Yoga and Science

August 30, 2004

Dear Angelina,

I want to comment that the term "science" has shifted its meaning at

least twice within the last couple centuries. Originally it meant

either 'knowledge', 'skill' or 'learning'.

In the 19th and early 20th century it was increasingly used in the

way you describe it, namely methodological knowledge of all kinds of

things including the field of humanities.

This is also the way it is referred to by Yogananda, and is still

being done so by apologists in the spiritual field. The dangers of

this approach are appropriately described by Sri Krishnaprem and

Frithjof Schuon (see quotes further below).

Today, science is almost always used denoting 'natural science' - the

study of physical processes i.e. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

Particularly to people who are aware of this the combination

of 'yoga' and 'science' may sound a bit queer.

See also the entry 'science' in Webster's dictionary of 1913:

http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/science

and the more up-to-date definition in Wikipedia:

GOALS OF SCIENCE

"Despite popular impressions of science, it is not the goal of

science to answer all questions, only those that pertain to physical

reality (measurable empirical experience). Also, science cannot

possibly address all possible questions, so the choice of which

questions to answer becomes important. Science does not and can not

produce absolute and unquestionable truth. Rather, science

consistently tests the currently best hypothesis about some aspect of

the physical world, and when necessary revises or replaces it in

light of new observations or data.

Science does not make any statements about how nature actually "is";

science can only make conclusions about our *observations* of nature.

The developments of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century

showed that observations are not independent of interactions, and the

implications of wave-particle duality have challenged the traditional

notion of "objectivity" in science.

Science is not a source of subjective value judgements, though it can

certainly speak to matters of ethics and public policy by pointing to

the likely consequences of actions. However, science can't tell us

which of those consequences to desire or which is 'best'. What one

projects from the currently most reasonable scientific hypothesis

onto other realms of interest is not a scientific issue, and the

scientific method offers no assistance for those who wish to do so.

Scientific justification (or refutation) for many things is,

nevertheless, often claimed."

Here is an interesting letter by Sri Krishnaprem (b. Roland Nixon), a

British professor who became the first Western Vaishnava, and

eventually a Guru in his own right at his ashram in Mirtola (Almora).

He was also a man of superior intelligence.

The letter is addressed to Dilip Kumar Roy, a noted devotional

singer, writer, and disciple of Sri Aurobindo.

----------------

28th January, 1932

My dear Dilip,

You ask me to explain why I think that modern analytic psychology and

subjectivist physics are going to be a more effective veil to Reality

than the old Materialism. Well, I can't give proof -- but can only

make a few suggestions. Religious apologists made a great mistake in

abandoning their defences and retreating to a supposedly

impregnable 'Hindenburg Line' of subjective experiences. They

relegated the truth of religion to the reign of the inner self, then

largely unexplored, just as the Theosophists located their Mahatmas

in unexplored Tibet. And they bolstered up their position with all

sorts of pragmatic arguments such as that prayer was a reality

because of the peace it brought etc. Now this was cowardly and

therefore foolish....Nayamatma balahinena labhyah. In fact, except on

that plane where subject and object are one, there can be nothing

subjective without an objective counterpart, and so what was the

result? Baffled for the moment, the attackers (and let me say it *is*

an attack and no mere judicial investigation -- whatever some may

pretend: merely look at the treatment meted out to any scientist

however eminent who reports favourably on psychical phenomena; "Poor

old Oliver Lodge," they will say, "he did good work once but he went

potty in the end over table-turning"), the attackers, I say, then set

to work to study the nature of the fortress in which the apologists

had so unwisely shut themselves up. They have now developed and are

still developing a technique which enables them to account so

plausibly for subjective psychic or mystic experiences that most

superficial thinkers are convinced.

First, the work of anthropologists of the Frazer school collected a

mass of information about savage magico-religious rites (which they

understood only in an exterior manner -- compare, for instance, Sea-

brook's inside account of African Negro magic with the account given

by any orthodox anthropologist) and then it was easy to show that the

same primitive (and therefore presumably ridiculous) ideas persisted

in modern religions.

