 In a lot of debates, and I'm writing on climate change, so this might be a key example, each side says if only the other side would accept the facts, would accept the science, then they would change their mind. And what's wrong with them? I mean, this is the science, this is fact, this is truth, and they must be on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry, they must not even care about the future of our children, they must be so wrapped up in their own self-interest and so deluded and susceptible to confirmation bias, unlike me, who is open-minded and objective, if only we can convince them of the facts, and the other side, most of you probably are not on the other side, maybe some of you are, they say pretty much the same thing, that the entire scientific establishment is in a collective delusion, that excludes any data that contradicts the dominant theory, and if you formulate a different hypothesis, you're out of a job, you can't get funding, you can't get grants, you can't get a seat at the policy table, so it's a self-free, I mean, they have their, like, a friend of mine was with his family, you know, and they watched Fox News 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and he was like, you know, at the end of that week I could see how in that reality bubble, you would have to be crazy to vote for Hillary Clinton. Okay, so here we are at the Science and Nonduality Conference that has, it has this, why are people so attracted to science and non-duality or science and spirituality? It awakens a kind of a hope for a reconciliation between these two sundered, divided aspects of reality, and we would like to say, yeah, these non-dual realizations or my spiritual life or my experiences of, as Jude was saying this morning, discarnate entities, like these are valid after all, so really, maybe what we're hoping for is a kind of a validation, in addition to adjoining together of a split reality. So I have to ask, why is this validation so important? It's because science is the main legitimizing institution of our culture. You could even say it's the religion of our culture. It's in the sense that it is what confers righteousness to anything, like a scientific policy, a scientific reason for something. That means that it's true for real. Now science itself says, no, no, no, we're not a religion. We are the opposite of a religion. Religion takes things on faith, but we ask the world. We perform an experiment. We don't take anything on faith. We're objective. What goes missing here is that this objectivity is based on, it's based on metaphysical assumptions that are unprovable, just like any religion. Among them, objectivity, that there's a world outside of ourselves that is separate from our asking of the questions that our questions don't change the reality that we ask about. That an experiment is repeatable, that the intention of the experimenter is irrelevant, that there's a division between observer and observed, and that the observed is constant in relation to the observer. Yada, yada, yada. Everyone knows this already. Another metaphysical assumption is that everything that is important or worth knowing can be measured and quantified. Now there's a lot of other ways in which science is suspiciously similar to a religion. It has a canon of holy texts. It has its own specialized mysterious language that only initiates can understand. It has an initiation ordeal called graduate school. Upon which you finish and you get a ceremonial name change. It has a system for the indoctrination of youth. It has deified saints and martyrs, Galileo, Newton, Einstein. It has schisms, heretics. It has the faithful lay believers who actually don't understand the esoteric knowledge of the religion, but they believe in it anyway. It has a divinatory practice for the attainment of truth called experimentation. It has a body of ritual built on top of it that's called technology. I mean the whole thing.