Is there a Role for Science on Spirituality's 'Lonely Path'?

". . . And I will speak to thee of that wisdom and vision which, when known, there is nothing else for thee to know.

Among thousands of men perhaps one strives for perfection; and among thousands of those who strive perhaps one knows me in truth."                    ("Bhagavad Gita," VII:2-3)

It's been said, over and over, in all the world's great wisdom traditions, that the road to enlightenment or true liberation is a lonely path. Indeed, even in the world's most widespread religion, Christianity, those who traveled the furthest down the spiritual road, those like St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, were often isolated by the Church authorities themselves. Speaking many centuries after the Bhagavad Gita was set down, Jesus (cryptically as ever) warned of the same existential loneliness in store for the true spiritual aspirant, saying, "The harvest is indeed great, but the laborers are few," (Matthew 9:27).

Essentially the spiritual quest for enlightenment is a lonely quest because it is an internal journey. Over and over, we read and hear testimony that it is essential for the spiritual aspirant to let go of the search for outward satisfaction, even his or her attachment to thoughts of outer things, in order that our real inner life is opened to us. The renowned 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, spoke of "the lonely self-inquiry" necessary to find the "depth" of one's existence:

". . . (A)ll those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth. . . ."                                   (Paul Tillich, "Shaking the Foundations," page 56)

Karlfried Graf Durckheim
(1896-1988)

Moreover, in today's Information Age, while our interconnectedness to a growing body of individuals seeking a higher meaning in their life seems to make this 'spiritual road' less lonely, it is deceptive. The pursuit of enlightenment is inherently a solitary business. While more people are striving for higher consciousness (perhaps "of hundreds," rather than "thousands," one strives to find the "Truth" of our existential being), even more individuals are hemmed in by the ever-illusive quest for more material wealth and 'security.' Such is the "Westernizing influences" of a worldview that tends to exult the material and discounts the spiritual.

In an interview with French Orthodox priest, Alfonse Goettman, the modern German mystic, Karlfried Graf Durckheim (see video at end of article), remarked that, "(t)he destiny of man is to become the one who can witness to the transcendent Reality at the very heart of existence." However as a culture, he observes, we seem to have turned a blind 'inner eye' to that destiny, much to our detriment.

". . . (C)ivilization in the West," he notes, "has developed only one pole of the human being and has sacrificed the other. Yet man is always called to a double mission: to recognize and master the world in which he lives, for which he needs efficiency, but at the same time to mature on the inner path which is vital to this fulfillment. The fruit of this maturity is seen in a person who is transparent to his essential being which he expresses in his daily life. It is a fact that western civilization has completely neglected this aspect of our nature."

His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama

Perhaps it is the Dalai Lama, with his profound respect for both scientific and spiritual inquiry, who best summarizes the basic existential problems - even threats - that an over-weighting of a 'mastery' of the physical world to the detriment of 'maturing' on the 'inner path' poses. In his insightful book, "The Universe In A Single Atom," he writes:

"The central question - central for the survival and well being of our world - is how we can make the wonderful developments of science into something that offers altruistic and compassionate service for the needs of humanity and the other sentient being with whom we share the earth."

". . . First of all like any instrument, science can be put to good use or bad. It is the state of mind of the person wielding the instrument that determines to what end it will be put. Second, scientific discoveries affect the way we understand the world and our place in it. This has consequences for our behavior."

Einstein famously remarked, "Science without religion is lame, while religion without science is blind." An apt paraphrase of this prescient observation in the context of over-weighting the importance of mastery of the physical world over mastery of one's inner self might be: "Spirituality without science is mute, while science without spirituality is deaf to humanity's deepest needs."

If the Information Age is to live up to its evident potential, it will perhaps do so by breaking up the relative loneliness of the spiritual path, thereby increasing the odds of finding the 'Truth' that Krishna gives in the Bhagavad Gita. The tool that might be most effectively wielded to break down this existential loneliness, given our overwhelming reliance on science and its technologies, is an authentic inner spirituality that is informed by open-minded scientific inquiry. Yet, the Western scientific culture by its logic and strictures continues, in most instances, to exclude the exploration of how inner, subjective spiritual experiences might fit into a more expansive worldview informed by both science and spirituality.

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An Unheralded Zen Master

William Samuel (1924-1996)

Perhaps one of the most unheralded American 'Zen masters' was the late William Samuel - a 'Zen master' whose life was a temple, who glimpsed enlightenment fighting with the Chinese Nationalists in World War II, who found enlightenment on an embattled hilltop in the Korean War, and a 'Zen master' who sat 'Zaizen' for the remainder of his life in the hill country of Alabama.

Samuel's largely unheralded teachings, although he wrote two inspiring and informative books on the matter, are emblematic somehow of an enlightened man of the 20th century who found peace in war, and surrendered to the Godhead in the midst of battle. The following passage from his essay, "A Soldier's Story" is at once enchanting and inspiring. Here is a man that "glimpsed" and then "grasped" the Absolute amid the Hell's of the last century's worst conflicts.

"Let me write a Glimpse or two from those days," he writes. "First, harking back to China, Mr. Shieh and I, with five American teammates, were being pursued by a Japanese combat patrol. We were "retrograding," bringing up the rear of our little patrol, trying to get back to the safety of friendly lines. We were close to being captured. In those days, neither the Japanese nor Chinese "gave quarter." That is we took no prisoners. I knew that if I were taken by the pursuing Japanese, it meant certain death. On the other hand, Mr. Shieh might successfully pass himself off as a Chinese peasant. Oh, I cannot write this story! At this minute it is enough to remember Mr. Shieh seeing and pointing out the beauty of those purple blooms on the distant mountain we had yet to climb. I marveled at a man who could see beauty under such oppressive circumstances. I marvel more that he helped me learn to do it"

From the peace of his post-war home in rural Alabama, Samuel taught a distinctly American brand of non-duality; a brand of non-duality informed by his immerision into an ancient Eastern culture during the worst of times and situations of modern conflict. Samuel's unique experiences paint an intriguing picture of what must have been both "the best of times and the worst of times," to steal a line from Dickens.

Here, in a recollection of his post-World War II travels set out in his most personal and eclectic book, "The Child Within Us Lives," Samuel invokes the wonder of a young Western exposed at once to the contradictory worlds of an ancient and too-modern China, between ancient teachings and modern cynicism and disbelief:

           In Kwangse the group sat talking.
          "With all my travel and study I've never heard of the equation," the soldier groused.
          "I haven't either," said the minister. Neither had Lee nor Mary.
          Han said, "One who doen't live the Divine Equation simply doesn't know it. To know it without living it is to be dead. To know it is to live it. personally, I do not see how one can know he knows it without living it, but I don't know everything."
          "But friend Han," shouted the soldier, "you just told us that the real Identity of each of us is Omniscience itself! How can one be that and still now know everything?"
          Han said, "God knows everything, but I don't. I am merely the knowing of God, so I certainly don't know everything."
          "That doesn't make a damn bit of sense," the soldier said. "I call that circular reasoning," he added, leaving the room.   

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The "Equation," of course is the fundamental truth of all the world's great wisdom traditions: 'All is One.' And Han, Samuel writes, "is not God and does not claim to be. . . . Han is as close as one comes to his real Identity before consciously being that One."

As such, Han is an inspiration for us all.

Samuel's work is elliptic, hinting at the Absolute and then drawing back in order to draw the spiritual aspirant in. Perhaps his most direct statement of the Absolute and our spiritual quest here is in his introduction to his other great work, "A Guide to Awareness and Tranquility." In it, he writes:

"The world is not as it appears to the busy, troubled mortal. A beautiful and magnificent harmony is spread over the entire face of the land; perfection permeates everything. This perfect Harmony is readily discernible and immediately available to anyone willing to acknowledge its presence and pay the small price demanded of it.

What is the price? Surrender of the personality! Only the personality, the prideful, intellectual ego, denies the totality of Reality and the presence of a perfect experience."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

"The world is not as it appears . . . ."

          I pause with Han and rest.
Breathing in, I become the fragrance of the purple blossoms on the side of the mountain we are climbing.

The "Present Moment" As a Mere "Consciousness of the Past"

In the first chapter of his insightful book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self," philosopher Thomas Metzinger takes us from the leading edge of cognitive neuroscience, where the search is underway for the 'neural correlates' of consciousness (the specific areas of the brain that correlate to various mental phenomena and perceptions), to a discussion of the for-now seemingly ineffable question of just what consciousness is, and back to the question of epistemology that traces its roots back to Plato's famous "Cave," and beyond.

Quite correctly, he takes us through the argument that what we see as our 'reality out there' is an internal representation of the stimuli we receive from the outer environment. What we make of it, the mental construct of what "it" is, is a purely an internal matter.

Take colour. Metzinger points out that all the colours we see are just our own internal representation of the outside field of electromagnetic radiation that falls within the frequency range that our retina can detect and relay to the visual centers in our brain (the 'neural correlates' of vision). Yet the frequency range of electromagnetic energy we cannot see - gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet rays, infra-red waves, radio waves etc. - far exceed the limited band of frequencies we can detect as colours. But still the adage that "seeing is believing" continues to hold sway in our common understanding of our 'reality.'

