As a holist I presume to roam in the specialities of many different disciplines, but it is finally, to recombine and link the wisdom thus distilled back into the larger picture it was a composition of.
The picture of reality that was broken up and lost at the very beginning of historic time by the Civilisational march of the Greeks to Materialism [see footnote 1] and now joined by the whole world, is the picture that preceded it. Plato's' picture of Reality, a Perennial Philosophy, [see footnote 2] the same as the Sanatana Dharma or Eternal Law, of Hinduism and the Vedas. [See footnote 3]
To day it's very clear to every one what reality is; Real Estate gives us the clew, its something solid, bankable, what you can see and touch, that's Material. Well nearly every one is wrong and whatever it is, it isn't matter or what we thought we meant was matter. Matter like the Indians realised many years ago is more akin to Maya or illusion.
This is all very confusing, so we will need to take our time to sort it out.
The present picture of Reality has taken thousands of years to build up really started with the Greeks, as Democretus' nomenclature for the ultimate bit of matter the Atom, indicates, was adopted when modern day physicists, finally thought they had found it. [See footnote 4]
But what they had found in the atomic or quantum world was very different from the irreducible bits of matter of classical physicist's expectations. First of all it was mostly empty space, extremely energetic, refused to obey the laws of physics such as locality, in other words could be two places at once, and other "strange" mysteries, no need to mention of now. This breakdown of the materialistic picture is very embarrassing for the Positivists [see footnote 5] who have waged a relentless war since the late 17th century in support of Materialism.
Then it held sway by virtue of gathering empiricism of the investigation of the physical world begun by the Greeks. By the time of Newton and the coining of the term scientist to denote an investigator of the physical as opposed to the spiritual realm of existence. The world of consensual reality became more and more primary and important, more real more substantial more alive, or so it seemed.
It needs to be understood how the consensual idea we all have of reality is based on a sense illusion very much like the flat earth one, humanity has recently overcome. Senses seem to prove the existence of a flat earth, Euclid's axioms claim its truth, but mind in time proves otherwise.
The Sages of old up until Plato's time had a different picture of Reality which has over the last two thousand years degenerated into what I call the current orthodoxy: Atheistic Scientific Materialism, what Positivists proclaim is the truth, but has turned out to be anything but.
The history of Physics and Science has taken two thousand years of steady development with a tremendous efflorescence in the late 18th century with an Atomic power climax and sudden collapse last century with silence now at the scene of the event, the quantum world.
The picture the world has of reality has mirrored the fluctuating fortunes of materialism, at the beginning a poor relation to the spirit world till its rise to undisputed unipolar omnipotent existence and then at the very height of its power brought undone by the very revolution its victory brought in.
From a modern Darwinian perspective mankind has crawled up from the slime and mud of matter our mother, but with the help of new tools of analysis such as semiotics, structuralism and symbology, a different view emerges from cultural studies. In this view we have fallen from a previous Divine Adamic Consciousness and Order.
According to Swedenborg a scientist come mystic who spent much of his adult life a scientist for half of the 18th century and seer until his death in the 1780's we have put things upside down and back to front. Heaven which was up has been put down and eviscerated and the body and the physical which used to be behind the mind or spirit has now been put in front, the former primary elements now displaced undergo a sort of debilitation that fades into a sort of non existence and then we wonder why life is so impoverished.
Here at the start of the third millennium after the upheaval of the last century and the breakthrough or down into Atomic energy, this, the crowning glory of the Queen of Sciences Physics, is at the same time its fall. Physics since Newton and his Principia had swept the world revealing the Universe as a huge mechanical clock like creation that had been wound up by God and was now winding down ticking away, to the heat death of the Universe, its entropy, according to the second law of thermodynamics.
