Mysticism in the New Age Are Mysticism and Science Converging ?
12. Mysticism in the New Age Are Mysticism and Science Converging?
Richard H. Jones
Abstract
For the past forty years, “New Age” advocates have claimed that the old “dualistic” science of Newtonian physics was the fundamental source leading to the conflict of science and religion, and that today the “new science” (in particular, quantum physics) is converging in a general worldview and in specific theories with “Eastern mysticism.” This essay explores this New Age claim of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The focus is Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and quantum physics. The issues covered include the differences in mystical and scientific subjects (i.e., the “beingness” of things
in the world or their ontological source versus understanding how things work); the different intents of mysticism and science (i.e., soteriological goals versus disinterested understanding); the differences between mystical awareness and scientific observations; the misuse of science and the misunderstanding of Asian mysticism leading to distortions in comparisons; and the overall insubstantiality of the alleged conver¬gences. Examples include the different meanings of “emptiness” in mysticism and in science, the role of consciousness in quantum physics, and whether the Buddha can be classified as a “scientist.” The authors to be noted include Fritjof Capra, Amit Goswami, Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra, B. Alan Wallace, and Neo-Buddhists including the Dalai Lama.
The “New Age” movement as it has developed over the last few decades involves a spirituality that draws on Western and Eastern religious traditions, psychology, holistic health programs, and other sources. It seeks support for its holistic claims on mind, body, and spirit and on the unity of the world in consciousness research and science—in particular, quantum physics. The claims of the relation of mysticism and science in New Age thought will be the focus here.
Buddhism was first portrayed as scientific by Western apologists in the mid-19th century. Soon Western-influenced Neo-Vedantists were doing the same for Hinduism. With a few exceptions, the issue of the relation of mysticism and science languished quietly until being revived in the 1960s and took off in the mid-1970s, when Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav published books that are still popular today. The former’s The Tao of Physics is considered “one of the canonical books of the New Age movement” and “the epitome of New Age science in the eyes of the public.” Books on how mystical thought may have influenced physics have also appeared. However, the question of the relation of mysticism and science has remained confined basically to New Age writers. Some scientists have shown interest in mysticism, but probably more scientists today would agree with Stephen Hawking who, in responding to his colleague Brian Joseph-son’s interest in Asian mysticism, said that the idea of mystical influence on science is “pure rubbish,” adding: “The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion. A physicist who attempts to link it with his own work has abandoned physics.”
The New Age approach would offer a new way to integrate mysticism into our lives. In particular, it would remove one popular reason to reject mysticism: the notion that mysticism necessarily conflicts with science. The New Age claim is not merely that science and mysticism are compatible or that scientific findings support mystical claims. Rather, a staple of New Age thought is that today science and Asian mystical claims are actually merging. That is, after hundreds of years of strenuous work, modern scientists are finally discovering what mystics have known for thousands of years. It is as if scientists after struggling up the mountain of empirical knowledge found mystics meditating at the top.
The old “dualistic” and “reductive” science arising from Newtonian physics is being replaced, and today relativity, particle physics, and biology are becoming one with the theories of Buddhism or of an abstract “Eastern mysticism.” The popular alternative-medicine practitioner Deepak Chopra tells us that scientists have “wound up with nothing less than a mystic’s universe.” Others tell us that the Buddha made claims about subatomic levels of structures that are only now finally being confirmed by scientists. Buddhists have “uncovered at least the basic principles of subatomic physics through their meditation practices,” and modern physics “echoes” the investigations of Buddhism. In the end, mystics and scientists are saying the same thing, just in “different lan¬guages.”
The Vagueness of the New Age Claims
The New Age enthusiasm for the convergence of science and mysticism is unfortunately not well supported. Mysticism could converge with science in two ways: mystical claims about the nature of the world could converge with scientific theories, and mystical experiences as a particular way of knowing reality could converge with the “scientific method” as a way of knowing reality. But one persistent problem is that those who see parallels between mysticism and science—namely, “parallelists”—do not clarify what precisely they are claiming. They throw together an amalgam of different ideas: science and mysticism “share the same insight” or have “common ground”; they are “harmonious” or “consistent”; scientific claims “mirror” mystical claims; scientific claims are “implicit” in mystical insights; each endeavor has “implications” for the other; the two have a “synergy”; mysticism “anticipates” or “resonates with” scientific claims; one “validates” or “verifies” the other; a “fusion” or “integration” between the two is occurring; or a “confluence” of science and mysticism will produce something new. However, the alleged relations are advanced without precise definitions or the specification of how exactly, for example, science can verify a mystical metaphysical claim.
The most commonly used terms are “parallels,” “converging,” “complements,” and “confirms.” But parallelists use these terms without realizing that these concepts are very different: if mystical claims parallel scientific claims, then the claims are fulfilling analogous roles in different conceptual systems but their substantive content is different, so they cannot converge; if the claims are converging, they are not separate complements; if the claims are complements, they are not confirming each other; indeed, if science and mysticism are complements, they cannot directly influence or affect each other but are separate endeavors that give some knowledge that the other omits; one endeavor cannot both complement and reveal the other’s truths at the same time. Nevertheless, parallelists throw these terms around haphazardly, sometimes in the same sentence.
Parallelists make much of the problems that practitioners in the two different endeavors have with language when encountering phenomena outside the everyday realm of experience. Apparent paradoxes also appear in both endeavors. Nevertheless, parallelists cannot make any substantive convergence out of these problems. Merely because both scientists and mystics have problems expressing what they encounter does not mean that they must be encountering the same thing. Both mystics and scientists must use metaphors when encountering the unexpected outside the everyday realm, but this is not a very profound commonality, especially since philosophers and linguists now point out that all our thought is permeated with metaphors. All the use of metaphors means is that mystical and scientific thought is human thought encountering something new; it tells us nothing about whether scientists and mystics are talking about the same thing. So too, mysticism and science may share some abstract vocabulary, but the terms in the actual contexts of their systems of thought show that their referents diverge: simply because discussing God and the quantum realm presents problems does not mean that God is the quantum realm. More argument is needed to make that equation.
It will be argued here that all the New Age claims on the convergence of mysticism and science are in fact groundless because mysticism and science deal with different dimensions of reality: mysticism deals with experiencing the “beingness” of things in nature or the ontological source of the being of the self or all of the natural world in a reality transcending the natural realm, while science deals with discovering how nature works. (A broader definition of “mysticism” covering other types of experiences may produce other types of claims, but New Age advocates typically focus on the claims in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism connected to these experiences. Thus, a narrow definition of mysticism is warranted here.) The epistemic differences between mysticism and science may not be as great as is usually supposed, but the difference in their subject matter and objectives forecloses any substantive convergences, even when their terminology seems to converge.
