Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology…

Science pursues the common-sense assumption that the natural world is a multiplicity of individual things and events by attempting to describe these units as accurately and minutely as possible. Because science is above all analytic in its way of describing things, it seems at first to disconnect them more than ever. Its experiments are the study of carefully isolated situations, designed to exclude influences that cannot be measured or controlled—as when one studies falling bodies in a vacuum to cut out the friction of the air. But for this reason the scientist understands better than anyone else just how inseparable things are. The more he tried to cut out external influences upon an experimental situation, the more he discovers new ones, hitherto unsuspected. The more carefully he describes the motion of a given particle, the more he finds himself describing also the space in which it moves. The realization that all things are inseparably related is in proportion to one’s effort to make them clearly distinct. Science therefore surpasses the common-sense point of view from which it begins, coming to speak of things and events as properties of the “fields” in which they occur. But this is simply a theoretical description of a state of affairs which, in these forms of Eastern Mysticism, is directly sensed. As soon as this is clear, we have a sound basis for meeting of minds between East and West which could be remarkably fruitful.

Via: processes | Filed under: perspective  alan watts