-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XIII, p. 144.
I have placed the brackets around "the." Science answers many questions that matter. Meditation, I think, answers questions that science cannot ask - about the individual self and its relationship to everything else. Science generalizes. Individual experience is specific. I have had one set of dispositions and am learning another.
Mystification denies science. However, mystical/spiritual philosophies and practices can clarify instead of mystify. The conflict between science and mystification is a theme in Anderson's Psychotechnic History (see Brotherhood And Order) and also occurs in Brain Wave.
See also The Gwydiona Experience.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
We also see a conflict between real science and pseudo mystical mystification in Chapter 4 of ORBIT UNLIMITED, when Jan Svoboda found his mine years old son David "meditating" about "elementary attunement," as part of practicing for obtaining the "Ineffable All." The boy tried to explain, but could not, because there was nothing that semantics and logic could grasp. As David said, quoting his "teacher": "He says this playing with words and d-definitions, logic, is a lotta looey! He says it's down on the ma-material plane. Attunement's real. This ole science isn't real. You're holding me back with your ole logic and, and, and the big kids laughed at me!" Needless to say, his father was enraged and stormed off to beat up, quite wrongly, the "teacher."
And all this, of course, was part of Jan's father, Commissioner Svoboda's devious scheme to provoke the Constitutionalists into such anger and discontent that, as a compromise, the decadent World Federation would help them to settle the planet Rustum. The Commissioner wanted to save some of Earth's heritage, including his son and grand children, from the approaching collapse of the Federation.
Sean
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