Journal of Dharma, Issue 10
It seems easier today than a century ago for man to have a religious outlook on life. In an apparent paradox, it is the scientific revolution of the twentieth century that makes this possible. Not so far back there was a time when it seemed that an iron-bound deterministic science was about to establish complete dominion over man and his environment - when the universe was seen as a cosmic machine functioning according to sets of mathematical equations. The physical world was seen through the lenses of an engineer, and the mind was thought to coincide with the brain. All this is now water under the bridge, and contemporary physicist regards the material world, in Arthur Eddington’s words, “in a more mystical, though no less exact and practical way.”
Strangely enough, there is also, in what some call the post-Christian world, a profound and rising scepticism regarding the dogmas and theologies of western creeds, although man’s religious aspirations are greater now than they were two or three generations ago. This coincidence is explosive, and evidence points to the fact that we are probably standing on a historical watershed - comparable in importance to the birth of Christianity some two thousand years ago. A new spiritual vision is beginning to take shape, under the spur of a most unlikely alliance between the new physics and eastern, rather than western, philosophies.
Few physicists who reach the outer limits of their science can avoid taking a side glance at the “metaphysical” implications of the recent revolution: but the surprising fact is that contemporary science seems to be deliberately turning away from its cultural roots, finding a more compatible atmosphere in the very different metaphysics of the orient. It is the startling parallelism between today’s physics and the world-vision of eastern mysticism that becomes an outstanding cultural phenomenon of times.
Furthermore, as Werner Heisenberg remarks, the increasing contribution of eastern scientists from India, China and Japan, among others, reinforces this conjunction. Physical science has now become planetary and draws into its fold an increasing number of non-westerners who find in its new vision of the universe many elements that are quick to note, one cannot always distinguish between statements made by eastern metaphysics based on mystical insight, and the pronouncements of modern physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical calculations.
The new picture of the universe presented to us by contemporary physics is baffling. Contrary to classical science, physics now states that the commonsensical world we live in simply does not exist; all our impressions of ultimate solid substances are deceptive. The scientific revolution has shattered our previous notions of physical reality and natural law. Space, time, energy, matter and causality have all acquired entirely new meanings.
The first item to go was the sharp and absolute separation between space and time. Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity have now joined them together into a four-dimension continuum lacking the Newtonian universal flow of time. Different observers will see events occurring in different temporal sequences according to their respective positions and velocities. As the eminent and Nobel Prize-winning Japanese physicist Hideki Yukama states it,
“Here time resolves itself into the fourth dimension, on a par with space, where harmony prevails in an eternal state of rest. One may sense something close to the Oriental outlook.”
The second item to go was the concept of matter as something substantial, whose building blocks, the atoms, were considered to be the ultimate, indivisible constituents of the physical world. Almost suddenly, the atom was understood to be divisible and made up of nucleus and particles. Stranger still, particles could be interpreted as waves as well as granular elements - it made little difference to the mathematical equations that dealt with them since they are not substantial things in the commonsensical meaning of the word. Wave mechanics assert that electrons can be either waves or corpuscles, giving rise to the Theory of Complementarity, according to which any physical event can be interpreted in two different frames of reference, mutually exclusive, yet also complementary. At that microcosmic level, the objective world of space and time ceases to exist: the mathematical interpretation of this subatomic world no longer refers to actual reality but only to potentialities, “probability waves.”
With Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty (or Indetermination), we now reach the outer limits of scientific possibilities by doing away with determinism and causality, in view of the impossibility of determining simultaneously the position and velocity of a particle - the greater the precision of the one, the greater the imprecision of the other. The deeper we penetrate into the microcosmic world, the more difficult, if not impossible, is direct observation, along with the fact that the observation itself interferes with the behaviour of the phenomenon. For instance, let us suppose that an imaginary microscope was able to magnify an individual electron a hundred thousand million times so as to make it visible to the human eye. Since an electron is smaller than a light-wave, the scientist could make it visible only by using radiation of a shorter wave-length high-frequency gamma rays of radium that would push it around violently and make an objective study of it impossible.
This amounts to saying that physics can go only so far in its objective study of nature, and no further: and beyond, there remains a whole realm of reality that can never be investigated by scientific observation and experimentation. Physics has to presuppose the existence of a background that shall remain forever outside the scope of its investigation. Physics itself is now reduced to statistical statements and pointer readings; physical laws simply express the “connectivity” of these pointer readings.
