Category: Latest Issue

93 Is Reality Real?

A Conversation with Evolutionary Game-Theorist Donald Hoffman

interviewed by David Wright

DW: Is what we perceive with our senses “real” in the deepest sense? Is there a reality “beyond” our perception? If so, what is it like, and what is our responsibility towards it? Too often, in seeking answers to these questions, scientists and spiritual aspirants find themselves living in worlds apart, unable to exchange and share common experiences or perspectives.

DH: My attitude about science and spirituality is… I’ll put it this way. There’s a famous quote from Rumi that says, “Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” I think of spirituality as relating to questions about human significance and meaning. Why are we here? What’s this all about? And often scientists will say that we can’t address those questions, but I take a different point of view. I think that we can. I do meditate, and I understand the importance of silence; I think that it is transformative. I think it restructures human consciousness to spend time in silence. It’s a very healthy thing.

 

ARTWORK © BARRY UNDERWOOD

93 Bridging the Two Worlds

93 Confessions of a Buddhist Theoretical Physicist

by Fred Cooper

Until recently, I was not willing to discuss the relation between Science and Spirituality, not because of any distrust of my understanding of physics, but because my meditation practice had not reached the necessary maturation to feel confident about discussing spiritual matters to non-meditators. It was only about 10 years ago, after practicing for 27 years, that I was able to integrate my experience of being introduced to the nature of mind (by two of my root teachers, H.E. Tai Situ Rinpoche and V.V. Mingyur Rinpoche) to achieve a stable “glimpse of recognition.” After this event I felt I had the credentials in both domains to make some statements about the connection between physics and spirituality.

In the present article, I am happy to share my thoughts on how physics and meditation are related based on my career as a theoretical physicist and on my training in the Mahamudra approach to meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

ARTWORK © SUKHI BARBER

93 Neurotheology

How Does the Brain Experience God?

Interview with Andrew B Newberg

Interviewed by Emily Esfahani Smith

EES: What are some of the questions you’re trying to answer in your research?

ABN: We are trying to understand the relationship between our religious and spiritual selves and the human brain. What are the ways that the brain allows us to experience religious feelings and thoughts, and what are the ways that it hinders us? I’m particularly interested in what’s going on inside the brain during intense religious experiences, like moments of transcendence, awe, and mysticism. When somebody says, “I had a mystical experience and I felt God” and someone says “I had a mystical experience and felt universal consciousness,” we can ask if those are the same experiences interpreted differently, or are they two completely different experiences?

 

PHOTO © CHRIS ROCHE

93 From the Scientific to the Mystical

In the Works of Carl Rogers

by Michael Sivori

In the years before he died Rogers was excited to see that his findings in the science of psychotherapy were reflected in other fields such as chemistry and mathematics and with the emergence of Chaos theory. In other words, the fully functioning person is an open system—a principle in Chaos theory—interacting with their environment and integrating these new experiences to adapt, as they proceed. It could well have been that Rogers would have gone on to use open systems theory to begin to synthesize the scientific with the spiritual.

ARTWORK © HILMA AF KLINT COMPLIMENTS OF THE HILMA AF KLINT FOUNDATION

PHOTOGRAPHER ALBIN DAHSTROM, MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM

93 Sufism Within A Worldview Transformed by Science

by Mary Coelho

The Sufi mystics have left us many remarkable statements that seem impossible to believe in the contemporary mechanistic Western context. Ibn Arabi wrote in the voice of the beloved “I am nearer to you than yourself.” From the writings of Al-Hallaj we find “Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain.”

These words are easily discredited and disregarded in our Western world in which mechanistic sciences have too often claimed full explanatory power of the nature of our world, thus discounting the possibility of dimensions of the world not accessible to that mode of knowing. As a consequence, these words just quoted are foreign to many people, as a sense of the sacred has been lost in much of the West. We have constructed a disenchanted, technological culture for ourselves that is a costly prison.

Sufism With a Worldview Transformed by Science Notes

 

ARTWORK © VELIRINA / BIGSTOCKPHOTOS.COM

93 Uncertainty Principle

by Dani Kopoulos

Another dream. This one with her head in a physics book. In the dream she is desperately trying to measure a very small thing. The thing is floating and inchoate, in front of her and then behind. She refers to her notes for instructions but when she looks up again it moves away. She pokes it and it disappears. She gives up trying to locate and record it. But as soon as she gives up observing, she’s overcome with the sense that it’s there after all. And that it’s looking at her.

When you try to observe and locate a Friend of God, he moves. But he’s there all along. Focus the microscope, bounce the photon and it’s another jump, a different momentum. The ultimate trickster, playing hide and seek between the human intellect and the human imagination.

 

PHOTO © JALAL SEPEHR

93 Observing From the Inside Out

by Ansuman Biswas

I quickly realized that Aristotle’s pithy aphorism that “Nature abhors a vacuum” holds just as true in art as it does in science. I was invisible and inactive. There was nothing to see. And yet I found that people flooded the nothingness with their own stories. Sometimes the less you do the more people see. Just as air rushes into a vacuum so people fill space with imagination. Many people perhaps imagined I would be found crumpled in a corner of the box when it was opened, an anguished skeleton. Others might have imagined I would flutter out on angelic wings with a beatific smile. Some told me that my incarceration threw into sharp relief the number of dinners they ate or TV shows they watched during that ten-day period in March, 1998. Even my own imagination played tricks on me.

 

93 Featured Poet

EVE POWERS is an award-winning poet whose work has
appeared in California Quarterly, Rockhurst Review, Purpose
Magazine, Sufi Journal, Third Wednesday Journal, Lalitamba,
Hawai’i Pacific Review, Atlanta Review, Archyopteryx: Th e
Newman Journal of Ideas, City Works Literary Journal, Kerf
Literary Journal, Whirlwind Review, and Muse Literary Journal.
Her fiction has been published in Writing Our Way Out
of the Dark, Scent of Cedars: Promising Writers of the Pacific
Northwest, A Cup of Comfort for Sisters, The Broken Plate Review,
and Slab Literary Journal. Her creative non-fiction has
appeared in Drash literary journal. She is listed in the Directory
of American Poets and Fiction Writers.