The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Reductionist Science and Religion / 159
science popularizers who appear to the public to be more progressive,
holistic, and even spiritual, these people are typically rejected by the vast
scientific enterprise that is founded on the principles of division, reduction,
and analysis it inherited wholesale from its parent, the herding culture.
9 Its enemy is the enemy of the herding culture, the feminine principle
that lives within all of us and manifests as a higher level of knowing
than the separatistic rationality on which reductionist science relies. To
the degree that science is disconnected from the compassionate, healing,
interconnecting wisdom of intuition and the feminine principle, it tends
to promote cruelty, destruction, slavery, and death.
Creating a science that authentically serves us rather than endangering,
distracting, and controlling us requires a fundamental shift in our
orientation away from the conventional reductive mentality that sees
physical matter as primary and consciousness as merely emerging from
it. When as a culture we stop seeing beings as things but as the conscious
subjects of their lives, we will naturally create a more empowering
science based on the primacy of consciousness and the interconnectedness
of living beings. This is beginning to be seen in the work and
writings of researchers and theorists like Rupert Sheldrake with his idea
of morphogenetic fields, as well as Robert Jahn, Elizabeth Targ, Amit
Goswami, Fred Alan Wolf, Vandana Shiva, Larry Dossey, Herbert
Benson, Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra, and others who are attempting
to reverse the reductionist mentality that pervades science. Some of
these are exploring the role of thoughts, intentions, feelings, and prayer
in healing, and some work to illuminate systemic interconnectivity and
the essential power of consciousness in determining human experience
of physical reality. 10 It’s not surprising that these researchers, like
Schweitzer, Einstein, and others, tend to question our culture’s view and
treatment of animals. Empowering approaches to science can also be
seen in people working at grassroots levels with the Gandhian idea of
appropriate technology: developing and using technologies that are
cooperative and sustainable and do not enslave communities financially
or politically to large-scale petroleum, agribusiness, chemical, or
other interests. For these holistic approaches to science to catch on and
become widely accepted, our culture must evolve beyond its current eat-