrases old-thinking and new-thinking are also very popular within the so-called postmodern intellectualism, which is the background for what I consider as a wrong spiritual turn within the more popular, common movement of New Age. In this movement I for example have heard people refer to themselves as New Thought Ministers (see my articles Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality and The New Thought movement and the law of attraction).

The phrases old-thinking and new-thinking are often used as a weapon against critique, and I see them as a signal of the rising of a dangerous ideology. In lack of better - in our postmodern world - I have called this ideology The Matrix Conspiracy (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy).

The name Newspeak is the name George Orwell gave the language, which the rulers in his dystopian novel 1984, had created. The intention with it was to control thinking, to make some ideas impossible to think, including concepts such as good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly. In this connection they used concepts such as old-thinking and new-thinking, so that people get a feeling of guilt, everytime they use concepts within old-thinking.

Today, after having passed 1984, we live in a so-called postmodernistic dystopia, where eternal values such as goodness, truth and beauty fall more and more away – and where we have been invaded by the ideology of relativism, which rulers, in creeping ways, use the same phrases as the rulers in Orwell´s novel, as if they had used it as inspiration (the nearest to an attempt of actually creating a new language, which implies some rules about what is considered as “negative” and “positive”, is probably the creating of the so-called Giraffe-language – see my article Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror).

This new language accepts the use of thought distortions (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions) – as for example rhetoric, ad hominem move, sophistry.

Often you hear postmodern intellectuals use the following bullying of critics:

“that they are hewing to the ´objective´ procedures and epistemological structures prescribed by the so-called scientific method.”

They typically assert that this “dogma” has already been thoroughly undermined by the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics and that physical reality has been shown to be “at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

This is used to term critics as old-thinkers, for example that their critique is part of a “patriarchal, racist, colonistic, eurocentric, cultural dominion discourse”

Relativists typically deride critics and scientists for continuing to cling to the “dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, that there exists an external world whose properties are independent of human beings, and that human beings can obtain reliable, if imperfect and tentative knowledge of these properties by hewing to the `objective´ procedures and epistemological structures prescribed by the so-called scientific method.”

And: “How can a self-perpetuting secular priesthood of credentialed ´scientists´ purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge?”

Therefore they demand alternative sciences (and alternative views of human rights), what I call the Illuminati-aspect of The Matrix Conspiracy, because science can´t be mixed with spiritual or political concepts. If this happens, then it is not science anymore. The same thing with relativistic and subjectivistic views of human rights; then it is not human rights anymore.

Postmodern intellectualists are through this use of language often trying to get a political agenda forced through. If you change the political terms with spiritual terms, though, the same language is used in New Age circles. As an example is the famous American New Age guru Deepak Chopra, who has invented the concept of quantum healing, which again is based on the misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, that the mind can control everything. Chopra is without hesitation going into discussions with experts, and is precisely using the above-mentioned language.

Critique

The emergence of quantum mechanics has not made classical physics invalid; it is still valid, but Planck´s constant (the quantum postulate) has given it a limited scope of application.

According to Niels Bohr quantum mechanics is a generalization of classical physics, and the complementarity principle is a generalization of the classical causality principle. In the same way the theory of relativity is a generalization in another direction of the classical physics.

According to Bohr you can´t replace classical physics with quantum physics, because the validity of classical physics is a necessary precondition for, that you can describe the quantum mechanical phenomena, and set out for the macroscopical (“classical”) experimental arrangement.

This means, that both materialism and idealism (subjectivism and relativism) are invalid point of views. On the one side quantum mechanics breaks with the principle of causation and determinism, so that neither the human brain/thought, or nature and evolution, can said to be fully cause-determined systems, as materialism claims. On the other side you can´t say neither, that the principle of causation and determinism are invalid, as idealism (subjectivism and relativism) claims. They are still valid, but with a limited scope of application. Instead you must use the complementarity-principle.

An interesting thing is, that almost all New Age versions of quantum mysticism, which totally deny the validity of the principle of causation and determinism (law of attraction, quantum healing, time travel, etc., etc.) actually are based on extreme cause-determined theories, for example the law of attraction, which claims, that if you think in a certain way, then the universe will reward you in a certain way. But that is what quantum mechanics breaks with.

If you want a deeper going examination of quantum mechanics, read my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr.

The Dream Hypothesis and the Brain-in-jar Hypothesis

2012-01-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

We almost all have an experience of, how our senses and thoughts can deceive us. Therefore the question about, whether life could be a dream or an illusion, also always has occupied Man.

In the scriptless people´s religions, or in the world of the child, the dreams are episodes in the waking condition. To the poets - and in the various wisdomtraditions in Western mysticism and in Eastern philosophy - it is not impossible, that the whole of the waking condition is a dream. As Shakespeare says in his play the Tempest: ”We are of the same matter as our dreams; our short life is encircled by a sleep.”

The spiritual practice can be said to consist partially of meditation, partially of Dream Yoga. Meditation and Dream Yoga are two sides of the same thing. If you nevertheless should try to discriminate, then you about meditation can say, that the three aspects of meditation are relaxfullness, awareness and heartfullness. These three aspects are trained through supporting exercises such as relaxation, Hara practice, as well as Tonglen practice (see the supporting exercises in my book Meditation as an Art of Life – a basic reader).

In Dream Yoga you can say, that the day practice of Dream Yoga consists - besides the continuous exercises of meditation - in understanding the nature of thought distortions; in seeing their illusory nature, in seeing how they create your reality; that is: to realize, that a lot of your waking life also has character of a dream (the night practice of Dream Yoga is about writing your dreams down, and practising in conditions of lucidity, as well as astrality, if such states should occur). – See my articles A dictionary of thought distortions, and What is Dream Yoga?

A lot of philosophers within European philosophy have also claimed, that life is a dream, or that the whole world is our own construction, created either by sensation or thinking. The best known examples are probably George Berkeley and René Descartes.

In European philosophy there is namely a strong tradition for only reckoning with two forms of cognition: sensation and thinking. Berkeley reckoned with sensation, whilst Descartes reckoned with thinking. Berkeley is famous for the sentence Esse est percipi, which means that being, or reality, consists in being percepted (to be is to be experienced). The absurdity in Berkeley´s assertion is swiftly seen: If a thing, or a human being for that matter, is not being perceived by the senses, then it does not exist. In accordance with Berkeley there therefore does not exist any sense-independent world. He ends in the so-called solipsism. That we will return to.

Descartes was also very dubious concerning how much we can trust our senses. Therefore also he took up the question Is life a dream? However his intention with this was in his Meditations to develop a confident cognition-argument.

In his Meditations Descartes presents the problem approximately like this: I frequently dream during the night, and while I dream, I am convinced, that what I dream is real. But then it always happens, that I wake up and realize, that everything I dreamt was not real, but only an illusion. And then is it I think: is it possible, that what I now, while I am awake, believe is real, also is something, which only is being dreamt by me right now? If it is not the case, how shall I then determinate it?

Precisely because Descartes not even in dreams can doubt, that 2 plus 3 is 5, he leaves the dream-argument in his Meditations and goes in tackle with the question, whether he could be cheated by an evil demon concerning all cognition, also the mathematics. This radical skepticism leads him forward to the cogito-argument: Cogito ergo Sum (I think, therefore I exist). – Note that Descartes´ philosophical skepticism not is the same as scientific skepticism (about scientific skepticism: read my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism)

In modern discussions about the reliability of our cognition you often meet a variation of Descartes´ argument of the evil demon. The argument is: some day surgery will have reached so far, that you will be able to operate the brain out of a human being and keep it alive by putting it in a jar with some nutrient substratum. At that time computer research perhaps will have reached so far, that you will be able to connect a computer with such a brain and feed it with all possible data – that is: supply us with an experiential ”virtual reality”, so that we think that we have a body, that we have a life and walk around in the world believing, that we can perceive our surroundings, whilst we in reality only is a brain laying in a jar. It is this thesis the movie The Matrix is based on. It is also a central theme in New Age.

A lot of so-called reductionists believe, that it is possible (again: see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism). There are computer scientists, who believe, that you can understand consciousness as ”soft-ware” and the brain as a ”hard disc”, and that you in a very few years will be able to decode a human being for the whole of its content of consciousness, immediately before it dies, and therewith ensure its soul an eternal life – admittedly on a discette, but what the hell, it is after all certainly always better than to pass into nothingness, and the discette will after all could be played again and again.

The Brain-in-jar Hypothesis says it in this way: existence, that which I, Morten Tolboll, calls reality, is an illusion, because the fact of the matter is this, that I haven´t got any body or any sense organs, but only are my brain, which is in a jar with a nutrient substratum, and which is connected to a computer, which provides me with experiences.

The problem is exactly the same as in Descartes´ Dream Hypothesis: existence, that which I, Morten Tolboll, calls reality, is a period, which after its end (that is to say: when I wake up from it) will be realized as illusory, in the same way as I realize a dream as illusory, when I wake up from it. That is to say: that, which I call ”reality”, is a dream, and that, which I call ”dream” (that is: the thing I am dealing with, when I am sleeping) is a dreamt dream.

Both the Brain-in-jar Hypothesis and the Dream Hypothesis are important in the ideology I call The Matrix Conspiracy (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy). An important pedagogy of The Matrix Conspiracy is namely subjectivism and relativism, which claim, that there doesn't exist any objective truth. Truth is something we create ourself, either as individuals or as cultures, and since there doesn't exist any objective truth, there doesn´t exist any objective scale of truth. Everything is our own thought-construction.

