Convergence

Last Sunday, my aunt Maria, the younger sister to my father, visited us in our home in The Hague. She’s been roaming all over the globe, pursueing a spiritual path, that brought her to gurus and kibutz and finally, after many years at Findhorn, to Abingdon, Oxforshire, driven by her love for Trish. she’s running her own spiritual practice now. We rarely meet, but I love her story. Nevertheless, her journey is one I’d always thought was light years from the one I would undertake, being very skeptical about all this spiritual blabla about karma and shakras. I’m a scientific hardliner. Some would probably say that “show me the data” is my motto. However, our lines seem to be much less far apart than I'd long thought.

The connection surfaced through a book I read recently, called “The Earth has a Fever”, (my translation) by Erik van Praag, Judy McAllister and Jan Paul van Soest.
It’s about how to consciously live with climate change; how do you deal with the scale of the phenomenon, which as an individual you can do very little about? It was written by three authors, one of whom is a colleague I work with. I know him as a man of science. The other two are from the spiritual scene. One of them my aunt knows very well, as they had been together on the management team of the Findhorn Foundation for a while. So that’s three handshakes from me to Maria, ignoring the family short cut.

Why do science and spirituality meet here, where in my dominant perception they’d always been like water and fire to each other? Why has spirituality intrigued me lately?

I think it’s because they’re forced into the same space by reality, by the evidence accumulated by science that shows that the limits of what our planet can bear are materialising, that our global society is on an unsustainable trajectory. In sustainability spirituality and science find common ground.

These days, science provides the evidence of limits, of problems. Climate change, pollution, over fishing, greed and abundance...evidence is accumulating and the solution is in living within the limits. There are two ways to do that: through development of clean technology, and through change of behavior. The increasing urgency provided by recent scientific findings suggests that we do both. Hence, science is promoting a more modest way of life like spiritual practitioners have done since long. Science needs spirituality. And science generates the evidence that makes spiritual living more and more attractive: that economic growth and happiness do not correlate beyond a certain threshold. Things that drive happiness are weakly dependent on the things that cause the problems. Spiritual principles can be the best way to live sustainably, within the planet’s limits, or in harmony with Gaia, good stewardship, without compromising on your good life.

That’s the perspective the book I was talking about takes. Dominant part of climate literature is about physical and technical alternatives, regulation and pricing. They all conclude: it can be done, yes, we can mitigate dangerous climate change. Yet, it doesn’t work. Despite the persisting efforts of Gore, the IPCC and organisations like Greenpeace in raising awareness, a recent survey revealed that climate change is not high on the list of what concerncs Dutch people (see results here; in Dutch). With the slow process in international climate negotiations and the bargaining that’s going on, politics isn’t really adding to the climate case. The image that sustainability is costly and requires that people give in on their budget, their comfort or other assets of lives is maintained. It will all get worse and my solitary efforts won’t make a difference anyway.

This book, though, is the first I read that tries to go beyond technology and regulation and tries to seduce first movers, the cultural creatives, by offering direct personal gain. By structuring your way of life according to principles that really matter to your happiness, you are likely to simultaneously – as as side effect - live a carbon extensive life.

That’s how science meets spirituality and religion. That’s where I hook up to the latter. If I look around I see that spiritual practice (tools, values and ethics) just seems to work for many people. They look happier, more relaxed and manage to control their emotions. It’s not only perception: by measuring brain activity, it can be proven that buddhist monks can control their mind and concentration much better than others (e.g. R. Davidson & A. Lutz, 2008). These facts trigger my attention. I can recognise the emotions and I value the tools, virtues and ethics.

Probably science and spirituality used to drift apart: to the business and science world spiritual and religious people were retards, denying the evidence that science generated and the progress we all benefitted from. Now this very progress asks to revamp old virtues that have lived on in religion and spirituality and in the process rechampion the practitioners as forerunners.

We reached some convergence. Let’s shake hands here and agree to disagree on the theoretical explanations to justify the practice and principles of either part. The quarreling over darwinism and creationism, shakra’s or just chemical processes, etc. continues.

Maybe I'll look into this some more later. I noticed that wikipedia has several articles relating to the theme, which, apparently, has been subject of many academic studies. See for example the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_ecology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_ecology