Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality

by Edward F. Kelly

The classic starting point for most contemporary discussions of the mind–matter problem and mind–matter relations, respectively, is Descartes’ ontologically conceived dualism of the mental (res cogitans, thought) and the material (res extensa, extended matter).

As soon as an individual has managed to unify the opposites within himself, nothing stands in the way of realizing both aspects of the world objectively. The inner psychic dissection becomes replaced by a dissected world view, which is unavoidable because without such discrimination no conscious knowledge would be possible.

Methods for a systematic generation of acategorial states play a central role in the spiritual traditions of Asian cultures. An outstanding example is the Buddhist Satipaṭṭhāna-Sutta, lectures on the “foundations of mindfulness” (Nyanaponika, 2001), dating back to the first century BCE.

The Cosmic Uroborus, showing the hierarchy of scales of structure in the Universe, from the Planck scale of quantum gravitational effects at 10−33 cm to the scale of the observable Universe at 10+27 cm. One can regard this as a clock, with the size increasing by a factor of ten for each minute. The structures on the left and right are in the domain of relativity theory and quantum theory respectively, and these theories must be unified at the top. Mind and extra dimensions may play a role here.

even our experiences of the material world (i.e., our ordinary sense perceptions) are ultimately mental. So the claim that physics is close to a Theory of Everything seems rather hollow.

This 3D space provided the arena for Newtonian dynamics and was the basis of classical physics for 250 years. Events can also be assigned a time coordinate, but time is absolute in a Newtonian model,

Vernon Neppe and Edward Close (2012) have written extensively about what they call the “Vortex N-dimensional Pluralism paradigm.” This features an infinitely extended N-dimensional space with vortices allowing communication across the extra dimensions.

They favor a 9D model, with three dimensions of space, three of time, and three of consciousness.

the existence of psi hints that this extended space is collective: clairvoyance and psychokinesis suggest that it contains physical space, while telepathy suggests that the nonphysical part is also communal. Transpersonal experiences suggest the existence of even “higher” spaces.

Randall–Sundrum version of M-theory, illustrated in Figure 7.3, in which the physical Universe is regarded as a 4D brane in a higher-dimensional bulk.

A subtle body can observe objects on its own or any lower actuality plane but only affect objects on its own plane. During normal consciousness, it should be collocated with the physical body and have a specious present determined by the brain, but during altered states of consciousness it may extend further into the fifth dimension, thereby allowing access to a larger domain of space and time.

The sixth-century Platonist Hierocles explains that philosophy must include theurgic rites: “Philosophy is united with the art of sacred things since this art is concerned with the purification of the luminous body, but if you separate philosophical thinking from this art, you will find that it no longer has the same power” (Hadot, 2004, p. 48;

It was the belief of all Platonists that the soul preexists its physical body, continues to exist after death, and after a period of time, descends into its next incarnation.

For the first vehicle (proton ochēma) of souls . . . can hear things inaudible to mortal hearing and see things invisible to mortal sight. (Commentary on the Republic, II.167.15–23, Kroll, 1899–1901,

“it is not enough simply to learn about these things . . . questions that require practical experience for their accurate understanding cannot be explained by words alone” (Myst. 114.3; 6.6–7). True knowledge of paranormal events and apparitions is not theoretical; it can only be realized in practice.

Important

Obeyesekere’s point is that all religious traditions, all teachings of awakened sages, originate in experiences that are other than rational. These visionary experiences can never be fully articulated rationally, but they give rise to our most profound philosophic teachings (Obeyesekere, 2012, pp. 4, 246).

The central aim of classical Sāṃkhya is to eliminate suffering by providing effective intellectual means for proper discernment, discrimination, or disentanglement between puruṣa and prakṛti, thereby overcoming this two-way misidentification.

along with mastery of higher stages of samādhi comes the “dawning” of prātibha, a faculty of instantaneous direct perception or insight without the aid of physical senses or the lower mind (manas). This is thought to be an inherent property of sattva, obscured or interfered with by the presence of tamasic and rajasic impurities of the internal organ, especially the buddhi, and hence it is progressively released or unfettered as full sattvification is approached, yielding supernormal perception and ultimately knowledge of everything in prakṛtic nature (YS III.34, 37;

Patañjali tells us that our actions, our karma, determine our species for our next life—that is, our bodies—along with our life span and pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

Māyā thus is the complexity that makes up the world and everything that we see here. Māyā is the principle which allows for differentiation. Māyā is fundamentally a lens or process that causes us to see things that do not in reality exist,

we have learned to identify ourselves as stained by three notions: (1) an identification with repercussions of former deeds known as karma mala, the stain of karma, (2) an identification with an essential sense of otherness, duality, māyīya mala, the stain of māyā, and (3) an essential and usually unarticulated conception of the self as inherently limited, aṇava mala, the stain of smallness.

Important

Leibniz supposed that the world consists of numerous, indivisible, transforming units. These “monads” are not the atoms of the materialists but complete perceptions of the universe organized from centers.

Leibniz’s metaphysics makes paranormal cognitions normal, a natural feature of the way things are, and gives a fundamental place to the subconscious, an essential part of filter theory.

That life should continue after death is to be expected in a monadological world. The destruction of the body and its brain is just the disintegration of a composite structure within experience, experience that continues unabated and in which new bodily structures, sense perceptions, and associated minds will emerge in due course.