Let us try to look at three logical problems, which the Dream Hypothesis runs into: The infinite regress, the solipsism, as well as the polarization-problem.

First the infinite regress:

I presuppose, that I - with the assertion about, that what, I now call reality, is a dream - believe, that it in principle is possible, that I wake up from it and realize, that it only was a dream. In that case I shall after all find myself situated in a new reality, which relate ifself to what I now call reality, as this relate ifself to my nightly dreams. This ”new reality” you could then term ”the R-reality”.

When I wake up to the R-reality, I realize, that what, I till then called reality, only was a dream. But using the Dream Hypothesis (whatever argument I might have for it) I must already now conclude, that the R-reality also could be a dream, which I, if I some day wake up from it, shows ifself to be contained in a R-R-R-reality – and in this way I can keep on.

If i say, that reality is a dream, and therefore ought to be called ”dreamt reality”, yes then I can not find any argument against, that it is a ”dreamt dreamt reality” or a ”dreamt dreamt dreamt reality” etc., indefinitely.

If you then take the solipsism:

Solipsism (of lat. Solus ipse, I alone), is the opinion, that I alone, and my states of consciousness, exist, or that I, and my states of consciousness, are the only things, which really can be realized. Everything else, for example other people´s consciousnesses and material things, which are claimed to be outside my consciousness, are problematic things.

The Dream Hypothesis can for example only be stated in first person. There are not two persons who can agree about it, because all other persons than the person, which put forward the Dream Hypothesis, ex hypothesi are dream phenomena in his dream. When I – in first person – analyzes the eventual arguments against the Dream Hypothesis, I realize, that I don´t need to take them seriously, because they ex hypothesi only are dream phenomena, which can´t be compelling. But at the same time I realize, that all my arguments for the Dream Hypothesis for the same reason nor can be considered compelling. I have ended up in a self-contradiction.

And if you then finally take the polarization-problem:

Reality seems to be an Otherness, which determines and defines the world – that is: a negation-principle. Any concept, any thing, is defined by its negation; that is to say: what it not is. A dream can in other words only be defined from what it not is. It is for example not reality. This logic seems to be impossible to get around. How can you altogether assert that life, or reality, is a dream, unless you know what a dream not is?

The Brain-in-jar Hypothesis runs into exactly the same logical problems.

To the common consciousness, or the common cognition - that is to say: sensation and thinking - life could very well be thought to be a dream. The wholeness could possible be sleeping. You could here very well imagine the validity of the above problems, but you end up in the three logical problems. It is precisely these logical anomalies, paradoxes and problems, which create Samsara´s wheel of eternal repeating up-cycles which is followed by eternal repeating down-cycles and vice versa (for example life and death, success and fiasco, joy and sorrow) – as well as the ignorance and the suffering when you are caught into this wheel, for example in the experience of nightmare and anxiety. All Jorge Luis Borges´ small stories are about these logical and philosophical problems. His stories are filled with mirrors, masks, endless series and regresses, labyrinths, doppelgängers, time, solipsisms and dreams (I have examined these logical and philosophical problems in my A dictionary of thought distortions, especially in the thought distortion I call The endless split of the thought).

As mentioned there is also within the wisdom traditions a lot of talk about, that life is a dream. The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tsi wrote for example:

”One time I dreamt, that I was a butter-fly. Pleased with my fortune I flew around and wasn´t thinking about anything else than being a butter-fly. About Chuang Tsi´s existence I suspected nothing. Then suddenly I awoked, and it stood clear to me, that I was Chuang Tsi. But now I just don´t know, whether I was Chuang Tsi, which dreamt that I was a butter-fly, or whether I am a butter-fly, which dreams, that it is Chuang Tsi. There is necessarily a difference in being Chuang Tsi and in being a butter-fly.”

At first Chuang Tsi´s text seems to be even more radical than Descartes. But what you can say, is, that there is a radical difference between Chuang Tsi and Descartes. Descartes and Berkeley reckoned namely, as before mentioned, only with two forms of cognition, sensation and thinking.

Chuang Tsi, as well as Medieval philosophers and a lot of Catholic philosophers in the present day, however speak about revelation as a third cognition-form. Some of our temporal existentialists speak about a type of being-cognition, which neither is due to sensation or thinking. And finally a couple of European mystics, as for example Plotin, Meister Eckhart and William Blake, have spoked about an occult cognition of God and higher powers, which reaches far beyond the areas of sensation and thinking. You could term it the wholeness-cognition. And in the East (for example Chuang Tsi) such a third cognition is well known (see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with mystical experiences).

To this third form of cognition, life is not a dream, but the Good, the True and the Beautiful itself – reality. The path to this can be described as in the education novel: at home – the homeless - home. In the start, at home (if you not, through meditation and Dream Yoga, are working with the third cognition-form), the wholeness is sleeping. If you however start to work with this cognition, the education journey out in the world begins. The wholeness starts to dream. But the more realization trained, the more you realize the illusory aspect of the dream of the wholeness, and then the journey home starts. The wholeness begins to wake up, for finally, in the revelation, to be completely awake.

The truth in this awakenness - and which of course also is there hidden, both when the wholeness is dreaming and sleeping - is precisely the instance which creates the logical, and insoluble problems with theories which only work with two forms of cognition, sensation and thinking.

This truth is reality, or the Otherness.

Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr

2012-01-12T06:04:00.000-08:00

I have in my book Dream Yoga looked at the abuses of quantum mechanics, which we see so widely-spread in New Age circles, and wherein the misinterpretation consists. However there has right now been published a new book by my professor in philosophy, David Favrholdt, who was one of Niels Bohr´s students. It is David Favrholdt who has taught me about the philosophical aspects of Niels Bohr´s thinking. His new book is called The Philosopher Niels Bohr, and I will here summarize the most central aspects of this book, in order to show the misinterpretation in a new way.

On Manchester University in 1913 Niels Bohr produced his atomic theory, which with his own words broked with the ”customary forms of experience within the physics”. The atomic theory was nothing less than a showdown with classic physics and the way, in which we look at the world. Mind you, Bohr´s atomic theory doesn´t replace classic physics, as many are claiming. Here we find one of the misinterpretations. It is showing where the limit is for our way of observing the world. But it ushered the atomic age, as David Favrholdt is writing in his book.

The quantum mechanics, as it came to be called, and which is about physics on atomic level, was so great a dispute with rational thinking, that only a few physicists at that time were willing to accept it. Bohr´s most famous opponent, Albert Einstein, tried in many years to disprove the theories of the Dane, but David Favrholdt claims, that there today is common agreement about, that Niels Bohr won that debate.

Bohr found out, that we have to establish certain rules in quantum mechanics, which we can´t use in classic physics. He discovered, that when we have to measure an electronic movement around the atoms, we come, with our units of measurement, to intervene in what we are investigating. In the same moment, we want to decide the location of the electron, we have disturbed its course.

Shortly said, then Bohr discovered, that we can´t observe the physics on atomic level without coming to influence it. In 1927 he goes forward and ends a discussion, which had taken place through centuries. It had been about, what light is consisting in – is it waves or particles?

Bohr shows, that light in some experiments behaves, as if it is particles, and in others as if it is waves. And here we have the foundation for the next misinterpretation, that goes on, that it is the consciousness of the physicist, which affects the light. This has led to the misunderstanding in the public, that quantum mechanics should imply, that there isn´t given any objective or true description of the physical reality, consequently that it is the human consciousness, which produces the phenomena: subjectivism. The same misunderstanding characterizes by the way also Einstein´s theory of relativity, that this should support relativism.

But it is not the consciousness of the physicist (the subjective), which makes the electron behave like a particle or a wave. It is the macrophysical (material) experimental devices, which affect the electron in a certain way, so that you unambiguous know, that if you work with this type of apparatus, then it will always behave like a wave, and with another type of apparatus, like a particle.

Nonetheless there has been created a lot of philosophical theories, which claim to be supported by quantum mechanics, and which have lead a war against the time of enlightenment, as well as against the classic physics and the connected rationalistic thinking. You could gather them under the word constructivism. Constructivism claims, that it is Man, who through his language and interpretations, creates the reality/truth. And you can swiftly see, that it for example is this idea the New Thought movement and law of attraction are based on (see my article The New Thought movement and the Law of Attraction).

The theories is in this way characterized by relativism and subjectivism, since they claim, that there doesn´t exist any objective order, which defines what is true or false, and that truth therefore exclusively is due to our own idea- and language constructions. Relativism exists in many forms, but generally you can talk about an individualistic relativism, subjectivism, which claims that it is the individual himself who creates his truth, and a collectivistic relativism, social constructivism, which claims, that it is groups of people, that create their own truth.

And both directions consequently, in richly way, use quantum mechanics to support their theories. But does it actually do this? No, the absurd is, that it actual directly pulls the carpet away under such theories. And these theorists could have discovered this, if they had read a bit of Niels Bohr´s own scriptures, instead of repeating from others, who continue the misinterpretation. But now David Favrholdt consequently has written a book about the philosopher Niels Bohr.

