Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man

As described in this as well as the series of prior works, until very recently humankind has had no reliable, objective, confirmable, or verifiable means by which to identify or discern truth from falsehood. As a consequence, despite man’s best efforts, for example, the conflict between spiritual faith and reason has remained a vexatious enigma for millennia. It challenged the great intellects of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the great philosophers and thinkers over the centuries whose works constitute The Great Books of the Western World. It remained unresolved despite the efforts of even the greatest theologians, from Thomas Aquinas up to the present day, where the ongoing debate constituted the main theme of even Time magazine (Van Biema, 13 November 2006). The crux of the impasse was presented eloquently at the famous hallmark Scopes trial in 1925, and the conflict was then further confounded in the political world by United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugo Black’s “high wall between Church and State.” That ruling, in 1946, which escalated the conflict, has been hotly contentious in today’s society and is symbolized by the ongoing political war between the secularists and the traditionalists. In the academic world, it is currently expressed as ‘creationism’ versus ‘intelligent design’. The attempt to mix oil and water was not possible until the method of fractionated homogeneity was discovered. Analogously, because of new discoveries, there is now a methodology to synchronize and recontextualize both faith and reason without violating the integrity of either one. It is currently possible to remain scientific, rational, logical, and intellectually erudite while simultaneously spiritually very much inspired by a faith that is bulwarked by demonstrable verification. A simple study of the nature of consciousness itself reveals an easily crossable bridge between what had previously seemed like very separate and disparate realms. The answer to the conflict and its successful resolution is a consequence of recognizing the importance of an expanded paradigm of reality that is inclusive of both science and spiritual realities instead of an ‘either-or’ partitioning of mutually separate, seemingly exclusive provinces or realms of inquiry. Because this verifiable expansion of context is simultaneously inclusive of both reason and faith, it is thus finally devoid of opinion, ambiguity, and conflict. Historically, expansions of context have had salutary effects, such as the expansion of physics from the limited Newtonian paradigm to inclusion of subparticle physics, quantum mechanics, and ever-evolving quantum theory. A conceptual bridge was established by the critical discovery of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It explained the effect of the impact of observation by human consciousness, which thereby empowers and precipitates the ‘collapse of the wave function’ (explained later) as a consequence of intention (i.e., from potentiality to actuality). The field of astronomy similarly expanded from the study of just our planetary system to include infinite galaxies and multiple universes that are ever expanding and multiplying at the speed of light. Spiritual realities and the inherent truths of revealed religion can also be examined in a manner that does not require deserting reason or violating the rules of logic and rationality. In fact, the very same context and methodology that is capable of validating spiritual realities also simultaneously validates scientific principles. Until very recently, both science and religion seemed to be encased in very separate boxes. Now the boxes can be removed, put in a much larger container that includes both and gives them equal importance, credence, and balance. Different points of observation do not thereby create separate conflicting ‘realities’ but merely represent different perspectives from within the all-inclusive, infinite field of consciousness itself. As an example, instead of artificially creating a fractious dichotomy between ‘evolution’ and ‘creation’, how simple it is to see from a higher, inclusive paradigm that evolution is creation. It becomes obvious that evolution is simply what ongoing creation looks like, and that they are actually one and the same thing (calibration level 1,000). Creation is innately evolutionary and emergently unfolding. Similarly, the intelligence of nature may seem to be only a linear, rudimentary trial-and-error system, but out of the prehistoric swamps has emerged Homo sapiens whose nonlinear consciousness provides context and meaning. The seemingly conflictual ‘faith versus science’ conundrum is also simplified by the realization that a permanent, ever-present ‘source’ is different from a transitory, ostensibly single event, such as a ‘cause’. The term ‘cause’ is a limitation of the restrictive Newtonian paradigm of reality, now outmoded by even science itself, which has gone on to nonlinear dynamics, probability theory, intermingling theory, emergence-and-complexity theory, and more. Significantly, over time the greatest scientific geniuses, paradoxically, have been very religious in their personal lives in that their capacity for depth of comprehension was profound and inclusive. While, because of their innate genius, they intuited there was no conflict between religion and science, none of them actually explained the resolution of the presumable disparity, as theirs was the inexplicable knowingness of comprehension.