The general algorithm of obtaining new scientific
knowledge can be described as follows:
Research, observations - hypothesis -
predictions - experiment - adjustment of hypothesis - another experiment.
Scientific method in studying any kind of phenomena - from physical to
biological to psychological to psycho-energetic - implies, among other things,
an ability to reproduce the results obtained in the experiment.
The task of finding the Truth in religion is in a close conjunction with the nature of religious research. The point is that religious Truth is impossible to understand by its description -
one can only perceive it by one's own personal experience.
In application to
religious research study the algorithm of scientific research may look as
follows: study of primary sources (various religious teachings), comprehension
and discerning their common inner essence, practice (under practice one should
understand efforts on self-transformation, which may be different for different
stages of spiritual development), apprehension of the results, search of methods
of further development, further practice
But while in a physical experiment
the object of research is some object or phenomenon of the material world which
is studied by means of some material instrument, in religious practice the
object of study is in non-material worlds, while as the scientific instrument
the experimentalist-practician uses the spirit, consciousness (self-awareness).
In the same way new discoveries become possible as scientific instruments get more sophisticated, one becomes able to cognize more profound religious truths as one's consciousness grows more purified and larger in size.
The ultimate purpose of religious practice should be cognition of the Creator.
The methods of spiritual self-perfection developed by our School have been tested for many years on a large number of people. Practice of these methods results in clearly perceptible and noticeable changes of the inner state of a person, and these results proved to be the same for all people who engaged in this practice during the past decades. It should be noted that even at the initial stages of such practice a person's outlook gradually, yet inevitably, changes towards more profound understanding of the structure of the Universe and realization of the interconnections that exist between everything in the world, while religious dogmas (distorted religious conceptions) get destroyed in a natural way. Similar processes take place in material science - antiquated conceptions get replaced with new, more profound ones (as it was the case, for example, with molecular-kinetic theory, Newton's laws and Einstein's relativity).
our website: www.swami-center.org.