Science and Spirituality

The young reader to whom I’ve referred earlier asks: I see you studied physics. Is there not something in science that suggests that we are of spiritual nature?

That’s a wonderful question.  Unfortunately, it’s not my field per se, but I’ll answer it as best I’m able.

You’re referring to neuroscience, which is focused mainly on brain chemistry at this point, but really doesn’t have a good understanding of human consciousness—and may never have.
Personally, I see no reason to believe that the human mind has the capacity to understand things like the nature of consciousness, the ultimate building blocks of the physical universe, etc.  One problem is that our species has evolved to see the world in three spatial dimensions and one temporal one (i.e., the forward progression of time).  This is at odds with things like the fact that, according to the current theory, the universe is made of stuff that exists in 11 dimensions. (!)

There are so many unanswered (unanswerable?) questions.  Consider dreams for a moment.  Start by comparing your experiences in your dreams with those in your local movie theater. When you go to a movie, you’re taken on a ride that was constructed from its opening scene to its closing credits by the filmmaker. At various points in that period of two hours or so, you will laugh, or cry, or envy, or hate—and you won’t know what will happen next, as, again, the adventure was scripted by someone else.

But now consider what happens in your dreams. Here, just as in your experiences with movies, you laugh, cry, envy and hate—and, again, you really have no idea what will come next. Yet there is one important difference: in the case of your dreams, you are the filmmaker, the lead character, and the audience. Please take a second and let that sink in. You–whoever “you” are–take on entirely distinct roles in your dreams. This blows apart the notion that consciousness is a simple, understandable thing.

Also, there is a large and growing body of scientific evidence that our consciousness and causation extend far outside our brains, and that we are all mysteriously but observably connected to one another. I’ll spare you the details, but if you want to see a really good movie on this, it’s “What the Bleep Do We Know.”

Interesting, in physics, we have a discipline called quantum mechanics that was developed in the 1920s and posits, among other things, that the observer and the observed are not two distinct things.  To me, this also supports the idea that we may be spiritual in nature.

Thanks again for the excellent question.