How Spirituality Can Help Explain the World Spirituality isn’t often thought of in an 'explanatory' context. Most people believe that it’s the role of science to explain how the world works. But the simple notion that that there is a fundamental spirit or consciousness which is ever-present and in everything has great explanatory power. In fact, this is the main reason why I think this approach is so valid. There are many things that don’t make sense from a materialist perspective, but which can be easily explained from a spiritual point of view. Conventional science can’t explain where consciousness comes from. It can’t explain the powerful effect that mental intentions and beliefs can have on the body (as shown by the placebo effect and the healing and analgesic effects of hypnosis). It can’t account for the extreme flexibility of the human brain, as shown by cases where people have had normal mental functioning in spite of lacking massive amounts of normal brain tissue. The normal scientific view cannot account for altruism either, except by explaining it away as a kind of mistake. It can’t explain anomalous phenomena such as spiritual experiences, near-death expe-riences (in which consciousness apparently continues when the brain is inactive) or telepathy or pre-cognition. Although there is a good deal of evidence of these phenomena, they make so little sense from the materialist perspective that they are either ignored or explained away. Even many of the phe-nomena of quantum physics make no sense from the standpoint of scientific materialism. But as I show in my new book Spiritual Science, all of these phenomena make sense in spir-itual terms. For example, our own individual consciousness can be explained as an 'influx' of the fun-damental consciousness of the universe, facilitated by our brains. Altruism can be explained as the result of the fundamental interconnectedness of human beings, which allows us to sense each other’s pain and suffering and respond to it. Spiritual experiences can be explained as moments in which we 'touch into' the fundamental oneness of the universe, and experience its spiritual essence. Telepathy can also be explained in terms of our interconnectedness. Perhaps the most important aspect of the spiritual worldview, however, is what it tells us about the world and our own lives as human beings. The conventional materialist model tells us that the world is an inert, soulless ma-
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chine, made up of genetic machines (such as ourselves), inert material particles and inert empty space. It tells us that we are isolated entities, enclosed within our brains and our bodies, in separation from the world and other human beings and living beings. It tells us that the only purpose of lives is to survive and replicate our genes. In other words, it leads to a devaluation of life - of our own lives, of other species’, and of the Earth itself. But the spiritual worldview tells us that we are not biological machines but manifestations of spirit. The whole world itself is a manifestation of spirit, so that we share its essence, and the essence of every other living being.
Steve Taylor PhD is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality. For the last six years he has been included in Watkins Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people.’ His books include Waking From Sleep, The Fall, Out of the Darkness, Back to Sanity, and his latest book The Leap published by Eckhart Tolle who has described his work as ‘an important contribution to the shift in consciousness which is happening on our planet at present’. www.stevenmtaylor,com.