Science and Spirituality

Many people feel that science is beginning to merge with spirituality. There is a feeling that science is getting closer, by degrees, to the supreme truths as expressed by the sages for millennia, and that eventually science and spirituality may unite. This idea has also been contemplated in regard to the teachings of Meher Baba in God Speaks, and in fact some consideration has been given to the idea that Baba may in fact help to promote this progress in science toward the spiritual by inspiring those in the new science, currently grappling with new discoveries, by giving them hints. However, this view misunderstands a fundamental difference between spirituality and the new science, which makes a merger of the two not just unlikely, but actually impossible.

However, we only mean to refer to the new science as it is currently practiced. It remains entirely possible that one day a new kind of science might emerge, as a result of Meher Baba’s revolutionary teachings on The Theme of Creation, that will in time come into closer tandem with genuine spirituality. But it is not the case with the current science, even when speaking of the newest of new. This is because it is simply headed in the opposite direction from spirituality, outward rather than inward, regardless of how inspiring its terminology and metaphors sound. To understand the sense in which this is true consider the following analogy.

In 1895, author H. G. Wells gave his protagonist in The Time Machine the unforgettable line that there is a “fourth dimension” that we have all missed, and that is “time.” What few today realize is that the argument Wells gave in his 1895 novel remains essentially identical to what is used today. Regardless of whether or not we take Wells to have been serious in his argument in The Time Machine, what we discover when we examine it is that it is profoundly flawed. It is possible that Wells only meant his character’s argument to stand as a McGuffin, a devise used in fiction simply to trigger a plot. The plot of The Time Machine included making a machine that could transport a person forward or back in time. Thus a time dimension might have done just the trick.

Regardless of how we interpret his motivation, the thinking Wells offers for his invention of a time dimension is worth considering, for it remains essentially the same as we have today, though it is rarely expressed as vividly as Wells did. Here then we speak of the ideas he puts into the mouth of his protagonist, who Wells refers to as The Time Traveller. Further down we include the relevant text from the novel itself. But first an overview.

In explaining to his colleagues the thinking behind the “fourth dimension” The Time Traveller conflates terms from geometry, used solely for demarcating types of conceptual shapes, with properties of phenomenal reality. It is by way of this carefully worded, but almost invisible, conflation that Wells invents his so-called fourth dimension that he claims we move about in. Geometry could be done entirely without the word “dimension.” It is just a word after all. But then it would lack the convenience of a way to distinguish single from multi-plane conceptual forms. By either not understanding what the word ‘dimension’ means in geometry, or by pretending not to for the sake of advancing his plot, by way of a clever twist of phrasing, Wells has his protagonist objectify the third dimension to his colleagues. As he explains to them the third dimension (quite wrongly), the Time Traveller converts it into concrete space, i.e. a kind of atmosphere we move through, which is frankly not the meaning in geometry at all. So by converting the third dimension of geometry into material space, by exceedingly clever subterfuge, he convinces his audience (and the reader) that they move about in a “space dimension.” It should be repeated that the idea of a space-dimension that we move about in never occurred to any Greek geometer. However, Wells’ character proceeds as if believing that the third dimension has to be describing something he calls “real,” something around us. This is simply incorrect. Next, from his established false logic by which he invented a space-dimension, he proceeds to create another “time-dimension.” And he dubs this new stuff we move through the long-sought “fourth dimension,” i.e. time. Note that he is simply objectifying what ought never be objectified. He’s turned the third dimension into physical space, and then time into another kind of space. “‘Scientific people,’ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, ‘know very well that Time is only a kind of Space’” (The Time Machine).

The 1895 book was almost certainly geared toward an audience of 19th century teenage science nerds, a group of people that most people don’t realize already existed then. One such science nerd in 1895 was 16 year old Albert Einstein. Ten years later, at the age of 26, Einstein published his famous paper on special relativity, introducing time as a fourth dimension. Fascinatingly, Einstein later admitted that his idea first struck him when he was 16, the same year The Time Machine came out.

Einstein did not get accepted to conventional college and instead went on to an electrical trade school, bypassing academic courses where he might have learned about more advanced ideas of time such as those by Immanuel Kant. So Einstein had a genius for mathematics but a high school boy’s idea about space and time, and would have almost certainly been influenced by accounts recounted to him from English books like The Time Machine, as these kinds of ideas were a sensation in Europe the year Einstein had his idea of a time dimension being a fourth dimension of “geometry.”

