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Fritjof Capra, physicist and philosopher is also the author of several international bestsellers, especially The Tao of Physics which makes an assertion that physics and metaphysics (spirituality) are both inexorably leading to the same knowledge.

What does spirituality mean to you?

It is a very intense feeling of being alive --- being so alive in mind and body that the separation between the two is transcended; and in some extreme moments the separation between myself and the environment is transcended as well. Those are what Abraham Maslow calls peak experiences. But spirituality is more than that. It fundamentally is a way of life. Those experiences help develop a certain attitude towards nature or human existence, they teach me things that I can then integrate into my life, that inform and shape it.

For instance, when I was last in India twenty-five years ago, I also spent some time in Sri Lanka, which was my first experience of a Buddhist country. There, I had quite a few discussions with leading Buddhist scholars and realized how limited our Buddhist practice was in the West. In Zen especially, we tended to equate Buddhism with meditation whereas the Buddha presented an eight-fold path, eight disciplines starting with right seeing, right speaking and so on --- the last one only being about right contemplation i.e. meditation. So being spiritual transcends all aspects of one’s life. And one should behave in an ethical way not because there is a God set to punish me on the Last Judgment day, but because it would reflect significantly and negatively on my mind and spirit.

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