Category: science

Stuck? 8 Scientific and Spiritual Practice

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Continued from Stuck? 7 The Four Fields of Knowledge.

Scientific and Spiritual Practice

We would hope to find common ground in the methods and principles which lie at the heart of scientific and spiritual practice.

What is the essence of the approach of science? Its main characteristics seem to be an aim for growth of a body of knowledge through exploration or experiment; an insistence on evidence and repeatability; a body of validated recipes that can be followed; some concept of peer review and consensus; and an openness to change as new ideas and evidence come along to change the current consensus paradigm[i]. And a certain humility – remember Gödel – no model is the last word.

What is the essence of spirituality? Its main characteristics are perhaps an aim for growth of an individual or group through inner exploration, experience and service; an insistence on inner evidence, reinforced by repeatability; a body of validated recipes (yoga) that can be followed; validation of the consensus of others by oneself; and an openness to change as new ideas and experience/ evidence indicate the need to further develop. And a spiritual humility – we can never assume that ‘that’s it, I/ we finally made it’.

Not a lot of difference really! And each is ‘scientific’ in its own way.

David Lorimer[ii] suggests that a similar spirit inspires the search for truth in both science and spirituality: “Exploration expressed in wonder and curiosity; Creativity and imagination – bringing forth new models and discoveries; Critical and analytical rigour – applied to methods and procedures; Practice – through experimental prediction and testing; Openness and awareness of metaphysical assumptions.”

Lorimer suggests that it is in the last of these that history shows scientists falling down, remaining too attached to their current theories and basic assumptions – and we could add that the same is true for religions. Both can only make the progress needed for integration through openness and the recognition of an expansive metaphysics such as the ontology of the Levels of Being and the epistemology of the Four Fields of Knowledge[iii].

2023 reflection: what I never considered in the original essay was the subversion of science to commercial ends, so that much current scientific practice is not actually objective as the theory says, it is science used for specific purposes. Paradoxically this sort of science is very much subjectively driven. Also, the materialistic framework of scientism is now pretty well discredited. At bottom, there appears to be no inconsistency between the practice of science and of spirituality, albeit that the focus is different. It seems to be easier to assert this in 2023 than it was twenty years ago.

[i] The word ‘paradigm’ was first coined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn. Its common meaning now is a body of knowledge that is generally accepted. In its original formulation I understand that Kuhn was more precise in including the recipe or approach as part of the paradigm.

[ii] David Lorimer’s reflections on science and spirituality are in his introduction to The Science of Spirit, ed David Lorimer.

[iii] Metaphysics: theoretical philosophy of being and knowing

Ontology: department of metaphysics concerned with the essence of things or being in the abstract

Epistemology: theory of the method or grounds of knowledge

So ontology is about the world as it is, and epistemology is about what we can know about the world.

Stuck? 5 World crisis and its roots

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Continued from Stuck? 4 The technological/ business/ capitalist world

World crisis and its roots

As a result of ‘the system’, as is now widely understood by scientists, the world is in crisis[i] – stressed environments, species loss, global warming, social deprivation and poverty, weapons of mass destruction etc. The result of our selfish materialistic system, and its irrational over-dependence on oil[ii], threatens to destroy our civilisation completely. Recent environmental catastrophes such as oil and chemical spills and widespread floods, and political catastrophes such as wars and terrorism, are but some of many recent warning signs.

The symptoms suggest a collective mental dissociation from the emotional and physical effects of our actions. Just as in my own life-threatening crisis, the battle between material desires and spiritual values rages. It seems a reasonable analogy[iii] to suggest that we need to collectively grow up, beyond the simple certainties of selfish materialism, to integrate our human mind, heart and body (the planet) and build a world based on spiritual values, to the benefit of the common good.

Just as I needed to integrate my own neglected feelings, we need to connect with our hearts. We know that it is things of the heart that really matter, whilst the glamours and illusions of today’s transient desires for consumer goods and money soon pall and fade[iv]. If we will but listen, our hearts are in anguish over the state of our planet and the threat to our children, and to our children’s children and future generations. But, as Al Gore has persuasively argued, we are collectively still in denial[v]!

Only with inspired creativity and wisdom can we solve the many divergent problems of the world crisis. The mind alone acts out of the power-based balancing of interests we see in world politics today, leading eventually to the relative neglect of concerns of body, heart and spirit that we also see. Mind, heart and spirit in concert can harness intuition to act with wisdom, doing what is best for all[vi].

Origins

Many commentators have suggested that it was around the time of the emergence of modern science in the 16th/ 17th centuries that the current split in our consciousness occurred[vii]. Simplistically, Descartes split our mind (res cogitans) off from the world (res extensa). The disembodied intellect (cogito ergo sum) controlled the world. Francis Bacon clarified the separation of science and religion, stating that the scientific method has no moral significance. What sounded at first a reasonable separation of concerns and striving for objectivity became a flight from qualities and values. By the 18th century Enlightenment, science “seemed to have dispensed with the need for God as a necessary factor in its explanation of the universe”[viii].

