Mr David Brooks says: “In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.” Are they really? In fact, the question is: Can they at all, knowing the way the two operate? In any case, this kind of talk is not totally new, particularly after the eventful decline of Materialism in the wake of Quantum Physics. But to equate the whirling of electrons, á la Fritjof Capra, with the dance of Shiva is a hastened irrationality which does not know that they belong to different categories of experience, altogether different in their calling and in their build-up, that science and spirituality have different methodologies for seeking knowledge. The talk of the ‘parallel’ between the two, western science and eastern spirituality, looks to be more a patent promotional talk than a search for truth, and it cannot have any deeper connotation than that of simply pleasing or entertaining oneself. So also is the talk of the origin of Quantum Mechanics in the omnipresent Reality of Sachchidananda; at the best, it could be an indistinct and remote shadow of the thick shadow of the transcendental Reality thrown on our mental consciousness, on our sense of perception. We should remember that the spiritual experience in its truest contents and implications could be an experience, for instance, of the universal Self, of the vast cosmic consciousness, of the One in All and All in One, of the wave of Bliss on the ocean of Bliss, and so on. It should therefore be understood that these experiences cannot come in the immediate purview of empirical rationalism of a scientist whose concern is chiefly to discover the ‘how’ of the process of the physical world. In the same way, the discovery of the power locked in the bosom of the atom and producing a weapon out of it belongs to another domain, and spiritual or theological pontification will avail nothing worthwhile in this respect to promote them. The two belong to different human faculties and mixing them up will be a mistake on our part. Instead, what is necessary is to sponsor the true potential of each faculty of ours to its utmost possibility which itself can be a desirable progressive march of possibilities, of the human potentials in several directions. Presently, let me just quote here one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters to bring the issue in its proper focus: (Letters on Yoga, pp. 195-99)

One feels here a stream from the direct sources of Truth that one does not meet so often as one could desire. Here is a mind that can not only think but see—and not merely see the surfaces of things with which most intellectual thought goes on wrestling without end or definite issue and as if there were nothing else, but look into the core. The Tantriks have a phrase paśyantī vāk to describe one level of the Vak-Shakti, the seeing Word; here is paśyantī buddhi, a seeing intelligence. It might be because the seer within has passed beyond thought into experience, but there are many who have a considerable wealth of experience without its clarifying their eye of thought to this extent; the soul feels, but the mind goes on with mixed and imperfect transcriptions, blurs and confusions in the idea. There must have been the gift of right vision lying ready in this nature.

It is an achievement to have got rid so rapidly and decisively of the shimmering mists and fogs which modern intellectualism takes for Light of Truth. The modern mind has so long and persistently wandered—and we with it—in the Valley of the False Glimmer that it is not easy for anyone to disperse its mists with the sunlight of clear vision so soon and entirely as has here been done. All that is said here about modern humanism and humanitarianism, the vain efforts of the sentimental idealist and the ineffective intellectual, about synthetic eclecticism and other kindred things is admirably clear-minded, it hits the target. It is not by these means that humanity can get that radical change of its ways of life which is yet becoming imperative, but only by reaching the bed-rock of Reality behind,—not through mere ideas and mental formations, but by a change of the consciousness, an inner and spiritual conversion. But that is a truth for which it would be difficult to get a hearing in the present noise of all kinds of many-voiced clamour and confusion and catastrophe.

A distinction, the distinction very keenly made here, between the plane of phenomenal process, of externalised Prakriti, and the plane of Divine Reality ranks among the first words of the inner wisdom. The turn given to it in these pages is not merely an ingenious explanation; it expresses very soundly one of the clear certainties you meet when you step across the border and look at the outer world from the standing-ground of the inner spiritual experience. The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge Science organises takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process.

I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After all the triumphs and marvels of Science the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast and variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number, is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organised and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened,—it has shown us a new, a material Maya, aghaţana-ghaţana-paţīyasī, very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there actual, irresistibly organised, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because Science has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila. I say “begin” because the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is the Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible.

I have once before told you what I think of the ineffective peckings of certain well-intentioned scientific minds on the surface or apparent surface of the spiritual Reality behind things and I need not elaborate it. More important is the prognostic of a greater danger coming in the new attack by the adversary, the sceptics, against the validity of spiritual and supraphysical experience, their new strategy of destruction by admitting and explaining it in their own sense. There may well be a strong ground for the apprehension; but I doubt whether, if these things are once admitted to scrutiny, the mind of humanity will long remain satisfied with explanations so ineptly superficial and external, explanations that explain nothing. If the defenders of religion take up an unsound position, easily capturable, when they affirm only the subjective validity of spiritual experience, the opponents also seem to me to be giving away, without knowing it, the gates of the materialistic stronghold by their consent at all to admit and examine spiritual and supraphysical experience. Their entrenchment in the physical field, their refusal to admit or even examine supraphysical things was their tower of strong safety; once it is abandoned, the human mind pressing towards something less negative, more helpfully positive will pass to it over the dead bodies of their theories and the broken debris of their annulling explanations and ingenious psychological labels. Another danger may then arise,—not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual—mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the material darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude.