Interestingly, Metzinger suggests our detection abilities may be evolving. Certainly, this has been put forward by Metzinger's predecessors who have studied the phenomena of consciousness. Both the pioneering psychologist Richard M. Bucke in his classic treatise, "Cosmic Consciousness," and the philosophical polymath, Gerald Heard, in "Pain, Sex and Time," both cite the inexplicability of  the 'blue' of the Aegean Sea never being mentioned in Homer's works, its  waters being referred to as wine coloured. Both give credence to the notion that our eyesight has continued to evolve in the bottom part of the visual spectrum.

Most interestingly, Metzingers states that the two facets of our subjective consciousness which are universally evident are (a) its "spatial internality" and (b) its "tempororal internality." The 'world' we see out there is not the world at all; it is not 'reality' but, rather, is our internal construction of the stimuli that our sense receptors - eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin - bring to our attention. We live in a 3-D world of our own making which is seamlessly cobbled together from the stream of stimuli created by our 'contact' with this colourless, odourless, tasteless and undivided, silent 'outer world' of electromagnetic phenomena. The more we ponder this reality, the more it begins to feel like the Buddhist notion of the Void from which all ideas and 'things' arise in a process of 'dependent origination' within our mind.

There is a famous Buddhist saying, "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon." Meant to signify that the spiritual methodology one uses to attain enlightenment is not the state of enlightened consciousness and experience, the "finger pointing at the moon" analogy suggests an interesting counterpoint to Metzinger's observation that there are two very interesting aspects of our 'ordinary' consciousness: 'spatial internality' and 'temporal internality.'

The first of these concepts, spatial internality, is straightforward. What is seemingly 'out there' impinges on our senses, we form our 'internal image' of what is 'out there' and, then, our consciousness does a flip and it seems that all we see is indeed 'out there' and is a fairly accurate (if limited) representation of what is 'external' to us. However, 'temporal internality,' while equally convincing, seems to me to be an inherently inaccurate picture of what is 'external.'

"Conscious experience, as such," Metzinger observes, "is an internal affair. Whatever else may or may not be true about consciousness, once all the internal properties of your nervous system are set, all the properties of your conscious experience - its subjective content and the way it feels to you are fully determined. By "internal" I mean not only spatial but also temporal internality - whatever is taking place right now, at this very moment. As soon as certain properties of your brain are fixed, everything you are experiencing at this moment is also fixed."

It seems to me that the latter part of Metzinger's analysis dealing with "temporal internality" is evidently wrong, and just tends to reinforce the 'reductionist view' that consciousness is just a by-product of a highly evolved brain. Take the man (above) with his 'finger pointing at the moon.' He 'sees' his arm, his finger, perhaps some clouds, the moon, and the panopoly of stars behind the moon. According to Metzinger, this would be (from our pictured man's point of view) "what is taking place right now, at this very moment, when "everything (he) is experiencing at this moment is also fixed."

Yet, we know that what he is "seeing" is the light from the stars and that reflected by the moon illuminating the clouds, the finger, and the man's arm. And we know that this light is travelling at a uniform 300,000-odd kilometres per second. The light from the man's fingertip is reflected a split nano-second before the light illuminating his arm. The reflected light from the moon takes just over 2 seconds to travel the 700,000 or so kilometers that lies between the man's fingertip and the moon.

And the stars? Their light has been travelling for hundreds or thousands of years (or perhaps much more) to reach our man who sits quiescently pointing at the moon behind which they lie. (The closest stars - those in the Alpha Centauri star system - are 4.35 light years distant from the earth, while the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way - the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the only galaxy visible to the naked eye - lies 2.65 million light years beyond the man's outstretched fingertip.)

Indeed, it takes a nano-second or so for the light gathered in the man's eye to travel through his neural circuitry and register the images of "what is taking place right now" in the visual cortex. So, in a very real sense, whenever we 'look out, to the stars (particularly when we are looking at the far distant objects in the night sky) we are looking into the past. Sound waves are incredibly slower than light, so in actuality, what we hear is a 'dim echo' of our past. And while the sense of what we touch, together with our taste and the fragrances we smell, are more immediate, we still 'grope' in the darkness 'blindly,' so to speak.

In one of the most familiar passages in the New Testament, Paul observes that: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (I Corinthians 13:12) It is a prescient reminder that our consciousness is much more than what we see, perhaps much more than we think . . . or even can think.

