Life, the universe, and everything

Hi there. My name is Michael Sharp. I’m a forty something male sociologist with degrees in psychology and sociology. I was born fire and brimstone Catholic, gave that up when I was eight, and existed as a happy agnostic till sometime in 2001 when the doors of the limited little box that I had put myself in were blown right of their hinges. It was a little bit of 9-11, a little bit of entheogen, and a whole lot of “my god, who would have thought.” I spent the next few years writing several spiritual/mystical books. From 2002 to 2007 I wrote six books on cosmology, theology, chakras, basic spiritual technique and so on.

I got to be honest with you, there was no rational or logical reason for me to be doing these things. I was a sociologist, for god’s sake, and I was an atheist/materialist. I’ve read a handful of spiritual books over the years but nothing that would qualify me to speak with the kind of authority and expertise that I was presuming to have in all my books. As I wrote it was clear, none of the information I was writing was coming from external sources. It was all coming from inside me.

Now, to the materialist, empirically trained scientist that I was at the time, this was a bit of an embarrassment. By scientific standards, I was a raving lunatic. Sitting there at my computer writing whatever came to my mind and passing it off as spiritual wisdom. I had no right. Where were the citations? Where was the past authority? Where was the slow creeping, self assured pace of scientific verification that I had been trained to participate in? Where was the proof that I had “done my home work.” As I type these words I am shaking my head. All gone, all gone, all gone.

If you ask me, good riddance and thank goodness. It’s about bloody time. In my opinion, science should have given up it’s pretensions to be any kind of reasonable path to knowledge and wisdom on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima burning to death thousands of Japanese children. If you ask me, that was the first clue. Of course, like the idiots that we are, we chose to ignore that clue and continue to participate in a intellectual exercise that has brought nothing but woe to this planet. Ya, we drill holes in our teeth, and ya the technology behind the Space Shuttle is like all “cool and wow and far out”, but our precious science, the sacred and hallowed activity that makes us superior to “the masses,” has done nothing to solve the poverty, hunger, starvation, violence, and destruction unleashed upon this world since its inception back in the time of Galileo. Its all pretension if you ask me. In fact, if it’s done anything, it’s given us the tools to destroy ourselves. Smiling nuclear and behavioral scientists aside, we’ve come to the literal end of our pretensions and if we don’t give them up right now, nothing is going to be able to save this miserable little planet from going into total ecological, political, and psychological failure.

So what are we going to do? Well, if you want to hang onto your naive materialist views, there’s nothing we are going to be able to do about it. There’s just no time. At the current pace of scholarly discourse, it’s going to take five centuries just to recognize that we (and be we I mean scientists) are a major component of the problem. HEPP archives aside, it still takes about two years to make a scholarly statement. By the time you write it up, submit, account for the reviewers concerns, revise, and resubmit, a good two years may have passed. And god help you if you try and criticize the core. Scientists don’t like that. They like to believe theirs is the pinnacle of human activity, objective, rational, and pure. Ya there’s problems but, say the stodgy old journal gatekeepers wagging their fingers and enforcing canon, science will sort those out in the long run. And besides, if science can’t do it, then nothing can. Organized religion has clearly failed to make a significant contribution to anything more than the suffering of humanity. And modern spirituality? For all the flashy marketing and new fangled DVD production, it has been turned into little more then ego-palooza with it’s smiling, heart centered, “secret” driven hyper-materialism. God in heaven, but what are we going to do?

Thankfully, there is a way out of this mess but if you are a hard nosed, empirically driven scientist it is going to require you to eject some of your most precious ontological and epistemological positions and revise the way you see not only this world, but yourself as well. You are going to have to expand your conception of reality, and how you apprehend it far, outside the confines of that physical body you now exist in, and you are going to have to do it fast. You can’t wait for the empirical evidence to appear in the grinding scholarly journal or next years Lipton monograph. We simply don’t have that luxury. You need to make a revolutionary shift in the way you think about science and the acquisition of valid knowledge, and you need to make it right now.

But how do you do that?

Where do you start?

Well, I got some ideas about that and I’m going to use this webpage to outline them. I’ll start by laying out what I consider to be the required ontological position of a “new science.” I’ll then explore some of the implications of that ontological position vis a vis some of the common epistemological assumptions of science. Once I’ve done that I’ll progress to a discussion of some of the principles of psychology that follow upon the revised view of reality presented here. By the end of it, I’ll have spent the most time on discussing the psychological implications of a revised ontology because that’s where my expertise lies. Although I’m trained as a sociologist in this life time, my past life credentials are almost exclusively psychological. Indeed, psychology has been my passion and love through countless incarnations on this earth, and elsewhere. Rather than relying on the slow rediscovery of psychological principles in this century, it’s this past life experience in psychology that I will be primarily drawing on in the discussions on these pages. If that statement makes your materialist/scientific hackles bristle, I ask only for your patience. It is not my goal to provide you with predigested truth so much as it is to offer a set of alternative concepts and ideas that you can use to evaluate and, if you find it all fruitful and satisfying, build for your self a new conceptual, scientific, and spiritual framework for whatever it is, whatever line of inquiry or human activity, that you find yourself passionate about.

Dr. Michael Sharp