Ignore the purposefully inflammatory title. This is a very interesting article for a few reasons. First, Chopra is getting at something that I dont think gets articulated very well in the mainstream. Dawkins and others in the New Atheist movement are proponents of the materialist paradigm. Reality is the material world. We are part of that material world and use our senses, a part of the material world, to understand it. Consciousness is the same as a rock, or cloud, a blue fish, or blue giant star. It has its own properties and is unique (as are all objects of the material world) but it is still understood as materialistic. We use our consciousness and senses to further understand this material world through various rules and regulations. That is it. That is the universe in a nut shell. Second, this paradigm is so powerful today that very few people can understand they are in a paradigm. A kind of hegemony is created where the walls of the outlook melt away and the limits taken to be actual limits of reality. As such, proponents of the pure materialist paradigm are people in a room who think the walls are the edges of reality and everything outside of it false. They do not understand they are submerged in a particular way of thinking. People who try and challenge this paradigm are seen as crazy, imposters, and perpetuating some kind of hoax since they do not operate by the same kind of understanding for reality. Others attempt to debate the scientific materialists on their own terms, and lose miserably. Modern American fundamentalist Christians are a perfect example of this. Listen to creationists talk. They attempt to use science and materialism to discredit science and materialism. God becomes an actual being with physical properties in this discourse, an actor bound to the rules of the Enlightenment. Hell becomes a geographic place, like Topeka, Kansas. Both emerge as utterly ridiculous, little more than straw men for atheists to use as punching bags. This outlook is so powerful that the journalist at Salon cannot even begin to understand what Chopra is trying to say. To him, the idea that there may be other ways to understand reality is totally alien. As such, the entire interview goes right over the journalists head. A fairly typical fate for writers at Salon, but in this case far more telling about intellectual assumptions than the abilities of the writer.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 19:44:33 +0000
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