The ancient Hindus had a joke – “God gave us truth - then the devil came along and said, ‘Here, let me organize that for you. I’ll call it religion’.” Deepak Chopra softens this point, reminding us that ‘enlightenment’ originally meant to rise above, or to ‘lighten up.’ [1]
Sadly, as if to prove this true, “prevailing culture still clings to a narrow conception of a distant holy land.” (Original Instructions, Gray, 87) and today as in centuries past, “the public is easily duped into righteous wars that are, in fact, ultimately aimed at control of distant natural resources,” (OI, Gray, 87) [2]just as the idea of manifest destiny rationalized the European invasion of the Americas and other lands around the world. “Correspondingly, we see heinous crimes against humanity enthusiastically committed by individuals and groups who” are bent on seeing “that their particular spiritual story…must prevail throughout the world.”(OI, Gray, 87) [3] All of which ignores the golden rule that is so often the fundamental, if forgotten, foundation of these faiths.
It takes courage, humility, and even humor to help us look and listen beyond our own chosen and/or conditioned beliefs, but if we do, we will hear from the collective voices of our ancient ancestors those inspired truths they took great care to remember that we might one day understand and pass on to our young as well. Seeing what each offers and how each speaks to all the others, we can see that and why it is in the dialogue between them that a real depth of understanding is achieved – again, just as two eyes add depth to what can be seen with only one.
Which leads us to a natural distinction between ‘wisdom traditions’ and ‘religions,’ for while some appear to use these terms interchangeably (including Smith himself), it is important to notice that many truly wise traditions are not ‘religions’ in the traditional sense. And what’s more, some religious traditions are not truly wise.
If we seek the truth in earnest, however, and are true to the call that these traditions put forth at their heart and soul, with the courage to listen and the humility to hear beyond our own habitual beliefs, then we might learn to learn from others and listen to the dialogue between those truest of our ancient ancestors, the sages of the ages who come to understand in this way what our ancient betters lived, and sometimes died, that we might remember.
Perhaps those who these days who work to advance religious tolerance put it best:
“In our opinion, the greatest failure of organized religion is its historical inability to convince their followers that the Ethic of Reciprocity applies to all humans, not merely to persons like themselves. It is our belief that religions should stress that their members use their Ethic of Reciprocity when dealing with persons of other religions, the other gender, other races, other sexual orientations, etc. Only when this is accomplished will religiously-related oppression… cease.”[4]
In his Illustrated World’s Religions, Huston Smith encourages what he calls ‘world understanding,’ and to this end gives us the enlightened origins of these ancient wisdom traditions. But only their “inspired truths” mind you, “not a balanced account” of these religions, for that “would include witch hunts and inquisitions, pogroms and persecution, the Christian Crusades and holy wars of Islam,”(p.10-11) [5]which are not the best of what these faiths have to offer us. In truth, "The full story of religion is not rose-colored" because “institutions are built on vices as well as virtues.”(p.13)[6]
Historically, as any earnest student can discern, there have been many traditions that began with a foundation based on true wisdom, but then gradually lost that ground along the way as participants became more hierarchical, controlled from the top. And “The thing about hierarchies…is that we accept it as THE main narrative to live by. But the truth is, there aren’t any main narratives… There are jillions of stories.””[7](OI, Allen, 139) And none of them are privileged or have a monopoly on truth. “The thing about…the old, old stories is that they recognize multiplicity at every single level. It’s always interaction.”(OI, Allen, 119)
“All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself.” So while it may be true that, “One can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion,” as one Hindu sage put it, but “It is in ignorance that people say, ‘My religion is the only one, my religion is the best’.”[8]
“But there is a need in human beings for spiritual understanding.”(p.11) And some, “with a growing sense of spiritual emptiness, seek to fill that void through the scripture, books, rituals and disciplines devised by various human cultures over the centuries.”(OI, p.xviii) But too often, “God, Allah, Kiektan…are only noises we fashion to be able to refer to what we don’t understand.”(OI, p.8) Too often “In our short history we have convinced ourselves that only our stories are true and we have often fought, killed, and died to convince others that we know better than they.”(OI, p.5)
But "there’s a difference between spiritual and religious. Whereas religion is about submission and obedience and authoritarianism. Spiritual is about taking responsibility.”(OI, Trudell, 322) What Huston Smith calls “the hard work of ego-reduction,” to which the trappings of religion are irrelevant.