Art, poetry, music are not yoga, not in themselves things spiritual any more than philosophy is a thing spiritual or Science. There lurks here another curious incapacity of the modern intellect—its inability to distinguish between mind and spirit, its readiness to mistake mental, moral and aesthetic idealisms for spirituality and their inferior degrees for spiritual values. It is mere truth that the mental intuitions of the metaphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short of a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flashes, shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light. It is not less true that, looked at from the peaks, there is not much difference between the high mental eminences and the lower climbings of this external existence. All the energies of the Lila are equal in the sight from above, all are disguises of the Divine. But one has to add that all can be turned into a first means towards the realisation of the Divine. A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience; yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what?—a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power, a Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother. Similar touches can come through art, music, poetry to their creator or to one who feels the shock of the word, the hidden significance of a form, a message in the sound that carries more perhaps than was consciously meant by the composer. All things in the Lila can turn into windows that open on the hidden Reality. Still so long as one is satisfied with looking through windows, the gain is only initial; one day one will have to take up the pilgrim's staff and start out to journey there where the Reality is for ever manifest and present. Still less can it be spiritually satisfying to remain with shadowy reflections, a search imposes itself for the Light which they strive to figure. But since this Reality and this Light are in ourselves no less than in some high region above the mortal plane, we can in the seeking for it use many of the figures and activities of life; as one offers a flower, a prayer, an act to the Divine, one can offer too a created form of beauty, a song, a poem, an image, a strain of music, and Page 199 gain through it a contact, a response or an experience. And when that divine consciousness has been entered or when it grows within, then too its expression in life through these things is not excluded from yoga; these creative activities can still have their place, though not intrinsically a greater place than any other that can be put to divine use and service. Art, poetry, music, as they are in their ordinary functioning, create mental and vital, not spiritual values; but they can be turned to a higher end, and then, like all things that are capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, they are transmuted and become spiritual and can be admitted as part of a life of yoga. All takes new values not from itself, but from the consciousness that uses it; for there is only one thing essential, needful, indispensable, to grow conscious of the Divine Reality and live in it and live it always.

RYD

http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/17/stories/2008051750010100.htm

Einstein’s letter auctioned

LONDON: A letter in which Albert Einstein termed God as the product of human weakness sold at an auction here on Thursday for more than £200,000.

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Apropos of Einstein’s views on matters outside science, let me quote one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters in the following: (Letters on Yoga, p. 202)

The minds of these people [the scientists] are too much accustomed to deal with physical things and things measurable by instruments and figures to be much good for any other provinces. Einstein's views outside his domain are crude and childish, a sort of unsubstantial commonplace idealism without grasp on realities. As a man can be a great scholar and yet simple and foolish, so a man can be a great scientist but his mind and ideas negligible in other things.

And here is another: (pp. 210-11)

As for Jeans, many would say that his conclusions are not at all legitimate. Einstein's law is a scientific generalisation based upon certain relations proper to the domain of physics and, if valid, valid there in the limits of that domain, or, if you like, in the general domain of scientific observation and measurement of physical processes and motions; but how can you transform that at once into a metaphysical generalisation? It is a jump over a considerable gulf—or a forceful transformation of one thing into another, of a limited physical result into an unlimited all-embracing formula. I don't quite know what Einstein's law really amounts to, but does it amount to more than this that our scientific measurements of time and other things are, in the conditions under which they have to be made, relative because subject to the unavoidable drawback of these conditions? What metaphysically follows from that—if anything at all does follow—it is for the metaphysicians, not the scientists to determine. The Vedantic position was that the Mind itself (as well as the senses) is a limited power making its own representations, constructions, formations and imposing them on the Reality. That is a much bigger and more intricate affair shooting down into the very roots of our existence. I think myself there are many positions taken by modern Science which tend to be helpful to that view—though in the nature of things they cannot be sufficient to prove it.

I state the objections only; I myself see certain fundamental truths underlying all the domains and the one Reality everywhere. But there is also a great difference in the instruments used and the ways of research followed by the seekers in these different ways (the physical, the occult and the spiritual) and for the intellect at least the bridge between them has still to be built. One can point out analogies, but it can be maintained very well that Science cannot be used for yielding or buttressing results of spiritual knowledge. The other side can be maintained also and it is best that both should be stated—so this is not meant to discourage your thesis.

