Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[beckett]

The cloud of unknowing beyond which we cannot see. Why is there something rather than nothing?

I realize Horgan seems to take sides on some contentious issues. It is not my purpose in posting the article to endorse them all. I just thought that for such a short piece he did an good job of presenting the problem, and of describing an approach to it that closely -- but not exactly -- coincides with my own.

[Gary Boldwater]

The real question is not "why is the universe is what it is?", but rather "how could it possibly be anything else?". The former is an attempt to refute the laws of identity and causality, that latter affirms it.

[Free the USA]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[Hank Kerchief]

The cloud of unknowing beyond which we cannot see.

All that matters is what you can see and what you can know. There is nothing else. It is exactly that, nothing, and to the extent one wastes their minds on what is not, they waste their lives.

Hank

[thinktwice]

what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us?

Answer ... No truth whatsoever.

The author begins with a figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory ideas or terms are combined ... an "oxymoron."

Check your premises.

[Abcdefg]

Introspection and this kind of philosophy has its place, but life is for living.
Treat yourself well, help others and enjoy this life.

[D-fendr]

The Clouding of Unknowing is not about a boundary beyond which we cannot see, but about how to approach knowledge beyond other forms of mental conceptualization.

You find the same practice among all the major experiential religions.

As for Science and Spirituality: Science is by definition without value, without qualitative measurement. This limits it's abillity to be used beyond the subset of those things capable of being detected by the senses (and their extensions), beyond that which has specific location in time and space and that which can be numbered and quantified.

So, it can be helpful in increasing knowledge but, as with logic/reason, it is insufficient a tool for approaching the realm of religion - the absolute in terms of values, truth, purpose, etc.

As another put it: science can only describe what is, not what ought.

[taxed2death]

You need to read the book "The physics of consiousness".

Every time I finish it, I pick it up and start over again..I've read it 6-1/2 times so far. The first half is heavy into the history of physics, put into an amusing, yet not dumbed down, lay-mans terms, the second half ties into spirituality (Buddism in particular) although 95% of it can be related to Christianity.......because he delves into the "spirituality" of religions, rather than the dogma.

Truley facinating book, I highly recommend it to any FReepers who are inquisitive about either Physics and / or Spirituality and how they are related. His breakdown of quantum mechanics is an excellent read in itself.

[beckett]

The Clouding of Unknowing is not about a boundary beyond which we cannot see, but about how to approach knowledge beyond other forms of mental conceptualization.

A perfect example of a gobbledygook sentence which ends up either saying the same thing it pretends to contradict, or saying nothing at all.

The unknown 14th century author of the Cloud of Unknowing is smiling somewhere, I'm sure.

[beckett]

Thank you -- I will put the book on my list.

[taxed2death]

Sorry if I have offended any Buddists out there, I did not mean to imply that Buddism was NOT a religion in my above post. Sorry for the gaff.

[f.Christian]

If tou want mysticism...the occult---that's evolution!

Big bang/pond doo-goo glop/morph are opposites of science....sorta the rope-a-dope clown science on a spring!

[f.Christian]

If you want mysticism...the occult---that's evolution!

Big bang/pond doo-goo glop/morph are opposites of science....sorta the rope-a-dope clown science on a spring!

[freedumb2003]

And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will.

Uh, yeah it will... but (assuming we are talking about the moment of demise), that moment of attention is pretty useless. It is like getting the license number of the bus that runs you over.

Lots of Fun post, but it goes from a useful thesis (the more scientific facts you uncover, the more it proves God) to psychobabble (there are things we can't know, but we don't know what they are... if we knew, we'd know, but we don't know so we can't know).

Trust me, if you drop an egg on the floor, it hits, splats, and makes a mess, no matter what mystical relativistic observational philosophical perspective you take. What greater truth can there be?

[freedumb2003]

And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will.

Uh, yeah it will... but (assuming we are talking about the moment of demise), that moment of attention is pretty useless. It is like getting the license number of the bus that runs you over.

Lots of Fun post, but it goes from a useful thesis (the more scientific facts you uncover, the more it proves God) to psychobabble (there are things we can't know, but we don't know what they are... if we knew, we'd know, but we don't know so we can't know).

Trust me, if you drop an egg on the floor, it hits, splats, and makes a mess, no matter what mystical relativistic observational philosophical perspective you take. What greater truth can there be?

[taxed2death]

Sorry, I don't really know how to take your post.

Maybe I'm pissing into the wind hear, but my take on the matter is that most religions are based on a core of spirituality. I've been raised a Christian, I also like to read about other religions, seeking out commonalities. Most religions have the equivilance of "the ten commandmants", although they might not be expressed in the same straight forward way. If you would take the "ten commandments" to heart, and do your honest best to be "Christ-like" in every action, you would be living by the tenets of most religions.

You might have confused my comments on religion and spirituality....there is a difference. Just as there is a difference between spirituality and mysticism. There is also a difference between Mysticism and the occult. I figured I'd get knocked around by someone who was confused by my post :)

The book I mentioned is interesting because it tries (and does an excellent job) of tying in Science and Spirituality. The Religion the author chose to use as a guide was Buddism, mainly because unlike Christianity, the religion of Buddism seems to lend itself better to this particular subject. This is an observation on my part and should not be taken in any way as a slam on Christianity.

Consequently, the book supports a supreme being, so you can chill out.

It does an excellent job (IMHO) of showing how such a Supreme being parallels with current theories of quantum physics. In a nutshell it is one of the few reads that supports science and Spirituality, (or religion, if you choose).

[f.Christian]

Creation/God...REFORMATION(Judeo-Christianity)---secular-govt.-humanism/SCIENCE---CIVILIZATION!

Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives(no govt religion--none) who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality... UNDER GOD---the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change. These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH(limited NON-intrusive PC Govt/religion---schools)!

Evolution...Atheism-dehumanism---TYRANNY(pc/liberal/govt-religion/rhetoric)...

Then came the SPLIT SCHIZOPHRENIA/ZOMBIE/BRAVE-NWO1984 LIBERAL NEO-Soviet Darwin/ACLU America---the post-modern...DARK/Dork---post-rational/logic age---

[D-fendr]

thanks for your reply.

Perhaps I misunderstood your use of "beyond which we cannot see."

Did you mean "see" literally or beyond which we cannot "know"?

[taxed2death]

ummmmmmm.......you're speaking in tongues again :)