“Organized religion may have discredited itself” in this way, as Chopra says, “but spirituality has suffered no such defeat.” “Just because religion didn’t succeed doesn’t mean that a new spirituality, based on consciousness won’t. We need to see the truth, and in the process we will awaken the profound powers that were promised to us thousands of years ago.”
But for this, “we need to go back to the source of religion,” he says, and “The source isn’t God. It’s consciousness. The great teachers who lived millennia ago offered something more radical than belief in a higher power.” They offered a faith in our “inner wisdom.” The “divine qualities of love, mercy, compassion, justice” are “a common thread in all major religions. Higher consciousness allowed the great sages, saints, and seers to attain a…common understanding of consciousness.” One that showed why we must “Be lamps onto ourselves,” as Buddha says. Or as Jesus put it, “Seek, and you shall find.”(Matthew 7:7)
Mind you, “the world’s wisdom traditions did not exclude a personal God,” but “wisdom traditions all include an impersonal God who permeates every atom of the universe and every fiber of our being.” But the difference in a personal and impersonal god is the difference in the person you love, “who puts a face on love,” and “love itself,” that existed before and will survive beyond the people we love. (War of the Worldviews)
And because religion often has its expressed purpose in promoting love, it stands to reason that it should advance mutual understanding to this end. And yet, too often it does anything but. Religion also has its expressed purpose in truth, yet its methods involve belief and faith, which discourages questioning or anything resembling reasoned dialogue or mutual appreciation and collective learning - arguably the only means to actual understanding.
Many take science to be the way out of the problems posed by religion, but science too has too often lost sight of its inspired origins. Isaac Newton himself proclaimed:
“I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some cause hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from one another. Their forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of Nature in vain: but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687)
Heisenberg said of Newton that:
“His position toward nature is most clearly circumscribed by his well-known statement that he felt like a child playing at the seashore, happy whenever he found a smoother pebble or a more beautiful sea shell than usual, while the great ocean of truth lay unexplored before him… Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that for Newton the seashell is significant only because it comes from the great ocean of truth. Observing it is not yet an end in itself; rather, its study receives meaning through its relation to the whole.”(Werner Heisenberg, The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics)
All the same, “Science…has been satisfied for four centuries with exploring the visible universe” only, neglecting the relationships that are invisible to the objectivity agenda.
Science as we know it has come to look upon life as essentially materialistic, and so it holds only “if the physical world is all that exists.” It studies only what can seen or conceptualized from outside-looking-in and thus objectified, in the sense that we can see it’s perimeters and so view it a literal object. But this habit ignores anything that we might be inside of, which includes all of our relationships, as invisible to us as water is to fish.
Newton notwithstanding, science “requires no faith in an invisible realm.” But as Chopra argues against physicist * in War of the Worldviews, “To deny the worth of subjective experience is to dismiss most of what makes life worth living: love, trust, faith, beauty, awe, wonder, compassion, truth, the arts, morality, and the mind itself.” In fact, “Human consciousness created science, which ironically is now moving to exclude consciousness, its very creator.”
Of course, “our five senses encourage us to accept that there are objects ‘out there’… However at the frontiers of physics, where Nature becomes very small, matter breaks down and then vanishes. Here the act of measuring changes what we see; every observer turns out to be woven into what he observes. This is the universe already known to spirituality, where passive observation gives way to active participation.”(Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
Here, Indigenous wisdom can illuminate what the scientific method cannot discern.
*put relationships
Thus, “the inner journey can go much deeper, taking you to a reality that isn’t about objects ‘out there’ or [even] feelings and thoughts ‘in here’.” But rather, “those two worlds meld into one state of being that lies beyond the limits of space-time, in the realm of infinite possibilities.” And here, “we discover that we are part of the fabric of creation. The result is enormous power and freedom,“ as well as inescapable responsibility.(Chopra, War of the Worldviews) For every action has butterfly effects that not only reverberate throughout the universe, but bring what goes around back around to us.