First of all: if we now take the claims of for instance New Thought, then it say, that if you think in a certain way, then the universe will reward you in a certain way. This is actually a claim, which in extreme way is based on the principle of causation, namely that a certain way of thinking will cause an effect from the universe.

But what nuclear physics and the quantum mechanics learn us, is, that there exists processes, which precisely not is cause determined, and which do not follow the old rule about, that everything has to be continuous. In our brains and thoughts, as well as in nature and evolution, there exist processes, which in a wide extent are quantum mechanical, and since the quantum mechanics breaks with the principle of causation and determinism, then neither the human brain/thought, or nature and evolution, are fully cause-determined systems. And then you precisely can´t explain processes in our brains and thoughts, or in nature and evolution, from theories such as New Thought.

Secondly, then Niels Bohr actually claims, that it is not us that put reality in order, as for example New Thought, and other relativistic and subjectivistic theories, claim, but reality, that puts us in order; a claim that involves that both materialism and idealism (subjectivism and relativism) are invalid point of views. Let us investigate it.

Bohr´s new discovery made of course the physicists ask: ”So what is light then?” And Bohr answered, that this you can´t ask about. The only thing we can do, is to say, that in some experiments we can make wave-descriptions, in others particle-descriptions. They supplement and contradict each other, but we can´t go behind our experiments and say what they are in themselves. From this Bohr founds the complementarity theory.

It appears, that when you are using a certain type of experimental device, then the electron always behaves as a particle, and when you use another type of apparatus, the electron always behaves as a wave (again: it is not the consciousness of the observer, which creates these phenomena!!). The two types of experimental devices mutually exclude each other, so that you – by choice of experimental device – can determine, whether you want, that the electron shall behave as a wave or as a particle. The same relationships exist in a number of areas within nuclear physics.

However, both types of examinations are equally necessary, if you want to understand the microphysical world. Bohr speaks about, among a lot of other things, that particle and wave experiments are complementary to each other, because they mutually exclude each other and at the same time necessarily must supplement each other. Generally the same relationship exists in all quantum physical examinations.

General you can formulate Bohr´s conception of complementarity in the following way: A complementary description from an area of phenomenon is a description by means of two sets of concepts, which mutually exclude each other, but where both the incompatible sets of concepts are equal necessary for a fully description of the area of phenomenon. You call the mutually excluding sets of concepts complementary.

Bohr himself had the opinion, that complementarity relations are a fundamental feature of the human cognition, which you can find analogies of in many other connections than in quantum physics. And it is exactly this, which the wisdom traditions also speak about, for example in the teaching of yin and yang, and in Nagarjuna´s teaching.

As an example, among countless, of an analogy, you can observe the experience of music. In a concert hall you can experience the music so strongly, that you not at all are aware that you are sitting and listening to music. You can describe this as ”to become completely lost in the music”.

On the other side you can also relate analyzing to the music, because you are concentrating about noticing, for instance the performance of the violin soloist, the orchestration, the tempo etc. You can switch back-and-forth between these two ways of experience, but you can´t have them both at the same time. Both ways of experience are necessary in order to understand, what music is. They mutually exclude each other, at the same time as they supplement each other, they are both necessary in a fully description of the area of phenomenon; they are in other words complementary.

In the same way with subject and object; inside-and-out perspective, and outside-and-in perspective; macrophysical phenomena and microphysical phenomena; etc., etc.

And now back to the problem of light. Could you then not imagine, that light is an entirely third phenomenon, which both consists of light and particle properties? No, Bohr claims. No matter how we try to imagine it, it is not possibly to imagine, that anything can be a wave and a particle at the same time. It is not possible.

In 1927 Bohr invented the so-called two-split experiment, and it has been discussed ever since. He says, that if you send electrons against a plate with two openings, it produces a wave phenomenon. But what happens along the way? He answers, that along the way you can´t see, what happens. But there must happen something? Yes, but you can´t make a description of it. But this you will be able to some day? No. If you intervene into it in order to see, what happens along the way, the whole of the phenomenon disappears.

Using the conventionally conceptions which is lying in our culture, we say, that you must be able to make a theory of everything, as for example the New Age philosophers Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber.

In New Age pseudoscience it is not (yet) so much a political agenda that distorts science, as occult and religious point of views. In the works of Fritjof Capra, though, you see the beginning of the combination. Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College.

Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), and The Turning Point (1982). The abuse of quantum mechanics within New Age seems to have originated with Capra in his book The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. The book´s first two parts are excellent expositions on ancient religions and modern physics. The third part, which tries to connect the two, is an abysmal failure. Nevertheless, it has been this third part, which has influenced numerous New Age advocates to claim that quantum mechanics proves the reality of everything from Clairvoyance to Time Travel: the so-called quantum mysticism (see my article Quantum mysticism and its web of lies).

Capra´s other book, The Turning Point, shows the ideology in it, where he combines quantum mysticism with reductionism, especially reductionisms such as historism and sociologism (though he is very aware of the reductionism of the “old” mechanical worldview) – see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism.

Since the first publication of his ideas at the age of 23, Ken Wilber has also sought to bring together the world´s far-ranging spiritual teachings, philosophies, and scientific truths into one coherent and all-embracing vision. This integral map of the Kosmos (the universe that includes the physical cosmos as well as the realms of consciousness and spirit) should then offer an unprecedented guide to discovering your highest potentials.

It is very popular in New Age, inspired by writers such as Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber, to term their positions as “Holism”. But both Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber´s systems, can be seen as substantive philosophies of history; that is: searches for overall meaning in human history; searches for theories of everything.

In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christianity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and (for Augustine) theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident.

Anyway, Bohr says, that you can´t make a theory of everything.

The movements of the electrons are fundamentally not able to be experienced. But we can very well talk about it. Should we eventually create theories about everything, it is not in three dimensions, then it is in nine or several dimensions; this we can´t. It would end in an endless split of the thought (see my article A Dictionary of Thought distortions).

David Favrholdt continues, that Bohr´s philosophy in this way originates from his physics. And Favrholdt says, that Bohr´s philosophy hasn´t gained so much a footing as his discoveries within the physics. But this it ought to. Bohr´s basic view on language is epochal, Favrholdt claims, though he must admit that the epoch not yet has turned up.

What is Bohr´s philosophical viewpoint?

According to Bohr´s philosophy, then it is correct that we actually from our thoughts, language and interpretations construct our self-images and world-images. But we can precisely not do it as it fits us, in the way constructivism claims. On the contrary it is this idea, which creates the whole of our illusion about reality, and therefore our problems and suffering.

Bohr says: If a person moves from A to B, it takes a certain time, and the faster he moves, the less time it takes. Here we suddenly have the concepts location, distance, movement, speed, time. It is therefore not ourselves who determine, how reality looks like. It is the constitution of nature, which determines, how we shall use the concepts in order to explain reality. This is lying in direct opposition to what the constructivists claim, and by the way to a number of Western philosophers up through time.

It is not us who put reality in order, it is reality which puts us in order. That is the soul in Bohr´s philosophy. Then comes the next, where Man as a rational being suddenly again has entered into the discussion. Bohr says, that when we have to establish the unambiguous language, then this is due to, that two persons can look at a thing and agree about, that the thing is round or square. They can´t agree about, whether it is beautiful or ugly. That is subjective. But they have an intersubjective agreement about, what means what, which you then can establish a language of physics about. A language of physics is nothing else but specified every day language.

The rise of quantum mechanics has in this way not made classical physics invalid; it is still valid, but Planck´s constant (the quantum postulate) has given it a limitary area of use.

That classical physics can be regarded as a borderline case of quantum mechanics appears from the fact, that the equations in the matrix mechanics of Heisenberg become identical with the equations in classical mechanics, when you set Planck´s constant to zero; an act which is allowed by the observation of macrophysical relationships. In accordance with Bohr quantum mechanics is a generalization of classical physics and the complementarity viewpoint is a generalization of the classical causality principle. The theory of relativity is also a generalization in another direction of classical physics.

Nor can you – in Bohr´s opinion – replace classical physics with quantum mechanics, because the validity of classical physics is a necessary precondition for, that you can describe the quantum mechanical phenomena and make account for the macroscopic (”classical”) experimental arrangement. Bohr is writing in a famous discussion contribution against Einstein, who didn't want to accept, that the causality principle has no validity in nuclear physics:

”…the account for all experiences – regardless how far the phenomena are lying outside the reach of classical physics – must be expressed in classical concepts. The reason is simply, that we by the word ”experiment” refer to a situation, where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned, and that the experimental device and measuring results therefore must be described in the usual language with appropriate use of the terminology of classical physics.”

Niels Bohr: ”Atomfysik og menneskelig erkendelse”, Schultz´ Forlag, København 1957, s. 53.

Note, that Bohr here speaks about the usual language (everyday language) supplemented with the terms of classical physics. This is due to, that he regards the concepts of classical physics as a more explicit formulation of everyday language. In that sense everyday language is a necessary precondition for all natural scientific realization, and nor can everyday language be replaced by an unambiguous and formalised, logical scientific language. David Favrholdt has developed this important theme in Bohr´s epistemology further in his own philosophy. He works with, what he calls The Core in everyday language.

Favrholdt asks us: please observe following concepts: Time – object – space – logic – body – person – experience – memory.

The phenomenalist/idealist claims, that we only with certainty can know, that the here italicized concepts stand for something real; that is to say: something from the concepts different: Time – object – space – logic – body – person – subject – experience – memory.