To sum up, the world we see and experience in everyday life is simply a mirage, an illusion of our perceptions and our brain. All that is around us, including ourselves, which appears so substantial, is ultimately nothing but networks of particle waves whirling around at lightning speed, colliding, rebounding, disintegration in almost total emptiness. Matter is mostly emptiness, proportionately as void as intergalactic space, void of anything except occasional dots and spots and scattered electric charges. For instance, a single atom is already minute enough: yet, although almost all of its mass is concentrated in the nucleus, this nucleus itself is a hundred thousand times smaller. An atom, therefore, is almost completely empty space in which protons and neutrons whirl around within its confines at speeds up to forty thousand miles per second-enough to make us dizzy when we understand that, in the last resort, that is what we and everything physical are made of.
A Victorian scientist thought that he knew clearly what he was talking about when he mentioned atoms, molecules, matter: he visualised them as concrete and describable elements. Today’s physicist knows that this is not exactly the case. Science no longer pretends to have anything to say about the intrinsic nature of the physical world: the atom we attempted to visualise earlier is, in fact, nothing more than a “schedule of pointer readings” attached to some unknown background. Scientific knowledge is all inferential knowledge. Physics presents us with the symbolic skeleton of the universe, not with an accurate picture of the universe itself.
The one indisputable fact about the universe is human consciousness which is known to us by direct and immediate self-knowledge. Even science and actuality of the physical world is, ultimately, a product of our consciousness. Physics now tends to accept the fact that we have to restore consciousness to the fundamental position in the universe, rather than see it simply as a material phenomenon derived from a particular arrangement of physical molecules, atoms and particles. Physicists such as Eugene Wigner believe that the formal inclusion of consciousness in physics could well become an essential feature of any further advance in our scientific understanding. The mind is the one element of knowledge that is not limited to pointer readings. Therefore, only consciousness can provide the necessary background for all the pointer readings that, in the aggregate, constitute physical science.
This background is mind-stuff and, as Eddington puts it, the “stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” This mind-stuff is not spread out in space and time: on the contrary, it is space and time that are spun out of it. Here and there it rises to the level of self-consciousness in human beings and from those tips of icebergs, floating on the surface of the world stuff, springs our two-tier intellectual knowledge - direct knowledge within each thinking individual, and generalised inferential knowledge which includes our knowledge of the physical world. Inferential knowledge, however, is only part of a whole and cannot grasp the whole. Science cannot, regardless of further discoveries, encroach on the background from which it springs; and our own consciousness lies in this background.
Our task now is to deal with that part of consciousness that does not emerge in space and time and is, therefore, not amenable to scientific analysis - a part that is, perhaps, amenable to the insights of the religious approach.
We are now faced with the central problem of the truth of religion. A vast number of churches and denominations scattered throughout the world claim a near-monopoly of spiritual truth with a remarkable lack of metaphysical humility such as characterises contemporary science. It has become difficult for any thoughtful person to subscribe to any such claim. All religions are true and false at the same time, in the sense that they all point toward some ultimate truth; but none of them is literally and absolutely true. All their myth, dogmas, scriptures and theologies are merely symbolic and relative interpretations designed to help the devotee on his spiritual way.
But how did this belief in the possibility of “literal” truth come about when thousands of years ago already, our much wiser cultural ancestors quite rightly understood that every form of expression is purely symbolic? As Origen expressed it in the third century:
“Who can be stupid enough to believe that God, like a gardener, tilled the fields of Eden and actually planted a tree named the Tree of Life?”
In order to understand it, we must come to grips with the fundamental dichotomy splitting mankind’s higher cultures into two distinct groups - East and West, the most famous twins in history: the East comprising Hinduism and Buddhism, along with all the other sects and creeds of the Far East and their offshoots; the West being largely made up of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The East springs mostly from India’s culture heritage, the West from Greek philosophy and the prophetic tradition of Judaism.
