I have it in mind to write something about materialism, and something else about fundamentalism. While it would make some logical sense to do fundamentalism first, since materialism is one of the most widespread and underpinning types of fundamentalism out there, methinks I’m going to start the other way ‘round. Not sure why, just feels right.
It occurs to me often these days that I’m in a funny position as a science teacher of some 20 years, who no longer believes in materialism as an article of faith. That is, I no longer take as fact that the basis of our reality is “fundamental forces and little particles”. I started to doubt it long ago, but in the last few years I really have shed, with the help of a little study group and some excellent books by George Adams and Olive Wicher, and Owen Barfield, some additional vestiges of whatever I was holding onto that said in my ear, “that’s all well and good, but really the universe is made up of subatomic force-particles that interact randomly and that explains everything you can see and experience.”
I’m no longer a spiritualist, either, since I now understand better than ever that nearly every kind of spiritualism is really cloaked materialism. That is, those that assert that the foundation of the world is spiritual (non-physical) are not actually saying anything different than the materialists. Just substitute “God and angels” for “Force and particles” and you're still talking about idealistic deterministic abstractions. There is nothing wrong with idealistic abstractions per se, as long as you remember the origin of the construct and don't get lost thinking that it has objective reality outside of your own participation in co-creating that reality (or believing in it, same difference).
What really distinguishes materialism is not the material. It’s not the atomic and subatomic particle theories or the Big Bang or string theory. The hallmark of materialism is cause and effect. This is still true even though quantum physics itself destroys cause and effect. It’s the foundational belief that all events must follow a linear chronological train of “this happens, and then because of that, this happens next.” That’s what’s no longer got me in its hold. And, it’s not that I disbelieve in cause and effect in the right context, since it clearly has applications in billiard balls and any physical happening that can be made analogous to billiard balls. It’s just that I no longer over-apply cause and effect to everything.
As Charles Eisenstein has written about so clearly in so many instances, cause and effect thinking is force-thinking. It makes a person feel that if they only understood the mechanism, they could find the right lever to pull to make something happen the way they want it. Finding that lever and manipulating it has been substituted for real understanding since materialism got us in its grasp (or we got materialism in our grasp) about 400 years ago. Real understanding as it was experienced prior to Galileo and as many are starting to experience it again today, is much deeper than being able to control. So materialism generates for people a false sense of security and comfort through the illusion of understanding via control. It’s what’s making so many people crazy these days, living in a world-view of control when everyday life butts in and negates the illusion of control for us a hundred times each day. We want the universe to follow logical (to us) patterns of thinking, and so we impose this thinking on the universe, forgetting that we got those very patterns from observing the universe in the first place (and then placed a flag there and declared, "this is how it really is, stop looking any further and interpret everything you see now based only on this reality." That's fundamentalism, I hope to write about that soon).
This doesn't mean I subscribe to relativism either. Believing that everything I see, believe and experience is being generated by me and that the outside world has no reality without my participation is like a kind of inverted materialism in which I become the abstraction in order to cancel out the existence of the real universe. Nope, you can't get rid of the world, and you can't get rid of yourself. Both are entirely evident aspects of each human's reality.
So, I teach science, but I try to do it in a way that doesn’t also accidentally transfer a mythology that I no longer ascribe to. What is a person to do, then, when one teaches about, for example, water? Well, water isn’t “just” H2O anymore, that’s for sure. How does one even approach the scientific investigation of something as mysterious, fundamental, and interconnected as water? This is what I’m joyfully wrestling with right now in preparation for teaching some 8th graders in March.
Try answering these questions for yourself in your mind for a few minutes:
What memories do you have of playing with water?
How do you know you are looking at water when you look at it?
How do you know you are feeling water when you feel it?
What forms have you seen water take? Is it right to call all of these water?
What does water do in nature, what roles does it take?
What does water do in our bodies and in the bodies of other living things, what roles does it take?
How is water’s behavior lawful and predictable, and how is it mysterious and not understandable in our current way of thinking?
This last question is anathema to science today, because it assumes cause and effect, and furthermore assumes that everything can (eventually) be understood from the lens of scientific understanding. But scientific understanding excludes mystery as unscientific. Perhaps you see the trouble now. If mystery is excluded, then a whole bunch of water’s actual behavior that we observe every day is "unscientific", meaning "to be ignored".
Why does water leaps backwards (against the flow) in a stream so often, and how does this explain the remarkable ability of salmon to swim upstream? What color is water??? When you look at a puddle of water, what are you really seeing that signals for you “water” (it’s often images of the surroundings reflected, or images of objects distorted). When water swirls around a paddle drawn through the water, or around a whale’s dorsal fin, why does it make the patterns it makes? How is the behavior of water reflected in the shapes of fishes' and other creatures' bodies? Why does water hold more oxygen at colder temperatures and how does this support all life on earth? Why does water expand when it approaches freezing temperatures, contrary to nearly every other substance in the known universe (which is why water ice floats on top of liquid water)? How does a tree get water to flow upward, sometimes hundreds of feet against gravity? How does water make you feel clean and new when you bathe in it?
