Get Ready to Step Out of the Spiritual Closet
We are entering a time when the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater 400 years ago — when science split from religion and spirituality — will be put back into the tub again.
How can I say that? Aren’t we in the midst of the most science-revering era ever, you might object. And you would be right. But the implications are perhaps not quite what you would expect.
Science is advancing so fast into the cosmos, the quantum world and the inner mechanisms of our DNA and our psyche that the borderline to spirituality is getting blurred. Wonderfully blurred.
This may scare some people, but it offers a beautiful opportunity for the open-minded. Those who intuitively sense that much of what they hear about life in esoteric and spiritual terms is true but just too unaccepted by society to talk about can start relaxing. The woo-woo shame label is getting less sticky by the day.
Even science fundamentalists will have to face the fact that cutting edge physics is nearing the contents of ancient philosophies from cultures like India, Egypt and the Mayans. Their scriptures describe aspects of the human genome, astronomy, planetary dimensions, the elements and the nature of base reality that modern science not very long ago understood poorly.
Truth be told, a few stellar physicists realized the surprising (to some, embarrassing) scientific depth of ancient knowledge already in the first half of last century.
- Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr were fascinated by the Upanishads and drew parallels to the quantum physics they pioneered.
- Max Planck regarded matter as derivative from consciousness (which is basically what the first Hermetic principle states).
- Physicist and philosopher John Archibald Wheeler thought consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe to existence. He said this is a participatory universe.
- Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with psychology renewer Carl Jung, who was heavily influenced by spiritual traditions.
- Einstein’s protegé David Bohm co-explored consciousness with Eastern philosopher Krishnamurti.
- Bohm proposed that the universe we experience with our senses constitutes an “explicate order”, whose underlying reality is the deeper, hidden “implicate order” (not unlike Plato’s world of ideas).
However, it is not until today that the connections between ancient and recent are getting more widely recognized.
With the recognition of an omnipresent quantum field, wherein energy spontaneously emerges in the form of vacuum state fluctuation, it’s becoming ever more obvious that there is no such thing as empty space. “Nothing” cannot exist. Everywhere there is something, and at the most primordial level this something is energy.
In describing reality this way, physicists are not only more or less rehabilitating the long-mocked 19th century assumption of an ether as an underlying “culture medium” for everything that exists, they are in fact saying that the ancient Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Egyptian, even Greek descriptions of an underlying life force — chi, prana, ka, pneuma — are true.
Combining the notion of an all-encompassing force field with what we now know about quantum entanglement points us to the inevitable conclusion that separation is an illusion, which is central to these millennia-old spiritual traditions.
Mindfulness practice leads to increases in gray matter density in the brain
The study of the brain and the mind has been called the last frontier in science. If this is true, hatches and doors that have been closed for centuries must be opened again.
The discoveries now being made in the organ between the ears — the physical proxy for consciousness — and its neurological activity, currents and fields are also closing in on ancient knowledge and practices. Not only independent researchers like Joe Dispenza and Dawson Church find that meditation “rewires” the brain, but so does, increasingly, also mainstream science.
- One article concludes that mindfulness meditation practice leads to increases in gray matter density in regions of the brain.
- Another study finds that Vipassana meditation may prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
- A third study concludes that meditation boosts the immune system.
I personally think focusing so much on what happens in the brain when you exercise mind and spirit is putting the cart before the horse. It’s a bit like praising the technical capacity of your radio for improvements in the quality of the programs you are listening to. But I suspect it’s (still) a tall order for mainstream science to accept that the mind affects matter, just like that. But it will get there. This is a promising beginning.
Another magnificent proof of mind-over-matter that doctors and medical researchers are finally beginning to recognize is the placebo effect, which is huge in many trials. Not long ago, this effect was considered a failure. Now, doctors are beginning to make constructive use of it in their clinical work.
To be honest, it’s not that ancient teachings are fully and enthusiastically embraced in the ivory towers of mainstream science. Certain “magical” methods and modalities are still thrown in the pseudo bin, such as astrology, numerology and different other forms of symbolism. But just wait and see.
I would be surprised if, for example, the connection between what is happening in the human world and recurring patterns and movements of the Earth and other celestial bodies will not one day be acknowledged. As above, so below, as the second Hermetic principle states. It will not be presented as an acknowledgement, of course. Nobody will step forward and say “oh, terribly sorry, it turns out astrology was accurate after all, and we were all wrong”. It will come gradually, and it will be described in familiar scientific terms, as every “disclosure” of mysteries has.
Remember Schopenhauer’s words that truth comes in three stages. First it is vehemently denied, then ridiculed, and finally accepted as self-evident.
