Modern Science and Technology in Light of the Alchemical Impulse

  The technological advancement of the past decades and the direction of material science, most notably the atom-smashing experiments at Cern, strongly suggest that the Western mind is obsessed with manifesting a magical object. Will our technology soon become alchemical, and with clanging machinery, produce this golden "god-particle?" I don't want to deny the possibility. However, I am reminded of something said by the cynical anti-guru, U.G. Krishnamurti: "Say you attain this "enlightenment," what will you do with it!?" Statistics show that new technological innovation is first used for military purposes, and secondly, for pornography, so it would seem that if modern scientists did manifest what Terrence McKenna referred to as the "transcendental object at the end of history," archetypal rapture of hipster-futurism as it were, they would have NO IDEA what to do with it. 

  Brion Gysin, who first discovered the "cut-up" writing technique, said that "writing is 50 years behind painting." I feel it is reasonable to elaborate by saying that modern scientific research, with its materialistic, financial, and political biases, is hundreds, if not thousands of years behind painting. And speaking of painting, I am moved by those paintings which animate inner intelligence and inspire an ever deeper self-knowledge. While technology can prove supplemental to our lives, providing convenience and entertainment in astounding ways, I feel that this same artistic resonance of experiencing one's soul through a painting, film, literary work, or musical piece, is the height of esotericism to which technology and science can aspire.

  What will hopefully be realized in the long-run from endeavors like the atom-smashing at Cern, is that our scientific experiments are fundamentally giving us insights into the nature of the human mind conducting and observing them, more so than any "objective reality" outside of us. In the years to come, we may begin to see an increase in technology created intentionally for the sake of art, and conventional realms of scientific study becoming like Quantam Physics, where the findings themselves resemble mystical paradox more than proclamations of "ultimate and final truth."