“In these times it will be well for us to remember that the essential component of religion is mystery and mystical experience… The numinous sensation of shuddering fear and joy, the sympathetic understanding of all creation, the dark night of the soul, the supernatural sense of peace and illumination, the peculiar beneficent effects of rites, the whole range of experience, in fact, which makes up religious mysticism, is what we have to deal with when we speak of religion” (Joseph Needham, 1931).

One can argue that the western tradition, the Hebrew/Christian tradition, actually fostered a feudal or imperialistic domination of nature. By contrast scholars have argued that eastern philosophies (Buddhism, Taoism, etc) have revered the natural processes.

Joseph Needham wrote:

“for the Chinese the natural world was not something hostile or evil, which had to be perpetually subdued by will-power and brute force, but something much more like the greatest of all living organisms, the governing principles of which had to be understood so that life could be lived in harmony with it” (1976).

Joseph Needham argued that in their time-bound and culture-bound ways, particular churches were reflecting more eternal spiritual values, common to all the great religions:

“Religion, the distinctive sense of the holy, the application of the category of the numinous, attached as it has been in its most developed form to the highest ethical principles known to man, altogether transcends the particular manifestations of it familiar in our parochial and limited experience” (1961).

A counter-culture writer wrote: “the nature of most human problems is such that universally valid answers do not exist, because there is more than one aspect to each of them”.  Joseph Needham continued that line of thought by saying that “the only way forward is the existentialist realization that the forms of experience, which have a habit of contradicting each other flatly, are all basically inadequate ways of apprehending reality, and can only be synthesized within the individual life as lived”.

“Western civilization is still suffering from an unjustifiable cultural pride which vitiates all its contacts with the other peoples of the world; this may truly be called ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’… the ‘spirit of evil in things heavenly’ … I should go so far as to say that this fixed idea is a cardinal danger to world peace. For ‘he that despiseth Man, despiseth not Man but God’ ” [Joseph Needham, 1961].

When Einstein experienced a sense of timeless awareness when observing the planets, his response was: “At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only Being”.