In a poll of runners conducted many years ago, I forget where, one wag gave his religious affiliation as “The Church of the Sunday Morning 20-Mile Run.”

His answer didn’t surprise me. At the time, I imagined there must be thousands of runners who felt the same - they’d rather spend Sunday morning having real experiences, than sit in church listening to a sermon.

If the present slugfest between fundamentalists and scientists over “intelligent design” leaves me dissatisfied, I think perhaps that’s the reason: the combatants aren’t talking from personal experience; they’re sermonizing.

Why can’t religion be more like running? How relevant is God, if we’re unable to experience Him?

I recall hearing of a monk in an early Greek monastery who asked his superior if it was all right to seek the actual experience of God. The abbot replied: “Of course — is God nothing?” The early Orthodox saints weren’t satisfied with talk; they wanted to know God, and they practiced the “prayer of the heart” because they had found that God is experienced in the heart.

To return to today’s news: the Christian fundamentalist “intelligent designers” claim that God can be known only after death, and that to seek to know Him in this present life is blasphemy. Meanwhile, atheist scientists, with biologist Richard Dawkins in their lead, claim that God is a fairy tale. (Dawkins is the author of a current bestseller, The God Delusion.)

It’s only fair to note that not all scientists - not even all biologists - endorse Dawkins’s views; and that in the Christian camp, a large sector of American clergy reject the fundamentalist line:

For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy.¹

The world’s spiritual teachings address the most pressing question faced by humanity: “How can I avoid suffering, and experience greater happiness?” The churches purport to deal with this issue; certainly they spend time talking about it, though they less often tell us how to experience happiness. And that’s unfortunate. A recent poll found that just 4 percent of U.S. teenagers plan to grow up as believing church members. Little wonder. While the fundamentalists shout, “Believe!”, Dawkins and his followers proclaim: “Life is an accident. It arose from random gurglings in the primordial soup. ‘Happiness,’ so-called, means behaving in ways that promote the survival of the species.” Neither of these invitations - to blind belief or dogmatic materialism — is inspiring.

The rational habit doesn’t touch our hearts. And it can lead to ludicrous extremes. I don’t read the papers much, but I came across an article in the Sacramento Bee many years ago that fairly begged to be disbelieved. Here’s an excerpt:

In a Journal of Medical Ethics article titled “A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder,” Liverpool University psychologist Richard P. Bentall argues that the so called syndrome of happiness is a diagnosable mood disturbance that should be included in standard taxonomies of mental illness such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Happiness, as Bentall states in his abstract, is “statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system.” (In this regard, as Bentall later notes, happiness resembles other psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.)

The author of the Bee article, New Republic contributing editor Maggie Scarf, related Dr. Bentall’s proposal “that the term ‘happiness’ be removed from future editions of the major diagnostic manuals, to be replaced by the formal description ‘major affective disorder, pleasant type.’”

When I read the article aloud to a friend, she doubled over with major affective disorder, pleasant type. “That’s such amazing cock-a-doo!” she howled. “It’s so carefully reasoned - yet it’s completely incredible!”

It is nutty-cakes. It’s rationalism gone mad. Consider, in contrast, how Albert Einstein addressed the human quest for happiness. Einstein spoke as a true scientist - that is, one whose concern is experience:

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves. (From the essay, Cosmic Religious Feeling.)

We runners occasionally have experiences that assuage pain, fire hope, and satisfy longings. I believe the man who declared his church to be running 20 miles on Sunday morning was onto something. In my 30-plus years as a runner, I doubt I’ve run a mile when I wasn’t seeking greater happiness. When I run, I look for “the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain.” And I’ve realized that the bliss I seek comes not by logically proving or disproving God - or by beating myself up as a “sinner” - but by opening my heart. Running makes me a scientist: one who demands empirical proof.

My most “spiritual” runs come invariably when my heart is loving, humble, compassionate, and expansive. In my research as a spiritual seeker and runner, I find that the heart is key.

The notion that the laboratory of religion is the human heart is backed by scientific research, and by the hard-won insights of the spiritual “scientists” of all traditions.

The “hard” science comes from studies such as those conducted at the Institute of Hearthmath. The Heartmath neuroscientists have shown that positive feelings have profound effects on our bodies and minds. In my book, Fitness Intuition, I summarized the Heartmath research:

Positive, harmonious feelings enhance mental focus, calmness, health, performance, intuition, and the frequency of spiritual feelings. They increase relaxation, alpha-wave output in the brain (associated with a calm, meditative state), and synchronize heart-rhythm patterns, respiratory rhythms, and blood pressure oscillations.

