Alex,
Thought you and others might be interested in this excerpt from an Utne (great site: utne.com) interview with author Ken Wilber:
" . . .the tragedy is that people have confused materialism with science, though they're not the same thing. Where we come to an impasse with "proving" religious truth, and reconciling religion and science, is around the mythological--or exoteric--forms of practice. These myths are immune to the scientific method because they cannot be confirmed or disproved. However appropriate they may have been at the time that they arose,they just don't stand up to modern tests. When you talk about Moses parting the Red Sea, most scientists (and many of the rest of us) would say, "Let's see evidence for that," which is pretty slim, to put it mildly. That's not to rule out occasional miracles, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
However, in all the world's great religions there is also a mystical--or esoteric--core, which is concerned not with beliefs, myths, or dogma, but with direct spiritual experience. None of the founders of the world's great religions handed down myths; they had a direct experience: Moses and the burning bush, Christ's "I and My Father are One," Buddha under the bodhi tree. The whole point of their religious practices is experiential: "Do this in remembrance of me," "Let this consciousness be in you which is in Christ Jesus," or "Repeat the
enlightenment of Gautama Buddha by following his injunctions." And mystical experiences do meet the criteria for the scientific method.
The instructions for practicing Zen Buddhism are clear: If you want to test this knowledge, cross your legs, sit like this, and observe the mindstream, much as a mathematician might look at symbols. And as you continue to do zazen for a number of years, certain interior apprehensions, or satori, come to the fore. These experiences are then struck against the combined knowledge of the community (sangha) to determine their veracity. This is exactly what happens in the general scientific approach.
Mystics have always claimed that they were practicing a kind of science that can be reproduced by those who follow the experiment. The fact that these forms of mystical knowledge have been handed down shows that these experiences are reproducible--not private, interior notions that can't be communicated. Science has managed to reproduce itself for two to three hundred years, while mystical science has been doing it for at least two to three thousand years. This is not insignificant."
Rick |
