"Throw me another idea."
"Okay, well..." Zac lay back on my bed and thought for a moment. "If the scientific community worships materialism, why don't you find some allies who support your ideas and think a bit differently? There are plenty of spiritual people out there who believe consciousness is more fundamental than materialism. Maybe they'd be more sympathetic to your work."
"Good," I said, writing his suggestion on the board again. "Also a terrible strategy, but good to get it out of the way."
"Wait. Why is that a terrible strategy?"
I turned to face him as he sat on my bed. "There's traditionally been a large divide between science and spirituality. Many people believe that they're mutually exclusive, but they're not. Two seemingly contradictory ideas can be simultaneously true when they are unified on a deeper level. It's possible for the universe to be created in an instant, over billions of years. It just depends on which dimension you're looking at: the implicate order or the explicate order."
"What are they?" Zac asked.
"The implicate order is the lower dimension, where space and time cease to exist. The explicate order is what we call 'physical reality.' Scientists operate on the explicate order, while my 'allies' operate on the implicate order. The clever scientists call the wise people 'woo woo,' and the wise people call the clever scientists 'blind.' The problem is, they can't speak a common language. No one has attempted to integrate science and spirituality, primarily because scientists don't believe it's possible. They don't even think to question the arbitrary rules of the system they operate within.
I mean, the scientists have spent centuries treating the observer as an insignificant afterthought. It never occurred to them that the observer is the only thing we know for sure exists. You literally cannot do science without an observer. That this is so patently obvious is what makes it so utterly painful to watch, and so poignantly ironic.
Yet, the spiritual folk aren't much better. Deepak Chopra is the perfect representation of this. I watched him debate Richard Dawkins once. It was so cringeworthy. Even though Chopra was technically correct, his communication was abysmal. He couldn't provide any compelling evidence for his claims, or present a coherent, logical argument. He just vomited up mystical word salad. Imprecise language may work for the average layperson, but it certainly won't work on a skilled scientist. He bastardized scientific words to promote his spiritual agenda, and scientists loathe that. Instead of Dawkins ripping into Chopra's ideas, he ripped into Chopra's shit communication and used that as a proxy for the quality of his ideas.
Unfortunately, Dawkins pretty much exemplifies the general attitude that scientists have towards anyone who uses the words 'consciousness' and 'quantum' in the same sentence. Even biologists like Rupert Sheldrake are censored by King Materialism's authoritarian soldiers when he tries to gently point out that materialism is an assumption, not a fact. They all label him 'woo woo' and 'pseudoscientific' without actually bothering to check their own faulty axioms.
If I'm seen fraternizing with my enemies' enemy, I'll get that label too. I'll be another 'woo woo' crackpot — especially because I don't look like someone you should take seriously. I may have a playful personality and long hair and wear feminine dresses when I say counterintuitive things, but that doesn't mean I'm a whimsical, irrational idiot. I know it's hard to tell sometimes, but I'm actually nowhere near as stupid as I look. Not even close.
So, yeah — I already look 'woo woo' enough without surrounding myself with more symbols that reinforce that stereotype. The world will just put me in a box because that's cognitively easy. They won't take me seriously. It's like hanging outside the fortress walls with a giant sign saying, 'I'm with Deepak.' I'm going to get an arrow straight through my chest."
