Do Scientific Methods Apply to Spirituality?

Spirit is all inclusive and unitive. Matter on the other hand is all exclusive and separative. Spirit is infinitely subtle and totally imperceptible to the senses or sense related instrumentation while matter on the other hand is susceptible to sense perception and sense related instrumentation. On the surface it seems that the methods that apply to the study of science are not applicable to the study of the spirit.

But let us examine closely what is entailed in the study of spirituality and being spiritual.

In my understanding, being spiritual is the opening of the human mind and intellect to the fact that our existence in the material realm is because of the spirit as our ground of being. That consciousness is meaningful and important to the way we relate with other beings in the material realm. Being spiritual has nothing to do with the spirit itself, it is just refining and deepening of my medium of consciousness to the inner perception of its infinitely subtle ground of being.

It is easy to perceive the gross; the gross is within the reach of our senses. It is hard to perceive the subtle. In science we devise instruments of perceiving what is beyond the reach of our bare senses. What about perceiving what is infinitely subtle beyond the reach of our unaided senses and also beyond the reach of scientific instrumentation?

I agree that most of us need to engage in spiritual study to be spiritual. How do we do that? What kind of mind do we need to develop to be spiritual. We have seen above that to be spiritual, the medium of our consciousness must become conscious of the infinitely subtle ground of our being. I suggest that we have to develop a scientific mind, a mind which is capable to perceiving the subtleties underlying the gross and the apparent. That is what science does.

Science does not work on faith; religion does. Can spirituality be based upon faith?

In spirituality, we need to develop a critical mind which is open to all subtle possibilities underlying the gross and the apparent universe. Science arrives at non-material (wave form) energy underlying the existence of all matter. Spirituality arrives at the the infinitely subtle and non-material spirit as the underlying ground of being of the entire universe of matter and consciousness.

The spiritual domain (matter and consciousness) is much more comprehensive than the domain of science (matter only). We have to understand that that is a the only difference between the explorations of science and spirituality. They need the same mindset: reason, logic, and rigor. The inner methodology is the same while the outer may be different because the spirit, unlike energy, is beyond the range of all instrumentation of subtle perception.