The resulting paradigm of scientific materialism has proved to be inadequate to describe the world we live in. With its fellow, capitalism, it has in some parts of the world created wealth and technology undreamed of. On the other hand, it has destroyed and exploited communities on a grand scale and is instrumental in the world crisis. Humanity would seem to have a choice – to transcend this simplistic paradigm, or to create an environment that is increasingly unsympathetic to the existence of human beings, perhaps to perish.

Our collective human psyche needs to be healed from the ‘Descartian’ split and re-inspired.

2023 perspective: It is difficult to comprehend that things have actually got worse over the last 20 years, despite all the many clarion calls across the years. The modern ‘permacrisis’ now threatens humanity’s very future. We now live in the crisis years when change becomes inevitable.

Featured image is NASA chart showing global CO2 levels since 800,000 years ago.

[i] The world crisis is documented in many places, notably in the annual State of the World reports by Lester R. Brown for the Worldwatch Institute.

[ii] For an inspiring work on the problems of the oil economy and what we need to do, see The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann.

[iii] ‘As above, so below.’ Analogy and correspondence are tools of the traditional wisdom.

[iv] For discussion of glamours and illusions see GLAMOUR, A World Problem, Alice Bailey

[v] A good analysis of the state of denial of our dysfunctional civilisation is given in Earth in the Balance, Al Gore. The failure of the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg to produce coherent action plans illustrates the continuation of this denial.

[vi] In A Guide for the Perplexed, E.F.Schumacher distinguishes between ‘science for understanding’, which he equates to wisdom, as primarily directed towards the True, the Good and the Beautiful, with the modern ‘science for manipulation’ primarily directed towards material power.

[vii] The evolution of Western ideas is brilliantly captured in The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas. There is also a concise summary in Earth in the Balance, Al Gore.

[viii] Quoted from The Enlightenment, Norman Hampson.

Stuck? 4 The technological/ business/ capitalist world

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Continued from Stuck? 3 Personal crisis and growth

The technological/ business/ capitalist world

After many years in the business world, first as engineer, later as manager, I became aware that both these disciplines are heavily dominated by that simple materialistic paradigm of my schooldays. Science and engineering are the drivers; science discovers technology, engineering puts it to work, management makes it happen. Money making is the object. And measurement of quantity is the ‘scientific’ management tool par excellence. Highly paid managers ‘persuade’ less highly paid managers to do things by setting them quantitative objectives which they have to achieve to earn respect, bonuses, salary increases and promotion.

Unfortunately, awareness of the uncertainty principle seems low – although it appears to be applicable. The act of measuring changes what is being measured. Thus I observed many a meaningless numerical target ‘achieved’ to no good purpose.

I gradually became more concerned about the quality of what was being done, and delved into the ‘quality’ movement. I discovered that, under the influence of quality gurus such as Philip Crosby[i], qualities were essentially reduced to measurable objective things in order that they could be ‘managed’. Qualitative things such as ethics, values, meanings and aesthetics were rarely stressed in business, except when it came to marketing the company.

We can observe that such qualitative factors are often not taken into consideration by many companies. Hence companies do bad things – ENRON and Worldcom being but recent examples of a very long list. Individuals are faced with the choice of achieving the approval of their bosses, and money and career, or following their own personal values where there is a conflict[ii]. Since the action is often ‘at a distance’ from the real human effects, such as the persecuted community in Nigeria or Indonesia, it is not surprising that the senior managers mostly get their way, to keep happy the shareholders of the even more ‘at a distance’ limited liability company.

Governments also increasingly treat government as management, with a similar quantitative emphasis. Not surprisingly, the current UK New Labour government is running into problems with its long list of numerical targets, and seems to have difficulty in articulating its values.

So we have a ‘system’ of science, technology, business and government (and economics and law etc.) that is dominated by this rather simplistic pseudo-scientific way of looking at the world, quantity dominating over quality, with self-interest and money predominant.

2023 perspective: no change here, then. The list of corporate scandals grows ever longer. Government has become even more about management. Increasing inequality demonstrates the lack of human values in decision making across the piece.

Featured image of Bell Curve by User:HiTe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

[i] Philip Crosby’s ‘system’ of quality is described in Quality is Free, Philip Crosby. More comprehensive approaches to quality, such as the model of the European Foundation for Quality Management, now address more qualitative factors, but generally strive to reduce the result to numbers in the end.

[ii] Why even good companies do bad things is the subject of When Good Companies Do Bad Things, Peter Schwartz & Blair Gibb

Stuck? 2 Early doubts

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Continued from Stuck? 1 Education of a Materialist.

Early doubts

I always had intimations that there might be something more to life than materialism, choosing the label ‘agnostic’ if pressed on my beliefs [atheism seemed to me to be irrational bravado].

