Metaphysical Realities in Psychology and Management:
A Sacred Path to Intuitive Awareness*
By
M.B. Sharan, Ph.D.**
Here is the first book written on how metaphysics could influence management style. The author, a retired professor from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, has contributed several articles to Intuitive Connections Network, and they served as the basis for this groundbreaking book. We are honored to have contributed in some small way to his bringing his innovative ideas to a larger public.
We are reprinting here the foreword to the book.
Foreword
Mathemathics, the Queen of the Sciences, is primarily a mental activity, drawing
upon both rationality and intuition. One of the advantages of mathematics is the
freedom mathematicians enjoy to explore the implications of impossible ideas.
Mathematicians are free to begin with assumptions, or axioms, statements that
cannot be proven, yet which prove to be very provocative by way of insights to
which they lead.
What passes for science as the twentieth
century turns into the twenty first is based upon an axiom, an assumption, but
unlike mathematics, it is one that is rarely put up for examination. The
assumption is that reality is comprised entirely of matter, or of things and
events which are observable by sensory apparatus. The results of persuing the
implications of this assumption have been enormous, leading to major
technological advances. Yet none of this scientific progress has led to any
clues to such questions as "What is the purpose of a human life?" Instead, our
technologically advanced science has led to our humanity's facing an out of
control, clockwork universe, ticking, without meaning, toward its eventual,
prewritten destiny.
Science, as a form of human collaboration,
arose distinct from another form of human collaboration, religious devotion. In
the latter, all truths arose from the King/Priest. At the time of Copernicus,
that King/Priest was the Catholic Pope. Truth emanated from the lips of the
Pope, who had the sole authority to interpret the book of truth, the Bible.
Truth was something passed down, authoritatively, from traditional sources.
Science, on the other hand, was born of a democratic spirit, from the natural
tendency of humans to want to share and compare their experiences. As a human
enterprise, science proclaimed that truth was best discovered by direct
experience and the comparing of that experience by independent observers. It
took awhile, but gradually the ideal of sharing and comparing experiences was
reduced to comparing quantitative measurements of material objects. What was an
expediency to facilitate comparison became an unclaimed axiom of science: what
is real is what is made of matter.
Now let's supposed we took as a starting axiom,
"what is real is what makes a difference in a person's life." Let's use that as
a basis for sharing and comparing experiences. In other words, let's use that
axiom as a basis for beginning our scientific explorations. To do so has major
implications for what truths we may uncover. For example, it has been proven to
the satisfaction of most logical, materialistically oriented minds that a proof
of God's existence is not possible. Yet, if we use our novel axiom, we can say,
without doubt, that the idea of God is a reality for many people and makes a
tremendous difference in their lives.
Alongside the materialistic tradition of
science there exists another thread of the history of human collaboration. It
concerns the methods, observations, and interpretations in the area of
spirituality. For countless centuries there have been those individuals whose
research has been of a more inward, intuitive nature. Many have written of their
experiences. Others have studied these accounts and shown the commonalities and
agreements existing among these "subjective" explorations. There is an
empiricism of the mind, of inner experience.
Different axioms spur different modes of
exploration. To take an important example. Is the universe comprised of separate
things that impact upon one another in time and space? Or is the universe a
creature of a meaningful "here and now" eternity of unfolding awareness? It
depends upon how one looks, or, in other words, the tools of observation that
are employed. In a series of experiments, I compared what participants
experienced when sitting facing one another. I directed them to use their eyes
to look and examine each other. I also asked them to close their eyes, enter
into the experience of their hearts, and "feel" the other person. These two
modalities of observation resulted in two very different sets of data. In the
first, participants could describe the appearance of each other. In the second,
they were able to share some empathy for the subjective experience of the other.
When they used their eyes, they saw that they were separate. When they used
their imagination, they felt as if they were "one," and experienced empathy. I
found that during their silent, "imaginary" conversations, they experienced such
subjective events as images, feelings and memories, but which later corresponded
to experiences of the other participant. There was a certain "objective," or
consensus reality to their shared subjectivity (you can download reprints of
this two-part study at
http://henryreed.com/close2you1.pdf and
http://henryreed.com/close2you2.pdf ).
How is it that
mathematicians, working purely intuitively within the subjectivity of their own
minds can develop mathematical systems that later prove to be perfectly
analogous to patterns in material nature? How is it that Edgar Cayce, who was
relatively uneducated, could, from a deep intuitive trance, describe the
molecular activities in the human body that provided the link between mental
events and hormonal ones, processes that took decades of later medical research
to discover and confirm his insights? May we infer that the same "creatively
intelligent designs" form both the elements found in the mind and the elements
found in the material world? If so, then by using the powers of the imagination
to "perceive" realities that do not have an observable materialistic
counterpart, we might scientifically proceed to understand some mysteries that
traditional science has ignored. The current volume of extraordinary work proves
that it is so. A dawn of a new era in science is upon us, and here it takes
great inspiration from one of the oldest endeavors of human exploration known to
history, the creative work of Vedanta, the ancient spiritual science of
Henry Reed,
Ph.D.
Professor of
Transpersonal Studies,
Director,
Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies.