July 20, 2014 (#1450)
"Cutting Through the Matrix" with Alan Watt
(Blurb, i.e. Educational Talk)
Evolution of Doctrines:
"Evolution of Doctrines says the Sage,
True at Advent, Supplanted with Age"
© Alan Watt July 20, 2014
Title/Poem & Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - July 20, 2014 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)
| cuttingthroughthematrix.com alternate sites: cuttingthroughthematrix.net , .us , .ca alanwattcuttingthroughthematrix.ca |
mirror site: cuttingthrough.jenkness.com |
| European site includes all audios & downloadable
TRANSCRIPTS in European languages for print up: alanwattsentientsentinel.eu | |
|
Information for purchasing Alan’s books, CDs, DVDs and DONATIONS: Canada and America: PayPal, Cash, personal checks & Outside the Americas: PayPal, Cash, Western Union and Money Gram PayPal Orders: USE THE DONATE BUTTON ON THE WEBSITE – AND – Click the link below for your location (ordering info): |
HI folks, I’m Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix on July the 20th, 2014. It’s one thing to feel bored… People feel bored even when they’re working, because work is often very boring in the first place, isn’t it. But we find that we’re bored even with all the entertainment, masses of entertainment which is churned out incessantly for us to lap up. Through entertainment today primarily we get the moral changes, you might say, that we’re supposed to adopt. And most folk do. It’s very simple, monkey see, monkey do. I’ve gone through in many talks before the art of cultural manipulation, you might say, or the directed culture that we’re all prone to and always have been prone to, from the early days of course, to the Greek tragedies and things like that, into the early Christian morality plays, and on it goes into the Enlightenment period and then out came more dramas, more secular type dramas, until today.
We think we’re seeing more choices and ideas, but in reality they’re being carefully selected by those that select what you’re going to watch and see, and believe and emulate too. Yet for all this massive variety of things to pass your time very few people are aware of the significance of the big boards and committees that select what will be shown and what will not be shown to the general populations, and the heavy editing that goes on in all scripts and movies and so on to make sure we all have the same, in common, repetitive agendas pushed in our faces basically: the correct way to think, the correct topics to talk about, the terms not to use anymore, things like that. And we’re constantly being trained by our betters you might say.
So that got me thinking this evening as to what to talk about and I thought, well, since this is so prevalent and so powerful a technique that’s used on us all, we can go into some of the histories of the past. Why not go back even into the ancient times and go through that, into the Christian eras and what the early Christians adopted from the previous, say, Greco/Roman eras that existed and brought into their culture and so on, and how that developed down through the ages into even revolutions in some sense and into the changes that came along the way.
There has always been conflict of some form or another down through the centuries right to the present day between what is sometimes called the church and the state. It can be a variety of churches and the state, it doesn’t matter. The state often has its own agenda, but at one time it had to listen to the churches an awful lot more to do with morality, etc. But the more secular a society that we have the more atheistical we happen to be. And with the rise of science, we now have science, the church and the state, and we have these three choices.
Science, since it’s so well-funded and so well promoted through funding, has taken over from a lot of the other institutions which make up humanity in itself. And we must never throw churches and religions out the window because, as I say, down through the ages, even pre-Christian, there were still state religions of a sort which gave some form of moralities to the people. That was in essence the reason that a lot of them existed in the first place. Because people need a common code of ethics to survive if they are not to kill each other and steal from each other and plunder each other, etc. So you need some code to follow, a universal code that makes sense.
Now, even in tribes which didn’t have any complex religions you found similar codes of behavior and ethics to function. There’s always a basic set that makes it work, even in a small tribal situation. Otherwise, as I say, they’d have so many affairs and promiscuity, children wouldn’t have any parents to look after them, and poverty would increase and so on. So they had simple rules and regulations to try and prevent most of this kind of thing from happening. Therefore the family was promoted as a very powerful institution which had to have a lot of respect given to it at all times. Because if it’s not for the family taking care of their own and their offspring and their in-laws and so on, then you have a welfare system where the state takes over all those responsibilities, the family fades off into the background and the state becomes the major domo you might say.
The ancient Greeks, for instance, the philosophers often talked about the restlessness in man, that there was something in man, this spirit in man that made him restless, never really satisfied with everything he knew or was told or his circumstances, constant restlessness. Of course you can subdivide that into station in life, occupation, income, etc., which could add or detract from the various problems. So it’s interesting to notice that we’ve always had this restlessness in us. But at one time of course, in ancient times, you were allowed various opinions on what it was that you were seeking and therefore religions were kind of waiting in the wings to happen, when they came on the scene, when there was something new in them. And that was the key of everything, new revolutionary type religions. And people don’t see them as such; they think they’re perpetual and unchanging. But there hasn’t been one yet that had started off without changing its concepts as it got older and older.