Mathematics had given me an insight of enormous value in my subsequent deliberations. Gödel’s theorem[i] shows that any mathematical system is in a sense incomplete – there are things outside of the system that cannot be known within it. Since much science is essentially about the construction of mathematical models of reality this seems enormously relevant to our subject. There can be no complete model of the universe. Period.

Physics also suggested that the materialistic viewpoint had its limitations. Paradoxes of relativity indicated that different people apparently aged at different rates. Quantum theory seemed even more challenging. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggested that science could not be as precise as it had seemed. You couldn’t even know, at the same time, how fast a particle was moving and where it was. And something was a wave or a particle depending on what you were looking for!

Quantum phenomena also included non-locality, when physically remote parts of the universe appeared to be causally and instantly connected[ii]. So-called paranormal phenomena came to seem quite plausible, and indeed are well documented, despite being apparently resistant to proof by controlled experiments.

Astronomy and its bedfellow cosmology offered exciting materialistic visions of our context in space and time. ‘Big bang’ theorists argued against, and prevailed over, ‘steady state’ theorists. And yet what did it all mean – and what came before the bang?

In the background I was becoming aware of the exciting psychology of Freud and Jung, then humanistic psychology and Maslow, and later Assagioli’s psychosynthesis. People grew to self actualisation or individuation. I had special experiences that later found the label ‘peak experiences’. I was convinced that these were intimations of my own potential for something more[iii].

I was also drawn towards the Eastern religions, particularly through the evocative novels of Hermann Hesse[iv] and the philosophical writings of Alan Watts[v]. There seemed to be sense here, notably in Buddhism and Taoism. But Christianity became more and more of a puzzle. The great European Gothic cathedrals were wonderfully evocative and inspiring buildings, surely pointing to something more than material concerns. The teachings of Christ largely made sense. And yet I became increasingly aware of the great crimes done over the centuries in the name of the church and Christ, such as the persecution of Cathars, the various Inquisitions and Crusades, even the apparent tacit support of the Nazi regime in the Second World War. I realised that the church, and the religion, were not the spiritual essence.

And there were great heroes, such as M.K.Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who achieved great things for humanity, apparently driven by the fire of an unselfish spirit.

Twenty years later, there is much more evidence of the validity of a ‘spiritual’ world viewpoint, from many great researchers, including the Integral philosophy pioneered by Ken Wilber and a whole raft of inspirational spiritual and psychological teachers. Yet, the materialistic emphasis of the everyday world continues as ever, driven by the interests of those in power, across the world, reinforced by the internet and social media that encourage us to skate across the surface of things, rather than penetrate below and inwards. The contradiction between the teachings of the great spiritual leaders – Christ, Buddha, Taoism, Hindu, etc. – and the institutions established in their name, is ever apparent.

To be continued in Stuck? 3 Personal crisis and growth.

Featured image of stars by Nova Dawn Astrophotography,
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Notes

[i] Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel’s theorem is discussed in The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose. Of course, chaos theory has more recently demonstrated that non-linear systems can exhibit inherently unpredictable emergent properties, but that’s another story…

[ii] A modern perspective on Quantum Theory is in Schrödinger’s Kittens, John Gribbin

[iii] The Outsider, Colin Wilson was a strong early influence.

[iv] Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse is a particularly sublime work.

[v] See e.g. The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts

Stuck? 1 Education of a Materialist

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Twenty years ago, early in my retirement, I wrote an essay on ‘Science and Spirituality: Complementary or Contradictory?’ as a submission for a Resurgence Magazine Essay Competition. It expressed my understanding of the dominant thinking of the time, and its limitations, through the lens of science and spirituality. It didn’t win the prize and the essay was just filed away on the computer.

Recently, I came across it, and thought that it would be interesting to reflect on my views as expressed all those years ago. Has anything changed? Am I any wiser than I was then? Are we collectively any wiser than we were then? Did anything change, or am I/we just stuck in my/our thinking? To attempt to answer these questions, I am serialising that essay over a number of blog posts, with any commentary that seems appropriate, in italics. You are welcome to join me on the journey.

Preamble

Science and spirituality are part of our collective experience. That they could be contradictory now seems strange to me, and yet once they seemed so. This series of posts draws parallels between my own personal experience of growth and the corresponding growth of humanity; reconciliation of a complementary science and spirituality is a fundamental part of this process.

Education of a materialist

My school years centred around the 1950s in Lincoln, England. Science was king. I well remember the reverence accorded to white-coated boffins on the television (when we eventually got one in 1953). What they said was treated as gospel. The pressure from teachers was for the sciences. This was the future, what the country needed. Humanities were second best, for those with no aptitude for science.

When we were kids, religion was singing in morning assembly, and being sent to the Methodist chapel on Sundays. The minister told bible stories and warned us of the dangers of alcohol, while parents kept away and did the gardening. Yet we loved the occasional lay preacher who came with song and speeches that stirred our soul with their passion. Except we had no concept of soul.

