DELUSIONS — Pragmatic Realism

by Stanislaw Kapuscinski (aka Stan I. S. Law)

  DELUSIONS

  Pragmatic Realism

  by

  Stanislaw Kapuscinski

  PUBLISHED BY INHOUESPRESS

  KINDLE EDITION 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Stanislaw Kapuscinski

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  By the same author

  KEY TO IMMORTALITY

  [Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas]

  BEYOND RELIGION Volumes I, II and III

  [3 Collections of Essays (52 each) on Perception of Reality]

  DICTIONARY OF BIBLICAL SYMBOLISM

  VISULIZATION—CREATING YOUR OWN UNIVERSE

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE — PAST

  Chapter 1. Fundamentalism in Religion and Science.

  Chapter 2. Where We Were

  Chapter 3. What We Were

  Chapter 4. The God Diffusion

  Chapter 5. The Beginning and the End.

  Chapter 6. Why We Where: Phase One

  Chapter 7. Atheist’s Delusion.

  PART TWO — PRESENT

  Chapter 8. Fundamentalism in Religion and Science

  Chapter 9. Where We Are

  Chapter 10. What We Are

  Chapter 11. The God Diffusion

  Chapter 12. The End of the Beginning

  Chapter 13. Why We Are: Phase Two

  Chapter 14. Atheist’s Delusion

  PART THREE — FUTURE

  Chapter 15. Fundamentalism in Religion and Science

  Chapter 16. Where We Might Be

  Chapter 17. What We Might Be

  Chapter 18. The God Diffusion

  Chapter 19. The Beginning of the End

  Chapter 20. Why We Shall Be: Phase Three

  Chapter 21. Scientist’s Delusion

  POSTSCRIPTUM

  APPENDIX I — The Church

  APPENDIX II — Science

  APPENDIX III — Richard Dawkins

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGAPHY

  FOREWORD

  I am reminded of a story about a seeker, a man from the West, coming upon two Buddhist monks. They were sitting in a contemplative silence, some distance apart. After waiting for a respectful while, in an attempt to understand the Infinite, the tourist asked the first monk,

  “Is there a God?”

  The monk opened his eyes, looked with patient tolerance at the traveler and replied, “Of course not.”

  The seeker shook his head in deep disappointment. Yet, the scientific part of his brain smiled with satisfaction. On the other hand, having been trained in the scientific method he felt a deep void in his heart. His upbringing and training precluded the existence of the permanent; of something he could fall back on if all else failed, and in science things changed constantly—even the universe. But, he was a seeker; he refused to give up. After another while he approached the second monk and repeated the same question,

  “Is there a God?”

  The second monk opened his eyes, looked at the traveler with inherent compassion and replied, “Of course. I am.”

  It sounded like a Zen Koan. Or, in Master Hyakujo’s words, “The enlightened man is one with causation.”

  The seeker remembered: “The perceiver and the perceived are one.”

  Contented, the seeker went on his way.

  INTRODUCTION

  In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  American social activist, orator and agnostic (1833—1899)

  As you must have gathered, or suspected from the dedication, this book has been inspired by Richard Dawkins’s last book, God Delusion, or at least the last book of his I read. And this in spite of the fact that my hero seems quite unable to understand that in the USA, and probably in most other parts of the world, religions, for the most part, have nothing to do with the existence of god, only with political expediency. His determined, if justified, attacks on most religions, made me think that, after all, there is little difference between religion and science. I know he’d vehemently object to this sentiment, but so would all people who deeply believe in the righteousness of their cause. And don’t be mistaken. With the author of God Delusion, the destruction of all things that most people hold holy is a cause. A Cause Célèbre.

  Yet, one of many reasons why I admire Richard Dawkins is his inherent honesty. Having spent a good part of his book doing his damnedest to destroy religions, and even faith as such, he offers us the following statement:

  King James Bible of 1611—the Authorized Version— includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right… (examples follow). But the main reason the English Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture. The same applies to the legends of the Greek and Roman gods…

  Such sentiment is rare indeed, and very close to my heart. I would add to this selection The Song Celestial, the translation of Ghagavad Gita (from The Mahabharata) by Sir Edwin Arnold. His poetic translation from Sanskrit text is so graceful as to be practically unrecognizable from the Bhagavad-Gita offered us by His Divine Grace, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Probhupada, with its ongoing learned fundamentalist purports. The Song Celestial is as poetic as are David’s Psalms or, as Dawkins so aptly observed, “the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes.” And let us not forget the euphoria Jalaludin Rumi shares with us, his inspiration coming directly from the Koran. Any man whose translation fails to capture the spirit or the beauty of the scriptures misses the opportunity to raise the consciousness of the reader.

  Bravo, Dr. Dawkins! As Burns and Wordsworth and Salinger would say, you’re a Gentleman and a Scholar.

  The original title of my book, as you might have guessed by scanning through the table of content, was to have been “Pragmatic Realism”, but it sounded too much like a philosophical dissertation. Also, I don’t have any delusions about being a philosopher, fewer still about following any particular religion, or betting my life on the latest scientific discoveries. I guess, we are just all people who believe in different things.

  Yet, having taken some time to study both parties in the science/religion argument, it seems to me that they both carry equal force, and most certainly are equally as stubborn, equally as set in their ways, and most certainly equally as convinced that they are right. Nevertheless, the argument can never be settled, for the simple reason that one party argues from the intellectual and the other from the emotional point of view. I let you decide which is which, although don’t be surprised if, at times, the demarcation line becomes blurry.

  My learned ‘inspirer’ failed to mention what were the sources that, in turn, inspired both, the religions and the various sciences. Lao Tzu (the Old Master), Krishna, Buddha, Yeshûa, among others, men who did little more then try to alleviate the hardships of everyday life of their fellow men; who tried, through their own experience to show others how to be happy. And, by the way, not one of them ever claimed divinity. People who cannot live without an idol they can both, fear and adore, have imposed the title of god, or something akin to divinity, on them all. A strange predilection but, apparently extremely human, considering that those very masters did their best to dissuade their followers from doing just that. In a way, the great masters had all been Hedonists, determined to alleviate suffering from the human equation.

  To alleviate suffering here and now.

  It is indeed unfortunate that Mr. Dawkins spent
so much time illustrating how people, masses of misguided people, managed to distort their teaching, rather than giving equal time to explaining the beauty of the original myths. I say myths, because it takes a great effort to try to uncover the truths, which the past masters attempted to impart to us.

  In John 8:23, evidently growing desperate or at best frustrated, Yeshûa asks his disciples: “Why do ye not understand my speech?”

  This sad, desperate cry is still ringing in my ears. Unfortunately the followers of religions were just as deaf as the scientists of the day. And, it seems, both remain deaf to this day.

  Rather than enter into a preaching contest, I’ll attempt to show that we, being a very, very primitive species, are extremely likely to be equally as wrong, whichever course we choose to guide our lives. The religionists choose essentially the emotional path, the scientists the intellectual. Perhaps that is what Einstein meant when he said as late as 1941 at the Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion, that “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

  Atheists hate this quotation, assuming that because of it, Einstein was, or had been, misrepresented as a religious man. The problem they, the vast majority of the atheists, have is that of semantics. They have absolutely no idea what Einstein meant by the word religion, let alone by the concept of god. For the uninitiated, let me just say that the word ‘religion’ comes from Latin, meaning, ‘to reconnect’. The question is, to what?

  And there’s the rub! The atheists don’t know. Nor do most followers of various religions. Perhaps none of us know. Wasn’t Einstein a genius? Alas, he’s dead. He won’t tell us. But for those who have no idea where to begin their search for the answer, try listening to Mozart’s Requiem. It’s a good start.

  I’d suggest that we should not exclude an important part of the human nature while in the pursuit of knowledge. According to the old masters, we are fourfold-entities, integral in spiritual, mental, emotional and physical form. The first is responsible for ideas, the second for intellectual perambulations, the third for igniting those ideas with fire (to produce tangible results), and the final aspect that is little more than the consequence, or the result, which we may examine, carefully, to see how far we have strayed from the original idea.

  We are life, and life is a learning process.

  With regard to the intellect, I used the word perambulations with particular reference to science, in the original British meaning: to walk around (the parish, forest, or indeed, anywhere) in order to assert and record its boundaries. This is essentially what scientists do: they walk about, view, study as best they can, in order to record and assert boundaries of the object or idea they are examining. Unfortunately this approach is always limiting—it is setting boundaries. The better they define (the more dogmatic they become), the more they limit. This method, by itself, also removes the first trait of our make up, the ‘spiritual’ aspect. By that I mean that a scientist, by limiting himself to careful observation, precludes new ideas from infiltrating his dedicated purpose.

  In spite of theoretical physicists’ assurances that the act of observation changes the nature of that which is observed, the vast majority of scientists are satisfied with what’s was there, though already isn’t.

  A sad ‘observation’ indeed.

  Here again I chose to place inverted commas in the word ‘spiritual’, for the simple reason that I never met two people who agreed on the meaning of ‘spirit’. The concept, however, is universal. Here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 1997 entitled Spirit. It is part of my Beyond Religion II collection. The essay is based, in part, on a book by Lyall Watson, the Lightning Bird.