The Greeks also talked about the difference between the state and the religion, or the spiritual life of the public too. Aristotle said that, in imperfect states there was a difference between the good man and the good citizen. He says, such a difference would disappear in the best state if the state worked upon it; the differences would disappear, and their, what they call, virtue and loyalty to the state and to each other would coincide basically. There has always been a conflict between the state and the people, or religion, in all ages actually. They form two different kinds of moralities, and one is of the state where you’ve got a station, you’re born as a citizen, in a class and all the rest of it, your station in life. And that’s a duty that they put upon you, to follow that station, very much like Hinduism in India where nothing much changes. Then the state also wants you to follow its duties, being a citizen, etc., of the state. And that conflicts often with morality of what’s called grace and perfection of religion, you see, and all religions seek some kind of personal perfection – other ones are more communal, mind you, and they don’t allow differences – but generally that’s what’s always been this thing within everyone that pushes them onwards, makes them ask questions, the spirit you might call it, this wandering spirit that makes you question everything and delve into things and so on, also has conflicts, as I say, with the state. Because obviously looking for perfection means change. Then the state has its own ideas of change, especially in this day and age where it wants to guide all of us to be good citizens, obedient, etc.
Our problem too with looking at the past is that many people have limited concepts of terms. They think that Gnostics were all the same, for instance, Gnosticism and those who were seeking perfection along a particular path. And certainly you would have groups of communal Gnostics, you might say, who lived together, agreed with basic tenets of their society and they became standardized after a while, and almost fossilized too. Things that don’t keep seeking perfection will become fossilized and more often an in-group type thing and very strict and rigid etc., even though they might start off as revolutionary.
There’s another code you might say too, the code of nature, which is in conflict, again, with many of these either spiritual or religious movements and that of the state too. They’re all pushing for certain particular changes, the restlessness within humanity itself, etc., the injustices and so on that go on all the time. We must always remember that there is no perfection, I would say, in leaders because leaders, especially in an economic system, tend to be of a very similar type of ilk. They have more of the psychopathic traits within them. They are out to aggrandize themselves, to gain lots of wealth and power, and publicity, etc; they love publicity. And they tend to be of a common ilk. And they can; psychopaths, by the way, can work together for their own personal betterment, as a gang or a group or a cartel or whatever it happens to be. They have a lot of sway once they become awfully powerfully rich, over governments too. So you get lots of different things in conflict as we go down through history to the present time, all competing.
You find that the law of nature is regarded basically as a code of morality and it’s binding on everyone, and reason is how you come through its code, by reason, which does not come through revelation, it’s just reason itself basically, the law of nature. Roman law really was a form of reason, or law of nature and it was called jus gentium basically. And Christian countries took Roman law for their law, especially in the States, so their Constitution was based on a form of government to do with Roman law. They thought that was the best kind possible for a form of republicanism, with elections possible, and the electional part was the only democratic part really there is in it. It still stands true today across most of the world. Even when the elections become a farce, much like the Soviet Union had Politburo A, B, C, or D, vote for one of them. It’s much the same today. Regardless of the type of party you’re voting for, they all have the same platforms: welfare, jobs, etc., healthcare and all these things, education. Always the same topics so they’re basically the same. But they themselves today are at the power and the sway of the big powerful organizations, private institutions, massive cartels, international corporations and so on, which constantly lobby them, get them into power by funding them into power, and then of course there’s always payback in one form or another for getting you into power.
But in Roman law, as I say, the jus gentium, you found it was a standard to which positive law had to conform, an agreed code of morality on which the state could be based basically. So therefore, that’s your form of legislation/law that you have today, which never works perfectly either. It’s often rigged and biased and so on; there’s many other things to it. You’ll never have real perfection. It only exists within the heart of humanity, not in the practice of humanity, when it comes into conflict, the law of nature. The law of nature too, remember, is for survival. Everyone must survive. And when your choices of survival are severely limited, as they are today because we’re all rushed into the same system, we must earn something called money, and with that money you’re then taxed back. Before all the taxes came in, especially income taxes and hereditary taxes and so on, then you could survive outside the money system on the land if you were left alone. And no matter how you lived, or what standard you lived in, you at least lived according to the way that you wanted to live basically. It was enough for you, you were happy with it. Today that’s gone and you’re forced into a standardized tunnel, I would call it, of conformity.
You’ll find too that the Middle Ages is not as tidy as our very thin history books, especially the ones they give today, would try to make you believe. There’s no doubt about it, there was always a conflict between nationhood and the king or queen, Empire. You’d find the Papacy too, the Vatican itself, always conflict. In the Middle Ages there was never meant to be total unity, in fact. There was an agreement that there would be a combination of different forces working together and sometimes coming into conflict with each other, but as I say, it was never as tidy as they would try to put out today. But there was a practical and theoretical synthesis of them all, at the time, for that particular period, which brought perhaps for the most people, for a while anyway, as they called it, the greatest good. The fewer wars they could have by a uniform religion, the better. But unfortunately when another branch of the religion springs up, a new revolutionary part of it, you’re back into conflict and war, etc. again. And along with all wars, most wars in fact are never done idealistically. They’re for economic purposes, and so again the psychopathic elements get in, on board with it, when they smell success and fortune for themselves on one side or the other.
