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Deepak Chopra - Hawkeye Crow - 01-02-2011
January 18, 2010
Deepak Chopra
Author, Sirius/XM radio
host
Posted: December 27, 2009
12:58 PM
Woo Woo Is a Step Ahead of
(Bad) Science
Read More: Albert
Einstein, Charles Darwin, Evolution, Fundamentalism, John Maddox,
Life-After-Death, Materialism, Michael Shermer, Neuroscience, Science,
Scientific American, Living News
It used to annoy me to be
called the king of woo woo. For those who aren't familiar with the term,
"woo woo" is a derogatory reference to almost any form of
unconventional thinking, aimed by professional skeptics who are self-appointed
vigilantes dedicated to the suppression of curiosity. I get labeled much worse
things as regularly as clockwork whenever I disagree with big fry like Richard
Dawkins or smaller fry like Michael Shermer, the Scientific American columnist
and editor of Skeptic magazine. The latest barrage of name-calling occurred
after the two of us had a spirited exchange on Larry King Live last week. .
Maybe you saw it. I was the one rolling my eyes as Shermer spoke. Sorry about
that, a spontaneous reflex of the involuntary nervous system.
Afterwards, however, I had
an unpredictable reaction. I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo
than the kind of bad science Shermer stands behind. He has made skepticism his
personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate
"those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on," as he
says on a YouTube video. No matter that this broad brush would tar not just the
Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who
happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed
irrational by the skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class
have made significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their
own right. Uh oh. No, they haven't. Their principal job is to reinforce the
great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.
Let me clear the slate
with Shermer and forget the several times he has wiggled out of a public debate
he was supposedly eager to have with me. I will ignore his recent blog in which
his rebuttal of my position was relegated to a long letter from someone who
obviously didn't possess English as a first language (would Shermer like to
write a defense of his position in Hindi? It would read just as ludicrously if
Hindi isn't his first language).
With the slate clear, I'd
like to see if Shermer will accept the offer to debate me at length on such
profound questions as the following:
• Is there evidence for
creativity and intelligence in the cosmos?
• What is consciousness?
• Do we have a core
identity beyond our biology, mind, and ego?
• Is there life after
death? Does this identity outlive the molecules through which it expresses
itself?
The rules will be simple.
He can argue from any basis he chooses, and I will confine myself entirely to
science. For we have reached the state where Shermer's tired, out-of-date,
utterly mediocre science is far in arrears of the best, most open scientific
thinkers -- actually, we reached that point 60 years ago when eminent
physicists like Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin
Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep spiritual questions. The arrogance
of skeptics is both high-handed and rusty. It is high-handed because they lump
brilliant speculative thinkers into one black box known as woo woo. It is rusty
because Shermer doesn't even bother to keep up with the latest findings in
neuroscience, medicine, genetics, physics, and evolutionary biology. All of
these fields have opened fascinating new ground for speculation and
imagination. But the king of pooh-pooh is too busy chasing down imaginary woo
woo.
Skeptics feel that they
have won the high ground in matters concerning consciousness, mind, the origins
of life, evolutionary theory, and brain science. This is far from the case.
What they cling to is 19th Century materialism, packaged with a screeching
hysteria about God and religion that is so passé it has become quaint. To
suggest that Darwinian theory is incomplete and full of unproven hypotheses
causes Shermer, who takes Darwin as purely as a fundamentalist takes scripture,
to see God everywhere in the enemy camp.
How silly. Shermer is a
former Christian fundamentalist who is now a fundamentalist about materialism;
fundamentalists must have an absolute to believe in. Thus he forces himself
into a corner, declaring that all spirituality is bogus, that the sense of self
is an illusion, that the soul is ipso facto a fraud, that mind has no existence
except in the brain, that intelligence emerged only when evolution, guided by
random mutations, developed the cerebral cortex, that nothing invisible can be
real compared to solid objects, and that any thought which ventures beyond the
five senses for evidence must be dismissed without question.
I won't go into detail
about the absurdity of such rigid thinking. However, the impulse behind
dogmatic materialism seems intended to flatten one's opponents so thoroughly
that through scorn and arrogance they must admit defeat, conceding that science
is the complete refutation of all preceding religion, spirituality, psychology,
myth, and philosophy -- in other words, any mode of gaining knowledge that arch
materialism doesn't countenance.
I've baited this post with
a few barbs to see if Shermer can be goaded into an actual public debate. I
have avoided his and his followers' underhanded methods, whereby an opponent is
attacked ad hominem as an ****, moron, and other choice epithets that in his
world are the mainstays of rational argument. And the point of such a debate?
To further public knowledge about the actual frontiers of science, which has
always depended on wonder, awe, imagination, and speculation. Petty science of
the Shermer brand scorns such things, but the greatest discoveries have been
anchored on them.
If you are tempted to
think that I have taken the weaker side and that materialism long ago won this
debate, let me end with a piece of utterly nonsensical woo woo:
Nobody understands how
decisions are made or how imagination is set free. What consciousness consists
of, or how it should be defined, is equally puzzling. Despite the marvelous
success of neuroscience in the past century, we seem as far from understanding
cognitive processes as we were a century ago.
That isn't a quote from
"one of those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on."
It's from Sir John Maddox, former editor-in-chief of the renowned scientific
journal Nature, writing in 1999. I can't wait for Shermer to call him an ****
and a moron. Don't worry, he won't. He'll find an artful way of slithering to
higher ground where all the other skeptics are huddled.
