Sunday, March 4, 2012

When "God" is NSFW*

It has taken me ten long years since the publication of the first edition of my book to write a new edition. It's not that I re-wrote that much of the book, or that I spent those ten years doing research to enrich the text.

It's just that I started taking my academic science career more seriously, and I was afraid that if my colleagues and potential employers saw that I wrote a book with "soul" in the title, "spirituality" in the endorsements, and "God" in the text, I'd be dismissed from the ranks of serious scientists. This is not at all a paranoid fear; there are real biases against spirituality in the academic workplace. This is why I used "NSFW" in the title. *NSFW is an web acronym meaning "Not Safe for Work" -- warning the casual internet user not to click on a link if they're at work because it leads to a page containing sexual or otherwise inappropriate content.

On the other hand, the academic bias against spirituality and religion is not based on paranoid fear either...the lives of many academics have been ruined (or ended) due to religious dogma (for more on the history of science and religion, see philosopher Ken Wilbur's excellent book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul). Further, as an empiricist myself, I value evidence above all. For me, evidence of God is what brought me to faith. But I don't blame anyone else for not having that experience.

What I have done, however, is to write about how the methods of science, not necessarily the products or knowledge gained by science, can be used to inform us about our own inner lives (or "souls" as many of us call them), our connections with the non-physical (or "spirituality"), and our relationships with universe that transcends us ("God").

When you let fear co-mingle with courage, courage always wins. As a result, I'm proud to announce the release of the second edition of my book, Unfolding: The Science of Your Soul's Work. If you buy it before April 15, you can use the coupon code RH44K to save a buck (click on the link to the right; total price is then $3.99).

In this blog, I look forward to writing not only about how our unfolding can benefit from the tools of science, but how the world of science unfolds in relationship to the world of the soul.

1 comment:

  1. Boyle, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz and the other founders of modern math and science were of the belief that God was at the heart and soul of all that is, was and will be. Heraclitus and Leibniz and Gustave Fechner, the founder of quantitative psychology, and many other once revered thinkers believed in pan-psychism, the belief that everything has a kind of consciousness. Today anyone who does so risks being considered a kook. Belief in teleology is also a no-no, Thomas Nagel comes to mind. As does the kind of anticipatory systems work of Robert Rosen.

    You are seeking to put a kind of perhaps not always kind "God" (as universal template or something) back into the math, science, cog sci, etc. equation. A "gut" GUT that was taken out after the so-called Enlightenment by those who now stand on the shoulders of giants, but who are not yet again able to see what you can see very well.

    Your courage exceeds even your science and math-tempered sagacity. Wow!!!

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