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(Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom - p.48)
...I was <...> faced with a serious problem. I had just embarked on a promising scientific career, in which I had considerable emotional involvement, and now Krishnamurti told me with all his charisma and persuasion to stop thinking, to liberate myself from all knowledge, to leave reasoning behind. What did this mean for me? Should I give up my scientific career at this early stage, or should I remain a scientist and abandon all hope of attaining spiritual self-realization? <... I was rather intimidated when I finally sat face to face with the Master, but I did not lose any time. I knew what I had come for. “How can I be a scientist” I asked, “and still follow your advice of stopping thought and attaining freedom from the known?” Krishnamurti did not hesitate for a moment. He answered my question in ten seconds, in a way that completely solved my problem. “First you are a human being,” he said; “then you are a scientist. First you have to become free, and this freedom cannot be achieved through thought. It is achieved through meditation – the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.” Once I had reached this understanding of life as a whole, he told me, I would be able to specialize and work as a scientist without any problems. And, of course, there was not question of abolishing science. Switching to French Krishnamurti added, “J´adore la science. C´est merveilleux!” (Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom - p.29-30)
...science, as it is practiced today, has no way of dealing with consciousness, or with experience, values, ethics, or anything referring to quality. “This situation derives from something that happened in European consciousness at the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno,” Laing began his argument. “These two men epitomize two paradigms – Bruno, who was tortured and burned for saying that there were infinite worlds; and Galileo, who said that the scientific method was to study this world as if there were no consciousness and no living creatures in it. Galileo made the statement that only quantifiable phenomena were admitted to the domain of science. Galileo said: “Whatever cannot be measured and quantified is not scientific”; and in post-Galilean science this came to mean: “What cannot be quantified is not real.” This has been the most profound corruption from the Greek view of nature as physis, which is alive, always in transformation, and not divorced from us. Galileo´s program offers us a dead world: Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and along with them have since gone esthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. Hardly anything has changed our world more during the past four hundred years than Galileo´s audacious program. We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice.” (Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom - p.133)
His observations of transpersonal experiences had shown him, Grof continued, that human experiences seems to be capable of two complementary modes of awareness. In the Cartesian-Newtonian mode, we perceive everyday reality in terms of separate objects, three-dimensional space, and linear time. In the transpersonal mode, the usual limitations of sensory perception and of logical reasoning are transcended and our perception shifts from solid objects to fluid energy patterns. Grof emphasized that he used the term “complementary” to describe the two modes of consciousness on purpose, because the corresponding modes of perception may be called “particle-like” and “wave-like” in analogy to quantum physics. <....> “There seems to be a fundamental dynamic tension between the two modes of consciousness,” he explained. “To perceive reality exclusively in the transpersonal mode is incompatible with our normal functioning in everyday world, and to experience the conflict and the clash of the two modes without being able to integrate them is phychotic. You see, the symptoms of mental illness may be viewed as manifestations of an interface noise between the two modes of consciousness.” As I reflected on Grof´s remarks, I asked myself how one would characterize a person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode, and I realized that this would also be madness. As Laing would say, it is the madness of our dominant culture. Grof agreed: “A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centered, competitive, goal-oriented lives. They tend to be unable to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life and become alienated from their inner world.<...>” (Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom - p.121-2) |
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