Spirituality was something we secretly found out about through reading library books. It seemed to be all to do with séances, ouija ouija boards and magic. It was not talked about in polite society, and definitely not recognised as valid by science.

So I emerged from the education system with an essentially materialistic scientific viewpoint, deeply sceptical of religion, and uncomprehending of spirituality. After studying mathematics, I took up what was then called computer science, and soon became information systems engineering. I joined the everyday world of industry, married and eventually we started a family.

That was the preamble, still valid today. To be continued in Stuck? 2 Early doubts.

Featured image of Lego city by Lamiot,
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Science and Spiritual Practice

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On reading the book with the above title by Rupert Sheldrake, I was surprised to discover that Rupert and I had a number of things in common. Rupert was born and grew up in Newark-on-Trent in a Methodist family. As he became fascinated by science, he became aware that most of his science teachers were atheists. Science and atheism went together. Similarly, I grew up in Lincoln, a mere 30 miles away and several years later, and was initially exposed to Methodism until the unrelenting materialism of the science at school led me into a deep scepticism about religion.

Rupert always felt that purely objective science was inimical to the study of biology; it seemed to be based on killing the things it was investigating. Eventually, through the inspiration of Goethe, he came to be an independent scientist with his own theories of what was called morphic resonance. After the then-fashionable experimenting with meditation and eastern religions, Rupert eventually returned to Christianity, which he has practised ever since, alongside an increasingly recognised scientific career.

Our paths crossed briefly in the 1990s, when Rupert came up to Knutsford and stayed at our house, to deliver a fascinating Knutsford Lecture on the subject of ‘Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home’. As a person, he was delightful to be with, unpretentious and yet seemed very wise.

Anyway, on to the book that is the subject of this review. Rupert refers to research that shows that religious and spiritual practices confer benefits in terms of physical and mental health. He has chosen 7 specific practices to concentrate on, that are common to the major religions, and each of which he has personally experienced. As he says, spirituality is about practice, not about belief. For each, he suggests ways of gaining direct experience of these practices.

The seven practices covered are: meditation; the flow of gratitude; reconnecting with the more-than-human world; relating to plants; involvement in rituals such as choral evensong; music, singing and chanting; pilgrimages and holy places. We are encouraged to get involved in each of these as part of our journey. And Rupert is suggestive, not prescriptive – a somewhat homespun approach to spiritual practice, but maybe that’s what we need. As one who has been involved in most of these as part of my own journey, I can say that it all makes sense – practical spirituality.

The concluding chapter suggests that each of these practices is a way of connecting – to our minds, to others, to the more-than-human world, to different life forms, to our social past, to the flow of life, to holy places. This is by no means an exhaustive list of practices, but engaging in them enriches our spiritual life. It also has measurable benefits, which will please the secular/ scientific reader, but come as no surprise to the more spiritually inclined. Rupert is doing great service in potentially spreading spiritual practices to a wider part of the population, without them feeling they are becoming part of ‘woo woo’ spirituality.

Featured image is of Boston Stump, a holy place in Boston, Lincolnshire – not far from Newark and Lincoln.

The Lovell Telescope

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Just becoming a teenager, I remember the fuss in the papers about some professor who was wasting taxpayers’ money on a new-fangled radio telescope in Cheshire. It was late and well over budget. Then in October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. It became apparent that the near-complete telescope at Jodrell Bank was the only instrument in the world capable of locating and tracking Sputnik and its carrier rocket. Overnight the fortunes of the telescope changed, and within weeks it was fully operational.

Bernard Lovell, whose baby it was, went from zero to hero almost overnight. He had successfully created the largest radio telescope on earth at 250m diameter, fully steerable so could be pointed in any upward direction.

You can investigate the story and exploits of this wonderful piece of technology at the Jodrell Bank Visitor Centre in Cheshire. You’ll find out, for example, that the technology emerged from wartime research into radar, and Lovell scrounged parts from the armed forces for his early experiments.

It’s also quite beautiful, and awe-inspiring when the wheels are set in motion and the disc slowly rotates in two dimensions.

The telescope is still operational today and an integral part of world radio telescope networks, still the third largest. In 2019 Jodrell Bank was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

One story from the exhibition sticks in my mind. Lovell visited fellow scientists in the USSR to discuss the technology. During the visit he was asked to set up a radio telescope in Russia, which would have meant defecting. After Lovell refused, he believed members of the KGB tried to wipe his memories of the visit using some sort of radiation, he was very sick for a brief period on his return. Le plus ça change….

Autopoesis

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An excellent article by Alfredo Erlwein-Vicuna in the recent edition of Resurgence magazine champions the concept of autopoesis – which is perhaps hampered by its rather obscure name. 

The basic idea is that cognition is the basic process of life, which is a process of a self creation. There is no separation between organism and environment; our perception of these sees different aspects of the same process. The whole is self regulating. Cf Gaia theory. 

