It's a well-worn truth that the modern world is built upon science and technology. But this truth doesn't dominate everyday life as much as one might think. Science is materialistic, and it explains the world through objective data. People lead their lives, at least partly, apart from materialism. The spiritual side of life exists and always has, which defies objective data. So does art, which isn't mystical, not to mention emotions, intuition, morality and much else that makes life worth living.
Most of the time we are satisfied with this kind of catch-as-catch-can dualism. One of the easiest precepts from Jesus to follow is "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's." If you substitute "science" or "materialism" for Caesar, everyone does exactly that, compartmentalizing personal and spiritual experience in a separate box from iPads, microwaves and space shuttles.
The problem is that a compartmentalized life feels inadequate, which is why a public debate has been ongoing for 200 years about whether God or science is the ultimate master of reality. The answer matters. If you plump for God then miracles, mysticism, the soul and invisible forces have a chance to be real. If you plump for science instead, then physical existence can be completely trusted and the rational mind will in time solve all apparent mysteries. In either case, dualism no longer pinches; some kind of non-dualism wins the day.
In my posts, articles and books I've argued that science can expand to include miracles and mysticism. There is no need to deny the miraculous if everything is a miracle. There is no mystery surrounding mysticism if we look into the subtle essence of the human mind. More importantly, a non-dual world based on consciousness would be a better world. The fact is that science won't reach answers to every riddle, so plumping for materialism is an empty gesture -- even a hoax -- when it comes to explaining a broad range of issues:
These questions seem so abstract, not to mention so huge, that everyday life seems content to pass the by, and materialists are content to call them metaphysics, putting them high on a shelf to gather philosophical dust. But I'd argue that no questions are more relevant to my life and yours, once we reduce them to the personal scale.
One could add many other important issues to the list, but all would have one thing in common: until you understand the mind, you haven't truly understood reality. Life comes to us as experience. This is true of driving a car, raising a child, catching a cold or building a super collider in order to detect subatomic particles. Experience is how we participate in the universe. The super collider isn't set aside in some objective space, even though data tries to be objective. Every moment in every scientist's life is a subjective experience. It consists of sensations, thoughts, feelings and images.
You can claim, as non-dual materialists do, that the subjective side taints the objective and should be considered an unreliable guide to truth. But to say this makes two mistakes, and they are whoppers. The first mistake is that the mind cannot be located in the material world. Primitive peoples, as we like to call them, believed that spirits inhabited physical objects, a perspective known as animism. Trees contained tree spirits, the sky was the home of rain gods, and little demons lurked all around. Yet when it says that mind exists in the brain, neuroscience is committing the same fallacy. The brain is made up of atoms and molecules. It is a thing, like a tree, and to say that the mind is only the brain means that you have attributed consciousness to atoms and molecules. No one has ever explained how mind suddenly arises in blood sugar when that sugar crosses the blood-brain barrier. It is simply assumed.
The second mistake, intimately connected to the first, is that observers can stand apart from what they observe. Instead of being a participatory universe, science asserts that outside reality is separate from us; we are like children with our noses pressed to a bake shop window, staring through the glass but never going inside. This view reduces experience to data and then goes further by saying that data is superior to experience. This cannot remotely be true. The data about your body, such as blood pressure, heart rate, hormone levels, etc., is essentially the same as the data from Buddha, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso. It seems obvious that when you throw out all the factors that make these individuals unique, you have thrown out something pretty essential -- the very meaning and purpose of life.
I've argued that a new world is being born in which nothing needs to be thrown out, and such a world can only be based on experience. Experience covers billions of people leading different lives, but one element is always present: consciousness. Thoughts and actions occur in consciousness. This is so obvious that it feels a bit meaningless, like saying that all marine life occurs in the sea. But the world's wisdom traditions exist to open our eyes, seeing beyond the obvious to something incredibly important: If you delve into consciousness, you will find the essence of existence, meaning it purpose, direction and goal. You will know deeply and fully who you are, and when that unfolds, you will know what reality is.
