Ideologies and Conflicts

Cole and Suzanne, this post is for you.

How is an ideology formed and what makes us accept its contents as statements about Reality with a capital R? Recently friends of ours sent us the URL of a YouTube Video entitled Time and Objects are Co-created that built aspects of an ideology on the basic nature of reality. (Click on the link to see it!) On initially seeing it, you might react to it much as I did. It initially seemed to me to be filled with a hippy-like, otherworldly vapidness that you would suspect of being the sales-job of some guru. That was certainly my first ungenerous reaction. But then I started to think about it.   

As the video starts out, the speaker Rupert Spira, speaks of a person’s consciousness perceiving an object outside the person. He makes the point in rather mystical language that one can consider the perceiving mind, the perceived object, and the interaction between them causing the perception (say light reflected from the object into the person’s eyes and interacting with the person’s nervous system), to be a single system. Therefore in Rupert’s view they can not really be considered to be separate. This I think is mostly a matter of semantics, but thinking about perceptions this way does emphasize the way in which we perceive other objects. This kind of reasoning has led modern science to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, which have their own rather mystical character with distortions of space and time.

Spira then continues with the confusing claim that the distance between the perceiving consciousness and perceived object is unknowable. His exact language is “if we look for that distance … we never actually find the distance.” A scientist who believes that a person’s consciousness resides within the individual’s brain would say the distance is the physical distance from the brain to the object. According to special relativity this distance is a relative, changeable thing depending on reference frames, but I do not think this is what Spira had in mind. Instead he seems to be implying that the conscious mind is not localized in a finite space. “From consciousness’ point of view, experience isn’t divided into a subject and an object.” He then goes on to say consciousness is unlimited (his word is infinite) and can not perceive a limited object without limiting itself. Well, okay, this hypothesis of infinite consciousness is a religious statement that can be compatible with any of several religions, including christianity. [Full disclosure: I myself believe in something that has many of the characteristics of what we call a “god”. My belief is based on a heuristic proof using the “design” of physical law. See some of the popular works of the physicist Paul Davies for more on this.]

Spira’s ideas have much of the flavor of a creation myth, where an infinite consciousness (god) limits itself into limited, finite versions of itself that forget their essential infinity(individual human beings?) to create and savor the artistic richness of a universe of objects. In Spira’s universe the laws of physics are really the laws imposed by the infinite mind; the structure of physical law came about in the manner in which that infinite mind chose to limit itself. We certainly have no evidence against this version of reality and it might well be real.

I must admit that, put in the way I have stated it, Spira’s picture of the universe is very close to what I myself believe. It has aspects compatible with quantum mechanics and general relativity. Spira states, “prior to the conception of the object over there, there is no time or space present in which the object or event can arise. So they are co-created.” This sounds very much like the space-time singularity of the big bang.

On the other hand a skeptic may well be forgiven the objection of “Where is the evidence for all this?” Other views of reality that are compatible with what we know of the universe can and have been constructed. The fact that it is so easy to construct so many views of reality is at the root of ideological conflict. Conflict is especially guaranteed when one group’s ideology seems threatened by another group’s. Is this not why ISIS is so busy killing others who disagree with them, especially (so-far) fellow muslims? We can see exactly the same dynamic in the confrontation of the political Left with the political Right in all the countries of western civilization.

Yet seemingly intractable conflict between views of reality sometimes can be transformed into compatibility. I alluded to one such case in suggesting a possible, maybe partial, compatibility of the hard science of physics with the mysticism of Rupert Spira. Is there a possibility for a modus vivendi between political combatants? The final goals of the Left and the Right seem essentially the same: the peace and general welfare for our country, and more than that, for other countries. The differences in our views of reality cause us to disagree (sometimes violently), but do we not owe it to each other and to those who succeed us to at least discuss our differences?

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