You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know They're Blowing Smoke Up Your Behind

The preferential selection of certain ideas which give a unity and a coherence to one's worldview, is, in itself a sign of intelligence, but if these ideas are defended to the extent of putting them beyond critical study by not allowing the most essential among them to be examined, we must suspect that there is in fact some 'sleight-of-hand' involved, possibly because of doubts as to whether the whole position would be defensible if openly stated. --Robert Bolton

Yesterday a drive-by troll urged readers to pay me no mind about the weathergate scandal, since I am not a scientist. True, I'd be the first to acknowledge that psychology is not a hard science. But it quite obviously intersects with science in an irreducibly complex manner, and the whole point about reality is that this is the rule, not the exception. The most interesting (and prevalent) systems are complex, non-linear, and hierarchical -- the mind itself being perhaps the quintessential example. To try to reduce mind to brain is a non-starter, at least for those of us not scarred by autism or tenure.

But to exclude neurology, biochemistry, and brain anatomy is equally daft. The problem, however, is not this seeming dualism. Rather, the problem is in our insistence that reality conform to our assumption -- whether scientistic or religiously nondualistic -- that it must be as simple as the tools we use to explore it.

Again, this is one of the fundamental errors of the scientific materialist, who confuses method with ontology -- as if what we know isn't limited and even defined by the way in which we study it. In point of fact, the scientific reductionist has no idea whatsoever how mind and brain interact. Rather, he just makes the problem go away by defining it out of existence -- by what Bion called premature closure of the psychic field.

Back briefly to yesterday's drive-by troll; no, I am not a scientist. But I am, conveniently, a forensic psychologist, so I've spent many years gleefully blowing the legs out from under attorneys and unscrupulous psychiatrists who try to defraud insurance companies by using the deductive method to prove that their client has sustained an "injury to the psyche."

In this deeply corrupt approach, the psychologist begins with the conclusion that their client has a mental condition, and then they retrospectively cherry pick "stressful" events from the workplace in order to support the contention that the mental condition was caused by work, or by whoever it is they happen to be suing.

In so doing, these hacks have no interest in gathering a serious history from the patient, since it will inevitably turn up other causes of their mental illness, and thereby threaten the source of their larcenous "funding." Nor do they undertake a serious analysis of psychological test data. Rather, all roads of inference lead to the Rome of cash and other valuable prizes.

It's frankly very similar to what so many defense attorneys do. That is, they begin with the conclusion that "my client is innocent," and then desperately try to impose a narrative in which this could be true. For example, all of that DNA can't belong to O.J. Simpson, because those gloves are too tight. Here we can see how a bogus empiricism -- hey, the gloves are a little snug! -- overrules a mountain of evidence and common sense.

It's the same with the gaia worshippers at Our Lady of Perpetual Climate Change. Temperature goes up? Global warming! Temperature goes down? Natural causes! In short, heads I win -- I am man of science -- tails you lose -- you are a science denier.

As Bolton says in another context, "the sense of standing on moral high ground is satisfying [to say nothing of lucrative] enough to discourage any attempts to look very closely at the validity of this position." This is a fine example of how the ego may merge with the superego to create an omnipotent "epistemological morality" that vaunts one's intelligence while sealing one's stupidity.

But again, this corrupt mode of moralistic thought pervades the left. Oppose racial quotas? Then you, sir, are a racist. Oppose socialized medicine? Then you are no better than apologists for slavery. Oppose the redefinition of marriage? Then you hate homosexuals. Question the settled science of climate change? Then you are a holocaust denier.

Now, what does this have to do with the book of esoteric theology we have been discussing, The One and the Many? Plenty. For starters, I would commend for your review Letter IX of Meditations on the Tarot, in which UF explains how Christian metaphysics reconciles the otherwise irresolvable philosophical antinomies of idealism <---> naturalism, philosophical realism <---> nominalism, and faith <---> empirical science.

(And if for some silly reason you don't have MOTT, see these three posts from last year: Herman's Hermits and Toots' Drawers, Naming the Nameless and Doing the Reality Dance, and Do I Dare Disturb the Obamaverse?)

Bottom line: when dealing with humans, it's always word and flesh, not either or. And when the flesh is as corrupt as the weathergate researchers, well, buddy... Not what goes into his melon defiles a man; but what comes out of his piehole, this defiles a man.

As Bolton writes, "The oracular and the irrational, if held with enough determination, thus lead inevitably to tyranny and violence, which is an additional reason why cultic thought like that of non-dualism should be critically examined." But again, please note that religious nondualism and scientistic monism converge in their denial of the ontologically real degrees of reality, i.e., the vertical plane of qualities.

And this is where the violence comes in, for scientistic or nondual monism can only be a complete account of man if great violence is done to man -- and therefore God -- which is to say, the totality of that which is.