With all that science has brought it’s absolutely essential to see that it has not brought us freedom. That’s not its job. That’s not its role. Its role is to look at the world and say what’s there and why is it happening and how is it happening and so forth, not what role does it play in the destiny of mankind or a life. In a most negative sense we could see this in the atomic bomb, we can see it in new armaments, we can see it in jet planes, we can see it in all kinds of negative ways that bring terrible destructive power, not because of science and what science saw, but because of how its made use of and it’s other parts of us that make use of it.
Science has enormous impact on how we see ourselves. Unfortunately or lawfully this turns in an almost infinite number of directions. It can be, and has been in the line of some people’s lives, the most demeaning force that has ever come, that has ever happened in the line of their life. On the other it has been the most free and then everything in between. Science enlarges our view of the world immensely in all directions, outward, into the size of the cosmos and so on, but looking inward in so many ways into our cellular nature and molecular nature and so forth. So, it certainly has expanded our realization of how immense, how complex the world is and this has been, you could say this is a major accomplishment of science, that it has given us these increasingly wide and penetrating views not only of what is there but also the processes that are involved in that.
And one of the things that we were exploring yesterday that I think is so vitally important now is that with all that science has brought it’s absolutely essential to see that it has not brought us freedom. That’s not its job. That’s not its role. Its role is to look at the world and say what’s there and why is it happening and how is it happening and so forth, not what role does it play in the destiny of mankind or a life. Those are other orders of question that science has really, from the origin has said this is not our providence. Not that there is no such providence, this is again something that I think people lay at the door of science that doesn’t belong there. You would not ask a spiritually minded person to give a lecture on quantum mechanics so you can’t lay that at the door of the spiritual teacher that he doesn’t know anything about quantum mechanics. That’s not his job and it’s not the job of science in that sense to do other than look at, be curious about and then find out as much as he can about the way things work and what they are, what their nature is in so far as they can describe it.
The problems enter immensely as soon as you get outside of the specific clear arena of what science is focused on because scientist are also fathers in science and mothers and so forth. They have lives in their limbic brain of relationship and so forth and it is inevitable that all that science has come up with, has discovered, would impact these other arenas. In a most negative sense we could see this in the atomic bomb, we can see it in new armaments, we can see it in jet planes, we can see it in all kinds of negative ways that bring terrible destructive power, not because of science and what science saw, but because of how its made use of and it’s other parts of us that make use of it.