  People living in northwestern Transvaal call themselves Ba Sotho. All things that are special to Ba Sotho have moya. The Polynesians call it mana. Both words have also been translated as wind, air, breath, spirit, soul and even life. In the Christian tradition, the Greek word pneuma has been translated as spirit, as had the Hebrew ruach, which also means wind and air. The Hebrews also have a word neshamah, which they translated variously as spirit or breath. Paul Twitchell, who wrote extensively on ancient religions, equates the words spirit and life as being synonymous, while defining the essence of soul as spirit. Thus between the Judeo-Christian tradition and some later writing attributing its knowledge to pre-Judaic scriptures, the Ba Sotho have covered all possible meanings.

  But only the Ba Sotho people give us an insight into the nature of spirit itself. According to Lyall Watson, Ba Sotho regard moya as “the essence of nature itself.” Dr. Watson compares their vision of moya to electricity, as being powerful but as having no will or purpose of its own. They, the Ba Sotho, lay no claim as to its origin and suggest that, “it may simply exist.” A few weeks ago a friend of mine came to see me. His eyes were shining with a new understanding. “There is no difference between spirit and matter,” he said. He reached this conclusion in 86th year of his life. Were he and the Ba Sotho talking about the same thing?

  In my reality, the words spirit, life, and consciousness, are synonymous. There is no life without consciousness; in both flora and fauna life manifests in different degrees, but life and consciousness remain synonymous. No ideas can touch our awareness when we are dead (not to be confused with ‘spiritually’ dead, which applies to people who knowingly shut off this gate of infinite knowledge.) As for physical ‘death’, I never met a person who was dead and conscious. I challenge any and all scientists to prove me otherwise. Of course, having walked about the parish, I do not equate physical cessation of biological functions with death. As I mentioned, our physical body is the result, not the cause of our being. In later chapters, we shall discuss what our body really is.

  Don’t hold your breath… it’s not pretty.

  My only way out was to try and leave out both: religions and science from this discussion. But as I could not make my points yet leave out both, emotions and intellect, completely from the equation (there would be no discernible result), I decided to resort to Pragmatic Realism. I’m sure that you’ll find pages in this book where I appear to repeat the same maxims more than once. In my defense I can only plead that both scientists and religionists do so at least as often as I do, and, once again, I am unable to dismiss two aspects of my nature to sate your need for perfection. Ideas may be perfect, the resolutions seldom are. Contact me in a few million years. I’m sure I’ll do better.

  To make sure that we are on the same page, let us agree what we mean by Pragmatic Realism. There is absolutely no point in having a philosophy that does not support our view of reality. Thus if you wish to count yourself among people guided by a pragmatic approach, you can include in your philosophy only those assumptions that work satisfactorily, that are practical in the interpretation of reality as we understand it.

  Also, the ideas must be testable.

  There go the myths! Unless, of course, we can prove them, or at least some of them, as true. And the strangest thing of all is that if one eliminates the malignant growth, which religions have imposed on the original myths, more of them seem a great deal closer to the truth than originally (i.e. since the onset of the age of enlightenment began) imagined. In fact, science is only now beginning to find facts, which many a myth proposed millennia ago. One can but wonder what tomorrow might bring.

  Yet here we encounter problems with our nature.

  The problem with people is that, unbeknownst to them, they are continuously creating realities. The universe is an on-going process. Stars are born, and stars die. In this whirlwind of life, the religionists long to satisfy their emotional needs for stability, the scientists aim to satisfy their intellectual hunger for intellectual base, e.g.: the Higgs boson, sometimes referred to (yes, by scientists) as “the God particle”. The priests, monks, preachers and their followers are in need of a god who will reward them for their good deeds, punish their enemies and, ultimately, grant them a way out—an eternal existence in heaven. Eternal boredom?

  Scientists, on the oth
er hand, are in need of a reality that makes, to them, some sort of logical sense. Einstein needed order and harmony and expected to find it in his equations. Now, even the velocity of light is being questioned. Both, religionists and scientists base their reality on transient phenomena. Their realities have both, a beginning and an end.

  Pragmatic Realism needs neither. A pragmatic realist deals with events such as they are—not such as they want them to be. “I know… that I know nothing,” said a wise man 2500 years ago. At long last, our ever-erring theoretical physicists have reached the state of embracing their ignorance—the premise that there are possibilities, at best probabilities, but no dogmas. If it weren’t so, then the rest of eternity would be sheer hell for them.

  Let us return to the roots of modern pragmatism.

  The concept was (re)introduced in late nineteenth century by an American philosopher, logician, and mathematician, Charles Sander Peirce (1839—1914) about whom Bertram Russell, himself a philosophical heavyweight, wrote in 1959: “Beyond doubt (…) he was (…) certainly the greatest American thinker ever.”

  He, Peirce, postulated a maxim that an ideology or theory can only be true if—and only if—it works satisfactorily, and that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that impractical ideas are to be rejected. Here is the original 1878 statement:

  “It appears, then, that the rule of attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

  Perhaps it should be noted that concepts of pragmatism are already present in the views of some ancient philosophers, including Xenophanes, Socrates, and Plato.