My experiences as a runner coincide precisely with the Heartmath findings. And when I compare those experiences with the scriptures, I find, again, a perfect match:

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. (John 1:7,12)

And unto these - thus serving well, thus loving ceaselessly -
I give a mind of perfect mood, whereby they draw to Me;
And, all for love of them, within their darkened souls I dwell,
And, with bright rays of wisdom’s lamp, their ignorance dispel.
(Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 10)

What delivers the experience of God is love. No wonder the scientists are unaware of spiritual realities: they haven’t tested religious claims using appropriate instruments, in the laboratory of their hearts.

There’s a wonderful book, Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t, by J. Donald Walters, that deals with the apparent conflict between faith and reason. Walters argues that the only worthy proof of religion is direct, personal, experience, and that the experience of the divine comes by expanding our awareness.

Walters observes that physicists speak from a more expanded vision than biologists. More than one physicist has speculated that matter is not merely created from energy, as Einstein showed, but that energy appears to be created by consciousness. Walters quotes Sir Arthur Eddington, the astrophysicist who introduced Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the world:

The recent discoveries of science do, I believe, take us to an eminence from which we can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and if I rashly plunge into them, it is not because I have confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to show that the water is really deep. To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.¹

Other physicists have spoken in similar vein, for example, Fritjof Capra (Tao of Physics), Fred Alan Wolf (The Spiritual Universe), and Gary Zukav (The Dancing Wu Li Masters).²

Not all biologists find themselves in agreement with Dawkins. Rebels like Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. (The Biology of Belief), formerly a researcher at Stanford Medical School, find a world of meaning where Dawkins sees life bound by its origins in primordial mud.

Lipton’s experiments on the mechanisms by which cells process information reveal one means by which consciousness can influence matter. Lipton found, for example, that genes can be turned on and off by influences outside the cell. His experiments showed that our perceptions and beliefs can affect our genetic activity and alter our genetic code - so much for the “selfish gene” which, Dawkins claims, rigidly determines our behavior. Lipton’s research lends support to the notion that consciousness, not matter, is the primary reality.

Physicists are engaged in expanding our awareness of the universe. By contrast, Dawkins and his fellow orthodox biologists appear stuck in a backward-facing pose. The image they give us is of human beings straining their mud-born brains in a vain effort to discover higher meaning, their yearnings poignantly doomed from the start. “Resistance is futile — you will be re-assimilated by the Bog.” It isn’t an expansive vision.

When my writing business took a nose dive following the tech crash of 2001 (I’d become dependent on a single dot-com client), I took a half-time job as assistant to the manager of the Mechanic Engineering Department at Stanford. It was one of the three best jobs I’ve had, in no small measure because the manager was a deeply competent woman with a quiet sense of humor and a wonderful heart. Many of the professors, too, were people of extraordinary personal magnetism. Their tremendous energy and intense concentration made it thrilling to be in their presence.

A vignette. At one point, my job required that I check the expense statements of several faculty members, one of whom was Prof. Beth Pruitt, a rising star in the department. Beth’s expense records were immaculate, but if I had a question, she answered with her habitual bounding, cheerful energy and laser-like concentration. It was like running an Excel spreadsheet through a Cray supercomputer.

In contrast to the backward-turned spotlight of the biologists, the energy that I experienced from those Stanford professors, who were among the smartest people in their fields, was of tremendous vistas waiting to be explored - it was a vibration not of limitation, but of limitlessness, and boundless hope.

I’ve felt a similar aura in the presence of people that I was convinced were close to Godby. From Fitness Intuition:

In the mid-1980s, I attended a talk by a ninety-year-old man whose name was Sunyabhai. He told us how, as a teenager, he had traveled to India from his native Denmark to study with the great yoga master, Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sunyabhai’s joy permeated the room - it was an energy that radiated from him with such saturating power that it filled me with a yearning to know God. I thought, “I would do anything to get what this man has. I would happily spend whole lifetimes in pursuit of that fulfillment.” There was something in the chemistry of my being, in the design of my heart and cells, that recognized that joy as my own.

“Sunyabhai” was the name that Ramana Maharshi had given him. In Sanskrit, it means “Brother Zero,” reflecting his detachment from personal cravings. He had emptied himself, and God had filled him with His primal bliss.

