Science and spirituality were never opposites

On August 23, 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander set down near the Moon’s south pole. No country had landed there before, and only three had ever landed on the Moon at all. It was a clean piece of engineering: orbital mechanics, guidance software, a descent that had to work the first time.

The same culture that did that gave the world yoga and Advaita Vedanta, and it doesn’t seem to think it has to choose. In the West we usually assume we do. Either you trust the telescope or you trust the meditation cushion. Pick a side.

I never could. I started meditating at six, and by fifteen I had more questions than the teachings could answer, so I went into physics to find out what was actually true. I expected physics to settle the argument one way or the other. It didn’t. What it did was show me that both sides, at their best, are doing the same thing.

Two inquiries, one discipline

Science asks what is true out there, and how we know. The contemplative traditions ask what is true in here: who or what is doing the knowing. Those are different questions. They are not opposing questions.

And at their best they share a method. You don’t take anyone’s word for it. You look, you test, you report what you find, and you let someone else check it. A good physicist and a serious contemplative both distrust claims that can’t be examined. Where each one fails is the same place too: when inquiry hardens into belief.

Spirituality that refuses to be tested turns into mythology. Science that refuses to look at experience leaves out the one instrument every measurement passes through, which is a conscious human being.

The same reality, from two sides

Advaita Vedanta says the separation between you and the universe isn’t ultimate. Physics says something that sounds close in its own language. The atoms in your body were made in stars. The fields that make up matter don’t stop at your skin. The line between you and everything else is real at one scale and harder to find at another.

Science and spirituality are describing the same reality from two sides. One measures it from the outside. The other knows it from the inside. They complement each other, and each one is incomplete without the other.

A step up, not a middle ground

The usual peace treaty between science and spirituality is a compromise: a bit of each, somewhere in the middle. I don’t think that works. The middle of a line is still on the line.

The move that works is vertical. You hold what each side got right and step to a view that includes both. Science gives us an evolving universe, 13.8 billion years of matter becoming chemistry, chemistry becoming life, life becoming mind. The traditions give us direct access to the ground that all of it rises from. Put those together and a new question appears: if evolution is still running, what has it already placed in us that hasn’t emerged yet?

The question isn’t how to get more out of the human being we already are. It’s what the human being is still becoming.

That question is the center of my work at The New Human University. It’s a question about evolution, not optimization. The old traditions glimpsed parts of the answer. Science can now study them. A country that can land on the Moon and still teach yoga understands something the rest of us are catching up to: you don’t have to give up one way of knowing to take the other seriously.

Adapted from an essay I first published at The New Human University, August 23, 2023. Read the original ↗