God, Science and Jnani: a New Framework

Mike King
London Guildhall University
kingm@lgu.ac.uk
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mr.king

The premise for this essay is that a better framework for the science / religion debate arises when we take the mystical core of religion and contrast its goals and methods with the goals and methods of science. This requires the establishment of a few simple concepts. First of all, a natural division of spiritual and religious phenomena can be summed up in three terms: the ‘social’, the ‘occult’, and the ‘transcendent’. The social in this context is the phenomenon of popular religion, including articles of faith, religious practice, priesthoods, and integration into the political life of a culture. These all evolve over centuries, usually from the teachings of a single religious founder (for example Christ or the Buddha), and may bear only a nominal relationship to that individual’s life or teachings. By the ‘occult’ I wish to denote a range of beliefs and practices that relate to a world of disembodied or spirit beings, the existence of which is neither posited nor denied by the use of the term. Teachers of occultism have existed throughout history and across the continents with considerable consistency in their statements, despite complete separation through time or location. One of the greatest such teachers in recent Western history has been Rudolf Steiner, while an account that is completely independent, but agreeing in many areas, originates at approximately the same time in the autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi. Occult accounts vary in detail, but generally include descriptions of spirit beings, life after death, and the ‘occult powers’ or siddhis of Indian and Buddhist tradition. Occultism usually also has a strong moral dimension, though in its perversion it may be described as ‘black’ magic. 

The term ‘transcendent’ is used here to describe the core mystical experience, and is independent of the social and occult dimensions of religion, as defined here. It does however act as a vortex in history, around which religions grow, as crystals around seed matter, and is often mistaken for an occult phenomenon. As religions grow from the transcendent experiences of the geniuses of a particular religion, a popularisation is as inevitable. Occult accretions take place at the same time, often leading to a mainstream religion being shadowed by ‘esoteric’ traditions that are often persecuted, or taught in secrecy. While popular religion has little in it that can constructively engage in science, the occult has, in the sense that it also represents an enquiry into the hidden nature of reality. However, one needs to examine the geniuses of this practice, such as Boehme, Blake, Swedenborg, Yogananda, and Steiner, rather than popularised versions, in order to establish a debate with science.

But how can we describe the transcendent? The answer given here is radical: in two completely different ways. The two forms of transcendence, or better, the two paths to the transcendent, can be simply delineated as devotional and non-devotional. We can immediately spot a problem here: the term ‘devotional’ is easily understood, if not necessarily empathised with, but how can the term ‘non-devotional’ be used to describe an exalted state or path to such a state? Our problem is of course a Western one: our language and culture have developed in the Christian context, which is devotional. We need to turn to the East to find a world religion that is non-devotional: Buddhism, and, we need to turn to Hinduism to give us a language that encompasses both paths or orientations  the terminology of bhakti and jnani. (The ‘jn’ in jnani is pronounced as the ‘n’ in the Spanish ‘signor’ or ‘signora.’)
 
The term bhakti means devotional, and although its expression varies widely across the world, it is generally recognisable from a Christian perspective. Key concepts of a bhakti tradition will be love (of God, or a god, or maybe the divine element in a spiritual teacher or mythologised person), devotion and surrender. The will of the individual is only important in as far as it is aligned to the divine will, and spiritual progress and understanding are acts of grace visited on the supplicant. In contrast the term jnani describes a spirituality that is in the first instance more cerebral, more inclined to enquiry than surrender, more inclined to meditation than prayer, to see the goal in terms of wisdom rather than love, and to emphasise the will as a means to the goal. A jnani tradition may have no concept of God at all, certainly not a personal God, but is not atheistic. However, its teachings will generally use non-theistic concepts in contrast to the heavily theistic emphasis in a bhakti tradition.

To recap: religious phenomena can be understood in three categories: the social, the occult, and the transcendent. Science can only have a limited debate with the social or popular dimension of religion; has more in common with the occult dimension because the occult can be seen as an attempt to penetrate behind appearances, but has most in common with the transcendent because it represents the purest inquiry into the deep structure of human experience. The transcendent itself can be understood in terms of two orientations: the devotional and the non-devotional, termed here bhakti and jnani. These terms, unfamiliar to the West, are vital to this thesis, and are presented as a Rosetta Stone in understanding the relationship between science and religion. It is the concept of jnani that is the most important and will be developed here as the central contribution to the debate. 