Years ago, I ran in a tiny rural marathon sponsored by a local Christian group. Before the race, a preacher invited the runners - there were just 13 of us - to join hands while he prayed that Christ protect us during the race. As he prayed, I felt a tangible blessing, and throughout the race there was a subtle sense of protection. “Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” (Acts 10)

Those were experiences, though I could no more explain them by logic than I could eat the moon in a bowl with chocolate sauce. I was convinced to the marrow of my bones that they were experiences of God, although they came from diverse spiritual traditions.

In Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramhansa Yogananda relates two stories of visitors to his guru’s hermitage - one a western-trained scientist, the other a Hindu fundamentalist:

A noted chemist once crossed swords with Sri Yukteswar. The visitor would not admit the existence of God, inasmuch as science has devised no means of detecting Him.

“So you have inexplicably failed to isolate the Supreme Power in your test tubes!” Master’s gaze was stern. “I recommend an unheard-of experiment. Examine your thoughts unremittingly for twenty-four hours. Then wonder no longer at God’s absence.”

A celebrated pundit received a similar jolt. With ostentatious zeal, the scholar shook the ashram rafters with scriptural lore. Resounding passages poured from the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the bhasyas of Shankara.

“I am waiting to hear you.” Sri Yukteswar’s tone was inquiring, as though utter silence had reigned. The pundit was puzzled.

“Quotations there have been, in superabundance.” Master’s words convulsed me with mirth, as I squatted in my corner, at a respectful distance from the visitor. “But what original commentary can you supply, from the uniqueness of your particular life? What holy text have you absorbed and made your own? In what ways have these timeless truths renovated your nature? Are you content to be a hollow victrola, mechanically repeating the words of other men?”

“I give up!” The scholar’s chagrin was comical. “I have no inner realization.”

For the first time, perhaps, he understood that discerning placement of the comma does not atone for a spiritual coma.

“These bloodless pedants smell unduly of the lamp,” my guru remarked after the departure of the chastened one. “They prefer philosophy to be a gentle intellectual setting-up exercise. Their elevated thoughts are carefully unrelated either to the crudity of outward action or to any scourging inner discipline!”

Yogananda’s disciple, Swami Kriyananda, records a meeting, years later, between Yogananda and a professor from Columbia University:

The Columbia professor had a probing mind. Among many questions, he asked, “How do you distinguish between yourself and your followers?”

“All are waves on the same, one ocean,” the Master replied, “composed, as ocean water is, of the same substance: Spirit. Some of the waves are higher than others. Some waves don’t even want to distance themselves from the ocean. All waves, no matter how high, are in essence one and the same. The difference between the guru and the disciples, then, lies only in their respective closeness to the ocean: in how conscious each one is of his essential reality. The greater the sense of ego, the taller the wave, and the greater, in consequence, the ignorance. The greater one’s awareness of the ocean as one’s sole reality, the smaller the wave, and also the less his sense of having a separate individuality.” (Swami Kriyananda, Conversations with Yogananda)

Professor: “Is there a difference, then, of evolution?”

The Master: “That much is true, if we understand evolution to mean a progressive refinement of awareness. The tall waves participate more exuberantly in the play of delusion. The little waves, which are more enlightened, are no longer excited by the play. Enlightened beings enjoy everything, not for itself, but as a ‘play’ of God’s.”

Professor: “Is there any end to evolution?”

The Master replied, “No end. You go on until you achieve endlessness.”4

In the direction of their vision, at least, the physicists seem better aligned than the biologists with the expanded vision of the saints. Yogananda’s remarks about the evolution of awareness hint at a larger consciousness that invites us to realize it. What’s implied by the saints - and by the more visionary physicists - is that consciousness created the primal mud; it was consciousness that evolved the brain; and consciousness is the source of the joy that we feel in embracing wider realities.

Albert Einstein hinted at that joy:

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

In Out of the Labyrinth, Walters plays an engaging game of “what if.” What if consciousness has not emerged from the slime, as Dawkins claims. What if, instead, everything emerged from consciousness. What if, as Einstein claimed, the longing that drives beings as they evolve through increasingly sophisticated forms — mineral, plant, animal, human - is the urge to escape suffering and find the freedom of expanded awareness.