And each time we gaze at the stars, it is a reminder that  we are all only cognizant of what has already passed, that we are in actuality blind to the present let alone the future, but that we are able to take (and are taking) actions the effects of which we will only come to know in time. Each time, this is a reminder that the laws of karma - the laws of cause and effect - are operative; and we do not, and cannot, know what those effects will be precisely, though we are good "guessers" or prognosticators. Therefore, we should treat our ever-changing present moment with the care and respect which are its due.

As the stoic, neo-platonist Roman Emperor. Marcus Aurelius, observed: "All we ever have to live and lose is this ever passing present moment."

The Entangled Universe, or 'The Structure of Consciousness?'

Quantum Entanglement

For the atheist, the seeming absurdity of the phenomena of 'quantum entanglement' likely raises for-now unanswerable questions; for the agnostic it must give wavering pause and cause him or her to suspect (once again) that something larger is going on in or beneath the universe; for the 'spiritual but not religious' it is likely to be a confirmation that there is a Wholeness or Unity to our 'reality' that is radically different from 'traditional' Western portrayals of what "God" is and how "He" operates. For the latter, an understanding of the basics of quantum entanglement will confirm that the representation of the 'Old Testament' God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is just that - an artistic 'representation' that was, more or less, coerced from Michaelangelo. It suggests, in fact, that we live in a physically, spiritually and psychologically "Entangled Universe."

Quantum entanglement is just one of many aspects of quantum theory that cannot be understood or 'pictured' very well, perhaps most so by those who are capable of 'best' understanding it. Fundamentally, it means that 'things' (experimentally, 'particles') that were once part of a single entity or system somehow remain connected thereafter; and if one makes an 'observation' that determines the properties of one 'part' of the former entity or system, the other part will instantaneously exhibit the opposite but equal property.

"Quantum entanglement is a property of the quantum mechanical state of a system containing two or more objects, where the objects that make up the system are linked in such a way that the quantum state of any of them cannot be adequately described without full mention of the others, even if the individual objects are spatially separated."

(Source: Wikipedia, "quantum entanglement.")

In simpler (and more illustrative) terms, when two particles come together and form a 'system,' thereafter "they behave like one object, but remain two separate objects. It is as if they now sit on the same teeter-totter seesaw. No matter how long the seesaw is, even if it is one million miles long, if one end is down the other end must be up, and this happens instantly." (Source: Simple English Wikipedia, "quantum entanglement.")

The "EPR paradox" (Einstein/Podulsky/Rosen) unsuccessfully
challenged the notion of quantum entanglement. (Wikipedia)

This 'radical' interconectivity at a distance (or 'non-locality,' as it is called in physics) gave Einstein fits. Although it did not cause the great scientist to pull out his iconic hair, he spent much of his latter career trying to disprove the phenomena. Along with his colleagues (Podulsky and Rosenstein) he proposed the "EPR Paradox" thought experiment in order to challenge the notion of entanglement, as according to relativity theory nothing travels faster than light; the speed of light (the c in Einstein's famous E=mc²  formula) being the notional "speed limit" of the universe.

Einstein was unsuccessful, however, and Scottish physicist John Bell showed in 'Bell's Theorem' that such 'super-liminal' (or "faster than light") connectivity must exist. This was proved, experimentally, in 1972; and thereafter the notion that one particle or 'thing' over 'here' is an integral part of a system with some 'thing' over 'there' - even when over 'there'  is a distance of thousands or millions of light years - fell away, and it began to seem that Western physics and cosmology was looking more and more like the cosmology and 'physics' of Eastern wisdom traditions.

(See article on Einstein's spiritual or 'religious' beliefs.)

The ideas of Buddhist 'dependent origination' (that everything that 'is' arises from interrelated and prior causes or phenomena) and "Indra's Many-Jewelled Net" from Hinduism (in which every bit of the universe is connected to and holographically "reflects" every other bit of matter) are beginning to look more and more like how Western physics was beginning to model the universe.

Perhaps this is just speculative and coincidental, but many informed scientists suspect that it is not. In any event, it has given great impetus to people who would classify themselves as 'spiritual but not religious' to question further the traditional notions of outwardly religious beliefs and dogma. More and more, it appears that the scientific and inner religious or spiritual traditions, as well as Western psychology are beginning to meld and overlap. Perhaps, they are destined to merge, as the following video on "Where Science and Buddhism Meet" suggests.



Or, as Gary Zukav observed in his now classic book, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters,," (at page 31), "(P)hysics is (becoming) the study of the structure of consciousness."