“That all things are shaped by fields that are beyond energy and matter is now what we must oxymoronically yet truthfully call “solid science.” As a result, in the realm of language the scientific facts of our physical situation are becoming impossible to express in spiritually neutral terms. Science has moved in a generation from the easily stated but mistaken claim that we are mortal matter, chemical compounds, and little more, to the inspiring but linguistically problematic claim that we are living repositories of the invisible wisdom of primordial electromagnetic and morphogenetic fields. Scientists who disdain religion seem horrified by the mounting pressure to deploy overtly spiritual terms such as Jager, Teilhard, and Schumacher use.. . . my advice to scientists with regard to all this is: relax. If unseen fields beyond literary or scientific expression lie at the root of all life-forms and matter— if these fields are invisible yet deducible, ineffable yet artful, evasive yet omnipresent, and if in the attempt to describe them science has never sounded so much like ancient myth or scripture—so be it. I realize that to many an old school scientist the words “ancient myth and scripture” translate to “superstitious pap”. But isn’t this mere arrogance? Ancient thought as expressed in Wisdom literature is unanswerably profound and poetic, and scientists who study the ancients know this. Cutting edge physicists have been pondering India’s five-thousand-year-old Upanishads for decades, stunned by its exacting observations of how unseen fields and mayavic forces create this world of forms.” . .”Is there anything we more experienced Uncomprehenders can do to help these scientists feel more comfortable with swimming in the end where you never touch bottom?”

~David James Duncan, God Laughs and Plays

Related reading:

David James Duncan on Wikipedia

God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right