One way to judge the two stories is think them both through with an open mind. And, like a scientist conducting an experiment in a laboratory, we must remove our own beliefs and prejudices from the outcome of the experiment. The reader must try to look at the world purely, like a child. Strive for extreme objectivity; be the perfect neutral judge and make no decisions until the evidence comes in and the arguments weighed against each other.
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Eckhart Tolle, in his popular book, The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, denigrates the physical world we live in as a secondary reality; a distraction from who we really are -- pure Being. But Tolle errs. The physical world, this three-dimensional place we inhabit, is a reflection of being, and the failure to appreciate the incredible improbablity that such a world exists, may lead someone, such as Tolle, to ponder instead the inner world of Being as constituting ultimate reality. It may be, but this ultimate reality has an unknown power to project a three-dimensional world of form that we should honor, not denigrate. ...
German physicist, Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, is credited with observing that “science advances one funeral at a time.” What did he mean? What we call “modern science” is in fact a set of theories advanced by the day’s leading scientists, teachers, authors, and textbook writers. (Included among this group would be Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krause, Stephen Weinberg, Leon Lederman, John Gribben, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennet). These individuals “control the airwaves” by defining the body of scientific knowledge that they hand down to their students, television commentators, readers, and the public at large. Boosted by their association with Science, the most authoritative intellectual discipline, these thought leaders direct the course of our worldview and determine the theories and ideas we are supposed to believe in. These ideas and theories include the Big Bang (the world was created in a gigantic explosion of matter, space, and time), cosmic inflation (the matter present at the Big Bang expanded by 50 orders of magnitude in...
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If the world is really a dream, our conception of time will have to change. Given modern science's current belief that 13.7 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, this may take some doing. On the other hand, if it turns out the world is really a dream we will have to change our frame of reference for determining the age of the cosmos. This is because a mind can dream a physical object -- such as a mountain, tree, or even stars -- quickly, and it would be inappropriate to base the age of the dream world upon a dreamt object. ...
Scientific theories are given greater weight than matters of faith or mere belief because theories are testable. We know that gravity is an attractive force because objects dropped from leaning towers fall down, not up; we know that light travels at 186,000 miles per second because scientists measured this speed; we know that the core elements of the physical world possess features of both matter and waves because the famous double-slit experiment shows elementary particles to have this double-identity. If a theory or belief is testable it means that it is open to questioning, and therefore able to possess a deeper validity. Some observers (e.g., the late Karl Popper) believe that the notion that the world is a dream is not testable and therefore not a scientific theory. But dream-theory is easily testable. Many of us have had the experience of “seeing stars” after a powerful sneeze, a fall off a...
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