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I of my own knowledge…
Epicycles
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by Frank DeMarco |
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Once upon a time there were these things called epicycles.
They didn’t really exist, but astronomers believed in them religiously. They had to: They were the only way to make sense of planetary motion.
People have been following the motions of the planets in the skies for thousands of years. The patterns were well known. The planets proceeded steadily in one direction, then slowed down and appeared to loop around and go backwards for a while, then completed the loop and went back to moving forward. The planets performed these loops, these epicycles, according to a predictable timetable. The motion could be plotted in advance, and was, but nobody knew just why the planets moved like that. (I’d bet, though, that lots of explanations were confidently put forth over the ages.)
Then, about 500 years ago, came a Polish astronomer named Copernicus.
As everybody knows, Copernicus published a book that overturned ancient assumptions by saying that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Once we could see the earth moved, suddenly we could see the same data with new eyes. The observed motion of the planets was the same. The tables of motion still worked. But now we could see that the only reason it looked like the planets were looping around was because the earth itself was moving. Put the sun in the center where it belongs, and everything clears up! Where we had seen epicycles suddenly we see elliptical orbits. The planets still move as they did in ancient times, but now we know that they aren’t doing what they look like they’re doing..
Goodbye epicycles. You were useful but now we know better.
The trouble is, we’re still drowning in epicycles of a different type. Modern man is still inventing epicycles to make sense of data so that we don’t have to change certain assumptions. The materialist worldview misunderstands so many things that it is forced to create epicycles more or less continuously. That alone goes to show that its time has passed.
Materialism started off about 500 years ago as a revolt against superstition. But with time it has become entrenched and fossilized. It has created, and become trapped by, superstitions of its own. It has lost its ability to absorb new data and reinterpret its beliefs so as to help us make the world meaningful. It has in fact become an obstacle to human spiritual growth.
When a worldview nears the end of its period of dominance and another has not yet come into focus, the meaning of events and ideas are obscured and confused. Its successor is created not by making minor adjustments, but by reinterpreting what was thought to be known. That means, among other things, that a new worldview will take seriously what had been thought by the older one to be superstition or ignorance or nonsense.
Therefore the inauguration of a new era may always appear to be a surrender to the forces of unreason, or the enemies of faith.
That’s what we are living through today, at the end of the age of dominance of materialist thought. Materialist-oriented science has become an embedded superstition armed with the financial resources of the state, a mirror image of the medieval papacy that it originally fought. Religion has become dogmatic rather than instructional, faith-based rather than experience-based. And in seeking to create heaven on earth by political means, we have come a lot closer to creating hell.
To take them in order—
The materialist view has at least three manifestations.
The most powerful is called science. Science decides for the culture what is “real” or not. But although its adherents like to think of it as the organized result of an impartial search for truth, in fact it is a structure with powerful concealed ideological biases. “The search for truth” is actually systematically distorted by peer review and by government funding. When certain areas of research are seen as "disreputable," they become off-limits because dangerous to your professional health. Does this sound like the fearless search for truth?
The second manifestation, oddly enough, is organized religion. Western society today does not proceed from religious assumptions. Our society has lost confidence in religion’s ability to explain the nature of the world, or our place in the world, or the nature of the individual, or the purpose of human life. Since “science” defines what is real and what isn’t – and since, in practice, it mostly disregards as “merely anecdotal” anything it cannot measure – religions have been reduced to proclaiming dogmas, more or less on a take it or leave it basis. I suspect that the political rise of fundamentalist religions stems from people’s clear sense of the inadequacy of the materialist paradigm, together with an inability to imagine an alternative.
A third force, widely discredited now but not yet played out, is that of political ideologies. In a few more years is going to seem unbelievable that the 20th century, particularly, should have devoted so much time and attention to conflicting attempts to create a society without problems. In short, having given up belief in heaven, we attempted to create heaven on earth. In time this will be seen more clearly as the traumatized reaction to the social disruptions caused by the Industrial Revolution.
A little thought should make it clear that the way forward cannot be any of these separately or a combination of two, or even all three of them together. There is no point in putting new wine into old wineskins. That there are more things in heaven and on earth, etc. If it isn’t yet obvious to you that we are at the end of the materialist worldview, stick around.
The only way forward lies through some new Copernican shift based firmly on spiritual and metaphysical experience. But what that new worldview will look like, no one living can say. It’ll be decades, perhaps, before even the outlines emerge. The only thing we can be confident of is that the future will not consist of more of the same. Our current epicycles have taken us about as far as we can go on this tack.
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Frank DeMarco,
Author, publisher, editor, & psychic explorer.
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Frank DeMarco holds an M.A. in History from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in History from George Washington University.
His work as co-founder and (for 15 years) chief editor of Hampton Roads Publishing Company brought him into close association with many brilliant and insightful minds, including psychics, remote viewers, channelers and mystics, and showed him the human side of extraordinary abilities.
In 1992, his psychic abilities opened up at a Gateway Voyage at The Monroe Institute in central Virginia. Since then he has been engaged in first-hand exploration of the nature and limits of all things psychic, especially including such areas as healing and guidance, direct access to knowledge, communication with past lives, and the integration of the spiritual dimension into everyday life.
His autobiographical work Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality describes the first stages of his discovery of the key to expanded awareness, and offers pointers for those just beginning their quest. In his weblog, www.hologrambooks.com
wordpress.com, he shares the journey and the results of continuing explorations. His blog, “I of my own knowledge…” investigates what individuals can know first-hand about the purpose and conduct of life.
Contact info
www.hologrambooks.com/
hologrambooksblog
email:
muddytracks@
earthlink.net
www.hamptonroadspub.
com/blog
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