It's interesting how, in the course of the last five years of writing this novel, it seems less an act of will than simply navigating a river. For all the trials and tribulations I've gone through--or been made to go through by others--the process of creation has, by and large, been one of near or total effortlessness. The story has literally come to me in overwhelming flashes of insight; the money has come to me, month after month, enabling me to continue living and writing, despite the wishes of many that it were not so: despite even the vigorous efforts of many others to consciously deny me that money as well.
Still, I have prevailed.
This will not change.
The pursuit of authentic purpose brings few friends and many enemies, I have long since discovered; and of the latter, one can count the Endless Apathetic, whose lifeless, flat stares act as a weight, pulling you under the surface of Life: for who am I to truly live, to have such fire in my belly, in my eyes, in my heart?
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But the stream I navigate pulls me away from the dead, and I find myself gifted with new insights, or new information that confirms old ones.
Take my recent discovery of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard, co-written with Denyse O'Leary. Here is a grand book that debunks the materialist stand on human existence, which is to say that free will does not exist, that the soul does not exist, that there is not a mind separate from the brain, that all is determined and conditioned, that God does not exist, that all that we are is a "sack of flesh" with a "three pound computer" guiding us along. Materialists hold that even consciousness does not exist, that it is an illusion of the inner workings of the brain, an artifact of neurons firing. Pop science and the media have bought this view hook, line, and sinker, says Beauregard, and he sites much evidence to back him up. Materialism is championed by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, by Michael Shermer and Raymond Kurzweil, among many, many others. We do not have an imagination, say these individuals; we are incapable of introspection. Both are illusory, false.
Materialist Peter Watson, quoted from New Scientist:
The social, psychological, and cognitive sciences remain stuck with prescientific words and concepts. For many of us the word "soul" is as obsolete as "phlogiston," but scientists still use such imprecise words as "consciousness," "personality" and "ego," not to mention "mind."
Perhaps it is time that, in science at least, "imagination" and "introspection" are remodelled or, preferably, retired. Artists can have fun with them, but the serious business of the world has moved on.
These individuals would, if so empowered, legislate the offending language out of the lexicon, and punish those using it, contradicting, of course, their position as determinists. For now, however, they are left simply bemoaning the ignorance of we who insist on using such terms, and worse, believing they are pointers to phenomenon that actually exist.
Beauregard's work does not attempt to "prove" the existence of God, or the soul, or free will; his stance, as a nonmaterialist, is to simply poke huge holes into the materialists' many specious arguments, as well as to show, via rigorous experimentation, that, for instance, there is in fact a mind separate from the brain, or to discuss correlates in patients who have undergone a near-death experience (some of these are astonishing), or to discuss mysticism and powerful religious or mystical experiences measured in the brain activity of Carmelite nuns and others. He shows--actually shows--that much of what these materialists say is completely devoid of any evidence whatsoever, or science, or anything even approaching objective, peer-reviewed, or rational. Evolutionary psychology takes particularly vicious hits here, ones that, were I part of that field, would consider a new line of work, so thoroughly does Beauregard dismantle that field of "study."
Beauregard also takes time to discuss what happens to scientists who take a view contrary to the materialist stand. And what happens is downright ugly. What one discovers reading this book is that science has literally gone from meaning the systematic, controlled search for truth to the dogmatic buttressing and rationalizing of the materialist position. Show evidence that butts up against that position, and you are faced with everything from being tossed unceremoniously out of your field to even threats of physical violence by those materialists themselves.
I've yet to finish this work, so this review will remain incomplete, but I'm sure its finish will be good: it's titled "Did God Create the Brain or Does the Brain Create God?"
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Melody & the Pier to Forever looks at the human soul; it looks at functions of the human soul like friendship and love and free will, and the many fruits that all three bear: heroism, nobility, loyalty, passion, joy, creation, and destruction. The Spiritual Brain came to me during the exact week that I had chosen to take a week off from the rigorous and time-consuming task of writing, transcribing, and editing the story. Had I chosen not to take a break, I would not have scanned the new books section at Mission Hills library; I would not have looked directly at The Spiritual Brain, would not have picked it up, would not have checked it out. I wouldn't have had the time. Had I chosen to take any other week off, it would be very likely that I'd've never seen this work, as it would've been checked out or at another branch entirely.
The materialist, with his flow charts and statistical analyses and three-pound computer analogies, would chalk this up to mere chance and psychological determinism, filtered via his flat, sterile, lifeless worldview that allows only mechanistic, brutal, selfish-gene survival. But I know quite differently. That that knowing is phenomenologically subjective and unprovable may make the materialist scream in rage and open his Skeptical Inquirer and read soothing holy words from his prophets Dawkins, Dennett, et al; it may compel him to label me a fool and an idiot and unschooled and unworthy; it may make him sneer in derision as he faces the black nihilism that his bankrupt philosophy ultimately is prize for having; and you know what?--I have to laugh and say cool!
I have the free will to do both.
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