THE MEETING OF SCIENCE AND SPIRIT: Guidelines for a New Age

Former nuclear officer White (Pole Shift, 1980), whose faith in the ultimate worth of our purely rational scientific tradition was sorely tried during the war in Vietnam, argues here for the incorporation of moral and spiritual values into scientific pursuits--in preparation for a big new step in human evolution. In 1964, while setting up a forward base for loading atomic depth bombs onto seaplanes off the coast of Vietnam, White became convinced that his mission--which violently contradicted his own sense of morality--was the indirect result of the amoral stance of the Western scientific tradition that produced the bombs. Referring to Einstein's statement that the atom bomb changed everything but the mind of man, White emphasizes the need to consider the moral context of scientific pursuits, and to make use of the scientific process in furthering humanity's spiritual evolution--by seriously investigating such phenomena as UFOs, ESP, spiritual enlightenment through meditation, etc. In an apparent effort to avoid being stereotyped as a spaced-out citizen of the New Age, White roundly condemns certain practices--crystals, pyramid power, varieties of channeling, and so on--while just as confidently affirming that angels exist in our atmosphere, UFOs make frequent visits, and we humans have the power to cause a shift, through negative thinking, in the Earth's magnetic poles. Such claims deafly beg for scientific proof, yet despite White's frequent diatribes on the need for scientific verification, practically no substantiation is offered here. Forced to take White's word that angels might get us if the UFOs don't, one longs for a double dose of that much-maligned scientific objectivity. Intellectually sloppy and ultimately unpersuasive, this has limited appeal.