The first striking difference is that the West often believes in the literal truth of its myths, scriptures, dogmas and ideologies, and often takes their contents as historical facts, very much as the Victorian physicist thought that his scientific world-picture literally described the universe as it is. The East, on the other hand, does nothing of the kind - indeed it has no dogmas at all, sees in all myths merely useful symbolism and does not care at all about historical fact. The roots of the pseudo conflict between science and religion, materialism and spiritualism lies right here and concerns only the West. No such conflict is possible in the East where all mythologies are understood to be simply allegoric and symbolic, implying no literal truth or factual statement whatsoever, and therefore no possibility of collision with any scientific view of the universe.
It does matter a great deal to the West whether Christ rose bodily from the dead, multiplied bread loaves, or even existed at all. It does not matter one whit to the East whether Rama, Shiva or Buddha ever existed; since their importance is not historical but symbolic. The West has always attempted to impose dogmatically its conflicting viewpoints because, imbued with a Biblical, Judaic or Koranic sense of God-given historical mission and the conviction of having the monopoly of literal religious truth, it has always attempted to conquer and shape the world, either by the sword or by scientific knowledge. The apparent paradox is that the western scientific attitude springs precisely from this belief in literalness, inherited from medieval scholasticism, from the intellectual gymnastics of such mental giants as Duns Scotus and Abelard, who raised the word-symbol to an almost mathematical precision, and made possible the total independence of the abstract idea from aesthetic impression. Thought was no longer chained to subjective emotion and could therefore enter into independent and objective relationship with the world of nature. The East also expanded its knowledge but without ever rejecting the mythologies from which it sprang. It never took those myths to be anything but metaphorical formulations of higher truths - as projected contents of an unconscious that was understood and accepted as being closer to ultimate Reality than conscious thought (waking-consciousness).
East and West alike, all religions attempt to provide for their devotees a “way”: a path toward some form of holiness. Unlike the West, the East concentrates almost entirely on the Path - the Chinese Tao, the Buddhist “Noble Eightfold Path” - and underplays the merely intellectual interpretations that supposedly go with it. Therefore it does not tread on the secular grounds covered by science. Furthermore, and this is crucial, it has studied the “way” of internal metamorphosis pragmatically and undogmatically, with almost clinical thoroughness; whereas the West, encumbered by dogmas and scriptures, has never developed a methodical “science” of the “way”, based on experimentation and observation. The “way”, of course, is the way of the mystic, for lack of a better word. Where the mystical impulse, in the West, is presumed to be a free gift of God’s grace imparted to the few, in the East it is presumed to arise through a form of knowledge and practice that is, theoretically, at everyone’s disposal.
Paradoxical meeting between eastern mystical insight and modern physics springs from the fact that both disciplines are thoroughly empirical. One investigates the inner world, the other the outer physical universe. Both are experimental, both observe with clinical detachment. Where they are to meet is when physics comes close to the fundamental nature of reality, to consciousness. This meeting would not have been possible a hundred years ago when physical science held dogmatically a far more mechanistic and substantial view of the material world, a view that is still quiet useful as far as our everyday life is concerned by which is no longer appropriate at the microcosmic level where problems of consciousness intrude unceasingly. The phenomena analysed by quantum physics are elements in a string of processes, and what binds them together lies in the observer’s mind. The fundamental unity of all things and events at that level is therefore bound to include consciousness.
It becomes increasingly clear that both approaches to ultimate Reality are complementary rather than opposite and antagonistic.
What, then, is the major characteristic of the mystical approach? The East seems to have understood long ago what Henri Bergson brilliantly demonstrated. That is, that man’s mind, as it evolved over hundreds of years, is cast in an essentially utilitarian mould. His mental functions are atavistically geared to practical action, rather than abstract thought about ultimates. The brain analyses perceptions and selects the actions to be accomplished. It is not, by nature, intended to deal with pure, non-utilitarian knowledge. The illusion that the rational intellect could reach some kind of ultimate metaphysical truth was never completely discarded in the West. It was never seriously considered in the East where the problem has always been to still and overcome the mind through appropriate techniques of meditation and contemplation, to shed an intuitive trans-rational light on the depths of the soul and let the Self disclose itself. Briefly, the various eastern techniques aim at controlling and eventually stopping the flow of thoughts with the assistance of physiological processes, bodily postures and breath control, according to the hallowed Tibetan saying:
Breath is the courser and thought the rider.
