From the Enlightened Zen Masters:
If you want to go inwards you have to leave the scientific attitude completely. If you want to move outwards, the scientific attitude is the only way. That’s why sometimes I praise it and sometimes I’m against it. It depends.
If you are going outwards, if your discovery is objective, if you want to know matter, then of course Zen is not going to help. That is not the Zen way. You will have to follow science. Then I’m all for science. But you have to decide where you are going, what you want to reach, what your goal is.
If your goal is inner peace, silence, love, bliss, self-knowledge, then the scientific approach is meaningless, irrelevant. If you are in the scientific attitude too much, focused, frozen, then it will be very difficult for you to move inwards because the very approach will become a barrier. Zen and science are two diametrically opposite directions. So one has to decide. Even if you want to be a scientist, you can be, but when you want to meditate you have to put away your scientific attitude.
So nothing is wrong in being a scientist. If you love it, be a scientist, but then become capable by and by of using that scientific attitude as an instrument. You use it when you are in the lab, but when you go into your meditation room, you put it outside. In the meditation room you go as a layman, not as a scientist. You go as an ordinary human being, not as a technician. Then there is no problem. But it is very difficult to put aside a certain attitude once you have invested your life in it.