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An abridged version of the letter from Albert Einstein to Eric Gutkind from Princeton in January 1954, translated from German by Joan Stambaugh, published by Manchester Guardian UK, is as follows. The letter was sold at Bloomsbury auctions on Thursday 15 May 2008 and fetched a record £170,000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/13/peopleinscience.religion

... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein

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£170,000 for a letter which declares that the word ‘God’ is nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses! Something is rotten in the State of Denmark—and there is no doubt about it. If that is the case then I don’t know what is going to mould post-human destinies of which we speak with such great expectations.

~ RYD

I would like to add some more lines from The Human cycle.

"What then will be that state of society, what that readiness of the common mind of man which will be most favorable to this change, so that even if it cannot at once effectuate itself, it may at least make for its ways a more decisive preparation than has been hitherto possible? For that seems the most important element, since it is that, it is the unpreparedness, the unfitness of the society or of the common mind of man which is always the chief stumbling-block. It is the readiness of this common mind which is of the first importance; for even if the condition of society and the principle and rule that govern
Society are opposed to the original change, even if these belong almost wholly to the vital, to the external, the economic, the mechanical order, as is certainly the way at present with human masses, yet if the common human mind has begun to admit the ideas proper to the higher order that is in the end to be, and the heart of man has begun to be stirred by aspirations born of these ideas, then there is a hope of some advance in the not distant future. And here the first essential sign must be thee growth of the subjective idea of life,--- the idea of the soul, the inner being, its powers, its possibilities, its growth, its expression and the creation of a true, beautiful and helpful environment for it as the one thing of first and last importance. The signals must be there that are precursors of a subjective age in humanity’s thought and social endeavor.

These ideas are likely first to declare their trend in philosophy, in psychological thinking, in the arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, in the main ideas of ethics, in the application of subjective principles by thinkers to social questions, even perhaps, though this is a perilous effort, to politics and economics, that hard refractory earth matter which most resists all but a gross utilitarian treatment. There will be new unexpected departures of science or at least of research,-- since to such a turn in its most fruitful seekings the orthodox still deny the name of science. Discoveries will be made that thin the wall between soul and matter; attempts there will be to extend exact knowledge into the psychological and psychic realms with a realization of the truth that these laws of their own which are other than physical, but not the less laws because they escape the external senses and are infinitely plastic and subtle. There will be a labour of religion to reject its past heavy weight of dead matter and revivify its strength in the foundation of the Spirit. These are sure signs, if not of the thing to be, at least of a great possibility of it, of an effort that will surely be made, another endeavor perhaps with a larger sweep and a better
Equipped intelligence capable not only of feeling but of such signs we can see at the present time although they are only incipient and sporadic and have not yet gone far enough to warrant a confident certitude. It is only when these groping beginnings have found that for which they are seeking, that it can be successfully applied to the remoulding of the life of man. Till then nothing better is likely to be achieve than an inner preparation and, for the rest, radical or revolutionary experiments of a doubtful kind with he details of the vast and cumbrous machinery under which life now groans and labours." ( pg 233, Conditions for the Coming of a spiritual Age, The Human cycle)

Sri Aurobindo has a number of times emphasised the distinction between the Spirit and mind in all this writings including the Life divine and The synthesis of Yoga. It is sad that there is still so much confusion about it among the intellectuals. Again he repeats in The Human cycle what the Spirit means.

"The true secret can only be discovered if in the third stage, in an age of mental subjectivism, the idea becomes strong of the Mind itself as no more than a secondary power of the Spirit’s working and of the Spirit as the general Eternal, the original and, in spite of the many terms in which it is both expressed and hidden, the sole reality, ayam atma brahma. Then only will the real, the decisive endeavour begin and life and the world be studied, known, dealt with in all directions as the self-finding and self-expression of the Spirit. The only will a spiritual age of mankind be possible. To attempt any adequate discussion there is no fruit, would need another volume or two of essays; for we should have to examine a knowledge which is rare and nowhere more than initial. It is enough to say that a spiritual human society would start from and try to realize three essential truths of existences which all Nature seems to be an attempt to hide by their opposites and which therefore are as yet for the mass of mankind only words and dreams, God, freedom, unity. Three things which are one, for you cannot realize freedom and unity unless you realize God, you cannot possess freedom and unity unless you possess God, possess at once your highest self and the self of all creatures. The freedom and unity which otherwise go by that name, are simply attempts of our subjection and our division to get away from themselves by shutting their eyes while they turn somersaults around their own centre. When man is able to see God and possess him, then he will know real freedom and arrive at real unity, never otherwise. And God is only waiting to be known, which man seeks for him everywhere and creates images of the Divine, but all the while truly finds, effectively erects and worships images only of his own mind-ego and life-ego. When this ego pivot is abandoned and this ego-hunt ceases, then man gets his first real chance of achieving spirituality in his inner and outer life. If will not be enough, but will be a commencement, a true gate and not a blind entrance."
( pg 239, Conditions for the coming of the Spiritual age, The
Human Cycle)