Do Science and Mysticism Have the Same Subject Matter? Parallelists usually go no further into the nature of science than noting that science involves empirical observations and claiming that Newtonian science is reductionistic. Only one point about science must be emphasized here: basic science is about how things in nature work—that is, identifying the structures in nature responsible for the lawful changes in phenomena that we observe and offering both tentative explanations of phenomena in terms of these underlying causes and also theories of those structures’ nature that ultimately depend on observations checkable by others. Realists and antirealists disagree on whether we can gain any genuine knowledge of those alleged causal structures that we cannot experience.
Mystics, on the other hand, in other states of consciousness focus on the “beingness” of the natural world or its source. Introvertive mystics focus on inward experiences of the source of being in the experiencer or in all the world. Extrover¬tive “mindfulness” mystics make claims about the impermanence and interconnectedness of the macro-objects we actually experience in the everyday world, not anything about features of the submicro¬scopic world that they have not experienced. These mystics apprehend something common to all reality—the sheer “is-ness” of things—by lessening the grip that our mental conceptions normally have on our perceptions. Nor do mystics make claims about any reality that cannot be directly experienced, unlike theoretical scientists, even if there is more to that reality than is experienced. Scientists, on the other hand, work through the mediation of our concepts to find struc¬tures underlying the changes we experience in the everyday world. Thus, extrovertive mystics and scientists look at different aspects of the natural realm: the beingness common to all things versus the causal structures operating in nature.
In this way, scientists focus precisely on the differentiations among phenomena that mystics bypass. Scientific experiences remain ordinary, everyday-type observations, even when scientists are studying extraordinary parts of nature through experimentation or technology-enhanced observation; mystics’ experiences are extraordinary even when they are looking at the ordinary. To determine how things work, scientists must distinguish objects and see how they interact with one another, and differentiations among phenomena are necessary for that. Physicists are interested only in what is measurable by the interaction of objects. This includes fields and the smaller and smaller bits of matter that are now being theorized. Even the mass of an object is measured only by the interaction of objects. And since beingness is common to all particulars, it cannot be studied scientifically: beingness is uniform for all phenomena, and thus it cannot be poked and prodded to see how it interacts with something else. Hence, no hypotheses about the nature of beingness can be scientifically tested in any way. Thus, beingness is not a different scientific level that scientists simply cannot reach externally; rather it is an aspect of reality that is free of differentiations.
In such circumstances, it is hard to argue that mystics are making claims about the underlying features of nature that scientists are revealing regarding the causes of things or that scientists are approaching the same aspect of reality as mystics are. Rather, mystics realize a dimension of reality that is missed in scientific knowledge and vice versa. Scientists and mystics each see something different about reality, and their subjects are irrelevant to each other. Thus their claims do not cross, let alone converge, at any point. Both endeavors are interested in what is “fundamentally real” but in different aspects of it—they are not merely reaching the same substantive claims through different routes. Mystical experiences do not give us any scientific knowl¬edge of reality, and no science gives us any mystical knowledge.
But New Age parallelists only see that both mystics and scientists are approaching reality and are out to gain knowledge; thus they assume without argument that mystics and scientists are engaged in gaining the same type of knowledge through different techniques. Parallelists do not consider that there may be fundamentally different aspects of what is real that must be approached through different functions of the mind and that this would foreclose any substantive convergence of knowledge claims. This parallelist failure extends even to physicists making comparisons to Asian thought.
The Tension between Mysticism and Science
To New Age advocates, the experiential nature of mysticism makes mystics more like scientists than practitioners of other forms of religiosity. However, they overlook how classical mystics’ religious objectives affect their endeavor. For example, the point of the Buddha’s teaching is to end the pervasive dissatisfaction, frustration, and suffering entailed by merely being alive (duhkha). Buddhism is not a “science of the mind” in any sense connected to natural science. Buddhism’s central objective is not to acquire disinterested knowledge about how something works; rather it is to transform the person to end suffering. To substitute a disinterested focus on how the parts of nature work—includ¬ing even the mental states involved in ending suffering—in order to learn more about the universe distorts the fundamental soteriological nature of Buddhism entirely. Today “Neo-Buddhists,” including the Dalai Lama, find scientific discoveries in physics, cosmology, and biology fascinating, but they must admit such discoveries in the final analysis are irrelevant to their central quest. As the respected Thera¬vada Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula has said, while some parallels and similarities between Buddhism and modern science may be intellectually interesting, they are “peripheral and do not touch the essential part, the center, the core, the heart of Buddhism.”
A scientific interest in nature’s structures is not a way to any type of mystical enlightenment: identifying and explaining the structures of reality only increase attention to the differentiations in the world and will never lead to the calming of the mind by emptying it of differentiated content that leads to an experience of beingness. The Buddha condemned astronomy/astrology as a wrong means of livelihood because it was unrelated to the religious concern. The Buddha even forbade monks a practice as valuable in our eyes as medicine since it interfered with their quest for selflessness. To use the Buddhist analogy: if we are shot with a poison-tipped arrow, we does not ask who made the arrow or what the arrow is made of (or any other scientific question related to the arrow)—we just want a cure for the poison. So too, what is vital here and now is finding a way to the deathless state, not wasting time on scientific questions about the construction of the universe. The means to doing so is to end a false sense of permanence in the world and in the mental life, with its accompanying ungrounded emotions, not to learn the scientific mechanisms at work causing this sense, let alone all the other mechanisms in the world. The Buddha would no doubt leave all scientific questions unanswered (including those involving the brain) since they are irrelevant to the soterio-logical problem of suffering, just as he did with questions about the age and size of the universe. Overall, Buddhism has been hostile to science throughout its history.
All classical mystical traditions have such religious ¬goals and no interests in natural causes. Daoism in classical China is a good example of the rejection of the discursive type of knowledge of which science is the paradigm: the Daoist interest in nature remained contemplative and did not lead to a scientific interest in how things in nature work. We cannot simply equate any interest in nature with a scientific interest in understanding the hidden causal order behind things that explains how things work. Daoists were interested in flowing with patterns inherent in nature through nonasser¬tive action (wuwei), not in any scientific findings or explanations of the efficient causes of those patterns. In the Daoist “forgetting” state of mind (xu), our mind is no longer guided by our own mentally conceived divisions of nature but responds spontaneously to what is presented without any preconceptions. Anything free of conceptions cannot guide scientific observations or theorizing since scientific observations and experiments involve predictions and theorizing based in our conceptions.
