Nihilism and spirituality

The empiricist definition of reality is “what can be proved.” The problem with this definition is that it alone leads to nihilism. If reality is what can be proven, then if something cannot be proven to one person, it is not real. Not much can be shown to a person with brain damage or to a person who thinks the earth is flat. This logically leads to the conclusion that nothing is real.

I went through a nihilistic stage as a teenager. Some people thought he was high and others thought he was running away from reality. The real reason was this cognition.

The nihilistic conclusion is corrected by a better definition of reality. This definition puts the cart before the horse. The test does not preexist reality; reality pre-exists the test. Reality does not exist in reference to a method to discern it. Reality exists in its own right and there is the method to discern it.

While not much can be said for nihilism itself, it can be a useful path to other systems of learning. There are many spiritual disciplines that claim that the true world is that of God, that of higher consciousness, or that of perfect forms. Much can be learned from these spiritual disciplines, practiced for centuries to enhance wisdom and understanding. The failure of many of these systems is that, when left to their own devices, they begin to military against scientific facts and against “the world”; And that’s not the right way either.

I want people to be able to benefit from both science and spirituality. Both the material and the spiritual world must be in the best possible shape. People have both physical and spiritual existence; and depriving them of any of them impoverishes them.

The real reason for the conflict between the materialistic and spiritual worldviews is that they are describing two different things. When one blind person holds an elephant’s trunk and the other his tail, he thinks he is describing two different things; however, what they both describe are different aspects of the same reality. Man the “rational animal” or “social animal” and man the spirit are both men. They are simply different aspects of man.

What is reality Reality is what exists. This is the case on both the material and spiritual aspects. Any true learning system will have to be consistent with scientific knowledge, while taking into account all the spiritual experiences that people have without qualifying them as mental illness or worse. The spiritually inclined will have to recognize scientific facts, and the materially inclined will have to recognize spiritual phenomena. And then people will be able to benefit from both approaches without killing each other for them.