Friday, October 30, 2020

Can We Prove the Existence of God? [or the Realm of Spirit?]

This is Part 2 of a series in Patheos.com in which Philosopher Ken Wilber tries to answer some "Big Questions" of Life. The annotations are by Julius-Kei Kato 

(The main text is of Ken Wilber. The subheadings, emboldened and underlined parts are added by the annotator. My (jkk) further reflections and observations are in italicized form.)

Source in the public domain (accessed 2020-10-08): https://www.patheos.com/blogs/kenwilberwakeupgrowup/2014/04/can-we-prove-the-existence-of-god-the-big-question-series-question-2/  


It always comes down to that: “How can you prove the existence of Spirit or God if you’re so convinced that it exists?” Part of the problem is that we tend to try to prove Sprit’s existence with tools that can’t actually do the job. And we tend to be unaware of the type of tools that can prove Spirit’s existence. So I’ll run through what some of those are, and give an example of what’s involved.

[jkk] This is especially fascinating for me because it is usually said, “we cannot prove the existence of Spirit (or of God).” I myself also say this and I still maintain that there is no direct, empirical way to “prove God” such as can be done in empirical experiments. However, here Ken Wilber claims that there is a “kind of” scientific way to prove the “greater reality” (the realm that transcends our physical reality). I encourage you to reflect on whether this proposed method is “scientific”for you.  After all, in our secularized age, the “scientific” way of making one’s points is deemed to be the best way.


The Method to Access the Spirit-Dimension

So it’s actually very experimental and very scientific. It rests on the fact that there is a scientific method, and this method can be applied to any number of domains. It can be applied to the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation.

So what is this method? Very briefly, it has three major components. [#1 “Injunction” or “Eperiment”] It has an injunction or experiment or exemplar, which is always in the form of “if you want to know this, do this.” And once you do that, it results in an experience, or what William James called a datum, or an illumination—some sort of [#2 Experience] direct immediate experience. And that’s the second strand. And then that experience or data is [#3 Verification] checked with others to make sure that they get the same results, to make sure that you’re not hallucinating or getting it wrong or somehow confused.

So let’s say, using the eye of flesh, we want to know if it’s raining outside. Very simply, we go to the window and look. That’s the injunction—if you want to know if it’s raining outside, go to the window and look. We look, and yes it does indeed seem to be raining. That’s our experience, our data, our illumination. We do the injunction and we have an experience, we see the data. To make sure that we’re not hallucinating or otherwise mistaken, we ask someone else to take a look as well. They go to the window and yup, they see it raining too. So that’s our confirmation or verification, our third major strand.

[jkk] Remember the three phases: #1 Experiment - #2 Experience - #3 Verification of the Experience (with others who are having the same or similar experiences). That does seem like a “scientific” way to prove something, right?


Further Elaboration

All science has those three strands. When applied to the eye of flesh we get physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. When applied to the eye of mind we get things like logic and mathematics. But what’s not often understood is that it can be applied to the eye of contemplation as well. And here it offers proof of the existence of Spirit, every bit as real as rain or mathematics.

So what we’re talking about is that there’s sensory experience, there’s mental experience, and there’s spiritual experience, and each of these experiences give particular types of data or information or knowledge. Too often we have attempted to try to prove the existence of Spirit by using the eye of flesh and the eye of mind. Aristotle’s proof of God, he gave five proofs, and they were all logical. But that won’t get it—it doesn’t touch Spirit, it doesn’t activate the spiritual dimension in us.

So if we want to see how it can operate in a spiritual practice, we can take Zen as an example. The injunction here, the practice or exemplar, is zazen or meditation or contemplation. You’re taught to sit in a relaxed position, rest the mind, and focus it on one item. It could be following the breath, or it might be an inquiry like “who am I?” And this is the first strand, the injunction or activity or exemplar—if you want to know whether Spirit is real, do this.

After anywhere from several months to a year or two, you will start having a series of experiences, interior data or illuminations. These profound experieces or experieces of a spiritual nature are called kensho, which means “seeing into true nature.” This is strand two, the direct experience Spirit itself—naked, unmediated, real, and direct. This direct religious experience is said to be of Spirit itself. Even in the case of individuals who have a Ph.D in science and who experience kensho, over 95% report that kensho is as real as anything that they study in conventional science. It’s a very powerful, convincing experience.

