DIALOGUE BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND SCIENCE

The spiritual experience of oneness conduces to the same insight as reasoning through science. Both convey the insight of fundamental interconnection between ourselves, other people, other forms of life, the biosphere and, ultimately, the universe. Science and spirituality, far from being mutually exclusive and conflicting elements, are complementary partners in the search for the path that can enable humanity to recover its oneness with the world. Science demonstrates the urgent and objective need for it; and spirituality testifies to its inherent value and supreme desirability. The Progress to new physics - quantum mechanics, relativity, the universe of the microparticles, theories for complex and non-linear dynamic systems, invisible worlds, chaos leads to order, give a different dimension to the way of thinking of individuals, scientists,
and philosophers. The basic elements of the Eastern world view are also those of the world view emerging from modern physics. The Eastern thought and, more generally, mystical
thought provide a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science; a conception of the world in which man's scientific discoveries can be in harmony with his spiritual aims and religious beliefs. The two basic themes of this conception are the unity and interrelation of all phenomena and the intrinsically dynamic nature of the universe.

The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever-moving components with man being an integral part of this system.Quantum theory thus reveals an essential interconnectedness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, we find that it is made of particles, but these are not the 'basic building blocks' in the sense of Democritus and Newton. They are merely idealizations which are useful from
practical point of view, but have no fundamental significance.In the words of Niels Bohr, 'Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems The structural similarities of Eastern thought and Western natural science pointed out the great scientists of our time. Bohr’s quantum principle of complementarity supports that everything in the Universe consists of opposed sections. The Chinese Tao is the symbol that characterizes the dialectic unity of opposites. The Tao is the rhythm which connects the opposites. Other physicists who noted this similarity include Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and
Julius Oppenheimer, as well as a host of contemporary scientists and biologists . Heisenberg: ‘’The two foundations of twentieth-century physics-quantum theory and
relativity theory-both force us to see the world very much in the way a Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist sees it, and how this similarity strengthens when we look at the recent attempts to combine these two theories in order to describe the phenomena of the submicroscopic world: the properties and interactions of the subatomic particles of which all matter is made. Here the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism are most striking and we shall often encounter statements where it is almost impossible to say whether they have been made by physicists or by Eastern mystics.

Niels Bohr ‘’The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory. Robert Oppenheimer: ‘’For a parallel to the lesson of atomic ....... [we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological
problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of
existence’’. Oppenheimer wrote in 1954: 'The general notions about human understanding…which are illustrated by the discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or even new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement and a refinement of old wisdom.' Schrödinger, in speaking of a universe in which particles are represented by wave functions, said, “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.” “The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view,

unless strong prejudices stand in the West.”(Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? , p. 129, Cambridge University Press) As Fritjof Capra suggests, '…Eastern thought, and more generally, mystical thought provide a consistent and
relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science,' both conveying 'the unity and interrelation of all phenomena and the intrinsically dynamic nature of the universe.' Capra quotes the Tantric Buddhist Lama Anagarika Govinda: 'The Buddhist does not believe in an independent or separately existing external world. The external world and his inner world are for him only two sides of the same fabric, in which the threads of all forces and of all events, of all forms of consciousness and of their objects, are woven into an inseparable net of endless, mutually conditioned relations.' Likewise, said a Japanese Zen master upon attaining enlightenment: 'I came to realise clearly that Mind is not other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.'