The Zennist: The factor of woo woo

The "woo" or "woo woo" factor generally refers to any belief in the supernatural which "big science" has not proven. It can include many religious beliefs and the use of pseudoscientific explanations. Those who generally accuse someone's belief of being "woo woo" are generally skeptics, materialists, naive realists, or those who believe science is infallible. The use of it during a debate is an effective tactic of putting a stop to any serious discussion as to the merits of a particular issue such as NDEs (near death experiences), rebirth, karma, spiritual experiences, UFOs, alien abduction, and so on.

Over the years, just concentrating on a few pet beliefs which rest upon the supposed infallibility of big science I have found that the so called big bang theory has not been verified. To this day it remains an unverified hypothesis; and yet, it is marketed on the MSM as a settled theory. The same, I hasten to add, goes with how the sun works and black holes. Another, is the belief that mind or consciousness is a product of the brain. This theory is also unverified. Almost verified is really never verified. The list goes on of science posturing itself as being more or less infallible when the facts speak differently. We have only to recall Copernicus who proposed that the Sun was the center of our Solar System, not the Earth. The settled theory of that period in Western history, the Ptolemaic system, used time to prove that the Sun and the various planets orbited around the Earth. Copernicus used distance, instead. Some forty-five years after Copernicus published his work, De Revolutionibus, his theory was still not widely accepted. Yes, we can call his theory when it first came out to be woo woo. And so was Max Planck's 'quantum of action' which he announced to the world in 1900 which put an end to 300 years of classical physics which had carelessly excluded the observer.

Just the other day, on YouTube, I watched Deepak Chopra in a debate get woo wooed for using the term "quantum healing" which he had earlier coined. In light of what Max Planck said in 1931 to the reporter J. W. N. Sullivan that, "Consciousness, I regard as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness," Chopra still got woo wooed for advocating mind's important role in healing. That the subjective observer of disease plays no part in their own healing is quite absurd, yet this is still where modern medicine is coming from. Modern medicine has all but made the use of placebos illegal (they deceive it claims) despite the fact that the placebo effect is just another word for the effect of self-healing!

If we redefine the "woo woo" factor to mean all unverified claims which, incidentally, can be put into a file named "refined opinions," then almost all of science is pretty much woo woo. Buddhism's verification, on the other hand, rests upon the notion that the experiences which the Buddha predicts in his discourses, such as the attainment of nirvana, actually obtain. This is somewhat like saying Tesla's patents, which he claims work, are verified if we can reproduce them. This is not woo woo.