Overall, science increases the amount of conceptual differentia¬tions in our mind by its analyzing, selecting, measuring, and theorizing. It utilizes the analytical function of the mind and increases attention to the differentiations within the phenomenal world and thus diverts attention from what mystics consider the only approach for aligning our lives with reality (calming the mind by freeing it of a sense of ego and conceptual differentiations). For mystical experiences to occur, one needs to empty the mind of the very stuff that is central to science. The aim is to achieve a knowledge inaccessible to the analytical mind.
Thus, science and mysticism pull in opposite directions, and most practitioners of either endeavor may very well dismiss the other as a waste of valuable time and energy. This picture is complicated by the fact that mysticism involves more than just cultivating mystical experiences; it also involves attempts to understand the significance of these experiences and to lay out the general nature of a person, the world, and transcendent realities for a way of life. However, the divergence of interests and subject matters in science and mysticism means that it is impossible to say that science and mysticism “converge” or that science “confirms” the specifically mystical claims of any tradition or vice versa.
The Difference in Content
In short, science and mysticism substantially diverge in their core subjects and interests. However, most New Age parallelists see the same or similar terms being used in mysticism and in discussions of science but miss the differences in context and thus believe that mystics and scientists are discussing the same thing. That scientists and mystics are discussing different aspects of what is fundamentally real is completely overlooked.
For example, parallelists misconstrue the “search for unity” by not distinguishing the unity of being in mysticism from the unity of structures in the sciences. Any scientific unity unifies apparently different structures (e. g., unifying magnetism and electricity), while the oneness of being has no parts to unite. Mysticism is neutral on the question of whether physicists can reduce the apparent levels of structures to only one fundamental level of physical structure, or whether, as antireduc¬tionists assert, nonphysicists are also discovering equally fundamental levels of structuring. Nothing in any classical mystical tradition suggests any interest in attempting to unify the structures at work in the world. Mystics do not seek a more comprehensive unification than scientists or pursue a Grand Unified Theory. Any Theory of Everything in physics would be simply irrelevant to the mystics’ concerns since it would remain a matter of structures. Nothing on this subject is disclosed in mystical experiences. Perhaps if more scholars used “identity of being” when discussing such mystical systems as Advaita Vedanta and not “unity” (which suggests a unification of parts), fewer parallelists would be misled concerning “oneness.”
The most important point concerning external phenomena is that extrovertive mysticism remains exclusively on the level that can be directly experienced. Buddhist theorists do categorize mental structures, but only in the context of how to end suffering, not out of a disinterested desire to discover all the structures of the mind. And nothing in the writings of the great Asian spiritual masters suggests that mystics become aware of the quantum realm or experience subatomic structures or anything other than the mind or the everyday level of phenomena in the external world. Nothing in their writings remotely suggests that they were “quite adept” at seeing into matter and space-time, or that through meditation mystics realize that energy comes in discrete packets (“quanta”). Contrary to what Fritjof Capra says, mystics in higher states of consciousness do not have “a strong intuition for the ‘space-time’ character of reality” or any other scientific explanatory structure.
Indeed, the connection of space and time would be news to Buddhists—nothing in Buddhist teachings would predict that time is connected to space. In fact, Theravada Buddhists would be quite surprised by this: they exempt space, but not time, from being “conditioned” (samskrita). This makes space as independent and absolute as is possible within their metaphysics and precludes any encompassing holism. Nor did Nagarjuna or any other Buddhist connect space with time in their analyses. Nor is Ervin Laszlo’s physics-influenced idea of an “Akashic field” “rediscovering the true meaning of the ancient Vedas”; rather it is imposing a new doctrine on the Indic notion. In classical Indic culture, space (akasha) is a substance pervading the world and thus is not “empty space,” but it is not the source of anything else or in any sense the fundamental reality—it is not any type of “field” connecting everything with everything else nor out of which entities appear. Rather, space is one of the five elements of the world (the others being earth, water, fire, and air); it is not the ground or source of anything else but is independent of all other elements and uninfluenced by them. Nor is there any reason to believe that depth-mystical experi¬ences are of “the four-dimensional space-time continuum” of relativity theory or the “ground manifold state” out of which quantum phenomena emerge and are reabsorbed: according to physicists, the “space-time manifold” is a structured aspect of reality, and thus it is no more “pure beingness” free of all structures than anything in the everyday world or any other phenomenon.
Like mysticism in general, Buddhism has no interest in the analysis of under¬lying structural layers of physical organi¬zation or in identifying the lowest structural level of physical realities. Buddhism has no scientific view of the nature of matter, and there is no such thing as a “Buddhist physics.” Buddhism has never given a physical analysis of matter. The closest concept in Buddhism to “matter” is “form” (rupa), which is one of dozens and dozens of “factors of experi¬ence” (dharmas) in the Abhi¬dharma analyses of experience. And even then “form” relates only to our experience and not to “matter in itself”—it is about the form of things that we directly experience and not any possible substance behind them. By naming things, we give what is actually real a form based on our perceptions—hence, the common phrase for the physical world: “name and form” (nama-rupa). Identifying a new subatomic level in an analysis of matter will not lead to discerning the dharmas, which are experiential in nature—if anything, the scientific analysis of matter only increases the danger of discriminations for the unenlightened by introducing a new layer of possible objects and creating new distinctions.
So too, mysticism and science may share a general ideal methodology—that is, careful observation, rational analysis, open-mindedness, and having background beliefs. But this too is only on an abstract level: in actual practice, the differences in objectives between cultivating mystical experiences versus scientific observation and explanation cause very different implementations of any abstract general principles. In the end, the only commonality may be features that any enterprise would have that seeks knowledge of reality and encounters things we would not expect from our ordinary experience in the everyday world. Mystics and scientists value types of experiences (conception-free experiences versus concept-driven observa¬tions) and conceptualizations (becoming free of conceptualizations versus coming up with better conceptualizations of how nature works) very differently, and this precludes any deeper convergence in “method.”
