Articles on Healing and Transformation

Where Science and Spirituality Meet

by Leigh Tremaine

The separation of science and spirituality as fields of inquiry can be traced back to René Descartes (1596-1650), who put forward the dualistic idea that mind and matter are two essentially distinct substances. When this mind-matter dualism was taken up by the scientific community, people's conception of matter became despiritualised, and as a result nature ceased to be an object of spiritual or moral concern. Descartes, along with Kepler, Bacon, and Newton, inaugurated the scientific revolution that has resulted in the materialistic worldview that predominates today.

The reductive approach to scientific inquiry that characterises the materialistic worldview achieved much by taking us more deeply into the particular, but by doing so at the expense of the whole it took us more deeply into separation and shattered our sense of organic wholeness with life. The loss of this sense of organic wholeness has been deeply traumatic for humanity, for this wholeness is the matrix of life itself, providing the context for meaning and relationship. The loss of meaning and the breakdown of relationships of all kinds mark out the materialistic age from an other.

It is important to realise that science itself is not opposed to spirituality. Rather, it is how we approach science that determines whether science and spirituality will be seen as either dichotomies or as complementary aspects of human experience. It is nothing more than our perception of reality that determines how we define our world. This point was made at length by Thomas Kuhn, who wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that scientific knowledge is relative and dependent on the paradigm or framework of thought that dominates a scientific field at the time.

Our choice to perceive the world in one way rather than another is basically a result of taking a certain path of social development, which in time becomes protected by the power of tradition and vested interests, both of which have a decisive influence on the mainstream media and education system, through which we receive much of our information about the world. It then becomes very hard to perceive the world in any other way, and those who do are often considered to be either mad, weird, or hopeless visionaries.

For all its positive achievements, the path of social development has taken us to a world which has an unprecedented economic gulf between rich and poor, and an unprecedented ecological crisis of global proportions. These disasters of human planning, along with the general stress of living in society, are examples of the initial indicators that bring a dominant worldview into question by showing how it is failing. The momentum for the transformation of the dominant worldview to occur is being continued by the further discovery of 'anomalies' in human and scientific experience, which the dominant worldview can not account for. What is interesting about these anomalies is that they support each other, indicating that a new worldview is indeed emerging. They have grown to form the fields of transpersonal psychology, systems theory, and the new physics.

Transpersonal psychology, which defines identity as unlimited to the personal self, has given a voice to a growing number of people who have spontaneously undergone 'peak experiences' that are characterised by an expanded state of consciousness and a sense of spiritual awakening, which reveals everything to be one in essence. Pioneered in the 1960s by such people as Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof, and prefigured by the work of the psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung, it has achieved therapeutic success by not pathologising the transpersonal experience itself, and by approaching physical or psychological illness as a state of spiritual emergency. By assisting the integration of the individual with the whole, on an intrapersonal as well as a transpersonal level, it has reached to the root of the illness and achieved results that have not been obtainable under the dominant worldview. Today it is making inroads into the fields of healthcare and ecology, giving rise to such practices as spiritual healing and deep ecology. It has also been able to integrate the practices of shamanic journeying, meditation, and prayer.

Systems theory, which emerged from the research of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the first half of the twentieth century, can be termed as a general science of wholeness, for it sees the world in terms of holistic or ecological relationships. It has found therapeutic expression in the practice of gestalt therapy and deep ecology. By focusing on the need to integrate the individual with the whole, and by illustrating how identity is defined as much by our interconnections as by our individuality, systems theory has paved the way for the integration of spirituality with science.

The new physics was born at the start of the twentieth century when Einstein broke with Newtonian particle physics and showed through his equation E = mc² that matter was just another form of energy. The basis of reality was now seen to be energy rather than matter - the same claim that many spiritual people are making today.

The subsequent developments in the field of quantum physics further laid the foundation for the integration of science and spirituality as areas of inquiry. Of particular relevance is the publication of Bell's Theorem in 1964, and the practical demonstration of it by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris in 1982. The theorem is based upon the EPR thought-experiment, in which paired particles are projected apart in opposite directions at the speed of light, so that the distance between them is huge. At the instant that the axis of spin of one particle is influenced, the axis of spin of the other is affected in the opposite way. For this to happen the communication between them would have to occur faster than light. From this, Bell's Theorem hints that the two-particle system must actually be an indivisible whole, for the connection between the two particles is both instantaneous and nonlocal.