The fundamental dichotomy between East and West is the result of a sharp cleavage between two forms of consciousness which took place some four thousand years ago. In the Sumerian and Babylonian civilisations, the respective spheres of man and higher divinity began to split away from one another. The king no longer partakes of the divine; he is nothing but the humble priest of a totally transcendental deity, and the religious problem therefore becomes one of relationship rather than identification between man and an external God. This sharp separation triggered a longing for the restoration of the broken connection between the human and divine spheres. The end result, many centuries later, was the birth of the notion of history as a spiritually meaningful progression in which the will of God reveals itself - history as a linear development with a temporal direction, and without any possibility of recurrence. This is a complete break with the previous cyclical concepts of time which were geared to the natural cycles of the seasons. The cosmic process appears now as a directional unfolding with a once-and-for-all Creation, followed by a Fall and a struggle to overcome the Fall and reach Redemption. The world becomes the dramatic battlefield of a mighty struggle between the powers of good and evil, light and darkness - a vision that found its fullest expression in Zoroastrian Persia and Israel. Thus, the West looked for what theologian Paul Tillich calls the “new being” in the historical process itself rather than beyond it.
All this is foreign to the concepts of the East where the ever-recurring cyclical view, either historical as in China, or transhistorical as in India, prevails. The process of history has no spiritual significance whatsoever. There is no temporal tension here, no historical struggle between good and evil, just a natural and inevitable alternance between two complementary poles, as between day and night. Man’s spiritual problem is not relationship with the divine but identification with it. Man is assumed to be divine in essence; his main problem is therefore to realise this identification by peeling off the veils of illusion, which separate him from his true divine being. Phrased another way, the problem is to eliminate mere appearance, to which the individual ego belongs, and which is due to the illusion bred by ignorance, in order to retrieve one’s fundamental identity, one’s divine Self.
This, of course, has great bearing on the problem of ultimate Reality. From the first, Greece’s Ionian philosophers took the major step of sharply dissociating the subjective from the objective - the subjective being viewed as illusory. Objective thinking made its first decisive appearance in Greek pre-Socratic philosophy; and the process of objectification can best be understood by looking at the rare surviving fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Until then, as a legacy of the magic mind, dream-pictures were considered to be at least as real as mental activity in the waking-state. In other words, the unconscious was granted at least as high a degree of reality. This was turned upside down by Heraclitus:
“It is therefore necessary to follow the common. But while reason is common, the majority live as though they had a private insight of their own … those who speak with a sound mind must hold fast to what is common to all … The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
In Indian thought, the process was reversed; the objective, that is, the world of appearances, Maya, is ultimately a phantasm (as modern physics tells us), whereas the subjective, that is, consciousness, is the real world.
The Greeks began to see the external world as full of detached, autonomous objects, and linked these objects with one another intellectually, binding them together into logically coherent systems of objective relationships according to strict physical laws. They conceived the ultimate object of the material world to be the atom, the Greek atomos signifying “indivisible”, that is, the irreducible building block of the physical universe. In the process, they came to rely increasingly on the rational intellect and on discursive thought, deemed fit to understand and explain everything in the phenomenal world and beyond. With Plato, for instance, the process of objectification reaches beyond the mere material world to postulate a supra-physical order of objectified ideas and geometrical concepts, of which physical things are imperfect replicas.
Hence, for thousands of years, all the vain efforts of the western mind to adduce rational proofs of the existence of an objectified God as First Cause, as Deus ex Machina. The East never had any need for this; in fact it largely turned its back on the subject, without cutting it off sharply from its emotional links with the non-subject surrounding or underlying it.
As a result, whereas western philosophies are philosophies of strict intellectual information, eastern philosophies are philosophies of total transformation, leading to a form of human wholeness that is unreachable in the western context. To the easterner, religion is an awareness of ultimate Reality, not an intellectual theory. It is psychology and method rather than theology and dogma. So that while the westerner advances from thought to thought, from abstract concept to abstract concept, deducing, inducing, differentiation, integrating, analysing, the easterner advances from one subjective condition to another. The westerner focuses on the objects of consciousness, the easterner on consciousness itself. Eastern philosophies are basically empirical descriptions of the possible evolution of man from one level of consciousness to higher ones. To sum up, the westerner aims at clear thought, the easterner at pure consciousness.