James Randerson, Science Correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, reports on 16 May 2008 about the Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s disappointment to own the Einstein letter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/16/peopleinscience.controversiesinscience

The evolutionary biologist Prof Richard Dawkins admitted he was 'disappointed' that he had not topped the bidding for a letter by Albert Einstein in which the famous physicist branded religious beliefs as "childish superstitions", it emerged today.

The letter fetched a record £170,000 at auction yesterday – four times higher than the previous price for an Einstein letter – after being bought by an overseas private collector.

Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair, which handled the sale, was deluged with interest in the lot, which had been given a guide price of between £6,000 and £8,000.

"What surprises me is the extraordinarily low estimate the auction house originally gave," Dawkins told the Guardian. He said he was disappointed to have lost the bid but added, "In a way I'm delighted that such a thing should be so highly valued."

Dawkins said he had planned to purchase the letter with his own money and present it to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

"This letter was about something very important to Einstein I suspect."

Dawkins was cagey about the precise value of his bid saying only that, "it was substantially higher than the estimate but substantially lower than the final price."

Unable to attend the auction, he put in his bid remotely. "I was closeted all afternoon unable to hear any news. I didn't get any news of what had happened until I logged onto the Guardian website just after midnight and saw the news item there."

Rupert Powell, managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, said the lot had received unprecedented interest from around the world. "[The sale price] beats the world record for an Einstein letter by about 4 times," he said. "It's a massive difference."

The auction house installed an extra 11 phone lines in order to include international bidders. Powell said the atmosphere in the saleroom went from excitement, to disappointment – as various bidders dropped out – to disbelief at the rocketing price.

The £170,000 value is merely the so-called hammer price; with auction house fees and other costs the buyer paid a total of £207,600.

The letter clearly illustrates Einstein's views on the supernatural. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and had declined an offer to be Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion, like all others, is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Powell said he thought the letter had captured buyers' imagination because it is such a clear exposition of the great physicist's views.

"One of the greatest scientific/philosophical minds of all time is succinctly putting his belief in fundamental questions," he said. "Those questions about God and religion and Judaism are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago when he wrote it."

The £170,000 price tag is exceptional. In 2007, a set of 13 letters and three holograph post cards was sold for $60,000 (£30,000) and an Einstein letter on world government went for $9,000; and in 2006 a six-page scientific essay plus a letter fetched £300,000

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This looks to be a great thing for the Western mind,—and astonishingly so even with the dawning of the 21st century. Einstein spoke of the mistake he had made in the formulation of the General Theory of Relativity, of introducing a constant corresponding to the repulsive force to hold on to the Steady State Theory of the Universe of the time. While that mistake comes in the rightful professional debate, and is therefore perfectly understandable, the present “God a weakness of the human mind” is as much a mistake as was Newton’s absolute space-and-time. We must retain the scientific gains of their great discoveries, but immediately dismiss them when extended to domains to which they do not belong. We must go by our own perceptions. And, though not easy or direct or immediate, there are ways also of seeing the authenticity of perceptions, following well worked out procedures.

~ RYD

The Guardian article dated 13 May 2008 carries the following:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion.

One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it.

Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture.

His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories.

"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote.

In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

~ RYD

Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times dated 17 May 2008 the following apropos of the Einstein letter:

From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.

The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as describing the unidentified buyer as having “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” Among the unsuccessful bidders, according to The Guardian newspaper, was Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist.

The price makes the Gutkind letter one of the best sellers among Einstein manuscripts. That $404,000 is only a little less than the $442,500 paid for the entire collection of 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 1996.

At that same auction a paper by Einstein and his best friend, Michele Besso, attempting a calculation that would later be a pivotal piece of his crowning achievement, the General Theory of Relativity, went for $398,500.

Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at the California Institute of Technology and head of the Einstein Papers project, said she was not surprised that the Gutkind letter, which was known to Einstein scholars, fetched such a high price.