In truth this is all very innocent and common confusion of thinking. Time is a way that the mind organizes information. Space is the same thing. Time evolved in the mind prior to space, and space is conceivable only in terms of time. This is explained in my book Evolution of Perception, and its central idea of time and space as conditions of the mind applied to matter come straight from Kant.

Below is the original argument for the time-dimension or fourth dimension, from the opening pages of H. G. Wells’ 1895 science fiction book The Time Machine. I’ve added line numbers for clarity and highlighted my remarks where Wells makes reasoning errors.

1. One dimensional referred to a straight line, which crosses two points and includes all other points along its path. A drawing of either a point or straight line is an expression of the concept called “one dimensional,” but does not exist in such a dimension, for the dimension is only a conceptual term, applying only to concepts.

2. Two dimensional referred to those geometric shapes that can be conceived on a single plane, like triangles, squares, and circles. We usually speak of images we draw on flat surfaces as being “two dimensional,” or nearly anything flat in common speech. However there is no two dimensional world, as the term is merely for discussion of concepts.

   1. Three dimensional referred to those shapes that fall into more than one plane. So theoretical cubes and spheres are “three dimensional,” for they cannot be conceived on a single plane. In common speech we refer to most things in the physical world around us as three dimensional. However, this is not quite right. As far as Greek geometry is concerned, physical objects are mere shadows of the three dimensional solids, which are entirely conceptual. Thus there is no ‘three dimensional world.’ It is only a conceptual term, to demarcate a range of geometric concepts, not things in outward space.

One of the set-backs to human understanding has been the post-modern invention of the ‘extra dimension’ as part of our metaphysical dialogue. In God Speaks Meher Baba never uses the word dimension even once. In the 1967 Discourses the word appears three times, but only in its most ordinary traditional senses: as an aspect of a subject, the size or scope of a subject, or in its most traditional three-dimensional sense, as found in geometry.

In the gross sphere a focus of this manifestation is represented by the tri-dimensional and inert stone... (Discourses, Vol. 1, p.58)

Man is ordinarily so immersed in the objects of the gross world that the dimensions, magnitudes and quantities of the gross world unconsciously creep into his estimate of spiritual worth and pervert his evaluation. (Discourses, Vol. 1, p.165)

The Master is never anxious to expedite it, as few persons are really qualified to stand the expansion of their experience in this new dimension. (Discourses, Vol. II, p.88)

One more occurrence of the word ‘dimension’ was added to Baba’s Discourses after his death. What had in the 1967 sixth edition been:

The Sahaj Samadhi of the Siddha or God-realised person is continuous with all the prior forms of meditation and is a culmination of them, but different in kind, and belongs to an entirely different order. (Discourses, Vol. I1, p.161)

was changed 18 years after Baba dropped his body, in the 1987 edition, to:

The Nirvikalpa Samadhi of the Siddha, or God-realized being, is continuous with all the prior forms of meditation; and through the grace of a Perfect Master, it can be the culmination of them. However, it is unique and of an entirely different dimension. (Discourses, 7th Edition, p. 240)

Starting in the 1800’s, the search for how to use the phrase “the fourth dimension” in some meaningful sense became fashionable. There was no immediate agreement over how this clever phrase ought best be applied. Even the current New Age use of the phrase was not unheard of. For instance, the astrophysicist Johann Zöllner (1834-1882) hypothesized the phenomenon of spirit mediums, which had begun in the burned over district of New York in 1848 and then swept across Europe, confirmed the existence of a “fourth dimension.”

In 1906 Albert Einstein introduced the fourth dimension to science as time. But Einstein was hardly being original. The first use of the term “fourth dimension” to indicate time, appeared ten years earlier in the popular science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895), by H. G. Wells. In it Wells offers the original argument for the fourth dimension, an argument that is discussed in some depth below.

Since the turn of the 20th century the dimension has taken on an even greater role in both the new physics and New Age metaphysics. It is my intention here to discuss why I think the dimension is a mostly gratuitous concept, especially as it is bandied about metaphysically.

Since the ancient Greeks, geometry has held an important role in philosophy. Above the entrance to Plato’s Academy read, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.” But it should be kept firmly in mind that to the Greeks geometry was simply the study of shapes (forms), understood conceptually, with a bent toward the mathematical and conceptual formulas that underlay them. For instance, a circle can be reduced to a mathematical formula far simpler than its appearance. Its circumference can be determined from its radius. In other words it is reducible to a concept, and this interested the Greeks. They were not interested simply in physical objects in space that imitated these shapes, objects that to them were mere shadows or representations of these higher order concepts they were considering in geometry. In other words they were interested in the logical constructs that underlay these forms, not the forms themselves. To the Greeks, a form such as a perfect circle is an ideal that is only definable in geometry. It could never be perfectly expressed in material form, a world which they saw as relatively vulgar to the conceptual. The relationship between mental forms and their rough outward expressions in the material world was important to the Greeks philosophically. It implied to them that in some sense the mind preceded the world, and this explains the caption above the door to Plato’s Academy. The forms were mental, their outward expressions a mere material shadow. This fascinated the Greeks, who were seeking to understand the self as the link to understanding reality. “Know thy self,” read the sign over the Temple of Delphi.

So now, what, from the Greek perspective, are dimensions? Originally the three dimensions were simply part of a language for discussing the complex subject of different types of conceivable abstract shapes. These did not apply to the world around us, but to the concepts in geometry.

Inventing Dimensions

There is a thinking problem common to this age. It is the problem of people becoming lost in the analogy. People often forget what an analogy is. An analogy is a comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure, and for the purpose of explanation or clarification. When people rely on analogies to inform them of anything beyond what those analogies were meant to convey, they have misunderstood what analogies are for.

An analogy is a tool used to convey a relationship between two things to someone who is less familiar with the topic. For instance if I want to convey to someone who has not seen a particular animal how it runs, I might say it runs like a deer, an animal the person has seen. As a deer is to its gate, so is this unseen animal to its. That’s a simple analogy. But not all analogies are so simple. When conveying an abstract thought to one unfamiliar with the particular abstract topic, analogies are also sometimes used, but the chance for misunderstanding in these cases increases exponentially. A teacher of metaphysics, for instance, might convey an abstract relationship in some very subtle realm of thought by referring to a somewhat similar relationship between two physical objects. Baba does this all the time. All masters do, including Jesus in his parables. Through the use of some visual figure more familiar to the aspirants, he attempts to give them a rough idea of a like-relationship that occurs in the sphere he is talking about, a sphere otherwise entirely beyond their comprehension. It is natural then that he chooses an object or event more tangible and familiar to the aspirants from their day to day experience to convey his point by such comparison. This teaching tool is ultimately used for purposes of making a point clear that would otherwise be too subtle for the student if conveyed solely in abstract language. But it is imperative to keep in mind that the analogy drawn by the teacher is limited to the common relationship he is pointing to, and that the teacher never means to convey that other parallels can be extracted from the analogy. If I say that a man runs like a deer, I am conveying only the man’s speed and grace while running, but conveying nothing else such as that the man has hair like a deer, or that he is a deer in some metaphysical sense. Similarly if Meher Baba says that the Over-Soul is like a shoreless ocean, he means to convey by comparison with a figure that It is boundless and limitless by giving us a picture we can hold in imagination. For we can all imagine being cast at sea, unable to see a shore. But he does not mean to convey that the Over-Soul is wet, or that there really is a metaphysical ocean. This limit of the conveyance of the analogy is the sense that easily gets lost, for people are eager to apply their imaginations to other possible considerations regarding especially evocative images. This is what we mean by getting lost in the analogy.

This habit carries over into the new physics, which increasingly employs evocative analogies to convey, or even sell, its most abstract ideas to the public. And this needs to be discussed in some depth, for it is here that we find the source of yet another way in which science and spirituality are perceived to have a relationship where no such true relationship exists. One of the reasons that science appears to be getting closer to spirituality has to do with this increasing use of analogy, often carelessly explained to the public. Here I speak of things now commonly imagined as fact, such as the big bang (as a bang), or black holes (as holes), or the fabric of spacetime (as a fabric, one that literally bends like taffy). The examples would fill a book: a God particle (that’s a particle), dark matter (that’s a kind of matter, and dark), superstrings (that are strings), etc. etc.

Science has a way of making its ideas sound important, surprising, and true. And much of science is in fact important, surprising, and true. But the new science, starting with the 20th century, has frankly suffered many problems that it could only attempt to resolve by resorting to analogies, and this new development in science, which is not necessarily a good development, has caused a very serious problem for people’s thinking about the universe and even spirituality.

As theoretical science attempts to convey subtler and subtler ideas to the public, it more and more often gives figures from people’s ordinary experience to convey these simply, or to gain more public or private interest. This makes the science more interesting and more understandable to some extent. But it should be understood that this use of analogy to sell new ideas by appealing to imagination, to make those ideas exciting and evocative to people who are not scientists, is new to science. We could speculate as to the causes of this trend, but what is important is that it has occurred. The problem comes when people who are not scientists begin to contemplate these new analogies deeply, wanting to engage in the new science on some level. As they do they begin to reify or objectify these figures in their imaginations. In other words they actually picture something, and often come to think there is yet more hidden in the terms and images these analogies invoke. In time such people come to think the analogy is saying more than it is, which is to say nothing of the fact that the figure being contemplated only conveys a theory to explain data, not the data. And in contemplating the analogy, as opposed to the actual data that the theory attempts to account for by way of an analogy, data that is often not even understood by the scientists themselves, people frankly become preoccupied in considerations of the analogy, thinking they are penetrating the truth.

To see this problem more vividly, let us consider a hypothetical example of an analogy I might use to convey a theory of mine regarding some data. Let us say that the data is some inexplicable radiation in the cosmos that might possibly come from Novas. Now let us suppose that I as a scientist propose that new Novas somehow form from this excess radiation and that this radiation comes from other Novas. To communicate my idea, I might offer an analogy of cell division. So word goes out that I have a theory that Novas divide like cells. I made this up for illustration purposes only. No one thinks Novas divide like cells. It is merely to convey the problem. Well, this image of cells dividing would certainly give people a picture of what I wanted to convey, that one Nova splits off from another at some point and becomes two. Realize that the radiation I am describing in my analogy is only measured mathematically, with scientific instruments. It has no visual component. Such an analogy is fine as far as it goes, to convey to the public imagination a new theory.

But imagine if people, thinking about this for some time, come to ponder what other things Novas might have in common with cells, since they are ‘analogous’ to cells now. Some might wonder if anything else could be guessed about Novas by studying living cells. Note that nothing can be learned about Novas by studying cells. To think so is to become waylaid by the analogy itself. In fact it should be noted that in this hypothetical example the analogy was only created to convey a single theory, where others might still be forthcoming. It does not convey a fact at all, but only an overly provocative distorted picture of a guess. These are just some of the dangers that getting lost in the scientific analogies currently being promoted by the new science can create. Searching for meaning in analogies mistakenly reifies the analogy itself, and misses what a small role analogies actually play. They are just tools for conveying ideas, nothing more. When people don’t grasp this, analogies becomes as important, if not more important, than the ideas they are meant to convey. In a vivid enough imagination, the analogy can even replace the subject matter altogether.

Now we come to the subject of science and spirituality. This confusion over metaphor, exacerbated by the overuse of metaphor in the new science, has a drastic effect on understanding. Religion has always had metaphors. And in religion, as with the new science, people are apt to idealize the metaphor rather than grasp what its intended significance is. However, there is big difference between metaphors in religion and these in science. In religion the absorption in the metaphor, even when the referent is not fully understood, tends to have its own value. For there is usually hidden truth veiled in religious symbols, and these hidden realities can be increasingly revealed as the aspirant matures. For example, the parables of Jesus are not spurious communications of theories, but in fact hold deeper hidden meaning that can be revealed.

So it is important at this point to see how the now vogue overuse of analogy in the new science has had an effect on people’s spiritual thinking. For they equate these scientific analogies with spiritual ones, for the language is often similarly evocative. It is precisely because metaphor is used in religion, and that in certain of these there is hidden truth, that the new use of analogy in science has been conflated by many people with a kind of new spiritual language. And this is largely what is giving people their false idea that the new science is approaching real spiritual understanding. People are thus taking the dubious analogies of science and searching into these for real divine inspiration. This is a gigantic mistake. For these are only theories, and the analogies science uses to convey them are often spurious and exaggerated, to make what is describable only in mathematical syntax more comprehensible to the public, or literally to sell books and lectures to a public eager for something spiritual from science to replace what it feels it has robbed.

So this misunderstanding about analogy, made worse by the overuse and even abuse of analogy in the new physics to sell its ideas, has a had a bad effect on people’s understanding of spirituality as well. And in fact there occurs in all of this a gradual blurring of the lines between science and religion, due to a similarity in language. But this similarity is coincidental, and not a sign of a genuine link. It is also entirely possible that some overzealous scientists recognize this blurring and exploit it, in order to make science appear to take the place of religion as a new quasi mysticism and sell books. Whether it is intentional or unintentional matters little; the effect is unfortunate for souls that are sincerely seeking answers to deeper questions than usual, and are drawn from the true sources of mysticism provided by the genuine masters, and waylaid by the new science.

Why has science resorted to the use of so much analogy? This is an interesting topic in itself. It is my belief that science is in the final stages of an aging and decaying paradigm of materialism, that no longer relates to the problems it now attempts to solve. To cope with late breaking data, that seems intractable by way of its methods, for which it has no clear explanation, science has begun to rely on devising analogies instead. Ironically, then, the apparent startling nature of many of these analogies, that are increasingly taken as the sign that science is at a point of breakthrough, are in fact signs of its decline. Conditioned as we have become by our culture and times to imagine these new analogies science concocts as remarkable discoveries, imagined by many as genuine objects and events, we are mislead to believe that a new science with special new understanding is at last catching up with the contemplations of the ancient mystics, whose words have frankly seemed equally exotic to us before we understand them. But I believe this comparison is an illusion. And I believe it is one that waylays souls by causing them to muse over words that have the ring of mysticism, but not its character. Science cannot possibly link with the spiritual so long as it searches the screen, to use the Fellini analogy, rather than considering the projector, the Soul.

Those who pick up the vocabulary of the new physics as a way to divine truth either of the universe or the spirit, pick up a vocabulary that in the end divines neither, and, in my opinion, wind up traveling down closed byways, looking for things they will not find, sated for a time perhaps by interesting but ultimately empty entanglements. Better to pick up God Speaks by Meher Baba, or any divine book. Or the works of some other divine fully enlightened master. Why pick up the Tao of Physics, when you can pick up the Tao.

Further Entanglements

Lost in the Analogy

Is it possible that one day a new kind of science, one that is truly new, not just new in terms of its analogies but its focus, could in fact begin to parallel (or come into accord with) some of what Baba says? If science came to recognize that its current fundamental approach, focussed as it is solely toward the screen of the film, is no longer suitable or sufficient to address the deeper issues of causation, then there could in fact be an unparalleled revolution in scientific thinking. What we mean by ‘scientific’ is not merely those beliefs tied to a particular paradigm or approach, but to the level of rigor applied to its analysis of experience in pursuit of answers about the origin and nature of the universe.

There are two ways that things could go for the future of science and spirituality. In one scenario, science refuses to adapt, continues to expand in complexity as the result of an outmoded and dying paradigm, applying metaphors and theoretical entities to band aid over problems no longer within the reach of its methods. Don’t be fooled by talk of photons that think, extra dimensions, and multiple universes. Such speculations are the absurd byproducts of a spent system. If science chooses this route, it will continue down its current path toward what science journalist John Horgan refers to in The End of Science as “ironic science”. By such a course, theoretical physics will fade into irrelevancy, and in its place the old science of real mysticism, renewed once again by the revelations of Meher Baba, will usurp the place of material science. In other words, if science refuses to adapt, mysticism will take its place as the only relevant science anyone pays any attention to.

But if science recognizes it is fated to continue to amass confusions if it does not come to grips with its now dying paradigm, one that has outstripped its usefulness in a new world, then science has a chance to redeem itself, and be rejuvenated. And in such a scenario both mysticism and a new science could easily commingle and share secrets.

But for this happy second scenario to happen, such a truly new science would require a radical new way of looking at the universe and how it interprets phenomena, no less than a complete metaphysical about-face in fundamental perception. Rather than man looking endlessly outside himself for causes, a recipe for infinite regress, man would need to begin with perceived effects and back up toward causes, knowing from Meher Baba that he himself is the fundamental cause of all he observes and tests, and that ultimately that self is One, i.e. God. Such a shocking paradigm shift would give rise to an entirely new model of causation, and around such a model would naturally arise new and previously inconceivable methods of research, based upon different assumptions, and different aims. In such a consciocentric science, one internally rather than externally pointed, it is even possible that physics and psychology could find themselves as pieces of a far vaster continuum. Such a world would see itself not as fundamentally composed of flecks of matter, compelled into motion and order by theoretical (and largely metaphorical) forces, but the natural and ordered emanations of the Self seeking itself. Matter, which is by definition inert, would be redefined as the result of the phenomenon of world-perceiving, rather than its cause as it is today.

If such an aggressive change as this could actually occur, it would mark the start of a science and spirituality that were genuinely in step. For the spiritual mystic, the aim will always be his own mind’s emancipation from Maya and realization of Self. Yet in such a world science might find a niche of its own, fruitful, though not quite as lofty as that of the mystic, of theoretically investigating the vast mechanics by which the evolving mind causes all phenomena. A science of sanskaras, odd as the phrase may sound to us now, would indeed be a science on course with truth, and a friend of mysticism. No longer would science stand in contest with spirituality, with the mystic, with the sage, but might even become a kind of mysticism in its own right, or if nothing more the happy ally and companion of the mystic.