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The basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be: a thing composed of
matter, and pretty much confined to its surface. The world is what it appears to be.
Now, this, on the face of it, is a tremendously naïve position, because what it says is the animal body
that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate
instruments of metaphysical conjecture… which is highly improbable. It seems to me, metaphysical
conjecture begins with the logic of the situation, and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic
will carry you. Well, if logic is true to experience, then we have to make room in any theory for
invisible connectedness between people; anticipation of a future that has not yet occurred; shared
dreaming; all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied. For approximately 500 years, the great
era of the triumph of modern science, materialism has had the field all to itself; and its argument for
its pre-eminence was the beautiful toys that it could create: aircraft, railroads, global economies,
television, spacecraft. But that is a fool’s argument for truth! I mean, that’s after all how a medicine
show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an
entirely rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of “rational”
scientific culture, we are literally at the end of our rope! Reason, and science, and the practice of
unbridled capitalism, have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary: they’ve
delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about what’s happening
to the other 97% of us who are eating it!
It’s not a pretty picture, modern civilisation. Most people in the world today are quite miserable,
actually. They have very little hope; their religions, their traditional value systems, are being eroded
by Dallas and Hawaii 5-0, which are on the village television every night; lifespans are being
shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment; and there is very little
political light on the horizon. So I believe that it’s reasonable, looking at this situation, to say that
history failed; and that the grand dream of Western civilisation has in fact failed. And now we are attempting – with basically a carved wooden oar – to turn a battleship around. And it’s a very
frustrating undertaking. The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation. But it’s not
100% certain that catastrophe is what we’re headed for, because we are not 100% unconscious. There
are people struggling to figure out how to control population, struggling to figure out how to balance
the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, struggling to bring amelioration of hunger
and disease to various parts of the world. So we’re in essentially a tragic situation. A tragic situation is
a catastrophe when you know it, you see. And part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all
other cultural styles to our own. And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting
Native American culture; the ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the megaculture of
Nouveau Europa, whatever that means; cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific
beast and then they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.

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