Here’s an excerpt from a fantastic article by Mark Matousek on the powerful creativity available at the Science and Nonduality Conference, where astronomers, cosmologists, and particle physicists comingle with Sufis, Buddhists, Christian mystics, and nondual practioners. Read this and get a sense of what’s possible when there is real dialogue across seemingly different disciplines:
The philosopher orders the pancakes and sausage. The shaman asks for the egg whites with cheese, the Jungian waits for her unbuttered toast, and the mindfulness teacher – a paragon of amusement and patience — stands next to me on the breakfast line beaming like a hundred-watt bulb. We’re here with hundreds of fellow scientists, spiritual teachers, academics, artists, and seekers for the third annual Science and Non Duality (SAND) Conference in San Rafael, Calif. Part think tank, part ashram, part arts festival, part Doctors Without Borders, SAND is a unique melting pot for interdisciplinary dialogue among groups that don’t ordinarily mingle to compare notes on what it means to be a 21st century human and how we can close the unnecessary gap between scientific knowledge and the world’s most ancient wisdom tradition, known as non-duality. Science and spirituality have always been odd bedfellows. Since the Scientific Revolution, when empirical discoveries began to undermine religious doctrine, tensions have steadily grown between those who sought truth through rational inquiry based on observation and those who accepted truths based on the authority of religious dogma. “While the liberation of science from religion resulted in tremendous advances in science and technology,” according to one of SAND’s founders, Maurizio Benazzo, “it also led to the fragmentation of knowledge, and to a science no longer engaged with the big questions: what it means to be human, to be conscious, to be a seeker of meaning amid the vagaries of life.” Go here for Mark’s full article, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Waking up at SAND12