It is proposed that the two spiritual orientations are spread about 50-50 in the individuals of any population. The dominant religion in any culture will however tend to emphasise one or the other orientation, usually depending on that of its founder, and hence roughly half of the population will find a mismatch between the religion of their birth and their religious instincts. This condition is mitigated to some degree by the way that religions develop, in that key players in this process (other than the religion’s founder) may instinctively bend the religion towards their own, contrary, orientation. In Christianity, which is bhakti in origin, some of the greatest shapers of its tradition have had a jnani orientation, while in Buddhism, a jnani religion, some of its development has been clearly shaped by bhakti influences. Although there are interesting parallels in the developments of the two religions, there have been important historical differences, which make a mirror symmetry less than perfect. However, it is a fruitful comparison to make, because the key creative tensions in both religions can be understood in terms of the differences between bhakti and jnani. The major differences between East and West can also be seen in terms of this dichotomy, leading to an understanding of science as the outcome of a suppressed jnani instinct in the West, and the failure of the development of science in the East due to the relative fulfilment of the jnani instinct.

Some development of the jnani concept is needed before we go further into this. Christ and the Buddha are problematic in that we have no documents written by them, but even so we can, by going to the Gospels in one case and the Pali canon in the other, find useful contrasts. When Jesus was asked what one must do to inherit eternal life, he asked the questioner how he understood it, and assented to the answer: ‘Love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind’ (Luke 10:25).  This is the core of bhakti, and from it arises the central practice: prayer or worship, a heart-oriented practice. The Buddha in contrast opens the Dhammapada (a central Buddhist text) with the statement: ‘Our life is shaped by our mind: we become what we think.’ He then offers eternal life (nirvana) as the fruit of meditation, a mind-oriented practice involving stilling of the mind. It is significant that the Pope quite recently exhorted his followers to the practice of prayer, and to consider meditation as foreign to their religion: a clear indication that Christianity is bhakti not jnani. Given that a picture of the jnani path and orientation needs to be built up or triangulated from many sources (preferably authenticated as genuine by scholarly research), and that these sources need to come from both East and West, it is hard to recommend a single work or even a small ‘canon’. However, two texts might be put forward: the Enneads of Plotinus, and Longchempa’s Kindly Bent to Ease Us (Part Three). Both texts are tightly linked to a spiritual tradition, the first to Neoplatonism, and the second to Tibetan Buddhism, but both authors are also genuine jnanis in their own right, and of the first order. Both give directions for the stilling of the mind, and an indication of the central jnani experience, a transcendence of conditioned existence through a direct apprehension of the ground of being.

In pointing up Plotinus and Longchempa as Western and Eastern representitives of the jnani orientation and achievement, we are brought to the idea of the lost Buddhas of the West. The term ‘buddha’ is a title given to a perfected jnani, though few Buddhists use the term for any other than the historical Buddha, born as Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan. (Instead the Bhodisattva ideal was developed in one of the major Buddhist branches, as a term covering other perfected beings.) If we run through the spiritual history of the West, we can identify developed jnani individuals, both before and after Christ, including Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, and Spinoza. In the modern period we could include Walt Whitman, Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding, and Andrew Cohen. However, if it is contentious to posit other historical buddhas, it is even more so to claim this status for the living, so it is just left to mention that, if one has no doctrinal objection to it, instruction from a living jnani is worth a thousand instructions from the texts of dead ones. 

We are now close to the point where we can examine the relationship between science and religion through the concept of jnani. Just one more distinction is required however, borrowing terms from Christianity this time, and using them in a slightly altered fashion: the terms via positiva and via negativa to indicate two possible relationships with the outside or so-called material world. In traditional Christian thinking these terms describe ways of thinking about God: the first to describe Him through positive attributes, and the second to describe Him via negating all attributes (also found in Hinduism as neti-neti  not this, not that). We have already noted however that the jnani traditions are generally non-theistic, and hence the terms via positiva and via negativa will have a slightly different meaning here. If the goal of the jnani is the disidentification with the ego, then there are logically two routes: to successively deny the identifications with body, home, family and desires, leading to the renunciative lifestyle typical of early Buddhism and many other religions, or to successively identify with everything. The history of religion is generally the history of via negativa, in the sense defined. We do find elements of via positiva in all religious traditions however, particularly in the Upanishads, though perhaps its best expression comes through the festivals and rituals of popular religion. The greatest single exponent of via positiva, and completely misunderstood by all but a few Hindu scholars, is Walt Whitman, of interest to the West usually as a poet, or possibly because of alleged homosexuality. In fact he came close to founding a jnani religion and had disciples who saw him as one of the world’s greatest gurus, though his bible, Leaves of Grass, was written by his own admission in such a way as to completely hide his teachings. 

