Peace Is Oneness: A New Vision of Science and Religion

By Hilton L. Anderson

HUMANITY HAS REACHED A DANGEROUS TIPPING POINT of potential self-destruction because our technical and scientific achievements have out distanced our spiritual realization. We must develop a new understanding of who we are, centered on the realization of oneness with all of creation. This realization can only be achieved by the combination and integration of rational logical thinking and mystical internal awareness.

Humanity has now reached the point where the two separate understandings of reality must be combined into a holistic understanding of existence. Peace Is Oneness addresses the dangers of accepting the separation that results from our egos, along with the ways that separation can be healed. Both science and evolutionary religion define the same reality. We must awaken from our dream state of separate selves and realize the oneness that is our true self of unconditional love.

Western culture has largely lost most of its connection to myth because of the dominance of material science. We have what the ancient Greeks called logos, but we have lost what they called mythos. This is about to change, as science and religion begin to define reality in the same way. Will it happen quickly enough to save us from our own self destruction? Your individual consciousness is essential in determining the outcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462053469

Hilton L. Anderson

The author is a retired seventy-seven year old who has been writing poetry for the past twenty years or so on mostly spiritual topics inspired by A Course in Miracles. He is a student of the Course since the late 1970's and a study group leader for the past fifteen years. He is a professional psychologist by training and was a practicing school psychologist for 25 years. He is married for fifty-two years to his wife Lorraine and has three adult children and seven grand children ranging in age from two to eighteen. He has been active in the Unitarian-Universalist Denomination since the nineteen fifties, and is presently active in the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Princeton since nineteen seventy-one. His interest in spiritual matters was awakened by his mother’s death in the nineteen seventies.

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Copyright © 2011 HILTON L. ANDERSON

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5345-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5346-9 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/27/2011

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Attaining Peace

CHAPTER 2

Where Are We Now?

CHAPTER 3

Evolution of Religion in the West

CHAPTER 4

The Age of Science

CHAPTER 5

Potential Healing Bridges

CHAPTER 6

The Landscape of Reality

CHAPTER 7

Psychology—Bridge between Science and Religion

CHAPTER 8

The Religion/Science of Universal Love

CHAPTER 9

The New/Old Reality

CHAPTER 10

The Practice of Universal Love

CHAPTER 11

You Are the One

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

KILL OR BE KILLED

For thousands of years

Man’s credo has been,

Kill or be killed. The truth is,

Kill and be killed.

Live by the sword,

Die by the sword.

Live by the bomb,

Die by the bomb.

Carry a big stick,

Hatred the consequence.

Military force seen as

The only response

To acts of terrorism.

Man has known

For thousands of years,

Love is our source.

Will we learn this lesson

Or in the firestorm of terrorism,

Continue to believe

That might makes right?

The choice is ours.

Our world hangs in the balance.

Vengeance is a hollow victory.

The only peace is love thy neighbor.

Who is not our neighbor?

Choose the power of love.

A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

—Albert Einstein

Yes, science and spirituality are coming closer and closer together on your planet, and soon it will be discovered that the two were always one. It is the same discipline, approached from different angles. It is the study of life, and what life really is, examined and explored from different perspectives.

Very soon now, science will confirm a great many things that spirituality has been telling you all along.

When it does, the human race will be faced with ethical and philosophical decisions, the likes of which it has never been faced with before.

—God¹

INTRODUCTION

All of humanity is one by virtue of its single spiritual source. This is not a new concept. Actually it is centuries old. It is being raised now so we can see the application to our present time and circumstances.

Socrates was forced to commit suicide, Jesus was crucified, thousands were killed by the Inquisition, and Gandhi and Martin Luther King were assassinated, all for propounding the same universal proposition, albeit manifested in their lives in different forms. Victor Hugo famously said there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Perhaps there should be a corollary: Nothing is as dangerous as an idea whose time has not come. The question is whether or not the time has come for this historic idea. The world is at an unprecedented and dangerous tipping point. Will this make us more receptive, resulting in a world transformation of consciousness that recognizes our universal oneness?

Science and industrialization have given us weapons of enormous destructive power and the sophisticated means to deliver them. We may become the first species that annihilates itself. Such technical exploits hold the possibility of not only our own extinction but even the end of all life on the planet.

