When my Buddhist friend was talking about science, he meant science based on classical physics, the physics that Isaac Newton founded in the seventeenth century and Albert Einstein completed in the first decades of the twentieth century. And his uneasiness was justifiable. Most biology and psychology and virtually all of our social sciences are carried out day-to-day on a Newtonian basis. Newtonian science has given us some strong prejudices—such as determinism, strong objectivity, and materialism—that are appropriate when we investigate the order of the outer world. But the purpose of spirituality and of religion is to investigate our inner reality, to establish order in our inner life. The spiritual quest is to find happiness beyond discord; it is an investigation of consciousness. Since spirituality requires that consciousness play a causal role, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make room for spirituality within objective, materialist science.

This was May 1996, and I, too, was right, because science had changed. Classical physics was replaced in the 1920s by a new physics called quantum mechanics. And now, after seven decades, this new physics is causing a major revision in how we think of living systems, and in how we do biology and psychology and thus all social sciences. In the new paradigm, there is a window of opportunity, a visionary window, through which to recognize that consciousness plays a major role—then spirituality can be reconciled with science.

The word quantum comes from a Latin word meaning quantity, and signifies a discontinuously discrete amount. In classical physics, all things vary in a continuous manner, but in quantum physics things change in both continuous and discontinuous ways. Continuous change is materially caused, even in quantum mechanics. But what brings about discontinuous change? If we posit that consciousness causes the change, we have the proposition that prompts the shift from a divisive paradigm to one that integrates science and spirituality. But there is more to consider here.

We have made enormous progress in science: Why have we not made similar progress in religion despite the efforts of spiritual traditions for millennia? In science, once a few scientists discover the laws of universal order, the job is done; the rest can read those scientists' work, and that is enough to be able to appreciate the harmony of the outer world. In the realm of spirituality, however, great strides have been made by figures such as Buddha, Plato, Lao Tzu, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, but their discoveries have not brought harmony and happiness to everyone. We remain by and large, even today, a violent and unhappy bunch. Why is this so? The objective of spirituality takes much longer to accomplish because one person's spiritual realization and happiness does not proliferate to others. Finding happiness and establishing inner harmony are fundamentally an individual process.

The Sanskrit word yoga means "union, integration." I have coined the phrase quantum yoga to signify the integration of the quantum message into a comprehensive new worldview that unites science and spirituality in a personally meaningful way. The word dialogue originated from two Greek words: dia, meaning "through," and logos, meaning "word"; thus, dialogue generally means communication through the word. Physicist David Bohm defined dialogue as "a free flow of meaning between people in communication." Can there be dialogue between science and religion in this Bohmian sense?

Initially, such a dialogue between science and religion seems rather unlikely. Both science and religion are endeavors in the search for truth. Both are based on the intuition that truth is unique, not pluralistic. The problem is that even when we haven't gone far enough in our search, we try to impose our limited truth upon others. This is what many exoteric religions have done traditionally; now science is doing the same thing, which has led to the present polarization of science and religion.

Seeking a Basis for
Reconciliation

One track for a possible dialogue between science and religion has arisen from the observation that spiritual and material traditions often use similar metaphors to elucidate their concepts. In the seventies, physicist Fritjof Capra wrote the influential book, The Tao of Physics, which delved deeply and revealed many parallels between concepts of modern science and spiritual traditions. If modern science uses the same metaphors as spiritual traditions, perhaps science is already spiritualized to the extent it needs to be. Capra and others (for example, the founders of the Deep Ecology movement) have enunciated a new, ecological worldview with parallels to animistic views of certain forms of shamanism—God is immanent everywhere, all things are interconnected and alive in spirit. In this view, there is no need to think in the divisive, reductionist terms of Newtonian science or to postulate a transcendent being.

Philosopher Ken Wilber sees the ecological worldview as the proponent of a descending-to-the-eco (ecology/world) "motto," in contrast to the ascending-from-the-ego "motto" of the Christian worldview. According to Wilber, the Christian worldview emphasizes transcendence, an ascending from the concerns of the ego and the world, whereas the postmodern worldview promotes immanence, a descending from concerns about God and transcendence. But, as Wilber correctly says, reality is not dualistic; reality is an integration of the immanent within the transcendent. Postmodern ecological science, however, has been unable to integrate the ascending and descending aspects of reality. In fact, the social effect of this new age brand of spirituality has been to enable opportunists to co-opt spirituality for selfish material pursuits.

Experimenting with another track for integration, many scientists have tried to extend traditional science to explain the subjective half of the world: consciousness, the self, spirituality, and moral values. For these scientists, explaining consciousness is a matter of understanding how the brain behaves as a complex material machine; consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter. These scientists ask: What in the brain's complexity makes it conscious, or makes ethics relevant? Can an epiphenomenon of matter have the appearance of causal efficacy and even of creativity and spirituality?

