Soup is for Suckas

Okay this is my last food analogy until some other one pops up and I digress to the sundries to influence the typed word…I promise the last one for awhile. Let’s talk soup and stew, because quite frankly I think soup is for sucka’s.

Science is rooted in fact, not truth. Fact is an empirically proven circumstance based on a physical law. Truth is a philosophical premise and is not fixed such as a fact. Two plus two is four is a fact and remains constant. It is wrong to eat pork is a truth for a man of one faith and quite the opposite for the man of another. Science has little room for the philosophical.

Reductionism is the scientific belief system held as a fact by most scientists. It can be defined as: Everything in the universe, to include the universe, can be explained by understanding the sum of its parts and how they work. All these molecules, atoms, stings, or whatever, bouncing to and fro are not conscious or sentient, they simply are. The idea of a soul, of collective conscious, etc. is just mystical bologna and is not fact and is never truth. Even thought is an illusion of sorts, as the mind is nothing more than just a set of parts banging out electrical impulses misunderstood as consciousness and thought. Reductionism is, in the end, completely and utterly materialistic.

To the reductionist, everything is a soup of small particles and can be broken down to its ingredients and understood as such. Well my friends and fellow seekers of relevance, soup is for sucka's.

What the reductionist has failed to understand and taken into account for is the stew. Stew is similar to soup for sure, but to simply combine the ingredients, as you would with soup, misses the key to a good stew. It is the time that the stew simmers and slowly cooks. As the flavors leech out and mix and congeal to a new and wonderful mixture. The stew is much more than the some of its parts. It is the long slow intermingling of inner juices that flow out slowly and mix with one another that create the stew. The stew is your spiritual side my friends. The stew is the mystical part of man that science can not explain and the reductionist claim relies on midguided faith…using faith as a dirty word.

Here is the kicker, they require that you have faith that physical laws sprang from nowhere, that multiple universes exist, that consciousness is an illusion. All these things the reductionist dogma passes off as hard (albeit improvable science) with little in the way of being any more probable than any other unproved theory. That my friend is faith and it is a heck of lot more than is required for a faith in the mystical. The idea of my consciousness being an illusion is down right foolishness.

Besides reeking of the same flavor of fundamentalism held true by the religious groups, this system is intellectual cowardice of the worst kind. It covets falsehood if the truth or fact of the matter fall outside of currently accepted rules and syllogisms. Because something challenges the current DOGMA of academia, it is heretical. Sound familiar?

Dogma, be it scientific or religious, combined with fundamentalism, creates poverty of the material and the spiritual in a populace. There is not a division between science and spirituality. It is perceived at odds with one another only because fundamentalist zealots on both sides can’t see the foolishness of their single sided approach. The religious zealot sees only religion and the scientific zealot is equally as guilty.

It is the ancient wisdom of systems within the Craft and other Hermetic traditions that have ensured that throughout history, some small group recognizes the singular source of all things to include that of science and religion. Equilibrium occurs whether we choose to recognize it or not. When we live out of balance, we begin to convince ourselves that the side we see is the only side.