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A couple things reading your post brought to mind @Jason. A quote from someone saying that 90% of the science in journals is probably wrong or incomplete in some form and 90% of the science in textbooks is probably right. I'm sure those percentages are off to some degree, but the takeaway is the notion that not everything that gets labeled as science has the same degree of validity to it.

And something B. Alan Wallace says about the methodology of contemplativism. That in the untrained mind introspection is like looking through a telescope on the back of a camel in a sand storm and trying to study astronomy. His, and I assume other's, claim is that a trained and disciplined mind can in fact discover real truths about the inner world that the average mind can't.

I get this POV. I share a similar one. Science, being composed of people with certain biases, agendas, and assumptions. And oftentimes, the scientific community discounts certain possibilities and experiences while promoting others. And memebers of that community can also be quite antagonistic to certain ideas that fall outside of the mainstream, as well as attack certain religious communities. Many of the New Atheists, for example, are very harsh on Islam and Muslims and single them out. Part of this is Western chauvinism, but they carry that into their worldview and work. In addition, some take such extreme views as they discount the reality of conscious experience itself. Anything immaterial is generally discounted as well because they can't as of yet test for it, so their methodology is based purely within the realm of the physical. It's possible that the physical is all there is and nothing immaterial involved or underlying matter. But to even posit the possibility is a faux pas and tossed into the realm of 'woo woo.' On top of that, science is often directed by the market forces of capitalism, and money is allocated to areas that benefit a certain outlook or outcome, so areas that may offer a glimpse into alternatives aren't given the funding or administrative ok to pursue. And one can certainly find themselves straight-jacketed by any kind of view or way of thinking, scientific or otherwise, which is its own danger.

All of that said, science at least has ways of testing theories and expanding knowledge that no other field or discipline has. And one must acknowledge these discoveries while seeing how they impact our current perception of reality. One must not become a zealot of science and cling to the lastest theories as infallible dogmas, but one can also not ignore them and be willing to adjust their viewss of reality and truth. But science doesn't have a monopoly on our conscious experience and spiritual development, and contemplativism is itself its own science, exploring consciousness and conscious experience from the subjective POV, because ultimately, that's the only way we can delve into our inner universe and transform our unique selves.

As far as I can see....

When either attached to the laws of science or the laws of the Dharma,
dissatisfaction, uneasiness, disquiet, a separation between self & others, an underlying sense of one's own inadequacy, an inability to fully accept who you are, endless manipulations of all our sense data as a justification of our identity's storyline, or just a continued slumbering within the human condition, are all the unavoidable fruitions of our maintenance of that attachment.

I can relate to this. I’ve had a similar journey although I still have respect for science and its place in the world.

There’s just so much it hasn’t and cannot answer

This morning I came across a post I made on another forum, from three years ago, and I realised that something significant for me had changed. Over the last three years I have let go of my belief in scientific truth, in believing more in proven science than in my own experience. That has been a shift very much to do with religion, and with acknowledging my own experiences.

In religion you come across all kinds of thoughts that are not compatible with either scientific truth or your own experience. For example the gods of Hinduism, or the devas of Buddhism. These things don’t need to be taken literally, you can take them as otherworldly, or astral, or other dimensional. They are mythical truths, that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

If you think of the world as purely scientific, just what is proven, you don’t give yourself much room for manoeuvre. Just because you can’t repeat an experience, does that mean it is untrue? I remember one extraordinary experience I had on the edge of sleep, of an encounter with a shaman dressed in bright green and yellow and feathers and a golden mask. In the end he blew a powder on me and I fell asleep.

In the end, this experience and many others made me think, the world is much more than only the material, and I decided to let go of science. In the end, all of our beliefs, conditionings, look to me now like limitations, things to ultimately be let go of. For me this was a big one, next to games perhaps the single biggest influence in my life.