Various Saints wrote about these problems in fact. And St. Thomas, if you go through his writings, made the accommodation between Aristotelianism and Christianity by producing an intellectual synthesis, as you would call it, corresponding to the practical synthesis of law of nature and the ethics of perfection, which of Christianity was initially based around, perfection. So he tried to create the synthesis for that too, to make it practical to live by these laws in a physical world. The ideas of order and unity and synthesis are dominant mainly through his writings, and partly too because they were so badly needed at that particular time of conflict and upheavals and so on.
Now, there’s also another side of all of this and that is the side of the closed world, where intellectual construction of humanity, you lived in a closed system, which is the completed world you might say. And you could feel secure because all your questions and problems were answered for you. Here’s what I’m thinking about, what’s the conclusion I must come to? And it must conform with what’s already given to you to conform to. Therefore, it’s a fixed system. Now, in a sense we’re going back into that today, with a closed system, where we’re told by scientific techniques what to believe, what to think, and you must parrot experts’ opinions all the time, not so much to think for yourselves. With all of these different areas of scientific technique, I include the morality and culture industries etc.; they’re all part of it. Educational and so on, they’re all indoctrinational and they all teach a form of conformity, a universal… That’s what ‘university’ means, universal belief or code of behavior and understanding, and therefore in practical ethics, etc.
Now, this idea of a synthesis of natural, the state, natural religion applied, nature you might say, for living in a physical world. And religion broke down eventually; it was upset by the Reformation when Protestantism came to the fore and questioned and attacked everything that existed. Very much like later communism came along. And even the idea of… basically the same kind of idea as we know as the Hegelian dialectic comes into play. It seems to be a common thing, this, in all revolutions, is that you get the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis comes out of them. It happens over and over again. And that was the whole doctrine basically of some types of communism and Marxism and Trotskyism, was that the young ones who took over would be more revolutionary than the older ones. You’ll find that even in the Old Testament where old Hebrews or their newer Jewish religion that came along, would stone the old prophets basically; that’s what they were accused of in the New Testament. So the old revolutionaries were stoned, they were obsolete, and they weren’t radical enough for the new; this is a common theme in all revolutions down through the ages.
So the Reformation, you might say, in all its forms of Reformation, attacked separation of the secular and the religious life. Monks were supposed to come out of their monasteries and nuns out of their convents, not giving up the challenge to perfection but to meet it basically in the ordinary affairs of secular life. So in other words, bring that spiritual aspect out of recluse into the open and make it work as an active thing in life itself in the natural world. That was one of the main tenets of the Protestant religion, when it first broke out; it was a protest against legalizing morality, which the medieval system had involved. And it was an assertion of the supremacy of grace over law, that the spiritual aspect would be the vanguard for the changes that had to come.
It also helped destroy the old basis of the social order and political order, of a form of feudalism, which was awfully prevalent too. Not completely, not altogether at the same time across the Western world, but it did succeed to an extent; it caused a revolution. Now, this created naturally a dilemma, and conflicts of how to be governed, and how to govern yourself, and how to survive as societies without all going off into anarchism and do your own thing basically where everything would break down. You find that some of the philosophers came along of course, that are held up today, such as Hobbes, or the Rastian solution which basically decided, claimed that the state should dominate religion and keep it in its place; that’s what they came up with basically. And it could tolerate it if it confined itself to a pietism which has no impact on society. That’s what’s happened today with the secular state. They allow you to have your religion as long as you don’t try to dominate the system altogether by your own particular creed and you do charitable works and things like that. That’s tolerated today. So that part kind of won out you might say.
The other side of the Hobbes doctrine, you might say, is that men should believe and worship in what the state determines they should believe or worship. I would call this political correctness, the moral guidance by the culture industry, and again a whole host of neuroscientists, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics on top of that. All the things that hammer us all the time on how to behave, how to react on certain topics, etc., what the state has determined today is the good and what is now the bad, often completely reversing what used to be good and bad. You can also find that if the spiritual side or a dominant church takes over then you can have conflict again. Because they believe that those at the top, those who are declared to be saints of the time in that particular religion, should rule and dominate all the courts as well, and court decisions, etc. And you end up with a kind of form of stagnancy and a stifling of thought or exploration of thought by such a religion. And they tried it in some countries and it eventually died out because the folk got fed up with it too.
Even in a lot of the puritanical areas of the world and where Puritans ruled they had enough of this indoctrination, heavy, heavy indoctrination where the rules had been preset and carved in stone you might say, and had no leeway for free thought or examination, or even applying to separate different individuals. Yet you will find in the early ideas of Puritanism, again a revolutionary spirit before it became fossilized you might say. If you read some of the writings of the Putney debates – they were really interesting to read at school a long time ago. They went into some of this, how many of the writings and statements of the early Puritans, who really believed they were the revolutionary force of the day, the experimental spirit they called it, and they believed there was more to be learned and more to be revealed all the time by following the Christian ethic, but also they combined it with the Judaic ethic which again is more fixed. So there was a conflict inside of it and eventually the law side of things, the legal side of things won out and it became kind of fossilized.