“It is an important expression of Einstein’s thoughts and views on religion, on Judaism, on his views about God and religious texts,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said the letter, which was not written for publication, was “concise and unvarnished” and more straightforward than the metaphors he usually turned to in public.

Gerald Holton, a historian of science at Harvard and a longtime Einstein expert, also was not surprised. He said Einstein’s marketability had been improved by the last few years of hoopla about the 100th anniversary of relativity, which included his selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Century in 2000, and several new biographies. Dr. Holton described the letter as “a feat of eloquent Credo in short form.”

Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility,” he once said.

“If something is in me that can be called religious,” he wrote in another letter, in 1954, “then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”

Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God — as a metaphor for physical law; in his famous rebuke to quantum mechanics, “God doesn’t play dice”; and in lines like the endlessly repeated, “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.

Trying to distinguish between a personal God and a more cosmic force, Einstein described himself as an “agnostic” and “not an atheist,” which he associated with the same intolerance as religious fanatics. “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”

The problem of God, he said, “is too vast for our limited minds.”

Einstein’s latest words offer scant comfort to the traditionally faithful.

In the letter, according to the A.P. account, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

As for his fellow Jews, he said that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

He claimed a deep affinity with the Jewish people, he said, but “as far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

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Einstein specifically said he does not believe in God!

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ~ Albert Einstein

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Here is the image of the Einstein letter published in the NYT:




~ RYD

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ~ Albert Einstein


Good for you Albert!!!! Of course Einstein did not believe in a narrow personal God that favored a certain ethnic or religious group. Einstein's God was the god of Spinoza, who through nature pervaded the entire universe. It can be called a qualified Advaita Vedânta. As I remember it the intellectual highway finds its destination in the impersonal Brahma. Einstein was certainly traveling down that road.

It was interesting to see this article written by David Brooks (neo-conservative political commentator whose own patronage to god includes the politics of empire with its sacraments of smart bombs) but I guess these ideas have disseminated widely enough through the popular culture as to be accessible to folks of all stripes

I certainly agree with Sri Aurobindo that physics and metaphysics are separate discourses with different practices which do not necessarily intersect. The mapping of empirical scientific observation onto the metaphysical realm is as over the top an enterprise as charting the physical universe through mystical topography of scripture. While one does find physical confirmation of a really weird Universe in the New Physics, that does not necessarily imply that these descriptions of reality confirm or deny
the phenomenological accounts of the mystical world given to us by yogis. It just means the Universe is a very strange place and much more is possible than we thought before quantum or relativity physics existed. Everyone can make as much as they want to out of that.

The other side of this equation however is the idea of purna or integral which embraces both metaphysical and physical realities. (As Mother says two sides of the same reality)

So while the equation of third person objective descriptions of reality with first person phenomenological accounts is not easily done. IMO a more promising route to explore the
intersection of science and spirituality is through those scientific domains which explore the phenomenological. (aka. psychology, cognitive science) The Dalai Lama has been engaged in some very interesting conversation with researchers in these fields. Who knows? We can never gather from passages written in the 1920s what Sri Aurobindo would have to say today, about opening a similar dialog between IY and the new domains of science.

Rich: “The mapping of empirical scientific observation onto the metaphysical realm is as over the top an enterprise as charting the physical universe through mystical topography of scripture…”

RYD: Well said, but perhaps the desired overlapping or the embracive ‘purnatva’ can occur only if, to go by Sri Aurobindo’s insight, paśyantī buddhi, that is, the seeing intelligence opens out. In any case, it is not scripture but a living dynamic experience that can avail something of the kind.

Rich: “…a more promising route to explore the intersection of science and spirituality is through those scientific domains which explore the phenomenological…”

RYD: I wonder. When we speak of true spirituality, we speak of the cosmic consciousness, the Self, the Atman, the static and dynamic Reality, the silent mind, the play of Purusha and Prakriti, and states rising one above the other, the supra-physical, superconscient realms, etc, etc.

Rich: “Who knows? We can never gather from passages written in the 1920s what Sri Aurobindo would have to say today, about opening a similar dialog between IY and the new domains of science.”

RYD: Surely, it will be presumptuous on our part what Sri Aurobindo would have said about the new domains of science and with them the new possibilities that are opening out today. But his observations belonged not to the 1920s but to the post-Quantum Mechanical period. The birth of Quantum Mechanics took place in the mid 1920s and Sri Aurobindo wrote those letters in the 1930s, in full awareness of the latest scientific developments as we can discern from some of his letters as well as evening talks of the period. The point is, these still remain different approaches.

In any case, we must also remember that there are certain fundamentals and they always stand valid. I’ll take the case of Einstein’s god born of human weaknesses. He says: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” To dismiss, for instance, crucifixion, as something “childish” is to display total lack of understanding of the nature of the event and the impact it has made in the march of mankind.

