All spiritual analogies have become physic. There's a force in us that doesn't die along. The spiritual is a sort of energy. Everything is material. This lead us to a basic confusion: what are this analogies? Have even the actual things been defined?

Physics is the new standard abstract realm. It's frontiers are loosely defined but well calculated. To exactly what all this amount of calculus represents we aren't sure. But it sure moves things around and reorganizes things — in such extremes as to control the most minute and powerful spirits through its numbers.

But it also gives us a fully deterministic and nihilist perspective of being, at least when we rule necessary to cling to some of its underlying thesis such as realism or instrumentalism, the scientific shadow of idealism.

It's necessary to uphold the deepest and rigorous analysis in these matters. It would become clear no close-boundaries system of understanding can relate properly to (contingent) facts. Since no metaphysics have supplied us with non-contradictory or non-"self-evident" theory about this yet, we must have the utmost care as not to become entrapped by the same old philosophical fun and games.

Spiritual values are completely out of the reach of thinking. Yet, evidence on satori is abundantly clear. And thinking can be a proper subject such as no other. It is by thinking that clarity develops, until it reaches the other, through compassionate activity, and becomes "self-illuminated". It is weirdly sublime that physics has managed to steal even one of the fundamentally spiritual words: light.

Alan Wallace was very excited about the new Dalai Lama book about science and spirituality, The Universe in a Single Atom, he was revising when we met some months ago. The NY Times Review by George Johnson was not that welcoming, and he responds it on Tricycle.

The following quote is from the review:

“In a new book, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality," the Dalai Lama laments what he calls "radical scientific materialism," warning that seeing people as "the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes" is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty. "The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality." Both, he suggests, are legitimate interpretations of science.”

I don't think the Dalai Lama would suggest anything closer to that! As a matter of fact, I know he didn't, since I finished the book just now. In fact, his point is that science has a metaphysical views as absurd as the theistic approach! More than that, the Dalai Lama doesn't hold any of those metaphysical views, he was just comparing two absurd things.