According to Wikipedia “the term originates from the Greek αὐτo (self), and ποίησι (creation, production), referring to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts”.

Fritjof Capra described this as “the first scientific theory that unifies mind, matter and life.”

Originator of the theory, Humberto Maturana states that reality is different for every living being because it is determined according to the sensory processes of each organism. There is no absolute truth. 

Erlwein-Vicuna suggests that democracy is a way of people living in mutual acceptance, which is perhaps a way of organising human affairs that is consistent with autopoesis. 

These ideas point the way beyond the current scientific materialism and the unsustainable politics of power and domination, towards a science that begins to understand life itself and a politics of cooperation and sustainability. 

Science, Philosophy, and Schizoid Man

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Here, the Crysalis encapsulates today’s problem. When natural philosophy was effectively superseded by objective science, we set off on a track that has inexorably led to today’s loss of wisdom. It won’t be easy to get back, but without wisdom how can humanity hope to survive long term?

( featured image from Blake’s Ancient of Days, by Frank Vincentz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Chrysalis

Before there was something called “Science” (with a capital “S”, and which is only of relatively recent coinage) it was called “natural philosophy”. That name itself is significant because it indicates that science and philosophy were not considered separate specialist activities and departments, but a unity — the unity of the quest for knowledge with the pursuit of wisdom.

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What can we know?

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What can we know about life? Start with what we might all agree on.

Look inside. I am a conscious subject.

Look outside. There appears to be an objective material world in which I experience. I have a body that operates in this external world.

There also appear to be in this world other conscious subjects, including those who conditioned me from birth, and including animals and other creatures. I recognise their interiority.

Much of that interiority is shared across humans (at least) – my surrounding culture.

Summary. Basic dualities.

Basic dualities
  • Interior/exterior or subject/object or conscious/material.
  • Individual/collective or me/society + culture.

Quadrants

We can express this as four quadrants; none is reducible to the others.

Wilber quadrants

These are the Four Quadrants of Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology, and Ken and others have done a great job of mapping all human knowledge onto these four quadrants. See for example his Integral Psychology or his magnum opus Sex, Ecology and Spirituality.

For example,

  • modern science belongs on the right, as it is concerned with objectivity and, axiomatically, excludes the subject.
  • psychology and spirituality belong on the left, although scientific psychology and institutional religion attempt to reduce this to the right, or control it from the right.
  • culture belongs in the bottom left, and social and government systems in the bottom right.
Huber quadrants

These are also the four quadrants of the modern astrological birth chart. Astrology and astrological psychology have long encompassed all aspects of our being in the world. See for example Bruno & Louise Huber’s The Astrological Houses or Life Clock.

Limitations

Remember that the quadrants are an analytical breakdown, and can only represent suggestive truth. In reality we know that all is interconnected; models such as this may help, but always have their limitations.

What this does imply is that one-dimensional approaches to life cannot work. Materialism is a dead end; it cannot deal with interiors and ends up being inhuman. Control of people’s innermost thoughts through religious or political systems is another dead end; it cannot effectively deal with exteriors through science. Humanity has tried all of these through history.

We just have to embrace the complexity, and ultimately the mystery, of life.

Featured image licensed via Shutterstock.

Sapiens

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Daughter left a copy of Juval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) lying around. I finally got around to reading it. What a great history of humankind: from the early variants that led to Homo Sapiens, to the great flooding; from the nomadic life to agriculture, cities, pyramids and early civilisations; to the dominance of religions and empires; to banks and money, the renaissance; and the development of science and capitalism; the industrial revolution and its empires, and the modern world of ‘permanent revolution’.

It’s a rollicking, engaging and informative tale that runs apace. Harari tells a good story and clearly knows a lot about the subject.

Unfortunately his description is one of surfaces, rather than of the spiritual depths of humanity – in a word, materialistic. Try this quote from page 263:

“…a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences… our liberal… systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature… which gives meaning to the world… the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief… Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there.”

This is of course nonsense. Science explicity deals with what can be ‘objectively’ measured, which explicitly avoids any question of inner experience and the soul. By definition it cannot understand ‘the sacred inner nature’ of every individual.

This does somewhat question the validity of Harari’s later speculations about the relationship of machines to future intelligence and possible supplanting of homo sapiens.

That aside, this book is a great read, and his speculations are stimulating!

As he indicates at the end, humans have become almost like gods in their powers, and yet we are wreaking havoc on the earth. He ends with a salutary note:

“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

Could that be because we have lost touch with that sacred inner nature, and hence lack wisdom?

The Matter With Things

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I have spent many happy hours reading Iain McGilchrist’s magnum opus The Matter With Things. This is probably the largest and most expensive book (in two volumes) that I have ever read or bought, at 1578 pages, including appendices and an extensive bibliography, and a cost in the region £75-£90 (hardback), although there is apparently a cheaper Kindle edition. Why did I do this? Because I was inspired by his previous book The Master and His Emissary, which seemed to capture something very important about the predicament we find ourselves in today. See my review of that book here.