In sum, scientists and mystics are doing basically different things. The difference is not only that different states of consciousness are involved. Rather, mystics do not directly experience the same “truth” that scientists arrive at tentatively or approximately through the route of theory and experiment. Nor do mystics reach a ¬new structural reality that scientists fail to reach. Each endeavor, if each is in fact cognitive, pursues the depth of a dimension of reality but not the same dimension. The content of science and mysticism will always remain distinct; thus their theories and ideas can never converge into one new set of theories replacing those in either science or mysticism. Nor, since their content will always remain distinct, can one endeavor to incorporate the other or be reduci¬ble to the other. So too, meditators may permit neuroscientists to scan their brains while they meditate in order to gather data on their brain activity, but no further “collaborative effort” —let alone a “synthesis,” “fusion,” or “concep¬tual unification” of the two endeavors—is possible. Nor can either endeavor discredit or confirm the other. Mystics’ claims about the impermanence and interconnectedness of the experienced everyday realm in no way “validate” or “verify” scien¬tific theories of any underlying structures, nor can scientific claims about structure verify mystical claims about beingness or its source.
As an example of the difference, consider the ideas of the emptiness in Buddhism and science. Much attention is being paid to the Madhyamaka tradition’s concept of emptiness (shunyata). The Dalai Lama sees an “unmistakable resonance” between Nagar¬juna’s notion of emptiness and the new physics. Physicists speak of the emptiness of phenomena on the subatomic level, and Buddhists speak of the emptiness of phenomena, so New Age parallelists conclude that physicists and Buddhists are actually discussing the same thing.
However, the Buddhist claim concerns the lack of any permanent entities in what we experience in the everyday realm—the emptiness of all phenomena of any “inherent self-existence” (svabhava) that would permanently separate one thing from another as distinct and self-existing realities. This lack of self-existence has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific notions of emptiness: it is the metaphysical absence of any power of self-existence, not anything about the absence of material in some space. Nevertheless, parallelists see Buddhist emptiness as connected to the emptiness of solid matter on the quantum level. The physicist Victor Mansfield thinks particle physics and Madhya¬maka Buddhism have “many deep links” and “remarkable and detailed connections.” But they in fact do not converge on the substance of their claims. The scientific notion of “emptiness” comes from the idea that there are no solid particles in a subatomic sea of energy, but the mystics’ claim stands or falls on the complete impermanence and interconnectedness of what we actually experience in the everyday world. Buddhists did not have to wait twenty-five hundred years to have their claims related to nirvana to be confirmed or disconfirmed by physicists.
This lack of “self-existence” has nothing to do with any alleged interaction of space, time, and matter. Nagarjuna says nothing about that scientific issue, so his ideas on the impermanence of the experienced realm cannot be considered “anticipations” of that issue. Nor did the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago in any way set out the hypothesis that elementary particles are not solid or independent. In fact, the early Abhi-dharma Buddhists posited discrete and undestroya¬ble minute particles of matter (paramanus) not open to sense experience, and yet they affirmed the impermanence of the experienced realm—such particles simply do not affect the impermanence that Buddhists are interested in. Thus, if physicists find permanent bits of matter on the quantum level, it would not refute a mindfulness tradition like Buddhism because it does not affect the impermanence of the “constructed” things of the everyday world that we actually experience.
Nor did Nagarjuna have any concept of a “Void.” Nagar¬juna’s emptiness is not the “quantum vacuum” out of which things arise. It is not a reality that is the source of anything. The term simply denotes the true state of everything in the phenomenal world—that is, the absence of anything that would make a phenomenon permanent, independent, and self-existent (svabhava). The state of empti¬ness itself is not a self-existent reality; it too is empty of any inherent self-existence. It is not an inherently existing continuum out of which we carve conventional entities; each phenomenon is empty, and the totality is also empty of self-existence. But parallelists routinely reify emptiness into a cosmic “Void” or “Absolute Reality” that is an underlying source of phenomena. However, according to Nagarjuna, anyone who reifies the mere absence of anything that could give self-existence into a reality of any kind is incurable (asadhyan).
Consciousness and the Phenomenal Realm
Another recurring problem in New Age works involves comparisons of consciousness and Advaita’s Brahman. For example, the physicist Amit Goswami gives consciousness a role in physics and also treats consciousness as the ground of being. However, there is nothing in, for example, Advaita’s Brahman doctrines about consciousness affecting, or inter¬acting with, an object—in fact, all that is real is only Brahman, and thus there is nothing for Brahman to interact with. Brahman does not even cause the entire material realm since what is conscious cannot cause what is unconscious. In Advaita, Brahman is never portrayed as any type of causal agent in the phenomenal world; thus to make it the cause of the wave-function collapse in particle physics is to change its nature. Brahman is the same undifferentiated reality for all phenomena and thus cannot explain why one phenomenal state of affairs is the case rather than another; thus it cannot function as a scientific expla¬nation. It is not that mystics go further than physicists on observa¬tion —what mystics are claiming about what is experienced in depth-mystical experiences that are free of all differentiated content is fundamentally different from any alleged interaction of the observer and observed in particle physics.
In mindfulness mysticism too, there is nothing about a subject’s consciousness affecting objects: we “create” objects by imposing artificial conceptual boundaries onto what is really there in the world—in Buddhism, creating the world of “name and form” out of what is really there (yathabhutam, tattva)—not by somehow physically affecting what is actually there. That is, we create illusory “entities” in the phenomenal world by erroneously separating off parts of the flux of reality with our analytical mind; it is a matter of the conceptualizations of our everyday perceptions and beliefs and has nothing to do with the idea that consciousness is a possible causal factor in events.
“Quantum Mysticism” The idea that the world is merely “an idea in the mind of God” is centuries old, but the New Age claim is that quantum physics proves that “the universe is being created in a dream of a single spiritual entity.” Indeed, “quantum” has become the parallelists’ favorite word. The reasoning is simple: if everything has a material base and quantum realities are the basis of physical organization, then everything is actually only a quantum reality. All things are just excited states of the underlying “quantum vacuum,” and human beings thus are just ripples on the quantum vacuum’s sea of potentiality. Thus there is a quantum basis to the mind, and thus there is a quantum basis to all things mystical and psychic. The movie What the BLEEP Do We Know !? centers on quantum mysticism. Amit Goswami and Deepak Chopra are two of the featured authorities. Goswami sums up its central theme succinctly: “I create my own reality”—we literally make the external reality through our thoughts and will. For Goswami and Chopra, consciousness generates reality, and to create a better reality for ourselves we need to correct our consciousness, since our consciousness infects the quantum field. Even some people in the popular mysticism movement are embarrassed by this. We now have “quantum yoga” at the interface of matter and energy and Chopra’s “quantum healing.” A remark by Chopra is typical: “The quantum field is just another label for the field of pure consciousness and potentiality.”
