Mind Is Spirit

Snippets maybe to be used later.

By now some readers may have noticed what appears to be an inconsistency.  I assert that matters of the spirit are not accessible to science, and yet I propose to use scientifically honorable inductive methods to establish the reality of a spiritual realm.  Actually, there is no inconsistency.  It is possible to proceed scientifically to establish the existence of something, even though the means are not available to study the thing itself.  A contemporary example is the phenomenon called “dark matter.”  Astrophysicists have accumulated evidence to support the hypothesis that dark matter exists, but so far are unable to tell us much about dark matter itself.  A classical example is the electromagnetic field.  It surely exists, but we know it only by its effects.

Although I have encountered many writings and speeches that provoke thought and inspire conviction, I have not encountered any assertion that spiritual ideas are anything other than personal beliefs.

My purpose in creating this site is to open the door to a different way of understanding spiritual matters.  I am not trying to “prove the existence of God,” as many theologians have attempted [refs].  Those efforts try to be analytical, in that they attempt to proceed logically from premises.  Instead I suggest that the subject of spirituality should be approached inductively, by gathering and organizing evidence.  The question is, what constitutes evidence?

Many distinguished scientists have written of their spiritual beliefs [refs], nurtured no doubt by their sense of wonder arising from zealous research.

50 years ago, when I was a student at M.I.T., and probably still today, a commonly encountered epistemology (theory of how we know things) was a kind of scientific extremism:  that any assertion not addressable by the scientific method is meaningless [ref] .

If this extremism has mellowed a bit today, it would be to allow the possibility of extra-scientific beliefs reached by faith or revelation in a religious or spiritual framework.

My focus on spiritual

Libraries and book stores have volumes of anecdotal reports of spiritual experiences.  People have testified about angels, visions, interventions, etc.  But our gathering of evidence must involve more than just the cataloging of such stories.  What is needed is a hypothesis connecting the spiritual to the reality we know — a hypothesis to be supported or falsified by evidence gathered.

In the tab labeled Consciousness, the reader is guided to the realization that mental experiences are personal and must be communicated by example.  Having established that science doesn’t account for all that is real, the possibility of a real spiritual realm can be entertained without relying solely on  personal belief.