What was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a wasteland. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for the inheritors of the seventeenth century idolum to fill the world up again with new organisms, devised to represent the new realities of physical science. Machines—and machines alone—completely met the requirements of the new scientific method and point of view: they fulfilled the definition of "reality" far more perfectly than living organisms. And once the mechanical world-picture was established, machines could thrive and multiply and dominate existence: their competitors had been exterminated or had been consigned to a penumbral universe in which only artists and lovers and breeders of animals dared to believe. Were machines not conceived in terms of primary qualities alone, without regard to appearance, sound, or any other sort of sensory stim.ulation? If science presented an ultimate reality, then the machine was, like the law in Gilbert's ballad, the true embodiment of everything that was excellent. Indeed in this empty, denuded world, the invention of machines became a duty. By renouncing a large part of his humanity, a man could achieve godhood: he dawned on this second chaos and created the machine in his own image: the image of power, but power ripped loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.
-Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization
In the quiet interstices of history, where the hum of machinery meets the whisper of the soul, there exists a tension as old as human ingenuity between the world we perceive and the worlds we might yet imagine. Lewis Mumford, peering through the lens of technics, once described a civilization stripped bare by its own abstractions, a wasteland where matter and motion reigned supreme, and machines became the ultimate deities of a disenchanted cosmos. This “depopulated world,” as he called it, emerged not from malice but from a peculiar kind of reverence: a devotion to quantification, precision, and control that flattened the multidimensional tapestry of existence into a monochrome grid. Yet, within this seemingly barren landscape, another vision flickers—one articulated by contemplative thinkers like Rob Burbea, who speaks of “many worlds” not as science fiction but as lived reality, an invitation to perceive the fabric of existence as a palimpsest of interwoven dimensions, each shaped by the ways we choose to look. To innovate in the modern era, this duality suggests, is not merely to build faster engines or smarter algorithms but to rekindle the capacity to dwell in—and cultivate—multiple realms of meaning, bridging the mechanistic and the mystical, the empirical and the imaginal. Mumford’s analysis of technics reveals how the clock, that quiet tyrant of modernity, didn’t just measure hours; it sculpted consciousness itself, training humanity to see time as a linear sequence of interchangeable moments rather than a lived rhythm of seasons, rituals, and breaths. The monastery’s bells, which first regimented life into sacred intervals, unwittingly midwifed a worldview where efficiency eclipsed eternity, and the cosmos became a clockwork puzzle to be solved. Yet Burbea’s exploration of “soulmaking” hints at a counter-movement: a way of seeing that refuses to reduce reality to mere mechanism. He invites us to consider how perception is not passive reception but active fabrication—a collaborative act between mind and world, where the lens we adopt (materialist, poetic, devotional) conjures the very reality it claims to observe. To speak of “many worlds,” is not to deny the truths of science but to expand them, recognizing that a single, static universe is insufficient to contain the plurality of human experience. Innovation becomes less about dominating nature and more about conversing with it, less about conquering space and time and more about inhabiting them with imaginative flexibility. The irony Mumford underscores—that machines, born of humanity’s quest for power, ended up mirroring a dismembered version of ourselves—finds its resonance in Burbea’s critique of “flat” metaphysics. When reality is stripped to its primary qualities (extension, mass, velocity), the soul’s hunger for depth, beauty, and relational meaning withers. The factories of the Industrial Revolution didn’t merely produce goods; they manufactured a sensibility, a way of being that privileged output over aliveness. Yet Burbea’s “many worlds” propose an antidote: a re-enchantment grounded not in regressive nostalgia but in deliberate practice. Just as medieval artisans once carved cathedrals to house the divine, we might now design technologies and systems that honor the verticality of existence—the layered realities of body, energy, and imagination. This is not a rejection of the machine but a transfiguration of it, where innovation serves not to further alienate us from the living world but to weave us back into its kaleidoscopic wholeness. Consider the clock again. In Mumford’s telling, it is the archetypal machine, the hidden engine of capitalism’s tempo. But what if we could, as Burbea suggests, “suspend the habitual indoctrination” of its tyranny? To innovate beyond the clock’s monotony might mean designing temporal architectures that honor circadian rhythms, seasonal cycles, and the nonlinear flow of creative insight. It might mean technologies that don’t merely save time but sanctify it, transforming efficiency from a metric of extraction into an art of presence. Similarly, Mumford’s “paleotechnic” phase—the coal-blackened era of steam and steel—exemplifies a world where material progress was purchased at the cost of ecological and spiritual poverty. Yet Burbea’s “many worlds” imply that another industrial revolution is possible, one where the mechanistic and the organic coexist not as adversaries but as collaborators, each informing the other. Imagine energy systems modeled not on combustion but on photosynthesis, or cities structured as ecosystems rather than machines—innovations that emerge when we allow the “hierophanic time” of sacred imagination to dialogue with empirical rigor. At the heart of this synthesis lies a recognition: the crisis of innovation in our age is not a shortage of ideas but a poverty of perception. Mumford’s “denuded world” persists not because we lack tools to re-enchant it but because we’ve been trained to dismiss the tools we already possess—the capacity to shift our ways of looking, to entertain plural realities, to hold the measurable and the mysterious in creative tension. The monastery’s horological discipline and the artist’s perspectival revolution were both, in their ways, technologies of the soul, methods of ordering chaos into coherence. To innovate today is to embrace a similar plurality, recognizing that a habitable future demands not just smarter machines but wiser metaphors—ones that allow us to navigate the “many worlds” within and around us, from the quantum to the cosmological, the ecological to the ethereal. In the end, the most radical innovation may be epistemological: a willingness to see, as both Mumford and Burbea urge, that the world is not a fixed stage but a living tapestry, woven anew with every act of attention. The clock’s tick and the artist’s brushstroke, the engineer’s equation and the mystic’s vision—all are threads in this tapestry, each revealing a facet of reality’s infinite potential. To innovate is to participate in this weaving, not as masters of a dead universe but as co-creators of worlds yet unborn.
Matter, Bodies, Worlds (Part 2)
A Dharma Talk by Rob Burbea
"Perception involves conception—most of the time very subtle, not even fully conscious. ... The same is also true about science. To a certain extent, materialistic/mechanistic science, well, that’s what it will find—through certain assumptions, what we seem to then discover objectively and independently is just reflecting back our paradigm, our point of view, our assumptions”
Meditation Practice
Practice bringing mindful awareness to the individual sensations that arise with each breath - notice the subtle movements, pressures, temperatures, and textures that make up your breathing experience. Pay particular attention to the distinct sensations at the beginning, middle and end of each in-breath and out-breath, observing how they arise and pass away moment by moment.