Also, I was inspired by hearing the man himself speaking in some of the videos produced by the Scientific & Medical Network. You can see some of these yourself on the website Channel McGilchrist. This man inspires by the depth of his erudition and the lengths to which he has gone to make his case. The Matter With Things took ten years of his life and provides a comprehensive justification and amplification of the theory in that earlier book. It speaks with equal erudition on neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, physics…

This is not really a book for the general reader; it does require interested effort and perseverance to complete, but I found the effort well repaid. When Iain presented his first draft to his publisher, the reaction was that it needed major editing and perhaps removal of references. He refused and chose to publish it himself. All the research and references were of importance.

I have no intention of trying any sort of summary. Perhaps the important point remains that first presented in The Master and his Emissary. We have these two modes of knowing about things: essentially rational and intuitive, which correspond strongly with left brain and right brain respectively. The proper mode of working of the human being involves both modes: initiation with intuition, working it through with rationality, and validating again with intuition.

Today’s problem is that the rational left brain has in many people significantly lost touch with the intuitive right, which is what grounds us in reality. The left tries to go its own way and ignore the right (the Emissary usurps the Master). We see the results all around in massive narcissism, and lost participation in the natural world, to the degree that we are apparently rather rapidly degrading it. The abstraction of the map has become more important than the reality of the territory.

In marshalling the evidence the book ranges widely over many fields. The first part considers the means to truth – attention, perception, judgement, intelligence (emotional social and cognitive) and creativity. The second part considers the paths to truth related to the brain hemispheres – science, reason and intuition. The third and final part considers the nature of reality, including the significance of opposites, the one and the many – parts and wholes, time, space, matter and consciousness, value, purpose of life and the nature of the cosmos, and the sense of the sacred. Wow.

Having seen various videos of the man in conversation, I found the experience of reading these volumes to be like having an ongoing conversation with an erudite and wise man – an enjoyable and educational experience.

McGilchrist sees this culmination of his life’s work to be the presentation and ‘proving’ of his theories, in an academic sense – there are just so many references, all beautifully laid out near the relevant text. Who can say that this is not a vital endeavour for humanity? These ideas are important!

Trauma and the body

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In the early 1980s I read the then-popular book Bodymind by Ken Dychtwald, on how the psychological/emotional effect of events in our lives are reflected in the body, and increasing body awareness can help in addressing the residue of these. It all made sense.

Science, and particularly neuroscience, has move a long way since those days, so it was interesting to come back to this scene with Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score – the title says it all. The subtitle gives the particular focus of the book: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma.

Over the years I’ve been involved in various ways with counselling and had an interest in the talking therapies, but it has been evident that there are problems that these simply cannot reach, trauma being a major one of these. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has specialised in helping people with trauma over a long career, and it is fascinating to see his perspective on it, and how the professional view has evolved over that time.

I do recall from my own experiences growing up, that various uncles who had served in World War II never talked about their experiences – whether in Burma, or as a prisoner of war in Germany, or in active combat. It was in the box of their past, and they just did not want to open up that box. I suspect that each had his own trauma that was just too difficult to resolve in any conscious way.

It was the traumas of war that were first recognised in USA in 1980, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. PTSD was then first described as a condition in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association. Van der Kolk gives insight into the fight there has been since then to introduce into the DSM more general traumas that come out of lived experience due to domestic/child abuse, physical circumstances such as poverty, neglect, working conditions, hunger, racism, oppression by unfair policing and so on. This has proved very difficult. Might one suggest that those in power might not wish it to be recognised that the conditions they were imposing on members of society are actually causing traumatic injury to those in their ‘care’.

Even so, there has been great progress in the understanding and treatment of trauma, and the book outlines many approaches that have proved helpful, and the underpinning advances in neuroscience. It is impossible to summarise the wise words and stories emerging in these pages – engaging psyche, emotions and the body with techniques, therapies bodywork etc. Of course, drugs may help, but they are not the ultimate answer.

Van der Kolk is a great storyteller, so the material is fully engaging. We can all learn a lot, even in dealing with the minor ‘traumas’ of everyday life. Even more, we can see how the generation of trauma is built in to some of our governmental and social systems. He ends the book with this statement:

Trauma is now our most urgent public health issue, and we have the knowledge necessary to respond effectively. The choice is ours to act on what we know.

Well worth reading.

Butterfly emerging

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Thanks to The Crysalis for alerting me to the story of the butterfly, a wonderful metaphor for the change in consciousness that we are in the midst of, or the New Renaissance we are involved in establishing.

You can find the story of the butterfly on the website of Evolution Biologist Elizabet Sahtouris here.