The Bhagavad Gita, one of the monuments of Indian literature, gives us a perfect example of this predominance of the subjective outlook. This “Song of the Blessed” depicts the battlefield of Kurukshetra where two armies stand face to face. One of the commanders,Arjuna, drives his war chariot between the lines and, horrified at the thought of the forthcoming slaughter, wants to call off the battle. Lord Krishna, who assumes temporarily the role of his charioteer and incarnates divine wisdom, urges him to fight regardless of the objective consequences, and his speech is the essence of the Gita’s message. Arjuna must fight with serenity and total detachment because it is his duty as a professional warrior, because he is bound by the Karma of his past and has to go inexorably through the mysterious labyrinth of his appointed duties, however evil the consequences may seem to others. The immediate message: there is no such thing as objective reality. And the ultimate message:
“Give thought to nothing but the act, never to its fruits … For him who achieves inward detachment, neither good nor evil exists any longer here below.”
The western outlook has always included a full acceptance of an objective reality, implying the absolute dissociation of every individual human being from every other, and the equally absolute dissociation of all human beings from the higher divinity. Furthermore, there was in the West, until the advent of psychoanalysis, no conscious problem of self-identification, of rediscovering one’s deeper layers of consciousness. The western problem was how to relate to divine powers outside oneself, and how to develop in the process one’s original personality (a concept ignored in the East), that is, one’s ego. In the East, the problem is how to overcome and extinguish the ego as an essential step on the way to the discovery of one’s fundamental identity with the unindividualised divinity within the deep self according to the sacred Vedic formula, “Tat Tvam Asi”, (That Thou Art). The Almighty Brahman, lord of the universe, and atman, the individual soul, are one and the same. Quite obviously, philosophies of transformation are entirely geared to the development of the mystical potential in man; whereas philosophies of objective information are not. This explains the unending tension between mystical tendencies in the West and the rational intellect of its dogmatic theologians and philosophers.
In spite of the East-West dichotomy, there seems to be, however, a broad area of agreement between all mystics the world over; that, while the majority of human beings lead a more or less worthy life framed by the moral standards of whatever society they happen to be born into, there is yet another “way” for those who feel instinctively in touch with higher spiritual powers. This way is as mysterious as its destination, which is literally beyond verbal description, inexpressible in any language, although it can be hinted at in pictures and metaphors, music and poetry. It is here, in the direct records of the personal experiences of the great mystics, that the heart of the religious impulse is to be found, rather than in the official dogmas and intellectual interpretations of theologians.
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of the opposition between the two forms of knowledge occurred to Thomas Aquinas, the supreme theologian whose monumental Summa Theologiae remained the cornerstone of Roman Catholic doctrine for centuries. On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, he was unexpectedly overpowered by a mystical rapture of such intensity that all his theological writings appeared to him as totally worthless. In his own words:
“Everything that I have written seems like straw to me, in comparison with the things that I have seen and that have been revealed to me.”
And therefore, he never wrote another word. This, from a theological standpoint, rather embarrassing episode, also illustrates the staggering nature of mystical rapture, not only as physical sensation and spiritual emotion, but also as translogical knowledge of a far higher order than can be acquired by the most brilliant intellect.
Quite clearly, all religions have sprung from this indefinable awareness in human nature that obviously transcends its physical and mental limitations, a potential awareness made actual in some peculiarly gifted human beings. It is in the sum-total of the records of their own direct personal experiences in this realm beyond life and death, and beyond time and space, that kernel of religious truth is to be found - although in most men, this mystical disposition lies beneath the threshold of waking consciousness, not strong enough to break into the open and revolutionise their lives.
If we peruse these records carefully, we are struck by a universal insistence on the fact that all distinction between things, men, object and subject, self and non-self is overcome, and abolished. The world becomes “One”, which is the essence of the monistic philosophy of India’s Vedanta. This, the western intellect resists with all its might, since it abolishes the whole monotheistic concept of a sharp distinction between man and God; it makes a mockery of the concept that history has any spiritual meaning; and it destroys all the analytical claims of western thought as to the sharp opposition between subject and object.
