We humans early on discovered there was something higher and
more powerful we could appeal to for help, guidance, or consolation. Cultures have varied in the way they
learned to connect with the higher power, how they named it, and how they tried
to communicate with it.The belief in some kind of spiritual force has been a staple
of the human race until in 17th century Europe some clever men
invented a thing called science.
The invention of science was destined to transform the whole
of life on earth. We know about
the benefits of science, but we also know that the effects of scientific
technology have been disastrous for living things on the planet and for its earth,
air, and waters. I’m referring to
the great looming climate catastrophe
The new powerful science that has done all this is mainly a
science of matter. Modern science
knows how to manipulate matter and that explains its economic, political, and
military power. As modern science
rose to prominence and began to reshape human existence, those traditions about
the “something higher and more powerful” were discarded as primitive, retrograde,
unscientific. In short, God died
and we bumped him off with science.
So here we are, godless on a diseased, over-heated planet
ready to explode. It’s also a
planet where powerful world “leaders” increasingly suffer from psychopathic narcissism. It really is an unprecedented moment in
world history.
I keep thinking about the way science split off from
spirituality. Spirituality is what makes us human, not our ability to produce
weapons of mass destruction or surveillance technologies. Spirituality touches on a world of
values such as truth, justice and beauty. Do we really believe that life on earth can manage without these
values?
After all, we are amphibians that dwell in two worlds, the
world outside and the world inside—the physical and the mental. It won’t do to ignore our inner life,
how we feel, sense, and understand the world.
It turns out that science has been looking at the inner
world, so there are consciousness studies, research on prayer, mysticism, and
wide ranges of paranormal phenomena—all types of experience that can’t be
explained physically but are nonetheless real—indeed, super-real. Science means knowledge, and what I’m
underscoring is that a science of spirituality is a real possibility for people
today.
A new spiritual science would be based on two principles. The first is that we think of ourselves
in relationship to something greater, more powerful, wiser, and creative than us.
The critical move is that our personal mental life participates in the life of a
greater mind and intelligence. This
one great mind generally tends to be personified and goes under many names, forms,
and mythologies.
Now to the second point. It’s not only possible for a
rational person to infer from a vast data base the existence of a higher mental
agency of apparently unbounded character and dimensions; it is also possible to
interact in various ways with this
extended spiritual reality. This narrative,
by the way, is consistent with a psychological or a religious perspective; it
requires no special faith, just an open mind and heart.
The big point is about access to a transcendent function, whether we think of it as
contact with God or with our subliminal self. Contact can occur in various ways,
petitionary prayer, ecstatic dance,
sand-painting, psychedelics, yogic samadhi, and so on. There is no algorithm for spiritual
breakthrough.
The one-sided emphasis of modern science on the physical
side of reality needs to be righted; we seem in fact to be at a turning-point
of history where the deep mistakes of emphasis are becoming catastrophically obvious.
The problem that afflicts us is metaphysical. What is needed is an overall new
worldview. We need a renaissance of
human sensibility that sees the whole living planet as sacred, not as a field
of economic and military exploitation.
In my book, Smile of
the Universe, I make a detailed argument for both points described above, the
case for a greater mind that I call Mind at Large and a description of how
people throughout history have sought contact with the greater
Spiritual sciences exist. You've just got to go knocking on doors.
ReplyDelete