The Importance Of Totality

By Leo Gura - June 10, 2025

Why is totality so important? Why must you have total scope, not partial scope, when trying to understand ultimate reality? Because if you leave out any part, that part can hold a critical factor that recontextualizes the whole picture. Parts, or lack of totality, leaves room for illusions to hide. If you want absolute understanding your understanding must be TOTAL — no parts can be left unaccounted for, otherwise your entire understanding might turn out to be an illusion. To grasp ultimate reality you have to grasp it so totally that no possibility of a hidden illusion remains. Or, to say it another way, you must find an absolute solution to the problem of self-deception. This is not a method science is accustomed to. Scientific method is the opposite of this because it seeks to divide reality into tiny isolated parts and only speaks on one part or another part at a time, never the whole. This allows science to do practical work but at the cost of never understanding the totality and never solving the problem of illusion and self-deception. This also means science can never understand God, because God is Totality.

Here’s what scientists do not understand. Understanding total reality is epistemically different in kind from understanding any one part. Why? Because when you are trying to explain the total you do not have the immense luxury to offload any explanatory power onto any other part. This trick of offloading explanation onto other parts is always done by scientific method. What’s an example of this? If you ask a scientist where a bird came from, he will say: from a dinosaur, which came from a lizard, which came from a fish, which came from an amoeba, which came from a bacteria, which came from the ocean, which came from the Earth, which came from a sun, which came from a dust cloud, which came from the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is left unexplained. My point is, this is a fundamental limit inherent to all scientific method. It’s not merely that we lack the tools to explain the Big Bang, it’s that in principle science can never explain anything in total, no matter how long it works or how good its tools.

Therefore, scientific method cannot be used to grasp totality. This is no trivial coincidence. It is a technical requirement of scientific method that it offload explanatory power onto other unknown parts. Scientific method only works because it shifts the fundamental Mystery of Being out of its domain of scope into another domain which it very conveniently doesn’t feel responsible to explain. Scientific method works like a heat engine. A heat engine cannot produce heat out of thin air, it requires pulling energy out of some part of reality into another. A heat engine achieves work at the expense of some other part of reality. Grasping reality as a whole is different in kind from a heat engine, it’s more like inventing a perpetual motion machine.

Science is a game of sweeping Mystery under one rug, then under another, until the scientist dies of old age. Scientific method only works because it deftly shifts epistemic and ontological responsibility.

Asking science to grasp total reality is like asking a helicopter to fly to the moon. A child might assume that a helicopter can fly to the moon, not realizing that helicopter blades only achieve work thanks to having bite on the air. No air, no bite, no lift, no moon. Materialist scientists and rationalists are like children who think that scientific method will keep doing work forever and work in the case of grasping ultimate reality, without seeing that scientific method only works if reality is divided into parts. “Parts” are to scientific method as air is to helicopter blades. No parts, no bite, no work. Science doesn’t see that total reality cannot be grasped with science for the same reason that a helicopter cannot fly to the moon. Science copes with this by denying that total reality matters or just by saying it’s an impossible issue. Yes, it’s impossible — for science. It’s impossible for a helicopter. But it’s not impossible to fly to the moon, it just requires a new paradigm that does not depend on parts to do its work. But here’s the devious trick that science plays: Whenever someone like me dares speak about the total nature of reality, science says, “That’s not true! You can’t know that! That’s unscientific! You’re hallucinating!” Which is as silly as saying, “That’s not fair! You can’t use a rocket to fly to the moon! You are only allowed to fly using helicopters! You hallucinated walking on the moon! Everyone knows walking on the moon is impossible — science says so!”

Well, fuck you. I used a rocket and I walked on the moon. Because I was smart enough to understand the limits of helicopters. I warned you not to cling to your helicopter. But you just can’t help yourself.

So what is the solution to this totality problem? If scientific method isn’t good enough, what is? Science is too limited. Philosophy is a better method. But it also turns out too limited. So science gives way to philosophy, philosophy gives way to mysticism, and mysticism gives way to Awakening. And Awakening is the solution. Awakening is the total grasp of absolute reality without offloading any explanatory load onto any other parts.

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Note: In this analogy the helicopter is thinking. Any form of thinking — scientific, philosophical, religious — is all helicopters. Thinking works by having semantic bite, like helicopter blades have bite on air. But reality is much more than thinking. Mind/Consciousness is much more than thinking. Thinking only takes you so far because it requires symbolic content to bite on. Thinking can’t take you to domains of consciousness beyond symbolic content. Thinking is not fundamental enough, in the same way that air is not as fundamental as empty space. You can’t use a helicopter to get to the moon because a helicopter is not a fundamental-enough propulsion method. A rocket is more fundamental. Likewise, meditation, psychedelics, mystical experience, or Consciousness is more fundamental than symbolic thinking. But how do you explain this to a scientist, rationalist, or atheist when their paradigm says that analytical thinking is the only way?

You cannot understand Unity with analytical thinking! — Duh! Because analysis is the division of Unity. And God is Unity!

Do you see how powerful paradigm-lock is? To reach new places requires new paradigms. But science has still not learned this lesson 60 years after Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of paradigms. That’s how slow human understanding advances. Hundred-year-old epistemic lessons have still not been learned by and large. We are dealing with a centuries-old backlog of positivist scientific and philosophical ignorance.

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