A companion volume to 'The Destiny of the Body,' this explores man as a species, his past beginnings, present achievements & failures, his evolutionary future.
III
(An Unnecessary Antinomy and a Harmonious Reconciliation)
"Earth is the Mother and Heaven the Father."
(Rigveda)
"All problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 4.)
Why Reconciliation?
Because of the complexity of his nature and being, man has always felt a double attraction apparently involving some sort of mutual contradiction: the lure of Earth and the call of Heaven. As a result, the human race has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals. On one side is the Hellenic ideal as taken up by Western civilisation and characterised by the cult of a critical and constructive rationality of which Science is the last outcome and which hopes to make individual men perfected social beings in a perfected economic society. On the other is the Eastern ideal imbued with a spiritual preoccupation, a mystic élan towards the Beyond and Unknown, a search for the self and the inmost truth of being, to which "every passing thing is nothing but a symbol".
An undue overstress on any one of these ideals to the detriment of the other can only lead to reductivist-omissive fallacy that misses their essential and harmonious compatibility and instead makes of them irreconcilable antagonists. But try as they may, the materialist and the ascetic can silence none of the aforesaid fundamental urges of man for all time, because they correspond to some essential elements of his being. Today, in India, we are on the threshold of a crisis of decision in which is concealed a choice of the nation's destiny: we are in the presence of the two extremes poised for a final confrontation, demanding if possible a harmonious reconciliation, otherwise an irrevocable parting of the ways.
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It is well to remember that this confrontation between Science and Spirituality will brook no eclectic compromise nor an uneasy mariage de convenance. What is called for is a deep and true and luminous reconciliation arising out of a mutual comprehension that will give to both "their due portion in Life and their due justification in Thought", thus relating the eternal aspiration of man upward and inward towards the Divine to his equally abiding drive towards the fullness of life and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions.
In our day this sought-after reconciliation has become all the more urgent, for the history of the race during the last half a century has made us poignantly aware that
(i)a sole stress on the economic and material existence of man leads inexorably to the rise in our midst of civilised barbarians so dangerous to the welfare of humanity itself;
(ii)an exclusively rational-scientific secular-material culture creates a dangerous void and imbalance in the subjective sphere of man's existence, so much so that the man of our epoch, in spite of all possible material comforts and conveniences, has fallen a prey to an all-pervading sense of anxiety with its background of frustration, maladjustment and inner disintegration;
(iii)although Science has brought to man an increasing mastery over his physical surroundings and along with it a growing material power, it has brought, alas, no adequate self-knowledge or self-mastery in the user of that power, the inevitable result being a horrible subjective chaos and the universalised confusion and discord that we witness everywhere;
(iv)Science and technology have made the life of humanity materially one, but have miserably failed to provide with a harmonising -light of the spirit that would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life-unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. "All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life-satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that it
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is his way out to something ideal."1
The dark doom to which humanity is hurtling headlong down under the impact of its external opulence and inner penury can be averted only if there dawns in man a greater spiritual consciousness adequate to meet and master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. "A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life."2
It is in the fitness of things that in India a conscious attempt is being made to harmonise modern science and technology with the age-old spiritual tradition of the land. And if India can find this basis of abiding collaboration between Science and Spirituality, she will not only do service to herself but show the necessary way to the bewildered world at large.
The present essay purports to show that such a harmonious and fruitful reconciliation is not merely possible but natural and inevitable if only Science and Spirituality, in their extraneous and inessential fortuitous accretions, consent to shed the dead weight of their inhibitions and presumptions. So the Mother has said, anything "that keeps to its proper place and plays its appointed role is helpful, but directly it steps beyond its sphere, it becomes twisted and perverted and therefore false."3 Indeed, as we shall see in the course of our essay, much of the conflict between Science and Religion is solely due to this overstepping of respective spheres and is therefore devoid of any veritable raison d'être. But before we may arrive at the reconciling solution, we propose first to analyse the reasons, historical as well as metaphysical, that have tended to put Science and Spirituality in two opposite camps; for a problem clearly put and squarely faced often brings its own solution.
Confrontation of Science and Religion
It is not so much spirituality and Yoga as the accredited credal religions that have historically clashed with the spirit and findings of Science. For what characterises a truly spiritual life is a direct
1.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 1054.
2.Ibid., p. 1055.
3.Questions and Answers, Cent. Vol. 3, p. 33.
