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.

[freedumb2003]

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

Can we buy a verb?

[Sabertooth]

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.

How do you know?

[beckett]

Not literally, no --- it's a metaphor.

[f.Christian]

Good News For The Day

‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ ( Mark 2:24)

"Except for God himself, there is nothing in the practice of religion that is more sacred than humanity. Men and women lose their dignity under any regime that sanctifies anything above men and women."

"In Communism, and Fascism the... system---is everything. The individual is subservient to the plan; to the state."

"Years ago a novelist, Barbara Goldberg wrote:"

"You see that bridge; that huge red naked thing of steel? Magnificent eh?
And there-no, there, right at the top. A little dot that sways and crawls along,
fearful lest it lose its dizzy head, and dash into oblivion. Pitiful isn't it?
That pygmy being with its two small hands, and smaller brain,
you see him? Well, he made the bridge!"

"People are greater than things. They are not like bridges; they build them! It is therefore as it should be, that God, when he sought to reveal himself to the world, did so through a human personality-the noblest thing in all creation. Not only were human beings honored by the incarnation, they were dignified by Jesus' own treatment of his fellows. Habitually he reserved his kindest attentions to human life in its frailest forms. Jesus gave the world a spiritual perspective that every religious obedience secondary, to our duty to care for one another."

-----------------------------------------------------

Good News For The Day

‘Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers on mine, you did for me’ (Matthew 25:40)

"A distinctive feature of Jesus regard for people, was his habit of reserving his best and kindest attentions for personality in its frailest forms. Lepers, in Jesus' day, had no few friends. They were tolerated, but seldom loved. Their life's work amounted largely to just staying out of other people's way. The rights and freedoms of healthy individuals were not permitted them. But Jesus treasured the lepers. He put his hands on their rotting flesh, to heal them. To him they were precious."

"Some of the harshest words Jesus spoke were directed against those who treated their weaker brethren badly. Witness his scathing rebuke of the scribes and pharisees who made life hard for widows by insisting on their obedience to many details of ritual law. In a time when few others did so, Jesus revered women, children, beggars, and aliens. He was the defender, protector, champion, and redeemer of the most oppressed and inglorious examples of humanity."

"Just as in his own day, Jesus now, is a... challenge---to the way society is structured."

"Governments, laws, traditions, and institutions both religious and secular, would be made better servants of humanity by striving to enact the ethics of Jesus. Jesus is far more than a topic or a theme for contemplation among religious hobbyists. He stands before this present world with a beautiful Spirit with which to live life; unequaled goals for service, and magnificent ideals to strive for."

[Sabertooth]

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason?

Since science and reason are inherently agnostic, if practiced honestly,
why should anyone presume they are in conflict with spirituality?

[taxed2death]

"In Communism and Fascism the system...is everything".

Cool, you can also add capitalism.

In capitalism, the "system" is undoubtably everything :)

[keri]

fyi

[taxed2death]

Excellent point.

[f.Christian]

Adam Smith...the 'invisible hand'(creator/programmer)!

[beckett]

Since science and reason are inherently agnostic, if practiced honestly, why should anyone presume they are in conflict with spirituality?

Good question. However we see much presumption made in that regard, do we not? And it's my feeling that most of it comes from the materialist side, whose impatience with the incompleteness of their knowledge drives them to lash out a bit.

[Sabertooth]

However we see much presumption made in that regard, do we not? And it's my feeling that most of it comes from the materialist side, whose impatience with the incompleteness of their knowledge drives them to lash out a bit.

I agree. Both atheism and theism are articles of faith, but it's been my observation that atheists are less likely to be honest about it.

It's almost enough to make a reasonable man presume toward spirituality.

[dark_lord]

And as my daughter asked me yesterday - what's a metaphor?

Cows.

(At least she's not doing the knock knock jokes anymore.)

[music_code]

Previously posted: "In Communism and Fascism the system...is everything".

Cool, you can also add capitalism.

