At the time of the the 2000 International
Conference on Science and Consciousness I was living in the same
city, Albuquerque, New Mexico, in which it took place. But “took
place” is somewhat misleading. While many of the speakers
addressed environmental concerns, their presentations were given inside the
Crowne Plaza Hotel, insulated and air-conditioned against the stark
high desert sun. This gave me the impression that there is a cabal
of highly-educated, extremely intelligent, dedicated New Age postulates
who make their living by flying from city to city, hotel to hotel,
giving stump speeches and classes, not stopping long enough to
notice which city or town they are in, much less the region’s
ecology. Were they conscious of this gap between presentation and
location? Peter Russell, in his keynote speech, “Consciousness:
Bridging Science and Spirit,” quipped, “Although scientists
are conscious, some scientists don’t believe consciousness
exists.” The author of The Brain Book, The Global
Brain Awakens, and several other books, Russell, a former student
of famed physicist, Stephen Hawking, didn’t follow the path
expected of Cambridge alumni. He traveled to India where, instead
of continuing his teacher’s work of theorizing the event horizons
of black holes, he tripped along the Void’s slippery rim.
In the class that followed, referring
to what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem
of consciousness,” Russell said, "My experience
is that this isnt the hard." The problem is , it’s the
impossible problem, at least within the present scientific paradigm.” Questioning
the objectivity of the standard scientific method is a theme that,
in different guises, united most of the conference’s presenters.
Science’s metaparadigm, as Russell calls it, is that “the
material world is the real world, and that when we understand the
laws behind space, time and matter, we’ll understand everything.” Except,
of course, for who is doing the understanding.
Charles Tart, a gregarious transpersonal
psychologist who holds his pants up with suspenders, said it this
way: “If you do real science, you do it with your prejudices
and beliefs.” There is a dilemma here, because, although it
addresses the fiction of an ethically neutral laboratory, it seems
to open the door to pseudo-science such as Creationism. If
one thinks beliefs can be detached from interpreting data, one
is evading how the human mind actually works. On the other hand,
bringing one’s prejudices into the laboratory leads to a subversion
of the objectivity that is science’s bedrock. Is the way through
this to educate scientists to be aware of how their minds are playing
as they gather and interpret their data? In other words, I speculated,
should classes in basic meditation techniques be included in doctoral
degree curricula?
These days Tart’s central
interest lies in collecting non-ordinary experiences scientists
have had. These scientifically inexplicable, mind-jolting moments
that many persons have experienced sometime during their life,
when they happen to those who believe in Scientism, the religion
of science, can not only be psychologically intimidating, but,
if publicly admitted, careers could be threatened. Tart hopes to
break the silence with a web site where scientists, anonymous or
not, can tell their stories. (http://issc-taste.org/index.shtml)
He points out a pattern of how at around age 15 many would-be scientists
begin to question the religion into which they’ve been indoctrinated.
They become agnostics, Agnostos, being, as it were, the god of
science. Then, at around age 35, the established scientist may
experience that inexplicable “spiritual” event that he
or she may deny had happened at all; even if, at that moment, he
or she thought, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, “After
seeing this, I must change my life.”
At this point, a French scientist
in the audience stood and, with passionate gesticulations, told
a story of having had such an experience, and how only his family
supported him in accepting the philosophical consequences of his
epiphany, while his university denied him tenure. “It takes
courage, he said. It takes courage.
Lunch. Sitting beneath a tree,
I thought about how just a few miles from this idyllic setting
there is a barrio in which live people who not only can’t
afford to attend a conference such as this one, but do not have
the luxury to contemplate many of the issues raised here. But are
these issues a luxury? Science can not only prolong life, it can
just as easily destroy it. Whether a corporation makes antibiotics
or biochemical weapons is a matter of choice, in most cases an
economic one.
Matthew Fox, a former Catholic
priest, and a performer in the spirit of his friend Robert Bly,
counseled that we must “shift from knowledge to wisdom,” and
that “awe is the beginning of wisdom.” This said during
the high tide of the Information Age! A missionary of the New Age,
Fox brought a young Rap singer with him. As with Rap, one has trouble
dodging the logic of his sermon, and the energy of his thoughts,
abstract as they may be. “The elders have failed us,” he
said, obliquely referring to the leaders of his church. “Is
wisdom,” he asked, “another word for consciousness?” This
aimed at the neuroscientists in the audience. Strangest or all,
was an insight more Buddhist than Christian, one that, not long
ago, would have gotten Fox—who has on occasion been silenced
by the Church—excommunicated, or worse: “Every rock and
every mountain and every blade of grass has an interior life.” He
spoke of how universities are teaching business instead of wisdom,
and that “We know the universe is expanding. The question
is, are we?”
Valerie Gremillion, psychologist
and neuroscientist, was one several presenters--Huston Smith being
another--who addressed the subject of;entheogens,the euphemism
that in scientific circles is being substituted for “psychedelics,” a
word tainted by the media, in the hope that a new nomenclature
will open a more socially acceptable avenue than the pioneers of
the 1960s explored. This subject, underground for decades because
of a government ban on the study of hallucinogens, is slowly becoming
a respectable field of inquiry again. As Gremillion said, “There
is an entire space of consciousness that we are not accessing.” She
then offered the interesting speculation that “most mental
illness is a discrepancy of attention,” and that psychedelics
can “change the aperture of our attention, so that
connections are more visible.” This transition in human consciousness “hinges
not on IQ, but on awareness.”
The conference spanned six days,
with several presenters working different rooms at the same time.
I have left out a few whom I did hear and who deserve recognition.
They include Larry Dossey, a physician who addresses the healing
power of prayer; Joan King, a neuroscientist and Catholic nun who
studies consciousness on a cellular level; John Hagelin, nuclear
physicist and Y 2000 candidate for President of the United States;
and Amit Goswami, a physicist who interprets “the hard problem” from
the viewpoint of quantum mechanics.
One of the most intriguing speculations
presented at this conference is that what we call consciousness
is not a product of the brain at all. Rather, consciousness is
the very nature of the universe, existing prior to the physical
world. Addressing a similar speculation, neurochemist Candice Pert,
who was not at this conference, has said, “This is about as
radical as my scientist’s mind will let me get.”