What would this imply about evolution - and about the backward gaze of biologists like Dawkins? To begin with, it would mean that as consciousness evolves, physical evolution is a by-product. Eastern lore states that the soul, traveling through many lives, temporarily inhabits bodies of increasing refinement that allow it to explore widening vistas of awareness. At last, it emerges in a human body, where limitless inner expansion of awareness becomes possible.

In his autobiography, Yogananda provides a glimpse of that final attainment. Having left his guru’s hermitage in a misguided attempt to find God by solitary meditation in the Himalayas, he shamefacedly returns.

A few mornings later I made my way to Master’s empty sitting room. I planned to meditate, but my laudable purpose was unshared by disobedient thoughts. They scattered like birds before the hunter.

“Mukunda!” Sri Yukteswar’s voice sounded from a distant inner balcony.

I felt as rebellious as my thoughts. “Master always urges me to meditate,” I muttered to myself. “He should not disturb me when he knows why I came to his room.”

He summoned me again; I remained obstinately silent. The third time his tone held rebuke.

“Sir, I am meditating,” I shouted protestingly.

“I know how you are meditating,” my guru called out, “with your mind distributed like leaves in a storm! Come here to me.”

Snubbed and exposed, I made my way sadly to his side.

“Poor boy, the mountains couldn’t give what you wanted.” Master spoke caressively, comfortingly. His calm gaze was unfathomable. “Your heart’s desire shall be fulfilled.”

Sri Yukteswar seldom indulged in riddles; I was bewildered. He struck gently on my chest above the heart.

My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead, yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body, but embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap.

The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. Through the back of my head I saw men strolling far down Rai Ghat Road, and noticed also a white cow who was leisurely approaching. When she reached the space in front of the open ashram gate, I observed her with my two physical eyes. As she passed by, behind the brick wall, I saw her clearly still.

All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation.

An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light….

Suddenly the breath returned to my lungs. With a disappointment almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. Once more I was limited to the humiliating cage of a body, not easily accommodative to the Spirit. Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm.

My guru was standing motionless before me; I started to drop at his holy feet in gratitude for the experience in cosmic consciousness which I had long passionately sought. He held me upright, and spoke calmly, unpretentiously.

“You must not get overdrunk with ecstasy. Much work yet remains for you in the world. Come; let us sweep the balcony floor; then we shall walk by the Ganges.”

Walters notes that scientists confine themselves to investigating the physical world using appropriate instruments, and that they avoid making statements that aren’t supported by the facts. Walters doesn’t dispute the physical evidence for evolution, but he argues that the biologists have misinterpreted what their findings imply regarding the purpose and meaning of life; and that a radically different interpretation is possible, one that embraces the vision of a cosmos not born of random bubblings, but created and sustained by consciousness and permeated with meaning.

It is an insurmountable problem for both Dawkins and the fundamentalists that their arguments aren’t grounded in experience. If the fundamentalists actually experienced God, they could meet the scientists on their own ground and calmly challenge them: “In your search for truth, you have dedicated yourselves to the empirical method. Why not bring that same scientific approach to the study of religion. In the laboratory of the human body, conduct rigorous experiments, using appropriate means.”

The only leaders in religion we find speaking that way are those who don’t demand blind belief, but challenge their members to “test the spirits.” They are people like the Dalai Lama, who invited Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, to study Buddhist meditation practices. Davidson recorded his findings in Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature⁵.

Ultimately, the most appropriate tools for the empirical testing of religion are the “lab instruments” of meditation and prayer. And the “proof,” as in all scientific study, is direct experience. As Paramhansa Yogananda put it, speaking from his own realization: “At the inner end of the human nervous system, the mind, interiorized, communes with God.”

Granted, the experience in this case is subjective. But the results satisfy the scientific demand for reproducibility. Among the saints of all spiritual traditions, there is absolute unanimity about the “results” of spiritual practice. St. Teresa of Avila stated that the presence of God is experienced at the top of the head - the Sahasrara Chakra of the eastern mystics. In Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda gives many examples of the similarities in the experiences of mystics of East and West.

I’ve quoted Yogananda because as a spokesperson for the path of personal realization as an alternative to blind belief and dry reasoning, he stands supreme. Autobiography of a Yogi is an amazing record of a spiritual search conducted with full dedication to the test of experience.

Yogananda deplored blind belief:

Science is progressive. Religion is stationary. Science is constantly producing new inventions because it is based on the laws of reason. Religion remains stagnant because it is based on untested beliefs. The scientist uses impartial reason to explore the universal laws of Nature. Religion uses reason to defend, but not to question, its basic assumptions. Reason, as used by the churches, is not a means of discovering truth, but of obscuring it.