And just recently someone had an experience that for some reason made all the news, a neuroscientist who had a near death experience, but it was so real to him that he was simply, absolutely, 100% convinced that this was a real experience, as real as anything he had ever experienced. That’s exactly the same kind of feeling that mystics have when they have a kensho, or a mystical experience, or an experience of oneness or unity. And he said he couldn’t find it described anywhere until he was looking through some Christian mysticism books and he found an explanation that spoke of infinite darkness suffused with luminosity. And he said that was it exactly! Anyone who knows the stages of meditation will recognize that as a causal state, it’s described that way in every major meditative tradition the world over. But of course we’ve so forgotten about this in the West that we just don’t know where to look. So he was completely confused until he found that one particular explanation.


Check with the Community of Practitioners

After the individual has had their unity experience, their awakening experience, just to make sure, they check with a spiritual teacher and a community of practitioners. Now this means all those who have completed the first two strands. If you want to vote on whether the Pythagorean theory is real, you have to learn mathematics, and then learn the Pythagorean theorem, and once you have completed the injunction and have had the experience of looking at the triangle and looking at the Pythagorean theorem, then you’re allowed to vote and confirm or not confirm whether it’s real. Most people who do that report that the Pythagorean Theorem is real.

     But the same thing is true in any other scientific experiment, and it’s true for this interior science of contemplation. So you check it with a spiritual teacher and a community of practitioners, all those who have completed the first two strands of injunction and illumination, just to make sure you’re not hallucinating or otherwise confused, just like in all the other sciences. If their illumination, the discovery of their own True Self that is one with Spirit, matches those in a larger community of knowledge-holders, then their kensho (見性 Japanese, “seeing the true nature of things”) is passed and their realization is confirmed.

[jkk] I want to underline the fact that Wilber calls the study of the transcendent realm the “interior science of contemplation.” By that, he implies that there is this realm of Spirit, this transcendent dimension that we can directly know, experience, and validate (the existence of) through methods and a process that are quite scientific. What is “the community of practitioners” anyway? In practically every religious tradition (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.), there are groups of people (both in the past and in the present) who have had direct, religious-spiritual experiences of the Sacred and the Transcendent. These people were/are able to have these spiritual experiences through methods of spiritual practice such as meditation, service, ethical living, training in compassion, etc. that are time-tested and proven in these religious traditions to effectively transform people and lead them to wisdom, peace, compassion and authentic happiness.


Direct Experience – Public Knowledge

So notice this is a real science, a direct and immediate 1st-person experience. It’s not anything taken on faith or mere belief, but a direct realization. And this is true whether the contemplation is Christian, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or Islamic, or Hindu, and so on. And this realization proves that Spirit is just as real as mathematics, or logic, or rain, or rocks. And those who have had that experience, even if they have Ph.Ds in science, take it as being as real as anything that they know. So it’s as real as “real” has any meaning. It’s a direct injunction, giving immediate data or illumination, and checked with a community of the adequate.

This is why contemplative knowledge is public knowledge, in both the East and the West it has been passed down for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. That’s not private knowledge. Anything that can be trained and passed down is public, and it all reaches that same conclusion: God is real, and tat tvam asi—you are that.

[jkk] Let me continue to comment on the nature of the time-tested spiritual practices of the world’s religious-spiritual traditions. Studies have been done of these spiritual practices and one can say that across the various religious-spiritual traditions of the world, there are striking commonalities in the spiritual practices that are encouraged and taught in order to be spiritually transformed. One notable study is Roger Walsh, M.D. Ph.D.’s Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind. There Walsh distills many of the practices from various religious-spiritual traditions into seven general principles that spiritual practitioners across the ages have observed to be continually transformed and renewed.

Wilber and Walsh also emphasize that spiritual transformation and direct experience of the Sacred NEED NOT BE just taken on faith or believed in blindly (as is often encouraged by religious institutions) without proof. Wilber and Walsh encourage people to, as it were, “check it out for themselves” by actually engaging in the time-tested spiritual practices because if they do, the practitioners will in time experience for themselves the truth that there is indeed a spiritual realm and that realm will transform the person who wakes up to it and continually grows more fully into it.  

 

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