You know, David, you've just skimmed the course and are still spouting nonsense about it. BK is attacking materialism using science's own methods, providing hard evidence along the way, which you'd know if you'd bothered to look into it more deeply. I have little patience with someone who pontificates without bothering to investigate properly.
Your asking me to show how I would use the course to better understand anything practical illustrates my point. What is more practical than understanding consciousness? In the end, everything we think we know is mediated by it. As BK says, physics is the science of perception rather than of reality, and to repeat, he provides hard evidence from physics and other disciplines to show it.
Technology is a red herring: engineers don't care about what is true, but what empirically works. They simply use materialistic models of reality to produce working devices, and there's no reason that they couldn't carry on applying models if the general acceptance of materialism changed to an acceptance of a better description of reality, such as idealism.
But what continued acceptance of materialism does is automatically
restrict what kinds of technology can be looked into. It leads to dismissal or ignoring of evidence that doesn't fit existing paradigms. It leads to a science that isn't interested in truth, so much as promulgating the authoritarian dogmatism of consensus.
That is why we can have continual nonsense being expounded in so many areas -- climate science, medicine, cosmology and all the rest. Why we keep coming up with technological solutions based on bullshit -- such as planting fuel crops, creating wind farms, and huge but largely ineffective solar power arrays that destroy environments and make the situation worse. I mean, they "work", but not in a good way because they aren't solving real problems.
Not only is idealism testable, it has already been quite extensively experimentally tested, but you evidently don't know that because you can't be bothered to really look at the evidence the course presents.
I'll say something else: I don't agree with BK on a number of issues -- he accepts global warming as being largely human-caused, for example. So I don't think he's superhuman by any means, but his basic premises in analytical idealism strike me as being parsimonious, consistent and cohesive -- and to provide a great deal more explanatory power than materialism ever has or ever could.
If we could turn the corner, science would open up and technologists might be able to have greater freedom to produce useful devices in areas that are currently beyond the pale. I mean, look at the placebo effect, for example. We've made progress in that it is accepted as real, but what if we really took it seriously and started to develop treatments based on it rather than just having it as a means of evaluating whether or not standard treatments were better than placebo? And what if people looked seriously at things like
Jaques Benveniste's "memory of water"? It might or might not be true -- but that's not the point. No one is seriously looking at it precisely because materialism is the prevailing paradigm.
Change the paradigm, and potentially, a whole raft of new scientific and technological possibilities open up. We won't stop using satnavs, jet airliners and computers: they work, and in many ways for the benefit of people, but who knows what new technologies lie in wait if only science were prepared to change the paradigm that has gradually become more and more of a straitjacket for real progress?