“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

MATERIALISM is the marvel of the modern world. With capitalism, modern science and engineering transformed the world in two centuries. First in the west, and now all over the world, we have gone from agrarian societies to the world of the internet, air travel, a cure for cancer and global corporations.

Most of this has been for the good, but materialism is now bumping up against its limitations. Our machines have caused global warming. Our chemicals have poisoned the oceans. Our emphasis on the material has produced angst and alienation.

We still hear pronouncements that life in the 21st century is about "being modern" and the expresson of technology. That was the second half of the 20th century. Now, we need to get beyond the limitations of materialism to the understanding that life holds more than that.

In my life, modern medicine has done a great deal for me: without modern science, I would be blind or even dead by now. But it was homeopathy, not modern medicine, that cured my Lyme Disease — the antibiotics doctors prescribed eventually killed the Lyme spirochetes but made me sicker than the spirochetes. Only homeopathy was able to treat both the spirochetes and the after effects of the antibiotics.

Homeopathy can be used and prescribed on a mundane, “scientific” basis. Two-hundred years of trial and observation have produced diagnoses that work, with no theory necessary to explain why (despite that, the American Medical Association says homeopathy is harmless but useless, because their theories don't agree — an unscientific pronouncement if ever there was one).

The most effective homeopaths may talk about "subtle energies," something the AMA is unable, and unwilling, to corroborate. But modern physics is beginning to explain them, while leading us back to the traditional religious idea that everything is connected. Through sub-atomic energy, physicists now say. It's related to Christopher Alexander's concept of "life" in The Nature of Order.

That's what the early 21st century is about.