Which will be more important in shaping your future, science or spirituality? For any number of people this sounds like an empty question. Science has shaped our age; religion is a declining force in the West, as it has been for decades. A clock could be placed behind every pulpit ticking off the thousands of people who leave organized faith behind every hour of the day. But there is a growing movement that is repairing the rift between science and religion. It has nothing to do with the noisy band of atheists who continue to foment discord between faith and reason. Rather, science has reached a point where certain basic mysteries cannot be solved without resorting to the one thing that spirituality has always specialized in: consciousness.
On that basis, groups of scientists have begun to eavesdrop on the future by looking into the worldview that we broadly call spiritual. One such gathering was recently held near San Diego, the second annual Sages and Scientists Symposium sponsored by the Chopra Foundation. Its purpose was to bring together not just the brightest scientific mind but also the perspective of a spirituality that is consciousness-based. It's hard to speak plainly about such things without stepping on toes. Science is dominated by materialism, a worldview that traces all activity, including our imagination and creativity, to physical processes in the brain, and these processes are either chemically determined or random, depending on which strain of materialism you confront. Spirituality, which is much broader than religion, is based on the assumption that a transcendent reality exists beyond the physical world. This is the domain of higher consciousness, or if you are conventionally minded, the home of the soul and God. It's hard to credit that either side would find much common ground.
But as the various talks offered here testify, there are enough mysteries to go around. Scientists who are willing to venture into speculative thinking, joined by sages from the world's wisdom traditions who are willing to look beyond arguments about God, face the same primal questions. Where did the universe come from? What preceded the Big Bang, before there was either "where" or "when"? A century after the quantum revolution in physics, science has to face up to the vanishing act that the physical universe pulled, as matter and energy were both seen to emerge from a timeless state that is either an empty void (which no one accepts) or a field of infinite possibilities, a veritable womb of creation (which almost everyone is beginning to accept, however offended science may be by learning that the world's ancient sages and spiritual teachers knew about this timeless domain long before physics arrived with its exact measuring devices.)
The reason that your future and mine depends on the settling of these questions isn't what you might think. Science can proceed perfectly well in everyday affairs without thinking about "metaphysics," as materialists like to call spirituality. For its part, spirituality can keep appealing to individuals one at a time as they arrive at personal crises, revelations and awakenings. But what will be shortchanged is reality. Ultimately, worldviews are secondary. If X believes in Buddha and Y in thermodynamics, their two worlds can sit uneasily next to each other or simply not interact. But reality is a shared concern. It's also a topic we can't afford to leave to specialists. Where the cosmos came from means a great deal, because the answer will tell you where the human mind came from, and where it's going.
Is the universe conscious? If so, then our minds are embedded in the cosmic mind. Is the universe evolving? If so, that casts human evolution in a new light, along with the origin of life. These are not specialist questions. They go to the heart of the human condition. In that spirit, take a look at the attached talks by various illustrious, curious, open-minded speakers. Don't pigeonhole anyone as sage or scientist. Try not to join a camp for ideological reasons. There is a struggle going on between science and spirituality that will shape everyone's future, and if we each decide to join in, a blending may occur with magical consequences. What could be more fascinating? Together a complete engagement of the human faculties promises a more powerful and realistic basis for humanity's next evolutionary leap.
This is the first in a series of essays exploring the relationship between religion and science. This series is an outgrowth of the Sages and Scientists Symposium sponsored by the Chopra Foundation.
Published in the Washington Post
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Deepak Chopra: A New Creation Story: Beyond Religion and Science
Deepak Chopra: Sages and Scientists Symposium
Sages and Scientists Symposium will start tonight. Live streaming ...
YouTube - SAGES & SCIENTISTS SYMPOSIUM DEEPAK CHOPRA Fri-Sun Feb ...
Marla Maples at Sages and Scientists Symposium - Deepak Chopra ...
