The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

29. Breaking the Mould: Spirituality and New Developments in Science and the Psychology of Consciousness

This paper was never published, but I have been developing these concepts over the past ten years for presentations at various training courses for psychotherapists. MY INTENTION in this paper is to attempt to contrast the Newtonian mechanistic scientific viewpoint with some recent, more open-minded scientific developments in the psychology of consciousness, brain function, memory and information storage, etc. These are quite separate endeavours going on in various centres around the world, but I believe they are all moving in the same direction. In a short paper such as this, it is not possible for me to describe these in detail. Rather, I think these endeavours provide a glimpse of a much more advanced evolution of human understanding that is coming in the not too distant future and they all point towards a convergence of science and spirituality. Certainly this seems to be what Babuji Maharaj is telling us in ‘Whispers from the Brighter World’. Professor Gary Schwartz, who is working in Arizona and is involved in some of these new developments, has stated that there are three main scientific world views: • Matter is primary and Energy is secondary and only an aspect of this. (Newton) • Matter and Energy are equivalent and are interchangeable. (Einstein) • Energy is primary and what we call Matter is simply organized Energy. (Heizenberg) It is the latter view that would be generally accepted by the scientists involved in these recent scientific developments. 29. Breaking the Mould: Spirituality and New Developments in Science and the Psychology of Consciousness 403 The Renaissance A major revolution in European thinking was made possible by the rediscovery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of a large body of Greek manuscripts. It was at this time that the ancient Greek writings of the atomists Leucippus and Democritus resurfaced and this led Galileo to make the statement which changed the western approach to science from then onwards: Scientists should restrict themselves to the essential properties of material bodies – size, shape, number, weight and motion. Only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world. (Tarnas 263) This statement made possible the extraordinary technological achievements which we see all around us in the world today. But, as R.D. Laing pointed out: Galileo’s programme offers us a dead world: out goes sight, sound, taste, touch and smell, and along with them have since gone aesthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness , spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. Hardly anything has changed our world more during the past 400 years than Galileo’s audacious programme . We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice. (Capra 40) Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in England around the same time, went even further. He is said to be the father of empirical science and stressed the importance of direct experiment. If Socrates had associated knowledge with ‘virtue’ in his search for wisdom, Bacon equated knowledge with ‘power’. This had profound implications for the nature and purpose of science. A marked divide was now opening up between the east and the west. Where Indian and Chinese thinkers had looked inwards, the new western scientific view was to look outwards, to map and increasingly control the world of nature. This was also a strongly male, patriarchal perspective and women, to this day, have never participated in this to the same extent (Capra 40–1). The shift in scientific direction brought about by Galileo and Bacon was pivotal for the influence it had on the development of western science and technology. This was brought to fruition by 404 The Writings of Ivor Browne two further towering figures of the seventeenth century – Descartes and Newton. In Descartes’ youth there was a sceptical crisis in French philosophy ; the old-world view was crumbling. Struggling with doubt of every kind, at the age of twenty-three he experienced a startling vision, a sudden flash of intuition, in which he saw, the ‘Foundations of a marvellous science’. Following this, he felt the only thing to do was to strip away everything, all traditional knowledge , what he could perceive and even his own body, until he reached the one thing he could not doubt – the existence of himself as a thinker. From this came his famous statement: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). He decided that...