Imants Barušs
Imprint
Academic, 2007, 155pp., - ISBN
9781845400743
Reviewed
by Chris Clarke
The Future of Science
Does
spirituality lie essentially outside science, or can science be extended so as
to encompass it? What is clear at
present is that the dominant power structures of science are set up so as to
exclude spirituality, so that when Barušs talks in this book of “forbidden
science”, every one of the large proportion of scientists that care about
spirituality or consciousness knows what he means. Barušs
formulates the issue around the concept of “materialism”: the idea that “all of
reality is ultimately made up of very small particles that collide with one
another in a manner analogous to the collisions of billiard balls”. With this
definition, “materialism is dead, [but] the bones of materialism continue to
rattle along the corridors of academia.” Science, he implies, must expand
beyond its imprisonment by materialism.
The outlines of the argument are by now familiar.
Materialism, in the sense just defined, is contradicted both by the data of
parapsychology and by those of quantum physics. Personal experiences of altered
states of consciousness provide persuasive material for an enlargement of our
world-view beyond materialism. Issues of comparability and validity are
challenging, but challenges of this nature are just what the methods of
science, including behavioural sciences, are set up to address. The author is a
true scientist, and one of the delights of this book is the way in which his
scientific curiosity keeps bubbling out to descriptions of surveys carried out
under his supervision to investigate aspects of deeper experience: “we need to
experiment in order to develop our understanding
and find out what works” (my emphasis).
Two particular points stand out from Barušs’ treatment, both drawn from the writings of Franklin
Merrell-Wolff. First, by “understanding” he means a process that includes both
“meaning” and “depth”;
the latter being “the inexpressible element of transcendent states of
consciousness that makes them what they are”. He regards this sort of
understanding as part of the essence of science, and so claims that science,
from its own nature, is seeking a transcendent form of knowing. The way to this
is then described in a second point, which is the main focus of the book. Barušs suggests that a person can come to be united with
the transcendent through a path that Wolff called “mathematical yoga” – a path
that is especially suited to the scientist. It involves not just doing
mathematics, but also philosophy (which supplies meaning and value) and yoga,
in the sense of “a complete sacrifice of everything that [one] is and has.”
Through such a sacrifice (a word which, as Ravi Ravindra has reminded us, has the etymology of “making
sacred”) we can reach the door of the transcendent. The threshold, however, marks an absolute
shift: we cannot pass it by the effort of our untransformed selves; rather, the
transcendent has to come upon us and transform us.
If, as Barušs is
suggesting, there is here a continuous path leading from a part of scientific
practice (mathematics) to self transformation, a path running from its
“differentiated pole” in science to its “indeterminate” pole in the
transcendent, then this would open up a completely new vista for science. I
would like to comment on this first in the light of my own experience of
mathematical physics, and then with regard to the nature of this account of
spirituality.
First it must be made clear that what is meant by
“mathematics” here is not the performance of numerical calculations, but the
exploration of, and discovery of pure mathematical structures, structures that
are entirely abstract and so no longer tied to concrete sensory experience.
Wolff claimed that the quality of “depth” grew precisely to the extent that the
sensory and conceptual components of experience diminished – reflecting, of
course, the via negativa
approach to the transcendent found in many mystical traditions. So the
abstraction of mathematics, by taking us away from the senses, could bring us
closer to depth. Thus mathematics might provide the first stages of
training for self transformation, by separating us from the sensory. But does
it really work like this? For the “transcendent” that Wolff is talking about it
is necessary to leave behind concepts
as well as the senses. But when I am engrossed in a mathematical problem I am
constantly juggling concepts. Of course, everything in the end depends on the
“aha”, the “seeing” of what the concepts lead to, but this is preceded by days
of preoccupation with moving around the furniture. In the simpler days of
mathematics it was perhaps different, as illustrated by Plato’s dialogue Meno which
portrays Socrates facilitating a process whereby a humble slave comes to see a
mathematical truth. On that picture, the
preliminary scene-setting could be ignored in comparison with the concluding theoria, the vision of a
mathematical truth, in the realm of the transcendent. For the modern
mathematician, on the other hand, it could often be the case that the
scene-setting is the main work, and what results is more a conceptual theory
than a pure theoria. I would agree, however, that in the
case of mathematical physics the whole process agreeably weakens one’s hold on
what is commonly called reality: classical logic, space, time and causality are
seen as just particular conventions and both the smallness and the creativity
of the human intellect are disclosed.
This leads me to compare the nature of the spirituality of Wolff’s mathematical yoga with other spiritual aspects of science. Perhaps it is not so much the element of abstraction that the scientist will recognise as spirituality, but the element of sacrifice. Science is a process of repeatedly putting my ideas to a test that lies outside myself. The question posed with each new idea is not, is this a satisfying idea, but, does it agree with the results of experiment? And it can be answered only by subjecting my idea to examination with scrupulous rigour and precision. The most admirable scientists are those who match a passion for their ideas with a readiness to tear them up and start again when (and ultimately it is always when, not if) they are found wanting. This passionate detachment is surely a moral quality, and I would suggest a spiritual one. But it is an embodied spirituality, with its path initially set into engagement with, and often a love of, the perceived material world, coupled with a renunciation of any personal ownership of the truth of that world.
The two spiritual paths, of abstraction and
engagement, could well lead to the same end, and Barušs
describes many other different forms of knowing that find a place both in
scientific work and in spiritual development. This book reinforced my view that
science can and must transform itself so as to embrace and follow a more
explicit recognition of its spiritual elements. We presently live among
confused premonitions of what might then appear, when scientists and scientific
communities begin to weave together experimentation, intuitive knowing,
rigorous deduction, passionate detachment, and love for kosmos, the universal order, in
its overarching majesty and in its intimate particulars.
Chris Clarke is Visiting Professor in the
School of Mathematics,