The materialist claims, that we only with certainty can know, that the here italicized concepts stand for something real; that is to say: something from the concepts different: Time – object – space – logic – body – person – subject – experience – memory.

Favrholdt claims, that since these concepts are interdependent, they all represent something. Together they are what he calls The Core in everyday language. That they are interdependent means, that they have to be used in a certain way in relation to each other, if we at all want to talk meaningful. The relations between them are not established by arbitrary definitions. We have discovered, that we shall respect the relations between them, if we want to describe something, whether we want to describe, that there is lying a phone book on the desktop, or that we have an experience of the phone book.

What we must say is as follows: When we as ordinary people – before we have heard anything about philosophy – orientate in life, we form a concept about reality. We associate with humans and animals and plants and non-living things in our daily lifes, and we learn to discriminate between, what is dream and reality, - and what is lie or illusion, and reality.

Any human being understand, what we mean by saying, that the witness explained in the court, that the thief had a pistol, but in reality the thief was unarmed. We also learn to talk about the poetic reality, about the experienced reality etc. We learn to talk about things, which exist, despite that no one experiences them, or have consciousness about them. When they found the Golden Horns at Gallehus, they found something, which no one knew were there. But they found them. Is wasn' t so, that they arised, because they were experienced.

Then certain philosophers are coming and saying, that we don't know, whether there is anything behind our experiences. What can you do but ask them about, what they mean with ”experiences”. Then they explain this. But it turns out, that they only can do this by using the whole of The Core. And in this set of fundamental concepts is included the concept ”object” or ”thing” which represent ”things, which exist whether they are experienced or not”.

This is included as a necessary precondition for, that we can define or explain, what we shall understand by experience. So, because they have explained, what they mean by ”experience” - so that we know the correct use of this concept - they have already accepted, that we in our description of reality must assume a correct use of the concept ”things, which exist, whether they are experienced or not”.

Why the conceptual relations in the The Core not are conventional or accidental, but unavoidable as the relations in the number theory, is precisely because reality - the from our experiences and consciousness independently existing reality - is included in the determination of, how we have to use our concepts in order to be able to realize it, and describe it.

We can choose not to describe it and instead soak ourselves in Hinajana Buddhistic meditation (or music, as already described), but if we want to describe it, if we want to find out, what is subjective and objective, if we want to achieve realization within physics, biology, psychology etc., then we must use our fundamental concepts in a correct, non-arbitrary way.

This involves, not an ontological dualism, but an epistemological, a so-called gnoseological dualism. Unambiguous description has the distinction between subject and object as a necessary precondition. And the fact itself, that we have to discriminate between subject and object in order to communicate unambiguous, actually indicates, that both materialism and idealism (subjectivism, relativism) are mistaken points of views.

And the same is the case in order to think clearly. Critical thinking is about spotting thought distortions created by dualistic unbalance (see my article A Dictionary of Thought distortions).

Magical thinking, for example, has a lot of thought distortions built into it, for example the thought distortion arbitrary inference, which means, that you make a causal linking of factors, which is accidental or misleading. The main reason for the rise of magical thinking is that you don´t discriminate between image and reality, the map and the landscape; or said in another way: between subject and object.

Central in critical thinking is the discrimination between subject and object. And discrimination is also a central virtue in true spirituality. The Dominican mystics call this steps discriminatio, the ability to discriminate between how the energy is used temporal or religious. And despite that magical thinking actually can create something magical, then in true spirituality it is still something temporal, or relatively (black magic/occultism), which will create negative karma if practised. The Orientals call it viveka, discrimination, the ability to use your will on that part of the energy, you can steer yourself, and steer it towards exercises, prayer, mantras, meditation, instead of towards career, worldliness, self-unfolding, as for example New Thought does.

So, all this is implying an opinion about, how we observe the world – and here Bohr picks inspiration from his own discoveries within the atom theory. We can´t place ourselves outside our own idea about reality, Favrholdt explains. The physicist can´t be a kind of God´s eye, who looks at the world from outside, because he is himself a part of the world. We can´t possibly think ourselves out of reality. But that is what for example Fritjof Capra and Ken Wilber are doing in a cultural relativistic way, and New Thought in a subjectivistic way; that is: in constructivistic ways.

Personally I have had the honour of participating Favrholdt´s lectures on Chinese philosophy, which is another of Favrholdt´s passions. And the Taoist teaching in China matches well with Bohr – it is therefore that Bohr´s coat of arms, when he got the elefant order, carries the yin and yang-symbol.

In accordance with Taoism there is nothing beyond the world, Favrholdt explains. You can´t see the world from outside. You are in the world, and you can only define something from its opposition. What is the good? This you understand, if you know what the evil is. You can´t say anything about the world as a whole, because you can´t put the whole in opposition to anything.

These thoughts you find in all wisdomtraditions, in all the spiritual directions within the religions. There exists a fundamental dualism, which the spiritual practitioner must understand, in order to reach into non-dualism. That is also the soul in Nagarjuna´s argumentation. You can´t say anything about the wholeness, and if you do it will be a distortion.

The problem with holistic theories such as Theosophy, Capra, Wilber, is in short that they want to reduce the mystical non-dualistic experience, to a theory. In this they completely misunderstand the spiritual traditions.

Bohr often told the story about the ethnographer, who is send out to learn about Indians in the Amazon jungle. He begins to dress and dance, as they do, but he is still an observer. He learns their language, but is still Danish. Gradually he has eventually forgotten his Danish, and he throws his camera and the typewriter in the river. Now he knows, how it is to be Indian, but now he can´t write about it.

Favrholdt says, that Bohr always ended this history saying with a smile: ”Well then we must send a new ethnographer.”

The Sokal Hoax

The Sokal Hoax

2012-01-12T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Sokal Hoax, also known as the Sokal Affair, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. The hoax was a so-called hoax of exposure. Hoaxes of exposure are semi-comical or private sting operations. They usually encourage people to act foolishly or credulously by falling for patent nonsense that the hoaxer deliberately presents as reality.

The Sokal Hoax was a pseudoscientific experiment to test the standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility within the postmodern intellectualism.

Before I go deeper into the hoax I will describe the postmodern intellectualism in a more broad sense. My intention is also to show where the pseudoscience within New Age is coming from, especially the abuse of quantum mechanics.

The postmodern intellectualism

The Postmodern Intellectualism is characterized by relativism. You can talk about a collective relativism (cultural relativism), and an individual relativism (subjectivism). These two kinds of relativism are often in opposition to each other, due to different politicial views, as for example socialism contra liberalism. But I see them both as part of the same Postmodern Intellectualism.

Relativism shows in an ingenious way, which no ideology have shown before – and therefore we don´t recognize it. Through schools, folk high schools, universities (especially in the Humanities and the social Sciences), continuing education and business communities – relativism has brainwashed most people to consider conceptions such as good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly, as something we have created ourselves, and which therefore don´t exist objective seen. Therefore they are rejected as premodern superstition, as an expression of old-thinking. Because if truth is something we have created ourselves, then there isn´t any objective criterium to decide what is true. All ideas are therefore equal true, and therefore anything goes.

Relativism shows itself in different forms: subjectivism, social constructivism, pragmatism, nihilism, postmodernism. It is a mishmash of trendy ideas – deconstructive literary theory, New Age fantasies, so-called feminist epistemology, extreme social constructivist philosophy of science, even Lacanian psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, experiential psychotherapy, coaching and management theory. And the books and articles written by these people, are also a mishmash of thought distortions, obscure jargon, political ideology, religious preaching and pseudoscientifical blather.

Through this we have reached the highest level of postmodern development for better or for worse. The same fully individualized core of personality, which makes us able to step out of the past´s fixed and subconscious attachment, has itself become our main interest, center for our identity in a degree, that almost all our awareness are directed inwards in a global seen exceptional narcissism.

How is that? Isn´t narcissism what for example social constructivists try to avoid? Yes, but with the opposite result – they haven´t examined the inner thinker´s (the Ego´s) ingenious ways to use thought distortions in order to defend itself (see my article A Dictionary of Thought distortions). Individually we have namely created a large scale self-image, which in a quite high degree is based on assumptions/ideas. This self-image we almost continuously defend, by filtrating the impressions we receive from the world. We want to be in peace with our self-images, and quite convenient we therefore have created a cultural pluralism (=culture relativism), which forbid actual value judgment. I have my truth, and you have yours. Respect! Self-accept! I am Okay, you’re Okay! It all run together in a fear of hierarchies, where it is political incorrect to claim that something is higher than something else. “You judge”, is the same as “you condemn.”

Relativism has in this way succeeded in creating an illusion of, that it is a kind of sacrilege (intolerance/thought-crime/old-thinking) wanting to utter yourself about, what is good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly, at the same time as the relativists does this themselves in all possible quibbling ways, under cover of concepts such as tolerance or new-thinking.

That relativism is an ideology shows in, that it is a closed system, which is shared by a large group of people – (though these people can disagree in between whether they are subjectivists (individual oriented relativists) or social constructivists (social oriented relativists), or if they are working in universities, or as coaches within the New Age environment, etc, etc).

Such a closed system has especially two distinctive characters: 1) It allows no imaginable circumstance to talk against the ideology. 2) It refuses all critique by analyzing the motives in the critique in concepts, which is collected from the ideology itself (an ideology always thinks black and white, and therefore always has an anti-ideology, an enemy image, which it attribute on to everyone, who don´t agree).

