Spiritualism & Science

What is a personal spiritual crisis? We tend to associate it with a loss of faith. We stop believing there is a divine will which may have little to do with our own. A client recently exclaimed, “I am losing my faith in God!” Some people just seem to have more than a fair share of suffering in their lives but for most us there are years that are just horrible and we wonder what we’ve done wrong to bring this upon ourselves.

Our much lauded Scientific Age has demanded a level of rationalism, methodology and justification that has presented numerous challenges to the realm of soul and spirit. Although science has claimed millions of converts to its side of the argument, it predominantly disagrees with notions of the unknowable held by millions who remain steadfast in the belief that there is a dimension of existence that cannot be scientifically proven.

In materialization for example, whereby the spirit world makes its presence heard and seen, science failed to explain the elements which make this possible. The most frustrating aspect of investigating mediumship for the scientific community has always been the phenomenology of the manifestations. They operate within their own set of laws which continue to stubbornly remain out of the bounds of our material world. A classic example is the phenomenon of the gifted medium who communicates with the spirit world on a regular basis. In the mid 1800’s, just at the cusp of sciences’ explosion of global influence and power, the spirit world made its presence known and seen in the most unpredictable and unlikely situations imaginable.

Spirit didn’t pick those in a position of hierarchal and earthly power to be mediums. In the majority of cases it was young, rather inexperienced women! Nor did the manifestations take place in geographical locations that were recognized to be spiritual according to collective agreements as such. They took place in random and innocuous places like ordinary people’s houses!

Science brought in its youngest, and poorest sister to investigate. Psychology with its rather embarrassingly loose boundaries was welcome to prove its mettle by debunking spirituality once and for all.

In the early twentieth century we have Freud, our grand-dad of psychoanalysis shushing his brilliant colleague, Carl Jung, about discussing spiritual matters in public or in any way associated with his work as a psychiatrist. He repeatedly admonished him to be more circumspect or psychoanalysis would lose all its hard won credibility in the much sought after approval of the scientific community.

Psychology remains split on this very fault line. On the one side we have those who acknowledge soul and spirit and on the other we have those who favour a strong psychopathological based analysis. In other words, if you believe you have seen and felt spirit you are at the very least abnormal, and at worst delusional and therefore insane. Science neatly disposed of the problem by handing it over to its barely tolerated repository, psychology, which has been struggling with this issue all on its own until recently.

This has left the gifted psychics: mediums, telepaths, spiritual healers, clairvoyants all twisting in the wind. It was (and continues to be) a terrible blight for many to work through on their own. It's hard to receive urgent messages to pass along to someone who would consider them at best crazy if they were to do so. I speak with budding psychics often who are at the end of their tether coping with this gift that no one believes exists. The is a global spiritual crisis which is far more prevalent than most people could imagine!

Science landed on a formula several years ago that it describes as quantum physics. In the purest of the scientific titans, physics, a new child was born. Presently the Perimeter Institute which is an enormous and ambitious project funded and supported by the RIM corporation, is focusing its beam of query into the laws of spirit. If you can’t beat ‘em as they say, join ‘em. Now the scientific community after more than a hundred and fifty years of thousands of manifestations of spirit concedes that there are dimensions to existence which have until now remained hard to prove.

It’s not all science’s fault either that this war between science and faith has been waging for so long. Galileo, one of the much loved great granddaddies of science was jailed for his findings and under the threat of terrifying torture by the Catholic Church was forced to rescind all his findings. When faith refuses to open itself to scientific query, it loses in the end too. It is when science and religion are in sync that we can have a hope of reaching the truth. The open mind and loving respect on both sides of the debate will be the critical ingredients in the crucible of seeking truth.

I always loved science in school. Math and physics comprised my highest grades but it was in the realm of spirit that my soul soared and spirit sang. Creative expression, story telling and sociology thrilled my soul but scientific inquiry satiated my mind. Don’t fall into the trap of one being right while the other is wrong. Push within yourself to have science and faith walk together as two equal supports working in sync to carry you through life fulfilling your purpose.

Be logical, creative and heart/mind full in all aspects of your life. Love and wisdom are the highest standards by which we solve the complex issues facing our world today. We cannot pray away pollution no more than we can be logical about desire. But we can find balance and wisdom within the tension created when we demand an equal partnership between science and faith within ourselves.