from religion to science and vice verse
by Caspar de Nada von Bigera, Ph.E.
Let me introduce myself first. In the late sixties I studied psychology at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, at that time behaviorism was still in vogue and the emerging humanistic and transpersonal psychology had not inspired my teachers and Ken Wilber came later. So after some yoga and eastern studies I found scientology as the only available spiritual psychology and in being in my early twenties went head over heel into this wild movement.
I studied and moved up the ranks and became a class IX auditor, the highest practitioner classification obtainable in the Sea Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have been a truth seeker and was already determined as a sixteen year old to find out all I could about the nöosphere, as Teilhard de Jardin called the spiritual world.
Scientology was a fascinating adventure and during those years I got to know many people and learnt a lot about their inner workings. It’s the equivalent to a clinical psychologist being in practice for over twenty years.
In 1970 when I was introduced to the subject by a psychology student scientology was presented to me as an off the mainstream scientific approach and it was only later that we found out it was a religion.
Meaning of the acronym
So jump forward to 2018 and we’re proposing XSCN which stands for a few things. It started as ex-scientology (scientology was often abbreviated as SCN), we had left the church already over 20 years ago, but then we also moved out of the constraints of Hubbardian Scientology to embrace, the wider Science of ConsciousNess, noetics, transpersonal psychology and integral psychology.
A few years ago I argued that scientology would be the word of choice for the science studying sciences, their methods and the character of scientists. [1]
This could become a new discipline and very much needed as well.
Regular or mainstream university science has become politicized and has progressively become subject to economics and limited to materialistic paradigms. The exceptions are some of the emeritus professors or those that do not depend on biased sources of funding.
Religion has become an upholding of fixed belief systems rather than ways to explore inner space, leading to spiritual development and in-sights. This mainly applies to the Abrahamic religions. If we consider the vedic religions there is plenty of space for personal inquiry into the nature and world of the spirit.
There is an emerging new science as Noel Huntley calls it [2] which does take consciousness into account. Science stems from Latin scientia, from scire ‘know’. and is usually defined as systematically organized bodies of knowledge on particular subjects. Modern science has been limiting itself to empirical knowledge, which can be sensed by the physical senses. Quantum physics has already called the classical concept of objectivity seriously in question. We therefore look at science as ways and means of obtaining knowledge, the consequence of that is that true religion which allows an individual to meditate and inquire into who she is and explore inner space becomes clearly another avenue of obtaining–subjective–knowledge. A complete science would embrace both.
We use the X as the symbol for transformative, experiential and also paradigm breaking. Thus we have arrived at XSCN.
There is one other aspect I want to mention. The old Aristotelian division of the sciences is no longer relevant. Biology for example needs chemical, physical, mental, psychological, parapsychological, energetic, spiritual and in fact multiple viewpoints to honestly research life and so it goes for all other branches of science.
Everything is related to everything else.
[1] https://xscn.mgtconcepts.com/definitions-2/. [2] Noel Huntley, 2013 The Emerging New Science, ISBN-13: 978-1481780247