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For centuries, philosophers and
scientists have asked themselves what sort of reality lies behind
the world of the senses, and if so, are there ways in which we can
actually learn to enter and experience that world? Many old and new
religious philosophies or ‘theosophies’ have affirmed that behind
the world of the senses lies a world of soul and spirit. On the
other hand, they offer us no ways of clearly making sense of the
very concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ themselves. That is one reason
why modern science has dispensed with these concepts and posits
instead an abstract realm of quantum field dynamics - one not
capable of being directly experienced at all, but only
conceptualised in quantitative mathematical equations. What I term
The New Science is a new ‘science of soul’ or ‘soul science’.
This is a science that not only makes sense of the term ‘soul’ in an
entirely new way, but offers us new ways of entering, experiencing
and thereby scientifically researching the world of soul. It makes
new ‘sense’ of the term ‘soul’ by arguing that it is nothing
‘suprasensuous’ - but consists instead of fields and field qualities
of awareness that have their own innately sensual character.
From a soul-scientific perspective, the sensuous qualities of
colour, shape and texture that make up the sensory world are sensory
manifestations of soul qualities – innately sensual colourations,
shapes and textures of awareness as such. These sensual qualities of
awareness or ‘Qualia’ constitute the very essence of meaning or
‘sense’. They are what we experience in a tangible sensual way as
the meaning of things, as when we feel enriched in a most
tangible and sensual way by the meanings we sense in a work of art
such as a painting or piece of music.
The overall subjective ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ we have of the inner
meaning of a painting or piece of music is nothing we can localise
in space or perceive with our senses. Scientifically
understood, it has a ‘non-local’ or ‘field’ quality. It is also
something we feel rather than something we perceive directly
with our senses. What physical science refuses to recognise
however, is that feeling is itself a different way of knowing things
– a mode of cognition more fundamental than either sensory awareness
or intellectual cognition. Scientifically put, feeling is a
non-local or field awareness as opposed to focused awareness.
Sights and sounds, colours and tones, shapes and textures, are
something we can localise in space – for they are localised sensory
qualities of perceptual objects. Yet when we feel our way
into a painting or piece of music, we understand its colours and
sounds as something more than just sensory qualities. It is not that
those ‘objective’ sensory colours and sounds somehow produce
subjective ‘feelings’ in us. On the contrary, if we feel ourselves
into a painting, piece of music – or any perceptual objects
whatsoever – we experience its ‘objective’ sensory qualities as the
physical manifestation of ‘subjective’ qualities – soul qualities.
Those qualities are a mystery to philosophy and physical science
because they are field qualities. ‘Soul’ is only a mystery to
philosophy and physical science because it is not something visible,
audible or measurable that we can localise in space or time. Instead
it is the non-local or field-dimension of our awareness. Soul, quite
simply, is field awareness - experienced as feeling
awareness – and the soul qualities that lie behind sensory qualities
are felt field qualities of awareness.
‘Qualia’ are a mystery to philosophy and physical science because
they are not simply qualities belonging to our focussed sensory
awareness of phenomena. Instead they are soul-qualities sensed
through non-local or field awareness - through feeling awareness.
That is why, when we fully feel ourselves into a painting or piece
of music, the feeling we have of each or any of its colours and
tones, shapes and textures is something all pervasive –
something we sense with and within our body as a whole and not
something we merely perceive through the peepholes of our bodily
senses. The meaning or sense of a painting or piece of music is not
something we can grasp through sensory or intellectual cognition
alone. It is something we can only sense in a feeling way – through
an overall and all-pervasive field-awareness. Similarly, whilst the
visible word on a page or the vocal sound of the spoken word is
something we perceive with our senses, its inner meaning or sense -
its ‘soul’ - is nothing verbal, visible or vocal. Those scientists
who deny the reality of a world of soul and spirit are simply
spiritually illiterate. To persuade them of the reality of
this world is like trying to persuade someone who has not yet
learned to read or who cannot understand the spoken word that there
is an invisible and inaudible world of meaning behind the
measurable ink marks on a page or sound waves of speech, and that
this world of meaning or ‘soul’ has its source in a ‘spiritual’
world – a world of beings who speak and write, beings
who create paintings or compose music.
To the ordinary scientist, the world of Qualia or soul qualities
will forever remain a mystery. They themselves are beings who seek
meaning through science. Paradoxically however, the picture of the
cosmos they present us with is a world with ‘causes’ but without
meaning. A world in which felt meanings, and feeling beings are
seen as mere by-products of matter and energy. Far from being a
‘rational’ world outlook their ‘science’ is the most totally
irrational world outlook conceivable – one that would imply that
the very meaning of words is a by-product of ‘matter’ in the form of
the paper and ink on which they are printed, or a by-product of
‘energy’ in the form of the sound waves of speech. Likewise the
meaning of a painting or piece of music would have nothing
whatsoever to do with a human being, but understood simply as a
by-product of pigments on canvas or notes on a printed score.