There are actually some astonishing similarities between these opposing camps
Perhaps surprisingly, the cutting edge technology of our time, artificial intelligence, also ties in with the merger I anticipate will happen between science and spirituality, albeit in a different way.
Technology is always neutral in itself. The emergence of AI has a few uncanny aspects, but I am sure that this meta-technology will eventually be as much to our benefit as most of the tech we have created thus far, provided we don’t completely forget the sacredness of our existence. To borrow a phrase polymath Gregg Braden often uses: there is a battle going on for our humanness.
Many in the spiritual camp, for lack of a better term, foresee a human awakening, an ascension of consciousness which will lead to a sense of oneness and access to hitherto dormant abilities, which some think will occur when our DNA is fully (re)activated.
In the physicalist camp, which is still generally equivalent to mainstream society, the counterpart of this envisioned ascension is to be found within transhumanism, which in many ways is the epitome of AI.
There are actually some astonishing similarities between these opposing camps when it comes to what is envisioned. Uncanny? Maybe. Or hopeful.
Swedish transhumanist Hannes Sapiens Sjöblad (yes, he has added that middle name), describes a future where humanity has achieved a hive mind, a collective intelligence encompassing the entire planet. In twenty years, he thinks, every human will be able to be in direct contact with everybody else. To achieve this, we need to tear down the “meat barrier” between our minds and the world outside. Our hive mind will then not only consist of thoughts but also of sense perceptions and feelings.
“We are wiser together. The more connected we are, the less we engage in conflict”, he says.
He then points to the human limitations he perceives:
“The human species is unfit for the future. The human body has design flaws.”
(Here, transhumanism ironically challenges neo-Darwinism, probably without even realizing it. Why would evolution through natural selection of random mutations opt for solutions that are flawed? And if this only goes for homo sapiens, what is particular about this species?)
Now, there is nothing inherently evil in augmenting and enhancing the body. Humans have done that as long as we have been able to do it. Tools, weapons and clothes are different kinds of transhuman enhancements. And, for that matter, shamans have for thousands of years ingested natural psychedelic substances to reach higher levels of consciousness.
Using technology to improve physical life is one of the hallmarks of homo sapiens. With artificial intelligence, the aim is to also better the nonphysical aspects of life, and this is where it gets interesting.
In Hannes Sjöblad’s vision, we will be able to cure severe disease and aging, expand our perceptual abilities, improve our physical and cognitive abilities and transform instincts and motivational patterns, i.e. rid ourselves of bad habits and traits like selfishness, xenophobia and short-sightedness.
This is not particularly different from the corresponding vision of what a spiritual upgrading or ascension of consciousness might bring: activation of inherent self-healing abilities, enhanced sense perception, a clearer mind that can access all knowledge and a strong sense of oneness, a realization that hurting others means hurting oneself.
Transhumanists are brimming with enthusiasm about the potential of the human race, but revolutionary as they believe they are, they are stuck in a conventional Western thinking box and have their materialist blinders firmly on. Says Sjöblad:
“Human enhancement will emancipate us from the two biggest prisons of all, the gravity well of the planet we were born on and the meat bag that is the prison of our consciousness. Humanity is still just an acorn, which should not be afraid to grow into a tree.”
I can’t help wondering what would happen if his higher self one day taps him on his inner shoulder and convinces him that he is not, in essence, a meat bag, and that the acorn that is he will grow into a tree by itself, if he only allows it. That would shake his worldview. But he would not really need to change his visions.
Hannes, we already have all this cool technology within us. It is the science of consciousness. One day we will call it precisely that. And then we can complement it with some external add-ons. The more we realize our own innate abilities, the less we will fear machines.
The mystery of life is a tenet of being human. It’s part of the deal
Everything can and will become science. There are no, and can be no, red lines between true science and anything. Science is not a belief system (although many misuse it as that). It is a tool to understand and describe human reality, and, as every living human who has ever so slightly investigated her essence can attest to, this reality is practically limitless.
We have been led to associate the spiritual side of life with the words of priests, sages and mystics. There will always be a place for those kinds of words. But when we have put the spiritual baby back into the scientific bathtub, we will increasingly hear about that side in the words of physicists, psychologists and philosophers, and they will be talking about the same things as the priests, sages and mystics.
Finally, an important point: The erasure of the borderline between science and spirituality will not mean that we will understand everything. The mystery of life is a tenet of being human. It’s part of the deal. Not fully knowing is, by the way, the whole point of both science and spirituality. The day we see the entire purpose of everything, we don’t need to be here anymore. And that is not going to happen anytime soon;)
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