Early on one of them said, he says, I think it was one of the leaders of the Puritan society… John Robinson it was. I am persuaded, he said to the pilgrims who were departing for the Americas and so on, the Lord hath more yet to break forth out of his holy word, he says, more yet to break forth. So it wasn’t a done deal, what was in the Scriptures, there was more to be revealed the more you studied them and you would act upon them through the way that you lived and so on. So they believed that to be a good Christian was always to be working, like the sea and nature itself, things that were always in movement, not stagnant and fixed basically, and they were always pressing forward. Truth had to be sought, and eternally sought. And even when you found a new truth that cast the old one out because it was imperfect, your understanding was imperfect, then you had to adopt the new truth with its new perfections you might say, or understandings which brought it to a better perfection.
You’ll find of course in all revolutions that the youth, especially, are prone to adopt these revolutionary ideas either from various philosophers or whoever it happens to be at the time, who are pushing a new way. Because they don’t see the gray areas the same way. They haven’t lived life for one thing. They haven’t had their ups and downs through life and the problems in life. They’re also great to recruit for that reason for armies as well, for warfare purposes… Here’s the enemy, they’re terribly bad people, go off and kill them. And they’ll do that without knowing the background of those people that they’re going off to kill, and what led up to the fact that they were set off to kill them in the first place. So they’ll adopt new movements in the same fashion. They don’t become tempered and understanding until they’re older and wiser.
But truth initially in the Puritan movement was what you were supposed to constantly dwell upon, the seeking of truth, in life itself, all the understandings of life, and the law of nature, which also combined with what they saw as the law of God, and coming to all these different perfections through truth. It was in religion in fact that the notion of progress to infinite perfection appeared first of all, as I say. In the 17th century, the 18th century and onwards, science kind of took over, that man would be perfected through understanding of man and how man ticked and worked, and science would eventually have a dominant position over society in the social sciences, and the new moralities which would be introduced because of their claims or findings.
For a long time now you’ll find that through the education, the standardized educations, authorized educations remember that we have, free thought really is not a prerequisite at all. It’s not encouraged, free thought. You get your degrees and so on by going along with the preestablished thinking, ideas and theories more than anything else; you conform. But what are the political implications of these conceptions of change? And it’s assumed that the most precious things in a society’s life won’t stay put. You see, that’s one thing that it pushes out there, that change is normal, perpetual change, and that they’re bound to grow and develop in a way which can’t be foreseen, because of progress through scientific techniques, breakthroughs, etc. That causes an awful lot of… Again, it’s the opposite of the Middle Age man where his system was fairly closed, it was very simple, they felt secure, and he didn’t have to do too much worrying about anything at all in a spiritual sense; it was all laid out for him.
Problems always arise with followers and leaders. Followers often, long after the leader is dead in fact, will reorganize their belief structure and change it to conform and cause uniformity and force it upon other people too in a particular setting if they can get that power to do so. Then it becomes fossilized and often hated, because it constantly changes not for the good of the general populations. History is replete with this kind of thing if you really look into it.
But you’ll find that the assumption that the true democratic experience is comprised of, say, voluntary organizations and religious organizations too with all its beliefs in open discussion and agreement through discussion and so on, and distrust of compulsory organizations and its force. You’ll find that really with true free organizations, they have a distrust of compulsory organization, which again, is in conflict with the state. The state wants you to be uniform basically. So the democratic state as it’s called today is an analogy of a democratic religious congregation to an extent. And that’s all it can ever really be, an analogy of something, an ideal which the state itself will never allow to become reality.
The US came closer to the end product you might say, or part of the end product, this endless product of what Christianity was supposed to be, in that no one particular religion would dominate the state and there’d be a diversity of religions, although they’d have common agreements among certain things to do with religions. But it created a form of freedom and equality endowed within it; you were not supposed to hate someone because they were different from you in a religious or political persuasion.
You’ll find that some philosophers, one of them, Thomas Hobbes for instance, had a big impact on many of the youth of his day by what he talked about, about man himself and this restless spirit of man which was always seeking something, never feeling totally secure and anxious, etc. And from that perspective it agreed with the Puritans who also agreed with that part of it. But Hobbes went so far as to say that this was an evil thing, this desire, this restless spirit within him. He of course put a lot of his thoughts down in Leviathan, if you ever read it. You’ll find that he was wrong in many things too. He’s studying insects, etc., communes of insects… It cannot be applied to humanity. That was a big Masonic thing too. Even later on, even the Royal Society, which is a Masonic institution, you find that their first project – after they established themselves, in the open that is, they already existed prior to that – was to create a glass beehive and study bees, everything in its proper place you might say, all the classes doing the proper thing for the class and so on. So that was a common, common thing.