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contact with the spiritual Reality, a union with the Divine and a living in the Divine Consciousness. Spirituality represents thus an essentially catholic mood, a programme of inner regeneration and finally a realised goal. The spiritual life, as distinguished from a religious life, "proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one's true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters".4
Now, the only and true function of a religion is, or should be, to prepare man's mind and life up to the point - and that in as catholic a manner as possible - where spiritual consciousness can directly take them up and illumine and govern their movements with the all-reconciling light of the spirit. But forgetting this central role and its essentially spiritual core, the religious attitude very soon degenerates in practice into some irrational and superstitious exoteric religionism that vaunts with dogmatic insistence an arbitrary array of theological dogmas, fixed beliefs and creeds, hollow ceremonies and lifeless ritual. And who can deny that, historically and as a matter of fact, religious traditions and orthodox reactions have stood violently in the way of science, burned a Bruno at the stake, imprisoned a sixty-seven years old Galileo, heaped abuses on a Darwin and often represented a force for retardation, superstition and oppressive ignorance. And all this simply because "men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophic truth had to be denied in order that religious error might survive".5
It is no wonder that Science with its spirit of free inquiry had to rise in revolt, as a reaction of sheer survival and self-defence, against the silly tenets and crude and inadequate dogmatic notions of popular religions. Science could not but recoil with a sense of estranged indifference, contempt and scepticism from what claims to determine truths even in Science's own domain by some so-
4.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 137.
5.Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, p. 165.
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called sacrosanct and infallible divine authority. This explains the historical hostility of Science and Religion, especially in Europe, which has led to the growth of the modern rationalistic attitude that seeks to make the earthly life our preoccupation and labours "to fulfil man by the law of the lower members divorced from all spiritual seeking."6
Inhibitions of Ascetic Spirituality
Ironically enough, in India, it is not the religions but a widely pervasive variant of metaphysical mood, a mood of ascetic spiritual aberration, that is likely to oppose the efflorescence of Science and the successful exploration and utilisation of Matter and the material world - not of course actively and outwardly as in Europe but in a passively negative and all the more potent way of mortifying the very initiative to scientific research, through the cultivation of a spirit of world-disgust. For the last two thousand years India has lived in 'the shadow of the great Refusal' and laboured under the sense of the cosmic Illusion. A supposed metaphysical dualism between Spirit and Matter, Reality and Appearance, has created in the collective Indian mind a feeling of the vanity of earthly existence, of the unimportance of things in Time, of the essential illusoriness of human life and its terrestrial aims and the unreality of the phenomenal world. The garb of the ascetic has been considered to be the highest possible possession of a man, kaupīnavanta khalu bhāgyavanta!
And if this be the true sense of spirituality and this anti-life attitude its inevitable consequence, this sort of spirituality, however ennobling for some isolated individual men, can have no essential dynamic validity nor any fruitful message for human society in the field of social effort, hope and aspiration. And, of course, it is futile to expect any universal growth of Science in the stifling atmosphere and on the unpropitious soil provided by this dilapidating vairāgya mood.
Fortunately, this anti-life mood and world-disgust, active or veiled, is not at all a necessary concomitant of true spirituality nor, for that matter, does it represent the robust catholicity of ancient
6. The Human Cycle, p. 168.
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Indian lore which admitted "both the claim of the pure spirit to manifest in us its absolute freedom and the claim of universal Matter to be the mould and condition of our manifestation",7 and heroically proceeded to embody here upon earth and not elsewhere, ihaiva, a higher consciousness and a spiritually moulded life.
What India wants today is not an obscurantist credal religionism nor the vitalistic occult and pseudo-spiritual practices, but the integral all-embracing dynamic spirituality of the Upanishads and the Vedas whose ancient wisdom, purānīprajñā, did not make this formidable division between Heaven and Earth, but accorded to both equal love and reverence. The Rishis went so far as to declare that "the Earth is the foundation and all the worlds are on the earth".
What, then, characterises this dynamic spiritual vision? What is its programme of action for man?
An Integral and Dynamic Spiritual Vision
The present appearance of our terrestrial being is a veiled and partial figure, and to limit ourselves to that first figure of the moment, to the present formula of an imperfect humanity, and base our world-conceptions on this appearance alone, as if that were an abiding truth for all times, is to exclude our divine possibilities. We have to bring a wider meaning into our human life and manifest in it the much more that we secretly are. We have to recognise the purport of our whole complex human nature in its right place in the cosmic movement and give its full legitimate value to each part of our complex being and many-sided aspiration; we have to find out the key of their unity as well as their phenomenal difference; and this finding must be by a synthesis and integration.
