The Beshara Lecture

With the rise of materialism, the concept of ‘soul’ as an inner essence that survives bodily death has become increasingly unfashionable within […]

Dialectical ‘both-and’ thinking is key to resolving paradox and integrating ideas in ways that avoid reduction of one idea to the other. In this talk, the history of such thinking in the West and East will be explored, including the Chinese yin-yang model, Hegel’s dialectical reasoning, Jung’s exploration of opposites within alchemy and the psyche, Erikson’s dialectics of psychological development, dialectical behaviour therapy, and both-and thinking in quantum physics. A dialectical model of the relationship between science and spirituality will be discussed.

It is true that scientific research and spiritual search both begin from a sense of mystery, as was specifically remarked upon by Einstein. However, there are profound differences in their approaches, and spiritual mysteries, unlike the scientific ones, cannot be solved even in principles.