But you’ll find that Hobbes was wrong on so many things too. He thought that this fear of everything, fear of death and poverty and all the other things, which have always been there and more so since the advent of money and those who rule over it and decide what it is, and keep their own power by the use of money over everybody else. He said that the fear which imagination induces, induces him to a restlessness. He thought it was all fear based and fear driven, and the desire of power, after power was something that all men have, which really isn’t true at all. The psychopathic types definitely have that in them but most folk are not the psychopathic types. But Thomas Hobbes believed that man couldn’t feel safe until he has everything in his hands. He even believed that anarchy and war were the result of this restlessness in every single individual, rather than look upon those who tended to use the crowd, as we call it today, using the crowd. And really, this restless imagination is the only thing infinite about him really. Because he said that man was still selfish and that their sympathies, desires and passions were limited, just like other animals. Therefore he felt that basically you needed a driving force over the general population almost in a totalitarian way, you could say.
So this is a perpetual theme, not just with him but many others down through the ages, much, much earlier than him as well, that man is infinitely bad, all men are infinitely bad. You find that even in the Old Testament with the stories, etc., and many of the old Greek mythologies as well where people can be tempted to do the wrong thing but for their own personal gain. But Hobbes also believed that these fears, especially that of death in itself, which is well used by governments, you’re all going to die or get bombed or nuked, we’ll have to take all your rights away. He believed that that would be the end of this restless spirit, when all your rights and freedoms are taken away from you, you might say, and given to a Leviathan, this big monster, this system, that you might even say we’re in today if you really look at it properly.
Many really good novelists understood this well. You’ll find that Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, for those who have read it, a quote from it says…
we shall persuade them, the people, says the grand inquisitor, that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which This freedom brought them.
He goes on to say that,
Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone perceive His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"
Now, it’s really profound, that, because the social scientists at the top, the ones who work for the governments – really above governments, and massive think tanks that have more to say on how you’re governed than the actual governments do themselves – have been promoting this idea for a long time, that all of you, all of you are not fit enough to govern your own lives. So under this guise of socialism they’re putting through GIRFEC in Scotland, and other names for the same program in other countries, the idea that the state must rule from birth to death and guide the child right through into adulthood and throughout his whole life, and constantly readjust you along the way if you happen to have certain thoughts, or even ask certain questions, too curious perhaps on certain areas, which are now taboo, and you’ll be readjusted all the way throughout your life. That is really what the humanists, etc, have brought us to today.
Now, Hobbes was correct in that the new sciences, the understanding of man himself especially, would give more power to powerful institutions and those that sought power over others. Karl Marx also quoted Thomas Hobbes and said, Thomas Hobbes is the father of us all. Because he, again, thought that understanding and using scientific techniques and mathematics and so on, they would divine what human nature was. And by using physics and various other things too they could then control each individual for the perfect state, which would be a rather horrible place to be. If everybody was the same we’d be like clones of each other. And to an extent too that’s even encouraged, in the idea of the cloning of humans, into the standardized humans, Huxley’s Brave New World idea.
Now, Hobbes too, tried to apply physics, what they thought was a new science, physics, to politics. And many came after him with the same idea, you might say, with their different interpretations of this new science of physics. They held what they thought to be true through the use of mathematics, especially. You can go way back to Plato’s time too, he talked about mathematics as well. The Greeks were heavily involved in mathematics and geometry and so on to try to find out the applied or real constant unchanging things in this world where everything else seemed to change. Those things that change, Plato used to call the world of coming into being and then passing away. And through mathematics, as I say, there’s always a constant. 2 and 2 is always 4 regardless of how they try to change it in this present time with various kinds of relativism and so on. But things pass away, that was the key to it; most other things pass away and are liable to change. We’re born, we grow, we’re zestful, youthful and so on, and then you age and things change with you, you break down, and death, you decay.
The Greeks, in some of the schools, Socrates talked about the three different worlds in this world, three existences or systems in this world. One that Plato talked about was the world of knowledge, the second world, because of its very nature couldn’t be known, it can only be the object of opinion or belief or seeming, as he called it. You find that later on of course those who were into physics thought they could break down the distinction of objects, but they didn’t conceive that the nature of knowledge or science had altered, even when they were doing it initially in the ancient times. Plato thought that knowledge was distinguished from opinion or belief, not in being what we would call true but in being infallible. Infallible is the key. Man’s always looking for infallibilities, something that’s perfect. And unfortunately that idea of this perfection of infallible, the perfection, the total perfection of man is a scary thing. Because it would mean it would be applied to everyone, eventually, and we would literally be like robots in a sense. There would be no dispute, and remember, through dispute you really have good change at times as well; ideas come from disputing things. And we are full of ideas. Man is supposed to have ideas all the time. It doesn’t mean you follow them all, but you look at all the different possibilities, and it also helps to teach you where these possibilities would lead, good or bad.
