Mysticism And Science- An Indian Context

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Mysticism in general comprises of all aspects of religiosity and spirituality which is the common core of all religious traditions of the world irrespective of their varying practices, rituals, dogmas and doctrines, philosophy and mythologies. Spirituality as we know, is the very essence of all religions. It leads to the most profound and sublime emotion with a humble adoration towards a mystical divinity experienced through supra- sensual perception. Such intense intuitive and unitive experience has been variously described by prophets, saints, sages and seers; aspirants and practitioners calling it as the ultimate reality, the God supreme. Mysticism with this spiritual content of the mystical theology, no doubt, has been one of the two significant human endeavours alongside science in the cultural history of mankind. Mysticism therefore can stand as the synonym for spiritual science or the science of the 'spirit' belonging to a transcendental spiritual realm, where as the so called 'Science', as we know today, is the science of matter belonging to the phenomenal realm. The ultimate purpose of both the ventures has been the same ceaseless pursuit after the true nature of Reality, the eternal absolute unit source as the ground of Being; the Ultimate Truth. But the path followed in these two endeavours are different appearing opposite of each other. 'Mysticism' as it is called today according to western view; the spiritual sciences prevalent in the ancient era and developed to a great extent by the eastern world through intuition, contemplation and mediation, follows purely an inward approach searching 'in here' within the mind as well as deep within one's own self. On the other hand 'Science, which is said to have emerged after the so called renaissance during 14th to 16th century in the western world; follows an outward approach of looking towards the objects 'out there' in the external world through pure human reason and intellect basing on experimental observations and logical analysis. Looking at the tremendous success of Science and Technology in our modern world and considering Science to be a verifiable and evidential enough scheme; it is generally viewed as the only legitimate and accurate approach in the pursuit of Truth and the Reality. Therefore the scientific world in general did not sanction any legitimacy to the spiritual science of the contemplative and meditative mode and denounced it to be subjectively vague, obscure and confused thinking only. Hence the western world invented the word 'Mysticism' to downgrade the contemplative approach that asserts the possibility of attaining an intuitive knowledge of the spiritual realm which is beyond perceptual and intellectual apprehensions in order to attain the Ultimate Truth that is spiritual in nature. This is because science used to disagree on this aspect claiming that the Ultimate Truth and Reality is only material in nature and not spiritual. Therefore it can only be objectively accessible through logico-rational routes by directly analysing the perceptible data from the external objective world 'out-there'.

Following this classical approach with materialistic paradigm; science no doubt marched ahead with spectacular success creating technology marvels to manipulate nature. Nevertheless this materialistic classical Science has already confronted its limitations in the microscopic dimensions in twentieth century. Its inadequacy had also been further exposed with the advent of special theory of relativity by Einstein in 1905 and quantum mechanics during the following decades. Adopting a drastically different approach of dual nature of matter and energy as well which is no less mystical, the modern science of twenty first century is maturing slowly to take a path converging towards once denounced subjective method of the inward approach. Thus one may notice that science is slowly catching up with 'Mysticism' and it will not be very far when the convergence of scientific ideas of the west and the contemplative ideas of the east will completely mingle and merge to demonstrate the greatest triumph of human ingenuity. Twenty first century and beyond would certainly bring to mankind this new light and glory.

In view of this, this book makes a humble venture to bring forth a ramification of the 'Eastern Mysticism' with particular emphasis on Indian Spiritualism considering its in-depth spiritual contents in comparison to the rest analysing vis-a-vis the question of Truth and Reality both in Science and Spirituality together.