Again, Indigenous wisdom can teach us what modern science cannot see.
*put reciprocity
And yet “morality, we are told, isn’t the responsibility of science.” As if it were not true that *
So “if you look deeper, science has run into the same problem as religion.” Both have “lost sight of its humanity, seeing Nature as a force to be opposed and conquered… Now we are paying the price.” (Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
“It was this tremendous promise” that both religion and science have “failed to deliver on.” “If the kingdom of God is within, as Christ declared, if nirvana means freedom from all suffering, as the Buddha taught, and if knowledge of the cosmos is locked inside the human mind, as the ancient reskis, or sages, of India proposed, we cannot look around today and say that those teachings bore fruit.“ (Chopra, War of the Worldviews) Neither can we make progress without dialectic humility.
“The future that spirituality promises – one of wisdom, freedom, and fulfillment – hasn’t vanished as the age of faith declined. Reality is reality. There is only one, and it’s permanent. This means that, “At some point the inner and outer worlds must meet; we won’t have to choose between them. That in itself will be a revolutionary discovery.” Ultimately, “it is this invisible wholeness that matters most.” (Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
Neither religion nor science can “resolve this dilemma…spirituality can.” “Although the eye beholds rocks, mountains, trees and sky, this is only a veil drawn over a vast, mysterious, unseen reality. Beyond the reach of the five senses lies an invisible realm of infinite possibility, and the key to unfolding its potential is consciousness.” (War of the Worldviews)
Until then, religion and science, both of which begin in the search for truth too often deteriorates to nothing more than habits, often bad habits, and bad communication habits, at that. I think it was Gulliver who lamented, “Nobody wants to end the war because everybody wants to win it!” As it is, religion and science both are too often adopted by unreflective individuals, in the same way that wolves might wear sheep’s clothing, with little or no understanding of their inspired origins or deep potential. Some in both camps stay true to the inspired vision of their most authentic ancestors, but too often, ego brings ulterior motives into the mix that cause practitioners of both to feign wisdom with a weapon’s purpose.
“Science,” wrote Werner Heisenberg, “is rooted in conversations..”(p.10, Bohm) In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue, controversy, disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty that fuels the creativity of the scientific community.
One of the best descriptions of the scientific method, certainly the closest to what the ancients would endorse, came from the legendary physicist, Richard Feynman:
“The only way to have real success in science…is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.” (p.12, Storms of my Grandchildren, James Hansen)
This is the dialectic method in a nutshell. It is why science was once part and parcel of what was then called natural philosophy. And why the dialogic Socratic method was understood to be an essential element of this holistic search for truth.
John Stuart Mill offered my favorite expression of this method:
““On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends upon a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.... He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that....nor is it ever really known but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest possible light....the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner…"
It is in this sense that Deepak Chopra claims that the ancient sage were ‘scientists’ – and Indigenous wisdom offers us native science*. (footnote: Leonard * disagrees, saying…* * ignores that hypothesis is theory laden. As * puts it, *. The consequent being that hypothetico-deductive science tends to find what it’s looking for, to the exclusion of contrary evidence, much less the rest of the whole truth of any matter.)
In his sobering book, Storms of my Grandchildren, climate scientist James Hansen shows the difficulty of this method when it comes to communicating with a general audience. Facing “the dean of the global warming contrarians,” Richard Lindzen, in their presentations to the * Task Force, Hansen discovered the impossibility of getting people who’ve made up their minds to see what they don’t want to see, when those who use “the opposite of the scientific method” are willing to tell them what they want to hear:
“In science, you want to examine evidence that seems to disagree with your preliminary interpretation. You must evaluate contradictory evidence to make sure that you are not fooling yourself.” Whereas those who approach evidence with a preconceived conclusion “tend to act like lawyers defending a client…presenting only arguments that favor their client.”
