I was sitting in bed with a copy of The Power of Now, feeling like my brain was melting.
“This… makes sense,” I thought.
“It’s not supposed to make sense.”
Ever since I was probably 14, I’d wrestled with science and religion. I went back and forth, but in my early 20s, I thought science had won.
Then I started meditating and all of a sudden the floodgates were open again. First there was Buddhism. I read all these books, and on one page there’d be a beautiful description of how distraction works and I was all in. On the next page there’d be a traditional description of the six realms of existence and I was out again.
Then there were writers like Ekhart Tolle, who sometimes interpreted passages from the Gospels in meditative terms.
“But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
If I could paraphrase my memory of his interpretation, it’s that few of us are in contact with our sensory experience as it’s happening right now, so few of us reap the rewards of that connection.
My jaw dropped. That made perfect sense. At the time I thought the Gospels were mostly nonsense.
But maybe they weren’t?
So which was it? Science or religion? Stuck between the two, I suffered. The distinction doesn’t bother me anymore, though. It’s a long story that I’d rather not repeat—mostly boring.
To make the long story short, I think we want to be careful of what our minds fix themselves to—at the end of the day, faith knows nothing in particular, and reason does well to know its limits. In that perspective, science and religion can be united.
What does mindfulness have to do with that? That’s another long story, but it can help us recognize when are minds are holding on to something—whether that’s a line from scripture we don’t really understand, something we read in a biology textbook that may or may not be the full picture, or what have you.
With mindfulness, we can also discover how tiring it is to hold on to anything.
Not knowing for sure tends to be much more freeing—and interesting.