There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one of the awe-inspiring testimonies of who we are and where we came from
The Esalen Institute is a cluster of meeting rooms, hospitality facilities and hot baths nestled among the stunning rocky cliffs of the Pacific Ocean in the town of Big Sur, California. In his 1985 book "You've Gotta Be Joking Mr. Feynman", the Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, wrote about his experiences in these hot baths and recalled a massage that a man gave to a woman he had just met:
"He starts rubbing her big toe. 'I think I feel it,' he says. 'I feel a kind of throbbing - is it the pituitary gland?' I blurt out without thinking, 'You have no idea how far out of your mind you are, man!'
They look at me, shocked... and say, 'It's reflexology!'
I immediately closed my eyes and pretended to be immersed in meditation."
With such an introduction to the mecca of the New Age movement, I accepted the invitation to host a weekend workshop on science and spirituality there. Given my tendency to be skeptical about most of the supernatural nonsense offered by the peddlers of Buddhist wisdom (prajna) here who are immersed in meditation and immersion on their way to nirvana, I was surprised that the hall was full. Maybe skeptical awareness is on the rise!
But precisely within the conversations outside the program, during the meals of the healthy food produced on the spot and while soaking in the baths, I began to understand a little about what things the people believe in and why. As soon as it became known that Mr. Skepticism was in place, I began to hear the question over and over again, "How do you explain this story?" Usually the stories were about angels, aliens and the usual supernatural experiences. But since this is Aslan - the bedrock of all the weird and wonderful in human diversity - there were some one-of-a-kind descriptions.
One woman explained the theory behind "energy work", a combination of massage and tuning the body's seven energy centers called chakras. I signed up for a massage, which was exceptionally relaxing, but when a colleague of mine told me how she cured a woman with a migraine by directing a beam of light across her head, I decided that theory and practice don't always match. Another woman warned of the plague of satanic cults. "But there is no evidence of the existence of such sects," I replied. "Of course not," she explained. "They erase all memories and all evidence of their criminal activity." One gentleman told of a long tantric sexual encounter with his beloved, which culminated after many hours when a bolt of lightning was shot through her left eye and following it a "blue light in the form of a child" penetrated her womb, ensuring conception. Nine months later, the couple were joined by friends and gurus and everyone gathered in the greenhouse and sweated to "rebirth themselves" before the mother gave birth to her son. The father told the baby that he would have to be an athlete to get into college. Twenty years later the guy became a professional baseball player. "How do you explain that?" I was asked. I immediately closed my eyes and pretended to be meditating.
People have such experiences, share them with others, and give them great meaning, because our cerebral cortex is big enough to conceive such lofty ideas, and our imaginations are creative enough to invent such fantastic stories. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the information template that builds us - our genes, proteins, memories and personality - then spirituality is the desire to know the place of our essence in the deep time spaces of evolution and the deep space spaces of the cosmos.
There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one of the awe-inspiring testimonies of who we are and where we came from. "The cosmos is within us. We are made of stardust. We give the cosmos a way to know itself." This is how the late astronomer Carl Sagan opened the film series "Cosmos" which was filmed down the coast, not far from Salen, referring to the stars that served as a source of the chemical elements of life. "Finally we began to wonder and think about our origins, stardust watching the stars, organized clusters of ten billion-billions-billions of atoms surveying the evolution of matter, exploring the long trajectory that brought them to consciousness... Our duty to survive and thrive is not only a duty to ourselves but Also to the ancient and wide cosmos from which we grew."
This is spirituality at its peak.