We have here the epitome of the difference between arguing to understand, and arguing only to win. The problem is, “The difference between scientist-style and lawyer-style tends to favor the contrarian in a discussion before an audience that is not expert in the science.”(p.12, Hansen) In this way, it’s easy for special interests to confuse the public with one-sided evidence and a surprising lack of insight into what is important and how nature works.
“The scientific method, in one sense, is a handicap in a debate before a nonscientist audience. It works great for advancing knowledge, but to the public it can seem wishy-washy and confounding: ‘on the one hand, this; on the other hand, that.’” And because the same media that is now (more than ever, thanks to the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision) able to buy our elections also reports our science to the public, effectively preventing them from hearing the undeniable evidence that “amplifying feedbacks are moving toward runaway self-amplification”(p.169) With the effect that, “The gap between public perception and scientific reality is now enormous. While some of the public is just becoming aware of the existence of global warming…those who know what they are talking about and have been watching this happen can’t help but realize that the climate system is on the verge of tipping points,”(p.171) at which point, “all hell will break loose.”(p.283)
Hansen worries that “One day [our] more perceptive grandchildren will say that [we] let the politicians lie to [us].”(p.177, Hansen) All of us who actively ignore what we don’t want to see will be held responsible, if only in the memory of our suffering grandchildren, for what we could have done, but didn’t.
“What can be done to improve this situation? There is no simple good answer, or it would have been found by now,” Hansen says. But I would argue that it has been found, time and again throughout history, but has been buried time and again over the centuries by the same ‘special interests’ who have existed in some form or another in all times and places, and who still succeed in convoluting the dialogue between intelligent people today.
And if we hope, at last, to overcome this deliberate ignorance, we must remember what the ancients tried to teach us, beginning with good communication – something we get little if any of in education as we know it. Which means that we must reeducate ourselves in this lost art of dialogue, if we hope to be able to pass it on to our young.
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation. And education is its midwife.”(The Finnish Alternative, Truthout.org)
Both religion and science may ultimately take many forms, and as Smith illustrates, they can easily lead away from what their visionaries had in mind, and in the process, discourage the development of the very thing that inspired them to begin with – the common truth of our inner moral compass -- the essential and primary purpose of spirituality. And for this reason, we cannot lump all wisdom traditions together under the term ‘religion.’ As the Greeks emphasize, there is an important distinction between following an outer authority, even a seemingly spiritual or rational one, and following our own inner reasoning and moral authority, our own inner voice, which has much less incentive to lie to us.
This book is not an attack on the so-called great religions of the west. It is, rather, a progressive revelation of those insights we in western traditions have largely missed out on because they’ve been neglected and maligned in that unholy competition that has too often passed for religion.
For there are many wisdom traditions that do not take on the form of an organized hierarchical body, and do not teach us to prejudge ourselves right and others wrong. They do not ask us to follow, but to find our way in earnest – and thus have much to offer us toward deep spiritual growth. The problem is, you never know which is which until you’ve done the study, something too few of us are inclined to do – thanks in part to educational and religious habits that deprive us when young of the “dialectic process of asking and answering questions”[9] by which the healthy mind (psyche, soul, etc.) might seek and find growth.
The difference between a true wisdom tradition and any lesser form, whether religious or scientific, can be found in the dialogue, or the lack thereof. One masters the appearance, while the other seeks the real thing.
So leave religion to the goddess at Delphi, says Socrates, and take her advice – instead, Know Thyself!
*The difference between wisdom traditions and organized religion…dialogue vs. obedience…morality is doing what’s right, regardless of what you’re told, obedience is doing what you’re told, regardless of what’s right.
[1] A&E Video, The Kama Sutra, quote from Deepak Chopra
[2] (OI, Gray, 87)
[3] (OI, Gray, 87)
[4] http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm
[5] (Illustrated Worlds Religions, p.10-11)
[6] Smith, Illustrated Worlds Religions:. p. 87. (And even as I write this, there comes a flash of synchronicity to illustrate this point – as a student email arrives to share this Tom Robbins quote: “Ideas are malleable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it…and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.”)
