I'm attending a conference on God and Physics, in honour of John Polkinghorne. I'll write a proper piece later, but for now, an observation - in the margins, as it were - stemming from attending a shorter paper this morning that tried to draw analogies between contemporary physics and Vedic spiritual ideas, via the prism of consciousness.

The link will be familiar to those who read New Age-type material - that at a very general level there appear to be parallels between, say, phenomena like quantum nonlocality and notions like collective consciousness. And this morning, I found myself asking: why do I feel embarrassed whilst listening to stuff like this? Does it say something about me, or is there something questionable about the links being drawn?

It may just be that the language of ancient Indian science is odd to me, and that learning about sat-cit-ananda in a temple, say - not a physics lab - would be straightforwardly interesting. Alternatively, it may be that I don't have the benefit of the esoteric experience that compels some people to seek to draw these links. Hence, I'm not feeling embarrassed so much as awkward, even annoyed, on account of feeling excluded. But, to be frank, I suspect not, and that rather there's something else going on.

I think the science is being appealed to in order to try and validate the spiritual insights, whilst paradoxically, at the same time, the science is patronised for only just beginning to grapple with the deep things that the spiritual have otherwise known for centuries.

Now, I should say that I don't need much convincing that the contemporary West is spiritually lite, and - more specifically - I have a growing sense that there is something going on in contemporary physics which is more than just an objective exploration of external reality. Perhaps not unlike Jung's reading of alchemy, and the exchanges he had with Wolfgang Pauli, the physical world can serve as an object on which to project essentially psychological searching - the imperative behind the search for a 'theory of everything' perhaps being appealing for not only metaphysical reasons, but because it mirrors the integrative goal of individuation too. Conversely, we are part of the natural world too, of course, and so our perception of it, as perceiving creatures, must have some bearing upon how we perceive and interpret it too.

But superficial, very general associations - such as between quantum nonlocality and collective consciousness - risk a confusion of languages, the scientific and spiritual. Without precise work on the associations and resonances between the two, if there are any, the result is naive, almost childish. Hence, I suspect, the embarrassment.