Indeed, in this irrational scientific world outlook, the human being
as such is seen as a by-product of a lump of grey matter – the
brain - quite forgetting that this lump of grey matter is only
visible in the first place as a perceptual object for a human
being. The light in which the brain or any material become
visible is not the abstract ‘light’ of the physicists, composed of
photonic energy quanta. Nor is it the light we know through our
senses. For that light is only visible ‘in the light’ of our
own awareness of it. Millennia before the abstract mathematical
models of the cosmos propounded as quantum physics appeared on the
scene, fundamental reality was understood in a far deeper, far more
rational ‘scientific’ way – as the light of awareness as such. That
a bright day can appear grey if we are in a dark ‘mood’ is not a
subjective aberration or hallucination. For it is the light of our
awareness that colours our perception of the world, just as it is
the light of awareness which is the field condition for our
awareness of any world and any physical phenomena whatsoever. The
physical-scientific model of invisible quantum energy fields is no
more and no less an abstract scientific metaphor of this
deeper reality. Indeed all scientific models of the cosmos are just
that – metaphors of a cosmos composed not of objective energetic
quanta but of subjective qualia, innate field qualities of awareness
or subjectivity itself. Despite all its talk of ‘fields’, physical
science is flawed at its very foundation by a failure to
affirm the field character of ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’. Since
feeling awareness is the very essence of field awareness,
this fundamental flaw makes it impossible for science to acknowledge
direct feeling cognition as an infinitely more profound way
of understanding all physical phenomena. It also makes it impossible
for the human being to use their own immediate sensory awareness as
an instrument of deep scientific research - a gateway to a hidden
world of soul and spirit. To do so requires only that we feel our
way into physical phenomena as we feel our way into art – transform
our focal awareness of sensory qualities into a field
awareness of the soul qualities they manifest. For it is these
soul qualities or Qualia and not energetic Quanta, that are the very
soul-stuff of which the cosmos is composed.
Just as colour tones and sound tones each have their own felt
qualities of hardness or softness, brightness or darkness,
angularity or roundedness, heaviness or lightness, intensity or
dullness, density or diffuseness, so are all sensuous qualities
essentially tonal qualities. Yet sound and colour tones
themselves are felt tonalities of awareness as such - ‘feeling
tones’ of the sort we experience in a sensual way as the ‘colour
tone’ or ‘tone colour’ of our moods. The ancient understanding that
everything has its own ‘vibration’, ‘sound’ or ‘tone’ – that the
cosmos is a manifestation of the ‘music of the spheres’ has been
turned on its head by modern physical science, which now understands
‘vibration’, ‘sound’ and ‘tone’ in a purely mechanical or
mathematical way and not in a musical way – as feeling
tone. At the heart of all Qualia – all specific sensual
qualities of feeling awareness - is a unique feeling tone or
field-tonality of awareness. Fundamental reality is thus
quintessentially musical – composed of countless tonalities of
feeling awareness, each with their own sensual qualities, and all of
which combine as that great symphony of the soul which manifests as
our sensory world.
The methodology of soul-scientific research turns the sensory world
into a gateway into a world of soul and spirit. It does so by
transforming all that we ordinarily experience as the sensory
qualities of bodies into a tangible bodily experience of the soul
qualities they manifest. Thus our sensory experience of bodily
qualities such as colour, shape and texture is transformed into an
experience of different colourations, shapes and textures of
awareness. The medium of this transformation and thus the principal
instrument of soul-scientific research is our own psychical body –
our awareness body or body of awareness. By attuning in a feeling
way to the unique tonality of the specific colours, shapes
and textures belonging to perceptual objects we bring our awareness
or subjectivity into resonance with them. This resonance in turn
allows our awareness itself to take on the bodily shape,
colour and texture of the perceptual object. The principle at work
here is well-named by Rupert Sheldrake’s term ‘morphic resonance’,
for it is a principle of resonance between outer sensory form
(Greek morphe) on the one hand, and inner feeling tone on the
other. Our psychical body can quite literally shape-shift or ‘morph’
in resonance with the sensory form of both our own physical
body and that of other bodies around us in space. It is this
awareness body – our psychical organism – that is the
principal instrument (Greek organon) of qualitative,
soul-scientific research, and not any external physical instruments.
For however sophisticated, the latter can serve only as a means of
purely external observation and quantitative measurement, providing
no truly experiential foundation - and therefore no truly
‘empirical’ foundation – for a deeper scientific understanding of
the sensory world. Modern science has long lost its anchor and
therefore also abandoned its empirical foundations in human sensory
experience. That is because it has lacked the means for transforming
outer sensory experience into direct inner experiences of soul and
of the soul qualities or Qualia that lie behind all sensory
qualities. The New Science is ‘Cosmic Qualia Science’. As soul
science, this is the sole science that can restore
meaning or sense to the cosmos - by returning science to its
bodily roots in our sensory experiencing and by re-ensouling
all the qualitative dimensions of sensory experience.
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