[7] Nelson, Melissa K. Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future. Rochester, VT: Bear, 2008. P. 139.
[8] (Smith, p.56)
[9] Socrates *Theatetus.
Sadly, as if to prove this true, “prevailing culture still clings to a narrow conception of a distant holy land.” (Original Instructions, Gray, 87) and today as in centuries past, “the public is easily duped into righteous wars that are, in fact, ultimately aimed at control of distant natural resources,” (OI, Gray, 87) [2]just as the idea of manifest destiny rationalized the European invasion of the Americas and other lands around the world. “Correspondingly, we see heinous crimes against humanity enthusiastically committed by individuals and groups who” are bent on seeing “that their particular spiritual story…must prevail throughout the world.”(OI, Gray, 87) [3] All of which ignores the golden rule that is so often the fundamental, if forgotten, foundation of these faiths.
It takes courage, humility, and even humor to help us look and listen beyond our own chosen and/or conditioned beliefs, but if we do, we will hear from the collective voices of our ancient ancestors those inspired truths they took great care to remember that we might one day understand and pass on to our young as well. Seeing what each offers and how each speaks to all the others, we can see that and why it is in the dialogue between them that a real depth of understanding is achieved – again, just as two eyes add depth to what can be seen with only one.
Which leads us to a natural distinction between ‘wisdom traditions’ and ‘religions,’ for while some appear to use these terms interchangeably (including Smith himself), it is important to notice that many truly wise traditions are not ‘religions’ in the traditional sense. And what’s more, some religious traditions are not truly wise.
If we seek the truth in earnest, however, and are true to the call that these traditions put forth at their heart and soul, with the courage to listen and the humility to hear beyond our own habitual beliefs, then we might learn to learn from others and listen to the dialogue between those truest of our ancient ancestors, the sages of the ages who come to understand in this way what our ancient betters lived, and sometimes died, that we might remember.
Perhaps those who these days who work to advance religious tolerance put it best:
“In our opinion, the greatest failure of organized religion is its historical inability to convince their followers that the Ethic of Reciprocity applies to all humans, not merely to persons like themselves. It is our belief that religions should stress that their members use their Ethic of Reciprocity when dealing with persons of other religions, the other gender, other races, other sexual orientations, etc. Only when this is accomplished will religiously-related oppression… cease.”[4]
In his Illustrated World’s Religions, Huston Smith encourages what he calls ‘world understanding,’ and to this end gives us the enlightened origins of these ancient wisdom traditions. But only their “inspired truths” mind you, “not a balanced account” of these religions, for that “would include witch hunts and inquisitions, pogroms and persecution, the Christian Crusades and holy wars of Islam,”(p.10-11) [5]which are not the best of what these faiths have to offer us. In truth, "The full story of religion is not rose-colored" because “institutions are built on vices as well as virtues.”(p.13)[6]
Historically, as any earnest student can discern, there have been many traditions that began with a foundation based on true wisdom, but then gradually lost that ground along the way as participants became more hierarchical, controlled from the top. And “The thing about hierarchies…is that we accept it as THE main narrative to live by. But the truth is, there aren’t any main narratives… There are jillions of stories.””[7](OI, Allen, 139) And none of them are privileged or have a monopoly on truth. “The thing about…the old, old stories is that they recognize multiplicity at every single level. It’s always interaction.”(OI, Allen, 119)
“All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself.” So while it may be true that, “One can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion,” as one Hindu sage put it, but “It is in ignorance that people say, ‘My religion is the only one, my religion is the best’.”[8]
“But there is a need in human beings for spiritual understanding.”(p.11) And some, “with a growing sense of spiritual emptiness, seek to fill that void through the scripture, books, rituals and disciplines devised by various human cultures over the centuries.”(OI, p.xviii) But too often, “God, Allah, Kiektan…are only noises we fashion to be able to refer to what we don’t understand.”(OI, p.8) Too often “In our short history we have convinced ourselves that only our stories are true and we have often fought, killed, and died to convince others that we know better than they.”(OI, p.5)
But "there’s a difference between spiritual and religious. Whereas religion is about submission and obedience and authoritarianism. Spiritual is about taking responsibility.”(OI, Trudell, 322) What Huston Smith calls “the hard work of ego-reduction,” to which the trappings of religion are irrelevant.
