Science and religion meet at the top of the mountain.
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1JGL53
^ As Alan Watts used to say.
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The below is excerpted from pages 171 – 173 of “Life and Literature”, editor John Erskine, 1917 – a collection of lectures by Lafcadio Hearn delivered at the University of Tokyo from 1896 – 1902 (i.e., astonishingly written about 120 years ago):
“….. But when the world shall have come to an end, will there still be man? Yes, in the poet's faith; for man is part of the eternal and the destruction of the universe cannot affect his destiny. It is not, however, when this world shall have come to an end that man will know. The earth will go back to the sun, out of which it came, and the sun itself will burn out into ashes, and the universe will disappear, and there will thereafter be another universe, with other suns and worlds, and only then, after passing through the fires of the sun, perhaps of many suns, will man obtain the supreme knowledge. Never in this world can he become wise enough and good enough to be perfectly happy.
But in some future universe, under the light of some sun not yet existing, he may become an almost perfect being. It may seem strange to you to hear such a prediction from an English poet, though the thought of the poem is very ancient in Indian philosophy. Yet (poet and writer George) Meredith did not reach this thought through the study of any oriental teaching. He obtained it from the evolutionary philosophy of the present century, adding, indeed, a little fancy of his own, but nothing at all in antagonism to the opinions of science, so far as fact is concerned.
What is the teaching of science in regard to the future and the past of the present universe? It is that in the course of enormous periods of time this universe passes away into a nebulous condition, and out of that condition is reformed again. Mathematically it has been calculated that the forces regulating the universe must have in the past formed the same kind of universes millions of times, and will do the same thing in the future, millions of times. Every modern astronomer recognizes the studies upon which these calculations are based.
It is certainly curious that when science tells us how the universe with its hundreds of millions of suns, and its trillions of worlds, regularly evolves and devolves alternately - it is curious, I repeat, that this science is telling us the very same thing that Indian philosophers were teaching thousands of years ago, before there was any science. They taught that all worlds appear and disappear by turns in the infinite void, and they compared these worlds to the shadows of the dream of a god. When the Supreme awakens from his sleep, then all the worlds disappear, because they were only the shapes of his dream.
Herbert Spencer would not go quite so far as that. But he would confirm Indian philosophy as to the apparition and disparition of the universes. There is another point upon which any Western man of science would also confirm the oriental teaching - that the essence of life does not cease and cannot cease with the destruction of our world. Only the form dies. The forces that make life cannot die; they are the same forces that spin the suns. world will be again in some future world, lighted by another sun. Meredith suggests perhaps more than this….. Take his poem, however, as it stands, and you will find it a very noble utterance of optimism, inspiring ideas astonishingly like the ideas of Eastern metaphysicians.
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The below is excerpted from pages 171 – 173 of “Life and Literature”, editor John Erskine, 1917 – a collection of lectures by Lafcadio Hearn delivered at the University of Tokyo from 1896 – 1902 (i.e., astonishingly written about 120 years ago):
“….. But when the world shall have come to an end, will there still be man? Yes, in the poet's faith; for man is part of the eternal and the destruction of the universe cannot affect his destiny. It is not, however, when this world shall have come to an end that man will know. The earth will go back to the sun, out of which it came, and the sun itself will burn out into ashes, and the universe will disappear, and there will thereafter be another universe, with other suns and worlds, and only then, after passing through the fires of the sun, perhaps of many suns, will man obtain the supreme knowledge. Never in this world can he become wise enough and good enough to be perfectly happy.
But in some future universe, under the light of some sun not yet existing, he may become an almost perfect being. It may seem strange to you to hear such a prediction from an English poet, though the thought of the poem is very ancient in Indian philosophy. Yet (poet and writer George) Meredith did not reach this thought through the study of any oriental teaching. He obtained it from the evolutionary philosophy of the present century, adding, indeed, a little fancy of his own, but nothing at all in antagonism to the opinions of science, so far as fact is concerned.
What is the teaching of science in regard to the future and the past of the present universe? It is that in the course of enormous periods of time this universe passes away into a nebulous condition, and out of that condition is reformed again. Mathematically it has been calculated that the forces regulating the universe must have in the past formed the same kind of universes millions of times, and will do the same thing in the future, millions of times. Every modern astronomer recognizes the studies upon which these calculations are based.
It is certainly curious that when science tells us how the universe with its hundreds of millions of suns, and its trillions of worlds, regularly evolves and devolves alternately - it is curious, I repeat, that this science is telling us the very same thing that Indian philosophers were teaching thousands of years ago, before there was any science. They taught that all worlds appear and disappear by turns in the infinite void, and they compared these worlds to the shadows of the dream of a god. When the Supreme awakens from his sleep, then all the worlds disappear, because they were only the shapes of his dream.
Herbert Spencer would not go quite so far as that. But he would confirm Indian philosophy as to the apparition and disparition of the universes. There is another point upon which any Western man of science would also confirm the oriental teaching - that the essence of life does not cease and cannot cease with the destruction of our world. Only the form dies. The forces that make life cannot die; they are the same forces that spin the suns. world will be again in some future world, lighted by another sun. Meredith suggests perhaps more than this….. Take his poem, however, as it stands, and you will find it a very noble utterance of optimism, inspiring ideas astonishingly like the ideas of Eastern metaphysicians.