But what the ancients were talking about was probabilities. They tried to apply mathematics in some esoteric schools to everything in life, right down to Bertrand Russell’s day. He talked about the pure logic was mathematics. He really believed in this. You’ll find that with Hobbes as well. Hobbes didn’t go into mathematics. He saw a book open in Euclid’s theorem I think it was, when he was middle-aged and he was so astonished by how this formula was worked out he was like a convert to a new religion and he tried to apply mathematics to everything, right up until he died much, much later in life; a devotee to finding truth through mathematics.
But in the 17th century the early physicists were, they were revolutionary. It’s very different from today with definite formats and laws to do with physics, etc. Then there were many paradoxes in physics, and ideas and theories etc. Descartes also talked about that. He was into the senses of man and he said that, they completely delude us about the nature of the natural world around us. Partially it’s true. Some of that is true. Your eyes don’t see what you’re actually… or you don’t interpret what you’re actually seeing. We do as best as we can through the eyes, through the nerves, etc., and reformulated in the brain like a TV camera to the screen. But often it’s clouded by what we want to see, what we’re thinking at the time, that doesn’t coincide with the thing that we’re seeing, can distort it too. And it’s very much apparent when you get to the scene of a crime and there’s 20 witnesses all with different descriptions of the culprits and the events and so on and so on.
Therefore modern science, they say that our perceptions of the world are imperfect in a sense. Again, they’re all into the same old revolutionary idea which began with religion, or expressed itself through religion, into the perfection of all things. And Descartes said that Cartesian first philosophy, this is what he called it, first philosophy, is the indispensable foundation of Cartesian physics. All the philosophies to do with that area must be founded on an absolute truth, an infallible truth, or else’s it’s false, all later deductions are false. That tends to go along with much of modern physics today.
He believed that Each separate proposition of science must be by itself distinctly apprehended and seen to follow inevitably from a previous proposition itself thus clearly and distinctly comprehended. It takes practice and care to know when we are "conceiving clearly and distinctly," and to learn to know the difference between such conceptions and unclear and indistinct apprehensions is the first essential of a scientific training. But when we do know the difference, we have only to be faithful to it to avoid error. Error arises because it will introduce us to give rise to answers to questions when we have not got the clear and distinct apprehension required.
But modern science, when you look at modern science today for instance, you can see… how completely erroneous this account of it is, and how entirely Descartes failed to understand what he as a physicist was doing. For Descartes' science was closely dependent upon and tied up with philosophy. …at the time. But as the new science progressed, it cut loose from philosophy. Philosophy had to be left behind for modern science to come into its own.
For it was in practice found that scientists holding opposed philosophical views could co-operate in scientific discovery. Discoveries in optics were made harmoniously by scientists some of whom held the Cartesian doctrine of the nature of light and some of whom held the Newtonian, and it did not in practice seem to matter. Hence science cut loose from philosophy until gradually the scientist came to regard the philosopher with a kindly and courteous but ineffable pity, and when anyone mentioned metaphysics it recalled a story about a blind man looking in a darkened room for a black cat that wasn't there. So you can see how the so-called sciences have altered and changed as they came along, first from religion and then from philosophy and then to what they call today the supposed true and pure sciences. But it’s never ever really been truly pure, even today, to be honest with you. I think you can’t… You definitely can’t, if you look around you today, see the distinctions of science in a completely different light from politics and political direction, cultural direction, and the way that we’re guided to go. They are definitely combined together.
Now another thing that’s awfully important is the conception of truthful change. if we say that a proposition of modern science is true, then we no longer mean that it is clear and distinct or that it is self-evident or that it is intellectually satisfying; we mean that the anticipation of experience implied in it are verified in the event. Truth becomes correct prediction, as falsehood is only incorrect prediction. That means that when we get scientific truth by the very method which Descartes announced as the source of error: by going beyond our evidence to a hypothetical assertion which only the future can confirm or reject.
And it’s so true, things are held up in science as literally a religious gospel truth, only to be discarded down the road. And many folk, remember, along the way, have got their degrees by following these various hypotheses, etc., and they were pretty well fake at the time. The problem with science too has for a long time been the specialization, you might say, of different areas of it, where they were closed shops. But now there’s interdisciplinary forces at work and there is more communication; therefore discoveries in one area can affect another area. So a true scientist will throw out his old ideas, that he held as gospel truths, to bring in something updated according to the new data, or new facts that have been discovered elsewhere to do with his particular field of investigation. So it doesn’t matter how much mathematical equipment they have and all the rest of it, new facts pop up which can discard so much that’s gone before and were believed to be true. And that’s a true scientist.