“Organized religion may have discredited itself” in this way, as Chopra says, “but spirituality has suffered no such defeat.” “Just because religion didn’t succeed doesn’t mean that a new spirituality, based on consciousness won’t. We need to see the truth, and in the process we will awaken the profound powers that were promised to us thousands of years ago.”
But for this, “we need to go back to the source of religion,” he says, and “The source isn’t God. It’s consciousness. The great teachers who lived millennia ago offered something more radical than belief in a higher power.” They offered a faith in our “inner wisdom.” The “divine qualities of love, mercy, compassion, justice” are “a common thread in all major religions. Higher consciousness allowed the great sages, saints, and seers to attain a…common understanding of consciousness.” One that showed why we must “Be lamps onto ourselves,” as Buddha says. Or as Jesus put it, “Seek, and you shall find.”(Matthew 7:7)
Mind you, “the world’s wisdom traditions did not exclude a personal God,” but “wisdom traditions all include an impersonal God who permeates every atom of the universe and every fiber of our being.” But the difference in a personal and impersonal god is the difference in the person you love, “who puts a face on love,” and “love itself,” that existed before and will survive beyond the people we love. (War of the Worldviews)
And because religion often has its expressed purpose in promoting love, it stands to reason that it should advance mutual understanding to this end. And yet, too often it does anything but. Religion also has its expressed purpose in truth, yet its methods involve belief and faith, which discourages questioning or anything resembling reasoned dialogue or mutual appreciation and collective learning - arguably the only means to actual understanding.
Many take science to be the way out of the problems posed by religion, but science too has too often lost sight of its inspired origins. Isaac Newton himself proclaimed:
“I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some cause hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from one another. Their forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of Nature in vain: but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687)
Heisenberg said of Newton that:
“His position toward nature is most clearly circumscribed by his well-known statement that he felt like a child playing at the seashore, happy whenever he found a smoother pebble or a more beautiful sea shell than usual, while the great ocean of truth lay unexplored before him… Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that for Newton the seashell is significant only because it comes from the great ocean of truth. Observing it is not yet an end in itself; rather, its study receives meaning through its relation to the whole.”(Werner Heisenberg, The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics)
All the same, “Science…has been satisfied for four centuries with exploring the visible universe” only, neglecting the relationships that are invisible to the objectivity agenda.
Science as we know it has come to look upon life as essentially materialistic, and so it holds only “if the physical world is all that exists.” It studies only what can seen or conceptualized from outside-looking-in and thus objectified, in the sense that we can see it’s perimeters and so view it a literal object. But this habit ignores anything that we might be inside of, which includes all of our relationships, as invisible to us as water is to fish.
Newton notwithstanding, science “requires no faith in an invisible realm.” But as Chopra argues against physicist * in War of the Worldviews, “To deny the worth of subjective experience is to dismiss most of what makes life worth living: love, trust, faith, beauty, awe, wonder, compassion, truth, the arts, morality, and the mind itself.” In fact, “Human consciousness created science, which ironically is now moving to exclude consciousness, its very creator.”
Of course, “our five senses encourage us to accept that there are objects ‘out there’… However at the frontiers of physics, where Nature becomes very small, matter breaks down and then vanishes. Here the act of measuring changes what we see; every observer turns out to be woven into what he observes. This is the universe already known to spirituality, where passive observation gives way to active participation.”(Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
Here, Indigenous wisdom can illuminate what the scientific method cannot discern.
*put relationships
Thus, “the inner journey can go much deeper, taking you to a reality that isn’t about objects ‘out there’ or [even] feelings and thoughts ‘in here’.” But rather, “those two worlds meld into one state of being that lies beyond the limits of space-time, in the realm of infinite possibilities.” And here, “we discover that we are part of the fabric of creation. The result is enormous power and freedom,“ as well as inescapable responsibility.(Chopra, War of the Worldviews) For every action has butterfly effects that not only reverberate throughout the universe, but bring what goes around back around to us.
