Woo v. Science: A DU Tempest in a Teapot [View all]

[99th_Monkey]

About 50 years ago, I took my first LSD trip. Together with the wondrous colors, hyper aliveness of trees, clouds, people, rocks, was a new awareness that took several days to come fully into focus. Undergirding the sensory tsunami of dancing energy patterns was some new piece of important information that would profoundly change how I viewed my world. In my "new" world the jig was up, there was an inherent sense of knowing that all things are intricately and delicately connected and inter-related somehow. Spirit and matter were no longer at odds with one another, and truth could take me wherever it led without my "science v. spirit" blinders.

This new insight, simply stated, was this: That there is nothing inherently oppositional or problematic about the seeming dichotomy of "science v. spirituality", because they are ultimately one in the same thing. The endless war of words about "science v. spirituality" is nothing more than a proxy war for those at the top of their respective authority structures seeking personal/professional advantage. Truth does not oppose itself, but humans -- when possessed by greed and avarice -- have an unfortunate habit of misusing truth to abuse one another.

During the intervening 50 years, advances in the field of quantum physics and string theory have pretty much confirmed the voracity of my experience on acid: i.e. that all things are alive and somehow interconnected in ways that cannot be adequately explained with the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, that there is life-force energy permeating everything, etc.

So please forgive me if I find this "woo v. science" kerfuffle on DU 50 years later to be downright laughable.