Professor John Moriarty, who guided me on this attempt to walk beautifully in the world, reminded that beliefs are important. They are actions. The beliefs like the belief in a Big Bang have been inherited by us. Scientists have led us into a “nothing but universe” that is without things. “These are like the 4 horses of the scientific apocalypse,” says Moriarty. The world has been reduced to ‘nothing but, by the Newtonian universe.’ This is the nothing but universe and he says, “in it our souls have drained away.” That does not make scientists wrong. In the hands of lesser persons than Newton such ideas are deadly. Destructive. “Add that to Genesis 1:26 and 28 and you have the formula for the modern world.” Those are the passages of the Bible that purport to give humans the right to dominate the world as they see fit.
In other words, Moriarty warns against the combination of Genesis and the ‘nothing but Newtonian universe. Moriarty believes that Europeans have come so far in the last 3 centuries that “we have lost our souls.”
According to Moriarty, the first peoples of the world, who he refuses to call primitive people because that assumes that we of the west are superior to them, have realized that to lose your souls is a great calamity. Only the greatest medicine or shaman or spirit guide can bring you back to your soul once you have lost it. “Because we have lost our soul we are not able to see soul in anything else,” according to Moriarty.
We have reached a stage where the universal European attitude is the utilitarian attitude. It is only if something is useful to us that it has value. This, he says, was the attitude of John Stuart Mill and the utilitarians. In other words, things that have use and benefit have value, and nothing but those things have value. It is an idea that Moriarty is convinced is a fundamental mistake. What I have called “the original sin.” We think we are superior to everything in nature. This is a powerful illusion.
As a result, he says, “our eyes are now like brain tumours.” All we see is economics. Farmers see a cow and all they see is kilos of milk. They don’t see a living being with soul. Just kilos of milk. Pig farmers see pork. Nothing else.
Moriarty recalled being near a salmon river in Ireland where “the river seems to be liquid soul—all soul.” The river “gives you your soul.”
When we reach the stage where we see a cow and see kilos of meat, or see a magnificent tree and all we see is how many board feet of timber we could get from it, or the stars at night and see the big bang or big crunch we have arrived at terrible universe. We have lost touch with the soul in us and therefore we can’t see soul. We can’t see aliveness; all we see is biology. If you ask these utilitarians, ‘well then what am I?” the answer of course would be “you are transformed groceries.” Moriarty says if the woman I love is merely transformed groceries how can I write a sonnet to her? We have destroyed her. We have destroyed the art of the sonnet. We have reduced Shakespeare to mush.