Science Awakes, Religion Mellows

     To summarize, we began the material on transformation with the thoroughly grounded physical processes studied by Prigogine, and found ourselves eventually talking of a necessary new step in evolution which is undertaken voluntarily, which brings a new level of aliveness, and to which what Buber called the Eternal Thou has a stake in becoming.
     How can we learn that higher feeling and deeper seeing are infinitely more satisfying than ego-gratification? When such an inner move occurs, individuals call it the grace of God," but there is a way of building to the point at which one can let it happen; building to the point of involution, transformation, opening, awakening.
     This can occur as we are gripped by symbols of potentiality. The remarkable thing is that these symbols are now arising within science as such, and this fact offers much hope. As I said earlier, the symbols provided by religious institutions, conditioned as they are by the cultures in which they arose, are not sufficiently universal for the step of forming a global consciousness. Only science, along with music and the visual arts, exhibits the necessary universality, the ability to cross the cultural borders of the world, and thus take the needed next step toward its unity.
— John L. Hitchcock, "The New Physics and Human Transformation," in Crysalis, Volume IV, Issue 1, "Science and Spirituality," p. 35.

....We're talking about a world in which there is the possibility of measurement for more precise seeing, and what that seeing does is to give us nuances of the new. Through more precise measurement, we discover things that are mind-blowing and open up whole new areas of thought, and that is the reason for precise measurement, for me. Not for everybody. A lot of physicists, I still think, and as Larry [Dossey, M.D.] was saying, the bulk of physicians, see medicine in a certain way, 'fix the machine,' and they say 'Get the world in place.' Hawking thinks that he might come up with a new 'theory of everything' in twenty years, if he can still communicate. I frankly disbelieve that God is going to run out of ideas with which to intrigue us about the nature of reality in this century or the next thousands of centuries.
     ". . . a law of physics or a law of science begins with the first observed regularity, and some are more universal than others, but any regularity that you can come back to constitutes a law of physics. Now, are we only projecting when we see purpose of events or events which carry meaning of purpose to us? If we see those [events] with any sense of reality, and I think that most people feel they do, then . . . purposiveness is an observed phenomenon and that is sufficient for me to begin talking theologically."
— Gustav Arrhenius, from "New Physics—Panel Discussion Highlights," in Ibid., p. 40.

TRANSFORMATION: [Emanuel] Swedenborg sees the whole purpose of human life as "regeneration," and sees clearly the need for dark passages. "Before anything is brought back into order, it is quite normal for it to be brought first into a kind of confusion, a virtual chaos. In this way, things that fit together badly are severed from each other; and when they have been severed, then the Lord arranges them in order."
— George Dole, from "Physics and Psychology: A Swedenborgian Response to Hitchcock's Paper," in Ibid., p. 41.

     To a greater degree than [William] James or [Alfred North] Whitehead realized, however, philosophizing out of, or in concert with, spirit, requires a new — and in some respects, an old — philosophical method. Philosophizing out of, and on behalf of, spirit is possible only by a mode of cognition which avoids the materialistic presuppositions and limitations of the modern western paradigm. It requires spiritually-based thinking such as was practiced by Plato and by medieval Christian philosophical theologians, by most practitioners of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, as well as by some western thinkers such as [Emanuel] Swedenborg and [Rudolph] Steiner, and to a lesser extent, Goethe and Emerson, who are apparently in touch with spiritual reality.
     Unfortunately, contemporary philosophy, both in theory and practice, emphatically excludes any possible contribution which might issue from a meditative or contemplative effort. As it prefers analysis to speculation, and argument to assent, it also prefers combat to contemplation. But it is by contemplation that the impersonal and universal can triumph over the subjective, the self-interested and the self-indulgent....
— Robert McDermott, "Curing Philosophy; Philosophy as Cure," in Ibid., pp. 62-63.