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A BASKETFUL OF THANKS
A basketful of thanks for sending me your current issue on "Science and Enlightenment." I have read every article with great interest. The interviews are penetrating and provocative, for students both of the sciences of matter and those of energy.
Vimala Thakar
Dalhousie, India



A CLOSE READING
Congratulations on your "Science" issue (and its lovely cover!). You've done a tremendous job of covering a very large waterfront and allowing radically different viewpoints to interact without losing their cutting edge. For instance, counterpointing Fritjof Capra's dialogue with E.F. Schumacher with that particular selection from Schumacher himself was brilliant. You also managed to allow Amit Goswami a genuinely fair go (with some support from the second go by Capra and your delightful open-ended review of Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality) even while offsetting the hegemony of physics with Huston Smith's heavy philosophical guns (plus some nice sharp-shots from Ken Wilber) and Rupert Sheldrake's equally telling case that any science which doesn't start from living creatures is only a shadow science.

While tending on the whole to agree with the Smith/Schumacher critique of the Goswami enterprise, I'm also aware that at least once before in the history of modern science a really major advance was made by taking a lead from spirituality—namely Faraday's invention of field theory after considering that basic physical reality should reflect God's nature in being totally present at every separate point in space and time. The trouble with Goswami at the moment is that unlike Faraday, he's not yet gotten sufficiently down to testable specifics to know whether he has anything to offer science that couldn't be offered by any one of a thousand other theories which produce nice comprehensive explanations of known phenomena, including overcoming current paradoxes, by introducing consciousness as an extra variable in the situations.

Rupert Sheldrake is open to the same criticism as far as the more far-reaching aspects of his own new field theory are concerned, but he can be forgiven at the moment because he's a dedicated experimentalist (and an admirer of Faraday to boot, I'm interested to note from your interview) and for the present is putting his main emphasis on getting some basic experimental evidence for the general idea of natural law as habit rather than mathematico-legal fiat. Overall, I thought his contribution was the jewel in the crown of your issue for several reasons, one of which I've already mentioned (his critique of the hegemony of the mathematical/ abstraction approach which currently dominates science, where he comes not from philosophy like Huston Smith, but from science itself, like Faraday in his day). Another is his very personal style, telling us what the various issues have actually meant to him in his life. A third, perhaps the most important, is his grasping of the nettle that when spirituality and science try to interact only at the level of physics, they are nicely able to skim over the "red in tooth and claw" aspects of nature, which must be taken into account by any spirituality.

Congratulations too on shedding real new light on the Bohm-Krishnamurti relationship and what they were severally trying to achieve through "dialogue." In fact the highest compliment I could pay you is that What Is Enlightenment?, and this issue of it in particular, is a living example of the kind of thing they were both aiming at, in which genuine exchange transcends mere argument or debate while doing real justice to individuality.
John Wren-Lewis
School of Studies in Religion
University of Sydney, Australia



H.P. BLAVATSKY ON THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE
Thank you for sending a copy What Is Enlightenment? to me and the speakers at our Theosophy/Science Conference at Tekels Park, Surrey, a few weeks ago. I for one found it most interesting and valuable. Our work has a common goal, and I send our best wishes to you and your staff.

It may be interesting to quote H.P. Blavatsky: "Official science is surrounded on every side and hedged in by unapproachable, forever impenetrable mysteries. And why? Simply because physical science is self-doomed to a squirrel-like progress around a wheel of matter limited by our five senses." (Collected Writings, 1890)

Also: ". . . the tardiness of Scientists to recognise that other instruments of research may be applicable to the mysteries of Nature besides those of the physical plane, and that it may consequently be impossible to appreciate the phenomena of any one plane correctly without observing them as well from the points of view afforded by others." (Secret Doctrine, 1888)
Harold Tarn
The Blavatsky Trust, Tyneside, U.K.



TRANSCENDENTAL PHYSICS
I began an earnest search for intellectually and logically sound ways to find answers to the really important questions confronting humanity—like, What is reality?, What are we? and Why are we here?—as an undergrad physics student in 1956. Some thinkers represented in your Spring/Summer 1997 issue, like Ken Wilber, Huston Smith and E.F. Schumacher, express the idea that modern science is unable to answer, or even address, such questions. I agree that it has not been able to, but I do not agree that it is unable to answer these questions. Science, as it exists, cannot answer our most important questions, but that is because we started with certain simplifying assumptions in the beginning. So we must change science in a way that will equip it to answer such basic questions. We can do this by changing basic assumptions—specifically the assumption that reality exists independent of the perceiving subject. This assumption, the most basic assumption underlying scientific materialism, does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis since it cannot be tested, proved or disproved. There is no way to investigate a reality without consciousness. In addition, we now have compelling evidence, with Bell's theorem and the Aspect experiment, that this assumption is simply false.

We've been asking whether consciousness can be explained in terms of matter and energy. This is the wrong question. We should be asking: Can matter and energy be explained in terms of consciousness? And the answer is: It can be. When the assumption of the existence of a reality independent of consciousness is replaced with the assumption that consciousness is the ground of all reality, a vital new scientific paradigm is the result. Amit Goswami argues very convincingly for this view as the metaphysical basis for a new scientific idealism paradigm in his book The Self-Aware Universe, but falls short of proving the point. I have recently published a book, Transcendental Physics, which goes to the next step. Using the basic principles of quantum mechanics and a mathematical approach based on G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, the logic of infinite descent proves that consciousness had to preexist physical reality, not the other way around.
Edward Close
Jackson, Missouri



KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING
I wanted to write to say what a fantastic issue you've produced. There are so many truly great things about it that I don't know where to start. The design is exquisite, beautiful to look at and very, very readable.