Non-dual consciousness doesn't celebrate subjectivity over objectivity. To do that is simply to take the mistakes of materialism and turn them on their heads. Non-dual systems all make the same claim: "Everything is made of X." Science says that everything is made of matter and energy. Non-dual consciousness says that everything is made of mind. An alien landing on Earth in a spaceship, lacking bias either way, could easily see why these two worldviews consider the other preposterous. To say that everything is matter and energy is preposterous when you are trying to get at the mind and subjective experience. Non-dual consciousness is preposterous when you are trying to figure out where stars and galaxies come from. In other words, the physical seems secure in making its claims on us, while the mental seems just as secure when telling the story of inner life.
The great challenge is to decide which preposterous claim is, believe it or not, actually true. For thousands of years human beings had no difficulty believing that Creation was happening in the mind of God; the spiritual origin of the universe was certain. Today, people have no trouble believing that tiny physical things called atoms and molecules will reveal why we fall in love, create art and have thoughts in our heads. I'm not defending an ancient bias as opposed to a modern one. Rather, there has been an evolution, bringing us to the point where we can go beyond crude animism, whether of the spiritual or materialistic kind, at last seeing how consciousness works in the whole scheme of reality.
We can explain the galaxies and personal experience at the same time by finding the same origin for each. If nature goes to the same place -- an invisible workshop beyond time and space -- to create a supernova, a rose, human love and our craving for God, then non-duality solves everything. My position is that non-duality must be based in consciousness, since it is inescapable that the only reality we know comes through experience. Without a doubt we live in a participatory universe, and the sooner we surrender the delusion that data is superior to experience, the closer we will come to transforming the world.
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Truth is what the opposites have in common.
is likely to be your pastor.
A person who uses logical reasoning for scientific study is
likely to be your anthropology profesor.
There is a need for both. They may not necessarily see a
conflict with what they both do. Why should you?
I think that consciousness is just our mental perception of subtle energy and that everything is energy. Science is not good enough to measure subtle energy. Religions all use subtle energy, but many don't teach their energy practices in order to credit their god and maintain their influence. Science is just as competitive in refusing to recognize evidence and influences beyond their perception and control.
So the biggest problem to meaningful learning and growth is the desire of intellect to maintain its own influence. That self-centered interest makes human consciousness just as unreliable as science or religion.
The resolution to the problem is to investigate what both sides have in common, which IMHO is subtle energy. Science needs to reconize the effects of subtle energy, which it currently ignores. Scientists working in this area are systematically ignored, shunned and ostrasized. Religions need to open their secrets of energy practices for all to learn and study.
The benefits would be real advances in healing without negative side effects and real empowerment of people over their own health.
In conclusion, consciousness is just a product of the human mind and just as suspect as science and religion.
I think that consciousness is closely related to energy, as set forth by the scientist William A. Tiller.
I think it depends upon the definition of consciousness, but I think that clarity is important to allow scientists to investigate subtle energy. If consciousness is energy, then maybe consciousness should be called energy, for clarity. Some organized religions have used energy work as part of their rituals for thousands of years, but have never called it energy or tried to teach people how to use energy. So renaming things is not helpful and obscures truth.
I relate consciousness to a discriminating mind. It might be extended to an instinctive mind or maybe the energy field of a plant, but where is the consciousness in E = M x C-squared?
If the term consciousness is defined too broadly it looses its meaning, so let that vagness be called energy and use consciousness more precisely to advance understanding.
Lastly, "beliefs" are problematic. Learning and growth has a real component in energy work, and beliefs interfer with learning and growth as shown by the disconnect between science and spirituality. I would not abandon beliefs because I think they access higher levels of energy work. But for the purpose of enabling science and spirituality to find common ground, I don't think that beliefs should be a part of that at this point in time.
Dave
I just could not wrap my mind around become obviously apparent with a
fresh viwwpoint, as if there is an intuitive external force at work.
The subconcience mind seems to draw from an unknown source of
logic that is uncanny.
No it doesn't. It says that everything has being. This is a distinctly different notion and shifts the view from idealism to realism, because we all know it's always a good idea to look both ways before we cross the street.
what miracles are you referring to??
