Deepak Chopra, MD - Diabolical science has to end – SF Chronicle
It’s amazing how far science has gone to destroy life without being blamed. We live in the scientific age, and science’s prestige has permitted it to spread far beyond the good it can do. The first shock was the atom bomb in 1945. Only people of that generation recall the deep horror that came with the first explosion of a weapon that foresaw the potential destruction of humankind itself. But in many ways the A-bomb is a bogeyman that has been successfully caged while an invisible virus has done far more harm.
That virus is the amorality of science. Science is unique in that we allow it to have no morality. Destruction and healing are on an equal footing. New weapons technologies are funded by the same government budget that funds new cancer research. Untested medical treatments and toxic drugs are allowed almost free rein to harm and kill patients in the name of helping them. If you doubt this, consider that surgeries are not monitored by any governmental regulation. Operations can become standard procedures with a minimum of testing. Among these are heart bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, hysterectomies, and radical mastectomies. None went through double-blind testing. As a result, radical mastectomy was the procedure of choice for decades in this country, while at the same time lumpectomies, a far more benign procedure, provided the same survival rates in Europe. Current studies show that angioplasty, performed by the thousands every month on heart patients, is not effective in extending life span.
Science is an enormous outlet for creativity, but when that creativity turns diabolical, we can’t keep allowing amorality to continue. Science has given us toxic pesticides and dubious genetic engineering of staple crops. High-yield fertilizers kill the soil; hormone-injected meats fill every supermarket. In the defense industry, ever more bizarre weapons of mechanized death have almost no oversight. Quite the contrary, eager technology buffs can’t wait to test lasers in space, robot armies, and neutron bombs that kill all living things while leaving buildings intact (the rationale being that bricks and mortar are more worth saving than lives). Current armaments are designed to make sure that maximum damage is done to the flesh of anyone in their vicinity — hence the white phosphorus from Israeli bombs that fell on schoolchildren in Gaza and scorched their skin.
The amorality of science is sometimes indirect. For example, as we became a nation of pill-poppers and surgery junkies over the past fifty years, millions of people felt free to ignore the positive benefits of wellness and prevention. Didn’t science promise the next miracle cure around the corner? As long as the doctor could fix us, we felt liberated to eat junk food, ignore exercise, and grow fatter than any population in history. In the last few months, studies have revealed that wellness isn’t pie in the sky. People who practice prevention in terms of diet, exercise, and stress management actually alter their genes in a beneficial way and lower the activity of genes that trigger diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. So there was no free pass by not doing the right thing.
Because science is worshipped and scientists have grown used to an ethos of amorality, to protest against diabolical creativity makes you a target of irrational smears. It doesn’t seem to bother the defenders of science-at-all-costs that they are acting out of the very irrationality that science is supposed to defeat.
Science deserves to be free, and ideas should never be enclosed in boundaries. No one is talking about the religious-based intolerance and anti-intellectualism that prompted the Bush administration to put a halt to funding of stem-cell research. But if we look at the problem without irrational attacks, we can have the benefits of science without the excessive dangers we now face. A new science that works to raise our humanity is possible, and in the face of an endangered planet and nightmarish weapons spreading everywhere, nothing is more critical.
Our values as a society dictate what is acceptable in our culture and as long as the dollar rules, people will continue to find diabolical creative ways of using science for their perceived benefit. I like Deepak and others comparing the diabolical science behind the Military Industrial Complex and the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, because both have vested interest in accumulating more power and wealth at all cost. Until we establish a currency of consciousness or values, we will be at the mercy of those with power and wealth.
I hope that the electing of President Obama, is a reflection and affirmation of the evolutionary shift of consciousness taking place on the planet. I hope the new administration governs, not just in science but all fields of government, with the ethics and awareness that is needed in confronting the many challenges. So together, we can have a “real” opportunity in providing the best environment for us and our children. It really does come down to ethics because intelligence can be good or bad, as so eloquently described, but ethics has all of our best interests at heart.
“No one is talking about the religious-based intolerance and anti-intellectualism that prompted the Bush administration to put a halt to funding of stem-cell research.”
First off, Bush funded all forms of stem-cell research; he just did it within certain ethical guidelines. Second off, anything that involves embryonic human beings needing to be destroyed for the purposes of medical research would qualify as “science destroying life,” and you don’t need to be the least bit religious to understand that.
Science sees the part, not the whole of things, and thus creates negative for each positive it unleashes. It knows the part of physical reality, missing the whole that includes the psychological, the mental, the societal, and the spiritual. Essentially the integral whole of Man is pushed aside for the part that is physical that science worships. As a result, ignorance, falsehoods, and evil come about.
When we develop the integral view of life, of a matter, we open to all of the parts, forces, influences, theories, insights, as well as the totality and Whole of the matter, the Essence, and beyond to their integral relationship. In that way, science is barely in first grade, when ultra, multifaceted PHD consciousness is required.
It will take an evolution of consciousness to move to this level of sophisticate spiritual mentality. Science can take one small step in that line to be open to the other planes of life when making discoveries, rather than mere material, mechanical, mechanistic view of existence. E.g. to understand how emotions and thought is subtle; that it is projected and moves across space and time. They can learn to understand this. Many of their quantum equations already prove this. Let the scientist be honest, and embrace and see all the force of life at work, from the causal to the subtle to the gross material, not merely the physical.
what people fail to realise is althou people listen to deepak chopra…. they are not truely listening
to him… i love deepak but even he does not fully understand what he teachs…it sounds good and
he makes 10million dollars a year…..so he doesnt care….. but all the knowledge that he writes
about and quotes from all the poets he qoutes has fallen on the ears of a man that is truely going
to practise the teaching and in doing so become one with everything that exists and thus change
the world….
what upsets me is that people like tony robbins…wayne dyer…deepak chopra make millions of
dollars a year and charge vast prices to be in there presence…. they are a mere shadow of this
man because this man wants not money but for his message to reach ever corner of the globe.
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