 124. Philosophy � Greek |
The right hemisphere of the human brain was once the Ruler of Man, in early societies founded in the methods of magic, psychism, and a truly active and inward religious consciousness. But the method of psychic inquiry proved to have severe limitations, because of the variables involved in personal subjective processes and the competitive conflicts between societies organized around different historical accumulations of conventional religious belief. Therefore, the functions of the left hemisphere of the human brain began to evolve and to achieve cultural prominence. And now they are the dominant characteristic of modern verbal and analytical Man. But the results of the dominance of the left brain are equally as limited, troublesome, and psychologically devastating as the results of dominance by the right brain.
The right-brained or "oriental" Man enjoys psychic attunement with the World-Process, but he cannot differentiate himself sufficiently to acquire responsibility for his destiny in the natural world of psycho-physical phenomena. And the left-brained or "occidental" Man, even though he is committed to responsible analysis of natural phenomena and control over the laws that govern the World-Process, is incapable of the higher morality or disposition of self-surrender, self-transcendence, psychic illumination, and participatory Communion with teh Radiant Transcendental Reality that may be intuited to be the Truth of the World-Process and the Source of the Happiness of Man.
Therefore, we must awaken from our solid pose of intellectual superiority and our irrational belief that knowledge about the processes of natural phenomena makes a superior humanity. A superior humanity will not be derived from authoritarian scientific decrees, imposed through powerful technologies. Man cannot live happily, nor survive long, without the intuitive certainty of Transcendental Love, or Spiritual Communion with Divine Power, Bliss, and Purpose. Without higher religious consciousness (free of the dogmatic nonsense of conventional religious beliefs), the future made by scientific acculturation is an abominable fiction, a mechanical contrivance in which Man is, paradoxically, both satisfied in his desires and desperate in his being.
The Wisdom of transforming our disposition before we fail is considered disdainfully by the popular and intellectual mentalizing of this day. Everyone is endlessly chatting, comparing concepts, looking for consoling pleasures, fascinations of mind and body. Everyone is possessed by a lust for knowledge about the natural world and about the experiential mechanism of Man. But it seems that very few are interested in being Man at this present time. Very few seem willing to accept the discipline that is the totality of Man and to fulfill the destiny of personal transformation in bodily, emotional, psychic, mental, and Transcendental unity with the Radiant Mystery of the World-Process, which is eternally prior to all our knowing.
-Franklin Jones
Religious Stupidity and Scientific Genius
The age in which we live is culturally distinct from times past, in which tribal and nationalistic movements, founded in ancient popular ideas and ideals, produced society, and politics, and religion. The Age in which we live was brought into being with the worldwide emergence of the industrial technologies of scientific materialism. Therefore, mankind has lately been obliged to root itself in the disposition of larger purposes, and our concept of the future must be projected against the infinite scale of the total universe, rather than the provincial scaled represented by gross self-interest, ancient tribal and national divisions, or even the scale represented by the Earth or by Man himself.
The broad political, social, and technological movements associated with our Age would inevitably draw mankind as a whole into the most sophisticated universal order, founded upon the more or less exclusive and even esoteric influence of the sciences. I say "esoteric" influence because the knowledge represented by scientific disciplines is not truly popular knowledge. It is the kind of knowledge that, because of its special intellectual, educational, and industrial requirements, may be fully acquired and possessed and used only by the very few. And, therefore, since knowledge is the measure of power in any Age, scientists, along with their academic, technological, and political extensions in the common domain, are tending to acquire the positions of power in this new Age.
