From the issue dated November 29,
2002
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i14/14b00701.htm
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Between Science and SpiritualityBy JOHN
HORGAN
Can mystical spirituality be
reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the
mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment
compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational
mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?
There are many claimed
convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly
corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum
mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how
we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is
an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein
disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the
interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of
convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the
miraculousness of our existence.
The more science learns about the origin
and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the
more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of
existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the
history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred
in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with
virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing.
In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun
as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no
idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the
quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what
happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven
Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.
Next
questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why
does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering
any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered
reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its
inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.
A smidgen
less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no
chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call
this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How
did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just
right?
The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density,
the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of
guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so
troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a
quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this
notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we
wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version
of creationism.
The next improbability is life. The evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer,"
because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet
life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by
evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and
molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us
why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a
once-in-eternity fluke.
Many scientists have argued that life must be a
ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious
little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching,
astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report
of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous.
Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all
the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin,
the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the
origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself,
Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted
on earth by an alien civilization.
Once life on earth started evolving,
many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural
selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more
than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted
entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the
simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist
Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun
a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to
mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and
television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr
to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations
-- is futile.
Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike
to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at
judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is
why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not
believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner
as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an
infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no
theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.
Scientists may go much
further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the
secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how
life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They
may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more
precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are
good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they
cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the
ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring
theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve
that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.
Although we
can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep
reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone -- and the
cold, hard facts of science -- cannot
serve as the basis for
spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that
conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses
the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it
truly is.
I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first,
because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The
worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by
postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and
ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way,
skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away
cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears
away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism
can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to
believe.
My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually
gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in
bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box
itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed
Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in
the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.
I went through
more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every
garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient
garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen
clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of
thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe
skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash
for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials,
parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with
disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.
The problem is that
any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring,
sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as
a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art
-- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture
-- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is
intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another
level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth
that cannot be told?
At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in
Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't
whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including
art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression,
art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own
insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean
mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like
science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should
view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to
ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur
Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if
the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the
Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we
read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.
Viewed ironically, even the most
fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a
purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens
in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God
who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind
us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and
eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us
discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated
theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What
Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly
extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God
defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is
not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."
ther than
art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the
side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered,
first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the
chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality"
-- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and
ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of
psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may
seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT
propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality
and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.
All mystical technologies
that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has
reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential
movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large
groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches
through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a
mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters,
proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human
consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities
not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."
Houston subsequently became
quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told
me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met
-- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the
psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental
hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and
say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen
too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might
say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain
that reality."
Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to
seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters
devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device,
or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects
could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that
Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and
even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston
recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or
path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an
end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward
it.
Anything that helps you see -- really see -- the
wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend,
when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the
highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor
asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention."
Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later
it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death
will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep
space in which we are suspended.
Spiritual seekers have employed mementos
mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme
version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next
to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely
desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling
on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding
reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves,
are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber
once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest
danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of
derealization and depersonalization.
If you are lucky, your glimpse of
the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what
Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic
properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which
he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he
returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he
felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life
we have here."
This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences
can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right
with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the
problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should
be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion,
fun. Never forget the problem of fun.
John Horgan writes about
science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism:
Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published
in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John
Horgan.
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Section: The Chronicle
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Volume 49, Issue 14, Page B7
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Copyright ©
2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education