Only the godless quarrel with science.
Who know What Is do not. These free souls are friends not foes of scientific inquiry. Who are these people that pick and prick issues with scientifically comprehending all that exists? It is the Stone Age horde which upholds an inferior understanding of what or who exactly is or is not God. This does not mean science has some deep answers about life, death and hereafter. It does not. But then, neither do simplistic faiths and their farcical philosophies.
Real spirituality has no real issue with science.
In fact, the only problem higher metaphysical sagacity has with science is that the latter is not advanced enough! Science has so far failed to find what ‘life’ is in its primordial substratum. It has no answer to whence ‘life’ cometh whither it goeth. So far it has not had much success in finding Which Is. An evolutionary theory of Darwin or a futuristic trip to mars is not the be all and end all of Reality As Is. In the eyes of Eastern spirituality and meta-physicality, all this is yet a dwarfish exploration and explanation of The Story of Life. Even the so-called ‘Big Bang’ hypothesis so lauded in recent times is a limited vision of Nature. In the Single Eye of Mysticism, of the Eastern not the Western kind, both the big bang and evolutionary theories are just that. Hypothesis.
The spirit of scientific self-inquiry in the East, more specifically in India, since the beginning of time, has not only been encouraged but practiced rationally and rigorously by advanced free mystics. Now days, this inner soul-search is simplistically and simply called Yoga. The spiritual seekers of this special kind of scientific temperament have always sought What Is through metaphysical self-experience. In the ‘clinical laboratory’ of one’s own physicality and psychic self. This is not much different or dissimilar from what psychologists and psychiatrists do. The free mystics too observe objectively, draw unemotional or unsentimental and non-judgmental conclusions from the ‘happenings’. Of course, in the latter case the observation is more than that of the mind. It surpasses the former in its search and research. It is all-inclusive. Unlike a mere mind search of modern day science, a free mystic seeks beyond it. This inquiry involves the realm of surrealism and mysticism. Traditionally, these ‘spiritual scientists’ have been addressed as yogis.
Then again, yoga or yogi is but a term of address. It is as significant or insignificant as calling chair chaise or eau water and table tableau. Once human mind is able to ‘lift up’ its limitation or becomes capable of grasping, nay ‘tasting’ the abstract, the heart and soul of the devout starts to ‘hear’ the whispers of metaphysics. A chosen few start both ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ What Is.
What messiahs mess up, mystics miss not.
Why should adherents of imagined spirits-gods, messianic isms and messed about come-hither-cretins condone evolution, abortion, homosexuality, gender equality and tolerance of other belief systems when their Book of God tells them otherwise? Why is the scientific community aghast at their fellow human beings’ ‘irrational’ and ‘inferior’ behavior when all that these so-called ‘chosen’ fellows of this or that creed are doing is strictly - verbatim - following the injunctions of their ‘holy’ book?
A colossal naivety propels some rationalists - whose “heart is in the right place” - to believe these ‘True Believers’ would stand by them in matters of climate, cloning or condoms. When the latter do not, these do-gooders are shocked! It is beyond belief. One cannot expect these kinds of bigoted, bookish and boorish religious zealots to fall in line and accept that “religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth”. It is asking a leopard to shed its skin! That said the Ultimate Reality is not of a different order from the ‘real’ religious truth.
Of course, if one’s religious belief is of a Stone Age variety, then, yes, it would be found to be diverse from and inverse of scientifically proven truth. When some people believe that life on earth began no more than five thousand years ago, despite scientific evidence to the contrary - scientists having found samples and traces of life and living entities existing millions and billions of years back in time - it is imbecilic to expect these die-hard faithful to find succor in science.
Better an irreligious rationalist than an irrational religionist.
However, at the end of it all this scientific or religious saber rattling, we yet reach nowhere near a certain, concrete and conclusive truth. Science does not satisfy the up-your-throat religionists. Religion does not the down-your-gut rationalists. The only way out of this quagmire is to seek and find That Which Is.
And, pray, who knows What Is?
Who really, truly seek do somehow, under Divine Will and Grace as if, reach a higher understanding of The Truth. The ‘door’ or ‘staircase’ to the ‘key of knowledge’ opens up ‘within’ our life-source. Some call it soul others ‘kingdom of heaven’. Ridding the self of all semantics, it is said the Yogis, Sufis and Free Mystics of the East who ‘hath’ in them, did and do self-discover The One Truth that pervades in and as All that is. The West has not.
This rational, scientific, mystical truth of creator and creation is definitely not known and found to be some clone of god-in-man-form squatting on any throne, in some far away galaxy, consorting with virgins! Neither is it ‘seen’ to be any bookish heaven nor a crooked hell waiting to embrace the ‘chosen’ or punish the ‘infidel’. Forms-names, concepts-precepts, life-death exist not in The End where The Beginning is. Quintessence and ‘Life Substratum’ of ‘That’ which is ‘here’ or ‘there’ in Self-Realization is experienced to be as The Self of All. One Whole Immanence sans distinction, difference or otherness. No ‘this’ no ‘that’. Neither god nor godless!
This ‘One’ that knows ‘Self’ as All That Is stands by both science and spirituality. Until such a Self-Realization of neither Ascension nor Dissension but Wholeness and Oneness becomes humankind’s metaphysical experience; cruelty, coaxing, cajoling, conversion, conceitedness and killing in the Name of God shall continue. This is the weird, whimsical story of life. And, until humankind self-discovers What Is, such is the story of science and spirituality.
{Please Note: This article is complementary to a post written by Brad Hershfield in The Huffington Post: http://bit.ly/afBrTC . Reader need read that too.}