Relativism has in this way also succeeded in getting philosophy psychologized/spoiled.

I have many times myself been surprised over, in what degree I have been attacked for my relativism-critique – attacks which apparently only directs itself against this, that I, with starting point in the wisdomtraditions, express the necessity of remembering the philosophical aspects of the spiritual work (the realization-work and the ethical practice). This is an absolutely necessity today, because the consequences of relativism will be the counter balancing of the Ego-unfolding.

Now if you use philosophy, you will see, how truth escapes relativism – (because truth does exist objective seen; that is: not in the mind of Man, whether as an idea, an assumption, or a conception) – and returns to relativism as a kind of hubris-nemesis.

Two crucial philosophical arguments can namely be put forward against relativism:

1) The argument of self-refutation. Relativism is logically fallacious, because it of course considers itself as being true. But it can precisely, in accordance with its own built-in relativism, not itself be regarded as more true than for example absolutism. For that reason it is followed by a long line of self-contradictions.

All ideas, theories, assumptions and conceptions are of course relative. But relativism is itself a theory. The self-contradiction is that relativism makes an exception of its own position: the very assertion of relativism is itself nonrelativistic. It relates absolute to the relative, where the relative here is its own assertion of relativism.

The art is of course to relativize oneself, and relate relative to the relative. And to do this you must also be able to relate absolute to the absolute, and acknowledge, that the absolute is an Otherness that transcends us, and therefore all our ideas, assumptions, theories etc., and which is the instance that carry us. The Otherness is the instance in reality, which makes it possible that we at all can investigate whether there is contradiction or coherence between our thoughts and our lived lifes. It is the instance that makes it possible to discriminate between awareness and inawareness; being yourself or trying to be something else. It is the order of nature, which puts us in order. It is not us who puts the nature in order.

2) The reductio ad absurdum argument. If you preach relativism and believe, that everything is relative and for that reason equal true, you have thereby accepted, that nazism, fascism, dictatorship, popular murder, terror and violence, are as equally great blessings for mankind as democracy, negotiation and dialogue (it is a fact that many totalitarian ideologies, paradoxically enough, today have begun to use relativism as justification for their business). Then you have no basis in order to criticize, because you haven´t got any rational frame to start from. You can´t criticize anyone for argumentation bungling, or to replace arguments with machine guns, because this presupposes, that there is a rational foundation in your arguments.

How far out in the absurd will a relativist in other words defend his so-called “tolerance”? What about the child, which has been raped and murdered? Will the relativist go in and defend the murderer against the critique, and say, that it might well be, that we are opposed to the murderer, but basically we can´t know, whether it is us who are mistaken, and him who is right?

This there actually are examples on. There are moreover examples on, that relativists have defended religious mass suicide, female circumcision, wife burning etc., etc. So you can yourself figure out, what the ideology can be used to justify.

The relativists´ idea of themselves as being mediators are in other words absurd and self-contradictory – go to an Islamic and Jewish fundamentalist – and create peace by telling them, that their faith after all only is something relatively? It is offensive, to hear this forbearing accent: “It is fine, that you have your viewpoints, but basically there is nothing which is true, so therefore make peace!” (Besides an extremely metaphysical statement, which claims itself to have practically divine insight in truth).

If you observe the built-in energylaws of life, then the collective Ego-unfolding is an expression of energy, which has swung out in its one extremity. With necessity the energy will swing over in the opposite extreme. And this won’t happen in a quiet way, when you consider the enormous momentum that is in the actual extreme, and it will happen quite simply: through pollution of the environment, through diseases (aids, cancer and else) through warfare, terror, crises, inner mass psychotic collapses, and through natural disasters.

This is what we very probably will have to face, because the rejection of the realization-work and the ethical practice is exactly what is needed for an ideology to keep its citizens in ignorance, and through ignorance to use them as means for reaching its goals; that is: using them in ways that don´t have to take ethics into consideration.

These things were what George Orwell mirrored in his novel 1984, and what he therefore warns us against.

But the defenders of relativism refuse the above-mentioned classical arguments against them, because they see it as old thinking. However the Sokal Hoax has exposed relativism in a nearly comical way.

The phrases old-thinking and new-thinking are very popular within the so-called postmodern intellectualism, which is the background for what I consider as a wrong spiritual turn within the more popular, common movement of New Age. In this movement I for example have heard people refer to themselves as New Thought Ministers (see my articles Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality and The New Thought movement and the law of attraction).

Though the postmodern intellectualism and New Age would disagree in between, they are both a sign of what I call the Illuminati-aspect the Matrix Conspiracy (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy). My concept of Illuminati is based on the rise of pseudoscience. There are especially two kinds of pseudoscience: 1) the pseudoscience of New Age, which demands “alternative” sciences with spiritual content. 2) The pseudoscience of reductionism, which connects their “sciences” with certain atheistic and political views (see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).

Both are a part of The Matrix Conspiracy because they both support subjectivism and relativism, which are a fundamental philosophy of this ideology.

The phrases old-thinking and new-thinking are often used as a weapon against critique. You see them used both by postmodern intellectuals and New Age devotees. The phrases have three sources:

1) George Orwell´s novel 1984.

2) Quantum mechanics

3) Thomas Kuhn´s work The structure of Scientific Revolutions

1) George Orwell´s novel 1984

The name Newspeak is the name George Orwell gave the language, which the rulers in his dystopian novel 1984, had created. The intention with it was to control thinking, to make some ideas impossible to think, including concepts such as good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly. In this connection they used concepts such as old-thinking and new-thinking, so that people get a feeling of guilt, everytime they use concepts within old-thinking.

Today, after having passed 1984, we live in a so-called postmodernistic dystopia, where eternal values such as goodness, truth and beauty fall more and more away – and where we have been invaded by the ideology of relativism, which rulers, in creeping ways, use the same phrases as the rulers in Orwell´s novel, as if they had used it as inspiration (the nearest to an attempt of actually creating a new language, which implies some rules about what is considered as “negative” and “positive”, is probably the creating of the so-called Giraffe-language – see my article Nonviolent Communication as an instrument of psychic terror).

2) Quantum mechanics

There are especially two kinds of abuse of science within New Age:

1) The claim, that Einstein´s theories of relativity, and quantum mechanics, prove that relativism and subjectivism are valid points of views.

2) The claim, that Quantum mechanics, and Einstein´s theories of relativity, prove that classical physics (the age of enlightenment, rationality, objectivity) is not valid anymore.

Often you hear postmodern intellectuals use the following bullying of critics:

“that they are hewing to the ´objective´ procedures and epistemological structures prescribed by the so-called scientific method.”

This is used to term critics as old-thinkers, for example that their critique is part of a “patriarchal, racist, colonistic, eurocentric, cultural dominion discourse”

And: “How can a self-perpetuting secular priesthood of credentialed ´scientists´ purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge?”

And, in short: relativistic theories are actually themselves using classical physics to explain their own theories (for example by the help of the causality-principle), and that is precisely what quantum mechanics breaks with (read more about this in my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr).

3) Thomas Kuhn´s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I will explain Thomas Kuhn in relation with how he is abused in Neuro-linguistic Programming (see my article Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT)).

NLP is founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

The following claim by Grinder provides some sense of what he thinks NLP is:

Kuhn did not promote the notion that not being particularly qualified in a scientific field is a significant condition for contributing to the development of a new paradigm in science. Furthermore, Kuhn did not provide a model or blueprint for creating paradigm shifts! His is an historical work, described what he believed to have occured in the history of science. He made no claim that anything similar happens in philosophy and he certainly did not imply that anything NLP did, or is doing, constitutes a paradigm shift.

Also of interest are the grand claims about themselves, which make you ask: what is it in these peoples´ thoughts and theories that make them so great? Nothing. It is the Emperor´s New Clothes: the thought, that if you just tell the story, then it probably will become true through some kind of magic.

The Sokal Hoax

In the autumn of 1994 Alan Sokal submitted an essay to Social Text, the leading journal in the field of cultural studies. Entitled “Trangressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” it purported to be a scholarly article about the “postmodern” philosophical and political implications of twentieth-century physical theories. After review by five members of Social Text´s board, Sokal´s parody was accepted for publication as a serious piece of scholarship. It appeared in April 1996 in a special double “Science Wars” issue of the journal devoted to rebutting the charge that cultural studies critiques of science tend to be riddled with incompetence. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside review by a physicist.

On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in the journal Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense...structured around the silliest quotations (by postmodern academics) he could find about mathematics and physics”.

The article was stiched together so as to look good and to flatter the ideological preconceptions of the editors.

Sokal´s hoax is today acquring the status of a classic succés de scandale, with extensive press coverage in the United States and, to a growing extent, in Europe and Latin America.

The Sokal Hoax shows three important things. First, that dubiously coherent relativistic views about the concepts of truth and evidence really have gained wide acceptance in the contemporary academy, just as it often seemed. Second, that this onset of relativism has had precisely the sorts of pernicious consequence for standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility that one would expect it to have. Finally, that neither of the preceding two claims need reflect a particular political point of view, least of all a conservative one.

In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition: The Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt reported an anti-intellectual trend in university liberal arts departments (especially English departments) which had caused them to become dominated by a “trendy” branch of post-modernist deconstructionism.

