The New Spirituality: A Movement

in Need of Metaphysics
"Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected.

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

"From your thought springs your reality. From your ideas your future emerges."

Neale Donald Walsch, Tomorrow's God: Our Greatest Spiritual

Challenge

Thoughts become things. Radiate positive vibrations and watch the universe
reverberate in kind; we create our own reality; think high thoughts and your world
grows brighter; focus on the negative, and your fears materialize. Thoughts inside
attract things out there.

Tomorrow's God will come down to earth and be part of us, as humankind awakens
to find that its concept of a supreme being wrongly reflects the real deity. Life is God
acting out its purpose, becoming real in physical form. A universal mind underlies
the world; speak to it and it will supply an answer. Make up your mind; think positive
thoughts; enrich yourself; leave your individual ego and create a New Earth.

And so the new spirituality speaks of a tidal wave soon to wash over us, joining the
old truths of religion with new-age optimism; one mind, one world.
As the teachings of the new spiritualism reflect the teachings of the old spiritualism,
it is hard to oppose this optimistic viewpoint. But for the teachings to become real,
the new spiritualism will need more than high thoughts, bright-colored books, and
promises of a better world. It will need a logical, credible grounding. It will need a
coherent worldview, a metaphysics, and specifically, an integrated picture of the
universe that explains both spirit and the material world.

Standing against the new spiritualism is the worldview of scientific materialism,

which today dominates the way we think.

What is scientific materialism? At its core, this worldview holds that the fundamental
constituent of the universe is matter, mindless stuff, and that what we call mind,
spirit or soul either do not exist or are some sort of emergent property of matter. If
we break down any portion of the physical world, whether a rock, a tree limb, or the
human heart, materialists tell us we will find only particles, "stardust," something
lifeless and ordinary, and surely nothing God-like.

Materialists assume that the entire world we experience exists independently from
the mind and outside of its control. There is a real world out there, they say, working
away on its own power unaffected by mind or spirit.

Thus, a material scientist, when presented with the claim that "thoughts create
reality," might respond as Nobel prize-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, did to
mind-over-matter claims: "What possible physical signal from our brains could move
distant objects and yet have no effect on any scientific instruments?" (Dreams of a
Final Theory).

And so the new spiritualism suffers from the same flaw as most mystical belief
systems: how can thoughts, those wispy, insubstantial, subjective shadows impact
the hard brute matter of the world, much less move mountains?

This is the problem of any spiritualism, whether it be the supposed spoon-bending

feats of Uri Geller or the red-sea-parting powers of the God of the Bible: how can
sheer emotion, thought or the deepest prayer alter, much less create, this hard,
material world? Are not spirit and matter wholly different substances?
And the question remains: where is the link between the thought and the thing?

Materialism supplies an answer: thoughts do not move things. Things move things.
In the language of Newton's third law of motion, for every action there is an equal
and opposite reaction. Newton's moving parts are things, not thoughts, and Newton's
mechanics are those of a machine not a mind. So in the end, modern science rejects
the new spiritualism and all its relations because they talk about things that cannot
be detected and measured by scientific instruments.

But perhaps the error lies in our conceptions of mind and matter, rather than in the
limitations of scientific instruments. Perhaps we have conjured up a battle between
mind and matter because we have misconstrued what the terms stand for.

Even Mr. Weinberg would not dispute that both "spirit" and "matter" are at least
mental conceptions. Our mental conception of "spirit" is of some internal feeling that
lifts and inspires; the "eternal breath;" at bottom, some powerful, but insubstantial
force. Interestingly, we have direct knowledge of the "spirit" concept because it is
something we feel inside. Team spirit; the sense of being "down-in-the-dumps,"
moodiness; hope; excitement. We know it's there.

Matter, it turns out, is also at least a mental conception. We have an idea or concept
of matter: something solid, hard, substantial and constant. A granite rock; tree trunk;
concrete wall.

But oddly, under current theories of modern (yes, materialistic) science and
according to some of the greatest philosophical minds, there is in fact no such thing
as self- sustaining "matter" existing outside the human mind. Might matter, like
spirit, also be only a concept of the mind?

In the early 18th Century, the British philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, launched
a powerful attack against the concept of matter. He said that what we call "matter" is
nothing but a collection of qualities extension, figure, motion, color, roughness,
taste that "are only ideas existing in the mind, and that an idea can be like nothing
but another idea; and that consequently neither they nor their archetypes can exist in
an unperceiving substance. Hence, it is plain that the very notion of what is called
Matter or corporeal substance involves a contradiction in it." (G. Berkeley, Principles
of Human Knowledge, Part First, 8.)(emphasis in original). It is a contradiction
because while we assume matter to have an independent existence from mind, we
know this thing we call matter only through ideas. How do we know this matter
exists outside of the mind of ideas?

