Monday 1 April 2013

The Screwtape Letters and Supermaterialism

Just read CS Lewis's excellent spiritual novelette (well worth a buy or library visit). In it he takes the micheal out of the dark side. It takes the form of a conversation between a Senior and a Junior devil, 'The Screwtape Letters' and this excerpt took my notice (it was written in the late 1940s). Italics mine. 'The Enemy' refers to the big white-bearded fella upstairs.

'Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet, I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The 'Life Force', the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work - the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he calls 'Forces' while denying the existence of 'spirits' - then the end of the war will be in sight.'
Its interesting that CS Lewis talks of life-force, perhaps he was aware of Reich's work, or perhaps he was talking of the vitalist tradition. Yet I share similar views about the 'pure' interpretation of life-force/orgone - that the entire universe is explainable as an energy-field. This is because there are phenomena that are beyond energy -  see my website here for more info - essays one and two have more info http://leonsouthgate.com/life-force-essays.html
Anyway I class some orgonomic views as being 'super-materialist' though they are still more correct than virtually any other scientific view in my humble opinion. I personally feel that to include all phenomena one must posit a force-field spectrum from spirit-to-energy-to-matter....this is more than saying everything is consciousness because that view doesn't explain why the material universe behaves, or appears to behave, as it does.