Now this all-reconciling dynamic integral spirituality posits that:8
(i) There is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in; there exists a supreme consciousness beyond and above this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we
7.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 25.
8.Adapted from Sri Aurobindo, mostly in his own words.
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grope and struggle at present; there is an Absolute beyond and behind every relative form and figure in this universe.
(ii)This omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence; this Reality of a Being and Consciousness, one and eternal, is behind the appearances of the world; all beings are united in that One Self and Spirit but divided by a certain separativity of consciousness, an ignorance of their true self and Reality in the mind, life and body.
(iii)This absolute Reality is in its nature indefinable; it is beyond the grasp of the ineffectual probe of separative mental consciousness; but there is a spiritual consciousness, a knowledge by identity, - attainable by a certain psycho-spiritual discipline otherwise called Yoga, - that can seize this Reality in its fundamental aspects and its manifold powers and forms and figures; Yoga can help us to remove the veil of separative consciousness and make us aware of the true self, the Divinity within us and all.
(iv)This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, this Sat, is not merely bare existence, or a conscious existence whose consciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss. In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda.
(v)This world is real because of the Reality that sustains it, because it is in its essence nothing else than the self-manifestation of the Supreme; but in its actual state strongly marked with inadequacy, imperfection, suffering and evil, it cannot be described as the perfect expression of Sachchidananda.
(vi)The supreme Reality, here in this manifested world, has taken upon itself the aspect of a Becoming in Time and this Becoming is essentially evolutionary in its character with Mind and Man as its highest products so far.
(vii)But Sachchidananda has yet to emerge fully in manifestation; therefore this evolution, this spiritual progression cannot stop short with Mind and with the imperfect mental being called Man; Mind is too imperfect an expression and Man too hampered and burdened a creature to be the last terms of evolution.
(viii)The former steps in evolution were taken by Nature in the plant and animal life without a conscious will or participation; but in men the substitution of a conscious for this subconscious evolution has become conceivable and practicable.
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(ix)Indeed the object of man in the world is "to become, to be conscious, to increase continually in our realised being and awareness of self and things, in our actualised force and joy of being, and to express that becoming dynamically in such an action on the world and ourselves that we and it shall grow more and always yet more towards the highest possible reach, largest possible breadth of universality and infinity".
(x)Since earth-life is thus seen to be not merely a lapse into something undivine, vain and miserable, offered to the embodied soul as a thing to be suffered and then cast away from it, as soon as its own inner evolution or some hidden law of the spirit makes that possible, the motivation for sadhana and the goal of spirituality should not be the drawing away from the world and its activities and a disappearance into far-off heights of the Self or Spirit but rather the invocation and descent of the higher principles here in the bosom of the world itself so that it becomes possible for the human being to find himself dynamically as well as inwardly and grow out of his still animal humanity into a divine race.
(xi)For this to be effectively realisable, man must know that
a)although he lives mostly in his surface mind, life and body, there is an inner being within him with greater possibilities to which he has to awake and can awake through the process of the psychological discipline of Yoga;
b)he has to open the ranges of this inner being and to live from there outward, governing his outward life by an inner light and force;
c)there are states beyond the material, - supraphysical planes and worlds, - which have laws of their own that can be investigated and utilised to the greater advantage of man if only he consents to undertake the study of them in a proper unbiased way;
d)there are several ranges of consciousness between the ordinary human mind and the supreme Truth-Consciousness and these intervening ranges have to be opened up and can be opened up in the subjective being of man, with all their potencies being actively available in the flowering of human life upon earth.
For the individual to arrive at the divine universality and supreme infinity, live in it, possess it, to be, know, feel and express that alone in all his being, consciousness, energy, delight of being is what the ancient seers of the Veda meant by the Knowledge, vidyā, and they recognised that avidyā ca vidyāliṅgam. To such a
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spiritual vision, positive and dynamic, "all man's age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour... and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense or foundation".9
Spirituality Reconciled to Science
Such then is the outlook of an integral spirituality that includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its due place of honour in the whole; it illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge, lower or higher, and gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. This spirituality is bold enough to declare in unequivocal terms that although it is a fact that without vidyā, the knowledge of the Oneness, avidyā, the relative and separative multiple consciousness, is a night of darkness and disorder, andhaṁ tamaḥ, bhūri anṛta, it is equally true that by excluding the field and operation of avidyā as if it were a thing non-existent and unreal, vidyā itself becomes a sort of obscurity and a source of imperfection, bhūya iva tamaḥ. This spirituality ordains man to cross beyond death through Avidya and enjoy Immortality by the Knowledge, avidyayā mṛtyuṁ tirtvā vidyayāmṛtamśnute. To its vision, Matter too is Brahman, annaṁ brahma, and so it does not seek to annul or deny the positive knowledge which Science has gathered from an elaborate investigation and exploration of the processes of life and nature, but only completes it by pointing out that the true foundation is above while the branchings are downward, ūrdhavudhna nīcīna-śākha (Rig-Veda), ūrdhamūlo'vākśa-kha (Gita), so that to know the essential truth of things as distinguished from their phenomenal appearances, one has to probe upward and inward instead of remaining content with only surface scrutiny. Ordinarily it is supposed that when we get to the higher knowledge, the knowledge that seeks to know the truth of existence from within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation, the world-knowledge becomes of no concern to us; but "in reality
9. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 686.