I was really excited to see this issue, as I have read books by almost all of the contributors and been very interested in the whole area of the connection between physics and spirituality. It is fascinating to see that however wonderful and cosmic the physical theories may be, what counts most is the quality of the individual scientist and what he or she is bringing to the investigation—basically either arrogance or humility. I never understood so clearly that human freedom cannot be reduced to any form of scientism, because then it would be known in a way that is incompatible with freedom itself. The whole issue is completely fascinating, a huge play of the struggle between knowing and not knowing.

To me, Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality is a frightening example of what happens when a scientist takes it all the way. I was shocked to read of Tipler's conclusions and his implicit view of a humanity that could be reduced to a 100-gram computer. What kind of life would that be? I don't feel very attracted to eternity in cyberspace, however many cosmos there may be to explore!

Many, many thanks for such a stunning production.
Rick Asherson
London, England



A DIFFERENT REALITY
It seems to me that the new scientific paradigm has to do with the deep yearning that all of us have to understand the meaning of our existence, as well as what happens to us after we die. Science has been the boon of our generation, but although it has allowed us to live farther away from our roots than any civilization or generation in history, it has not allowed us to stay "forever young." So what has science really given us except a fake sense of "self"? Modern religion has largely been co-opted by the miracles of scientific discovery and invention. Most religions have bought into the idea that in duality we can enjoy all the fruits of our creations, that man reigns supreme on earth, and that somehow we needn't think about our relationship to earth or to the origins of our being. Thus our sense of separation from the reality of who and what we are widens, and as this separation widens, so too does our anxiety. There is a deep hole in our psyche that is filled with a restless sorrow that somewhere we went down the wrong path, and we want to go back and start over again; we want a different reality.

If we could take all of the combined wisdom of the scientists' words in all of your wonderful articles and somehow condense them into an elixir and drink its contents, what would we know? Simply that, like the rest of us, many scientists have a deep yearning to rest in the arms of the beloved. We would know that when trying to verbalize the vastness, the boundless, the eternal, the ineffable, we are all reduced to some primitive form of intelligence which is no more capable of doing this than were our ancestors who pictorialized it on the walls of caves in total darkness.

To be aware that we are living on one plane of many realities is, to me at least, the definition of what it means to be conscious. What your magazine did on this trip around the block was to confirm in our minds that there are many realities existing together at the same time. We have learned that we can bear witness to the shadows of the other realities even as we exist in form. We are conscious of the fact that we "know" something, but what is it that we "know"? Only that there is some energy, some source that seems to guide us and lead us in learning while we are in form.

We live on this planet in a state of consciousness that is pretty much reactive to the events and stimuli that can be seen, heard or felt physically. But there are those among us who can stand back and look at themselves from a "higher" vantage point or from a different perspective that enables them to understand what an experience means in the totality of their lives, not just in the moment that it is happening. To all the scientists out there who have discovered that they are souls first who also happen to have some knowledge of the physical universe, I would say that they have the best insight on "knowing" other planes of reality and other truths. But I would also say that when we meditate together we will realize that we all know all that there is to know, that we are bound together by the oneness that is everything and everywhere.
Thomas Borin
Tucson, Arizona



THE FIGHT AGAINST ILLITERACY
Just a few nights ago I stopped off at a Barnes and Noble in my hometown New York City. I pulled down the latest issue of What Is Enlightenment?, bought a tea, sat down at a table and began to read. Here are some of my thoughts and feelings about WIE:

It was as though some boy had graduated high school and was summing it up: "Religion, particularly prayer, is cool; the rest is bullshit and irrelevant—particularly science, knowledge of which cannot make me happier. And what, after all, is the purpose of life if not to be happy?" In case I am not being clear, I find this thinking to be sophomoric and I felt that way about much of what I read in your magazine.

One of the great challenges, in this country and in the world, is the fight against ignorance and illiteracy. Unfortunately, two of the greatest Western religions (Christianity and Islam) seem not to discourage ignorance as long as the adherent lives a good or holy life (as defined by their orthodoxies). Your magazine, I daresay, is certainly not contributing intentionally to the tragedy of illiteracy, nor to contempt for knowledge; it just felt that way. Unhappily, the only evidence I found for WIE's not preferring spirituality over a solid secular liberal education was the fact that only a liberally educated person could understand or appreciate your magazine. The domain of the liberally educated is your editors' and writers' source and the source of your readers.

Why do I care about your science-bashing? For one thing, it is unseemly. The Scopes trial was seventy years ago, Galileo and Copernicus several hundred. Have we not progressed? For another thing, true enlightenment cannot exist in disdain of one of the greatest creations of the human mind, science, and its painfully achieved knowledge of the (physical) universe. Science has brought us the modern world, whether we like it or not, its good and its evil. Enlightenment must be able to show us the way to avoid Mad Max, a scientific apocalypse. Turning our backs on science, failing to see its genius and its contributions, will not do. Mad Max is as much the consequence of the failure of wisdom as of the arrogance of science.

We are in real trouble if we discard the deduced truths of science because they conflict with the stories of the Bible. A viable religion, for modern, educated men and women, had best include stories that are planet-centered, not man-centered, not even Adam's God-centered. These stories can honor the physical universe and our hard-fought knowledge of it; honor life in all its forms, animal and vegetable, mammal and insect; honor mankind for its ability, finally to recognize that its own greatness lies partly in the acceptance of its own nondivinity; and, most of all, honor our common home.
David Abraham
via e-mail


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This article is from
Our Modern Spiritual Predicament Issue