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- Jul 31, 2016
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It is my contention that many aficionados of Charles Fort have completely missed his real importance to modern thought. Many speak about Fort as if he were nothing more than an eccentric curator of a virtual museum of late Victorian curiosities. This certainly is the view taken by the majority of contributors to Fortean Times magazine. The magazine mostly occupies itself with the debunking of Fortean ephemera. It takes the conventional scientific epistemic tack (rational materialism) that the only things that are "real" are material in nature. Everything else is only convenient fodder for snarky prejudiced debunking.
This, of course, is contrary to what Fort was about. In fact, this was the very kind of thing that Fort worked so hard to inveigh against. He questioned the "damned" data of science because science, in its rational materialist fervor, refused to look at so many things that happened and could not be explained in conventional material terms. Simply attributing them to mirages, fantasy and tortured "conventional" explanations was not an intellectual probing, but a case of intellectual denial. Fort knew this and that is what his eccentric curating was really all about.
The late Colin Bennett understood Fort. And there are a few others of us out here that actually "get it". It is to them that I dedicate these Fortean essays.....
Buddha Was a Fortean
Even though he lived hundreds of years before the birth of Charles Fort, Buddha knew what it meant to be an inveterate questioner. And that is the special dish that Fort brought to the table: questioning.
But this is not the simple curiosity that questions our world in pursuit of answers. That is for lightweights and posers. It is a questioning that questions the questioner and the questions themselves. So, what about answers? Surely you jest! When you go down the Fortean road, answers are – if not irrelevant – certainly relative. Buddha himself summed up this paradoxical mind game succinctly: “All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.”
This is a distinctly wobbly and uncomfortable mindset for people who wish reality to be cut and dried. It eschews comfortable assumptions and cuddly “teddy bear” pet theories. It avoids the simplistic “this is this and that is that” explanations of conventional science and looks into the mirror reflection of reality and asks, what can we possibly know that is not a product of mind?
Ultimately, the only thing we can know is our consciousness. And it always works best when it is empty of judgments and notions, the ersatz manufactured goods of mind. I am not sure that Fort completely cottoned onto this last point. But Buddha sure did. He wallowed in it like a hog in a slop-hole. They call that slop-hole enlightenment.
I wouldn’t say Fort was enlightened in the Buddhist sense. But he certainly was able to rise above the masturbatory mental machinations of conventional academics. Then he took the scientific dogmatists out to the wood-shed for the epistemic spanking they so richly deserved.
But alas, he suffered the fate of most heretics. He was marginalized by smaller and less honest minds; minds with fancy degrees and social clout. And thus Fort was relegated to a mostly forgotten footnote in history.
But his subversive outlook has won him many admirers. He is considered by many to be the father of “paranormal” studies. For instance, he may have proposed the idea that people are abducted by aliens. He was also an early theorizer that UFOs are peopled by extraterrestrial beings. In these instances, and many others, he was far ahead of his time.
Fort is a shining example of what it means to be a skeptic. Not the stilted inbred dogmatism of our UFO pseudo-skeptics, but the honest to god skepticism of a mind that questions all assumptions. And that was what Fort was really about. He found the soft white underbelly of science - its unexamined assumptions - and plunged his knife in deeply. The cries of pain were palpable and predictable. But science, being the lumbering dolt that it is, applied its Hello Kitty band-aid and continued on with its old delusional ways as if nothing had happened. Indeed, ignorance is bliss.
But a Fortean state of mind is a hard one to maintain. It takes a willingness to swim upstream, against the current of unexamined social assumptions. It also takes discipline. That’s because it is a lot easier to believe in something than to believe in nothing. Ultimately, that means not knowing stuff.
Who would have thought that it was smarter to not know stuff? Many intellectuals are allergic to this idea. But they don’t know any better. Academia has a spastic compulsion to explain everything. This sometimes leads to fuzzy assumptions which have little basis in reality. It seems that consensus thinking is a dim bulb which only evolves slowly and reluctantly.