Chaos theory also has shown promise as a context for a science/spirituality dialogue. Chaotic systems are those that are so sensitive to their initial conditions that their behavior cannot be predicted for long; little inaccuracies or omissions in reading the initial values of positions and velocities multiply exponentially to make the behavior of chaotic systems appear creative. Small changes in the environment enable chaotic systems to display new, self-organizing behavior (order). Could spirituality be the apparently creative behavior of a chaotic system?

But if spirituality is an epiphenomenon, or by-product, of chaos, and if chaos is the norm, then once again the vision of religion—to replace the suffering and disorder in our inner reality with happiness and order—is undermined. The spiritual vision makes sense only if happiness is the order, and chaos, or unhappiness, is the epiphenomenon.

Furthermore, a reconciliation between science and spirituality in terms of concepts such as ecology or chaos theory is precarious. Wilber argues the folly of founding spirituality on scientific notions. Science, he points out, is an evolutionary enterprise. New theories rise to invalidate older theories. A perennial philosophy cannot be based on such ephemeral notions as a theory of emergent consciousness in the brain. Back again to the impasse.

Can there be dialogue and eventual reconciliation between science and spirituality? Wilber is right: As long as we hold onto a material-based ontology, there is no scope for real dialogue, let alone reconciliation, for the simple reason that science deals with phenomena, while spirituality is concerned with what is beyond phenomena.

The Integration of
Metaphysics

The crucial question is: Must the metaphysics of science be based on material realism? The current paradigm of physics has in fact shifted beyond Newtonian science to quantum physics. Quantum physics is based on the notion of quanta—discrete quantities of energy and other attributes of matter, such as angular momentum. The consequences of this physics for the description of matter are deep and unexpected. For example, matter is described as waves of possibility. Quantum physics calculates possible events for electrons and the probability of each of these possible events, but cannot predict the unique actual event that a particular measurement will precipitate. So who or what precipitates the unique actuality from the myriad possibilities? Or, to use the physicists' favorite jargon, who or what "collapses" the possibility wave into the actual electron in actual space and time in an actual measurement event?

It took seven decades for us to see that this question— which I call the visionary window—has the paradigm-shifting consequence of reconciling science and spirituality. But the basic idea is extremely simple: The agency that transforms possibility into actuality is consciousness. It is a fact that whenever we observe an object, we see a unique actuality, not the entire spectrum of possibilities. Thus conscious observation is a sufficient condition for the collapse of the possibility wave. Mathematician John von Neumann argued decades ago that consciousness is a necessary condition for that collapse. All objects obey quantum mechanics; this includes any machine we may employ to facilitate our observation. Any such measuring-aid machine, however, when coupled to a quantum possibility wave, makes up a larger wave of possibility that includes the machine. In order to initiate collapse, an agency is needed that is outside the jurisdiction of quantum mechanics. For von Neumann, there is only one such agency: consciousness.

This potent idea, however, became bogged down in a nasty debate because consciousness is misunderstood in the West. In Western materialism, consciousness collapsing a possibility wave is a paradox because consciousness, as an epiphenomenon of matter (the brain), has no causal efficacy. How can it cause a quantum possibility wave to collapse? And if consciousness belongs to a dual world, then the decisive objection against dualism—how can "ghostly" nonspatial mind interact with weighty, spatial matter?—comes back to haunt us. It took all of seven decades for the light of idealism—where only consciousness is real—to be brought in to clear up the matter.

Here, then, is my thesis: When we introduce consciousness as the ground of being, as transcendent, as one, as self-referent in us, which is what the spiritual teachers of the world have taught, then the quantum debate can be settled and the paradoxes resolved.

And there is more. Positing consciousness as the ground of being calls forth a paradigm shift from a materialist science to a science based explicitly on the primacy of consciousness. In this science, matter has causal efficacy but only to the point of determining possibilities and probabilities. Consciousness ultimately creates reality because the choice of what is actualized, event-to-event, is always up to consciousness. Therefore, consciousness can and does imbue reality with its creative purpose, as many Christian theologians have intuited (those who do not hold dogmatically to the creationist view). This choice of actuality from possibility is the discontinuity at the heart of reality; it is the source of discontinuous change that allows nature to be creative—the transcendent breath of the divine that moves the natural world of matter. The world is only seemingly continuous, Newtonian, and material. In reality, it is discontinuous, quantum, and conscious.

Most importantly, such a science leads to a true reconciliation with spiritual traditions because it does not ask spirituality to be based on science, but asks science to be based on the notion of eternal spirit. Spiritual metaphysics is never in question. Instead, the focus is on cosmology—how the world of phenomena comes about. The new science can include subjectivity as well as objectivity, spiritual matters as well as material ones. This new science I call "science within consciousness" or "idealist science."

