a center for
personal and planetary
awakening

Mystic River Yoga
196 Boston Avenue
Suite 3900
Medford, MA 02155

781 396 0808
info@MysticRiverYoga.com

Introduction

12 Principles of Awakening

Spiritual Foundation

Scientific Foundation

Embodying the Practice

Collective Awakening

           The Scientific Foundation:

                                   the

       Emergence, Sustenance and Dissolution

                               of Forms.

             Science is the Yoga of the West

             Yoga is the Science of the East

                                                 John Lilly

   What is Creation? How did the universe come into being? What sustains the universe? What leads to the multiplicity of forms, seen and unseen? All cultures have attempted to answer these fundamental questions of existence. Mythology, story telling and religion served this purpose well throughout most of history, but over the last few centuries a new way of understanding and explaining the world has emerged. We call this science. Science, from the Latin 'scientia' , knowledge, has two very general and related meanings.

   First of all science refers to the way of discovering knowlege about the world using observation, speculation, repeated experimentation and the accumulation of empirical evidence. This mode of enquiry, also known as the scientific method, is a rigorous and disciplined way to unfold understandings of how the different layers of the world function. 

   Observations are made about the world we see; theories or hypotheses are suggested to explain the observations or to connect them to other observations; experiments are performed to provide evidence that either validates or invalidates the hypotheses; and then further experiments are attempted to replicate or further refine the conclusions. In this way, an objective body of knowledge emerges that can be universally agreed upon. Science books, science courses and scientific journals all document the current levels of scientific understanding and the term science is also used to indicate this sum total of knowlege accumulated through such investigations.

   Of course, 'universally agreed upon' encompasses a very narrow segment of the scientific world and is not necessarily the current state in many of the diverse fields of scientific enquiry. The scientific community spends a large amount of its time in interpretation, speculation and hypothesis as uncertainty is one of the fundamental features of the relative world. Also, because of extreme specialization, the incredible diversity of fields of enquiry and the explosion of information that has emerged in the last fifty years, it has become very difficult in science to step back and see the big picture, to locate the large scale themes integrating the diversity. Fortunately, interdisciplinary studies are emerging and scientists are communicating with others in related fields and beginning to develop more powerful integrative themes.

   The scientific perspective is fundamentally objective. That is, it is interested in the study of objects that can be detected, from large scale structures like stars and galaxies, to microcosmic possibilities such sub-atomic particles, to patterns of thought. It is not concerned with the study of the subject, the nature of the self who makes these observations which is the major interest in the yogic enquiry into the nature of reality

   The yogic enquiry into the nature of reality with its own language, metaphors, imagery and stories, includes studies of both objective and subjective realities. It describes the objective creation and also the subjective observer, confidently venturing into the subjective territory that science fears to tread with a penetrating objectivity worthy of the finest scientist. Now theologians have no problem speculating about the subjective realm, but most refuse to have any objectivity, falling back on 'you just have to believe' as their foundation.

   In our studies, we will integrate yogic terminology with that of modern science to create an embodied integral languaging relevant to both. We will begin with a look at the two fundamental manifestations of creation, energy and matter, corresponding tendencies, flow/change and stability, and the embodied expressions of these as a felt sense of weight (matter) and breath (energy, flow, chi).

  Mattter can be microscopic (elementary particles  such as protons, neurtrons, electrons etc) macroscopic (stars and galaxies,) or complex like the human body which contains approximately 50 trillion cells and (1followed by 27 0's) atoms. There are only (1followed by 21 0's ) stars in the known universe!

Limitations of Science:

From Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith, pg 14 - 18

Science has nothing to say about: values, purposes life meanings and qualities:

Scientism, scientific materialism

  Science requires time. Science begins with the origin of the known universe some 14.8 billion years ago at what has been called the Big Bang or the Great Flaring Forth. What seems to have emerged was raw energy, latent forms, and a set of rules or laws that govern the relationships between energy and forms, between stability and mobility.

World of forms;

  Both of these traditions have been extraordinarily successful, but there has also developed major confusion and misunderstandings in these worlds when the fundamental premise of their foundation has been forgotten. That is, they are emerging and evolving modes of enquiry based on present experience and not absolute, fixed positions or statements about reality. Scientific materialism and spiritual dogmatism are the two pathologies that the modern world has to confront and heal if we are to move forward in any deeply meaningful way into the future