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East and West: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science
| Article
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11319 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
6,484 Words |
| Author
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Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof M.D., former chief of Psychiatric Research at
the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and past president of
the International Transpersonal Association, is currently
Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California. This article is taken, by permission of SUNY
Press, from Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science, edited by Dr.
Grof. |
Science and technology have become dominant forces in the modern world, and Western civilization, pioneering in technological development, is commonly seen as a symbol of progress and enlightenment. A tendency to glorify progress and revolution and to look down upon the past as a time of infancy and immaturity is associated with the view that the ideological and cultural differences between East and West are absolute and unbridgeable. This view was most succinctly expressed by Rudyard Kipling in his famous "East is East and West is West/and never the twain shall meet."
A major reason for the incompatibility of the ancient and the modern, as well as the Eastern and the Western, has been the fundamental difference in their dominant worldviews and philosophies. Western scientific disciplines have described the universe as an infinitely complex mechanical system of interacting, discrete particles and separate objects. In this context, matter appears to be solid, inert, passive, and unconscious; life, consciousness, and creative intelligence are seen as insignificant accidents and derivatives of material development. They emerged after billions of years of random mechanical evolution of matter and only in a negligible section of an immense universe.
In contrast, the spiritual philosophies of the great ancient and Eastern cultures--or "perennial philosophy" as Aldous Huxley referred to them--describe consciousness and creative intelligence as primary attributes of existence, both transcendent and immanent in the phenomenal world. Western science recognizes as real only those phenomena that can be objectively observed and measured; perennial philosophy acknowledges an entire hierarchy of realities--some of them manifest, others hidden under ordinary circumstances and directly observable only in certain special states of consciousness.
Materialistic science and perennial philosophy differ most in their images of human nature. Western science portrays human beings as highly developed animals and thinking biological machines who have a fleeting, insignificant role in the overall scheme of things. Perennial philosophy sees humans as essentially commensurate with the entire universe and ultimately divine. Western science offers psychological and psychopharmacological assistance to people who have difficulties adjusting to the miserable predicament of human life. (Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, described the goal of successful psychotherapy as "changing the extreme suffering of the neurotic into the normal misery of human existence.") But perennial philosophy offers a rich spectrum of spiritual techniques
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