Today scientists, again, have unfortunately taken the path of being involved heavily in politics. We find the big organizations that are dealing with global warming, who are so well-funded, they live on grants, remember, scientists; they depend on grants. They smell the wind, where it’s going, where the grant money is coming, and they get on board and they become prostitutes for someone else’s causes. But they are well benefited for it financially and prestige-wise, that they don’t want to admit the truth that they’re a bunch of prostitutes. It’s so sad to see that but it’s true. They cannot be called true scientists when they have literally got on board with a new kind of doctrine, a religious doctrine, done through an idea, someone’s idea. Because it’s based on humanism, there’s too many people, how do we cull them down, etc. etc? That means the state must, and the world state for that must take over more and more responsibilities over the individual. In fact, the individual becomes the enemy. Never forget that, the individual becomes the enemy. You’re all guilty of something, say those who decide that they’re better than you.
Blake, when he was talking about scientists in fact, said that… Humble to God and haughty to man. And that’s been the attitude of the scientists for an awful long time, that he would accept certain things he couldn’t know from a creator type situation, a God, he’d accept that could exist, but everything else in the world he was dead on because he was a scientist, you see.
And In spite of his repudiation of certainty and infallibility... You find that Men nowadays say "Modern science teaches us," what "The Church used to teach us." The infallibility doctrine basically. We’re taught to obey scientists and believe them, even when they’re put out there for political reasons, we parrot what they say.
The layman's attitude to the pronouncements of science is well described in Hilaire Belloc... for those who have read it…
Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about!
So This is a revolutionary view of knowledge itself. You can never have complete knowledge on any particular thing. You’re only a product of your own time.
Now remember, all this started with religious ideas and metaphysical ideas. And down through history big changes happen but there were stable periods where people at least had an understanding of their place in things and how they related to things in the world; to them it felt a bit more secure in some ways, and a common culture. In the Christian world especially there was a kind of common culture. But that was really upset and went into upheaval during the industrial revolution basically and things changed with the advent of science coming in and experts coming in and all the rest of it. It threw us into a form of chaos, which in themselves too led to big experimentation, experiments like Nazism and Communism and communitarianism and all of these kind of things too, collectivism, that are still on the go yet in some places. They called this, this reconstruction of society, this reordering of society and upheaval, the great adventure.
Out of that came the idea too of democracy and a form of democracy based on old English law, common law. And there are some differences between that and the American law, for sure, to do with democracy but they have the same fundamental view which they took from the Puritans, that the state is only an instrument to serve society. That’s how it’s been for a long time but it changed over the last 30 years, maybe even since World War II, into a more aggressive all-powerful state unfortunately. So it’s supposed to be an instrument to serve society. Today it’s run by experts, and they keep telling us that experts run it all, etc., and we should do what the experts say. Community and the values of community really should be free, but the role of the state with its organized force is supposed to serve that freedom and now it’s destroying it, or dominating it through the destruction of old values; that’s fundamental.
So all great ideas, it’s like the road to hell basically is paved with good intentions, end up as institutions that first are lauded and approved and do the right things to the best of their abilities or restrictions, and then they fossilize into institutions which lose touch with the general population. That’s really what I’m driving at. But you find in the States, for instance, there were many people who wrote about this idea of the republican form of democracy and how the people had rights, rights, rights. That was pretty new actually for a country to have it written down what the rights were. In the British version it was more verbal, which can be changed all the time by lawyers and the meanings changed to suit the times too. But in the States they tried to put it down into a form, which would exist and be used for as long as the people could remember it and remember what they were. They were also aware that government tends to lose its revolutionary spirit, and its decency and its goodness, and become narrow in its thinking and more fossilized as it gets older. That’s happened too of course.
With all these different philosophers’ ideas that combined into the fact that the state, the governments don’t believe that man has the ability to govern himself, which is the ideal state of things to be, a form of self-government where you can decide what’s right and wrong. You don’t come in conflict with other people and make their lives hell, those around you, because of your belief. But you can have differences of opinion and accept that without coming to blows. So the government believes that man will never have a harmonious system and therefore they want to literally bioengineer all of us. And that’s what they’ve been doing for quite some time. They can’t ask for volunteers, naturally, because no one would come forward. So it’s done in ways that you don’t even know it’s happening. That’s the sad part of it.
It’s become more rigid in its view of this particular thing since World War I and II and into the present day, as they blame the masses for all the problems in the world. They never blame the fact of the big entrepreneurs that want the wars and profit from them, and from the psychopaths who helped to organize these wars into being. So it’s a rather sad situation that we find ourselves in, that you can have as many philosophers as you want giving new ideas out, or even regurgitating old ideas and updating them for the time, but until the state gets off the back of the people you can’t really have any real true freedom of any kind. We’re stunted now. We’re limited in what we can say, do, think and so on, as they pretend to give certain minorities, approved minorities, rights, that they’re really taking the rights away from everybody else at the same time. And that’s the important thing to notice, not what they claim that they’re doing, but what are they really doing, when everyone is limited in what they can say and do.