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they are two sides of one seeking. All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through Nature, through her works".10 And therefore, since all sincere pursuit after knowledge, if not vitiated and coarsened by a too earthward tendency, tends "to refine, to subtilise, to purify the being", a spirituality turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the supreme here upon earth cannot and will not exclude and throw away the forms and achievements of the so-called lower knowledge, nor will it shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which the Cosmic Spirit has assigned to himself in the human creature. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:
"All activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful material for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, - for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or word-expression, - all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation."11
Even after his spiritual attainment, siddhi, a man of integral spirituality will continue to take interest in the knowledge of the world, in the "contemplation of God in Nature", and his "aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we
10.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 492.
11.Ibid., pp. 132-33.
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may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment."12
In spirituality understood in the way as we have ventured to delineate above - and which, we trust, recaptures the spirit of our ancient Indian Wisdom, purāṇi prajñā, lies the harmonising light and law. And the supposed antinomy between Science and Spirituality is at least resolved from the latter's side. But what about the former? Is Science ready to clasp the hand of co-operation stretched by such a dynamic spirituality? Or will it rather by its very nature remain estranged from all spirituality of whatever sort that may be?
Here, again, our answer is in the negative. But to substantiate our proposition, we must first of all see what Science is, what its methodology, and what the outlook implied in its successful pursuit.
The Common Ground of Essential Attitude
One fact immediately arising out of even a cursory view of nature is the permanence of an over-riding rhythm in the sensate world of becoming and movement. In the absence of this rhythm, nature would have been totally incomprehensible, our memory useless, all science impossible and the activity of man blind and aleatory. Science is the discipline through which man attempts to catch this rhythm and imprison it in the framework of a precise formulation.
Now, all that is ordinarily knowable in phenomena is function and all discursive knowledge of which science is only a specialised form is nothing more than functional correspondence. Science replaces the study of the ontological content of a phenomenon by a functional explanation, and this explanation is sought by the application of both theory and experiment. The explanation in Science is not "revelatory" but "prognostic": "scientific truth is a prediction, or rather a predication.... Above the subject, beyond the immediate object, modern Science bases itself on pro-ject."13
Now it is a striking fact of good augury that a proper pursuit of scientific research calls for and develops in the scientist certain qualities of head and heart, a psychological poise and a certain
12.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 132-33.
13.G. Bachelard, he Nouvel Esprit Scientifique.
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global attitude that are at the same time very much needed in the fulfilment of a dynamically positive spiritual seeking. Mention may be made of:
(i)an intense mental concentration that ruthlessly eliminates all idle wandering of mind;
(ii)a boundless patience and an unflagging perseverance in the ceaseless search after truth;
(iii)strength of "character to seek the truth even when we have reason to fear that it will not be to our liking";14
(iv)"sincerity to accept the truth when this truth happens to contradict all that we have previously professed;"14
(v)"modesty to recognise that man... must stoop to experiment" to attain to truth;14
(vi)a spirit of heroic adventure that does not shun problems, rather confronts them with zest only to conquer them;
(vii)a creative imagination eager to strike out new pathways, to open up new vistas and explore new avenues to the unknown and the unconquered;
(viii)determination hot to get lost in the diversity of appearances but rather to penetrate deeper and wider into the mystery of things until one gets at the veiled connections and the underlying essential unity (cf. vahunāmekaṁ vījaṁ vahudhā yaḥ karoti);
(ix)readiness to sacrifice one's time and energy in an attempt to raise, even if a little more, the veil covering the face of truth;
(x)a positive and discriminating and constructive faith that steers clear of the two extremes of superstitious belief and sterile doubt.
