Science, Spirituality, and their relationship || Acharya Prashant (2016)
Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, how is the knowledge of the scriptures different from the knowledge of science?
Acharya Prashant (AP): No scripture ever offers you knowledge. There is a great difference between knowing Science, and Spirituality. Science is knowledge. Science is incremental. A certain fellow does something, and the next fellow takes it forward from there. It’s like a relay race.
Spirituality – everyone has to start afresh. It doesn’t matter, how much your father, your ancestors, your predecessors knew. You will still have to start from where you are. Einstein didn’t have to start from zero. Newton said, “He could see so far because he was standing on the shoulders of giants.” In Spirituality, you cannot stand on somebody else’s shoulders. You have to stand on your own. So, knowledge cannot help.
In Science, the more knowledge, the better.
In Spirituality, the more your freedom from knowledge, the better.
It has become a trend over the last few decades to conflate these two – science and spirituality. In fact, certain authors think that it is a mark of their scholarship if they use scientific terms in the spiritual domain. They would try to bring in quantum physics in Spirituality. There can be nothing more foolish than this. It only shows that you know no Spirituality and you are also revealing that you know no Science. If you know Science, then you would not conflate it with Spirituality. And had you been spiritual, why would you bring in Science?