The Integration of
Cosmologies

In the Middle Ages, influenced by Aristotelian thinking, Christian belief maintained that the universe was anthropocentric. The Earth was regarded as the center of the universe. Humans were regarded as superior to animals. These cosmological components of Western religion were demolished by science. Copernicus demonstrated that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. Later work took the demolition of Christian cosmology even further: the sun is only an average-sized star on the edge of one galaxy among a hundred billion other galaxies. We are insignificant on the cosmic scale. Scientists now make a good case for a big-bang creation of the universe some fifteen billion years ago. From that initial creation, the evolution of galaxies, star systems, planets, and life are all seen as the play of chance statistical fluctuation. Darwin's argument that humans have evolved from animals, and his further contention that all evolution is a play of mere chance and the necessity of survival, further diminishes the importance of being human, and suggests that human pursuits such as religion are meaningless.

What is the Christian answer to the big bang? Since the big bang is a singularity in some theories of cosmology, and since a singularity is a breakdown of physics, the Christian scientist may see in the big bang the signature of the divine. But there are also ways in physics to avoid the singularity. The most vocal Christian answer to Darwinism is still creationism, which in view of the fossil data does not make sense to the modern mind.

I suggest that in esotericism (whether it is called Vedanta, mysticism, perennial philosophy, or monistic idealism) is the resolution of the ontological debate between science and religion. And perhaps an awareness of consciousness as the ground of all being offers a resolution of other cosmologies as well.

A number of coincidences in cosmology suggest that the universe evolves toward the manifestation of life and sentience—an idea that is called the anthropic principle. When we do science within consciousness, we see that the anthropic principle makes perfect sense: the universe is a play of consciousness.

The materialist cosmology is not wrong, but it's not the complete story. In the completion of the story, the cosmological struggles of both science and religion are found to converge, and integration becomes possible.

The Integration of
Methodologies

The methodology of religion is faith, while the scientific method is: Try it and see the result. This great divide seems impossible to cross. If we consider the esoteric religious traditions, however, the divide between the methodologies of religion and science is not so great after all. In fact, there are obvious parallels. Although experiential and subjective, the esoteric traditions of both East and West also use the scientific method of "try it and see for yourself." They do not define the spiritual search as a matter of acceptance of dogma. Faith is reinterpreted not as blind belief in this or that system of knowledge, but as an intuition to be followed by a commitment to look, to investigate.

Science within consciousness allows us to see that neither science nor spiritual traditions have emphasized an important aspect of their endeavors. When we emphasize this hidden component, it becomes clear that science and spirituality have been using the same method all along. What is this unrecognized component? It is creativity—the discovery of or insight into new meaning within old or new contexts. Until recently, scientists have been much too carried away with emphasizing the rational and continuous processes of scientific investigation. But creativity is nonrational and discontinuous. And science involves creativity in a major way. "I did not discover relativity by rational thinking alone," said the immortal Einstein.

Spiritual traditions have always known the importance of the nonrational—for example, the intuition that becomes faith—but they, too, have not universally emphasized the suddenness and discontinuity of spiritual insights. Science within consciousness enables us to develop a theory of creativity in which science is the result of creative investigation in the outer arena, and spirituality is the result of creative investigation in the inner arena.

There may be a protest: Spiritual traditions don't all follow one path, one technique; each has its own methods. In creativity, one starts with a burning question and the answer comes in sudden insight. This may describe how a seeker finds truth through what Hindus call the path of knowledge (jñana yoga in Sanskrit); but Christianity uses the paths of devotion to God and ethical action, and loving God and acting ethically are not what we normally identify as creative endeavors. Can all these methods be classified as inner creativity?

Is loving a creative act? Do ethics demand a protracted process, of which insight is the crown jewel? I argue that when we recognize creativity in love and ethics, the misconception that Christianity is dualistic evaporates. In other words, the dualism of exoteric Christianity comes largely from the methodology it uses. Because the methodology initially requires a separation between God and ourselves, we tend to forget that there is unity beyond the separation, and that the method eventually takes us there.

So not only can we have a dialogue; I contend that the development of science within consciousness can give us an integration of science and religion, an integration of metaphysics, cosmology, and methodology.

One may ask, isn't the idea that consciousness is the ground of all being just another metaphysical idea? Shouldn't we think twice before declaring this the termination of our search for truth? Esoteric religions agree that no verbalizable metaphysics can be the final truth, for the final truth can only be discovered directly by each of us. However, some metaphysics are more inclusive than others, and therefore are better fingers pointing to the moon of truth.

Amit Goswami will be a featured presenter at
IONS' Spirit Rising conference in July 2001.

Amit Goswami is an IONS fellow, professor of physics at the University of Oregon, and author of five books, including the acclaimed The Self-Aware Universe. This article is adapted from his latest book, The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment. (Quest Books, 2000). Dr Goswami, and his wife, Uma Krishnamurthy, MD, will lead an IONS trip to India, entitled "Quantum Consciousness, Spirituality, and Creativity," in December 2001. For more information click here.