Higher Superstition argued that in the 1990s, a group of academics whom the authors referred to collectively as “the Academic Left” was dominated by professors who concentrated on racism, sexism, and other perceived prejudices, and that science was eventually included among their targets – later provoking the “Science Wars”, which questioned the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic journals in the humanities were publishing articles by writers who, scientists argued, demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. Per the introduction: “A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity, of indifference towards the subject, not by studying it in detail, but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study.”

After analyzing essays from “the academic left”, scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. Gross and Levitt found it especially troubling that academic journals were not judging the intellectual integrity of the scholarship through peer review but were merely judging papers according to their political tilt.

Higher Superstition argued that for an article to be published in some academic journals, especially those associated with the humanities, it needed only to display “the proper leftist thought” and to be written by – or to quote – well-known leftist authors.

Thus, Higher Superstition was an attempt to challenge purportedly uncritical subjectivist thought, the validity of which otherwise went largely uncriticized. Moreover, the book served as an argument from scientists that the Science Wars were primarily fought by non-scientists who were pushing contentious claims about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity.

Sokal reasoned that, if the presumption of editorial laziness were correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideological obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of feminist and socialist terminology (see my article The new feminism and the philosophy of women´s magazines).

The content of the article

It is impossible to do justice to the egregiousness of Sokal´s essay without making account of some common themes that you find in almost all publications of relativism, no matter of the disagreements they might have in between; that is: what makes relativism into an ideology shared by the enormous group of people that call themselves relativists.

1) As mentioned: Relativists typically deride scientists for continuing to cling to the “dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, “that there exists an external world whose properties are independent of human beings, and that human beings can obtain reliable, if imperfect and tentative knowledge of these properties “by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological structures prescribed by the so-called scientific method.”

2) They typically assert that this “dogma” has already been thoroughly undermined by the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics and that physical reality has been shown to be “at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” In support of this, they adduce nothing more than a couple of pronouncements from physicists as for example Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, pronouncements that have been shown to be naive by discussions in the philosophy of science over the past 50 years (see my articles Quantum mysticism and its web of lies, and Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr).

3) They then typically pick up steam, moving (jumping) to one of their central theses.

According to where they belong within the wildgrowing theories of relativism, they have many different central theses (within New Age one of the more popular is New Thought and the law of attraction). But let us take one of the theses from The Postmodern Intellectualism, for example where they move to the thesis, that recent developments in quantum gravity – an emerging and still-speculative physical theory – go much further, substantiating not only postmodern denials of the objectivity of truth but also the beginnings of a kind of physics that would be genuinely “liberatory”, of real service to progressive (and also right-wing depending on where they belong) political causes. And here the “reasoning” becomes truly venturesome, as they contrive to generate political and cultural conclusions from the physics of the very, very small (in New Age it is typical “spiritual” conclusions).

4) Their inferences are typically mediated by nothing more than a hazy patchwork of puns (especially on the words linear and discontinous), strained analogies, bald assertions, and what can be described only as non sequitors of numbing grossness (to use a phrase that Peter Strawson applied to the far less culpable Immanuel Kant). For example, they move immediately from Bohr´s observation that in quantum mechanics “a complete elucidiation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view” to imply, that in such a situation, how can a self-perpetuting secular priesthood of credentialed “scientists” purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge!

The content and methodology of postmodern “science” thus provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive (or Capitalistic, if they belong there) political project, understood in its broadest sense: the transgressing of boundaries, the breaking down of barriers, the radical democratization of all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life.

5) They pepper their works with as many smaller bits of transparent nonsense, as could be made to fit on any given page. Some of these are of purely mathematical or scientific nature, or quotes from spiritual traditions. Others have to do with the alleged philosophical or political/spiritual implications of basic science – for example that quantum fields theory confirms Lacan´s psychoanalytic speculations about the nature of the neurotic subject, or that it confirms the New Thought and the law of Attraction, and therefore coaching and management theories about the blessings of unlimited ego-unfolding (political Liberalism/consumer-capitalism). Also that fuzzy logic is better suited to leftist political causes than classical logic is; and that Bell´s theorem, a technical result in the foundations of quantum mechanics, supports a claimed linkage between quantum theory and “industrial discipline in the early bourgois epoch.”

So the works of these people are often breathtaking in their combination of self-confidence and absurdity.

And this was precisely what Sokal´s Hoax was a parody on. Sokal´s article proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the “morphogenetic field” (a New Age concept by Rupert Sheldrake) could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. He concluded that, since “physical reality” is, at bottom, a social and linguistic construct, a “liberatory science” and an “emancipatory mathematics”, spurning “the elite caste canon of ´high science´”, must be established for a “postmodern science that provides powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.” Moreover, the articles footnotes contain obvious (to mathematicians) jokes, such as:

“Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ´pro-choice´, so liberal (and even socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.”

Sokal´s article proves that the editors of Social Text were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum mechanics, solely because it came from a “conveniently credentialed ally” (as social Text coeditor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted), flattered the editors´ ideological preconceptions, and attacked their “enemies.”

What Robbins and Co. Should have said, is that Social Text is a political magazine in a deeper and more radical sense: under appropriate circumstance, it is prepared to let agreement with its ideological orientation trump every other criterion for publication, including something as basic as sheer intelligibility. The prospect of being able to display in their pages a natural scientist – a physicist, no less-throwing the full weight of his authority behind their cause was compelling enough for them to overlook the fact that they didn´t have much of a clue to exactly what sort of support they were being offered (if you change the word political with the word spiritual, then you see, that the precise same is happening in New Age circles and in New Age magazines).

And this is what is at heart of the issue raised by Sokal´s Hoax: not the mere incompetence in the academy, but rather that specific form of it that arises from allowing ideological criteria to displace standards of scholarship so completely that not even considerations of intelligibility are seen as relevant to an argument´s acceptability. How, given the recent and sorry story of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge – Lysenkoism in Stalin´s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of “Jewish science” – could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?

But it is not only in Social Text you see this. You see it practically everywhere in schools, folk high schools, universities, continuing education and business communities. You are therefore forced to accept it, in order to be able to work and live in our society of today.

The most grotesque form though, is within the theory of New Thought (see my article The New Thought movement and the law of attraction). Here you see coaches/gurus in silk suits earn millions of money on repeatedly abusing scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification – or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist audiences and readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning – and mixing it with spiritual concepts (also totally out of context, and therefore abusing) in order to give their work some kind of “holy” meaning (see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).

The Sokal Hoax can serve as a flash point for a necessary gathering storm of protest against the collapse in standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility that vast sectors of the humanities and social sciences are currently afflicted with, and which therefore also is spreading without the universities.

As mentioned, I have myself been attacked by these people in very, very insulting ways, when I have shown my critical view on all this. I have especially been surprised over the reactions coming from people in the New Age invironment (especially from advocates of New Thought), who, in other contexts, almost is shouting about how big their love is.

And, it is always the same way these people react on critique, like if you turned a tape-recorder on. They always use the thought distortion Ad hominem move, no doubt because of the psychologizing aspects of their teachings (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions).

Also Alan Sokal was attacked in these ways. After having revealed his Hoax he wrote a book Intellectual Impostures, together with Jean Brichmont, where he examined the canon of French postmodernists – Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari – and systematically (with the use of objective argumentation) exposed their abuse of science. In the book he also writes about the reactions of the relativists.

As I have mentioned, then George Orwell´s novel 1984 seems to be a possible inspiration for these people. Alan Sokal mentions Schopenhauer´s The Art of Always Being Right: namely, enlarge your opponent´s target so as to make him look ridiculous. The relativists support the use of rhetoric, manipulation and even lies in order to force their message through, because, according to them, it is not facts, but the best story, which wins (they have actually written books about this). Relativism justifies it. Anything goes (there is a tendency to that objective dialogue more and more is being replaced by a subjective, coarse debate culture).

Sokal describes the reactions in the following way, which I will repeat below, because the insults are very semilar to the insults I have experienced.

Sokal categorizes the reactions in two kinds of Ad Hominem move:

1) Name-calling.

2) Attacking his alleged motivations.

1) Name-calling. Some of Sokal´s opponents seem to think that clever epithets can replace the detailed refutation of his arguments. And the insults are legion: “little school-teacher”, “cowboy and pharmacist”, “censor”, Francophobe”, and “purveyor of disinformation”, “gendarmer”, and even “a dwarf who resemble teenagers Game Boy all day long.” Still more extraordinary, Philippe Sollers asserts, in an interview paradoxically entitled “Answer to imbeciles”, that Alan Sokal´s private life “merit investigation”: “What is Alan Sokal like? What paintings do he have on his walls? What is his wife like? How is his beautiful abstract statements translated in their daily and sexual lifes?” So the insults are going on the same themes: that Sokal is an arrogant, mediocre, sexually frustrated scientist, ignorant in postmodernist science, and enslaved by a scientistic ideology (neoconservative or hard-line Marxist, take your pick). But Alan Sokal keeps his philosophical integration intact and is calmly answering: “Please tell me what this implies concerning the validity or invalidity of my arguments?”

