S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 7 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 2 1 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos science is largely relegated to dealing with approximations; in doing so, it is always modifying its understanding and thus is in no position to declare what can be finally known with certainty: [W]hat is paraded as scientific fact is simply the current belief of some scientists. We are accustomed to regard science as Truth with a capital ‘T.’ What scientific knowledge is, in fact, is the best available approximation of truth in the judgment of the majority of scientists who work in the particular specialty involved. Truth is not something that we possess; it is a goal toward which we, hopefully, strive … the current opinion of the scientific establishment is only the latest and never the last word … The hegemony of modern Western science has become so dominant and commonplace that its implications are barely discerned today. American psychologist Amedeo Giorgi points out that, “[t]he perennial crisis of … [note: modern Western] psychology is due to the fact that it does not see that the problem lies in the meaning of science it adopted.” (Giorgi 1997, 19; see also Koch 1999; Koch and Leary 1985). If we are truly going to speak about the importance of culture and human diversity in a way that is still meaningful, other modes of knowing must be recognized as valid (see Bendeck Sotillos 2016; 2018). Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the Romanian historian of religion, provides a salutary caution that remains unheeded (1960, 8–9): Western culture will be in danger of a decline into a sterilizing provincialism if it despises or neglects the dialogue with other cultures … [T]he West is forced [note: one might almost say, condemned] to this encounter and confrontation with the cultural values of ‘the others’ ... One day the West will have to know and to understand the existential situations and the cultural universes of the non-Western peoples; moreover, the West will come to value them as integral with the history of the human spirit and will no longer regard them as immature episodes or as aberrations from an exemplary History of man – a History conceived, of course, only as that of Western man. A true postcolonial psychology or rather perennial psychology (see Bendeck Sotillos 2013a) would be grounded in an authentic metaphysical framework that reflects the diverse religious and spiritual traditions of humanity. This approach draws on the universal principles that disclose all levels of reality and buttress all modes of knowledge. In order to be efficacious, a true psychology or science of the soul requires that we assent to the rights of spiritual truth: “Psychology, we must remember, is the study of the soul, therefore the discipline closest to the religious life. An authentic psychology discards none of the insights gained from spiritual disciplines.” (Roszak 1972, 414). Through a more integral framework, our real identity in divinis can be realized: “The ultimate reality of metaphysics is a Supreme Identity in which the opposition of all contraries, even of being and not-being, is resolved” (Coomaraswamy 1978, 6) as “pure Being by its very nature comprises All-Possibility” (Schuon 1995a, 69). This traditional approach to the sacred, which is uncontaminated by modernism, includes a tripartite understanding of the human being consisting of Spirit, soul and body [1]. Accordingly, Burckhardt (1987, 173) remarks that, “man in his integral nature … is not only a physical datum but, at one and the same time, body, soul, and spirit” [2]. According to sacred science, the human microcosm mirrors the macrocosm: “Man is a little cosmos, and the cosmos is like a big man.” [3] In the same way “the cosmos at large proves to be ontologically trichotomous: that even as man himself is made up of ‘corpus,’ ‘anima,’ and ‘spiritus,’ so is the integral cosmos” (Smith 2019, iii). Without the inclusion of Spirit, soul and body it could not be a cross-cultural psychology as these ways of knowing are found throughout the world’s civilizations –“[p]ure metaphysics is hidden in every religion” (Schuon in Casey 1996, 75). Metaphysics as understood in this sense has nothing to do with modern Western philosophy: “The ‘philosophia perennis’ possesses branches and ramifications pertaining to cosmology, anthropology, art and other disciplines, but at its heart lies pure metaphysics, if this latter term is understood … as the science of Ultimate Reality, as a ‘scientia sacra’ not to be confused with the subject bearing the name metaphysics in postmedieval Western philosophy.” (Nasr 1993, 54). Sacred science, which is found at the heart of all sapiential traditions, provides an effective, comprehensive and valid mode of knowing that is not subject to the findings of modern Western psychology. Influential Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains that “‘scientia sacra’ is none other than that sacred knowledge which lies at the heart of every revelation and is the center of that circle which encompasses and defines tradition” (1989, 130). It was this outlook that prevailed prior to the emergence of modernity with its materialistic and reductionist worldview [4]. In fact, prior to the onset of the modern world, there were no secular civilizations to be found and no science divorced from its origin in divinis. Eliade (1996, xvii) challenges reductionist methodologies as follows:
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