Ironically, even while disparaging reductionism, parallelists engage in a reduc¬tionism of their own: they treat the lowest levels of physical interactions as the only type of action that is real. They bash “reductive science” yet argue that how events occur on those lowest levels must be the model for how we must treat reality on the everyday level. Ken Wilber summarizes (and later criticizes) the paral¬lelists’ reduc¬tionism: “Since all things are ultimately made of subatomic parti¬cles, and since sub¬atomic particles are mutually interrelated and holistic, then all things are holistically one, just like mysticism says.” For parallelists, Heisen¬berg’s Uncertainty Principle (con¬cerning our inability to measure the exact momentum and exact location of particles at the same time) means that we cannot have certain knowledge about anything on the everyday level of the world. So too, the “wave/par¬ticle paradox” in quantum science means that nothing on any level has fixed properties and we must speak paradoxically about everything in the everyday world.
What initially drew the parallelists’ attention to the possibility of the convergence of science and mysticism was the fact that our everyday notions do not apply to subatomic events. But the reverse implication of this is some¬how forgotten: obviously any theories developed specifically for the subatomic level will not apply to the everyday world for the same reason—in the macroscopic world, planets do not jump orbits like electrons, baseballs cannot be in two places at once, and so forth. Heisenberg did not point out that the very act of measurement interferes with what one was attempting to measure in all situations: on the tiny quantum scales, observation by injecting light interferes with what is there—there is no scientific basis to date to generalize anything like this to all scales of reality and to all types of measurements. No quantum theories lead to B. Alan Wallace’s conclusion that the mind “is necessarily at the heart of every assertion of reality.”
In sum, we cannot jump from the fact that everything has a material base to privileging the lowest level of organization as the sum of reality. The only way to maintain the New Age position is to deny the emergence of any new, genuinely real levels of causation and any genuine multiplicity of levels to nature’s organization—there is only one level of causation and structuring. However, parallelists want to emphasize both that new higher-level phenomena emerge and that the lowest level of physical organization dictates how we must see the world. They do not see the blatant contradiction. But the only way to make these two points consistent is a reduction¬ist interpretation of all emergent properties, which parallelists do not accept.
So too, whatever physicists find about the subatomic level, the fact remains that physical forces still produce, for example, solidity on the everyday level: chairs still support us and do not fall through the floor, no matter what post-Newtonian physics says about the “emptiness” of the subatomic level of the world. Solidity may be limited to only the everyday level of the world, but regardless of what physicists discover about its causes, it is not an illusion, but just as real and nonnegotiable as properties on other levels. Thus, particle physics is not “forcing” us to see all the world differently. Billiard balls still behave like billiard balls, despite what is happening on their subatomic levels. So too, atoms are causal units on their own level of interactions, so physicists and chemists can still properly treat them as entities. Nothing in science itself justifies making the colossal jump from subatomic physics to an all-encompassing holism for all aspects of all phenomena of reality, regardless of the levels of organization involved, or the denial of genuinely new levels of causation emerging.
Also notice that the world of the new physics remains as “objective” as under the old physics despite what parallelists think. Consistently getting the same experimental results means that physicists are studying structures that exist indepen¬dently of our minds: they are irrevocably real aspects of the world—that is, some¬thing that we simply cannot get around, whatever we think. There may be severe limits to our knowledge of structures, but even empiricists in the philosophy of science acknowledge that something in the objective world is responsible for the repro¬ducible changes we observe, although they insist that we cannot know what it is without experiences of it. And the actions of the unseen realities remain as rigorous as with Newtonian particles: physicists have replaced the precise Newtonian language of particle trajectories with the precise quantum language of wave functions. Predictions are now a matter of percentages but very precise and consistent percentages. The objects in the everyday world may be impermanent and thus “illusions” in the Indic mystical sense, but the structures operating in the “illusions” are still objective. Most importantly for the issue at hand, there is nothing “mystical” about the new scientific picture: the parallelists’ reduction¬ism misses the fact that mystical experiences deal with the impermanence of the everyday world and the possible source of being, not with anything about scientific structures.
Methodological Distortions
Many of the parallelists’ claims are embarrassingly bad. For example, Deepak Chopra tells us that the atom has no physical properties and that matter is “literally nothing,” even though “empty” space-time has structured field properties and hence is not actually nothing. Gary Zukav provides a paradigm of typical New Age reasoning. He notes that light has no prop-erties independent of our observation and then continues: “To say that something has no properties is the same as saying that it does not exist. The next step in this logic is inescapable. Without us, light does not exist.” It is one thing to realize that light has no particle-like or wavelike properties independent of our act of observation; it is another thing altogether to conclude that it therefore has no properties at all and does not exist. Our experimental observation may affect what is there and produce the observable properties, but it is absurd to say that nothing was there to begin with or that we created some physical reality. Nor are the properties of light arbitrary: physicists always get the same properties by the same experimental procedures, so some structures in light must be fixed even if we cannot observe them directly.
Typical of New Age advocates’ reasoning is the conclusion that if A in mysticism cannot be visualized and B in science cannot be visualized, then A and B must have something significant in common, or they in fact must be the same thing, without any analysis of the underlying content of the claims or any discussions of the ¬problems in comparing two different endeavors. Usually the comparisons are of isolated statements with little background on the contexts that make their meaning clear. Thomas McFarlane’s Einstein and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings is the extreme in this regard: he quotes merely the isolated statements with nothing at all to give them any context whatsoever. Because the wording in bits of translations from mystical texts resemble something from science that a parallelist is familiar with, New Age writers conclude without further research that the passage must be referring to the same scientific subject. However, if we look at the context, inevitably we see that the wording clearly does not refer to anything in mystical texts we would consider “scientific.” Nothing is established by that method: meaning is not an objective feature of words, and the unit of meaning is not such isolated snippets. Rather, we have to consider the role the words play in a total system of thought to see what they mean to the persons using them—we could take isolated sentences that sound similar and not be able to tell if they are about baseball or butterflies, and the same is true here.
A related problem is translating terms from other cultures to fit a predetermined position. For example, the Buddhist term dharmata means simply “the nature of things,” but in the hands of parallelists it becomes “laws of nature,” and Buddhism is thus magically shown to be scientific. Indeed, parallelists distort mysticism from the beginning of their comparisons. Whenever we attempt to understand anything new, we all have previous beliefs that influence us, and when we compare science and mysticism, there is a very real danger of misreading one endeavor in light of our prior commitment to the other. If parallelists rely on Westernized versions of Asian schools for their under¬standing of mysticism (e. g., the works of D. T. Suzuki), the comparisons may well end up being circular. The danger is that we will ultimately see mystical ideas in the scientific ideas or vice versa and not on their own terms. That is, our understanding of one endeavor may be “contaminated” by our understanding of the other endeavor, and thus the comparisons will not be of the genuine article.
