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The premise for this essay is that
a better framework for the science / religion debate arises when
we take the mystical core of religion and contrast its goals
and methods with the goals and methods of science. This requires
the establishment of a few simple concepts. First of all, a natural
division of spiritual and religious phenomena can be summed up
in three terms: the `social', the `occult', and the `transcendent'.
The social in this context is the phenomenon of popular religion,
including articles of faith, religious practice, priesthoods,
and integration into the political life of a culture. These all
evolve over centuries, usually from the teachings of a single
religious founder (for example Christ or the Buddha), and may
bear only a nominal relationship to that individual's life or
teachings. By the `occult' I wish to denote a range of beliefs
and practices that relate to a world of disembodied or spirit
beings, the existence of which is neither posited nor denied
by the use of the term. Teachers of occultism have existed throughout
history and across the continents with considerable consistency
in their statements, despite complete separation through time
or location. One of the greatest such teachers in recent Western
history has been Rudolf Steiner, while an account that is completely
independent, but agreeing in many areas, originates at approximately
the same time in the autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda,
an Indian yogi. Occult accounts vary in detail, but generally
include descriptions of spirit beings, life after death, and
the `occult powers' or siddhis of Indian and Buddhist
tradition. Occultism usually also has a strong moral dimension,
though in its perversion it may be described as `black' magic.
The term `transcendent' is used here to describe the core mystical
experience, and is independent of the social and occult dimensions
of religion, as defined here. It does however act as a vortex
in history, around which religions grow, as crystals around seed
matter, and is often mistaken for an occult phenomenon. As religions
grow from the transcendent experiences of the geniuses of a particular
religion, a popularisation is as inevitable. Occult accretions
take place at the same time, often leading to a mainstream religion
being shadowed by `esoteric' traditions that are often persecuted,
or taught in secrecy. While popular religion has little in it
that can constructively engage in science, the occult has, in
the sense that it also represents an enquiry into the hidden
nature of reality. However, one needs to examine the geniuses
of this practice, such as Boehme, Blake, Swedenborg, Yogananda,
and Steiner, rather than popularised versions, in order to establish
a debate with science.
But how can we describe the transcendent? The answer given here
is radical: in two completely different ways. The two
forms of transcendence, or better, the two paths to the transcendent,
can be simply delineated as devotional and non-devotional. We
can immediately spot a problem here: the term `devotional' is
easily understood, if not necessarily empathised with, but how
can the term `non-devotional' be used to describe an exalted
state or path to such a state? Our problem is of course a Western
one: our language and culture have developed in the Christian
context, which is devotional. We need to turn to the East to
find a world religion that is non-devotional: Buddhism, and,
we need to turn to Hinduism to give us a language that encompasses
both paths or orientations the terminology of bhakti and
jnani. (The `jn' in jnani is pronounced as the `n'
in the Spanish `signor' or `signora.')
The term bhakti means devotional, and although its expression
varies widely across the world, it is generally recognisable
from a Christian perspective. Key concepts of a bhakti
tradition will be love (of God, or a god, or maybe the divine
element in a spiritual teacher or mythologised person), devotion
and surrender. The will of the individual is only important in
as far as it is aligned to the divine will, and spiritual progress
and understanding are acts of grace visited on the supplicant.
In contrast the term jnani describes a spirituality that
is in the first instance more cerebral, more inclined to enquiry
than surrender, more inclined to meditation than prayer, to see
the goal in terms of wisdom rather than love, and to emphasise
the will as a means to the goal. A jnani tradition may
have no concept of God at all, certainly not a personal God,
but is not atheistic. However, its teachings will generally use
non-theistic concepts in contrast to the heavily theistic emphasis
in a bhakti tradition.
To recap: religious phenomena can be understood in three categories:
the social, the occult, and the transcendent. Science can only
have a limited debate with the social or popular dimension of
religion; has more in common with the occult dimension because
the occult can be seen as an attempt to penetrate behind appearances,
but has most in common with the transcendent because it represents
the purest inquiry into the deep structure of human experience.
The transcendent itself can be understood in terms of two orientations:
the devotional and the non-devotional, termed here bhakti
and jnani. These terms, unfamiliar to the West, are vital
to this thesis, and are presented as a Rosetta Stone in understanding
the relationship between science and religion. It is the concept
of jnani that is the most important and will be developed
here as the central contribution to the debate.
It is proposed that the two spiritual orientations are spread
about 50-50 in the individuals of any population. The dominant
religion in any culture will however tend to emphasise one or
the other orientation, usually depending on that of its founder,
and hence roughly half of the population will find a mismatch
between the religion of their birth and their religious instincts.
This condition is mitigated to some degree by the way that religions
develop, in that key players in this process (other than the
religion's founder) may instinctively bend the religion towards
their own, contrary, orientation. In Christianity, which is bhakti
in origin, some of the greatest shapers of its tradition have
had a jnani orientation, while in Buddhism, a jnani
religion, some of its development has been clearly shaped by
bhakti influences. Although there are interesting parallels
in the developments of the two religions, there have been important
historical differences, which make a mirror symmetry less than
perfect. However, it is a fruitful comparison to make, because
the key creative tensions in both religions can be understood
in terms of the differences between bhakti and jnani.
