FEATURES Science vs. Spirituality Religion By Deepak Chopra & Leonard Mlodinow


The Spiritual Perspective DEEPAK W


—al Jn


from religion no longer even need an excuse. Science long ago showed us a brave new world that requires no faith in an invisible realm.


h ok usd, dem; wo los whn wkn.


o los otie ra s h ok iti, a aes Cr ug


If it is going to win the struggle for the future, spirituality must first overcome a major disadvantage. In the popu- lar imagination, science long ago discredited religion. Facts replaced faith. Superstition was gradually vanquished. That’s why Darwin’s explanation of man’s de- scent from lower primates prevails over Genesis and why we look to the Big Bang as the source of the cos- mos rather than to a creation myth populated by one or more gods.


So it’s important to begin by say- ing that religion isn’t the same as spirituality—far from it. Even God isn’t the same as spirituality. Orga- nized religion may have discredited itself, but spirituality has suffered no such defeat. Thousands of years ago, in cultures across the globe, inspired spiritual teach- ers such as the Buddha, Jesus, and Lao-tzu proposed profound views of life. They taught that a transcendent domain resides beyond the everyday world of pain and struggle. Although the eye beholds rocks, moun- tains, trees, and sky, this is only a veil drawn over a vast, mysterious, unseen reality. Beyond the reach of the five senses lies an invisible realm of infinite possibility, and the key to un- folding its potential is con- sciousness. Go within, the sages and seers declared, and you will find the true source of everything: your own awareness.


It was this tremendous promise that religion failed to deliver on. The reasons don’t concern us here, because this is a book about the future. It’s enough to say that if the kingdom of God is within, as Christ declared, if nir- vana means freedom from all suffering, as the Buddha taught, and if knowledge of the cosmos is locked inside the human mind, as the ancient rishis, or sages, of India proposed, we cannot look around today and say that those teachings bore fruit. Increasingly few people wor- ship in the old ways around the world, and even as their elders lament this decline, those who have walked away


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The real issue is knowledge and how you attain it. Jesus and the Buddha had no doubt that they were describing reality from a position of true knowledge. After more than two thousand years, we think we know better.


Science celebrates its triumphs, which are many, and excuses its catastrophes, which are also numerous— and growing. The atomic bomb delivered us into an age of mass destruction that


brings night terrors just to contemplate. The environ- ment has been disastrously disrupted by emissions spew- ing from the machines that technology gives us to make life better. Yet supporters of science shrug off these threats as either side effects or failures of social policy. Morality, we are told, isn’t the responsibility of science.


But if you look deeper, sci- ence has run into the same problem as religion. Religion lost sight of humility before God, and science lost its


sense of awe, increasingly seeing Nature as a force to be opposed and conquered, its secrets stripped bare for the benefit of humankind. Now we are paying the price. When asked if Homo Sapiens is in danger of extinction, some


scientists offer hope that within a few hundred years space travel will be advanced enough to let us abandon the planetary nest we are fouling. Off we go to spoil other worlds!


We all know what’s at stake: the foreseeable future looms grimly over us. The standard solution for our present woes is all too familiar. Science will rescue us with new technology—for restoring the environment, replacing fossil fuels, curing AIDS and cancer, and end- ing the threat of famine. Name your malady and there’s someone to tell you that a scientific solution is just around the corner. But isn’t science promising to rescue us from itself? And why is that a promise we should trust? The worldview that triumphed over religion, and


Oracle 20/20 November 2011


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