There’s never been such a monitored society as we have today. Every individual, it doesn’t matter who you are, even if you’re conforming perfectly to your indoctrination, you’re still monitored with your daily chitchats on your phone and your emails and everything else you do. You’ve been trained to put up all your information on different sites and that’s a good thing. You’ve been trained that’s a good thing, a normal thing to do, and it really has cut all the problems of the totalitarian state into a tiny, tiny fraction; they’ve got not much left at all. Because in a totalitarian system everyone must be predictable, and they do that by updating your profile, constantly, and eventually you will have knocks on the door when you change your habits and your routines. They want to know why. If they can’t find it from you by you volunteering to put things up on your net and saying why, they want to find out why you’re changing. What are you thinking about between this time and that time that you used to go to this club or whatever? What are you thinking about now? It could be dangerous, you see. This is what happens in totalitarian states. And today the totalitarian state has the advantage of having incredible, omnipotent powers almost over all of us when it comes to information gathering and spying upon the people. Spying is spying, there’s no nice way to put it.
American and English democracy, as it used to be called, if we can call it that, was…
the function of the State is to serve the community and to help to make it a community by removing the disharmonies and corruptions which hinder the common life. But we have to deal with a certain paralysis of will – and that’s what happens when the state becomes powerful – which is largely due to men holding on to an antiquated interpretation of freedom. Freedom, as it was always recognized, needs power, to an extent. You need the power to be left alone. But if we think of freedom as merely being let alone, then freedom and power are thought of as opposites, and power as a necessary evil.
In the US…
Roger Williams and his successors had recognized that the State was an instrument of power, and had sought to preserve the freedom of the centres of inspiration and growth by using power for a strictly limited purpose and keeping it in its proper place and at a distance. Power came to be thought of as a necessary but ugly thing, not pertaining to the beautiful free life of the churches and the colleges. In time some of their members came to thank God that they were not as other men are, even these soldiers and politicians. No doubt the soldiers and politicians did their moral dirty work for them but it was dirty work, and its existence was one of those disagreeable facts it is better not to see.
So behind all of this there’s always the corruptive forces too, and dirty and nasty forces. Power can’t help but have those particular forces. The toleration of society is, what degree of the dirty power are you willing to put up with? That really is what it comes down to. And the answer to all of this came with the Cold War and all the massive debates that went on, between those on both sides of the Cold War, on how to control future societies. And they’ve been implementing it for an awful long time, this changing of the human, each individual human themselves, to a form of conformity beginning with indoctrination, using the psychological sciences, etc., the training, and also bioengineering through food, water, and probably inoculations too, which definitely affect more than just your immune system with the high sciences that go into them.
So therefore the answer to disharmony in the world is to completely alter humanity itself, to be a good obedient servant. You go back again to Hobbes’ idea with the insects living in harmony. Well, insects can’t help it because they’re genetically programmed; they don’t have abstract thought and the choice of moral right or wrong. They don’t have that. They have no choice. They’re the perfect slave you might say. There are those who work today in the high echelons of society that have the same view of humanity, that that’s the society they want to bring in, where you’re all completely predictable because you’re genetically programmed to be so.
I’m trying to cram a lot of stuff in, really, to something that just came out of the top of my head tonight. But I hope you get some sense out of what I’m saying and understand how this applies to today, how things are becoming, the way that they’ve become, those involved of course, how they have come along this path to think as they do, the ones who want control over you, and to give you an insight too into the ways that we think. We all do think certain things in common, about certain topics. We have certain drives too, that all of us have, and these also influence our behavior as well and so on.
But there are also those who will not only use your questioning against you, if they can grab it and they can guide you into the correct or the authorized way to think and perceive this thing, but they can also use your own drives against you as well. A very, very perfected technique today with hyper-sexualization through the culture industry and through your training at school even. So you become a collage, you might say, by the time you come through schooling and university, of all the indoctrinations from the different sciences and how they’ve been brought to affect you. They churn out rather than freethinkers, they really churn out conformists who think because they’re disagreeing about certain things in public, they can disagree, that they’re actually freethinkers. They’re not freethinkers at all. They have far more in common with each other in their ideas and perceptions and deductions than they’d like to admit. And these are the people you should really start to fear because they have powerful institutions and they definitely think they have the right to do as they wish with humanity… always for the common good, remember, for the good of all, meaning total peace because no one can think for themselves, except the free men at the top, the wild men as Charles Galton Darwin called his own particular class.
So anyway, I hope you get something out of this and from Hamish and myself from Ontario, Canada, it’s good night and may your God or your gods go with you.
For more information please visit the web sites:
cuttingthroughthematrix.com and alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
|
Alan's Materials Available for Purchase and Ordering Information: |
|||
|
"Cutting Through" |
& |
"Waiting for the Miracle....." |
|
|
Ancient Religions and History MP3 CDs: |
& |
Blurbs and 'Cutting Through the Matrix' Shows on MP3 CDs (Up to 50 Hours per Disc) |
|
|
"Reality Check Part 1" & "Reality Check Part 2 - Wisdom, Esoterica and ...TIME" |
|||