Fort himself was primarily a contrarian. Raised with a strict and abusive father, he developed an early disdain for authority. Being an intellectual, this predisposed him to question the stuffy assumptions of science and ferret out the uncomfortable data that science rejected as improbable or, worse, fantasy. The fact is that conventional science, with its hard materialist bias, is too limited in scope to encompass the full breadth of human experience. It is a philosophy which sees anything outside the material realm as illusory.
Buddha sets this presumption in its proper place. Buddhism suggests that the rational mind (the ne plus ultra of science) not human experience, is the source of illusion.
Buddhist enlightenment is, in fact, a philosophy one step beyond Charles Fort. It goes beyond simple contrarian questioning of socially imposed assumptions. It stems from the understanding that only the empty mind is truly in a position to parse the reality of human experience. The hard won “knowledge” of science is a series of preconceived notions which act as impediments to the understanding of true experience. Both Buddha and Fort recognized that the banishment of preconceived notions is a necessary palliative for the prevention of truth decay.
This should not be thought of as anti-intellectual or anti-scientific. It is merely the understanding that our assumptions do not and cannot prepare us for experiencing reality as it truly is. Science is fallible. It is, like most human experience, corrupted with the delusion of ego. And it is through the dissolution of ego and the embracing of our most core being, our consciousness, that illusion disappears.
But the old lumbering giant is still out there with its tattered Hello Kitty band-aid. The superannuated dinosaurs still hold court and swear the earth is flat. They don’t seem to know it yet, but the materialist paradigm is in its death knell. And, being the stubborn old coots that they are, their ideas probably will not die until they do. Too bad it has to be that way.
However, I am optimistic about the future. Quantum physics have shown us that the ancient lessons of metaphysics were an accurate picture of reality and how it works. These ideas have been with us throughout human history. But somehow, over the millennia, they have been understood by only a small minority of people. Buddha was one of them.
Quantum thinking builds on the ideas of Einstein’s physics. Quantum theory makes as much of a leap over Einstein as Einstein did over Newton. It is a radical shift in epistemology. It is the clarion call for the entre of consciousness into scientific understanding. I think the science of the 21st Century will stem from an understanding of consciousness and its intimate connection with our material reality. And when we get there, the lumbering giant will be deader than Fort himself.
The universe is far greater than the breadth of our prejudices. Just think of the fun we could have had if we all thought like Buddha, or even Charles Fort. In order to understand the universe, we must reject our preconceived notions. Otherwise we are not skeptical truth seekers, but dogmatists. It is never too late to change your mindset…..
END
This, of course, is contrary to what Fort was about. In fact, this was the very kind of thing that Fort worked so hard to inveigh against. He questioned the "damned" data of science because science, in its rational materialist fervor, refused to look at so many things that happened and could not be explained in conventional material terms. Simply attributing them to mirages, fantasy and tortured "conventional" explanations was not an intellectual probing, but a case of intellectual denial. Fort knew this and that is what his eccentric curating was really all about.
The late Colin Bennett understood Fort. And there are a few others of us out here that actually "get it". It is to them that I dedicate these Fortean essays.....
Buddha Was a Fortean
Even though he lived hundreds of years before the birth of Charles Fort, Buddha knew what it meant to be an inveterate questioner. And that is the special dish that Fort brought to the table: questioning.
But this is not the simple curiosity that questions our world in pursuit of answers. That is for lightweights and posers. It is a questioning that questions the questioner and the questions themselves. So, what about answers? Surely you jest! When you go down the Fortean road, answers are – if not irrelevant – certainly relative. Buddha himself summed up this paradoxical mind game succinctly: “All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.”
This is a distinctly wobbly and uncomfortable mindset for people who wish reality to be cut and dried. It eschews comfortable assumptions and cuddly “teddy bear” pet theories. It avoids the simplistic “this is this and that is that” explanations of conventional science and looks into the mirror reflection of reality and asks, what can we possibly know that is not a product of mind?
Ultimately, the only thing we can know is our consciousness. And it always works best when it is empty of judgments and notions, the ersatz manufactured goods of mind. I am not sure that Fort completely cottoned onto this last point. But Buddha sure did. He wallowed in it like a hog in a slop-hole. They call that slop-hole enlightenment.
I wouldn’t say Fort was enlightened in the Buddhist sense. But he certainly was able to rise above the masturbatory mental machinations of conventional academics. Then he took the scientific dogmatists out to the wood-shed for the epistemic spanking they so richly deserved.
