Science Aspires to the Condition of Spirit

Science aspires to the condition of spirit.

When I wrote that down a few years ago I wanted to convey the idea that science, and the applications of science in various technologies, are taking humankind closer and closer to what many imagine (and report) to be conditions on “the spiritual plane”.

That statement presupposes that there is a “spiritual” ground or foundation to Being, and that we have some idea about the conditions of conscious existence in the spiritual realm as contrasted with our physical, material realm. Whether we accept them as true or not, we have heard of out-of-body experiences, astral travel, disembodied souls, “impossible” levitation, near-death experiences in which awareness functions separately from the physical form, and purported descriptions of “the higher side” from mediums and psychics both famous (e.g., Swedenborg, "There are two worlds, a spiritual world where angels and spirits are, and a natural world where men are.") and little known.

We are told that “spirits” not encumbered by the kind of bodies we earthbound animals have can move from place to place with the speed of thought, traveling halfway around the world in a flash. As the spirit Puck said, “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” Not exactly a flash, but not bad for the 16th Century.

Spirits appear to be free of gravity, able to float in the air and view a room from the ceiling. They can communicate telepathically, mind to mind, without spoken words, and thus can communicate instantaneously over unlimited distances. Our science fiction has entertained us with spiritually advanced beings who can control spaceships and other objects with their minds alone, or mentally heal serious wounds in a few seconds.

Whether you believe in such conditions of being or not, please imagine them and then look at the direction of scientific and technological developments. Two and more centuries ago, with no trains or automobiles or airplanes, no radio or television or telephones, it took from dawn till night to travel to a town we of today can reach by car in an hour. It took days to get somewhere which we can reach today in a plane in a couple of hours. We can sit in our homes and watch what is taking place on another continent or on the Moon or Mars. While people once waited for weeks for letters to make their way over land or sea, meanwhile deprived of all contact with the correspondent, today we can speak with someone thousands of miles away as if she were in our own kitchen. As Freyashawk commented on Yves’ blog, “Through the internet, physical distance has been conquered and one has the freedom to travel effortlessly from continent to continent.”

I don’t need to catalogue any more of the accomplishments of science to get my point across, but I will add a few other things which I believe that science will tend toward whether it achieves them or not: Almost instant travel and transport by breaking bodies and objects down and reassembling them at another location (“Beam me up, Scotty!”). Anti-gravity. What we would now call “holographic” methods of both seeing and speaking with (and perhaps feeling) three dimensional forms of people who are actually at a distance. The use of nanotechnology or a development thereof to accomplish swift cures and healings which we today would look upon as miracles. One of my favorite dreams is of a system of air conditioning which cools or heats the air in a building directly, without the need for circulating the air with fans or passing it through any mechanical device.

And I must keep in mind that every time I’ve read a forecast of this kind written by a person in a past era, it has always failed to foresee some revolutionary invention or discovery that opened completely new territory.

I had intended today to write about a yellowing paperback I happened to uncover on my bookshelf a week ago, THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE, by Steward Edward White. I couldn’t recall ever hearing of it, and have no idea how I happened to have it, but I read it – skimming a lot – and found some interesting points which are pertinent to the present blog entry and to a much-needed definition of “spirit” and “spirituality”.

“Spirituality means too many things to too many people.” Yes, like the words “God” and “prayer”. Those are words without clear and agreed-upon referents.

I plan to talk about the book soon.