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human, can enter the domain of objective science. The exclusion is complete. Science is objective, not subjective or projective. If we ask what purpose do the stars in the sky serve?; the answer of astronomy is: The stars serve no purpose whatsoever. In the realm of science any other answer would be absured. To think of any purpose or goal for the universe (or for any parts of it) is totally alien to science, it is incompatible with it. (Knoff, New York, 1971).
Any yet deep within us there is some vague feeling beyond doubt, akin to faith, that the universe (with its billions of galaxies, and each galaxy with billions. of stars) and human life, has some purpose, some transcendental goal Again, we would be overstepping the bounds of science, and indeed be untrue to science, if we were to believe that "prayers" could influence the course of physical phenomena. Prayers cannot effect or alter material things That is so. Yet, who can assert that in the realm of the mind a "prayer", earnest and heart-felt, is meaningless? To quote Gandhiji: "Prayer has been the saving of my life. Without it I should have been a lunatic long ago. My autobiography will tell you that I have had my fair share of the bitterest public and private experience. They threw me into temporary despair, but if I was to get rid of it, it was because of prayers....I am indifferent as to the form (of prayer)....I have given my personal testimony. Let every one try and find that, as a result of daily prayer, he adds. something new of his life, something with which nothing can be compared." (See also William James, The Varieties of Religions Experience, Lecture XIX, Longmans (1919).
Science declares that the universe, including man's life, has no purpose, but the "I" certainly feels otherwise. For the "I", purpose (teleonomy) is everything; without it there is nothing. What is the bridge, the connecting link between objective science and subjective "I"? (How to resolve the flagrant contradiction between the determinism that science predicates and the freedom of the will which the "I" directly experiences?). It raises the deepest of all questions: What is "I"? How does the "I" (mind, consciousness) interact with the body? There is no solution to this profoundest of all "mysteries." (We are no nearer to an understanding of the mystery than the insight and wisdom provided by the Upanishads, as emphasized by Erwin Schroedinger in his remarkable book, My view of the World (1964). The current developments in quantum physics, cybernetics, and molecular biology emphasize that-if anything-the "mystery" is far deeper than ever thought before. It is one thing to recognize that we have no "solution", but altogether another thing to cavalierly assert (as some people do) that there is no "problem", no "mystery." The distinction is important. Otherwise, there is a real danger that science which man has created, and which is mankind's greatest intellectual and most fruitful enterprise, may, in the end, smother his spirit instead of enlarging and enriching it.
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