2) Attacking his alleged motivations. Some commentators, instead of examining Sokal´s reasoning, attack the motivations, that they attribute to him. For example, Julia Kristeva claims that his book forms part of an American economic and diplomatic campaign against France. Isabelle Stengers sees it as a pure “commercial operation.” Vincent Fleury and Yun Sun Limet accuse him of seeking to redistribute research funds from the social sciences to the natural sciences. But Sokal answers: “Again this form of defence is curious: for even if my motivations were as alleged (and they most certainly are not), how could that affect the validity or invalidity of my arguments?”

Yes, we have passed 1984, and now we see, how frightening close to reality George Orwell´s novel is. The Sokal Hoax clearly shows the symptoms of The Matrix Conspiracy.

Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with mystical experiences

2012-01-11T04:33:00.000-08:00

To begin a spiritual practice is to begin a proces of awakening (see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with spiritual practice). In Zen it is for example said about the process of awakening: ”In the beginning mountains are mountains, and woods are woods. Then mountains no longer are mountains and woods are no longer woods. Finally mountains are again mountains, woods are again woods.”

This refers to the three forms of states the wholeness can be in: sleep, dream, awake. When the wholeness is sleeping, mountains are mountains and woods are woods. This is the reality of the ordinary consciousness (the Ego-consciousness). The ordinary consciousness can sleep in three ways: 1) the dark sleep, which is the Ego´s deep nightly sleep; 2) the grey sleep, which is the Ego´s nightly dreams and other dreams; 3) the light sleep, where the Ego is awake.

The three forms of states the wholeness can be in, can also be described as the personal time, the collective time and the universal time. Furthermore it can be described as the personal history, the collective history and the universal history. Time and history constitute the structure under your thinking.

This structure is also called the astral plane, or the astral world. It is a plane of existence postulated both by classical (particular neo-Platonic), medieval, oriental and esoteric philosophies and mystery religions. It is the world of the planetary spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body, either through the dream state, or on the way to being born and after death, and generally said to be populated by angels, demons, spirits or other immaterial beings.

The astral plane is connected with the so-called Akashic records. The Akashic records are a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence: the astral plane. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are holding a record of all events, actions, thoughts and feelings that have ever occurred or will ever occur.

The Akasha is an “astral light” containing occult records, which spiritual beings can perceive by their “astral senses” and “astral bodies”. Clairvoyance, spiritual insight, prophecy and many other metaphysical and religious notions are made possible by tapping into the Akashic reacords. They are metaphorically described as a library. They can be accessed through astral projection, meditation, near-death experience, lucid dreaming, or other means.

The Akashic records are the wholeness, and as mentioned: the wholeness can be in three states of spiritual awakening - sleep, dream, awake – which again can be described as the personal, collective and universal time (or history).

The collective history of the astral plane, is, as a matter of fact, creating a subject-field and an object-field, but this is not reality, it is based on a self-image and a world-image, therefore an illusion, a poetic work of mankind, as they both in Buddhist and Indian philosophy point out. They work fragmented in sequences in past and future.

The universal history of the astral plane, is, contrary to the collective history, an expression of reality itself, though. It is the Akashic records when not influenced by human thought distortions (see my article A dictionary of thought distortions). It is not human made. In Yogacara Buddhism they use the term Alaya-Vijnana, the common universal storeroom of consciousness, which doesn't consist of anything else than forms, the carrier of all latent possibilities and the store place for all accumulated tendencies. It is the foundation for the activity of the mind, and because it always both is changeable, dynamic, and at the same time a continuum, which is an oneness and homogeneous, it can´t be understood by the thinking.

Nonetheless the universal history is of linguistic kind, language, which however no longer is verbal, but superior, visionary syntheses and wholes, that work more in synchronism with the Now than in sequences in past and future. The thoughts of God.

Both the personal, collective, and universal history, are images in time.

We can now talk about two types of symbols and symbolizing. There exist two types of symbols, dependent on whether it is the collective images, or the universal images, which are lying as foundation for the symbol.

A mystical experience is happening when astral energies and content arrive to the consciousness, either from the collective images, or from the universal images.

When energy and content arrive to the consciousness from the collective images, then this energy, and this content, will symbolize itself. This is due to, that the collective images are in a condition of vague, diffuse, astral oneness. What is coming from the collective images therefore contains a much greater width and depth than the limitary, relatively narrow and clear concepts and classes of the ordinary consciousness. The vague, wide contents and energies from the collective images are therefore growing narrower in the meeting with the consciousness. The symbol is this quintessence, this shortened, condensed form of expression of the vague, wide collective material.

The other types of symbols are coming from the universal images, and therewith from reality and truth itself. All reality, which shall mirror itself in the superficial mind, will automatically symbolize itself. Again the symbol is a telescopying, a representing quintessence of the informationquantities, and the greater clarity, which are connected with reality.

Symbols from the collective images reproduce a more vague, more imprecisely, but richer organic astral oneness. Symbols from the universal images reproduce a clearer, more precise and superior astral oneness. The more vague astral oneness, or the more precise astral oneness, shows itself in symbolic form in the dividing, separating structure of consciousness.

Symbols from the collective images are known from the archetypes and primordial images of the dreams, from fantasies, fairy-tales, myths etc.

Symbols from the universal images are formed in the transition from the wholeness of the observer and the observed, to the separation of the observer and the observed. What reality in itself contains, is real in this dimension, not symbolic, not linguistical. But when reality becomes unreality in the separation of the observer and the observed, it narrows, looses clarity and light, is being muted to the split consciousness, and that – which in reality was truth – will transmute itself to symbols. That which is truth in reality and presence, is symbolic in unreality and absence. It is therefore very difficult for the universal images to communicate themselves to an ordinary absent consciousness. It requires, that you yourself do your part of the spiritual work.

So, there exist symbols both from the collective and universal images of time. Symbols are manifestations of these images. They are all a telescopying, a representing quintessence of the astral informationquantities the images contain.

Symbols from the collective images are, as already mentioned, shortened, condensed modes of expression from a subordinate, vague, diffuse and imprecise astral time unit, which moves fragmented in sequences in past and future; or said differently: in cycles. Symbols from here are known from the archetypes and primordial images of the dreams, from fantasies, fairy-tales, myths etc. To experience symbols from here is however not the same as directly (without the intermediate state of the symbols) experiencing the collective time´s astral images and worlds. Here the consciousness has to be in an astral state.

Symbols from the collective images are for example the cause of spiritual crises, clairvoyance, and channeling (see my articles Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena, Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with clairvoyance, and Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with channeling).

Symbols from the universal images are of a completely different character. They reproduce a much clearer, more precise and superior astral wholeness. It is from these symbols you can receive direct teachings about your spiritual development process.

When you have trained meditation and dream yoga in many years, a so-called divine being can visit you through a symbol from the universal images (Christ, Buddha, masters, teachers, angels).

Such a symbol is, as mentioned, a telescopying, a representing quintessence of the informationquantities, which the wholeness in a universal image contains. The divine being will in that way canalize information to you from the universal image, which, together with the whole of the universal vision, constitutes the dream-tracks and the songlines in the artwork of your life. The divine being (or other symbols from the universal images) will in that way help you to compose, to synthesize and interlock, what your inner thinker in the waking state has divided. But it is very important to understand that this nothing has to do with the channeling phenomenon, which belongs to the collective images. In order to receive help from a divine being you must be very close to enlightenment yourself.

Our suffering, our painbody is, through the inner evaluating ego, which the painbody is constructed around, connected with the more dangerous dephts of the astral plane´s collective history, which also are a kind of dark, ancient inertia, which opposes any change of the ego (see my article The emotional painbody and why psychotherapy can´t heal it).

That is also the reason why you, through therapy, can´t heal Man from the ground. In order to heal Man from the ground you need to go into a spiritual practice. It is only within the religions and their spiritual traditions they have knowledge and names for the more dark sides of the astral plane´s collective history. The West has very precisely called this factor the original sin. The East has called it negative karma. The concepts indicate, that the inertia projects beyond the personal history (growing up conditions, traumatic bindings, painful experiences etc.) and far down into the collective inherit-backgrounds of history (genes, environment, society-ideals, the archetypes and the primordial images of the dreams, fantasies, fairy-tales, myths, and finally: instincts inherited from the animals). It is a factor, which lies in the evolution itself, in the genes, in the collective subconcious, in the collectice history.

When therefore therapy requires a change, then the instinctive survival-preparedness in us reacts and protests. Man has survived on willfulness and a consciousness-structure, which mental and psychic sign is Egocentredness. The bigger Ego, the bigger survival chance.

Seen from a spiritual perspective, this instinctive survival strategi (the Ego) appears as a resistance, an invincible inertia: original sin, negative karma. You can´t, by therapeutic strategies, free the consciousness for its attachment to this inertia. You can therefore not dissolve or dilute or convert the original sin through therapy. Only the intervention of the Source (God, Christ, the enlightened consciousness) can basically help Man with a trancendence of the negative karma of the original sin. But in order to, that a human being should be able to receive this help from the Source (gift of grace), then this requires an eminently precise and profound preparation. And as part of this preparation serve the true spiritual practice within the religions (see my article The value of having a religion in a spiritual practice).

So, when you in this way do your part of the work, then you will discover that the enlightened consciousness (God, Christ, Buddha), already have cleansed the negative karma and taken on, and forgiven, the original sin. All enlightened teachers of this Earth (Rumi, Krishna, Francis of Assisi, Rabia, Meera, Yeshe Tsogyel, Teresa of Avila) are doing the same: they take on the original sin and are purifying it for us.