So, to science and jnani. Firstly we can return to the proposition made earlier that science arose in the West because the jnani instincts of some of its greatest thinkers had no legitimate expression within Christianity. We are used to understanding the Middle Ages as a period where the early Christian church discouraged enquiry into the nature of the universe, and encouraged faith in the power of love and in the practice of prayer and service. This is a particular irony as Saint Augustine, one of the chief architects of this medieval world-view, renounced his Manichaean faith of ten years because one of its chief bishops gave him an answer to an astronomical question that did not fit the science of the time. After renouncing Manichaeism Augustine contemplated the views of the Neoplatonists (a European jnani tradition owing largely to Plotinus), but rejected them in favour of Christianity: Augustine was bhakti by orientation. The intellectuals of the Christian world tended to seek a jnani teaching to supplement their Christian heritage, and were thus instinctively drawn to the Greeks, resulting in a struggle within the Church between the followers of Aristotle and the followers of Plato (the Neoplatonists). In Aquinas the victory goes to Aristotle, which allows for the Church to prune back the threat of Neoplatonism in favour of the more spiritually neutral terrain of Aristotle. In the Renaissance the struggle re-erupts with Neoplatonism appearing in the Academy of Ficino, but it has not the intellectual vigour to attract the disenfranchised Christians of the jnani orientation, and so we find a genius like Leonardo putting his faith in observation of the natural world. Galileo’s discoveries then mark the beginning of the schism between Church and science.

It is important to point out that the jnani of the Neoplatonists was via negativa, from Plato’s emphasis on the forms and his rejection of the empirical, to Plotinus’s quasi-Buddhism. Hence the Renaissance vigour of thought could not find in it an engagement with a physical world (newly discovered as more human-friendly than in the introspective period of the Dark Ages), and is roundly dismissed by Leonardo as a worshipping of the ancients. Christianity rejected it because Christianity remained a bhakti religion (despite the best efforts of its more intellectual clergy), and the new intellectual classes dismissed it because it was via negativa. In this climate the growth of science and its inevitable domination of Western culture became inevitable. 

Christianity and Buddhism have a coincidence of propagation: both were taken up and made the state religion of an empire, by Constantine in Europe, and by Ashoka in India, and both were doctrinally formulated through religious councils under the chairmanship of the Emperor. The Emperor Ashoka, after the conquest of a small kingdom called Kalinga in the third century BCE, experienced remorse for the resultant slaughter, converted to Buddhism (or at least took it up more seriously) and established a generally pacifist rule through the empire. Ashoka’s Buddhism was tolerant of other faiths, principally those of the Brahmins, Jains, and Ajivikas, found in the empire, and this tolerance was encouraged by edicts in rock inscriptions found across the region. Constantine, in contrast, experienced a military victory after his original inspiration, which confirmed his conversion to the Christianity, and made it the religion of the Roman empire. The evolution of Christian thought for several centuries was centralised by the apparatus of the empire, in contrast to the evolution of Buddhism which, even in Ashoka’s time, was allowed to absorb local influences. The central apparatus of Christian governance was one of the reasons for the unfortunate appearance of the Inquisition.

Thus the birth of science was painful, as it came in the middle of a this long period of religious persecutions. There can be no doubt that the collective religious psyche of the West was traumatised by these events, and scientists also seem to be collectively aware that many of their kind were reviled, tortured or even killed in pursuit of their science. The devout atheism of some of today’s scientists and writers, such as Richard Dawkins and Gore Vidal, has a spleen that can only be explained by the residual effect of this historical trauma. The paradoxical result of the Christian history of the West is therefore both the rise of science as an outlet for the suppressed jnani instinct of its brightest intellectuals, and also the contempt held for religion by some of today’s best scientists. However the goals and methods of the jnani, particularly when of a via positiva orientation, have much in common with the goals and methods of the scientists. When John Polkinghorne states that ‘both science and religion are and enquiry into what is’ he is right as far as the jnani religionist is concerned, but less so for the bhakti.

Einstein’s personal writings show jnani, via positiva characteristics found in the writings of many great scientists, often expressed as a wonder or awe at the natural world, and at the order behind it, as revealed through the physical laws of science. He also tells us of a sympathy for Spinoza (whose extraordinary convoluted proofs of the existence of God can be read as the struggle of a highly gifted jnani to coexist with the bhakti traditions of Judaism and Christianity), and a general lack of engagement with the theistic doctrines of popular Western religion. Could his genius, the genius of doubt and enquiry, and the extraordinary ability to think the unthinkable, could this genius, in a jnani heritage, also express itself in a religious way? Is the real dialogue between science and religion yet to come, as the West absorbs Eastern ideas, comes to a more fluid conception of God, and considers, as the Buddha did, our interiority a worthy subject for systematic enquiry? Can the West can contribute to this the concept of via positiva, resulting in an enquiry that embraces the inner as much as the outer, a spirituality that embraces the outer as much as the inner? I suggest that the answer is yes, and that from the concept of jnani we will be able to develop the true complement to our conventional, third-person science of the outer: a first-person science of the inner.

(This is a summary of a forthcoming book, Jnani: An Alternative Intellectual History of the West.)

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