Religion often has provided the irrational belief system sanctioning the use of these weapons to kill infidels, i.e., those who believe differently. Science has provided an existential philosophy of survival of the fittest, based on Darwinian evolution theory, providing little room for hope and optimism beyond survival by brute force and intellectual wile. The practical applications of scientific discoveries have been turned into weapons of mass destruction. The future of humanity and life on earth are at stake. We have little time left to cope with our self-created problems.

Will the rational mind be able to integrate the two forces of science and religion in a comprehensive understanding of ourselves enabling us to realize that we are all one? We need to achieve a compassionate world-centric consciousness in which we realize that we can only win if all do. Will we finally fully realize that hostility begets hostility in a vicious, endless cycle? Without the willingness to forgive, the cycle of hostility will continue reinforcing itself. We must realize that peace is not a goal, but is the internal and external state created by the expression of unconditional love. Love thy neighbor as thyself is the only path of peace. This universality of oneness transcends the ego demands of me and mine and heals the separation created by ego identity.

It appears over the millennia that few humans have attained a level of spiritual realization adequate to save humanity from itself, and their belief system has never been sufficiently understood by others to gain ascendancy and influence over world events. The translation of their knowing into the understanding of the masses has distorted and subverted the message. The translation has often served to empower the messenger rather than make clear the message. The many abuses and the accumulation of wealth by religious groups over the centuries are examples. These distortions have resulted in the ascendancy of many less evolved beliefs.

What is the critical mass necessary for profound spiritual beliefs to gain traction without profound distortion? The realization of our collective vulnerability to total destruction can be the tipping point that allows us to fuse our rational and intuitive minds into a highly evolved humanity. This highly evolved humanity will use both our scientific knowledge and our spiritual understanding in the service and betterment of all humanity.

A confluence of factors give some glimmer of hope. The first of these is the spread of information about the spiritual traditions and practices of both East and West. Never before in human history has so much been known by so many about the diverse religious and spiritual practices around the world spanning the vastness of history. Historical research, translation skills, massive communication capabilities and the frightening nature of our dilemma all converge to increase interest and practice of spiritual disciplines. New revelations are appearing in many books by many authors documenting that our interior, spiritual-mystical way of knowing is still alive and well.

On the other side of knowing, that of the external world, scientific and technological advances are proceeding at an ever accelerating pace. Scientific discoveries and spiritual practices for the first time may be revealing a common reality approached from two different viewpoints. Both quantum mechanics and relativity theory have altered the belief in the simple cause-and-effect interactions of physical objects postulated from Newton’s discovery of gravity. Science seems to be defining a reality of energy interactions in a dynamic field rather than something more substantial to our senses. Parapsychology reports occurrences such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition that fit more comfortably into field theories of modern physics than explanations of Newtonian physics.

Unfortunately, the scientific community’s adherence to material monism (the belief that materiality is all there is) and the religious community’s championing of fundamentalism continue to attract and hold many members of their respective groups. Without broader thinking in both groups, the prospects for integrating science and spirituality remain problematic, resulting in an incomplete comprehension of reality, self, and the meaning of existence.

To save us from self-destruction, we must hope for a convergence of the change from classical physics to quantum mechanics, along with increased understanding of the relationship between brain functioning and spiritual and mystical states provided by new imaging techniques in the scientific community, and a change from fundamentalism to ecumenicalism in the religious community. If scientific evolutionary theory is understood to apply also to religion, resulting in recognizing the developmental nature of religious beliefs, it could form the grounds for bridging the gap between science and religion. We need to move from endless debate over differences in belief to a universal realization of common humanitarian action.

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND TRUTH

Both science and religion seek truth.

There is only one truth.

Yet science and religion are protagonists.

What is the combined truth,

Only partially seen by each?

How shall this larger reality be known?

CHAPTER 1

Attaining Peace

What is within us is also without.

What is without is also within.

He who sees differences between

what is within and what is without

goes evermore from death to death.

Upanishad Katha¹

The Need for Oneness and Peace

The world is constantly seeking peace in the external world as a means of ending conflict. There seems to be little recognition that peace will only come when the external and the internal are in a state of harmony. Religion is perceived as the gateway to the world within, while science is focused on the world without. The ability to harmonize these two great domains has largely escaped humanity’s understanding, with few exceptions. Until the oneness of creation is fully realized, humanity’s struggle will continue.