Religious groups and ministers of religion should work to develop a more scientific outlook. Their commitment should be to expanding their understanding of the truth, not to protecting their already-formulated definitions of it. They should reason as scientists do, impartially. As scientists test their hypotheses regarding material realities, so religionists should test their beliefs by psychological and spiritual experimentation. They should try to demonstrate how spiritual laws, such as faith and charity, actually work in human lives.

Instead of peddling untested dogmas and urging people to “Believe-believe!” the churches should convert their premises into Universities of Living, where experiments are conducted in how to find the true fulfillment in life that all people seek.⁶

The grand experiment of knowing God can’t be conducted in an idle hour; thus it isn’t surprising if the biologists and fundamentalists sidestep the challenge. But the fact remains, it has been conducted, and the “lab notes” duly recorded. Dawkins doesn’t challenge the saints; he conveniently ignores them, just as the fundamentalists do. For his target, he chooses instead that most fragile segment of religious believers: those who haven’t tested their beliefs, whether because they aren’t aware that testing is possible, or they aren’t aware of the method, or because - like most fundamentalists - they believe it’s blasphemous to probe God. On the basis of what Dawkins knows of fundamentalism, he concludes that all religion is a sham, and that God is a myth. In this way, Dawkins and his followers allow themselves to violate the fundamental principles of scientific experimentation: “Never theorize in advance of your data. It can cause you to manipulate your own observations.” And “Record first, interpret later.”

Meanwhile, the fundamentalists, lacking inner experience, resort to shouting and politicking to mask the shaky foundations of their faith.

In Out of the Labyrinth, Walters writes:

The reason dogmatism is so often associated with religion can be explained by a simple principle, which I’ve called the Law of Dogmatic Proliferation: The dogmatic tendency increases in direct proportion to one’s inability to prove a point. This inability is greatest, certainly, in confrontation with the eternal mysteries.

What is needed now, however, is the clearest, simplest, most honest approach possible. Religiously inclined people should be as honest in their approach as any skeptic. There is no evidence, indeed, to show that a sincere and open-minded search for truth has ever met with divine displeasure. Jesus Christ himself said, “The truth shall make you free.”⁷

If consciousness created the brain, it isn’t something we’re likely to learn from the biologists. Most biologists - like the fundamentalists — reject the primacy of consciousness out of hand. If a theory can’t be proved in the laboratory, or by abstract reason, they bar it from consideration. (Dawkins goes even further; he rejects a priori the studies by scientists like Rupert Sheldrake that strongly suggest the primacy of consciousness. Dawkins doesn’t merely refuse to examine Shelddrake’s evidence; he said, in essence, “It cannot be so, therefore it isn’t.” See Sheldrake’s response.)

Studies of the brain’s behavior in states of meditation have shown that there are physical correlates of religious experience. And because these physical brain behaviors are the only aspect of spiritual experience that can be measured, many scientists have concluded that they are all that can be known about religion, and that the experiments simply prove that “religious experiences” originate in the brain.

But spiritual experience is bound to be reflected in the brain’s activity. Spiritual experiences are, after all, experiences of human beings encased in physical bodies. Surely it is possible that the source of those experience is consciousness, acting through the brain as its instrument.

The notion that consciousness is primary changes everything, including the controversy over the meaning of evolution - that scorched plot between the fundamentalists and biologists. Walters doesn’t shy from the battle; in Labyrinth, he speculates on how the longing for expanding awareness manifests in living things.

An animal may appear to be purely engaged in a struggle for survival. But what if it is consciousness that drives evolution? What if, life after life, as the soul inhabits ever more sophisticated bodies, it grows clearer in its awareness of where happiness and freedom from suffering lie?

Suppose, further, that having attained the human level, the potential to expand awareness becomes suddenly much greater. Where, for animals, expansion can be experienced only through the senses, what if, in a human body, it becomes possible to expand awareness boundlessly through inner realization born of spiritual practice?

Walters cites evidence from the natural world in support of the evolution of awareness. A homely example: why does a monkey, having gained possession of a perfectly adequate banana, toss it away half-eaten and begin searching for a better banana? The relentless quest for greater awareness drives all living beings.

