integration.
Integrating East and West
In early last century, we would have seen the conflict of science and spirituality as one between West and East. The Western cultures ignored the spiritual and the Eastern cultures ignored the material–the domain of science. The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote:
East is East, and West is West
And the twain shall never meet.
And this was true then. West was already a scientific culture, but the Easterners stubbornly held on to their spiritual cultures and it seemed they would never budge. Of course, many people still believe that this is so. Alas! The East is now also rapidly giving way to a materialist culture.
From: Amit Goswami
Eastern spirituality fundamentally professes oneness of consciousness and spirituality was a way of life for Easterners. But in the Western old science, consciousness is assumed to be brain-based, to be individual by nature, and to be conditioned (via biological and socio-cultural evolution) to operate on the survival of the fittest kind of competitive individual mode.
But rapid change is under way. A brain-based consciousness conflicts in a major unsolvable manner with quantum physics. So science is undergoing a paradigm shift. In this new paradigm, the Eastern model of oneness of consciousness is found to be the right way to think about consciousness. Thus this paradigm is paving the way for an integration of science and spirituality, of modern West and the old East.
There is another subtle conflict between the Eastern and the Western approach to life. Easterners, by and large, consider spirituality as the goal of their lives. It is believed that the individual