Essentially, it goes as follows>

“A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day… continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis… a very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. This confused biologists for a long time. How could a different genome plan exist within the caterpillar to form a different creature? They knew that metamorphosis occurs in a number of insect species, but it was not known until quite recently that nature did a lot of mixing and matching of very different genome/protein configurations in early evolutionary times. Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call ‘imaginal cells’, hidden away inside the caterpillar’ all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly!” 

Elizabet Sahtouris

This gives us a wonderful metaphor for the changing consciousness of humanity and the evolution of a New Renaissance. Our Western world culture that has developed and spread around the globe since the times of the Italian Renaissance has clearly reached its limits, as climate breakdown and energy limits take hold. The bloated old system has too many people on the planet trying to live in a way that is slowly destroying nature, until the inevitable comeback.

All over the world you find more and more ‘imaginal cells’ of people who dream of a better world and offer solutions that are necessary parts of a transition to something better. Of course, they are resisted by ‘the system’, and at first their efforts seem in vain. Yet there is an inevitability of progress in the long run. The butterfly cannot be prevented from emerging; it is in the nature of things.

As Sahtouris says,

“… the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many ‘imaginal cell’ humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.”

The New Renaissance will come. Our task is to support and join forces with other imaginal cells to build the better future!

Featured image of the Asian Gerosis Bhagava butterfly by Pkgmohan, via Wikimedia Commons

Fundamentalism

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My post Modes of knowing highlighted that we have two modes of knowing: rationality, corresponding to left brain function; and intuition, corresponding to right brain function. The human being operates at best when these two modes of knowing operate in tandem, and there is great danger when the rational/left brain function takes over and ignores or denies the right brain/intuition. This is the root cause of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism appears in many guises in the modern world.

  • Religious fundamentalism. We all know about that. The word in the holy books is taken as a statement of fact, rather than as metaphor. We see these fundamentalists all over the world – Islamic Christian, Hindhu, Buddhist… The effect is to deny the basic truths that were initially espoused by the founding spiritual teachers – Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha…
  • Political fundamentalism. The dedication to a particular ideology, which is often the cover for a privileged class, even an individual, to stay in control of society.
  • Economic fundamentalism. The dedication to particular ideas about how an economy is run, such as that private is always good, public spending is always bad, of many modern right wingers – or indeed the very opposite from many modern left wingers.
  • Scientific materialist fundamentalism. The belief that objective science and the materialist paradigm can explain everything, and that subjective life – religion/spirituality, morality, values etc – are somehow unimportant as without foundation.

I’m sure you could add further examples. Yes, fundamentalism abounds wherever there is human thought and endeavour – particularly, I would suggest, in these days of significant left-brain domination. The task of human development is, as ever, to tread the path between the extremes that lead to fundamentalism, to respond to life with the full subjectivity of those very subjective values that fundamentalism is inherently unable to take into consideration. To be human beings, not the machines that various fundamentalisms would seek to turn us into.

Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.
Featured image by Stiller Beobachter from Ansbach, Germany, via Wikimedia Commons

Metaphor, Map and Model

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Metaphor

1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance…
2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.

dictionary.com

Metaphor is the basis of language and related creativity. While this has always been apparent in the arts and literature, it is perhaps not so readily associated with other fields.

Just consider the two domains of thought that have dominated Western cultures for thousands of years: religion and science.

Religious texts are full of metaphor pointing towards the great religious and spiritual truths that can never be precisely expressed in language. Religions become problematic for human society when these texts are interpreted literally, rather than metaphorically. Then fundamentalism becomes a big problem, as it was for centuries in Europe and still is in many parts of the world. In the terms of Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary, the Left Brain Emissary has usurped the function of the Right Brain Master.

But surely science is different, you exclaim – it’s objective. Piffle! In essence, science makes mathematical models of the real world. And what are these models but metaphors that reach towards the underlying reality. Scientific fundamentalism becomes a problem when the scientist believes that the model accurately describes the real world, rather than being a metaphor, leading to losing touch with reality itself. The map is not the territory (another metaphor).

Of course, science’s handmaidens technology and modern capitalism have this problem in spades. It is not a huge leap to suggest that this Left Brain dominance has significantly contributed to today’s ecological and climate problems, and to the mealy mouthed response to these problems so far.

It’s all metaphor really!

Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s magnum opus The Matter with Things.
Featured image includes a quote from Genesis I, King James version.

John Polkinghorne

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I was sorry to learn of the death of John Polkinghorne in the recent college magazine Trinity Review. John was my director of studies in Applied Mathematics in the early 1960s, the only director of studies I can really remember from my time at university – which says something. He was very approachable and human, although I must record that he did not in the end succeed in inspiring me to a career involving Applied Mathematics.

I subsequently intemittently followed John’s career at a distance, with interest. Although a physicist specialising in quantum mechanics, John “baffled many of his fellow scientists by believing that advances in his field in the 20th century had made it easier to believe in God… he thought it was no less an article of faith to believe that atoms moved according to some hidden law of nature, as many other scientists did, than it was for him to believe they moved according to God’s will.”

