So far, we have been led by an unseen hand that has guided the progress of the last century. It is working as the Time-Spirit in man, raising new issues, inducing fresh discoveries, inviting greater challenges, goading him to deeper enquiries and inspiring him with novel ideas. The major leaps of mankind in the domain of science have nearly always been unexplained and surreptitious. The next step has not often been logically linked to the previous one. It has even sometimes stood out in opposition, as if overtopping or even effacing the previous view with a new discovery. These leaps, called ‘accidents’, are really signs of a greater intervention hidden in the heart of time that uses nature and man to push its own purpose. Both science and spirituality serve the same purpose. What appear to us as opposites conspire towards a common goal. The truth however is sealed from the eye of man. Standing at the crossroads, he wonders where these parallel lines will meet. The problem for man is not merely theoretical. He seeks, even more importantly, a law of action, his role and scope in the journey. He now follows one line of advance, then another, then both, trying to form the bridge. But the bridge is not a meeting point of two lines. Something more is needed. So we cast our gaze into the future across the stretch of infinity to see where the parallel lines will meet.
There has always been some adjustment and accommodation between the material sciences and spirituality, as we have seen. Material science has begun to admit phenomena like hypnosis, autosuggestion etc., as far as they are useful in making life more comfortable for man. However, the theoretical paradigm still does not include it, except perhaps passingly and ambiguously. The reason is simple. A theoretical paradigm is a closed construction like a frame. To accommodate another construct, it has to shift and change, possibly at the cost of demolishing the entire past construction. It is difficult for the human mind to do this unless it serves an immediate benefit. New vistas of possibilities opening through this shift have not yet fully been embraced by the mind of man. A similar situation seems to exist in the other field. Though they are trying to adapt scientific methods and standards for classifying phenomena and their utilities, the theoretical frames remain unchanged. In other words, matter is matter, apart and distinct from the spirit which is quite another reality. But what we need is a leap to the point where the two fuse and mingle; the secret origin of both, the common parentage, the paradigm that includes both as two facets of a single Reality.
This is the line for the future. To try to prove the power of consciousness by the tools and methods of material science is not quite the right way. Material methods are built for and quite useful in the material domain. They cannot register or measure consciousness. Even if they occasionally capture some glimpse of the supraphysical, it will still only be a hint. A vast field will escape simply because the instruments do not register that. We may even end up in the same old cycle of material cause and effect while the real thing is lost. Thus, several enthusiasts of ‘yoga’ want to prove that ‘yoga’ helps. What they end up proving (strictly scientifically) is that a set of physical postures helps. The real significance of ‘yoga’ is lost if it is reduced to a mechanical technique, ‘a set of exercises’ rather than a means ‘to open oneself to the influx of a higher consciousness’. The same is true of ‘methods’ of breathing, ‘techniques’ of meditation and the practice of repeating a sound symbol. Scientific methods record the physical events. The rest remains a matter for personal belief. The scientist believes it is the baro-receptors that guide; the spiritualist believes it to be the higher consciousness. In fact, the scientist is more likely to prove his hypothesis and strike a blow against the idea of consciousness. Even worse, the ‘spiritualist’, after all these scientific methods, ends up rejecting matter and the material world as it collapses into a void of Nihil or Nirvana. If that is the end point of all self-discovery, then why care about science and its world of men and machines? The wish to ‘prove God in a laboratory’ is a subtle trap that could end up proving that God is a chemical since ‘only a chemical’ can be measured in a lab. The attempt, however well-intentioned, is puerile and not worthy of mature intellects.
