At first glance, science and spirituality seem to cover completely different domains.

Science tries to find underlying principles to determine how certain aspects of the universe work. For instance, physics is used to figure out how matter and energy behaves under various conditions, claiming that everything we know can be reduced to four fundamental forces of nature. Biology studies life, geology studies rocks and minerals, and astronomy studies stars and planets.

Spirituality, on the other hand, has an entirely different focus. What is the meaning of life? Who or what created the universe, and is he/she/it benevolent and working to help us? If there is a creator, is there more than one? Why does suffering exist in the human psyche?

I argue, however, that the two are related, and in one sense one and the same in that they are both forms of exploration and discovery. The only difference is that science studies the outer world and spirituality studies the inner world.

As Galileo put it, “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go”. God explains why, science explains how.

Both paradigms are incomplete even to this day. There is currently a crisis in modern physics in that under extreme circumstances (such as around black holes), the laws of quantum mechanics produce different predictions than the laws of gravity. There are hints of a possible fifth force of nature, though they are controversial. Certain subatomic particles decay in ways which violate the Standard Model. And there is still no explanation for dark matter and dark energy.

Suppose we do determine how everything works. Is the search for knowledge over? Not necessarily. There have been several times in the past, including during the twentieth century, that people thought that physics would explain everything in the universe. They were proven wrong over and over again, primarily because humanity until then had been living in a bubble of environmental conditions suitable for human life (a condition known as the anthropic principle: had the conditions been otherwise, we would not have been here to contemplate them). There is generally no indication of a deviation from predictions until someone probes some unusual environment and sees something which violates everything known then.

Spirituality is currently in the same boat. There have been many traditions over the years which have tried to explain why the human condition is the way it is, even relying on unseen forces (in the case of spirituality, deities and angels) to explain the mysteries of our nature. In that sense, God is no different from dark energy or a singularity in a physics equation.

To this date, none of them have been complete, either. We have never been able to prove or disprove the existence of God, and there is no firm explanation for human suffering even in Scripture. In fact, Buddhism’s First Noble Truth admits that suffering exists in the world regardless of what you do, triggered in part by mankind’s tendency to attach or detach from the situation. The only solution is to follow a spiritual path such as the Buddha’s to handle it.

One major difference spirituality has with science is that we may not yet have the tools to quantitatively measure spiritual quantities. Given the development in its sister discipline, those may be forthcoming at some point.

I recently had a friend of mine perform an energy healing for me in her office in Newton. Given my scientific bent, I was somewhat skeptical and was wondering if the placebo effect was coming into play. In the placebo effect, someone who is expecting an experiment to produce a certain result determines that the result has occurred even if nothing has actually been changed to trigger it. This behavior, curiously, currently cannot be explained by science…but could it be explained through metaphysics and spirituality?

During the session, she put her hands near the crown of my head and touched only the top of my hair, if anything. Nevertheless, I distinctly felt energy escaping through the top of my head, as if my body had been radiating away stress. What’s more, I had a very good two weeks after that.

Needless to say, I tried to think of how the electric fields in her body (most animals have electric fields) were interacting with my brain to trigger the effect. This was a natural instinct for me as tried to use my science knowledge to explain it. However, the fact that one is not yet able to prove something could very easily mean that it is still provable…if one had the correct tools to investigate it.

Some of you may wonder if the session had been a statistical fluke and not reproducible. The first time I had a healing, I figured as much. However, people have been doing these sessions for many years and research has shown that they often have beneficial effects. What’s more, I had had a crystal healing session with her a few years ago using a completely different modality in which she place a crystal on my third eye (between my eyebrows). That session proved to be effective as well. Once could be a fluke. Twice, however, is not, specially if the effect involved variables outside of my personal control.

Interestingly, I tried to reproduce the effect of the crystal healing by placing a rock or stuffed animal on my head in that location. The stuffed animal proved to be a poor substitute as it was too soft and large to fit over that area, and it was prone to falling off. The rock, however, was of the right size…and ineffective. Had it been a placebo effect, the rock would have produced the same result as the crystal healing.

Using a meditation practice to clear their mind is no different, in one sense, to taking a science-endorsed pill to cure a disease. In fact, it has been shown that our spirit can have major effects on the progress of disease. People optimistic about their diagnoses usually have better outcomes from pessimists, sometimes defying the predictions of science. The only difference is in their mind.

It is quite possible that there exists a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, something that explains all science and spirituality using tools yet to be developed which span both disciplines. We will never know until we reach that point. On the other hand, trying to explain science entirely with spiritual language and vice versa likely will not work.

The truth is out there. Somewhere.

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The photo above was taken outside the main retreat hall at the Won Dharma Center, a Korean Buddhist retreat in upstate New York I had the honor staying at for a weekend of silent meditation. It’s not quite a diffraction interference pattern combined with a beautiful sunset, but it is close enough.