Awareness.
I incant the magic words for you: Quantum. Hokum. Bunkum. Bank, Deepak Chopra's full of...
Humans have the capacity to remember this essential nature and thereby resolve the dichotomy between consciousness and non-consciousness: they are one and the same, once a person's OWN state of consciousness starts to behave in a certain way.
However, until that point is reached, making the claim is simply philosophical mumbo jumbo that no-one should be inclined to agree with simply because it "sounds nice."
Chopra appeals to people who want to play mental games with themselves.
Let me just say a quick word about the photon experiment (not quite the same thing as an experience). With this kind of questioning, we can find ourselves asking again ‘how do I know if the world is round?’ However, let us be serious. When Oppenhiemer (1904 - 1967) made the first atomic bomb, I was not there. When America dropped it on Japan, I was not there. When the Wright brothers flew their plane at Kitty Hawk, I was not there. When Tibetan monks did levitation according to Marco Polo, I was not there.
However, I can take the original Wright brothers plane (or an exact replica) and experience their first flight. Scientists can make more atomic bombs and test them (not on real people, heaven forbid) and I can ask to experience it from a safe (very safe) distance. However, for me to believe that monks can heal or levitate, I ask to see a redo, and they can’t. This is just to say that the difference between a scientific experience (or experiment) and a spiritual experience is that a scientific one is reproducible, directly or indirectly.
It is not the role of science to produce spiritual experiences. But it often does leave room for very intense spiritual exaltations, especially when something new is discovered.
Scientists as human beings will often be emotional about their findings but one cannot expect the “tool” they are using to be emotional. One cannot expect them to allow themselves to make interpretations based solely on their emotions. This is the essential difference between science and religion. When a man observes the night sky and lets his mind or an emotion run wild or lets himself influenced by myth or religion, we all know the spectrum of fantasies that can result. A look at history tells us just how inexact and damaging for progress such, interpretations based on emotions can be and have been in the past.
"The brain is made up of atoms and molecules. It is a thing, like a tree, and to say that the mind is only the brain means that you have attributed consciousness to atoms and molecules."
First of all, the mind is a *product* of the brain. There's a difference.
Second, my dog is made up of atoms and molecules. To say that my dog produces drool is to attribute salivary glands to atoms and molecules!
We have now proven, using the logic of Deepak, that my dog does not produce saliva because obviously atoms don't drool.
What connects body and mind? - The Brain.
Where does meaning come from? - It doesn't come from anywhere, we choose where we place meaning.
Why and how does the body heal itself? - Really? this is "The tides! we dont' know how they work!" all over agian.
Oh, come on. That's pretty fatuous, don't you think? He's clearly not asking what the mechanics of the body are, but inquiring into the nature of the innate intelligence that runs the mechanics.
He's asking questions to about things we have answers to, as if it's some mystery.
The reason the illusion of depth creeps up, is because the claims being made have absolutely no evidentiary foundation, it just amounts to simply just "saying things in a pretty way". But it has no grounds to stand on when it proposes it should be on equal footing to the Objective reality to the material and ONLY material discoveries made by Science.
Unfortunately for Chopra, he's making claims against materialism, while existing in a vast and objectively proven to exist *material* universe, basking in the heat of the material sun, while being stuck to a material planet and produced by his material parents by a material process. The objective reality and evidence of the material universe and material reality has 13 billions years of existence backing it up and all the discoveries since.
and the super-natural, what objectivity is backing it up? .....None. not a single piece of evidence that anything other than a material universe.
The inability to explain a personal subjective experience in no way is evidence of any objective reality of of the super natural. Consciousness is a product of the brain, and if you think it's not, go to the hospital and have them shut down your brain, and see if your consciousness sticks around.
Caesar and God are two distinct consciousnesses not compartments!
This philosophical error to to equate the two into a single Consciousness which he understands as "spirituality" is actually a Pantheist position of reality.
This becomes clear when he says " My position is that non-duality must be based in consciousness, since it is inescapable that the only reality we know comes through experience."