But alas, he suffered the fate of most heretics. He was marginalized by smaller and less honest minds; minds with fancy degrees and social clout. And thus Fort was relegated to a mostly forgotten footnote in history.
But his subversive outlook has won him many admirers. He is considered by many to be the father of “paranormal” studies. For instance, he may have proposed the idea that people are abducted by aliens. He was also an early theorizer that UFOs are peopled by extraterrestrial beings. In these instances, and many others, he was far ahead of his time.
Fort is a shining example of what it means to be a skeptic. Not the stilted inbred dogmatism of our UFO pseudo-skeptics, but the honest to god skepticism of a mind that questions all assumptions. And that was what Fort was really about. He found the soft white underbelly of science - its unexamined assumptions - and plunged his knife in deeply. The cries of pain were palpable and predictable. But science, being the lumbering dolt that it is, applied its Hello Kitty band-aid and continued on with its old delusional ways as if nothing had happened. Indeed, ignorance is bliss.
But a Fortean state of mind is a hard one to maintain. It takes a willingness to swim upstream, against the current of unexamined social assumptions. It also takes discipline. That’s because it is a lot easier to believe in something than to believe in nothing. Ultimately, that means not knowing stuff.
Who would have thought that it was smarter to not know stuff? Many intellectuals are allergic to this idea. But they don’t know any better. Academia has a spastic compulsion to explain everything. This sometimes leads to fuzzy assumptions which have little basis in reality. It seems that consensus thinking is a dim bulb which only evolves slowly and reluctantly.
Fort himself was primarily a contrarian. Raised with a strict and abusive father, he developed an early disdain for authority. Being an intellectual, this predisposed him to question the stuffy assumptions of science and ferret out the uncomfortable data that science rejected as improbable or, worse, fantasy. The fact is that conventional science, with its hard materialist bias, is too limited in scope to encompass the full breadth of human experience. It is a philosophy which sees anything outside the material realm as illusory.
Buddha sets this presumption in its proper place. Buddhism suggests that the rational mind (the ne plus ultra of science) not human experience, is the source of illusion.
Buddhist enlightenment is, in fact, a philosophy one step beyond Charles Fort. It goes beyond simple contrarian questioning of socially imposed assumptions. It stems from the understanding that only the empty mind is truly in a position to parse the reality of human experience. The hard won “knowledge” of science is a series of preconceived notions which act as impediments to the understanding of true experience. Both Buddha and Fort recognized that the banishment of preconceived notions is a necessary palliative for the prevention of truth decay.
This should not be thought of as anti-intellectual or anti-scientific. It is merely the understanding that our assumptions do not and cannot prepare us for experiencing reality as it truly is. Science is fallible. It is, like most human experience, corrupted with the delusion of ego. And it is through the dissolution of ego and the embracing of our most core being, our consciousness, that illusion disappears.
But the old lumbering giant is still out there with its tattered Hello Kitty band-aid. The superannuated dinosaurs still hold court and swear the earth is flat. They don’t seem to know it yet, but the materialist paradigm is in its death knell. And, being the stubborn old coots that they are, their ideas probably will not die until they do. Too bad it has to be that way.
However, I am optimistic about the future. Quantum physics have shown us that the ancient lessons of metaphysics were an accurate picture of reality and how it works. These ideas have been with us throughout human history. But somehow, over the millennia, they have been understood by only a small minority of people. Buddha was one of them.
Quantum thinking builds on the ideas of Einstein’s physics. Quantum theory makes as much of a leap over Einstein as Einstein did over Newton. It is a radical shift in epistemology. It is the clarion call for the entre of consciousness into scientific understanding. I think the science of the 21st Century will stem from an understanding of consciousness and its intimate connection with our material reality. And when we get there, the lumbering giant will be deader than Fort himself.
The universe is far greater than the breadth of our prejudices. Just think of the fun we could have had if we all thought like Buddha, or even Charles Fort. In order to understand the universe, we must reject our preconceived notions. Otherwise we are not skeptical truth seekers, but dogmatists. It is never too late to change your mindset…..
END
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:glee:
