Monday, August 19, 2013

Spirituality and Science OR Spirituality vs Science?


One of the most deeply rooted and age old debates in our society is the one between spirituality and science. For centuries, spiritual seekers have associated science with man trying to question the work of God and maybe play God himself, and the Scientific community has given very little credit to spirituality.

I choose to use the word spirituality and not religion because by talking about spirituality and science, I wish to focus on the subjects of faith and rationality, experience and exploration and try to find any connection that might exist between the two. And in this context, organised religion can be kept aside for a while.

Spirituality and science are often seen as opposing concepts and in general people who speak for science are against spirituality and vice-versa.
But when I try to examine the nature of spirituality and science, I do not see them as opposing concepts at all, rather to me they seem to be deeply inter-linked. Rather than being two completely detached and different ways of looking at the world, they seem to me to be two steps of the same process -- of understanding all that is life.

To me spirituality is synonymous with experience. Spirituality and spiritual conclusions/inclinations/faiths are usually a direct result of an individual's experiences and instinctive voices and science is exploration into the logical reasoning behind an experience. So to me it seems that spirituality is the first step of 'being' which is nothing but the act of experiencing life.

And once an individual has experienced, he/she wants to look into the rationality of that experience. To explore and find a logical reason for what the experience of the instinctive voice tells them.
So in this way of thinking, spirituality and science are two steps of the same process of being a human. First you experience and then you try to understand and find a reason for that experience.

In other words spirituality and science seem to be nothing but the two halves of our brains trying to understand and comprehend the unified reality in two different ways. The right side spiritually experiences the world and then the left rational half sets on the process understanding that experience.



And so conflict between spirituality and science in the world, to me, is representative of the conflict between the left and right side of our brains. The key to life in any context seems to be balance, but our world which is representative of our states of minds is clearly out of balance. We seem to be living in a world dominated by the Left side of our brains. And how are we to get a complete and unified view of the world when there is conflict between the two halves of our brains? Only when the left and the right side come together with their understandings and conclusions can we hope to achieve a complete picture of the world by the harmonious use of our brains entirely.

Logic, mathematics, and science gives us numbers, figures and infinite possibilities but one thing science can not do is reduce these infinite possibilities to one outcome. That is where you and I, the observer comes in. Every moment in our lives presents us with infinite choices but it is our choices that reduce all these infinite possibilities to once concrete tangible outcome in the real world.

I very strongly feel that human beings trying to explore life and universe through science without taking the observer/spirituality into consideration will never work. Here is the analogy that time and over again leads me to this conclusion -  Let us imagine the entire universe as one big jig-saw puzzle, and human species being a part of the universe is one of the jig-saw pieces. Now what is happening is that this one jig saw piece called human has pulled itself out of the overall picture and is trying to find the 100% in the 99% of the puzzle, which it will never find. Only when human scientific exploration puts the human piece of the puzzle back into the equation will the puzzle be complete, not otherwise.

Scientific development on a lot of fronts seems to be meaningless, and on a lot of other fronts it seems destructive because we are exploring possibilities of our universe without considering who is exploring?! And why did we begin the exploration in the first place?!
I strongly hold that human exploration on scientific and technological front will find the direction and reason that it clearly lacks currently only when spirituality is rightly recognised as the first step of human exploration and is deeply embedded into our scientific and technological endeavours.

Spirituality and science are not opposing in nature as it might seem at first, rather they are two steps of one unified movement of human existence and one can't be complete without the other; one is blind without the other.





















                                                          

Friday, July 19, 2013

Humanity as an extension of myself

Physics, philosophy, history, chemistry, biology, agriculture, geology,
archaeology, anthropology, art, education, psychology, sociology, and the list goes on and on. Humans have had to catalogue and categorise information about life under numerous names based on the nature of information to bring some sense of order to a seemingly random and chaotic universe.  

Life is so immense and complex that it is impossible for one individual to explore all the different facets of life and hence different people working in different fields, exploring many different facets of life works perfectly on an individual level and on a collective human level. 
Such diversity in interests among people helps build a more holistic view and understanding of life for the whole of humanity at large. At the same time it enables individuals who are caught up in their individual fields of work to understand life on its different fronts for which they don't have the time. 
Humanity could very well be visualised as a man with many faces and limbs, each one with its own special power and interest, and this is where I suddenly find myself thinking if this is precisely what Krishna was referring to when he showed his all superior self to Arjuna according to Indian mythology 'Mahabharata'. Forgive me for pulling you to mythological realm without any prior warning.  

It is self-empowering and comforting for me to see the whole of humanity as an extension of my own self rather than as a fragmented divided system. Also I wouldn't dare put one field over another as being more important, because it is only when knowledge from these different fields come together that we can begin to get a complete picture of life and its meaning. 
So here goes out a big heartfelt gratitude to all those scientists, anthropologists, historians and all other professionals whose curiosities and hard work have given me the understanding of the world I have today. 



Thursday, July 18, 2013

Hate crime and not Criminals


To begin let us first consider a hypothetical situation where a society is in a state of total collapse, where there is a lack of food, water, and money. 
In this given situation I think most of us; in fact all of us would resort to stealing, looting, fighting, and killing for survival if we had to. 
But in a day to day normally functional society, most of us will not need to resort to such behaviour for most of our lives. Most people are found saying things like – “Stealing is wrong and I would never steal. And if someone does he/she should be punished for it”, without realising that they would never steal because they never find themselves in a position where it becomes a choice between stealing or dying and that may be some other people steal and kill because they find themselves in such situations. I think in such drastic scenarios most of us would steal and kill if we had to.
But in a normally functional society that we live in on a day to day basis most of us will not need to resort to such behaviour for most of our lives. And most of us judge other people’s actions as right or wrong from our individual level of comfort, without realising that we have created a society in which everybody is selfishly competing with one another for survival, and in such a paradigm everybody is constantly trying to secure more resources for themselves and lesser for everybody else. In such a selfish and competitive paradigm people who succeed get rich and continue to get richer, while people who didn’t have the situations working in their favour lose and stay poor. 
So poverty is part of our social structure, it is woven into the very fabric of human society. If there are rich people, there will be poor people. Unless of course we evolve to a point where we all freely share all our resources equally.  
And in this poverty stricken daily reality of the majority of the world’s population living under poverty line, struggle for survival is a day to day reality and just like any other human being would in such situations, these people resort to whatever means they have to, in order to feed and protect themselves and their loved ones. 
So looking at the broader picture we are all as individuals equally responsible for the crime in the world, because we let our selfishness blind us from seeing that in our individual pursuit for more, we let some of our brothers and sisters slip through the cracks and live in conditions that no human or animal should live in. 
And if pushing fellow humans to such situations of desperation wasn’t enough, we then punish them by the law for doing something that we all would have done in similar situations. 
And in doing so, we are doubly wronging our fellow human beings. First we push them to a point of desperation and then we punish them for doing something that we all would have done in such desperate situations.  
Of course I cannot deny that there are some sociopathic people out there who commit crimes because they love it. But I have to admit that most of the sociopathic tendencies are bred in the horrible conditions that the poor of our society live in. And so even in case of such sociopathic people, it is the environment or the condition that is to be blamed which is poverty. 
And poverty is the direct result of uneven distribution of wealth which arises out of each one of our individual attitude of trying to secure more for ourselves and less for everybody else. 
In conclusion, I think arresting and locking up individuals who have committed crimes might be necessary, at least till a situation has been understood and resolved. But it is nowhere close to ridding the society of crime. 
An unhealthy act is an outcome of an unhealthy mind, and an unhealthy mind is an outcome of an unhealthy environment. We need to examine the environment. 

Through this thought I wish to at least make people think twice about this issue, if not rid the society of crime completely.