Preparing for the Miraculous

118 eleven talksthe peril of gross reduction of the integrality, the conditionof the intended divine transformation.Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often stressed theneed for a clear mind and ever expanding knowledge. SriAurobindo writes e.g. in The Life Divine: “In any total advanceor evolution of the Spirit, not only the intuition, insight,inner sense, the heart’s devotion, a deep and directlife-experience of the things of the Spirit have to be developed,but the intellect also must be enlightened and satisfied,our thinking and reflecting mind must be helped tounderstand, to form a reasoned and systematized idea ofthe goal, the method, the principle of this highest developmentand activity of our nature and the truth of all that liesbehind it.” 1Science is fundamentally a form of knowledge, it is themind searching for the Truth behind the workings of Nature.Its importance, combined with the wonders of technology,is evident in the world in which we live. Unfortunatelyits unprejudiced search for Truth was turned into a dogmatizedpositivist or materialistic system, for historical reasonswhich we will see later. The result has been that academicscience has divided the integrality of the human experienceinto two separate spheres: the sphere of the materially perceptibleand the sphere of the non-material, at best treatedagnostically but more often with supercilious disdain. Sciencemetaphysically dogmatized became Scientism.The hypothetical gap between science and religion orspirituality turned into a cause of serious tension, for instanceduring the late Renaissance when Galileo Galileiwas put on trial by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.“The Galileo Affair had a catastrophic effect on the Church,1 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 910.