Photo by Noel A.Tanner

One of the biggest ongoing debates in the last two centuries is definitely the one between the conflicting views of faith and science.

For too long now it seems that these views are not only irreconcilable but mutually exclusive. In simplistic terms, faith is commonly associated with the belief in a divine power which is not grounded in the senses, experience or reason. Science, on the other hand, is associated with the objective inquiry into the nature of the universe through experimentation, critical assessment, logic and reason.

Mixed messages of faith:

I was brought up in an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic country with a very fine line of divide between church and state. As a young inquisitive mind growing up in that cultural background I had learned to despise all those authoritative arguments about faith, dogma, and the narrow worldview of catholic doctrine they used to teach us at school.

I remember arguing with the priest that use to teach us religion class (which was compulsory of course) about the irrationality and blindness of dogma and he’d always answer with the same old answer – “It’s a matter of faith”. I used to hate that answer. I thought it was such an excuse for an answer when you don’t have enough reasons to back your arguments.

This is what mostly creates the conflict between reason and faith. It’s the reluctance of some people to have faith understood and assessed with a more evaluative undertone. They say that’s impossible because reason and faith are incompatible. Faith is faith and that’s the end of it.

Faith has another side though – a much more positive one which I have come to understand under a different light.

A broader understanding of faith:

I have described the dark side of faith as that irrational and dogmatic standpoint sometimes verging on fundamentalism and intolerance at its extreme fringes.

The thing is that faith is very often associated with religious loyalty rather than spirituality. It’s about the faith in God, the teaching of the scriptures, deities or the sacred laws of some religion or other. This again can be dangerous and self-defeating because people having faith in this sense run the risk of attaching themselves to some idea which is not authentically their own but as portrayed by the religious institution they belong to.

But I think that there is another aspect of faith which needs to be understood: One which is more religion-neutral in the sense that it shares a common characteristic amongst different faiths.

Faith is when your heart and mind are set firm in some direction even though the feedback you get from your current circumstances point elsewhere.

This is what is called a leap of faith. It is the ability to leap beyond the walls of your current reality and keep your mind and heart focused on a different one even though it is incredibly hard to do considering that circumstances can be pretty adversary at times.

Ask and it will be given to you:

Another important thing about faith which is very often not considered is that people of faith have the implicit understanding that their consciousness, through their prayers, believing, asking or wanting is a determining factor of how things unfold in their lives.

That is to say that one’s beliefs and intentions affects the way the future unfolds in the physical world. Their asking initiates a process which is then answered to and taken care of by that divine force they have faith in – God, the universe, etc.

In the words of Luke the evangelist: “Ask and it will be given to you…”

Experiments in Faith and Intention:

If you ever heard about the Intention experiment , you would have already guessed where I am getting at.

The intention experiment is probably one of the largest and most interesting experiments happening at the moment. Thousands of people from around the globe are participating in this collective experiment in which the participants are asked to focus their intentions at the same time on a particular object or outcome such as the healing of an organism.

The experiment started with small objectives such as having a hundred meditators focusing their mind on a picture of a plant’s leaf in a laboratory thousands of miles away. Special measurements and photography then verified if there were any positive effects on it which in almost every case it resulted that it did.

Then the website started putting up cases every week of people having some sort of problems such as terminal illnesses and participants enrolled in the experiment are asked to put their focus on the person with the intention to heal him/her.

The project is founded and led by journalist and writer Lynn McTaggart, author of ‘The Field’, ‘Living with Intention’ and ‘The Intention experiment’.

McTaggart’s idea is based on her scientifically oriented inquiry about the power of intentions as she studied and interviewed master healers, Quantum physicists, Buddhist monks and Qi Gong masters around the globe. Her findings point at the astounding relation between consciousness and the universe and to the increasingly popular notion that consciousness affects matter. (The experiment became also part of the main plot in Dan Brown’s latest book ‘The lost symbol’)

Having faith in the laboratory:

One thing which would be very interesting to find out in such experiments is whether people with a strong faith are better ‘intenders’ than those that are non-believers. A controlled experiment such as in the ones carried out in the intention experiment can be set up and the data properly analyzed to check out for any significant results.

I have a feeling that such experiments would show that people with strong faith have a significantly higher success rate at intending an outcome than those that do not or the control group.

But this is not all there is to it. It would clearly show an important feature of faith which has been disregarded – the idea that faith is deeply tied to the phenomenon of consciousness and like consciousness it stands the chance of being understood in a richer and more holistic way as our view of science evolves.

The old view of science is dying:

Back to Science.   In the post-war era a strict view of science known as the ‘classical view of science’ emerged. This view, which is now making way for a broader and richer paradigm, can be summarized in the three following relevant points:

• The world of objects and natural phenomena are separate and independent from us, the observers.
• Only knowledge ultimately based on empirical observation is scientifically valid and the data extracted is objective and value-free.
• Any phenomena can be explained by reducing it to the lowest-level material processes such as chemical and physical processes – a view known as reductionism.

The great scientific leap forward:

Since the birth of Quantum Physics till present, new evidence has shown that all the three points above are wrong. Physicists studying phenomena down at the level of the smallest particles in the universe have realized that:

• Our mere observation influences the outcome of the experiment. Hence consciousness is intrinsically interdependent with the physical world.
• Knowledge and data are not completely objective and value-free since our subjectivity plays a part in it.
• There are other dimensions of reality apart from our 3-dimensional physical one and hence our understanding of phenomena cannot be reduced to only those dimensions.