Comparisons to science also are always comparisons to the theories of the day, and there is thus the danger that convergences parallelists see will disappear in the next generation. That is, if a mystical claim is the same as a particular scientific claim, then if the science changes, the mystical claim must be rejected too. It is also good to remember that books written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America and Europe portrayed the Buddha as a good Newtonian. In the 1960s, when interest in Buddhism and science revived, the Buddha had become an Einsteinian. Fritjof Capra illustrates the problem well. In the 1970s, Capra championed his teacher Geoffrey Chew’s S-matrix theory in particle physics in which there are no fundamental entities or laws of nature. However, the S-matrix’s competitor—the particle approach of quarks, leptons, and bosons—won out. Nevertheless, Capra still adheres to the S-matrix theory, while other physicists have made advances in the particle approach. But incredibly, Capra sees nothing that has developed in physics in the intervening decades as invalidating anything he wrote. To physicists, he is simply in denial.
As Victor Mans¬field has said, since physical theories are intrinsically impermanent, it is a guarantee of obsolescence to bind Buddhism or any philosophical view too tightly to a physical theory. Today, the inconsistency of quantum theory and relativity leads many physicists to believe that their current theories are not final but only approximations. So too, the element of randomness and the general statistical nature of quantum physics suggest to many particle physicists that their science has not yet captured the true structures at work on that level. Thus, alleged parallels to mystical claims may prove to be only temporary. On the other hand, if claims from assorted mystical traditions can be attached to whatever the currently accepted theory in particle physics happens to be, then there must be very little substance to the alleged convergence.
Beyond contamination, distortions of the basic nature of mysticism also frequently occur. Andrea Diem and James Lewis only slightly exaggerate when they say that Fritjof Capra in his New Age classic The Tao of Physics “misinterprets Asian religions and cultures on almost every page.” There is always a great danger of circular reasoning here: cleansing a mystical tradition of anything that might conflict with current scientific claims as simply “nonessential” cultural accretions (e. g., Buddhism’s “flat earth” cosmology), and then miraculously finding that the tradition was scientific all along. Letting science set what is deemed “essential” to the mystical tradition in the first place results in a blatant circularity. Highlighting selective aspects of a tradition is certainly legitimate, but parallelists tend to reduce a spiritual tradition to only those aspects and to view even the selected aspects through the lens of science, thereby making mystical concepts into scientific concepts when such concepts are not scientific in content or purpose. Parallelists distort mystical doctrines to fit science, and then those doctrines become “anticipations” of specific physical and biological theories. For example, parallelists reinterpret the Chinese notion of the Way (dao) along the lines of modern field theory in physics and then see science as confirmation of the Chinese anticipation.
Equally important, parallelists lump all Asian mystical traditions together as if they were in fact only one system of beliefs shared by all. However, the differences in doctrines preclude there being an abstract “Eastern mysticism.” Parallelists play down or ignore entirely the fact that Advaita’s depth-mystical doctrines are very different from Samkhya’s dualism of matter and multiple selves, which in turn are very different from the mindfulness doctrines of the different Buddhist traditions, and so on. Indic theism is ignored completely. So too, the parallelists’ approach distorts Advaita by making its claims related to the natural realm its central ontic topic in order to connect it to the idea that change is central to reality, even though Advaitins take what is changing to be unreal and illusory (maya) and emphasize the unchanging reality of Brahman as central.
Overall, parallelists read Asian teachings through a prism of scientific knowledge that distorts or screens out the original intent and meaning of these teachings and substitutes alien ideas in their place. Only in this way can they find particle physics and modern cosmology in ancient texts—everything from the virtual particles of the quantum field to the Big Bang to relativity to multiple universes.
Ironically, Capra himself has become disenchanted with “Eastern mysticism” and has shifted his focus to Christian mysticism because he found that “many Eastern spiritual teachers . . . [are] unable to understand some crucial aspects of the new paradigm that is now emerging in the West.” Why this should be so would be hard for him to explain since he believes the “new paradigm” is simply the expression of the “essence” of all Asian mystical tradi¬tions. How can these teachers not understand themselves? He does not consider the possibility that he might be distorting Asian teachings by seeing them through the lens of modern science.
The filtering problem can occur in another way: the emphasis in mysticism on experi¬ence as the source of knowledge when seen through the lens of modernity becomes a scientific method. For example, Buddhist claims in the New Age view become a matter of tentatively advanced, empirically tested hypotheses. All meditative exercises become scientific experiments on the mind. The basic point that the Buddha exhorted his followers to rely on their own experiences and to examine phenomena dispassionately means that the Buddha must have been a scientist—not that he was trying to get them to follow the path to end their suffering themselves.
However, there is nothing “scientific” in the Buddhist aim or purpose. In the Kalama Sutta, villagers expressed to the Buddha their confu¬sion about the conflicting religious doctrines they had heard. He exhorted them not to rely on reports, hearsay, the authority of religious texts, mere logic or influence, appearances, seeming possibilities, speculative opinions, or teachers’ ideas, but to know for themselves what is efficacious and what is not. But he was not exhorting them to conduct mental experiments over a range of inner states and see what happens: the villagers were told in advance what would work—the Buddhist-prescribed path to ending suffering—and the Buddha already knew what the villagers would find. What they will find is set before any mental exercises are undertaken, unlike in science, where scientists do not know beforehand what their experiments will disclose when they test predictions. The villagers’ subsequent experiences cannot even be considered attempts to duplicate an experiment in order to confirm or disconfirm an earlier finding since the Buddha is accepted as enlightened and any lack of enlightenment on the part of the villagers will not be seen as disconfirma¬tion.
The Sanskrit scholar Wilhelm Halbfass summed this up nicely: “Following the experiential path of the Buddha does not mean to continue a process of open-ended experimentation and inquiry. There is no ‘empiricist’ openness for future additions or corrections: there is nothing to be added to the discoveries of the Buddha and other ‘omniscient’ founders of soteriological traditions. . . . There is no programmatic and systematic accumulation of ‘psychological’ data or observations, no pursuit of fact-finding in the realm of consciousness. . . . [T]here is no more ‘inner experimentation’ in these traditions, than there is experimentation related to the ‘outer’ sphere of nature.”
Thus, Buddhism is prescriptive in a way science is not. Pinit Ratanakul may say “Buddhism has a free and open spirit of enquiry and encourages the search for truth in an objective way,” but this is deceptive: it is not fresh research since the Buddha was only prescribing the path to the end of suffering. In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha is merely saying that by following the path the villagers will then know for themselves because they will have experienced the end of suffering themselves. We have to distort Buddhism to see this as “anticipating the skeptical empiricism of the modern scientific method.” Discovering something for yourself through experience that you did not know before does not necessarily make you a scientist—sometimes it is only a matter of correctly following a path that others laid out for you. In short, we cannot equate everything based on experience with a “scientific method.” Moreover, the Buddha’s exhortation did not prevent Buddhist schools over time from accepting the Buddha’s testimony (shabda) as a means of valid knowledge, as epitomized in schools valuing the Lotus Sutra centrally. The Dalai Lama realizes that accepting such authority for settling matters separates Buddhism from science.
In sum, Buddhist meditation is less an open-ended inquiry than a method of discovering for oneself the truths authorized by the tradition. Neverthe¬less, in the parallelists’ eyes, the Buddha is regularly considered a scientist. But even in a proto-scientific sense, let alone a modern sense of natural science, this claim is simply wrong. The Buddha did not have a scientist’s interest in understanding how nature works; rather he had only one interest: just as the one flavor of saltiness permeates the entire ocean, so too the Buddha’s teaching has only one flavor—how to end permanently the suffering caused by perpetual rebirth. The Buddha cannot even be seen as “a scientist of the inner world” of consciousness since he was not interested in establishing a scientific understanding of consciousness. Merely having a taxonomy of mental states relevant to ending suffering (as Buddhist Abhi¬dharmists did) does not make a meditative tradition scientific in method or intent. The Buddha did not use the “scientific method” to test various hypotheses to create a scientific picture of the inner world. His method does involve experiential investigation of inner mental states, but the objective is not to learn more about the world. The Buddhist analogy of the man struck by a poisoned arrow mentioned above again applies.
Calling meditation a “contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness” is at best misleading: the Buddha did not seek to describe whatever he found during his quest to end suffering in order to contribute to a scientific study of the psyche. Buddhists following the prescribed path to end suffering have not developed, as B. Alan Wallace thinks, a “science of consciousness” by “collecting data by observing mental processes and experimenting.” And putting the word “experiments” in quotation marks when discussing meditation does not make the medita¬tors’ observation of their mental states, as they attempt to calm their mind, into scientific experiments. Buddhists are not “experimenting” in the scientific sense at all or “testing scientific hypotheses.” The Buddha’s claims are not “hypotheses” presented for confirmation or disconfirma¬tion as scientists test tentative new ideas. Simply because unenlightened Buddhists have not yet experi¬entially realized their prescribed goal of enlightenment them¬selves does not mean they are “testing hypotheses scientifically” by their meditative practices and behavior in any sense. And that others have achieved this goal does not mean that the Buddha was offering a “scientific hypothesis” that he and others had “verified.” Having to follow a prescribed path to a goal yourself does not make the path in any sense a scientific hypothesis. Moreover, to think that the Buddha was setting out a “hypothesis” about subatomic particles, which cannot be experienced, only compounds the error.
Buddhists have developed “rigorous methods for refining attention,” but not to explore the nature of consciousness scientifically. Learning meditation is more like learning a musical instrument than scientific research: it is a matter of practice and correcting errors. At the very most, the Buddha can be likened, not to a basic research scientist, who is out to find how nature works, but rather to a technician, who was using trial and error to learn what worked for a practical goal he already had in mind and was showing others how to follow the path and use the techniques to achieve what he had discovered.
Mindfulness and scientific observation both involve disinterested observation, but this is not grounds to conclude that even only to that extent Buddhism is “a science of the mind.” Seeing the relevant inner states as if from a third-person point of view, free of one’s beliefs and preferences, and cultivating a general attitude of impartiality and objectivity do not make mindfulness a scientific study of the mind. Another interest is needed for meditation to be science: understanding the processes at work and explaining them. The Buddhist quest to end suffering is not scientific “research” guided by empirical findings. Indeed, the impartiality of mindfulness would actually interfere with scientific observation by disconnecting observation from making any phenomenon a priority: in a mindful state, there are no predictions, preset categories of objects, or other conceptual guidance as are needed to conduct a scientific observation. There is a “bare attention” to what is presented to our senses, without attention to anything in particular and with no accompanying intellectual expectations and reactions. Scientific observations that test hypotheses arising from data require responses to predictions created by questions and thus are necessarily driven by concepts—such directed observations are not the free-floating observations of whatever occurs as in meditation.
Meditation should be unbiased and thus objective in that sense. So too, being unbiased is highly valued in scientific research. However, we cannot use “objectivity” in this sense to claim that meditation is objective in the specifically scientific sense of being presentable to others to experience. Nor can we use this sense of “objectivity” to mean “empiricism.” The conflict of knowledge claims from different mystical traditions about the same topic (e. g., the nature of conscious¬ness) makes it hard to see mystical experiences as confirming or discon¬firming any claim in a straightforward empiricist manner. Moreover, whether meditation might at least establish a universally accepted phenomenology of mental states is questionable since meditators of different traditions see the states in terms of different typologies—for example, the Samkhya versus Buddhist delineation of the constituents of the mind and whether there is a self.
Nor does “empiricism” mean simply “experiential.” Empiricism is a philosophical position that involves more than simply having experiences; it is an epistemic matter of the limits of what we can know. In empiricism, in contrast to rationalism, knowledge is limited to what we can directly experience. In calling for a “return to empiricism,” B. Alan Wallace has no problem utilizing the Yogachara Buddhist concept of the alaya¬vijnana—a “substrate conscious¬ness” that precedes life and continues beyond death in which karmic seeds take root and develop; it is the ultimate ground state of consciousness, existing prior to all conceptual dichoto¬mies, including subject/object and mind/matter. However, it is hard to see how we could know by any experience that this substrate existed prior to life and conscious-ness. How could any experiences prove that there is a reality that existed prior to the dichotomy of “mind” and “matter,” or that con¬sciousness has no beginning but has existed since the beginning of the universe, or that consciousness will never end? Thus, it is hard to see the “substrate consciousness” as the result of empiricism. Rather, this appears to be a bit of Buddhist theorizing: it is an attempt to answer the problem of how karmic effects can take place in future rebirths when everything under Buddhist metaphysics is momentary. Moreover, most Buddhists do not accept such a posit.