The difference between consciousness emerging from the primordial soup, and consciousness as the source of everything, is the difference between mud-gazing and striving for the stars. The latter vision gives life meaning. Kindness, for example, becomes not merely a convenient ploy, aimed at cementing social groups and helping the species to survive, but deeply meaningful as an instrument for expanding awareness. Love becomes no mere expedient based on our biology, but the larger consciousness inviting us to taste more of Itself. Values become relative, but directional - what’s moral, at each stage of our evolution, is that which takes us in an expansive direction, toward greater awareness. Little wonder if, compared to the vision of physicists and saints, the “hard facts” of the puddle-gazers seem gray and uninspiring. When sages want to convey the wonder of the universe, they speak as Einstein did, not like Richard Dawkins.

What of our runner? Clearly, the biologists would claim that a runner’s “spiritual experiences” are no more than the brain’s response to chemicals squeezed out by the stimulus of exercise. Yet when I run, I know the difference between how it feels to experience the endorphin-generated “runner’s high” - which arrives reliably after 35-45 minutes of running - and an opening of the heart in greater awareness, which is more difficult to achieve, and correspondingly satisfying.

For me, my subjective experiences are sufficient proof. But, if Walters is right, both the runner’s high and those “spiritual” experiences may be the result of opening awareness to a broader, more joyful consciousness. Sounds right to me; I have the feeling, at such times, as of a wider Self inviting me to open my heart and find greater joy.

I’ll end with an excerpt from Out of the Labyrinth:

Orthodox thinking so far, almost as much so in religion as in science, has viewed mankind-to say nothing of the lower forms of life-almost wholly in relation to the depths. In religion, the emphasis has been on original sin. In physics and chemistry, it has been on the material origins of life. In biology, it has been on the gradual change from lower life forms as a result of the struggle for survival. In psychology, it has been on defining man in terms of his more physical drives, which are merely suppressed when he tries to live by lofty ideals. Always, the emphasis has been on the lower as though it, and not man’s aspirations, were the basic reality.

If the force behind life and evolution were nothing but a struggle for procreation and survival, a blind push upwards from below, then certainly we ought to acknowledge this reality humbly, lest we cut ourselves off from the very wellspring of our existence. To deny our primordial urges would mean to weaken any chances we might have for further development.

If, however, the creative force behind evolution has been a search for experience, and for expanding awareness and enjoyment, then it is forward with aspiration, and not backward with fear or deprecation, that man must look for further guidance on the evolutional path.

In fact, the common experience of life at every level, and by no means only the human level, tells us that worthwhile developments are always the result of reaching out for something better, and not of being swept along accidentally like unresisting pebbles in a mountain stream.

Again, the fact that life is capable of evolving to higher levels of awareness means that life’s highest potential is the central reality, of which the lower forms are as yet but imperfect manifestations. The lowest life forms may be compared, in other words, to the first, tentative brush strokes on a vast, uncompleted canvas.

Science speaks of potential energy. This is what is present in a pendulum, for instance, at the top of its swing: Though the pendulum is momentarily motionless, it contains all the energy potential for its downward movement. Life, similarly, contains in its humblest beginnings all the potential for its highest future development-a potential presumably far greater than that realized by mankind up to the present time. Life must, gradually, of its own nature, find its way to higher and higher manifestations of awareness.⁸

¹ From the Clergy Letter Project website, http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evol_sun2007.htm

² Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan, 1958), p. 276.

³ Perhaps not coincidentally, several of these scientists have praised Walters’s book, including Fred Alan Wolf and Leon Kolb emeritus Associate Clinical Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and an eminent Jewish scholar. Wolf: “Be prepared to take on a new view of reality and your own nature. Labyrinth is thought-provoking, intelligent, and filled with remarkable wisdom. This belongs in any thinking/feeling person’s library.” Kolb: “This (Labyrinth) is wonderful! It’s completely in harmony with the findings of modern science, yet it provides them with deep meaning. It is wonderful - wonderful! I tell you, this message must be spread everywhere.”

⁴ Conversations with Yogananda, recorded with reflections by Swami Kriyananda, Crystal Clarity Publishers.

⁵ Davidson, Richard J., & Harrington, Anne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

⁶ Paramhansa Yogananda, How to Keep the Church Steadfast: A New Awakening in the Churches, 1933 (edited by Swami Kriyananda, 1992).

⁷ Out of the Labyrinth, Chapter 2, by J. Donald Walters, Copyright 2001 Hansa Trust

⁸ Out of the Labyrinth, Ch. 12.