convergence

Science is a belief system. is a highly successful one, but a belief system nonetheless. However, the direction of physics, psychology, and metaphysics appears to be converging on an understanding of what is variously described in these disparate disciplines as a unified field, the collective consciousness (or collective unconscious), the Oneness, the Totality, the Ground of Being, the Absolute or ‘God’. Just choose your term.

The question this points to is why a belief system steeped in the rigors of the scientific method, with the inherent need for its “laws” and “theories” to produce verifiable predictions that will produce “objective” and repeatable results, should ask toward essentially the same conclusion, albeit in different terms, as the much mushier social sciences and metaphysics do: that the whole (or ‘All’) is One, and in it “we live and move and have our being.” “. (Acts 17:28)

Two conclusions seem self-evident: First, that we have a basic affinity, despite our egoic and inherently dualistic self-awareness, with the number ‘one’ as the most basic unit of calculation (the concept of “nil” or “zero” arose much earlier). afternoon); or, that we really are integral parts of an undivided ‘whole’ or universal field. So, therefore, let us fast forward to examining the latter for an explanation of why scientists, psychologists, and philosophers seem to be scratching the surface of the same thing.

The resistance

Perhaps the most influential book of the last hundred years that analyzes what modern science ‘is’ and how the process (and progress) of modern science ‘works’ is Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Kuhn’s basic thesis is that science comes to accept a “paradigm” that explains and accounts for the observations scientists have made up to that point and the experiments they have performed to verify their theories about “what” is “what.” “. A paradigm is thus essentially the prevailing “belief system” within the larger “belief system” of science.

Kuhn claims that a dominant paradigm will remain rigid until someone notices an “anomaly” or “result” that the paradigmatic theory does not and cannot explain, even hypothetically. At that point, and very often it is the same person who first detects the anomaly, some theorist presents a new theory or belief system that can and does explain ‘results’ that the previous paradigm could not.

“Ordinary scientists” in lab coats—those tasked with ‘developing’ the old scientific paradigm and determining its intricacies, rather than eliminating it with a theoretical flourish—more typically oppose and mistrust the new paradigm at first. However, over time, as the new paradigm is understood and tested, and its predictions proven experimentally to be correct, both mainstream and mainstream scientists will come to a consensus in favor of it. The new ‘theory’ or ‘belief system’ is gradually adopted and the old theory falls into the scientific path as a ‘new paradigm’ is born. A good example of this process (and used, unsurprisingly, by Kuhn himself) is how Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newton’s “classical” theories of optics, motion, and gravity.

Lord Kelvin wrongly predicted that only a few clouds remained on the horizon of physics at the dawn of the 20th century. Five years later, a young Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein would rewrite physics textbooks when, in his annus mirabulus In 1905, he published three ‘major’ papers (and two ‘minor’ papers) that fundamentally changed the direction of physics and laid the foundation for both Einstein’s own theory of relativity and quantum theory.

One problem on Lord Kelvin’s horizon was that Newton’s ‘classical’ theory could not explain the strange anomaly of Mercury’s orbit. Einstein came along with an entirely new paradigm of how we might understand the physics of motion that would explain the Martian orbit anomaly and a host of other problematic difficulties. Einstein did not discover the theory of relativity to explain Mercury’s orbit, but he did.

However, the theory of relativity predicted that during a solar eclipse the great mass of the sun could be shown to deflect light from stars whose positions lie within one degree of arc from the edge of the eclipsed sun. Most scientists were, as Kuhn points out, skeptical. However, the English physicist Arthur Eddington, one of the few scientists who could grasp the full importance of relativity, thought that Einstein was right and in 1919 organized an expedition to photograph a complete solar eclipse to verify Einstein’s prediction. (It was no small professional risk for an Englishman to be seen as ‘collaborating’ with a German in the proceedings of the month and after the end of ‘the Great War’).

Eddington’s observations, however, put the theory of relativity to the test and established it as the new paradigm of physics (along with quantum theory, in which Einstein also participated); however, this did not occur until fifteen years after Einstein published his “Special Theory of Relativity” and three years after he published the “General Theory of Relativity”.

The emergency

The problem is that ‘science’ will not accept any evidence for its theories that is not “objective” and “empirical” (i.e., supported by data expressible in mathematical terms). Since virtually all spiritual and/or religious experience is inherently “subjective” and “non-empirical” in today’s view of what science is about, this conveniently prevents scientists, psychologists, and philosophers from speaking a common language about at least the surface of science. unitive field, consciousness or Absolute that all the disciplines are scratching. And, until this general ‘paradigm’ is successfully challenged, by definition, all observations from thousands of years of Eastern psychological, physical and metaphysical experience cannot challenge the paradigms of science.

This is true even where, as in quantum mechanics (which cannot explain why an “observation” is needed to give “reality” and “determine” a quantum event, or how apparently “separate” particles remain “entangled” with each other. yes even at monumental distances), theoretical research claims the explanations that Eastern “inner scientists” discovered millennia ago. Thus (as Einstein noted) “Science without religion [remains] blind, while religion without science [remains] sword.”

However, it does seem that the “Chinese wall between the objective and the subjective, between the empirical and the intuitive, between East and West, is slowly giving way and that the campaign to finally get the Western mind sciences to observe the invaluable The discoveries of the Eastern traditions are succeeding The cooperative work of Western scientists with meditation practitioners of the Eastern wisdom traditions, using increasingly sophisticated instruments (both the highly trained Eastern “brain” and the powerful “force technique), promises to do for the study of consciousness and our understanding of our ‘inner’ landscape what Galileo’s telescope did for the study of physics and our understanding of our ‘outer reality’, despite the time it took. it may take for a true East-West ‘physical and metaphysical paradigm’ to emerge.