The Once and Future Paradigm -- Is Back

Man is an animal, as modern science would have us believe; but he is far, far more, as the same science too often would have us forget. We are insignificant on the Earth, and in the vastness of the universe. Yet our minds constantly slip these bounds, and all others that are placed upon them. We are very much minds with bodies, not bodies harboring only a simulacrum of mind. Physical reality is a hard reality we constantly bump into -- and we are annoyed, or insulted, or scared witless, or worse -- because our minds touch a higher reality, a prior reality, that entices us inward, and outward, with the ultimate freedom. Thus, within this physical realm, we must learn in order to survive and to prosper -- to deal with the structures of physical existence.



I'm talking about physical details. The world is full of it, more often than not far too much of it for our simple tastes. So we say "The Devil is in the details." Or better, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." Science is about finding simple answers to the astounding detail of physical processes, physical phenomena. It gathers large swaths of the physical experience into classes, and sets of classes, and organizations of sets. It would replace the real many (the near-infinitude) with much fewer, simple categories. Yet the real physical world is "everywhere dense" in detail, and resists every simple-minded categorization, no matter how "unified" the approach, how sophisticated the philosophy. Sooner or later the old observation comes back to haunt the present: "There are more things (still)...."



This blog is about something that science, along with the entire human race throughout history, has neglected to learn...or been misdirected from realizing. Something fundamental to everything Man has studied for thousands of years, something at the very heart of our physical existence on this world, and the very origin of all our learning. Call it the First Paradigm, or the Once and Future Paradigm. Because it's back. More later.