It is not without significance that the Mother has remarked: "the method of scientific work is a marvellous discipline. Those who follow it in all sincerity truly prepare themselves for Yoga. It requires but a slight turn, somewhere in their being, which will enable them to come out of their a little too narrow point of view and enter into an integrality which will surely lead them toward the Truth and the supreme mastery."15
It may be noted in this connection that "Yoga [itself] is scientific to this extent that it proceeds by subjective experiment and bases all its findings on experience; mental intuitions are admitted only as a first step and are not considered as realisation - they must be
14.A. d'Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, pp. 9-10.
15.Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
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confirmed by being translated into and justified by experience."16 But in order to obviate any possible chance of misunderstanding it must be forthwith stated that "the subjective discovery must be pursued by a subjective method of enquiry, observation and verification; research into the supraphysical must evolve, accept and test appropriate means and methods other than those by which one examines the constituents of physical objects and the processes of Energy in material Nature".17
Here at this point there is some scope for serious misgivings about the prospect of reconciliation between Science and Spirituality. For, it is generally asserted that the methods adopted by the seekers of Yoga to attain to knowledge as well as the very content of this "knowledge" go counter to the basic methodology of Science and are hence altogether to be put out of court! But these objections are more apparent than real and spring from a superficial view of things and from entire misunderstanding of the case for spiritual seekers. For, what is after all the methodology of Science and, shorn of all appendages, what are its fundamental traits?
The Methodology of Science
Science may be defined as a nomothetico-experimental procedure that studies "the regularities observed in normal human sense-perceptions, thereby excluding the sub-normal and supra-normal experiences as well as judgments of value that imply non-sensual premises".18
The man of science in practising his art exercises a series of operations, e.g., (a) collecting systematic and unbiased observations with precision; (b) forming hypotheses linking up these observations; (c) testing the validity of these hypotheses by logically deducing from them the possibility of new observations and seeking for their correspondence in further experimentation; (d) alterations being made in the hypotheses and laws already posited, in case of failures in correspondence; (e) building up of a theoretical structure with specialised concepts and nomenclatures, that
16.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 189.
17.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 650.
18.J.G. Bennette, The Dimensional Network of the Natural Sciences.
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will confer the status of a deductive discipline to scientific knowledge already gathered; etc.
Amongst the more important attributes of scientific enterprise mention may be made of the following:
(1)"Natural science is empirical, i.e. it deals only with what has been experienced or may be experienced under an appropriate setup of conditions. No other data are admissible".19
(2)"Science is a search for judgments, to which universal assent may be obtained - universal, that is, on the part of those who understand the judgments and their bases."20
(3)The generalisations of science are never considered to be final or absolute: they are liable to revision as experience enlarges.
(4)The methods to be adopted in the sciences, and also their subject matter, must perforce be such as to admit of the possibility of checking the truth or otherwise of any statement made therein.
(5)Repetition is one of the most potent methods of checking for correctness of any statement. "If a situation cannot be made to repeat, it is commonly regarded as of little or no scientific interest, and none of the usual scientific methods are applicable to it".21
(6)Acceptance of authority is never tolerated as a method in science. "No report of experimental observation or theoretical deduction is scientifically acceptable unless made in such terms that it can be repeated and confirmed by any qualified individual."22
(7)The two basic assumptions of science are, according to Planck, the existence of a real outer world independent of our act of knowing, and the impossibility of having any direct knowledge of this world. "This world cannot be disclosed by mere meditation and introspection;... the direct knowledge of the world claimed by the mystic... has no place in a scientific discussion."23
(8)No understanding is regarded to be adequate unless and until it "can correctly anticipate what will occur under every conceivable range of circumstances, whether imposed naturally or by artifice".24
19.Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1960, Vol. VIII, p. 929.
20.Charles Singer, "Science" in Encyclo. Brit.., Vol. XX, p. 114.
21.P. W. Bridgman, "Scientific Methods" in McGraw Hill Encyclo. of Science and Technology, Vol. 12, p. 73.
22.Ibid.
23.A. d'Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, p. 15.
24.P. W. Bridgman, "Scientific Methods" in McGraw Hill Encyclo. of Science and Technology, Vol. 12, p. 73.
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Now because of these and related traits of all scientific enterprise, men of science tend to level certain charges against spiritual experiences and realisations. And if Science has to accept Spirituality as a partner in progress, we must take note of these objections and dispose of them, if they are not valid, only after due consideration. And in this task, in order to bring in a certain touch of authenticity, we propose to introduce the words of Sri Aurobindo who is acknowledged by universal consent as one of the greatest mystics and thinkers.