In 1979 John left academia to take holy orders, eventually becoming the vicar of Blean, near Canterbury. He later became dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and a prolific writer about the intersection between science and religion. He was knighted in 1997, but as a clergyman was not called “sir”.

As well as being a fine human being, John was yet another example of the long parade of quantum physicists who have stressed the importance of reconciling science and religion/spirituality, in direct contradiction of the materialistic beliefs of many of today’s so-called scientific disciplines. See eg my post on Mystical Scientists.

It was a privilege to have known him.

Featured image of Trinity College, Cambridge by Mahyar-UK, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The thing thing

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The thing is, we tend to think in terms of things – for everything (!)

Reality is something else. Everything is connected. There is no unique thing. Thingness is a model, approximating to reality. We could call it thing theory; some might call it materialism.

Psychologically we have an unfortunate tendency to confuse the map with the territory, so we think that things are more real than reality itself. Yet Quantum theory debunked thing theory many years ago.

Reality is more akin to interconnected processes – for example the human process interconnected with the earth process, interconnected with the solar system process, and the galactic process…

Does it matter? Yes, because we appear to think we can manipulate things without considering their interconnections, with our reductionist, materialistic mentality. The effect is only too obvious in what we are doing to the natural world. For example, the UK HS2 rail project replaces a complete ecosystem with a few trees planted in a load of freshly laid soil, and thinks that’s fine.

Of course, in daily life, thing theory works quite well on a practical basis, as does flat earth theory. I sit on a thing chair on a flat earth and eat a thing meal on a thing plate with a thing knife and a thing fork. We just need to know the limits of our theories and models, and when they cannot and should not be applied.

From the perspective of neuroscience, the left brain is very good at things and theories, but not very good at flow and interconnected processes. That’s when we need the right brain. If lefty has taken over completely (the Emissary usurping the Master) then ultimately we destroy every ‘thing’.

Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.
Featured image of billiard break by No-w-ay in collaboration with H. Caps, via Wikimedia Commons

A systems problem

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Global warming and climate change are symptoms of a systems problem in the organisation human affairs. At a gross level we could characterise the system as having four key elements: sovereign nation states, a fairly ineffectual United Nations, the global capitalist system, and the mass body of modern science and technology.

The scale of system change required is massive and fundamental. It is unlikely to be achieved top-down. It requires change in all these areas.

COP26 set some directions and targets, but not really adequate to address the need. But well done to those involved. What is clear is that the current rich and powerful form a huge brake that resists and will resist the changes needed.

So hang on to your seats. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. But the thing about nature is (and we are part of nature) it does evolve, in an intelligent manner, at all levels, from the smallest components of life. Some form of humanity will emerge in some form of synergistic relationship with nature.

What we don’t know is just how bumpy the ride might get, and just how long it might take. It’ll always be true that for each of us it’s the living right here, right now, that matters, and doing the right thing.

Featured image of hurricane from free photo library.

Restoring the natural order

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Once, we human beings were immersed in the dreaming of the world, just as the plants and animals. Our brains had two hemispheres, which were equally immersed, equally perceptive of and involved in our interconnected world.

Then, we created language and the ability to reflect. Gradually, the left side of our brain began to specialise, to separate out and lose contact with our livingness, an ability which was retained in the right brain. The right brain was grounded in the body and sensing the world; the left brain increasingly concentrated on abstraction and manipulation of the world. Being interconnected, they formed a wonderful partnership, but it was the right brain that was grounded in living, was the Master, served by the left brain.

But the left brain became ever more powerful in its schemes and manipulations. It invented science and technology and the duality of subject and object. The subjective was ‘in here’, and the objective was ‘out there’, and the latter could be measured and manipulated by science.

The problem was, the left brain began to think it was more important – than the connectedness, the beautiful, the moral, the intuition grounded in right brain experience. What was important was the re-presentation of the world, not the actual experience. Even that, subjectivity itself, would eventually be explained away by materialist models. Art was just about concepts, not beauty. Justice was about laws and punishment, not what was right. Might was right in the politics of ‘interests’, which even purported to justify obscene warfare. Money was the supreme value. Science could be directed without making space for inspiration. Education was to prepare for making money. Intelligence was an abstraction that could be mechanised.

Yet still the right brain was there, belittled, but grounding and connecting. The denied connection with nature as it was slowly and systematically debased, exploited, polluted. The failed left brain dominance was showing its true colours as climate breakdown and pollution got a grip, species began to disappear, a stream of plagues burst forth on the earth. It was time for the right brain to take charge again, a new interconnectedness, a new caring for nature and others. The science and the money became once again harnessed to the good of all, no longer driven by the fearful band of rich and powerful left brains who almost destroyed it all. Education aimed once again to uncover the destiny of this particular soul on earth.

What made this happen? Well it was the natural order of things. The over-specialised left brain could not in the end cover up the effect of its own defects. The mass tragedies stirred the human soul, and the balance changed.

Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.