Lifescape

A lot of time, this spring and summer, has been taken up with endings and new beginnings. Finishing my MSc in Psychotherapy was one (long overdue) ending. The publication of my new editions poetry series and the growth of my new venture, creative thorp, with my wife Mary, both felt very much like beginnings. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about experience and about the tension between rational and enlightened experience. Here’s the beginnings of a summer reflection….

THE MOMENT IS NOW

In his wonderful ‘Lectures on Physics’, latter-day renaissance man Richard Feynmann wrote – “We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that is not science”. He was aware that science is a human activity and that science – or sciences – can divide the universe into parts, rather than experiencing it as a whole.

For many people over the centuries there has been a divide between materialistic science and spiritual experience (historically aka religion), and the debate rages even now as the materialists (Dawkins, Hitchens et al) are attacked both traditional theologists (perhaps understandably) but also by a new breed of ‘enlightened’ and ‘awakened’ thinkers and practitioners. I’ve written about what I see as the muddled thinking of those in the new-age community who want to use the language of science to explain their own versions of reality which are, often, experiential and speculatory. Now there’s nothing wrong with experience – I think, in fact that its a good thing, but like Feynmann might have said “there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not science”.

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