I’ve tried to write the above questions in a way that will make it hard for you to Google the answers, although I'm sure you could input them and get something that seems like “an answer”. Google is the supreme materialist construction, the assumption that you can type your question in a little box and the box will deliver the answer. This is the smokescreen that materialism hides behind, it gives what seems like an answer, but is in fact a slight-of-hand that quickly moves to talking about molecular forces and particles (or spiritual forces and angels, or whatever). The above are just a tiny list of what I contend are truly scientific questions that a materialist worldview just can’t answer sufficiently, although it will try.
Science as an approach (careful repeated observation of a phenomena, sharing results transparently with others in a way that they can independently verify) is entirely valid. But science has accrued a hefty weight of dictatorial materialistic authoritativeness that, like any fundamentalism, does not serve science or humans or any authentic inquiry into nature. And, unfortunately, as long as we inquire into nature using materialism as our primary lens, we will keep forcing nature to fit our thinking, and we will continue to cause terrible damage in the process. Not irreparable damage (as water also has the quality of cleansing, scouring and resetting damaged landscapes), but terrible damage.
I used to teach about water with plenty of time spent working on the questions above. Now, what I want to do is that, but more of it, plus: first, no longer assuming that the answers are findable in the first place (because, mystery); and second, no longer assuming that the answers are in any way traceable to atoms, molecules, particles, cause and effect, etc. Anyone who studies water with anything like fair-mindedness and tries to put aside bias has to admit mystery, and even magic. There is a reason water ceremonies have been central to human religious practice for time immemorial. There is a reason that the bible story of Genesis has God "moving over the waters of the deep" before the creating got underway.
Science can be redeemed from "scientism", which is what I call the materialistic obsession with cause and effect thinking described above. Water can be redeemed from the profane way we typically study it, and the profane way we typically treat it. The starting point may be to realize that water is crucial to life and life is crucial to water. The two are intertwined like braids of currents down a flowing stream. Therefore, while water may be able to be transformed into two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by application of an electric current, this is simply kicking the ball down the road of what, really, we are going to study and pay attention to. Are we going to pay attention to water, or to the so-called constituent gasses? Are we going to pay attention to the gasses, or to their physical properties while imagining that those gasses are “really” billiard balls? Or, will we keep our attention on water, real water in all of its manifestations in one's actual life experience, and this will lead us to pay attention to life which is built upon water?
Will we realize that living things of all kinds permeate the universe (see my previous essay about the Sun and the pulsating living universe for a more expanded view on the notion of "living"), and the body of all living things have “chosen” as their vehicle of material manifestation, this mysterious, dousing, sloshing, waving, powerful Being, water? The universe itself, then, is not just a Void or empty space filled with matter, which creates water, which creates life. And it’s also not just a spiritual hierarchy filled with God and the angels which manifests material water, which creates life. Both of these images place the Void or the Angels in primary position in the cause and effect way of thinking. Both have validity within their own abstract constructions, but neither of them completely explain nor collapse the mystery of water. The alternative is that one can utilize but not get lost in the abstractions and can keep giving attention to the water. By doing so, one is, depending on one’s approach and chosen lens of the moment, perhaps seeing the effects of both the particles and the angels, the substance and the spirit; or neither, and seeing something totally new that doesn’t fit either world-view.
And to go one step further one could realize that one’s thinking itself that is being brought to bear on understanding the water (and thereby something about the world), has been borne along on its own watery waves; physically (in the sense of one's own pulsing watery blood, and the completely still and calm water that the brain floats within) and mentally (in the sense of the watery qualities one experiences all the time in one's thinking, the eddies and currents of thought itself). This very moment of contemplation you as a human being are attempting, is a water-being contemplating water, a reunion of the inner world and the outer, neither taking precedence over the other, neither the cause nor the effect. And one realizes that true understanding surrenders to mystery, does not impose control, and yet finds wherever it looks a Being: Water, active both within and without, neither constrained to the physical nor the spiritual. And certainly not constrained to cause and effect or linear time, because Water flows; this is, I submit, one of the deep understandings of this Being. Water also eddies, communicates and cleanses, to name a few more. These are, I contend, entirely scientific statements that help one to recognize water and "wateriness" wherever one experiences it. Through this kind of working, one can really, continuously, flowingly, know Water, and thereby oneself and the world, better and better.
P.S. This has exciting implications for me in the search for extraterrestrial life, in that it is currently focused myopically only on the material signature of water, i.e. in the spectroscopic analysis of far away solar systems. We should be looking, however, not just for material water, but for watery-ness, the qualities of water. I suspect we’d find if we did this seriously that the search for life (again, in the broader sense in which I mean it) throughout the observable universe would suddenly get more productive and more interesting.
Photo by mrjn Photography on Unsplash
While I think it will take me several readings to fully take this in, I will say that for the last month or so since reading it I have spent more time paying attention to water... In puddles, on the windshield, in the sink and shower. To appreciate what it means to be cleaned by water. To have the water in me recognize water. So I've pondered water more than ever. And the idea of holding our understanding loosely so as not to try and force them into corners or to make them fit where they don't is helpful.