The implication of this is profoundly spiritual: all particles must be understood not as isolated units, but as interconnections within an undivided whole - an idea that is resonant with transpersonal psychology and systems theory. This undivided whole is being called the 'zero-point energy field' by today's leading-edge physicists, who see it as the source the electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear forces behind matter. Strong evidence for its existence has been provided by quantum equations and its ability to more accurately predict phenomena in physical chemistry.

For reality to reveal itself as a manifestation of individual forms, or as a single manifesting essence, depends on where we place our attention, and perhaps where we place our prejudices. For example, physicists have found that if we expect to see light as a stream of particles, and look for these particles, we will see that light is made up of particles rather than waves. However, if we expect to see light as waves, and look for these waves, we will see that light is made up of waves rather than particles. Nature is in fact simultaneously individual and holistic in nature, for it exists free of the dualism that the human has projected upon it. In this sense it is multidimensional, and can be understood as the circle whose centre is everywhere at once. To grasp this idea we need to get out of the trap of logical and linear thinking, which only works in reductive analysis.

Many scientific studies support the multidimensional view of reality and the various disciplines based upon it. For instance, scientists using photomultiplier tubes in a light-tight room found that the light emission of human subjects was around 15 per cent more than the background noise, and that certain individuals were able to increase their light emission by 100 per cent simply by trying to activate and project their energy fields, or entering into a meditative state. The light recorded around the body had several cone-shaped structures in the areas of the body corresponding to the chakras. In a separate study, Valerie Hunt of UCLA found that she could use an electromyograph to pick up a pattern of frequencies associated with the chakras and the colours seen in a person's energy field by an aura-reader.

The area of spiritual healing - which is defined here as the therapeutic use of spiritual attunement to assist the integration of the individual with the whole - probably has the greatest implications for human evolution, for it is the healing of the fragmented consciousness of humanity that reaches to the very root of all crises affecting humanity.

Scientific evidence for the power of spiritual healing has been available for decades. In the 1960s, for instance, Dr Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal found that in water treated by healers there is a widening of the hydrogen bonds, a decrease in surface tension, an increase in solubility, and other changes in conductivity and pH. Often, such healers will attune to and direct 'healing energy' through their hands, which is claimed to be channelled from the universal field of subtle energy, and guided by the organising forces or spiritual intelligence of that energy. Evidence for this has been provided by such researchers as Dr John Zimmerman of the University of Colorado, who has used a highly sensitive magnetometer to detect magnetic fields hundred of times stronger than background noise around the hands of healers while they are at work, which are believed to be induced by the subtle energy that is being channelled.

The most ambitious form of spiritual healing is that which works on a collective or environmental scale, and is not merely limited to a single individual. There is comparatively little awareness of this form of healing, beyond what is traditionally known about prayer. However, evidence for its effectiveness has been put forward by practitioners of transcendental meditation, who have found that there is a statistically significant reduction in crime in the area in which they perform their collective meditations.

In terms of scientific support of this kind of healing, researchers at the Institute of HeartMath in California have shown that when meditators experience planetary love, sensitive coils placed several hundred feet away pick up dramatic changes in the Earth's magnetic field, which show that the magnetic frequencies of the Earth move into resonant alignment with the coherent electrical signals that are emitted by the body when we are in this state of love. The implications of this are huge: science is finally following spirituality by recognising and validating the power of love as a force for integration and wellbeing. Similar implications have arisen recently in the scientific field of psychoneuroimmunology, where it has been found that the neuropeptides we produce when we are in a state of love bind to receptor sites on immune cells, increasing the health of our immune system.

If science is showing us that we are one with all life, then the ability to shape the spiritual energies of our environment should also be scientifically plausible. Given what the new science has confirmed to date, it is entirely possible that, on a subtle-energetic level, we are all to some extent affecting and being affected by our larger environment anyway, for better or worse. We can no longer dismiss the impact that our individual thoughts, feelings, and actions have upon the whole. When the frontier of science has opened the doors of perception to an essential unity, those doors become very hard to shut.