 |
"As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish
the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth."
— Boris Pasternak |
(Special thanks to Dr. Julia Assante who also published the following at her blog,
The Last Frontier.)
As physical mediumship continues to
re-emerge into the 21st century and becomes increasingly more
familiar to worldwide spiritual communities, materialist skeptics are also
rising to what their ego-minds perceive as a challenge of some kind.
Who are these resistant and avoidant skeptics,
anyway? Do they need any more attention? I recently happened to re-read Soul Force, written by a friend and
colleague, Paul Olsen, (1933-2001) a brilliant clinical psychologist,
psychotherapist and successfully published novelist. I found what he had to say
about skeptics quite stimulating and share it here:
“Skepticism
is one of the most prevalent and damaging counterforces to recognizing the
power of the soul, a short-circuit par excellence of inner energy. It prevents
a living connection, and so it keeps us deadened, inert, checks our every
movement.
“The
problem with skepticism is that it has become an accepted position. It is even
supposed to label a person ‘smart.’ But skepticism is total passivity: you don’t
have to do, feel, or think anything at all to be a skeptic. All you have to do
is say No. You just have to be
negative. It’s an uncharged position, like a dead battery; it has no life to
it. It’s a wall trying to dam up a flow.
“The
‘position’ is accepted because it comes from the misuse and misunderstanding of
the scientific viewpoint which for decades has had us by the throats. It’s a
show-me position that takes the place of imagination with as deadly an effect
as a surgical brain transplant.
“Skepticism
is a position of arrogance—and it is utterly devoid of imagination and
creativity. No spontaneity at all. Yet how can such total passivity be so
arrogant? Precisely because anything so passive, so inert, so without curiosity
and a sense of wonder, finds itself cut off from its own energy—and so it lives
in a world of being acted upon by forces outside itself, and in its helplessness
it becomes arrogant. Helplessness—then it feels fear and becomes a dictator
that persecutes anything new and different. In psychology this is called ‘overcompensation.’
But kids peg it in a different way: inside every bully is a coward. The skeptic
hurts himself far more than he can ever hurt you.
“Maybe
at this point you might be asking: what about the ‘healthy’ skeptic? The person
who isn’t in the habit of buying the Brooklyn Bridge or getting set up by con
men? The ‘healthy’ skeptic hangs loose. The healthy skeptic doesn’t believe
everything he hears—but what he does is investigate. Not with the idea of
disproving something, but with the idea of finding something that may enrich
him. Implicit in the healthy skeptic is that he might find something, and so he
sets off actively. He seeks experience. Openly. And so he is not really a
skeptic at all. He just wants to do it himself.
“The
true skeptic will ... avoid exploration, the main reason being that someone has
suggested it to him. He will call it all nonsense. But how can he know it is
anything at all unless he tries? Obviously he won’t try, so therefore he knows
nothing. Or he will try only to defeat the purpose.
“It
is important for the skeptic that nothing ever happens.
“So
we can say, with pretty good assurance, that the skeptic keeps himself
deliberately in ignorance, in his dark trap. This idea is crucial for almost
all that follows. Skepticism is a position of inert, self-willed ignorance. It
is soulless.
“The
‘healthy’ skeptic, if you want to use that term, will try—with the idea of
experiencing something. And that is a position of self-willed knowledge.” (1)
The Italian mystic, Massimo Scaligero
(1906-1980) reveals many hidden ideas in his exploratory offerings about
materialism:
“Materialism
is our faith in matter. We do not know how to experience matter by means of the
concrete forces of thinking. Materialism is the most obscure mysticism, for it
purports to be the opposite of mysticism simply because it is nourished by
mathematical calculation and dialectical abstractions. It feeds our inner
weaknesses with the dead products of thinking. By failing to penetrate matter,
such thinking elevates it to a mystical reality without any awareness that it
does so. No bigot devotes him or herself more faithfully to the object of this
or her opiated faith than does the materialist.