Again, Indigenous wisdom can teach us what modern science cannot see.
*put reciprocity
And yet “morality, we are told, isn’t the responsibility of science.” As if it were not true that *
So “if you look deeper, science has run into the same problem as religion.” Both have “lost sight of its humanity, seeing Nature as a force to be opposed and conquered… Now we are paying the price.” (Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
“It was this tremendous promise” that both religion and science have “failed to deliver on.” “If the kingdom of God is within, as Christ declared, if nirvana means freedom from all suffering, as the Buddha taught, and if knowledge of the cosmos is locked inside the human mind, as the ancient reskis, or sages, of India proposed, we cannot look around today and say that those teachings bore fruit.“ (Chopra, War of the Worldviews) Neither can we make progress without dialectic humility.
“The future that spirituality promises – one of wisdom, freedom, and fulfillment – hasn’t vanished as the age of faith declined. Reality is reality. There is only one, and it’s permanent. This means that, “At some point the inner and outer worlds must meet; we won’t have to choose between them. That in itself will be a revolutionary discovery.” Ultimately, “it is this invisible wholeness that matters most.” (Chopra, War of the Worldviews)
Neither religion nor science can “resolve this dilemma…spirituality can.” “Although the eye beholds rocks, mountains, trees and sky, this is only a veil drawn over a vast, mysterious, unseen reality. Beyond the reach of the five senses lies an invisible realm of infinite possibility, and the key to unfolding its potential is consciousness.” (War of the Worldviews)
Until then, religion and science, both of which begin in the search for truth too often deteriorates to nothing more than habits, often bad habits, and bad communication habits, at that. I think it was Gulliver who lamented, “Nobody wants to end the war because everybody wants to win it!” As it is, religion and science both are too often adopted by unreflective individuals, in the same way that wolves might wear sheep’s clothing, with little or no understanding of their inspired origins or deep potential. Some in both camps stay true to the inspired vision of their most authentic ancestors, but too often, ego brings ulterior motives into the mix that cause practitioners of both to feign wisdom with a weapon’s purpose.
“Science,” wrote Werner Heisenberg, “is rooted in conversations..”(p.10, Bohm) In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue, controversy, disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty that fuels the creativity of the scientific community.
One of the best descriptions of the scientific method, certainly the closest to what the ancients would endorse, came from the legendary physicist, Richard Feynman:
“The only way to have real success in science…is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.” (p.12, Storms of my Grandchildren, James Hansen)
This is the dialectic method in a nutshell. It is why science was once part and parcel of what was then called natural philosophy. And why the dialogic Socratic method was understood to be an essential element of this holistic search for truth.
John Stuart Mill offered my favorite expression of this method:
““On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends upon a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.... He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that....nor is it ever really known but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest possible light....the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner…"
It is in this sense that Deepak Chopra claims that the ancient sage were ‘scientists’ – and Indigenous wisdom offers us native science*. (footnote: Leonard * disagrees, saying…* * ignores that hypothesis is theory laden. As * puts it, *. The consequent being that hypothetico-deductive science tends to find what it’s looking for, to the exclusion of contrary evidence, much less the rest of the whole truth of any matter.)
In his sobering book, Storms of my Grandchildren, climate scientist James Hansen shows the difficulty of this method when it comes to communicating with a general audience. Facing “the dean of the global warming contrarians,” Richard Lindzen, in their presentations to the * Task Force, Hansen discovered the impossibility of getting people who’ve made up their minds to see what they don’t want to see, when those who use “the opposite of the scientific method” are willing to tell them what they want to hear:
“In science, you want to examine evidence that seems to disagree with your preliminary interpretation. You must evaluate contradictory evidence to make sure that you are not fooling yourself.” Whereas those who approach evidence with a preconceived conclusion “tend to act like lawyers defending a client…presenting only arguments that favor their client.”
We have here the epitome of the difference between arguing to understand, and arguing only to win. The problem is, “The difference between scientist-style and lawyer-style tends to favor the contrarian in a discussion before an audience that is not expert in the science.”(p.12, Hansen) In this way, it’s easy for special interests to confuse the public with one-sided evidence and a surprising lack of insight into what is important and how nature works.
