1991
Originally published in ReVision magazine
Fall 1991, Vol. 14, no. 2, p. 108-110
from UFODisclosure Website
We hear the expression “consensus reality” used more and more often to distinguish the conventional Western/Newtonian/Cartesian world view from other possible philosophies or frameworks of thought.
The frequent bracketing of these words in writing and conversation implies that there is one accepted version of reality that includes a social agreement about what the mind may or may not legitimately countenance, if its owner wishes to remain within mainstream discourse. Yet there is also a connotation of questioning or doubt in the use of the modifying adjective “consensus,” even a certain defensiveness.
It is as if the speaker, who may generally accept the prevailing paradigm, does not completely agree that what we have been acculturated to believe is, in fact, the only reality.
In order to carry forward my argument, I will try to define the dominant Western view of reality in my own words, appreciating that this may be an oversimplification.
The two pillars of this world view are materialism and mental dualism.
According to the materialistic conviction, all that exists outside ourselves is the physical or “material” world apprehended by our senses. Everything other than this “objective” reality is “subjective,” that is, belongs to the realm of feeling, the psyche, the spirit, or something similar.
Mental dualism is the ability of the psyche to experience separateness and difference, beginning with the distinction between the psyche itself and the material world. Dualistic thinking is characterized by the dichotomizing tendencies that we take for granted, such as stereotyping, the pairs of opposite words and phrases like good and evil, or black and white, that fill our language, and the insistence of parents that children learn to distinguish what is “real” from the products of their imaginations.
The materialist/dualist version of reality has proved useful for Western society in its attempts to dominate the material world, other peoples, and nature.
This philosophy has also led us to the brink of nuclear war - the ultimate expression of self-other division - and the extinction of many of the planet's many life forms, as human beings pursue their own material well-being at the expense of weaker humans, other animals, and plants.
The Western world view is, however, under assault due to a number of scientific discoveries. These include research that has demonstrated the paradoxical and probabilistic ambiguities of matter and energy at the subatomic level, and contemporary studies of human consciousness that have shown us that what we have previously accepted as “reality” is but one of a virtually infinite number of ways of constructing or experiencing existence.
It is a curious fact, perhaps reflective of the operation of some sort of universal intelligence, that the assault upon the Western world view is both scientific and exigent in nature. The Western view is contradicted by new knowledge of the physical world and the nature of the psyche, whereas the simultaneous urge to reject that view is demonstrative of imperative need in the face of the planetary crisis that humans have caused.
It is as if our minds are being opened to new realities in some sort of synchrony with the conscious and unconscious, individual and collective, perception that we cannot go on as we have been without destroying life itself. Science, need, pragmatism, and morality have all fused. The established version of reality no longer “works” in all the operational and normative senses of that word.
Stated more positively, facts that we are discovering about nature, and ourselves in nature, seem to correspond to the knowledge that will be required to preserve life and well-being on the planet.
The new paradigm emerging from the current discoveries of laboratory science and consciousness research is in some ways embarrassingly old and familiar.
This model embraces truths known to virtually all past cultures and most contemporary societies, however much the latter may be influenced by materialism and dualism in their pursuit of modernization, political power, and market advantage. How we in the West could have succeeded in forgetting this knowledge is one of the great untold stories of our time.
Essentially what we are relearning is that intelligence and connection are pervasive, not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, and that complex relationships exist in the cosmos, ones that we are only beginning to grasp. Whether or not we accept the holographic model (the idea that the whole is contained in each part) of the universe, it seems clear that the universe functions like a vast, interconnected information system, in which an action or thought occurring in one part has an unpredictable effect upon other dimensions of the system.
The central tasks confronting humankind at this critical juncture are to limit our destructiveness, to learn to live harmoniously in the natural world, and to discover the appropriate outlets for our remarkable creative energies. We will also need to cultivate, really to liberate, those capabilities of the psyche that allow us to experience the numinous in nature and to perceive realities beyond the empirically observable physical world.
In order for psychologists to help support the emerging paradigm described above, we need first look to our new profession. The fact is that academic departments of psychology and psychiatry, and even therapeutic models, are dominated by a mechanistic, dualistic view of the psyche based on the Newtonian/Cartesian world view.
Defenses and rigidly defined mental structures, compartmentalized divisions of the psyche, and self/other or self/object dichotomies are the stuff of everyday discourse in the psychology and mental health fields. However, change is occurring gradually, due to the influence of several factors: experiential and growth-promoting transformational models, the transpersonal psychology movement, the introduction of non-Western healing methods, a new emphasis on spirituality in therapeutic dialogue, and the feminist-inspired emphasis on relationship and connection.
But fear of subjectivity and "mysticism," confusion of spirituality with traditional religion, reliance on exclusively sensory/empirical or cognitive/intellectual knowledge, and habitual dependence on quantifiability for academic respectability and advancement have made the psychology professions particularly slow to move toward the new world view.
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