No wonder that western mystics have always had to contend with the underlying hostility of the cultural environment into which they were born. Unless they are honest enough to claim, like Aquinas, that their intellectual word is “straw” as compared with the true mystical vision, they had to go through extraordinary contortions to dissociate the vision from the almost irresistible claim of their souls to outright participation in the Divine. As St. John of the Cross put it in his Dark Night of the Soul:
“I trust neither to experience nor to knowledge … but solely to the Holy Scriptures … it is not my intention to depart from the sound doctrine of our holy mother, the Catholic Church. I resign myself absolutely to her light, and submit to her decisions …”
In the East there can be no such surrender since it is acknowledged that ultimate Reality is precisely what the mystic experiences; and that this experience is the actual recovery of his inner, divine Self. He becomes, in fact, what he has actually alway been. Time and again, the western mystic is warned not to let himself be carried away by the subjective “illusion” of his own potential divinity, warned that there can be no divine incarnation in man - save in the one and only case of Jesus, for the Christians - and that his experience is actually a “vision” of an objectified, transcendental and forever separate Almighty God, rather than a “fusion” with it.
In spite of all those strictures, western mystics managed often enough to convey the essence of their raptures, which agree with the eastern testimony. The essence is the monistic feeling that the seer and the seen are identical, that there is no division or distinction between one thing and another: the corollary is that the vision completely transcends the rational mind, and that it is therefore beyond verbal description: and finally that the experience is an overwhelmingly emotional one, involving a supreme peace “that passes all understanding”, total calm and total blessedness. As the pagan mystic Plontinus put it:
“The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging: he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it … This is why the vision baffles telling: for how could a man bring back tidings of the Supreme as detached, when he has seen it as one with himself?”
The true mystical experience is in complete contradiction with the main trend of the western philosophic outlook. No wonder that, time and again, the objectifying, analytical mind of the West has viewed mysticism either with distrust, or as sheer delusion or superstition whereas the East views precisely this objectifying, analytical mind as the source of all delusions.
In early Buddhism, we reach the height of total subjectivity untainted by any attempt at objectification. Buddha denied the objective reality of Brahman, merely stressing Nirvana, the subjective state of enlightenment. This has brought upon him the accusation of atheism; but this accusation is irrelevant to the extent that early Buddhism was simply not interested in any kind of objectification whatsoever. It merely posits the total unreality of any stable substance, thing or concept, claiming that everything is in a perpetual flux, that only events take place - reminding us of Whiteheads’s famous saying that “The event is the unit of things real.” The same, of course, applies to the other so-called “atheistic” schools of Indian philosophy such as Sankhya and Yoga. The real is what you experience, not what you think. All attempts at identifying and defining the Supreme Deity, God, Allah, Brahman, are pointless and meaningless since they all hint at some Reality that is beyond time and space, beyond the objective and the subjective, and therefore beyond verbal description - and yet, can be experienced by man. Even to state that God exists objectifies Him, and implies that He is one thing among other things, and is therefore finite and in contradiction with His infinity - hence the impossibility of proving His existence by intellectual means alone.
We can now sum up the broad areas of agreement between the eastern mystical insight as expressed in eastern literature and philosophy, and the revolutionary vision of the universe postulated in contemporary physics. The first place must be given to the monistic view of the world, the fundamental oneness of it, which becomes increasingly evident at the subatomic level where all the phenomena are interrelated and cannot be viewed as autonomous and isolated things or processes: particles’ properties can only be observed and defined through their interactions with other systems. The second place must be given to the non-existence of a sharp separation between object and subject, observer and thing observed, since the observer, like the mystic, is an active “participant” in the experiment, and forms one whole with whatever is being observed.
This entails, in turn, the overcoming of the world of opposites and transforming them into alternation and interdependent poles, like those of a magnetic field. In China the interplay of Yin and Yang has traditionally symbolised this alternance. In the far more intellectualised culture of India, the constant theme is the need to transcend all pairs-of-opposites, dvandva. This overcoming of pairs-of-opposites occurs constantly in nuclear physics where continuity and discontinuity co-exist; where particles are all at once destructible and indestructible; where energy changes into matter and vice-versa; where the statistical character of the quantum theory makes it impossible to state flatly that a particle exists or does not exist in a given place since it is, in fact, a probability pattern in a state that is halfway between existence and non-existence.
To conclude, we may eventually look forward to a global, planetary culture in which both the “eastern” mystical and “western” scientific searches for ultimate Reality will merge, and which will transcend them both. A physical science will go on developing indefinitely within the limits it is setting for itself; and a science and technique of mysticism will strip away all dogmas, theologies and ideologies prevailing today in order to concern itself exclusively with this most mysterious and profound trans-human experience.
