Spirituality? What a Load of Nonsense
Often during our spiritual journeys, the spiritual seeker finds themselves challenged quite heavily by those that don’t believe in anything more than gross matter. Moreover, they themselves may cling to certain scientific dogma that they were raised with. “Why would you believe this spiritual stuff when science has brought us this far? We have cars and factories and computers, because of science.” To paraphrase Leo Gura of Actualized.org, “something being useful doesn’t necessarily make it True. After all, lies are useful.”
“I believe in logic and rationality. None of this airy fairy garbage.”
Who’s to say that the Truth can be attained through logical thinking? Consider love: people work jobs they hate for decades to provide for their families. One would even push someone they love out of the way of a car that was about to hit them, absent thought of throwing away their own life in the process.
Love is illogical. Love is irrational. Yet it’s the driving force that governs a huge chunk of the actions that we take in our daily lives. We are far from logical creatures . So why do we place logic on a pedestal and say “this particular way of thinking is what I will use to shape what I know to be true and untrue?”
“Religious people are close-minded”
The atheist will demonise the devout Christian or strict Muslim for not being able to think outside of their worldview. For their lack of open-mindedness. "How can you base your whole life around a book that may or may not be true?"
Yet is the materialist not guilty of the exact same epistemological error? Nobody wants their worldview challenged. It’s uncomfortable.
The atheist might not be believing a holy book blindly, or basing their beliefs on the phrase "Jesus said", but instead will ground their reality with "science says" or "studies show." In this way, science has become the modern day religion.
But how much has science changed in the last 500 years? How much will it change in the next 500 years? How often can science be influenced by who’s funding it? How many 'scientifically backed' fad diets are out there that all seem to contradict each other?
This isn’t to say that science is all bad, or that it hasn’t made valuable contributions to humanity — of course it has. The point is to acknowledge that science still has its limitations.
Grounded spiritual seeking is science distilled
The materialist often asks for the spiritualist to prove the existence of God to them.
If God could really be proven to someone else, it would have been done a long time ago. The only reliable way God can be proven is through first hand experience.
Imagine you have a telescope in a room and you have observed an unknown planet by looking into it. Without looking into the telescope, one group of people in the room swear blind that that planet is there. The other group of people in the room say “nonsense! There are no other planets. If there were, science would have shown us that!”
But the spiritual seeker is the one that looks into the telescope themselves. With a deep curiosity and radical open-mindedness, they explore reality with the scientific instrument that is their own awareness. The culmination of the seeker’s findings occur by conducting regular spiritual practice and observing the results through direct experience.
Teachers and books may play their part, but when all is said and done, the highest source of authority is one’s own direct experience, not by experiments others — whether that may be Einstein or Jesus — have done.
For when we come Home, it will only be ourselves that can declare it so.
There is no purer science than the search for the Ultimate Reality.