New bridges are being built:

What was once a big rift between Science and faith will start to narrow down. As paradigms change and old views are abandoned, both sides are starting to move towards each other until the conflict will start to ease and the line of divide blurs out.

On the one hand, faith is standing a better chance of being understood as a natural rather than super-natural phenomenon and its relations to consciousness given wider attention.

On the other hand, the general scientific view has been changing in the past few decades from one in which reality is flattened to its underlying physical and chemical processes, to one in which the conscious effect of the observer on reality is embraced.

Time will tell.

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I always wondered about the deep connection between humans and music. The origin of music is unknown or at least we only have a very vague idea as to how far its stretches back in time, mainly through the findings of rudimental bone-made musical instruments found in early cave dwellings.

It would also be interesting to know at which stage of the human evolutionary process the appreciation of music emerged. Although we know that other creatures such as higher mammals can respond positively to sounds and music, it is a distinctive mark in humans to really have an aesthetic affinity to it. This is mainly because of our higher and more complex cognitive makeup.

The brain being an intricate pattern-matching organ can recognize subtle sequences and variations in sound waves which are then consolidated and matched to a broader pattern or rhythm, eventually giving rise to that subjective feeling of aesthetic beauty, joy, elation or whatever emotion matches the musical style or our present mood.

Music and Consciousness

It is because music imparts these subjective and qualitative feelings or emotions that it is automatically linked to Consciousness.  These qualitative experiences cannot be described objectively by the languages of Science but only recalled from a first-person point of view.

What Scientists can describe are only the physiological effects of it such as the detections of neuron activations during a brain scan or the release of endorphins (pleasure inducing chemicals) in the blood. Besides that the experience remains within the confines of the subjectivity black box in our heads.

Notwithstanding that it cannot be truly measured or described scientifically, our deep relationship with music is a universally shared perception which is known and celebrated across cultures since time immemorial.

The Music of the Spheres

The other side of the coin is that Music has an objective and universal existence.

The ancient mathematician Pythagoras believed that musical notes can be translated into mathematical equations. He and his followers believed in something call ‘the harmony of the spheres’, where the planets and stars moved according to mathematical equations which corresponded to musical notes in a grand symphony.

This point of view is another way of saying that the beauty of music is not only in the eye of the beholder but rather in the mathematical harmony inherent in itself and this harmony can resonate within our soul. The mathematical structure of music has a rhythm of its own (pun intended)

Music as a tool for Self-Development

Music has been used for different reasons throughout its history. Its main use was always for entertainment but other uses have been recognized as well such as spiritual practice, healing and therapy, meditation, political and commercial campaigning, celebration or protest, funding and world compassion, courtship and even learning.

Music can also be a very powerful tool for self-development and this aspect of music is rarely talked about in personal growth books or resources. Here are what I believe to be great uses for music along the path of inner-growth:

• Learning: When I was doing my thesis for the Masters programme, I used to listen to Bach a lot. Although I always enjoyed classical music, I never had an affinity with Bach before so I used to find it a bit curious why I used to unknowingly choose Bach for background music while I studied. The answer came a few years later when I was watching a video by famous hypnotist Paul McKenna about learning. He stated that listening to Baroque music such as Bach’s or Vivaldi’s while studying is extremely helpful since their music is based on 64 beats per minute. Bach’s music has a kind of  ‘mathematical and rhythmic fluency’ in it which makes part of the brain ‘follow it’  and ‘lock on to it’ subconsciously while at the same time keeping itself from wandering off and therefore more concentrated on the task at hand. I had the same feedback from people who have listened to Bach while studying. I now appreciate his music more than just for study accompaniment.

• Meditation: No doubt that just as there is music which tunes-in your mind for studying there is music which help you out in doing meditation. There are many background music CDs out there for Meditation or Yoga. Although I believe that some of them are very good, I don’t use any of them. What I use for my meditation is a CD that I have been keeping close to my heart and spirit for many years till present. It is a CD called ‘Zen Garden’ by Kokin Gumi. It’s divine and every time I hear it I swear I have an instant shift in consciousness. Listening to it, one has to agree with Pythagoras that some music is in divine harmony.

• Mood Enhancer: This is a no-brainer. We all know that music can lift up the spirit in those moments when we’re feeling a bit down or depressed. I must say, however that this doesn’t always happen. One must be cautious because there are times when for example someone is heartbroken because of a relationship ending and he or she ends up listening to some love song which talks about heartbreak and the like. This is a very common thing. It’s so common that the whole music industry thrives and survives on it. There’s nothing wrong with those type of songs per se. What happens is that in those moments when someone is suffering a heartbreak, it strengthens and amplifies the feeling. It becomes the soundtrack of the moment which the person identifies with himself and his/her suffering. It becomes our soundtrack which wrongly reminds us how victimized, unlucky or sorry about ourselves we are. It is best to find more uplifting type of music in those situations. Music that can inspire you, encourage you or motivate you in getting back on your feet again.

• Creativity: Music, being a performing art, has always been related to creativity. We always presuppose that music has been composed and created out of an act of inspiration and a sublime creative process.  I think this is a widely accepted notion. However I also think that music can also trigger off a creative process in the person listening to it. This has to do a lot with the left-right hemispheres of the brain. As you might know, the left side of the brain is more responsible for logic, linear thinking, linguistic processing and understanding things in detail. The right side of the brain is more responsible for holistic understanding or seeing the big picture, intuition and insight. Research has shown that exposure to background music promotes what is called interhemispheric activity which in simple words means there is more ‘talking’ between the two spheres. This greatly increases creativity, enhances the creative process and the other aspects related to it such as problem solving.

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