---

Capitalism is not a system of government as Communism and Fascism are. It is the free market system of economics. To equate it with the other two is inaccurate.

[freedumb2003]

You are starting to scare me. You offer quotes with no reference (except for the Mark quite from the Bible) with no argumentation. Biblical-based psychobabble is still psychobabble and presents an opening for the liberals out there. Think there isn't a liberal with an ounce of sense (that's about all they have or they would be conservatives) that couldn't take your rather blathering posts as an example of just how "mystical" (i.e. without reasonable foundation) "Conservatives" can be?

God is great. Jesus was His son and died on the cross for us. All that is wonderful (and I believe true) and not to be diminshed . That means nothing if we can't use our God-given ability to reason to bring light and truth to those who are being seduced by the dark forces of liberalism and multiculturalism. If your post is meant to add light to the discussion, then it does the opposite. In a purely intellectual milieu, this advances the discussion not at all.

[Hank Kerchief]

I do want to thank you for this posting. Frequently in our discussion of philosophy there is a need good examples of bad reasoning. This posting has provided several very good ones. I will be saving it.

Here is a good example:

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?

This begins with the nihilisticly absurd notion that "nothing" is an alternative to "something." Of course, "honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing," because it is a question none of them would have thought of (they are scientist, they deal with what is, not with what is not) and only a crackpot pseudo-intellectual posing as a philosopher could suggest "non-existense" was a possibility. If we pretend to take the question seriously, always knowing that is not honestly possible, the answer is, "well, because there is something."

As for the rest, it just a list of variations of the same mistaken notion that anything can be other than what it is. In every case where one asks, why does X have quality A rather than quality B, it is because if X had quality B it would not be X. The universe has the laws it has, because it is this universe. If there were other laws, it would be a hypothetical "other" universe, but since there is no "other" universe, the question is meaningless.

All of this can be reduced to the logical fallacy which claims the universe could be both A (existense as it is) and non-A (existense as it is not). It is a simple logical error disguised as a philosophical question in an attempt to obfuscate the irrationality of mysticism.

As Gary Boldwater indicated, this whole thing is a defiance of the law of identity #2. As thinktwice suggested, this guy, and anyone who admires him, needs to check his premises. #5 Hank

[victim soul]

Time to read or reread Pope John Paul II's "FAITH AND REASON."

[D-fendr]

thanks, then "see" is a metaphor for "know"? That we cannot know?

Would that mean your observation:

"The cloud of unknowing beyond which we cannot see." refers to "beyond which we cannot know"?

If so, perhaps our misunderstanding would be dissolved by adding: "cannot know by use of science/materialism and reason/logic.

And then maybe the author of The Cloud of Unknowing would not be spinning so much after all.

[f.Christian]

Your voice sounds squeaky sucking on that balloon!

[beckett]

A completely idiotic post which makes wholly unsupported assumptions and insults a long line of philosophers much smarter than you who, unlike you, can spell.

[Hank Kerchief]

Must be you're in your 20's and read all the Dutch guys. The only reason anyone knows anything about the material world is because of mathematics, which is pure concept. One cannot feel, touch or otherwise examine a concept in the material world. If you think not, give me a 7.

Been there (20's) three times. As for the rest of your guesses, science and mathematics are nothing more than mataphorical descriptions of material touchable world, without which, there would be no abstract concept "7." Before man could conceive "7" he had to discover how to count to 7, and the possible existense "7" can have is as a symbol (such as this 7, or one printed on a page), or as the abstract concept for a collection of objects, with one more than 6 in it, or the doubly abstract notion of measure, such as 7 inches or 7 lightyears.

Without material things to count and measure, no numbers would exist. Mathematics is nothing but an intellectual (conceptual) method for identifying and dealing with certain qualities and phenomena of the very real touchable material world without which mathematics would be meaningless.

Mathematics can be used to measure the world, but first you have to have a world. Of course I cannot give you a 7 anymore than I could give you "uncleness." However, I can show you someone with the quality of being an uncle, and I can show you many examples of things with the quality 7.

Hank