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SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY : DIMENSIONS
Sampooran Singh
The epochal discoveries of modern science are : (a) objective science has started recognising the dimensions of consciousness; (b) at a deep and fundamental level, the 'separate parts of the universe are connected in an intimate and immediate way; (c) the cosmos is an integrated and self.energizing system, a totality that creates itself; (d) every “thing" in the cosmos is a coherent "event" and every event is the summed result of all other events; and (e) all the concepts we use to describe nature are not fea. tures of reality, but creations of the mind-parts of the map, not of the territory. The world-view implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the harmonious interrelatedness we observe in nature. Wills W. Harman concludes, “Western society is drifting toward increasing entropy, economic and technological chaos, ecological disaster, and ultimately, psychic dismemberment and disintegration. Nothing less than an epistemological revolution will stem these tendencies". While man discovers the mysteries of spaceage and atomic-age, he also stands at the edge of an abyss of total annihilation. The extinction of life is at the very core of man's anxiety.
The present objective science is the search for truth in the outer world, so it deals with a fragment. We shape our "reality" (object) from the miniscule amount of information our sensory mechanisms, with the help of some artifacts, gather; we then graft (called coherent superpositions of different webs) the corresponding recalled memory (subject) on the object; and this leads to distortion of the fact which is called the distorted perception. In technical parlance, it is called the "crisis of perception". The crisis
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