Science against Spiritual Knowledge: Charges and their Refutation
I.Argument: Spiritual experiences are individual and have no general validity independent of the individual seeker's supposed testimony.
Critique: This statement arises out of a complete misreading of facts as they stand. For the truth is that yogic experiences run everywhere on the same lines. "Certainly, there are, not one line, but many, for, admittedly, we are dealing with a many-sided Infinite to which there are and must be many ways of approach; but yet the broad lines are the same everywhere and the intuitions, experiences, phenomena are the same in all ages and countries far apart from each other and in systems practised quite independently from each other."25 The substance of spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, is identical everywhere; only when it gets translated into the external consciousness of the seeker, difference of colour comes in because of the difference of mental language.
II.Argument: Yoga experiences are altogether personal and not validated by the common pool of normal human experiences.
Critique: Obviously it is an absurd standard of reality to assert that only what is or can easily be evident to everybody without any need of specialised training or development, is to be taken as valid, and all else that does not square with the experiences or scope of understanding of average human beings cannot be considered to be true. Such a standard of knowledge is not accepted even in the sciences themselves. Of course, "the greatest inner discoveries, the experience of self-being, the cosmic consciousness,
25. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 190.
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the inner calm of the liberated spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a proof of their invalidity or their non-existence. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible."26
III. Argument: Since Yogic exploration does not adopt the methodology of Science, it is unscientific and its so-called findings presumably untrue.
Critique: Modern man has been led to believe that "one is either in Science or outside it, just as one is either in Paradise or in Hell!"27
Thus the term 'unscientific' has almost come to acquire a pejorative connotation. But what is science, after all? It is essentially a methodology devised for and successfully applied to the investigation of an arbitrarily delimited field of enquiry. Now, Yoga also devises a methodology of its own, precise and potent in its own domain. But the methods of Yoga have to be different from those of the physical sciences, since it seeks to identify our inner being with the Reality behind the appearances and see from there the workings of Nature, while Science endeavours to make us aware of the detailed workings and through them get some indirect glimpse of the Reality.
Thus the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain, go according to a law of their own and have their own standards of judgment and verification other than those that Science applies in its external objective field. "Just as scientific enquiry passes beyond that of the physical senses and enters the domain of the infinite and infinitesimal about which the senses can say nothing and test nothing,... so also spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aids of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual
26.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 650.
27.Prof. Robert Lenoble.
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experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature."28 Subjective experiences and supraphysical realities must, by their very nature, be investigated and verified by other than the physical or sense mind, by a method of scrutiny and affirmation applicable to their own domain. And there is nothing unscientific or objectionable in it.
TV. Argument: A spiritual experience cannot be scientifically demonstrated and hence lacks in concrete certitude.
Critique: It has been asserted that although the scientific process is in the last analysis reduced to two main activities, discovery and demonstration, "it is in the process of demonstration that we discern man's efforts as scientific. Discovery is an art, demonstration makes the science".29
Now, by demonstration the physical sciences ultimately mean "demonstration to the physical senses" - if necessary in a roundabout and indirect way and by means of mathematical and technological devices. But the final appeal in the sciences is always to sense-observation. And this because "science can treat the outer world solely on the level of phenomena ('things that appear', 'appearances') [and] these can appear only to the senses that we possess.... Phenomena must [thus] ultimately be sensed,... though sense-experience may for some sciences (and perhaps eventually for all) be ultimately reducible to scale-readings."30
Now, spiritual and supraphysical experiences cannot of course be demonstrated in this way, for, by their very definition, they transcend the order of physical facts and are not thus physically tangible. But that does not mean in any way that spiritual experiences lack in concrete certitude or are vague, amorphous and open to doubts. They are "not only as concrete but more concrete than anything sensed by ear or eye or touch in the world of Matter; but it is a certitude not of mental thought but of essential experience.... You can much less doubt it or deny it than you can deny or doubt daylight or air or the sun in heaven - for of these physical things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experience of the Divine, doubt is impossible."31
V. Argument: The objective Reality being the only entire truth
28.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga. p. 191.
29.Charles Singer, "Science" in Encyclo. Brit., Vol. XX, p. 115.
30.Ibid., p. 114.
31.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 168.
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and an objective knowledge the sole entirely reliable knowledge, the value of spiritual experiences is very doubtful since they are subjective and not objective.
