Spirituality as broad science

June 12, 11:56 AMSacramento Spirituality ExaminerSteve Curless

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Yesterday, we considered Sam Harris' proposal of a "contemplative science" that evaluates "spiritual" experiences generated by such methods as meditation not in terms of dogmatic religious teachings accepted on faith, but in terms of open-minded scientific investigation. In other words, Harris believes, as do many others, that science can legitimately study not only phenomena that we perceive with our physical senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, but also every kind of phenomena we perceive including those inside and outside us that we apprehend with our mind and spirit.

Philosopher-mystic Ken Wilber asserts that we have an "eye of flesh," an "eye of mind," and an "eye of contemplation," and that there is a kind of science that corresponds to each eye. Roughly speaking, physical and biological sciences use the "eye of flesh." That is, they employ the physical senses to study physical and biological phenomena such as atoms, rocks, cells, and organisms. Mental science uses the "eye of mind" to study such intangible things as psychological states, human personality and culture, logical relations, and mathematical theorems. And contemplative science uses the "eye of spirit" to study such phenomena as the experiences of "no-self" and "oneness" generated by meditation.

To those who argue that science legitimately studies only phenomena perceived by the senses, Wilber replies that this is an inadequate and narrow definition of "science." For Wilber, science studies all phenomena that can be experienced, and, as we've already seen, we experience more than just physical phenomena. Not only that, but when, say, physicists study physical phenomena such as gravity or electromagnetism, they use not only their senses but also mental mathematics to understand them. In other words, even so-called "physical science" includes "mental science" to carry out its investigations of the physical world.

So, for Wilber, there are two kinds of science--"narrow" and "broad." Both are "empirical" in the sense that they study the phenomena we experience, but the former studies our experience of physical or sensory phenomena only, whereas the latter studies all kinds of phenomena--physical, mental, and spiritual. The reason Wilber refers to all three undertakings as "science" is because they all consist of the following three elements or "strands":

Injunction: The operations you must perform to obtain an empirical--i.e., experiential result. If you want to know this, do this. Here are some crude examples Wilber uses for each of the three types of science: If you want to know if it's raining, step outside. If you want to know the meaning of Hamlet, read it. If you want to know if there's Buddha nature, count your breath for five years.

Data: What you experience when you perform the injunction. Examples: What you observe if you stain animal tissue in certain ways and examine it under a microscope at a certain power of magnification in a specified way. What you experience if you do zazen in the prescribed manner long enough.

Confirmation: When other qualified people perform the same injunction, they obtain the same result. Those who examine properly stained human tissue under a microscope in the prescribed way observe cells and parts of cells. Those who do zazen in the prescribed manner experience satori. It's important to note that verification takes place only among a "community of the adequate." Someone untrained in cytology can't confirm the presence of cells and their components. Someone untrained in higher math and physics can't verify M-theory. Someone untrained in meditation can't verify the satori state.

In conclusion, all science, according to Ken Wilber, consists of injunctions, data, and verification or falsification by a community of the adequate. This pertains to broader contemplative science as well as to narrower physical and mental science. In other words, it's possible to, in the broader sense, scientifically investigate the phenomena produced by meditation and other "contemplative" or "spiritual" methods, and we shall examine this contemplative science in more detail in future articles.