The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow examines how perception, social conditioning, group identity, history, psychology, and inherited ideas shape what people accept as truth. Was there a particular assumption about modern life that first made you question the larger worldview behind it?

As a child I saw that the basic assumptions people make about life were wrong. As I looked around at the adults, they were living a lie, and probably didn’t know it. They bought into the whole story that you have to go to college, get a job, get married, work hard, get a mortgage, have children–that if you do all of that, you will be living the best life. But as I looked around, I saw people who were not happy, who did not have fun, and did not seem to be doing anything great. There was no way, I thought, that I would fall for these lies. There was a truth out there that could set us free to be happy and fulfilled in life, and the people around me had totally missed it.

Why do you think people become so emotionally attached to beliefs that challenge can feel like a personal attack?

I think Eckhart Tolle explained it well. People believe that they are their minds. They think their minds are clever. They have worked a lifetime creating their admirable minds, much like a sculptor creates a perfect statue out of block of granite. (I once believed that too, and being supremely arrogant, I thought my mind was a work to be admired by all young attractive women. Of course, they rarely admired my creation, and shied away from me.) 

When an outsider questions basic tenants of our belief systems, people see it as a personal attack. You are attacking their persons–well, their minds. And to them, this is the same thing. But they are completely wrong. If you sit and try to meditate, you can watch all the garbage, half-baked thoughts the mind comes up with. Nobody would be proud of those thoughts.

But there is more to that question. If you can destabilize someone’s thinking, make them realize that their entire outlook was wrong, now what are they going to do? That is a very uncomfortable place to be. Who wants to reassess their lives, and reconstruct their world outlook? It can mean that they have spent decades doing the wrong things. Nobody wants to face that. It is easier to just tell me, and other troublemakers, that we are wrong, and get back to the football game.

What do you believe people misunderstand about the relationship between scientific models and reality itself?

In the book, I think the chapter that rattles people the most is when I question science, and I believe it is because to differing degrees we have all unconsciously absorbed science as the bedrock of truth. Most of us lost God in the 18th and 19th centuries, and so we gravitated towards science. We need some ultimate authority. It used to be God. Everything that was so, was so because of God. Now, science has become the bedrock of our life views. And it has become the ultimate authority. Even for religious people. 

Almost everyone believes in evolution, big bang, and cave men. Are they all true? I don’t know. They are theories. If you question some aspects of science successfully, where does that leave the reader who blindly accepts it all? If parts of science are just conjecture, then how are people to decide what is real and what is not? We are not scientists. It was easier to just accept all of science without thinking too hard about it. But questioning the fundamentals of our belief systems is not a comfortable place to be. All of a sudden our outlook on the world is imperiled. Again, it is easier to just tell me I am wrong..

Ah, but you asked about scientific models and reality itself. . .Probably all scientists realize that theories are theories. They are not necessarily the truth. Theories cannot be proven. They are generally accepted explanations of reality. But they usually are disproven in time, although it may take centuries. When we find data that contradicts our theories, our scientists will typically amend the theory, but rarely will they cast it out. It is only when a generation of scientists dies, that their theories can die with them. (That is one of the great things about death. It brings change, as the newer generations replace old ways of thinking with newer ones.)

But normal people, we tend to confound theories with all the rest of science. We are black and white thinkers. To us, science is true or it is not. We can put rocket ships on the moon, therefore, science is true, including all of its theories. But in reality, some science is true, and some is just conjecture–theories.

So, if scientific theories are not necessarily true and likely to be discarded at some point, why do we base our beliefs on them? Why have we made scientific theories the central tenant of our worldview and why do we use them to define who we are? It has become just this for a great many of us. We do not realize to what extent science has replaced the Catholic Church in providing much of the foundation of our collective understanding of the world. In the past, people would be aghast if you stated that Christ was not God but was instead a divinely inspired man. You would be shunned, tortured or perhaps executed as a heretic if you spread those blasphemous thoughts. It is similar today with regards to science. In much of Western society, if someone professed that evolution is a fanciful theory and is not true or, even better, that the Earth does not rotate around the sun, you would be considered an idiot and would likely be shunned as ignorant or crazy. It’s the same.

To sum it all up. . .the likely reason people misunderstand the relationship between scientific models and reality itself, is probably due to lazy black and white thinking. People have a tendency to take the whole package, or none of it. Just like in the Middle Ages, you accept everything the Church says, and now, you accept everything science says. No picking and choosing. It is so much easier to just chunk it all together, and accept it all as one package. Science is good, therefore all science is true.

Do you see the transformation you describe as something that could happen gradually through culture and education, or does it require a more fundamental shift in human consciousness?

The change I call for, is that people realize that individuals are not important, and that humanity, itself, the aggregation of all people, living and dead, is what really matters. To focus on only ourselves is to be short-sighted. To reach our potential, to help others reach theirs, that is the proper outlook. It took a book to explain this concept, so I won’t try in a few sentences, or I risk sounding trite.

But, yes, humanity will transform into this realization. It will become fundamental, and we will create different social systems and personal outlooks completely different based on this fundamental realization. But likely not in our lifetimes, possibly not even in our grandchildren’s lifetimes. Fundamental change on this scale takes centuries, not years. Humanity is the creature that matters, not us individuals. We come and go and are forgotten, but humanity persists, doing whatever it is it does, but it is heading somewhere. We just cannot know where. I personally believe, but do not know, that the type of change I see coming, will happen soul by soul, individual by individual, and slowly, over the generations, people will think and act differently. Christianity took almost 350 years before it really started growing, that is, when it became the state religion of Rome. Until then, it was a very small movement, slowly proceeding, slowly growing. Nobody in the first generation thought it would ever be the religion of Rome, or that it would take over Latin America or Africa. This is the same. We cannot know what the future holds. (Yes, including me.) But as I see it, this is where we are headed.

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