“Materialism
... signifies the actual situation of present-day humanity. Materialism is the
uncognized and, therefore, the unelaborated basis of all the doctrines and
spiritualisms, traditional or not, which ignore the underlying process that
gives rise to material appearances. It shuns the task of confronting the
problem of the physical objectivity of nature: sensory perceptions and its
coming into being as representation. This is a problem that cannot be solved
theoretically, but only through the active penetration of reality.
“
A corresponding ... error, which leaves the authority of matter over us
unchanged, is to accept the physical world as it is, and matter as it appears.
With this error, we engage in abstracted experiments or calculations with the
physical world and material appearances, or we seek to transcend them
theoretically or mystically.” (2)
Some people are Skeptics with a capital S.
These Professional Skeptics feel it’s their job to remain closed in their minds
and hearts while retaining the right to question anything. Many of them include
scientists, who represent a very small minority of humanity on earth, but have
been placed on pedestals that raise them above the majority. This
misapprehension disempowers the majority, disabling them from assessing their
own valid experiences of personal reality. Science has given us brilliant
advances in many aspects of human living, but not without a lot of trials and
errors. The facets of truth that science presents as dogma are often successful
in creating distractions from those with alternate viewpoints. Yet scientific
history consistently reveals the inevitable result of radical exchanges of such
dogma. Former universally accepted and supposedly proven axioms are continually
replaced by new discoveries, which are then made formal by a collective
agreement of this minority. Such has been the course of mainly Western science
as it has evolved on earth. This is finally changing as science rediscovers the
idea of the energy we call spirit. Science is wonderful, amazing, and
necessary, and can provide a certain amount of insight into our existence, but
not all. Given the amazing changes in our scientific world-views over the past
one hundred years, can we truly think we can now put a cap on what is to come
in the next hundred?
Earthly, western scientific methods are
not derived from Nature, but from human minds that see themselves as separate
from it. But it’s not the only way of thinking about things. If something can
be seen, held, heard, smelled and felt, then scientific measurement can be
applied. If they’re too subtle to be detected beyond the senses, then they’re
beyond known scientific methods.
The materialistic reductionist models of
Western science have attempted to govern humankind’s world-mind for the past
two centuries. This is particularly exemplified in the dominant Darwinian
life-models. These reified theories have been less concerned with subjective
value issues, focusing primarily on objective experiences manifested by those
human senses that can be used to physically see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and
measure. Traditionally, materialistic science has sought to gather, weigh,
measure, compare, and ultimately predict and control aspects of our existence,
even if no under-standing of the phenomenon is ever gained. Value is seen in
terms of who can predict with the greatest accuracy, and thus who will have the
most control. The Global Madison Avenue, or the world of advertising, uses
materialistic science to assign value to whatever market they wish to control,
including their primary target, the mental market of the masses—the collective
ego-mind. One does not have to look too deeply to reach the conclusion that
most of our modern societal beliefs—and worldly ones as well—are created,
maintained, and controlled by the collaborative efforts of the media and the
Global Madison Avenue. Imagine what might happen if the same energy from the
efforts placed into creating and selling fossil fuel-burning cars was channeled
into communication with the Risen.
_______________________________________________
(1) From the
chapter “Freeing Your Emotion” in Soul
Force: A Step-by-Step Guide to Inner Strength, by Paul Olsen, Ph.D, 1978,
New York: M. Evans & Company. Quoted with kind permission by the author's
family. This book is freely accessible at an online archive at: http://archive.org/details/soulforcereleasi00olse
(2) From the
chapter “Forces of Opposition: Mediumship” in The Light: An Introduction to Creative Imagination by Massimo
Scaligero, 2001 (translated by Eric L. Bisbocci, Lindisfarne Books,)
SteinerBooks/Anthroposophic Press/Lindisfarne Books, 610 Main Street, Gt.
Barrington, MA 01230. Quoted with kind permission by the publisher.