P. S. In light of a few of
the comments I would like to clarify something. I hold great value and trust in
the scientific method when practiced honestly. Also, I have nothing against
healthy skepticism which retains an open mind to future possibilities in
science. What I am really addressing here is the brand of professional
skepticism that Shermer stands for that borders on cynicism and which leads to
a rigid attachment to materialist science. It is the cynicism and prejudice
that refuses to explore the new frontiers of neuroscience, genomics,
epigenetics, information theory and the understanding of consciousness that I
am speaking to.
Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost...ep-ahead-o_b_404311.html
Deepak Chopra - Hawkeye Crow - 01-02-2011
You Are the Light of the World
posted by Deepak Chopra
Nov 24, 2010 4:00 am
Through second attention, you can perceive yourself as awareness itself,
not as one of its products and creations. There are many ways to catch such
glimpses: Meditating to reach inner silence; sensing the purity of nature;
sudden flashes of innocence; an impulse of love; an intuitive connection to
your muse; sensing inner guidance, a source of wisdom; a feeling that you
belong in the larger scheme of life.
Consider if you have ever experienced such things; begin to notice them
now, and be on the lookout for those moments when you can sense something lies
behind the veil of appearances. Even though we all live by first attention and
therefore lose our selves in constant activity, we are also equipped to
perceive the world through second attention.
Whenever you have a flash of love, innocence, inspiration, awe, wonder,
or joy, remind yourself: This is the real me. Don’t let such moments simply
pass you by. Stop and appreciate them, and ask that you receive more in the
future. In this way you open a feedback loop between first and second
attention.
You will continue to view the physical world as such, but its
significance will change. You will start to see consciousness at work, Being in
motion. In this way, the realms of change and non-change begin to merge. Light
starts to enter the world, until the world is eventually seen as made of light
and nothing else.
Adapted from The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, by
Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).
Deepak Chopra - Hawkeye Crow - 01-02-2011
The Purpose of Archetypes
Discovering archetypes is a highly personal experience. Vedic science,
the ancient wisdom tradition of India,
says that unless you can get in touch with that embryo of a god or goddess
incubating inside you, unless you can let that embryo be fully born, then your
life will always be mundane. But once that god to goddess expresses itself
through you, then you will do grand and wondrous things.
These days, we tend to seek symbolic archetypes in celebrities, but we
need to nurture a full expression of the archetypes in ourselves. They are part
of what creates us. This is the stuff our dreams are made of. This is the stuff
of mythology, of campfire stories, of legends. This is what inspires great
movies.
Mythology is the wellspring of our civilization. One of the consequences
of depriving people of mythology is that they join street gangs. Why? Because
gangs have a leader, they have rituals, they have initiation rites–the stuff of
mythology.
Mythological stories are the deepest wellspring of civilization and identity.
Gangs and movies and soap operas and celebrities are seductive precisely
because they strike this mythic chord. But they are second-class substitutes
for mythology. Real archetypes are enacted by people like Mahatma Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, anyone who reaches beyond daily life into
the realm of the wondrous.
They are able to achieve greatness because they tapped into the
collective unconscious, which gave them the ability to see several event lines
simultaneously and predict the future based on choices in the moment. These
events create a shift in cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. These are the
powers that bloom as myth.
Adapted from The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, by Deepak
Chopra (Three Rivers Press).
Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/the-pu ... z1945nJoh6
Deepak Chopra - Turin Otzaki - 01-02-2011
Through second attention, you can perceive yourself as awareness itself,
not as one of its products and creations. There are many ways to catch such
glimpses: Meditating to reach inner silence; sensing the purity of nature;
sudden flashes of innocence; an impulse of love; an intuitive connection to
your muse; sensing inner guidance, a source of wisdom; a feeling that you
belong in the larger scheme of life.
Consider if you have ever experienced such things; begin to notice them
now, and be on the lookout for those moments when you can sense something lies
behind the veil of appearances. Even though we all live by first attention and
therefore lose our selves in constant activity, we are also equipped to
perceive the world through second attention.
Whenever you have a flash of love, innocence, inspiration, awe, wonder,
or joy, remind yourself: This is the real me. Don’t let such moments simply
pass you by. Stop and appreciate them, and ask that you receive more in the
future. In this way you open a feedback loop between first and second
attention.
You will continue to view the physical world as such, but its
significance will change. You will start to see consciousness at work, Being in
motion. In this way, the realms of change and non-change begin to merge. Light
starts to enter the world, until the world is eventually seen as made of light
and nothing else.
Thats really excellent Haweye, made a lot of sense and is a timely reminder thank you.
Deepak Chopra - Hawkeye Crow - 02-06-2011
The sons of Genghis Khan gave the Dalia Lama his name; it means 'Oceans of Wisdom'
He is the eternal Buddha reborn, a rainforest to cleanse the Earth.
Who will be the next incarnation?
Deepak Chopra - Nu Lang - 02-07-2011
Dali Lama, from Tibet...
Mongolians went into Tibet and there after accepting it as a religion merged the Tibetan Buddhist with the Mongolian Shaman. Tibetan Buddhism has more elements of 'witchcraft' than other sects of Buddhism, if I am correct. I read about this somewhere just can't remember where, but things that resemble 'spells' , calling of allies (Bodhisattvas) and animalism are more related to Tibet than say inner China Buddhism or Zen Buddhism which is from Japan. Furthermore, the geographical similarities of Tibet and Mongolia made the two cultures feel a kinship. And I must say they also remind me a bit of Native Americans.
Deepak Chopra - Nu Lang - 02-07-2011
"Who will be the next incarnation?"
I was told it can't be a woman.
Deepak Chopra - Guest - 08-21-2019