Spirituality, taboo, and opportunity for science

pp. 69-92

in: Harald Walach, Secular spirituality, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

In this chapter it is argued that spirituality is the next if not last taboo that science has imposed on enquiry, similar to the taboo imposed on studying sexuality at the beginning of the twentieth century. This taboo needs to be broken in order for science and society to progress. In this chapter, some presuppositions are clarified and questions posed in relation to the content and reality of spiritual experience. The epistemological presuppositions of how we actually know that a spiritual experience is a spiritual experience and not just a hallucination, and how individual consciousness can actually touch reality if it is only an epiphenomenon of material organization are tackled and potential solutions offered. It is shown that by subscribing to a complementarist view of the mind-body problem or the way consciousness operates, inner experience can be seen as a way of approaching reality similar to the way science approaches reality through sense experience. Finally the question of what the referent of such an experience is addressed and a bridge built briefly towards the traditional philosophical notion of reality, God, and totality.