The major differences between East and West can also be seen
in terms of this dichotomy, leading to an understanding of science
as the outcome of a suppressed jnani instinct in the West,
and the failure of the development of science in the East due
to the relative fulfilment of the jnani instinct.
Some development of the jnani concept is needed before
we go further into this. Christ and the Buddha are problematic
in that we have no documents written by them, but even so we
can, by going to the Gospels in one case and the Pali canon in
the other, find useful contrasts. When Jesus was asked what one
must do to inherit eternal life, he asked the questioner how
he understood it, and assented to the answer: `Love the Lord
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
strength, and with all your mind' (Luke 10:25). This is the core
of bhakti, and from it arises the central practice: prayer
or worship, a heart-oriented practice. The Buddha in contrast
opens the Dhammapada (a central Buddhist text) with the
statement: `Our life is shaped by our mind: we become what we
think.[1]' He then offers eternal life (nirvana)
as the fruit of meditation, a mind-oriented practice involving
stilling of the mind. It is significant that the Pope quite recently
exhorted his followers to the practice of prayer, and to consider
meditation as foreign to their religion: a clear indication that
Christianity is bhakti not jnani. Given that a
picture of the jnani path and orientation needs to be
built up or triangulated from many sources (preferably authenticated
as genuine by scholarly research), and that these sources need
to come from both East and West, it is hard to recommend a single
work or even a small `canon'. However, two texts might be put
forward: the Enneads of Plotinus [2], and Longchempa's
Kindly Bent to Ease Us (Part Three) [3]. Both texts are
tightly linked to a spiritual tradition, the first to Neoplatonism,
and the second to Tibetan Buddhism, but both authors are also
genuine jnanis in their own right, and of the first order.
Both give directions for the stilling of the mind, and an indication
of the central jnani experience, a transcendence of conditioned
existence through a direct apprehension of the ground of being.
In pointing up Plotinus and Longchempa as Western and Eastern
representitives of the jnani orientation and achievement,
we are brought to the idea of the lost Buddhas of the West. The
term `buddha' is a title given to a perfected jnani, though
few Buddhists use the term for any other than the historical
Buddha, born as Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan. (Instead
the Bhodisattva ideal was developed in one of the major
Buddhist branches, as a term covering other perfected beings.)
If we run through the spiritual history of the West, we can identify
developed jnani individuals, both before and after Christ,
including Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Meister
Eckhart, and Spinoza. In the modern period we could include Walt
Whitman, Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding,
and Andrew Cohen. However, if it is contentious to posit other
historical buddhas, it is even more so to claim this status for
the living, so it is just left to mention that, if one has no
doctrinal objection to it, instruction from a living jnani
is worth a thousand instructions from the texts of dead ones.
We are now close to the point where we can examine the relationship
between science and religion through the concept of jnani.
Just one more distinction is required however, borrowing terms
from Christianity this time, and using them in a slightly altered
fashion: the terms via positiva and via negativa
to indicate two possible relationships with the outside or so-called
material world. In traditional Christian thinking these terms
describe ways of thinking about God: the first to describe Him
through positive attributes, and the second to describe Him via
negating all attributes (also found in Hinduism as neti-neti
not this, not that). We have already noted however that the jnani
traditions are generally non-theistic, and hence the terms via
positiva and via negativa will have a slightly different
meaning here. If the goal of the jnani is the disidentification
with the ego, then there are logically two routes: to successively
deny the identifications with body, home, family and desires,
leading to the renunciative lifestyle typical of early Buddhism
and many other religions, or to successively identify with everything.
The history of religion is generally the history of via negativa,
in the sense defined. We do find elements of via positiva
in all religious traditions however, particularly in the Upanishads,
though perhaps its best expression comes through the festivals
and rituals of popular religion. The greatest single exponent
of via positiva, and completely misunderstood by all but
a few Hindu scholars, is Walt Whitman, of interest to the West
usually as a poet, or possibly because of alleged homosexuality.
In fact he came close to founding a jnani religion and
had disciples who saw him as one of the world's greatest gurus,
though his bible, Leaves of Grass, was written by his
own admission in such a way as to completely hide his teachings.
So, to science and jnani. Firstly we can return to the
proposition made earlier that science arose in the West because
the jnani instincts of some of its greatest thinkers had
no legitimate expression within Christianity. We are used to
understanding the Middle Ages as a period where the early Christian
church discouraged enquiry into the nature of the universe, and
encouraged faith in the power of love and in the practice of
prayer and service. This is a particular irony as Saint Augustine,
one of the chief architects of this medieval world-view, renounced
his Manichaean faith of ten years because one of its chief bishops
gave him an answer to an astronomical question that did not fit
the science of the time. After renouncing Manichaeism Augustine
contemplated the views of the Neoplatonists (a European jnani
tradition owing largely to Plotinus), but rejected them in favour
of Christianity: Augustine was bhakti by orientation.