Atrocities or distortions of religion do no make God weak and trivial—that, and not God, is patently the human weakness. The Mother herself spoke of her atheism in such a context and never was she the denier of the Divine whom she addressed as her Lord. To speak of Beauty, Love, Joy, Sweetness, Perfection, Harmony, Knowledge, Power, Life, and to make an effort to strive towards them, to live in them, is in fact to promote post-human possibilities, promote through every field of activity, science and art and religion and philosophy and devotion and will of the life. I don’t think Einstein himself would have denied such a proposition. Perhaps his own comment about God as a product of the human weakness was in the context of the book by Eric Gutkind, the philosopher, who had sent it to him, the scientist. Unless we get an idea of Gutkind’s book, we may not even understand the true tone of Einstein’s letter. Einstein writes:

...I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common…

We might also remember here Immanuel Kant who said: “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

But let me quote here the opening paragraph of The Life Divine published on 15 August 1914. Can we say that this is time-barred now? It only shows that one can go even beyond seeing intelligence or paśyantī buddhi. It is with that vision that we must receive the Yogi’s insights into things:

The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

~ RYD

RYD: perhaps the desired overlapping or the embracive ‘purnatva’ can occur only if, to go by Sri Aurobindo’s insight, paśyantī buddhi, that is, the seeing intelligence opens out.

RC: Good observation

RC: "a more promising route to explore the intersection of science and spirituality is through those scientific domains which explore the phenomenological"…

” RYD: I wonder. When we speak of true spirituality, we speak of the cosmic consciousness, the Self, the Atman, the static and dynamic Reality, the silent mind, the play of Purusha and Prakriti, and states rising one above the other, the supra-physical, superconscient realms, etc, etc.

RC: Well this dialog is in its infancy whether it will produce scientific descriptions of the superconscient, is a huge question. However researchers have studied the silent mind
and have come away with some very interesting observations of the brain in meditation. Not that this is necessarily a measure of conditions of spirituality because these experiments still focus on gathering empirical data, but the empirical data is correlated to phenomenological experience. (some of these phenomenological experiences are thought to be an opening of non-physical realities)

Admittedly its a baby step but it is still an inching forward. And the Dalai Lama has provided -at least from a Buddhist perspective- many reasons for following this path.


RYD: Atrocities or distortions of religion do no make God weak and trivial—that, and not God, is patently the human weakness.<

RC:But if one formulates God as the patriarchal creator who favors a certain people -in the simplistic notion of religion Einstein is dismissing - then God created human weakness and he is in fact the root of our problem. From this perspective it follows that it is God who commits the atrocities, it is God who is the murderer! Surely such a wrathful, vengeful, God needs a Nietzsche to come along to properly put him to death, even if his intention was also to slay the god of the crucifixion. (that Nietzsche also kills "man" in the process is the post-human consequence)

and from the Life Divine:
The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.<


OK I want to believe this too, however the most recent production of the evolution of consciousness in the post-Enlightenment era is the atheist and the agnostic scientist, while its contrary movement has strengthened the reactionary, and the wrathful God of the religious fundamentalist.

So whether the earliest formulas will teleologically restate themselves in the enlightened manner Sri Aurobindo proposes is still out for the cosmic jury to decide. But I am keeping the faith none the less.

Rich: >>>…evolution of consciousness in the post-Enlightenment era is the atheist and the agnostic scientist, while its contrary movement has strengthened the reactionary, and the wrathful God of the religious fundamentalist…>>>

There is an element of truth in what you say in this, Rich. But let me disregard the second aspect and say something about the expectations from science proper. We must first recognize that the collective science which is being practised today is of a different kind than that was there a little more than 50-60 years ago, essentially the pre-WWII science done by outstanding individuals. I think there was a stronger urge of a seeker of truth in it and it is that which kind of gave to it an exceptionally high degree of acceptability in its deepest and truth-full sense. Today we have more of professionalism than pursuit of knowledge, the intrinsic knowledge of the material world. That itself could make it suspect, if the cognitive sciences can at all lead us into the unknown realms of the subtler or higher extensions of our consciousness. This is not to deny their gains, but this is to admit the limitations of mind-formed instrumentations to probe which lies beyond them. When we speak of the silent mind, then we speak of a state where mind is blown out, a kind of Nirvana of thought. In the theological phrase it is the Night of God into which we enter. Naturally therefore cognitive sciences will have no handle to study this state, the silent mind. Behind our five senses of cognition there is the fundamental sense of cognition, manas or mind, and if it is blown out, then what will remain as a tool for cognition? That is the conundrum for the cognitive sciences when they try to set themselves on the explorative route of the spiritual states. The only sense that can come to our aid is samjnāna, the comprehending consciousness, but there are no tools yet available for its employment. So, it’s not just a question of these sciences being in the state of babyhood; they have not even been properly conceived yet, particularly on a collective level which is our present platform to work out the algorithms of the seeing intelligence, paśyantī buddhi. We have gone through this argument earlier at the sciy and I’m somewhat brief here.