Critique: Apart from the general truth that all knowledge and experience, without any exception, - even of the so-called objective external physical things, - is at bottom subjective, we may ask if Science itself, at the end of its victorious analysis of Matter, has not come to the astonishing conclusion that "precisely beyond our natural perceptual world the very concept of thing can be denned only in relation to the man to whom it appears or who himself makes it... contemporary physics compels the physicist to look upon himself as a subject."32 The words of Heisenberg, the author of the uncertainty principle, are eloquent on this point:
"...We can no longer consider 'in themselves' those building-stones of matter which we originally held to be the last objective reality. This is so because they defy all forms of objective location in space and time, and since basically it is always our knowledge of these particles alone which we can make the object of science.... From the very start we are involved in the argument between nature and man in which science plays only a part, so that the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties. Thus even in science the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature. Here, again, man confronts himself alone."33
As a matter of fact, subjectivity and objectivity are not independent realities; the subjective and the objective are two necessary sides of the manifested Reality and of equal value. Only they are of different orders of reality. "The objective and physical is convincing to the physical or externalising mind because it is directly obvious to the senses, while of the subjective and the supraphysical that mind has no means of knowledge except from fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable to error."34 Does not the Kathopanishad point out that in men the Self-Existent has cut the doors of consciousness outward, but a few men turn the eye inward and it is these who see and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being?
32.Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics.
33.Heisenberg, The Physicist's Conception of Nature, p. 24.
34.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 649.
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Men of science should note that our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings, with laws of their own and their special method of scrutiny and affirmation and hence "to refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge as the religious obscurantism which opposed in Europe the extension of scientific discovery".35
We have come to the end of our survey of the respective standpoints of Science and Spirituality. Because of the inadequacy of space, this survey could not but content itself with the throwing in of some suggestive hints; it does not claim in any way to have disposed of all possible factors of supposed divergence between the two disciplines. But however cursory this survey may have been, it has shown us that the contradictions between Science and Spirituality are most often more apparent than real and hence a luminous reconciliation between them is absolutely a feasible proposition and programme.
The Co-operative Reconciliation
"Half-truth is its own Nemesis. One-sided dogmatism has the opposite dogmatism latent in itself."
The conflict between Science and Spirituality arises from a misunderstanding of each other's position, role and field of study. And it is not so much on the positive side, on the side of vindication of one's own right to exist and grow; it is more often on the negative side, and therefore unnecessary and eliminable, when one tries to deny the right of existence to the other. And this is nothing but an error of misdirected enthusiasm and the folly of the presumptuous vital in man.
A positive spirituality appreciates the worth of the achievements of Science in its own domain: it does not deny the reality of the rich harvest that men of science have gleaned from an elaborate investigation and exploration of physical Nature. But Science too, on its part, should not hesitate to admit that "the material universe
35. The Life Divine, p. 650.
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is only the faÇade of an immense building which has other structures behind it", and that "there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses."36 For indubitable inner experiences testify to the existence of supraphysical planes of existence having their "universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge."37 And physical sciences should not unduly claim to pronounce anything on these matters for which it has no means of enquiry nor any possibility of arriving at any valid decision.
As a matter of fact, for a harmonious reconciliation between the pursuit of science and the practice of spirituality, it is essential never to lose sight of the fundamental truth that each of them has its own province and its own method of enquiry and each is valid in its own domain. Trouble is bound to arise if there is an unwarranted and illegitimate intrusion of one in the other's arena. Science cannot dictate its conclusion to the man of Spirit any more than Spirituality has the right to impose its own oh the scientist and his work in the domain of the physical. Indeed, as has been mentioned before, the physical scientist probing into phenomena erects formulas and standards based on the objective and phenomenal reality and its processes, while the Yogi or the supraphysical scientist concerns himself with the essential Reality and his deeper probing brings up the truth of Self and Spirit and all possible experiences of the subjective inner domain.
But there need not be any essential contradiction between the results gathered by Science and those obtained by Spirituality in their respective fields - if only one knows how to read and interpret them. After all, the Reality is one and unique everywhere and hence there must be systems of correspondences expressive of a common Truth underlying all the domains of manifestation. Thus the truths of the physical universe can very well throw some light on the phenomena of the inner world and vice versa, and the possibility of co-operation between Science and Spirituality in the pursuit after truth remains no longer a fond wish or pious hope. As Sri Aurobindo has so pointedly remarked:
36.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 10.
37.Ibid., p. 19.
