A VIEW FROM THE ROAD
February 2012
The two authors traveled together for a month after this book first appeared, sharing the road on a promotional tour, letting the dust settle, and listening to audience reactions. We got a feeling for the state of play between the two worldviews, science and spirituality, now that they have been road tested.
The big thing that surprised us was how anxious people were to see a peaceful ending. At every talk, which was staged as a debate, there were “Deepak’s people” and “Leonard’s people,” as you’d expect. From their reactions we could feel that the divide between a spiritual view of the world and a scientific one was quite real. But divisiveness makes people uncomfortable, too, and the most common question we received, in city after city, was, “Can your two views be reconciled?”
It would be a magical ending if they could. Science is traveling its own road, and so is spirituality. What lies behind them is a good deal of wreckage, unfortunately. In the rearview mirror we see the church putting Galileo on trial for promoting the new astronomy and going much further by burning Giordano Bruno at the stake for uttering the same things in a more defiant way. Science fought for its life, and for a long time religion served as obstacle, enemy, and reactionary. Even today, around a third of responders in public opinion polls believe that evolution must take God into account in the creation of the world, and a huge majority of people, up to 90 percent in polls, still believe in God, the soul, and the afterlife. So why were our audiences so anxious to see reconciliation?
Science has been extraordinarily successful in explaining the physical world, but most people, even most scientists, feel that there are some important things not explained by science, or at least not yet: what consciousness is, why there is a universe, and how to give our own lives the greatest meaning. People want to understand the physical world, but they also seek spiritual fulfillment and personal awareness, and they don’t believe one should preclude the other.
Do science and spirituality ultimately have to be at loggerheads? As we toured together on a tight schedule, squeezing in meals, shuttling from airport to lecture hall, we found ourselves continuing our debate with passion on both sides. Deepak explained the benefits of meditation and led Leonard in a shared meditation session as our plane sat for an hour on the runway in Boston. Leonard outlined the nuances of curved space-time, tracing out diagrams on the floor of Penn Station in New York. As we spent hours, days, and weeks in close quarters, our intellectual discussions also taught us about each other as individuals. We discovered that despite our differing worldviews we shared more than we had imagined.
Leonard learned that Deepak recognizes the precious insight into our physical world that science provides, and in return Deepak found that Leonard appreciates that human spirituality makes life more profound. Our differences regarding the source of the laws governing the universe had seemed to place us on opposing ends of a great battlefield, but we now recognize that we were actually striving for the same understanding. Through our interactions we gained new respect for the other’s way of seeing things. With time, our public debates became more like conversations than arguments, to the apparent appreciation of the audience.
So that’s the view from the road. Neither author is in a position to accurately predict what lies ahead. We are both caught up in the process, both evolving as thinking advances around us. It is said that wisdom arises when you realize that there is no end to the journey. What matters is the journey itself. That has proven true in our lives and in the writing of this book. Together we feel that the world is facing many dire problems, so it is in our mutual interest that all people recognize the value of both the scientific and spiritual approaches if humanity is to find viable answers.
DEEPAK AND LEONARD