An important issue I’ve yet to discuss at SoulLaboratory.com is the idea of spiritual technology. If our understanding of psychology is sufficiently detailed to incorporate spiritual aspects of the human experience, than it is also reasonable to discuss the brain correlates of the spiritual experience. The trick is to do it without being reductionist and dismissive of the spiritual experience. Once we understand that everything has a material basis, then we can start to understand that we can affect our spiritual experience through physical actions. This is what I refer to as spiritual technology. This technology can include prayer, kabbalistic tools, and psychedelic drugs – all ancient techniques for achieving spiritual aims through physical action.
…And before you ask, no, not all such things are spiritual technology. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, making space for spirituality in our personal experience doesn’t mean abandoning cause and effect. We have to prove to ourselves, and if possible, others, that these things work.
Towards that end, scientists are now finally starting to overcome the anti-drug biases of the post-1960’s generation and taking a look at the effects of psychedelic drugs. Among the world’s oldest and most common spiritual technologies is the use of magic mushrooms – various species of Amanita and Psilocybin. Check out this report of a new scientific study of their effects. Note especially how the scientists constrain their questions to a few specific points about memory and brain function.
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The title of this post, “Filling the Space,” alludes to my theory of the objective/subjective divide – a limit to the domain of science that creates a figurative space in our lives for some other system to help guide our self exploration. In part 1 of this series, I described my developing spirituality. Spirituality is that thing that I’ve struggled to make space for in my life and my guiding worldview. But readers of SoulLaboratory.com already know that spirituality is not my only way of understanding the world. Professionally, I’m a scientist, and a defender of the scientific worldview. In this post I’ll describe my personal history with science, and ultimately how I made peace between the scientific and spiritual halves of my soul.
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Huffington Post today published a fantastic article by Adam Frank. Adam, a self-described atheist, describes the eruption of the sacred into his life – what Mircea Eliade calls hierophany – while watching the surface of his coffee vibrate. Check it out.
You can also read my comment, which describes the cabalistic view of concealment and the role of science in revelation.
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A primary complaint about evolution from the creationist circles is that life couldn’t have evolved complex forms purely through natural selection. Laboratory experiments in evolution aim to identify conditions that select for the basic characteristics of complex life. Here is an article at Ars Technica reporting conditions that cause single cell organisms to evolve into multicellular organism. As a result, cells started specializing, another key characteristic of complex life.
One of my main motivations for bring SoulLaboratory.com into existence is to push back against the scientific atheists with a theory that clearly defines the roles of science and spirituality. A secondary goal is a critique of the scientific atheists themselves. My main concern is the abuse of the authority granted by a Ph.D. in science evident in many of the works of the scientific atheists, which are polemic and philosophical, but hardly scientific. However, it is just as important to attack the theories directly.
This article by John Gray does an amazing job at comparing the scientific atheists to the religious fundamentalists they seek to overthrow. Hence his phrase secular fundamentalists, which bares a none-to-coincidental resemblance to the term fundamentalist materialist coined by Robert Anton Wilson in his broadside against overzealous scientists in the New Inquisition.
Thanks to my colleague Chris Habeck for sharing this!
All the best,
B.
