Reply to a skeptic

Excerpts from:

From: Chris Case
Date: Tue Jun 15, 1999 9:48pm
Subject: Reply to a skeptic

..As I think I explained, I have my own sense of the word "TechGnosis", having (also) invented it. It has to do with the *hoped-for* convergence of the gnostic and creative sector with the scientific. It is time for left and right brains to stop squaring off in the kind of opposition that resembles the archetypal argument between men and women.

There is a kind of New Age mysticism which perpetuates the notion that science is the misguided enemy of holistic knowledge, but I do not believe this to be the case, and find ample evidence in the writings of what I consider the most illuminated minds that rejection of science as such is a foolish and ostrich-like move. Just as some mystics have made ignorantly dismissive remarks about extrospection, stemming from their own disinterest in phenomenal reality,
or Maya, so have many scientist made equally "blinkered' remarks about the experiences and capabilities deriving from introspection. This leads to a characteristic lack of practicality in the one camp and of creativity in the other. I eschew all forms of camping about, and prefer a cognitive atmosphere that is hetero-intellectual.

....

From my point of view, TechGnosis is an attempt to minimise the number of infants lost in the bathwater effluent. For this to work, both blinkered empiricists and arm-waving mystics will have to renounce their desire for hegemony, respect the others' freedom to explore whatever fields with whatever methods they choose, and seek common ground, scant though it may at the moment seem, for this is only a seeming.

To assume that all exponents of mystical insight are woolly-minded fools, incapable of logic or practicality, is simply incorrect. The master who initiated me into the techniques of Shabad Yoga was a highly successful lawyer before he succeeded his teacher, who had been a professor of chemistry, his own master having been a high-ranking engineer in the military. None of them found it necessary to deny or reject the findings of science, but rather extended beyond the domain of the externally-oriented senses the empirical practices of science, insisting that nothing should be taken on faith, nor should one extrapolate any more beyond ones own experience than a scientist does in imagining in which direction it "might be nice" or revealing to look next.

Few men could have been more practical than Napoleon, who said, more or less: "qui sait ou il va n'ira jamais nulpart." (He who knows where he's heading will never go anywhere.)