Where Science and Spirituality Meet…

 

‘Is there an overlap between science and spirituality?’

 

 

 

 

While these two fields have traditionally been seen to be at odds, the more realistic question is, what are the periods of time in which they did NOT overlap? Science, of course, is a field of study that originally emerged out of alchemy and magic.

Previous to the Enlightenment, the two were not separate.

Many of the people who organized the scientific revolution in human knowledge were also practicing magicians and alchemists, at a time where both of these activities were considered equal parts of the human quest for knowledge. 

______________________________________

 

Separation came later, when the Western world chose to take the purely material path and leave the spiritual behind in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and Industrial Revolution. The universe was seen as a place of inert matter and rules, which could be known, understood, and ultimately controlled. Such is the ethos that has given us the advances in technology and material comfort that we enjoy today (at least in the first world). But a few hundred years are only the blink of an eye… and in the post-Relativity world, we now enjoy an approaching worldview in which science and spirituality aren’t quite so divorced anymore.

Out at the outer fringes of quantum physics and superstring theory, reality takes on a far stranger tinge than even the oddest psychic and magical theories. At a loss as to how reality operates at the sub-sub-atomic level, quantum physicists give quark particles names like “charm” and “strange.” Beyond that, at the superstring level, physics becomes Vedic, suggesting that the world is in fact made of pure vibration. Many of the stranger interpretations of quantum physics propose that, for instance, we exist in almost infinite parallel universes which are created every time a decision is made (the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics), while the Deep Anthropic Principle suggests that the universe was created simply because we are here observing it, and that the act of our observing the universe is what creates it in the first place (similar to the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine of “dependent co-arising.”)

We now live in a world in which the boundaries between spirit and matter are not only less discrete, but simply don’t exist. However, here’s the question: What has actually changed? The answer, of course, is nothing. The universe still presumably runs on the same laws it always has. So when we talk about our changing view of the nature of reality, we’re not talking about reality itself… we’re talking about how we’re choosing to interpret it. The universe doesn’t change; human opinions do. In that sense, rather than theorizing about the ultimate nature of the universe, it seems more prudent simply to note that the human interpretation of the universe is becoming a more “magical” one. This says a lot about who we are, and where we are as a species. As many an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosopher noted, we can never truly observe anything except the limits of our own minds.

Therefore, it makes sense the changes in how humans perceive the universe as a history of how humans are changing. And the message seems clear: we don’t want a materialistic, Descartian universe. We want a universe of magic. As so it is, from the greatest outskirts of the infinitely-expanding, utterly inscrutable universe we can only barely comprehend, down to the sub-atomic level where reality becomes explainable only in terms once reserved for books on the occult.

 

 

The Universe is nothing but Pure Magic!

 

 

Thanks to Alys Cusack of: www.californiapsychics.com