Nor can we simply jump from the fact that mysticism and science are both experiential to the conclusion that they therefore make the same type of claims and are both “empirical” in the scientific sense of making claims checkable by scientific methods. Nor is it at all clear how contemplation can present any information that would shed light on the relationship of the nonphysical mind to the physical body —whether mystical experi¬ences are products of the brain alone, as naturalists claim, or involve something more, they would still have the same phenomenal character.
In short, not everything experiential is scientific. The need for the “direct experience of spiritual truths” makes mysticism experiential, but it does not necessarily make it scientific. Nevertheless, New Age advocates usually consider meditation “essentially scientific” in method. To Ken Wilber, “contemplative science” is no different from natural science except in its subject matter. But again, while meditation is certainly experiential, this does not make it the concept-guided observation of the empirical method of scientific knowing. Nor can we speak of Buddhist metaphysics as “a verifiable system of knowledge” when other traditions with knowledge claims that conflict with Buddhist claims about the nature of the mind are “verified” by the same experiences. Later practitioners at most could confirm only that the general meditative techniques laid out by the Buddha worked to end a sense of self, not the theory of the mental life and rebirth advanced by Buddhists that is disputed by other mystics.
Complementarity
At the end of the epilogue to The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra does state the correct relation between science and mysticism in one respect: mysticism and science are entirely different approaches involving different functions of the mind: “Neither is comprehended in the other, nor can either be reduced to the other, but both of them are necessary, supplementing one another for a fuller understanding of the world. . . . Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both.” Nevertheless in the actual body of his work, he still insists that we need “a dynamic interplay” between science and mysticism. He still advances unsupporta¬ble claims of “convergence” and “confir¬ma¬tion” —and he does so even in the epilogue just quoted.
Unfortunately the same tendency toward inconsistency on the supposed relation between science and mysticism is the norm among New Age parallelists today. Whether they see a similarity between mysticism and science in content but a difference in method or vice versa, many speak of a “complemen¬tarity.” For many, mysticism is a function of the right hemisphere of the brain and science the left, so only by utilizing what comes through each hemisphere do we have “the full-brain approach.” However, difficulties arise here too. Mysticism and science do not separate neatly into different compartments. It is not as if mysticism is about the “inner world” of consciousness, while science is about the “outer world” of material objects: mystics work on consciousness, but they are interested in the beingness of all reality, including the beingness of the “outer world.”
José Cabezón elaborates the complementarity position: science deals with the exterior world, matter, and the hardware of the brain, while Buddhism deals with the interior world and the mind; science is rationalist, quantitative, and conven¬tional, while Buddhism is experiential, qualitative, and contemplative. But he realizes there are limitations: Buddhist analyses show a concern with the external world, and science too can study aspects of the mind. It is also hard to see natural science as “rationalist” as opposed to “experiential.” Perhaps Cabezón is highlighting the centrality of thought in scientific theorizing and testing. There are also limitations on compartmentalizing all elements of mystical ways of life from science because mystical ways of life encompass more than mystical experiences.
The idea of complementarity at least affirms that science and mysticism involve irreducible differences. However, the most popular way to recon¬cile mysticism and science as complements is to claim that mystics are dealing with the “depth” of reality and scientists with the “surface” of the same aspect of reality. That is, mystics and scientists are using different approaches to reality, but they apprehend the same thing, not fundamentally different aspects of reality: mystics simply turn observation inward and arrive at a deeper level of the same truth that scientists reach observing external phenomena. Since science and mysticism both lead to the same basic knowledge, we only have to choose the route that is more suitable to our disposition.
However, parallelists do not see the consequence of this position: either mystics are producing a more thorough account of what scientists are studying—that is, they get to the root of the same subject matter and therefore are doing a more thorough job than are scientists—or scientists are examining the same subject matter as are mystics but with more precision. Either way, one endeavor is superseded: either mysti¬cism’s thoroughness renders science unnecessary, or science’s precision replaces mysticism’s looser approach. Thus this New Age position becomes the basis for rejecting either mysticism or science altogether.
So too, since science and mysticism achieve the same knowledge through different routes, there is in fact no reason to bother with the strenuous way of life that serious mysticism requires—all we have to do is read a few popular accounts of contemporary physics or cosmology and we will know what enlightened mystics know and hence be enlightened. All that matters is learning a post-Newtonian way of looking at the world—namely, “shifting the paradigm” to the “new worldview,” not experiencing the beingness of reality free of all points of view through mystical experiences. Conversely, by the same reasoning, scientists need not go through the expense and trouble of conducting elaborate experiments to learn about structures; mystics have already “intuited” what physicists would learn and in fact have achieved the same knowledge with even more thoroughness through their experiences. Mystics already know what scientists will discover on the quantum level of organization in the future, so there is no need to conduct any more experiments. Hence, shut down the CERN supercollider and all research labs—all that scientists need to do is meditate.
In sum, if scientists and mystics are studying the same thing and one group is doing the job better, one of the endeavors is not needed. On the other hand, if scientists and mystics are studying different aspects of reality that result in completely different types of knowledge claims, and if both endeavors do in fact produce knowledge, then both endeavors are needed for a fuller knowledge of reality. It is not as if all we have to do is push further in science and we will end up mystically enlightened, or push further in mysticism and we will end up with a Theory of Everything for physics. Of course, science and mysticism can be said to have a “common pursuit of truth,” or are “united in the one endeavor of discovering knowledge and truth about reality,” or “seek the reality behind appearances,” but such statements only place both endeavors in a more abstract category of being knowledge-seeking endeavors since they are not pursing the same truths.
Different Endeavors
Seeing mysticism and science converging is no doubt a desideratum in New Age thought: it would give the imprimatur of science to New Age spirituality. However, New Age claims to convergence do not pan out. Of course, mystical and scientific claims will obviously always be “harmonious,” “compatible,” and “consistent” on basic claims if the two endeavors are dealing with fundamentally different aspects of reality and hence they cannot intersect at all—they logi¬cally could then not converge or conflict or support each other even in principle. If this is so, it would make reconciling mystical metaphysics and science very simple as long as introvertive mystical claims are confined to claims about a transcen¬dent self or ground of reality. So too, one might adapt the metaphysics of some mystical tradition into an analytical metaphysical framework that absorbs the current body of scientific theories and findings within an encompassing mystical world view, but this does not make scientists mystics or vice versa. But however a reconciliation is attempted, reconciling science and mystical spirituality should not be sought by distorting their nature.