And the the subjective experiences. Experiments with drugs showed

that to some extent similar states (to the mystic's experiences) can

be produced in the laboratory. Other experiences are dealt with in

the manner satirized in one of G. K. Chesterton's fantasies: A man

shipwrecked from his yacht found himself in the compound of a lunatic

asylum and was promptly assumed to be a patient. Every explanation he

tried to give of his arrival was assumed to be delusion about

shipwreck. Thus, if the mystic escapes the Scylla of Freudian

repressed sensuality, he is caught in the Charybdis of Jung's 'racial

unconsciousness' in which, for some reason, all the religious symbols

of the past are supposed to be preserved like flies in amber and to

issue unexpectedly, causing the appearance of mystic experience.

But I must come to the point. There is a saying in Vishva-Sara

Tantra; "What is there is here, what is not here is nowhere":

yadihasti tadamutra yannehasti na tat kvachit -- If God exists in the

subjective world then he exists equally in the objective world. But

the objective side has generally been abandoned by the defenders. If

the working of the mind in mystic experiences is explained as has

been the working of Nature, the the ordinary educated man will feel

that the last stronghold is gone and that all farther belief is

impossible. *And it will be so explained away.* This is quite

certain. There is a universal tendency to think that when the process

*by which* a thing happens has also been explained, then the reason

*for which* it happens has also been explained. Why? Because the

mind, as you know, is just as much mechanical (and as little if you

like) as the outer world. It is merely more subtle: *sukshmah*: both

are mere modifications of *prakriti* and explicable in similar ways.

The real subject (and object, too) is the *jivatma* (soul) and that

is for ever beyond the ken of mechanistic science because it is in a

*different dimension*. (I use dimension only metaphorically). Now the

modifications of *prakriti* form a closed circle as it were, Guna

guneshu vartante, as the Gita says. Science moves in the sphere of

phenomena, that is, of the *gunas*, and there will always be an

apparent causal sequence among all phenomena in the plane of

phenomena and there is small reason to suppose that the end will ever

come and, even if it did, it would be back at the beginning again --

the snake with its tail in the mouth. In time, science will no doubt

come to admit certain apparently marvellous phenomena now denied, but

they will be found also to be explicable along similar lines to all

other natural phenomena. All phenomena can be explained in two ways:

one in their own plane, and the other at right angles to it, as it

were, that is, in a different dimension. In their own plane all

phenomena follow mechanical laws. This is the mechanism by which they

take place (for, after all, everything, however 'marvellous' has to

take place in some definite way) and this mechanism is in the realm

of science. The other explains the reason *for which* they happen and

this is the sphere of the mystic or yogi. This possibility of two-

fold explanation applies, I believe, to all phenomena

whether 'physical' or 'mental' or 'psychic'. (I use 'psychic' here in

its ordinary meaning -- somewhat different from that which it bears

in Sri Aurobindo's system, I believe). But when an explanation has

been given along the lines of the first method there is an almost

universal tendency to think that the phenomena in question have been

completely explained -- not to say explained away. Hence my forecast

of a thickening of the veil, for it is the second method alone which

brings the seeker through other planes into the region of real

causation and of the Ultimate Reality. And this method requires an

act of faith at the outset and an attitude of mind throughout that is

quite different from that of most scientists.

I have said nothing so far about the modern tendencies in physics.

The subjectivism of Jeans, Eddington and others is no doubt nearer

the truth than the nineteenth-century conceptions. But the crucial

point is not whether the universe is compelled of miniature billiard-

balls vibrating in an elastic jelly or of geodesics in an expanding

soap-bubble of space-time, but whether its basis is to be found in

*Sachchidananda* or merely in a tenuously incomprehensible but

ultimately *dead* square-root of minus one; and on this point

physics, however subjective, can give no answer.

One last word and I have done. I think you will find in what I have

said above concerning the two-fold explanation of phenomena the

meaning of certain apparent paradoxes in the Gita. For instance, you

will find there two sorts of statements about the way in which things

happen:

Na kartritvam na karmani lokasya srijati Prabhuh

Na karmaphala-samyogam svabhavas-tu pravartate.

That is:

The Lord produces neither agency nor actions nor yet the union of

action and fruit. All is a manifestation of Nature.

And then, on the other hand:

Isvarah sarvabhutanam hriddeshe'rjuna tisthati

Bhramayan sarvabhutani yantrarudhani mayaya.

That is:

O Arjuna! the Lord, seated in the hearts of all, whirls around by His

maya all beings as if they were mounted on a machine.

The first couplet refers to the first type of explanation in which

Sri Krishna plays no part, being outside the series; the last to the

second type in which He plays the only part. Tameva sharanam gaccha,

O Dilip! (Take refuge in Him alone).

Affectionately yours,

Krishnaprem

------------

Here are some excerpts on science and religious faith from the works

of the famous French Sufi master Frithjof Schuon who basically uses

the same logic:

"There is certainly no reason to admire a science which counts

insects and atoms but is ignorant of God; which makes an avowal of

not knowing Him and yet claims omniscience by principle. It should be

noted that the scientist, like every other rationalist, does not base

himself on reason in itself; he calls "reason" his lack of

imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the "data"

of reason." [sufism: Veil and Quintessence, p. 128, note 12].

"One of the effects of modern science has been to give religion a

mortal wound, by posing in concrete terms problems which only

esoterism can resolve; but these problems remain unresolved, because

esoterism is not listened to, and is listened to less now than ever.

Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows

clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy; it is thus

compelled to falsify by imperceptible degrees its own perspective,

and more and more to disavow itself. Its doctrine, it is true, is not

affected, but the false opinion borrowed from its repudiators corrode

it cunningly "from within"; witness, for example, modernist exegesis,

the demagogic leveling down of the liturgy, the Darwinism of Teilhard

de Chardin, the "worker-priests", and a "sacred art" obedient to

surrealist and "abstract" influences. Scientific discoveries prove

nothing to contradict the traditional positions of religion, of

course, but there is no one at hand to point this out; too

many "believers" consider, on the contrary, that it is time that

religion "shook off the dust of the centuries", which amounts to

saying, that it should "liberate" itself from its very essence and

from everything which manifests that essence.

The absence of metaphysical or esoteric knowledge on the one hand,

and the suggestive force emanating from scientific discoveries as

well as from collective psychoses on the other, make religion an

almost defenseless victim, a victim that even refuses more often than

not to make use of the arguments at its disposal. It would be

nevertheless easy, instead of slipping into the errors of others, to

demonstrate that a world fabricated by scientific influences tends

everywhere to turn ends into means and means into ends, and that it

results either in a mystique of envy, bitterness or hatred, or in a

complacent shallow materialism destructive of qualitative

distinctions. It could be demonstrated too that science, although in

itself neutral, -- for facts are facts -- is none the less a seed of

corruption and annihilation in the hands of man, who in general has

not enough knowledge of the underlying nature of Existence to be able

to integrate -- and thereby to neutralize -- the facts of science in

a total view of the world; that the philosophical consequences of

science imply fundamental contradictions; and that man has never been

so ill-known and so misinterpreted as from the moment when he was

subjected to the "X-rays" of a psychology founded on postulates that

are radically false and contrary to his nature." [Light on the

Ancient Worlds, p. 37-38]

http://www.frithjof-schuon.com/sc-foi-engl.htm

------------

> No godrealized

> soul will claim and reveal his enlightment.

Oh, I think he might, but take care if he does so without being

asked :-)

> THOSE WHO REJECT THE SCIENIFIC APROACH TOWARDS SPIRITUALITY AND

> RELIGION ARE THE ONES, WHO ARE TRYING TO DECEIVE CREDULOUS AND

NAIVE

> HUMANS WITH A WEAK MIND.

Not quite so. Science describes the functioning of physical processes

and nothing else. What you can do is question statements, quote

spiritual authorities and form opinions or find out probabilities,

but not apply science to matters which are supposed to be beyond

physics or the source of it.

If yoga and religion stand for a supreme truth, it would cease to be

one by the very success of explaining it in scientific terms.

Yours truly,

Hendrik

Don Salmon · August 14, 2010

Hi,

I was just copying out a passage from Sri Krishna Prem and decided to search the net to see if by chance it was already available. I landed here and found to my utter delight that Hendrik had quoted it along with an excellent passage from F. Schuon. If anybody reads this and knows Hendrik, please have him contact me. My wife and I are working on videos critiquing the materialistic view so often wrongly assumed to be necessary as a foundation for scientific investigation. One of our videos can be found on youtube by searching "Beyond the Matrix: The Only Way Out"

Thank you.