Knowing All that We Need to Know

Todd Hayen

It is a mystery to me why human beings, as a whole, seem to think that the entire workings of the universe have been “figured out.” And as such, there really is no mystery left to any of it.

Yes, people think there are still things yet to invent, and still things in the natural world yet to take apart and understand better. But the fundamental building blocks of the material realm have been discovered and essentially understood.

I think most people will agree there are more things on the horizon that we can “invent”—meaning that we can still learn how to read minds, or learn how to eliminate cancer, or fly to distant solar systems, but I think, even if this is true, that most people believe we have broken the code regarding how the universe works.

We know all that we need to know about atoms, the smallest building blocks of nature—we know all that we need to know about the human body, including genomes, DNA structure, proteins, and all that scientific gobbledygook the “scientists” have told us they have “figured out.” If not, why then be so confident regarding the safety of injecting billions of people with a gene altering “drug”? And of course the majority of the world said, “yeah, why not, they know what they are doing.”

If this isn’t true for someone, and if that person is saying, “oh, I don’t believe that at all, I believe science has much more to discover in the natural world,” I would still be willing to bet that even that person believes science has nothing new to learn about human beings. Particularly regarding the human psyche, human behaviour, and human psychology.

Most of these “materialist types” believe that religion and spirituality is old hat superstition. Therefore anything of a metaphysical nature is cast out with the materialist bathwater. Things like rituals, archetypes, dreams, even the mysterious effect that art or music has on the human psyche, are not even considered as having much importance. As a result of these things essentially being cast aside, they are considered to be things that are “fully understood.” Fully understood to have no meaning and no importance.

This, to me, has been the greatest assault to humanity in the history of mankind, and has had the greatest negative impact on our way of life—the wholesale destruction of meaning in the unseen, and by “unseen” I mean non-material. For this destruction to take place fully and effectively, we first have to be made to believe that it has “all been figured out.”

There is really nothing new to learn, and what we cannot explain, we will relegate to “promissory materialism”—a term invented to say that if we can’t explain now through material means, one day we will be able to—we now know the building blocks of reality, nothing is a true mystery.

Now, not all scientists are so arrogant to believe this. Some just while away in their labs with their theories, their experiments, and their reliance on the “scientific method” to prove or disprove their hypotheses. These are the true scientists. But they too have their traumas, which are always trying to get the best of them. They are constantly attacked in academia by other scientists trying to prove they are wrong—thus go the wars of falsification, a constant in the world of academic science—a necessary constant.

But this relentless battle can have its deleterious effect on those engaged in it. Trauma is trauma, and it all has negative effect in some way. These scientists get hardened, and often are unwilling to let go of treasured beliefs. They fight hard for what they hold to be truth about the mechanisms of the natural world, and the longer they hold a truth, the more difficult it becomes to pull it down from its exalted pedestal.

God forbid, then, politicians get involved. Any person of authority will grab any sort of scientific “idea” (which they will call truth) that supports their agenda, and they will run with it. They will do whatever they can to support the false idea that the “science is set” and that any contrary idea is thrown in the waste bin by vilifying the notion, the purveyor of the notion, or censoring the contrary idea altogether. “We know everything!” They spout out. “It is all figured out, follow the science!”

I would suspect that a lot of real scientists that hear this sort of thing rub their chin and say, “well, that isn’t exactly right . . .” but they want to keep their jobs at the lab, or their tenured position at the university, or their stature among their peers and instead mutter, “yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.” Some of them are probably even unconscious that is what they are doing.

I would also suspect that the majority of scientists believe what I am stating here about “knowing everything.” I think most of them believe that. Sure, they think there are still things to “figure out” but they believe all the basic building blocks have been discovered. They have reduced EVERYTHING down to its fundamental reality. And that’s that.

They are wrong.

I am a psychologist, and although I would definitely enter a debate with anyone about the limitations of physical reality, I would rather argue the audacity of any belief that says the human psyche is an open book that has been read from page one to the last. And, believe it or not, the reality of the planet (if not the entire universe) is impacted by the inner workings of the human psyche. And we have not even begun to understand how that works. Not even a smidgen.

When I say, “psyche,” I am not speaking of the medical model definition of “psyche” which stays within the materialist paradigm. I am including all of that, yes, but that is not the whole picture. The psyche also “contains” the non-objective elements of reality—thoughts, dreams, love, emotions, intuition, gut feelings, and meaning beyond the physical senses—as well as an awareness of God and spirituality.

Within the psyche lies the reason a sunset is emotionally moving, a kiss brings more than a physical sensation, or why a rain dance among indigenous people actually brings rain (or doesn’t). It contains the mystery of “meaning” and of “purpose” and if we want to discover what these things are to us as an individual (and as a community of humans) we have to give these things more credence than the materialists want us to. We have to embrace the fact that life is ineffable and is not made up of only material particles.

All the things humans have done throughout the millennia to bring meaning and purpose to their lives, cannot be seen solely as superstition, but as life affirming concepts, rituals, stories, imaginations, and formulations. If we keep ignoring this, we will continue to destroy ourselves. We don’t know everything; we must leave a lot up to faith, and to mystery. We must not only follow consciousness of the intellect, but consciousness of the heart. Therein lies the peace of the Universe.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here