THE WHAT OF SCIENCE IS TRUE. THE WHY OF THE SPIRITUAL IS TRUTH
A hand is stretched out, and holds in its palm an electric glowing bulb. This is set against a night-dark background. The spirituality and the wonder of science in the palm of our hands.
Science is very good at telling us what happens. It is not able to tell us why something happens. It does seem to tell us ‘why’, but it doesn’t. It’s ‘why’ is invariably another, admittedly deeper level of ‘what’. So science will tell us that after a number of observations, it can declare that gasses rise when they heat up. They then investigated why that should be so. Their answer, however, was another ‘what’. They investigated and ultimately they found that the molecules that constituted the gas became excited as they were warmed, and so began to occupy a greater space, thereby lowering their weight to mass, and thereby rising relative to other gases that remained at a constant temperature. This is, of course, another ‘what’.
All of scientific endeavour is necessarily a series of ‘whats’ being investigated in order to reveal the underlying or more fundamental ‘whats’. These ‘whats’ are facts that we can take to be true. But they do not reveal to us the much more interesting issue of the ‘whys’. Perhaps we know what the universe now is, and perhaps we know what happened at the Big Bang. But the ‘whys’ continually elude us.
Our spiritual and mystical quests, our inner searches into the deep reaches of our minds and souls, are not concerned with ‘whats’. They are always concerned with the ‘whys’ of our spiritual existence, the matters of our souls, the deep purposes of our being. Our spiritual and mystical pilgrimages are set deep within the realms of our consciousness, our sentience. The ‘whats’ of science are solely concerned with the material phenomena of our universe. Even investigations into the psychology of humans is really only science when it deals with physical phenomena. When it goes deeper, and necessarily it should, then it enters into the deeper realms of the psyche, of us as spiritual beings, and then enters into realms of being, of spiritual purpose, of deeps-set mystical meaning. The greatest mystery of the universe is not to be found in the slow gyrations and developments of galaxies, nor is it to be found deep within the atom and the fundamental particles that make up the atoms. The great mystery of the universe is consciousness. The great mystery of the universe is US.
The universe is not a mere jumble of objects. The universe is alive with sentience, with consciousness. Everything in the universe has profound spiritual significance for us. Everything in the universe informs our innermost being, our spirit and soul. It is our spiritual and sacred consciousness that give us our significance, that gives us our worth within the great unfolding of the universe that is both made of matter and is sentient. We know instinctively that we have profound worth, and it is our sentience that gives us that. Our spiritual destiny, purpose and meaning of our mystical quest is to validate that significance of our sentient selves through our slow spiritual unfolding into the great spiritual entities we are always destined to be. We are not a collection of atoms. We are pilgrims on our spiritual and sacred quests for the eternal infinite.
And we must learn from this. We must care for each other because we are all on the same spiritual pilgrimage. We must protect and nurture our Mother Earth because She too is sentient and responds to our neglect not merely in mechanical ways but deep within Her own psyche. All conscious entities know when they are not cherished. All conscious entities close-in and know the debilitation of despair when they are not cherished. Our sentience, our sacred awareness and duty requires us to love each other and our Mother Earth if ALL are to flourish and know that infinite eternity that is the spiritual destiny of ALL.
That is WHY we must care.
The ‘what’ of science: is TRUE.
The ‘why’ of the spiritual and mystical
Quest is TRUTH.