About the silent mind, let me quote here something from Sri Aurobindo:

It is not possible to situate Nirvana as a world or plane, for the Nirvana push is to a withdrawal from world and world-values; it is therefore a state of consciousness or rather of super-consciousness without habitation or level. There is more than one kind of Nirvana (extinction or dissolution) possible. Man being a mental being in a body, manomaya puruşa, makes this attempt at retreat from the cosmos through the spiritualised mind, he cannot do otherwise and it is this that gives it the appearance of an extinction or dissolution, laya, nirvāņa; for extinction of the mind and all that depends on it including the separative ego in something Beyond is the natural way, almost the indispensable way for such a withdrawal. In a more affirmative yoga seeking transcendence but not withdrawal there would not be this indispensability, for there would be the way already alluded to of self-exceeding or transformation of the mental being. But it is possible also to pass to that through a certain experience of Nirvana, an absolute silence of mind and cessation of activities, constructions, representations, which can be so complete that not only to the silent mind but also to the passive senses the whole world is emptied of its solidity and reality and things appear only as unsubstantial forms without any real habitations or else floating in Something that is a nameless infinite: this infinite or else something still beyond is That which alone is real; an absolute calm, peace, liberation would be the resulting state. Action would continue, but no initiation or participation in it by the silent liberated consciousness; a nameless power would do all until there began the descent from above which would transform the consciousness, making its silence and freedom a basis for a luminous knowledge, action, Ananda. But such a passage would be rare; ordinarily a silence of the mind, a liberation of the consciousness, a renunciation of its belief in the final value or truth of the mind's imperfect representations or constructions would be enough for the higher working to be possible. (Letters on Yoga, pp. 245-46)

About Sri Aurobindo’s first realization of the silent mind this is what we have: This he had gained while meditating with Lele at Baroda sometime in the first week of January 1908 or there around. “It was the realization of the silent, spaceless and timeless Brahman gained after a complete and abiding stillness of the whole consciousness and attended at first by an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world, though this feeling disappeared after his second realization which was that of the cosmic consciousness and the Divine as all beings and all that is, which happened in Alipore jail” a little more than six months later. Sri Aurobindo clarifies: “…when the mind draws back into itself, it enters easily into a relationless peace in which nothing matters—for in its absoluteness there are no mental or vital values—and from which the mind can rapidly move towards that great short cut to the superconscient, the mindless trance, suşupti.” I don’t know how cognitive sciences will study this state.

In a letter written on 17 October 1933 Sri Aurobindo reveals: “Since 1908 when I got the silence, I never think with my head or brain—it is always in the wideness generally above the head that the thoughts occur.”

If that is silent mind, then I really stand dumbfound—if there are enough number of ‘samples’ of the silent mind available at all for the cognitive researches. But if “researchers have studied the silent mind and have come away with some very interesting observations of the brain in meditation”, then perhaps we are talking of two different things.

~ RYD

I think there a small misunderstanding here as why I am more enthusiastic about the dialog of scientist with meditation et al. Its a matter of context

Of course no one is going to measure that which is essentially beyond the limits of its own instrumentation to detect. In the case of Sri Aurobindo's experience if it were measured it could only be correlated with corresponding physiological changes in the body.

Basically cognitive science can only measure neurological activity during the time the person "claims" to be in these states of consciousness. As I said it is still an empirical description of a phenomenological event. All science can do is correlate these states with certain criteria extracted from brain functioning. That is simply it.

However, the very fact that a scientific discipline is taking phenomenology seriously is a a leap forward in science itself. Because science in many ways is like a religion on to itself. I'll skip the deconstruction for the moment, but just say that science has its own set of assumptions, its own doxa that it brings to the laboratory, a reductionist approach informed by the limitations of its own practices, which only allow it to view phenomena according to one empirical perspective. (and there are a myriad of perspectives)

But I can understand why the Dalai Lama advocates this line of meditation research, because even the fact that science is starting to take seriously our 1st person experiences is a small step for mankind.

