“Faith . . . must be enforced by reason. The two are not antagonistic as some think.”
~ Gandhi, The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, p. 41

The great appeal of the Vedanta (India’s collective spiritual wisdom), or one of them, is the way it avoids many of our “either-or” dilemmas. If the role of faith is to shine a light in the darkness, the role of reason is to verify that we are not being misled. With only one or the other, we can go wrong, we can certainly lack confidence, and at worst lapse into dogmatism. On a cultural level, too, what we’re seeing here is a unity of religion and science, something that modern civilization has sorely lacked.

That unity is now possible thanks to the extraordinary discoveries of science that began to unfold with the discovery of quantum reality, which put the spotlight back on consciousness, at the beginning of last century.  The harmony of “new” science and the age-old wisdom tradition has yet to be explored and appreciated as the “new story” of life and human meaning.

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About Daily Metta

Stephanie Van Hook, the Metta Center’s executive director, launched Daily Metta in 2015 as a way to share Gandhi’s spiritual wisdom and experiments with nonviolence.

Our 2016 Daily Metta continues with Gandhi on weekdays. On weekends, we share videos that complement Michael Nagler’s award-winning book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. To help readers engage with the book more deeply, the Metta Center offers a free PDF study guide.

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