Nature may be full of living presences, but we would not be able to intuit their subjectivity unless our minds have access to those presences and their interiority. Neo-Leibnizian monads have such access by virtue of their inherent perceptual inclusiveness.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was a philosopher, scientist, expert in the construction of scientific instruments, logician, mathematician, and originator of semiotics.

Peirce also saw evidence of the action of signs outside a nervous system and even outside a biological organism: “It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there” (CP 4.551).

I call the worlds that we experience in dreaming, lucid dreaming, and life after death the “transphysical worlds.” Transphysical worlds are worlds that are fully actual but which cannot be found anywhere in the physical world as defined by physics.

Quantum physicists have accustomed us to the idea that the “outer world” consists, ultimately, not of enduring substances, but rather of short-lived dynamic events. We can, for example, imagine that a rock is a very large number of subatomic events taking place very rapidly and organizing themselves into a stable, repetitive pattern.

Griffin has already suggested that high-grade occasions can continue to endure even after the death of their bodies. Thus higher-grade occasions can exist independently from the bodies with which they are associated in waking life.

Transphysical Process Metaphysics gives us, thus, an expanded idea of causality: consciousness plays a causal role as the agency of actualization; efficient causes are a flow of experience from occasion to occasion; an individual formal cause is intrinsic to each actual occasion; final causes have an important role in the unfolding of the actual world.

While all past cultures have acknowledged transphysical realities (in their own language, of course), our modern culture does not, and this makes it particularly difficult to master these skills at this time.

Argument

Despite many magnificent and undeniable successes, current mainstream neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy of mind are incapable of accommodating various well-evidenced mental and psychophysiological phenomena of the sorts catalogued in Chapter 1 above, Irreducible Mind, and many other places.

Explanation why

we suggest designating this class of models more generally as “ROSTA” models, incorporating the central common notion of Resonant Opening to Subliminal and Transpersonal Assets.

Important

recent discoveries regarding “dark” matter and energy, previously unrecognized constituents of the universe which together represent something like 96% of its physical contents, suggest that there might be room for such possibilities within physics, and at minimum should encourage humility as to the limits of current knowledge.

Important

At the moment our popular and scientific culture mainly offers a stark black-and-white contrast between what’s “real”—i.e., classically physical, and hence accessible to our senses—and what’s merely imagined or imaginary and hence unreal. But not everything imagined is necessarily imaginary.

Important

the most extreme of all such “coincidences” involves the simultaneous setting of various basic physical constants to the very precise values they need to have in order for life even to be possible on earth—the “Anthropic Principle.”

Interesting!

plants using time-lapse photography, for example, shows them behaving in ways much like those that lead us to attribute conscious intelligence to mammals, but on a longer time-scale—perhaps a different “specious present”

Plant consciousness

we consider it possible that the future could be determinate—existing, and hence potentially accessible to precognition—and yet not determined, in the sense that it is not an inevitable, causal consequence of what preceded it, with no place for free will. Such pictures go back through Thomas Aquinas at least to Boethius in the early sixth century CE, and a version of it is in fact developed in some detail by Sprigge

Future

Hartshorne and Reese (1953/2000), which systematically samples the history of serious and disciplined thought about the central religious questions as to the existence and character of God. Drawing upon selections from some fifty major thinkers, both Eastern and Western and from ancient to modern times, they construct what amounts to a systematic exposition and defense of panentheism—a third point of view, or tertium quid—which attempts to overcome the historical polarization between classical theism and pantheism, and which for them represents the culmination of millennia of philosophical theology.

the recent book by Biernacki and Clayton (2014) shows clearly that all of the world’s major faiths already contain significant panentheistic themes or elements.

Panentheism in faith

The “hyperdimensional” model of Bernard Carr (Chapter 7), growing out of relativity and string theory rather than quantum theory, postulates a “Universal Structure,” interpretable as a higher-dimensional psychophysical information space, which gives rise to a hierarchical structure of projections to lower-dimensional actualities including the physical world at the lowest level and the complete range of mental worlds at the higher levels.

Universal Structure

we will need to defuse the charge that in moving toward panentheism we are simply being metaphysically self-indulgent, building into the system from the beginning what we want to get out of it in the end.

Important

this comprises the main conclusion of the present chapter and our book as a whole—we now claim in addition that a rich and worldwide history of efforts toward abduction from that sort of broadened empirical foundation points inescapably in the direction of a panentheistic metaphysics of the sort emerging here.

Important!!

we believe that to be truly meaningful this “reconciliation” of science and religion must necessarily go beyond uneasy coexistence from within hermetically isolated magisteria to a creative synthesis, taking the form of an enlarged conception of the nature of Reality that is both spiritually satisfying and compatible with science.

Combine religion and science

We strongly suspect that our individual and collective human fates in these exceptionally dangerous and difficult times—indeed, the fate of our precious planet and all of its passengers—may ultimately hinge upon wider recognition and more effective utilization of the higher states of being that are potentially available to us but largely ignored or even actively suppressed by our postmodern civilization with its strange combination of self-aggrandizing individualism and fundamentalist tribalisms.

Important!!

The one thing we should all regard as unacceptable is unyielding and aggressive fundamentalism, whether of the religious or the scientific sort. Nobody has thought more about the humanly vital matters touched upon in this brief coda than our colleague Mike Murphy, and we turn next to him for concluding reflections.

Important!!