So although metaphysics can not be reduced to physics nor physics to metaphysics, it does not mean they can not at time converse with each other. We just have to be careful what conclusions we draw from that conversation

rc

I agree with you Rich. You have clearly explained the limits of the instuments in observing the phenomenon and its probable corelation to metaphysics.

I would like to mention that Maharishi Mahesh yogi has also advocated these scientific evaluation for more than 30 years. There are team of scientists in Europe infact an institution devoted to research on meditation and also often shown on Maharshi channel.

I couldn't refrain from expressing my joy in reading some thoughts expressed here. RY your extract from Sri Aurobindo's letter to Dilip on Krishna Prem is thrilling. Any number of readings will not satiate our desire to read it but once more and resume and renew the inspiration that one derives from it. What a beautiful and direct way to foster a collective spiritual growth - the purpose for which most of us are here consciously or led to be here fortuitously. Have you read the book "Yogi Sri Krishna Prem" by Dilip?
I couldn't agree with you more where you write "In any case, this kind of talk is not totally new, particularly after the eventful decline of Materialism in the wake of Quantum Physics. But to equate the whirling of electrons, á la Fritjof Capra, with the dance of Shiva is a hastened irrationality........... and it cannot have any deeper connotation than that of simply pleasing or entertaining oneself." It is refreshing to read you boldly aver the travesty of equating Eastern Spirituality and Western Science. The path and aim of the truth-seeker - an inner and a far more precipitous one - leads him to his randezvous with the Divine/truth/God, while the path of the scientist is an outer one with no such ostensible aim. Where would they meet? The truth-seeker or mystic wants to meet God(truth/Divine call it what you want)while the scientist wants to "keep his intellectual sky free from mystic clouds"(Bertrand Russell to Dilip).
On what you write about the practice of collective science "I think there was a stronger urge of a seeker of truth in it...... Today we have more of professionalism than pursuit of knowledge, the intrinsic knowledge of the material world. ",
I am not sure that the pursuit of knowledge is any less deep or intense and many sided than it was pre WW2. I find on the contrary that unencumbered in many ways and standing on the shoulders of past giants, the pursuit and practice of scientists today has yielded incredible results to which medicine/genetics/internet/space stand testimony. It is true however that commercial interests - the curse of modern capitalism - usurp the fruits of the practice and determine to a large degree their utility.
VB

My point was essentially in the context of the Aurobindonian silent mind coming in the purview of scientific investigations. If the mind falls silent, if it is utter passivity or blankness where nothing happens, or where nothing can reach, then one doesn’t know what tools or instruments can be employed to study such a state. Naturally, therefore, it will be pretty frustrating if we are going to approach it using the manas or mind-made tools. Practical wisdom would suggest us to avoid such prospects. That does not mean that we should not make tools—far from that.

On the contrary, we should explore the possibilities of engaging ourselves in an active dialogue concerned with science and spirituality. It must be pursued—but pursued without imposing one on the other. The findings of one can supply intuitions to the other, each truthful to its purest methodology, and it is in that way that there can be some advance made. “We just have to be careful what conclusions we draw from that conversation,” rightly says Rich. This is absolutely correct, although we judge “care” in terms of convictions in which we have grown. We should also remember what Plato’s Critias is driving at, when he says “to speak well of the gods to men is far easier than to speak well of men to men.” Perhaps it is here that the true seeker of the truth always keeps himself open to the quest he has set himself upon. And things are such that, that very quest itself shall be the guide for him on the path. Our faculties can indeed be developed by remaining open to their true potentials, open to the extent that without our knowledge they even become spiritual. For this to happen only one thing is “essential, needful, indispensable,” that is, to grow more and more conscious of things. When that is not present then everything, Art and Science and Religion and Philosophy, everything, is no more than a “bagatelle”. This is not to say that we should all turn at once into yogis. What’s needed is we’ve to develop deeper convictions and always keep in focus the central aim of our quest, the quest of the truth of the thing.

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Today’s science is a product of ‘fast-food culture”. Publish or Perish—that’s the present Darwinian formula it follows. It has become very competitive and a kind of ‘meditative mood’ that is needed for it to see the light in its own domain of operation is not present. But that is true everywhere—the bane of our globalised-commercial age. Will it, under its own extreme or excessive weight, survive? That’s the question which should haunt the social scientist and thinker.

~ RYD

From a point of view, an engagement of spirituality with science can yield fruit in the way of supplying intuitions to each other. To the truth-seeker the dialogue with science can help him just as much a dialogue with art or philosophy or religion - especially in the light of Sir Aurobindo's "All life is yoga". I suppose science need not be viewed as particularly antagonistic to the pursuit of spirituality. That being said, dailogue or not, the gains of one influence and advance the other.
VB