The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
— Albert Einstein
We think we know what Science is, but most of us don’t. We think we know what “sacred” means, but most of us don’t think about it. And so a veil has been drawn over our eyes as we search for Truth and Meaning. A veil that is not without purpose.
The irony is that Science has become Religion - slowly but surely the word has become a tool of repression and even of deliberately fostered ignorance. Where once the Church could declaim to the masses, “Scripture is the Word of God - as interpreted by us! And you must obey!” - now it is the bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces of corporate media who hold up the dubious “facts” of corrupt pseudo-science and declaim, “Science is the absolute Truth - as defined by our corporate masters and proven by the studies they themselves have funded! And you must obey!”
The reality of what Science is - the methodical testing of hypotheses about how the world works in order to achieve predictable results, which must always be questioned and subject to new proofs - is now an all-powerful word of magic, invoked to silence heretics.
The burning of Dutch Anabaptist, Anneken Hendriks, Amsterdam, 1571
Whereas the great scientists, on the other hand, tell us quite a different story.
“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.”
— Richard Feynman
The true meaning and history of Science can be objectively established. The ‘true meaning’ of the sacred is eternally subjective, and can only be experienced, not objectively established, within the soul.
The sacred cannot be precisely defined. Each of us perceives it through the lens of a unique personal history. For me, sacredness is an experience of the inner radiance of life, the unseen force that transforms and nourishes the physical world but is never limited by it. There is something more to it, a mystery that is never totally grasped.
— Anthony Lawlor
Yet when we seek the sacred in a scientific manner, the entire world can light up as we experiment in the reverent laboratory of the mind, searching methodically to experience the Soul and its relationship to Source.
And now we live in a time when this stream of scientific seeking has grown into a tidal flood, composed of ancient sacred methods such as Kriya Yoga, working directly to control the flow of life force and consciousness in the spine, as well as distorted by rishi-come-lateleys who pedal quick fixes and apocalyptic prophecies to the gullible.
I live in a remote Colorado mountain town which is home to just as many authentic Rinpoches, dedicated meditation practitioners, and multiple ancient Buddhist lineages as it is to deluded pretenders, self-aggrandizing wackos, and (most embarrassingly in recent headlines) a “mother-God” cult which ended up worshipping the dead body of their founder for weeks in a trailer park until county officials showed up to cart the mess away.
The Sangdo Palri Temple of Wisdom and Compassion in Crestone, Colorado
So the mind vs soul vs heart vs common sense vs science labyrinth has been familiar territory to me for most of my life. In my late teens I needed an approach to Divine Reality which my intellect could respect. I started out with the breakthrough of finding the work of renowned Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who delineated a path of evolution which attempted to reconcile (or even intertwine) the findings of science and spirituality.
This came after a comparatively benevolent Catholic upbringing which included eight years of parochial elementary school and the Sacraments as well as training in Silva Mind Control techniques of clairvoyance and remote healing, courtesy of a mother and father who (while devout Catholics) featured books on reincarnation and yoga throughout our home and who later immersed in Dr. Jean Houston’s Mystery School initiatory journeys to such mystic meccas as the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, and the erstwhile home of the Oracle at Delphi.
Having practiced the Kriya Yoga teachings of the renowned yoga master, Paramahansa Yogananda, for some 30 years, I can attest as a result of that long scientific experiment that the Divine can become wondrously real and personal in an undeniably tangible way, that the fabled Light of the Third Eye is also real and can be seen in meditation, that miracles are both explicable and mysterious - in the same way that electricity is real and predictable and is still an astonishing mystery that science can predict but not explain.
After twenty years of accumulated tales of sacred science and miracles (plus my own devotional experiences), a spiritual memoir took shape, now available on Amazon.
And my experiments have also shown me that the Divine Mother adored by many Names in India, and in the West primarily as Mother Mary - can become an undeniable Reality in one’s life through that same stunning blend of devotion and science.
MahaPrakriti, The Cosmic Divine Mother, containing with Herself the divine Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva - the Creator, the Preservor, and the Destroyer-Renewer.
Pursuing a spiritual practice for so many years is easier said than done, and it should be an encouragement to readers that a practitioner as doggedly inconsistent as this writer should have be able to share such testimony.
In the meantime, I will do my best to remember the words of Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita -
“Kill therefore with the Sword of Wisdom the doubt born of ignorance which lies in thy heart. Be one in yoga, in self-harmony, and arise, great warrior, arise!”
blessings,
Michael