What is Dream Yoga?

Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with spiritual practice

2012-01-11T04:30:00.000-08:00

The Good, the True and the Beautiful, is the Source, which rays in all religions, though often faint, through countless thought-distortions. But through history there have always existed rare individuals, who experienced an inner transformation, and therewith realized that in themselves, which all religions aim towards. The various descriptions of this, basically same, indescribable ground-realization, could, in a spiritual practice, be:

a) Oneness with the divine

b) The ultimate fulfilment

c) The essence of consciousness

d) The naked consciousness

e) The enlightened consciousness

f) The Source of love

But in order to describe this non-conceptual truth in a more broad sense, they thereafter used their own religions as frame of reference.

Through some of these men and women there has in all great religions arisen a spiritual practice, which represented, not only a rediscovery, but in some cases an intensification of the light of an original teaching, universal and common to all mankind. Thus Gnosticism and Mysticism arised in the early and medieval Christianity, Sufism in Islam, Hasidism and Cabbala in Judaism, Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. But even older are shamanism and paganism; religious practices which I under one call the old religion and the old art.

Unlike the established religions then the spiritual practice presupposes no religious doctrine, ideology, myth or conception, though religion and supporting exercises often are used as a frame of reference. The spiritual practice puts its emphasis on realization and inner transformation. And it is this, which constitute the philosophical element in the spiritual practice.

The spiritual practice contains three important concepts:

1) Critical thinking (spotting thought distortions, created by dualistic unbalance)

2) Investigating the shadow (ignorance, the unconscious, the painbody, the cause of suffering, your own dark side, the Ego)

3) The spiritual practice (going beyond all ideas and images)

To begin a spiritual practice is to begin a proces of awakening. In Zen it is for example said about the process of awakening: ”In the beginning mountains are mountains, and woods are woods. Then mountains no longer are mountains and woods are no longer woods. Finally mountains are again mountains, woods are again woods.”

The collective time is a very dangerous intermediate area, if you not are very trained in realization and compassion. The collective time is the area where different kinds of paranormal (philosophical/religious) phenomena are beginning to occur in your daily life. It is especially the lack of understanding this area, that is due to my critique of the many incompetent spiritual teachers you see today in the New Age movement (see my articles Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality, and The Matrix Conspiracy). If you don´t understand what to do, when these phenomena arise, it can end in a spiritual crisis (see my article Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena). Though you might have paranormal abilities, then you, spiritual seen, not necessarily are sufficiently awake on these areas, and therefore competent enough to guide other people spiritual.

I have in my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist set up six steps, or phases in this proces of awakening, which are recurring in all the various wisdomtraditions. These steps indicate a common core, which in remarkable equal form occurs in all the directions. That is: some existential conditions, and some, common to all mankind, growing conditions, and growth levels, in the spiritual practician´s voyage of discovery into himself, and thereby into life itself. The steps are:

1) The separation of the observer and the observed

2) Religion and supporting exercises

3) Passive listening presence (wordless prayer)

4) Discrimination

5) Creative emptiness

6) The wholeness of the observer and the observed

Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with channeling

2012-01-11T04:27:00.000-08:00

Channeling is a process whereby an individual (the ”channeler”) claims to have been invaded by a spirit entity, which speaks through the channeler. It is claimed to be the ability to make contact with divine creatures and levels of consciousness, which is thought to possess informations of spiritual value for people, and through the body mediate communication from these levels.

The phenomenon plays a great role within the New Age environment.

Channeling is grown out of the 19^th century spiritualistic and occult environments, where special so-called ”mediums” received messages from for instance dead relatives and passed on these to a circle of people at special ”séances”. In this early ”channeling” the ability to be ”medium” were perceived as exclusive and something, which not all were able to.

The modern channeling-phenomenon, where you no longer speak of ”medium”, but of ”the channel” (that is to say: the one who channels), has roots in Theosophy, and its conceptions of The Great White Brotherhood, a hierarchy of spiritual masters (see my article The fascism of Theosophy).

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who is one of the founders of Theosophical Society, became in New York in 1873 precisely involved in the American spiritualist movement, where she established herself as medium and started to give séances. After the foundation of Theosophical Society in 1875 she started her first book, ”Isis Unveiled”, which was published in 1877. The year after she and Harry Steel Olcott moved to India, where Blavatsky started to receive ”messages” from so-called Mahatmas, spiritual masters.

After that Richard Hodgson, in his 1885 report to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud, and didn´t receive the claimed messages, but invented them herself, she moved to London, where she tried to recover after the scandal. The report has later been questioned, though. In London Blavatsky began her life as an author.

Influenced by the works of Madame Blavatsky, another theosophist, Alice Bailey, described the majority of her own works as having been telepathically dictated to her by a “master of the Wisdom”, initially referred to only as “the Tibetan”, or by the initials “D,K.”, later identified as Djwal Khul.

The theosophical influenced UFO religions are an expression of the modern making use of channeling with for instance messages from space gods and galactic masters.

Within the New Age environment channeling today plays a still greater role as one of the many rituals, and, contrary to the early spiritualistic forerunners, channeling is considered as an indwelling ability, which all people can learn, if they open their spiritual consciousness. In this way there is held courses and educations on channeling. It is therefore the same Consumer Capitalistic spirituality, where you can buy yourself to spiritual authority, which also is seen in all kinds of other connections within the New Age environment (see my articles Six common traits of New Age that distort spirituality, and Management theory and the self-help industry).

There are in that way many non-enlightened New Age teachers today – (they might very well have strange paranormal abilities, it doesn´t matter in this question) – who get authority by claiming, that their teaching, either is coming from a state of enlightenment, is being channeled from some kind of divine source, or are coming from clairvoyant abilities.

If such teachers put their teaching forward in this way, you can be hundred procent sure, that this teacher has a problem with ego-inflation - if he is not directly a fraud -and them there are thousands of within New Age (see my articles The ego-inflation in the New Age and self-help environment, and Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena) Why? Because no real enlightened master, or sober spiritual teacher, would argue in this way. True enlightened masters, or sober spiritual teachers, speak from their own source, and are always characterized by humility. Just look at Dalai Lama, who incessantly claims, that he hasn´t reached the full Rigpa, and that he is just a beginner. True enlightened masters, as well as sober spiritual teachers, are also always philosophers, who are giving reasons and presenting arguments to support conclusions.

Beside the already above-mentioned links, there are especially three problems with channeling:

1) The one problem is the thought distortion called Truth by Authority. Truth by Authority is about taking statements to be true simply because an alleged authority (experts, teachers, states of enlightenment, divine sources, paranormal abilities, etc.) on the matter has said/justified that they are true. A level of critical thinking is always appropriate, because the statement may be based on magical thinking, false premises, faulty reasoning, wishful thinking or vested interests.

People, who in their arguments/teachings, again and again, have to defer to some authority (experts, teachers, states of enlightenment, divine sources, paranormal abilities) in order to justify their arguments/teachings, are hundred procent on the wrong track, even if they should have some paranormal abilities. It is interesting to see, that true enlightened masters, as well as sober spiritual teachers, never do this. And interesting, that probably most of the many people, who have made a business of being clairvoyant/mediums/channelers etc., will fall for Truth by Authority.

3) Another problem is, that spiritual seen, then nobody can tell you about your karmacially structures, or your spiritual evolution. All people, models or techniques - clairvoyants, channelers, regression therapists, shamans, Theosophy, Astrologers, prophets etc. etc. - who are claiming they can help you karmacial – that is: with your spiritual growth - are cognitional and ethical delusional and deceptive.

The genuine karmacially structures do not lie in the collective time, but in the universal time, which work in synchronism with the Now. If the karma idea is used spiritual seen correctly, then the focus, instead of being projected out in something afar (past lifes, a guru, birth, the future, Theosophy), will be present in something very near, namely only in the most intensive experiences of this actual life, and after that: in this actual Now with its possibility of realizing your innermost.

So the universal images are lying as a kind of dream-tracks and song-lines in your actual life here and now. Only here and now they can be discovered. Only Man himself can find the progressive karma. The consciousness has the key in its life. It helps nothing, what people through a system may be able to think about the collective time, or fantasize about karmacially experiences and spiritual evolution. Many of these experiences (for example about past lifes) – and which have a certain reality for either the clairvoyant or the channeler – are collective fantasies (see my articles Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with clairvoyance, Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with spiritual practice, and Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with mystical experiences).

3) The third problem is the problem of pseudohistory. Pseudohistory is purported history such as Afrocentrism, creationism, holocaust revisionism and the catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky. Pseudohistory should be distinguished from the ancient texts it is based on. The sagas, legends, myths and histories, which have been passed on orally or in written documents by ancient peoples are sometimes called pseudohistory. Some of it is pseudohistory, some of it is flawed history and some of isn´ t history at all.

Pseudohistory should also be distinguished from historical fiction and fantasy. Anyone who cites a work of historical fiction as if it were a historical text is a practicing pseudohistorian. There are also writers of historical fiction who intentionally falsify and invent ancient history. A technique to do this is to claim to find an ancient document and publishing it in order to express one´ s own ideas. An example is The Celestine Prophecy, and The WingMakers story. A variation on this theme is to claim that one is channeling a book from some ancient being, e.g, The Urantia Book and Bringers of the Dawn (see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).