From this standpoint, Berkeley concluded that the whole framework of the material
world resided in "the mind of some Eternal Spirit," and there is no other "Substance
than Spirit." (Id. 6). Although Berkeley's viewpoints have been criticized as being
solipsistic (the world is all in my head) and mystical (where is the Eternal Spirit?),
they point in a direction that appears more promising with time. (For responses to
both of these criticisms, see The Heaven at the End of Science.)

Another great British thinker, David Hume (1711-76), came to a similar conclusion
when he pondered the question of why the common person continued to believe in
the continued existence of a mind-independent world when all that is ever present to
the mind are ideas. Hume said:

Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are
deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that 'tis
impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything specifically
different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as
much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to utmost limits of
the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive of
any kind of existence, but these perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow
compass. This is the universe of the imagination nor have we any idea but what is
there produc'd. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Sec. 6.) (emphasis
added.)

In other words, dear scientists, do all the theorizing you desire, but in the end you are
only discussing a world of the imagination, not a mind-independent objective world.

Modern scientists typically ridicule these positions either because they do not
understand them, or because they undercut the foundation of their own materialistic
worldview; a worldview that assumes the existence of the very mind-independent
material world that Berkeley and Hume showed was conception of the mind.
That's all fine and good. No one reads, much less agrees with, Berkeley and Hume
any more. But then here comes the shocker for those who care to devote some
attention to the issue.

When we turn to quantum theory, physic's leading theory of the nature of reality, we
find that physicists and the idealist philosophers are saying very close to the same
thing but in different ways. Physicists repeatedly remind us that "atoms are not
things." Rather, at the base of reality all we have are "quantum waves," something
resting in the borderland between a particle and a wave, or the wave function, a
formula telling us where we might find a particle if we decide to look for one. (See
Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters
Consciousness). Nobel prize-winning physicists, Robert J. Laughlin, tells us that
"[q]uantum mechanical matter consists of waves of nothing." (A Different Universe).
Jim Al-Khalili, in his book, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed, acknowledges that
"no one really knows what the wave function actually is." It is not a "classical particle
with a definite location at each time." Rather it is a probability wave that "collapses"
into a discrete particle when observed.

As Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner write, "There is no way to interpret quantum
theory without encountering consciousness." Why? Because even though quantum
theory says only wave functions exist, scientific observations somehow convert the
wave function into a particle. As soon as consciousness is found to play a role in the
"collapse of the wave function," the next question is, how much of a role? Instead of
mind-independent matter, are there mind-independent wave functions "out there"
waiting to be collapsed into a real world? Or, was Berkeley right after all? Are we
simply looking at a dream in the mind of an Eternal Spirit?

Quantum theorists say that conscious observations are necessary to create a picture
of physical reality; Berkeley said that a mind or spirit is necessary for us to
experience a material world. Isn't the difference between these two viewpoints one of
emphasis rather than of doctrine? Have scientists, in belittling Berkeley's philosophy,
missed out on a chance to integrate science with idealism?

Despite the findings of quantum physics, the scientific mind cannot bring itself to
dispense with the principle of objectivity, the belief that "there is a real world
independent of human perceptions." (Ernst Mayr, This is Biology: The Science of the
Living World.) Science remains the emotionally-detached search for truth; it does
not want to inject spirit, life, or mind into the wave function; it only wants to observe
particles in motion.
Both the idealist philosophers and quantum theorists agree that there is no such
thing as a mind-independent world of matter. Rather, under both fields of thought,
matter is a concept we have implanted upon the external world. In other words, both
matter and spirit are internal concepts and exist on the same level. Therefore, spirit
should be able to affect matter in the same way that the material world a bad day at
the office, the home team comes from behind to win, our best friend moves away
affects spirit.

So we are now ready to outline metaphysics for the new spirituality. And it is simple.
All of physical reality does in fact reside in an Eternal Spirit, and this spirit is what
we call God. If we are one mind in the midst of a powerful dream, then most
everything the new spirituality says can be true: thoughts can make up things
because the thought and the thing are connected, like a dreamer and its dream. If we
can solve the problem of solipsism and find a way to integrate science into this new
viewpoint, then we will really be on to something.

The prediction here is that the "new spirituality" will eventually divide into two
camps: those who practice spirituality (or religion) within the worldview of
materialism and pray for an omnipotent God to change the world through a miracle,
and those who conclude that to make spiritualism real, it will be necessary to
eliminate the independent-world assumption of scientific materialism and join spirit
with matter, the dreamer with its dream.

The University of Metaphysics and The University of Sedona is a private, post

secondary, distance learning, theological school operating under the auspices of the
International Metaphysical Ministry (I.M.M.).

The International Metaphysical Ministry, which operates the University Of

Metaphysics, is a worldwide New Thought Metaphysical Ministry having exposure in
the domestic United States along with over 120 countries internationally. The I.M.M
has over fifty years of service in the private, post secondary religious field.

The coursework written by the Founder Dr. Paul Leon Masters includes a synthesis
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