“The scientific method, in one sense, is a handicap in a debate before a nonscientist audience. It works great for advancing knowledge, but to the public it can seem wishy-washy and confounding: ‘on the one hand, this; on the other hand, that.’” And because the same media that is now (more than ever, thanks to the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision) able to buy our elections also reports our science to the public, effectively preventing them from hearing the undeniable evidence that “amplifying feedbacks are moving toward runaway self-amplification”(p.169) With the effect that, “The gap between public perception and scientific reality is now enormous. While some of the public is just becoming aware of the existence of global warming…those who know what they are talking about and have been watching this happen can’t help but realize that the climate system is on the verge of tipping points,”(p.171) at which point, “all hell will break loose.”(p.283)
Hansen worries that “One day [our] more perceptive grandchildren will say that [we] let the politicians lie to [us].”(p.177, Hansen) All of us who actively ignore what we don’t want to see will be held responsible, if only in the memory of our suffering grandchildren, for what we could have done, but didn’t.
“What can be done to improve this situation? There is no simple good answer, or it would have been found by now,” Hansen says. But I would argue that it has been found, time and again throughout history, but has been buried time and again over the centuries by the same ‘special interests’ who have existed in some form or another in all times and places, and who still succeed in convoluting the dialogue between intelligent people today.
And if we hope, at last, to overcome this deliberate ignorance, we must remember what the ancients tried to teach us, beginning with good communication – something we get little if any of in education as we know it. Which means that we must reeducate ourselves in this lost art of dialogue, if we hope to be able to pass it on to our young.
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation. And education is its midwife.”(The Finnish Alternative, Truthout.org)
Both religion and science may ultimately take many forms, and as Smith illustrates, they can easily lead away from what their visionaries had in mind, and in the process, discourage the development of the very thing that inspired them to begin with – the common truth of our inner moral compass -- the essential and primary purpose of spirituality. And for this reason, we cannot lump all wisdom traditions together under the term ‘religion.’ As the Greeks emphasize, there is an important distinction between following an outer authority, even a seemingly spiritual or rational one, and following our own inner reasoning and moral authority, our own inner voice, which has much less incentive to lie to us.
This book is not an attack on the so-called great religions of the west. It is, rather, a progressive revelation of those insights we in western traditions have largely missed out on because they’ve been neglected and maligned in that unholy competition that has too often passed for religion.
For there are many wisdom traditions that do not take on the form of an organized hierarchical body, and do not teach us to prejudge ourselves right and others wrong. They do not ask us to follow, but to find our way in earnest – and thus have much to offer us toward deep spiritual growth. The problem is, you never know which is which until you’ve done the study, something too few of us are inclined to do – thanks in part to educational and religious habits that deprive us when young of the “dialectic process of asking and answering questions”[9] by which the healthy mind (psyche, soul, etc.) might seek and find growth.
The difference between a true wisdom tradition and any lesser form, whether religious or scientific, can be found in the dialogue, or the lack thereof. One masters the appearance, while the other seeks the real thing.
So leave religion to the goddess at Delphi, says Socrates, and take her advice – instead, Know Thyself!
*The difference between wisdom traditions and organized religion…dialogue vs. obedience…morality is doing what’s right, regardless of what you’re told, obedience is doing what you’re told, regardless of what’s right.
[1] A&E Video, The Kama Sutra, quote from Deepak Chopra
[2] (OI, Gray, 87)
[3] (OI, Gray, 87)
[4] http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm
[5] (Illustrated Worlds Religions, p.10-11)
[6] Smith, Illustrated Worlds Religions:. p. 87. (And even as I write this, there comes a flash of synchronicity to illustrate this point – as a student email arrives to share this Tom Robbins quote: “Ideas are malleable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it…and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.”)
[7] Nelson, Melissa K. Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future. Rochester, VT: Bear, 2008. P. 139.
[8] (Smith, p.56)
[9] Socrates *Theatetus.