Deepak, I wrote an open letter to President Obama calling for compassion and sanity over profits re: nuclear energy. Advocating a shift in actions and therefore, consciousness. I hope you don't mind if I share it: Dear Mr. President... http://annienomad.blogspot.com/
Make sure you don't miss anyone when generalizing as that might affect sales.
I've been seeing a lot of this, I call it the new religion. organized bronze aged religions are going the way of the dodo slowly but surely, mostly because they are just horribly primitive, and lack any sense of rationality, so we have these people who still want there to be something more, so they take sciency sounding things and make it this new religion, and it's waaaay more rational because it uses pseudo science and sciency sounding words so that it appears RATIONAL.
But it's just the same ole irrational way of thinking with a more professional label.
I'm a big believer in "Track Record", of all the thing that inform us about our world and universe, how it works and how we can make it work for us, which has a better track record for trust?
Religion
Spirituality
or Science.
I think I'm gonna go with the one that keeps planes in the air.
As far as God is concern He and She is ABSOLUTE and depends on absolutely NOTHING.
Information is free. Your Quantum computer mind is tailor made to access the Akashic Information Field of the Cosmos. There's a prayer each night that I always pray, “Let the data guide me through every day”.
The BIN Singularity is near. Quantum be upon you.
Based on an assumption? So how is that different from, say, just making things up?
"Scientists who are willing to venture into speculative thinking" Most scientists would be willing to venture into speculative thinking, but I would hope they might need a smidgeon of evidence before publishing anything.
People blindly believe this, but are flabbergasted when reality whacks them in the back of the head. They shake their fist at 'god' asking "Why, why WHY!??!?"
Uh, it's because you weren't paying attention - you were busy praying to some diety.
Science does not have all the answers - yet. It's a complex reality, one we've barely begun to reckon. But simply explaining away phenomena as the whim of a god used to work a couple thousand years ago; not so much today. Of course, there will always be people who refuse to ask questions, and rely on the word of someone else for all things important. And some simply aren't mentally up to the challenge of delving into what makes things tick. Have pity on them; they're doing the best that they know how.
The question that Deepak raised, 'what was there before the big bang?' is one that I'm perfectly willing to let someone else answer. Pretty much everything else has been covered.
I guess it was more like scientists need God and religions need science but biblical teaching is all factual and therefore it is all scientific already.
It also seems to be an attempt to try to keep especially the far eastern religions relative. They like to believe the universe has an eternal consiousness or something like that but the matter in the univese is lifeless. It just happens to work in life forms only because of the way that it is made to function.
Noisy, unenlightened atheists are helpless to slow the emergence of Quantum Evolutionary Spirituality Science. We must always remember that this new QESS is not subject to the distortions and inclinations of its leaders or its culture. The Noosphere will be directed by Pure Unified Transpersonal Consciousness. In the not-so-remote future, every Quantum particle in the Wuniverse will be lit up with Consciousness and the Bodhisattvas can retire.
Quantum unto the Supra Universal Consciousness (SUC).
Lawrence Krauss: I think it's probably one of the most abused concepts in physics among the public. You should be wary whenever you hear something like, "Quantum mechanics connects you with the universe" ... or "quantum mechanics unifies you with everything else." You can begin to be skeptical that the speaker is somehow trying to use quantum mechanics to argue fundamentally that you can change the world by thinking about it.
Q: But isn't everything really connected? Doesn't the quantum world pervade everything that we see around us?
A: Of course it does. So does classical physics. The quantum world does pervade everything around us, but as Richard Feynman liked to say, "Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket." Not everything is possible. That's what makes the world so interesting. It is true that quantum mechanics is extremely strange, and on extremely small scales for short times, all sorts of weird things happen. And in fact we can make weird quantum phenomena happen. But what quantum mechanics doesn't change about the universe is, if you want to change things, you still have to do something. You can't change the world by thinking about it.
I also love how he just crushes people who misconstrue science (such as Chopra) for their own causes (in this case, money).