Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018

Models of Reality
The Formation of Reality

If you were to take only one lesson from this book, this section is the one to bank on. I say this because the first lesson in a shamanic apprenticeship often centers on learning that the world we hold to be real is only a description: a collection of ideas. Whatever that description is, it forms a model of reality. For shaman or scientist, knowing that this is factual produces a formative step in exploring consciousness.

Once you understand models, learning and imagination enter entirely new realms. This is because your current reality, as well as all other realities past, present, and future, are models, approximations of the overarching potential of what exists. Infinity has been reduced to “reality,” to an extensive inventory that, even though forming an entire worldview, remains decidedly limited. Inventories are about something; they are not necessarily what is. A model is a bag of options that comes in all sizes. They are gestalts formed by culling interrelated elements of an inventory to form a representation of something larger.

Models are both solitary and influence other models. While interest in electricity and magnetism can be dated back to ancient Greece, the nineteenth century marked a historical turning point in the field of bioenergetics, for example. Many practical discoveries relating to different forms of energy and how they affect the human body were made during that period and the models associated with bioenergetics continue to be augmented. After Michael Faraday learned to harness magnetism to generate electrical current, Elias Smith patented an electromagnetic healing coil, Edwin Babbitt depicted energy fields surrounding the body and presented his work in the treatise The Principles of Light and Color, and Hahnemann developed homeopathy. Today we have magnetic resonance imaging and SQUID magnetometers. Over the years homeopathic provings (a method to determine the efficacy of a remedy) have increased. All of the information in this book is a model: that of an extended bioenergetic view of human anatomy. Within this, acupuncture offers a model, as do chakras, as do Western psychologies.

Within any discipline, models are often the benchmark to which new ideas, procedures, and products are measured, tested, and examined. By providing the means to intellectually grasp a system, models enable further study of the characteristics of that system, such as a mathematical model of atmospheric conditions, or a mechanistic view of the universe. A viable model explains, predicts, and adds to the knowledge from which it was born. The use of the Newtonian perspective of a mechanistic world reveals why an apple falls to the ground, enables the building of magnificent bridges, and helps to accurately forecast what will happen when something explodes or implodes.

Models both grow and fall to the side, though, because they are conditional fields and therefore invariably incomplete. The logic of a model consists of the arrangement of particular conditions. The practical effect is that a model always has limited applicability. For example, classical physics does little to make sense of teleportation. This form of travel—an area of investigation that is increasingly leaving the ranks of science fiction and entering science fact—finds home in the province of quantum physics. But to build this type of machine requires the knowledge of classical physics. Other models, like viewing our Sun as revolving around Earth, have become artifacts of an obsolete worldview.

At once resilient and fragile, models instill the means to have exquisite investigations or act as stumbling blocks to further research. These magnificently frail instruments capture the joy and the bane of trying to grasp what the world really is all about. All coherent intellectual perceptions rest within models, structures that reason uses to reflect, interpret, expand, and consider. Each model represents a singular cohesion and therefore an assemblage point position. On a grander scale, the interlocking of several compatible models forms a mega-cohesion, as it were, and is the driving force of group consensus reality.

Models come in all sizes. A laboratory bench model might be used to explain and measure the effects of adding one chemical to another. There are paradigms: expansive, wide-reaching models. Then there are worldviews, entire cosmologies that become so ingrained that they lead us to forget that the world that is being viewed is in fact a conglomeration of interpretations. The difference between a laboratory model that accounts for a chemical reaction and a model portraying a complete worldview is a matter of scale. Regardless of their expanse, as measured against infinity all models—be they of shamanism or science—are but single, isolated pictures of significantly greater circumstances.

It is worth repeating that each type of model, however large or small, is a reduced version of something larger. They exist as representations, symbols, or images, not reality itself. Any viable model functions as a principal determinant of what can be observed as well as focusing the results of that observation. Without this awareness of the role played by models, any approach to understanding can quickly degenerate into dogmatic fundamentalism. As physician Gabriel Cousens points out in the introduction to Richard Gerber’s book, Vibrational Medicine, “. . . models are not necessarily real, but serve as conceptual tools to enhance a functional understanding.”¹⁴

Models therefore need to be fluid. While they allow us to make practical gains in our understanding, they need to change to allow us to have new relationships to an ever-evolving universe, at least our ever-evolving perception of the universe. Without this malleability, submarines, airplanes, and healing technologies would have remained solely on the pages of science-fiction novels. When a more comprehensive model is developed, it is not that the new model is “right.” It is that—in relation to the preceding model—it offers new perspective containing more potential.

For instance, the ability to specifically target cancer cells with minimal effect on healthy tissue, via new drugs and biotech advances, has produced a paradigm shift in oncology; physicians now approach the disease differently.¹⁵ They have a new model, with matching technology, to specifically go after diseased cells rather than place the entire body under assault with broadly toxic cancer-fighting drugs. So-called “smart bombs,” for example, distinguish between cancer cells and healthy cells, enter the diseased cell, and then explode.

Some models, however, are not all that useful in the first place. Engineering professor Henry Petroski says that including considerations of failure in a model is part of achieving success.¹⁶ In the world of drug discovery, federal law usually requires animal testing for many new drugs in order to help ensure safety and efficacy. Because of the difficulties of correspondence between species, the type of data derived from these animal studies may be of only marginal value or even inaccurate, thereby throwing studies completely off the mark. By contrast, certain other animal models have proven to have better predictive value about what will happen when a drug is given to humans; these are known as “validated animal models.” The validated models often provide a better basis for evaluation; however, the frequent lack of correlation between animal models demonstrates why possibilities of failure need to be part of investigations. You therefore have models within models within models. . . . This aptly reflects the complexity of constructing reality.