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"Not only in the one final conception, but in the great line of its general results Knowledge, by whatever path it is followed, tends to become one. Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulas of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the Vedan-ta, - the original Vedanta, not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the discoveries of modern Science."38
One of the encouraging signs of our day conducive to the reconciliation between Science and Spirituality is the growth of a spirit of modesty in the bosom of Science itself, arising out of a sober and mature comprehension of the limited but definite role that it can play. Science has abandoned the claim to put at our disposal a final truth; it knows that it has no means to decide what is the real reality of things; it can envisage only the how and the process of the operations of material Force in the physical front of things, but the essence of things eludes its grasp. Science which started with the assumption that Matter is the sole reality has come to realise its inherent impotency before the problem of the reality of things and thus, as Sri Aurobindo has put it, "the rock on which materialism was built and which in the 19th century seemed unshakable has now been shattered. Materialism has now become a philosophical speculation just like any other theory; it cannot claim to found itself on a sort of infallible biblical authority, based on the facts and conclusions of Science."39
Gone is the presumptuous conviction that Matter is the basic and unique Reality, and that the Divine, the freedom of the Spirit, the immortality of the Soul are all myths of an unscientific temperament and Honni soit qui trop y pensel Science is now poignantly aware that the world-knowledge it builds up as an abstracted and therefore partial and imperfect knowledge, leaves out much that is refractory to scientific treatment, and even in its delimited field of enquiry, the formulas of Science, although pragmatically correct and governing the practical how of things, do not disclose the intrinsic how or why; "rather they have the air of the formulas
38.The Life Divine, pp. 13-14.
39.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 206.
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of a cosmic magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible."40
Evidently, present-day "Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eye to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance."41
Now, to help us to come out of this narrow surface crust and sound the depths and heights of inner and higher spiritual realities and bring their riches into active manifestation in our life, is one of the functions of Yoga and Spirituality. For, to reach a satisfactory solution of the problems, both individual and collective, that are besetting the life of humanity today, men must know not only what Matter is and what its processes and potentialities are, but also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface. As a matter of fact, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, if man is not to remain content with his ordinary status of a being of surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and collecting and systematising fragments and sections of knowledge, and if he would like his life upon earth to take something of the hue of a life divine, his self-expansion has to proceed on more than one line. "He must know himself and discover and utilise all his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material front of the universe.... He must know also the hidden Power or Powers that control the world... and link [himself] with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be something more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept it, to correlate it with the principle of things and the observed truth of the universe.... But
40. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 299. 4t. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 197.
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all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness and its established operations; an opening up of the spiritual consciousness,... the building of a life and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is the work of spiritual realisation and experience."42
And in this all-round fulfilment of man's many-sided aspiration, Science and Spirituality can very well co-operate and offer each other their helping hands, anyonyabaddhavāhu. To outgrow their mutual mistrust and popularly supposed conflict, what is needed is the rise of a dynamic spirituality that accepts embodied Life and its all-sided opulent growth as something worthy of pursuit, also the rise of a mood of science that displays an attitude of unbiased humility before truth whenever and in whatever form it may be found, so that the sceptical folly of a so-called scientific attitude does not confront the supernormal experiences of the inner and higher worlds with "the stiletto of doubt and the bludgeon of denial." For it cannot but be stressed to the point of monotonous repetition that what "all our mind-knowledge and sense-knowledge and suprasensuous vision is seeking, is found most integrally in the unity of God and man and Nature and all that is in Nature.... A triune knowledge, the complete knowledge of God, the complete knowledge of himself, the complete knowledge of Nature, gives him [man] his high goal; it assigns a vast and full sense to the labour and effort of humanity. The conscious unity of the three, God, Soul and Nature, in his own consciousness is the sure foundation of his perfection and his realisation of all harmonies: this will be his highest and widest state, his status of a divine consciousness and a divine life and its initiation the starting-point for his entire evolution of his self-knowledge, world-knowledge, God-knowledge".43
It is not expected that everybody will be a yogi or everybody a practising scientist. But in order that a few can be effectively the same for the welfare of all, also for the general flowering of Science and Spirituality, it is absolutely essential that thecollective mind of man accept (i) the simultaneous necessity of both the disciplines for the eradication of the multipronged ills of man and
42.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 861-62.
43.Ibid., p. 701.
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his society, and (ii) the validity and truth of each of them in its own field of search.
And then will surely open the still locked-up gates to the enormous vistas of the future development of man.
As a matter of fact, a sincere and unbiased pursuit of any branch of human knowledge, if not hampered with erroneous preconceptions and ill-founded prejudices, cannot but lead the seeker to the door-step of the integral approach to Reality as propounded by Sri Aurobindo.
We take up here a single case, the case of mathematical culture, to substantiate our point, and the following chapter will be devoted to its detailed consideration.
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