The intellectuals of the Christian world tended to seek a jnani
teaching to supplement their Christian heritage, and were thus
instinctively drawn to the Greeks, resulting in a struggle within
the Church between the followers of Aristotle and the followers
of Plato (the Neoplatonists). In Aquinas the victory goes to
Aristotle, which allows for the Church to prune back the threat
of Neoplatonism in favour of the more spiritually neutral terrain
of Aristotle. In the Renaissance the struggle re-erupts with
Neoplatonism appearing in the Academy of Ficino, but it has not
the intellectual vigour to attract the disenfranchised Christians
of the jnani orientation, and so we find a genius like
Leonardo putting his faith in observation of the natural
world. Galileo's discoveries then mark the beginning of the schism
between Church and science.
It is important to point out that the jnani of the Neoplatonists
was via negativa, from Plato's emphasis on the forms
and his rejection of the empirical, to Plotinus's quasi-Buddhism.
Hence the Renaissance vigour of thought could not find in it
an engagement with a physical world (newly discovered as more
human-friendly than in the introspective period of the Dark Ages),
and is roundly dismissed by Leonardo as a worshipping of the
ancients. Christianity rejected it because Christianity remained
a bhakti religion (despite the best efforts of its more
intellectual clergy), and the new intellectual classes dismissed
it because it was via negativa. In this climate the growth
of science and its inevitable domination of Western culture became
inevitable.
Christianity and Buddhism have a coincidence of propagation:
both were taken up and made the state religion of an empire,
by Constantine in Europe, and by Ashoka in India, and both were
doctrinally formulated through religious councils under the chairmanship
of the Emperor. The Emperor Ashoka, after the conquest of a small
kingdom called Kalinga in the third century BCE, experienced
remorse for the resultant slaughter, converted to Buddhism (or
at least took it up more seriously) and established a generally
pacifist rule through the empire. Ashoka's Buddhism was tolerant
of other faiths, principally those of the Brahmins, Jains, and
Ajivikas, found in the empire, and this tolerance was encouraged
by edicts in rock inscriptions found across the region. Constantine,
in contrast, experienced a military victory after his original
inspiration, which confirmed his conversion to the Christianity,
and made it the religion of the Roman empire. The evolution of
Christian thought for several centuries was centralised by the
apparatus of the empire, in contrast to the evolution of Buddhism
which, even in Ashoka's time, was allowed to absorb local influences.
The central apparatus of Christian governance was one of the
reasons for the unfortunate appearance of the Inquisition.
Thus the birth of science was painful, as it came in the middle
of a this long period of religious persecutions. There can be
no doubt that the collective religious psyche of the West was
traumatised by these events, and scientists also seem to be collectively
aware that many of their kind were reviled, tortured or even
killed in pursuit of their science. The devout atheism of some
of today's scientists and writers, such as Richard Dawkins and
Gore Vidal, has a spleen that can only be explained by the residual
effect of this historical trauma. The paradoxical result of the
Christian history of the West is therefore both the rise of science
as an outlet for the suppressed jnani instinct of its
brightest intellectuals, and also the contempt held for religion
by some of today's best scientists. However the goals and methods
of the jnani, particularly when of a via positiva
orientation, have much in common with the goals and methods of
the scientists. When John Polkinghorne states that `both science
and religion are and enquiry into what is [4]' he is right as
far as the jnani religionist is concerned, but less so
for the bhakti.
Einstein's personal writings show jnani, via positiva
characteristics found in the writings of many great scientists,
often expressed as a wonder or awe at the natural world, and
at the order behind it, as revealed through the physical laws
of science. He also tells us of a sympathy for Spinoza (whose
extraordinary convoluted proofs of the existence of God can be
read as the struggle of a highly gifted jnani to coexist
with the bhakti traditions of Judaism and Christianity),
and a general lack of engagement with the theistic doctrines
of popular Western religion. Could his genius, the genius of
doubt and enquiry, and the extraordinary ability to think the
unthinkable, could this genius, in a jnani heritage, also
express itself in a religious way? Is the real dialogue between
science and religion yet to come, as the West absorbs Eastern
ideas, comes to a more fluid conception of God, and considers,
as the Buddha did, our interiority a worthy subject for systematic
enquiry? Can the West can contribute to this the concept of via
positiva, resulting in an enquiry that embraces the inner
as much as the outer, a spirituality that embraces the outer
as much as the inner? I suggest that the answer is yes, and that
from the concept of jnani we will be able to develop the
true complement to our conventional, third-person science of
the outer: a first-person science of the inner.
(This is a summary of a forthcoming book, Jnani: An Alternative
Intellectual History of the West.)
References:
[1]
Dhammapada, (Trans.: Eknath Easwaran),
London: Arkana, 1986
[2] Plotinus,
Enneads, (Trans.: Stephen Mackenna), Penguin, 1991
[3] Longchenpa,
Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Part One: Mind, Berkely, California:
Dharma Publishing, 1975
[4] Polkinghorne,
John, Reason and Reality, London: SPCK, 1991
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