New Age Woo-woo: NONE of this is True.. Except it all IS

It's funny how the world likes to separate itself into differing schools of thought and belief.

Mrs. Denmarkguy and I spend a lot of time involved in various facets of the "spiritual" community, which means we come across a lot of what some people (especially those claiming to have a "scientific mind") would dismiss as "New Age Woo-Woo."

I suppose I see myself more as an impartial observer who's more interested in possibilities than eternally trying to nail down everything as fact or not-fact.

Never the Twain Shall Meet?

Truth be known, I have "issues" with both sides of the coin.

I have trouble with the New Agers and Spiritualists who seem very fond of inventing "realities of convenience" even when the cold hard facts sit right in front of their face.

But I also have trouble with the Scientists who hold that "If we can't measure it and reproduce it in a lab, IT DOESN'T EXIST."

Take the very simplest of examples: Some Woo-Woo person saying they are reading "negative energy," which is immediately dismissed as total nonsense by the scientist who in their next breath will totally confess that they always felt "a bad vibe" coming from the kid who later turned out to be a serial child molester.

So YOUR "vibe" is OK, but THEIR "negative energy" is NOT?

Of course, that usually invites a 40-page dissertation on how "it's not the same thing," which tends to make my eyes glaze over.

A War of Semantics?

Seems to me it's more a battle of semantics than anything.

Although I am only being slightly facetious here, I often get the impression that the Scientist would be perfectly fine if we called it a "Cognitive thought pattern 42, subsection 9" instead of "negative energy."

Beats me.

Just to make one thing clear here: For the purpose of this discussion, I'm not talking about "Science vs. Religion." I'm more interested in the way people approach "things not (yet) explained."

There's a huge body of events, things and tendencies in the Universe that we simply don't (yet) understand. Just like there are things we now understand that we didn't understand before.

Don't believe me?

Take a super simple thing like radio waves. They've existed in the Universe for billions of years. And yet, can we claim that they "didn't exist" until Maxwell, Hertz and other "proved" their existence? Of course not! Of course they existed!

Open-mindedness, Flexibility and Exploration...

People sometimes tell me that I seem to have become "less scientific" than I used to be, and that perhaps it's because the "Woo" is rubbing off on me.

That's not true, from my perspective.

Science has become less scientific, leading me to put less stock in it than I used to.

What do I mean by that? Simplest explanation: Science has become too "monetized." Ostensible "scientists" set out to prove what happens to be convenient for their financial underwriters, rather than uncovering facts about the Universe and how things work.

Which creates a dangerous thing called "research bias." Meaning that scientists focus on a specific outcome, rather than simply "observing what happens."

But aren't experiments SUPPOSED to have a specific focus?

Yes... BUT...

If you are looking for proof" that potatoes cure cancer and you're not finding it, and your control accidentally proves that carrots DO cure cancer, sweeping those results aside as "irrelevant" because your research is sponsored by the potato growers association... see where I'm going with this?

But I'm not going to belabor the point. Just wanted to lay forth the possibility that staying open minded is possibly a wiser path than getting locked down in either the path of "scientific proof" OR the path of "Wishful Woo-woo Thinking."

Thanks for reading.

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Created at 181010 15:00 PDT