Perhaps now humanity is ready to learn the essential lesson of oneness. For thousands of years humans have known of this oneness and have taught the concept, as witness the quote from the Katha Upanishad. Based on the historical record, however, few have learned or understood the concept. Perhaps intellectual understanding alone is inadequate.

One must know oneness by experience. If oneness is not experienced, each individual continues to believe in a separate existence apart from others. Separate physical bodies are a compelling reality supporting the belief in separation. Unrealized is the reality of our connectedness with all of creation. Sensory perception of our physical environment also confirms separation. An equally compelling internal awareness of oneness appears to be required if we are to understand our oneness.

Many paths lead up the mountain of spiritual enlightenment, ending in the realization of the Self or our universal oneness and state of unconditional love. Some of these include the paths of Buddhism, the shaman, depth psychology, Christian mysticism and Gnosticism, Kaballah, Sufism, and many others. Each of these paths has many different techniques for Self-discovery. These methods include such practices as meditation, chanting, movement and dancing, mandalas, sensory isolation or deprivation, breath work, mantras, rituals, and many others, all intended to transform consciousness. Each individual must find his or her path and the method that each feels is best suited. For guidance in selecting a teacher for the journey see A Search for the Source, pages 98–99.

Some have spontaneous experiences of transcendence, the seeming dissolution of self, in for example, the awe of nature, lovemaking, or listening to music. These states are usually transitory but often unforgotten if the experience is powerful enough. The fully enlightened are able to remain in this state of awareness indefinitely and realize that everything in creation is already perfect.

Environmental biology is providing compelling evidence of our interdependence. Coral reefs all over the world are being degraded by pollution and changes in water temperature. Ground fish on the Grand Banks have been seriously degraded by overfishing. Rivers and streams have been polluted by industrial contaminants. Rainfall patterns have been altered by global warming effecting a reduction in agricultural production in some parts of the world causing famine.

Evidence of Oneness

Modern physics is moving us away from Newtonian concepts of separate objects interacting in cause-and-effect relationships in serial time to a dynamic field concept, resulting in potential outcome probabilities outside the limits of serial time. Astronomy is expanding our concepts of the universe almost beyond our comprehension, introducing the need to recognize the limitations of rational knowledge and a corresponding humility.

In an area of expanded scientific empiricism, evidence for mind–matter interactions is being documented. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, for example, has consistently demonstrated a small but consistent effect of mind on matter. Subjects concentrating on specific outcomes have demonstrated their ability to alter the chance results of random generators in the direction of their attempted outcome. This research was conducted over a twelve-year period, with thousands of trials, producing consistent results beyond chance expectations. This mind effect on matter has been labeled psychokinesis and has been studied in its many forms by psychical researchers for over one hundred years. It would appear that mind can affect matter, although the effect is small. Mind appears to be a player in the dynamics of the quantum field.

The earliest laboratory experiments in parapsychology conducted by J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s involving card calling, demonstrated that subjects were able to call the order of the cards, above chance expectations, at a distance without the use of sensory means of perception. This established laboratory evidence not only for clairvoyance, (the ability to know the order of the cards without seeing them) but also for telepathy (the ability to know what another mind is thinking). Both these phenomena have been observed for a long time by psychical researchers in case studies. This suggests that distance is not a limit on the way mind can function, nor is the mind dependent solely on the sensory organs of sight, hearing, smell, and touch.

These findings from early laboratory studies have been confirmed multiple times, raising the probability scores over chance to very high levels. These phenomena are real. Scientific skeptics cling to their material monist position that denies such phenomena despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary, just as the flat-earth people clung to their beliefs long after the evidence proved them wrong.

The significance of these laboratory studies is that they brought psychic capabilities of the mind into the laboratory, legitimating them as scientific investigations. Using the methods of science to prove the existence of phenomena outside the accepted realm of traditional scientific theory was the beginning of a revolution in scientific thinking that continues today.

Windows on the Larger Self

Transpersonal psychology is beginning to map a domain of awareness that transcends both the separate self and the dimensions of space and time. Many of these new findings have been discovered by religious