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, I renounce what I refer to as “rationalist fundamentalism” — i.e: the dogmatic conception of the universe as a lifeless machine. I’ve never understood how this conception is defensible by logic, or even by empirical measurement. I regard adherents of this view as identical to religious fundamentalists. And I have enormous disdain for their fanatical certainty that we know where the bounds of reality lie. Their willingness to dismiss anything that falls outside those bounds strikes me as, well, religious.I actually have very little issue with this on a personal level. Several of the closest people in my life are hardcore proponents of this model for nature. I find little need to argue with them, convince them otherwise, and make it an issue. But, like Pinchbeck, it troubles me that so much of the world has live in thrall to this outlook for centuries. And it’s never sat well with me that the default position of the culture I live in remains mired in the modern equivalent of the Dark Ages.
In his video post titled How Does Magic Work, Pinchbeck proposed that humanity may be at the cusp of an awareness around consciousness that echoes where we were at the earliest discoveries of electricity. I agree with him. Just the other day, in fact, I wrote to a friend that our burgeoning mastery of the mind-matter connection is “like a new form of electricity.” For me, there will be no love lost for rationalist materialism when we move into a new phase — or will there?
Might there be aspects of the modern-industrialist paradigm after all? Pinchbeck invited video responses to his video, so I posed the question to him.
Both Pinchbeck and I reference Rupert Sheldrake, whose work I can’t recommend enough:
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Video response to Pinchbeck's "future science of the psyche"