A Passion for Pushing the Limits
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
Evolution biologist
—Max Flisher, in Science and Objectivity http://home.debitel.net/user/RMittelstaedt/Media/subj-obj.html
_____________________
Searching for
understanding and consistency
Almost from the time I
rose up onto my two legs, I was free to explore my birth ecosystem—the
woodlands and fields of the Hudson River’s shores—as freely as any Indian in
whose invisible footsteps I walked.
I climbed trees to see farther, crossed fences that said “no
trespassing,” came close to copperheads and bears, risked my life on thin
ice—always pushing the limits—but was never hurt beyond a wasp sting due to my
own carelessness and knew nature to be benign and friendly. Nature and I had not been parted by
theories of science or cultural categories, so I could, for example, take my mind
up into any tree too high or difficult to climb and be with a woodpecker there
in my seamless world even as my toes still squished deeply into the river mud
in search of snail friends. It was
a delicious time of innocence and profound knowing of what we now call
‘Oneness’ that shaped my life and brings pleasure in recalling. More than sixty years later, exploring
my early childhood turf after attending my 50th high school reunion,
I found myself weeping with joy to find so many of my childhood tree friends
alive and well after such long absence.
Perhaps my earliest
introduction to living systems forged by humans was the weekly circuit of
nearby farms my family made in my father’s Model-T ford truck on Saturday or
Sunday, bartering my mother’s fruits and vegetables for eggs and chickens at
one farm, milk at another, honey, cider and plums at a third and so on. My two brothers and I would play Kick
the Can with the kids on each farm, or jump and swing on ropes in hay barns and
check in on the various animals while the grownups exchanged local news,
calling us in for cake and whipped cream before leaving. Most of our food—all organically grown,
if not so labeled—was traded in this way, the farm families supporting one
another. More formally scheduled activities were held at the local Grange, the
hub of our rural social system half a century ago.
As I grew old enough to
think about my
experiences, rather than simply live them, I investigated the insides of dead
animals, pondered their lives and deaths, grew curious about how Nature worked
and who we humans were in this scheme of things, where we had come from and
where we were headed. When I was
ten years old in seventh grade, having skipped ahead in school during early
years, a wonderful biology teacher with a Ph.D. in music and encouragement for
my curiosity made me realize I was slated to study science. My parents, however, perceived science
as a subject for boys and steered me away from math and physics, into French,
music and art, explaining that I had talent and needed to study art after high
school. Earning a four-year full
tuition, room and board university scholarship at fifteen, I entered Syracuse
University at sixteen. There I could at least experience broader ideas than
those of its Art School alone, but I did not formally study science until some
years later, making my way into graduate school at Indiana University as a
divorcee with a tow-year-old daughter. I made up my lack of the requisite
background by passing some exams I crammed for and convincing a few professors
I was capable of doing the advanced work in science.
By the time I got my Ph.D.
and a post-doctoral fellowship in evolution biology at the AMNH (American
Museum of Natural History), I had really come to believe in the western materialist
scientific worldview, which was compatible with the materialist Marxist
economics I had learned during a few intervening years in Berkeley, where my
second child, a son, was born in the politically dramatic early Sixties. I had
become an activist and lived out the mid Sixties in the safety of Canada,
continuing to organize anti-war demonstrations there while my brother went to
Vietnam and became a colonel in the Marines. The considerable research I did in my concern with global
political and economic issues contributed further to me growing understanding
of planetwide human systems.
Always I felt the need for
coherence and consistency in my worldview. It was important to me, for example, to integrate my
scientific worldview with my Marxist understanding of economics. In the ensuing
years I continued to explore new mental and physical territories, diving into
new fields or areas of inquiry, even whole new cultures and languages,
immersing myself in them with enthusiasm to see as quickly as possible how they
looked from the inside, then re-emerging to compare and integrate them with my
other life experiences—plowing new territory, sowing, feeding, weeding and
harvesting the fruits of my ever-evolving worldview.
Sometimes I literally
plunged myself from morning sessions with professors in the hallowed ivy halls
of MIT to evening sessions in prison with black inmates, or from dancing Reggae
with the natives of a Costa Rican rainforest to having cocktails at the palace
in the capitol next day, striving to see things from the most different
perspectives. I deliberately
sought new perspectives, looking out for inconsistencies in my worldview and
finding ways of eliminating or resolving them. This has made for a very complex life that has often seemed
highly inconsistent to my family and friends, and even to me like a cat’s
proverbial nine lives in one, but I was always true to the unreachable goals of
the true explorer’s path, to my soul’s deep yearning for wholeness and meaning. How could I act with integrity if I did
not know How Things Are in the great scheme of things?
I never thought this
unusual until I began to notice how often other people thought it so, and until
I noticed how many people have inconsistent worldviews. To me it is very strange that a fully
committed materialist reductionist scientist can be equally committed to God on
Sundays or that a concentration camp guard can torture his victims all day and
bring flowers lovingly to his wife after work or that a culture can tell its children
not to take things from each other and then aggress on the people of sovereign
nations to exploit their resources.
No one was talking about
systems theory when I began to evolve my lifestyle, and even after I first
learned about it almost half a century ago, I did not see its implications for
such matters as worldviews or belief systems for a very long time; I did not
know myself as a natural systems theorist and practitioner. Within the sciences alone, I came to
explore biology, physiology, psychology, physics, anthropology, sociology,
medicine, foundations of logic and mathematics, ancient sciences such as the
Vedic, Taoist and Incan, worldwide indigenous sciences and contemporary
alternative sciences, not to mention philosophy of science, in order to arrive
eventually at the rudiments of a comprehensive new scientific worldview of my
own1.
In the animal behavior
department on the top floor of the AMNH, while doing my post-doc in the late
Sixties, I came to see my own and my colleagues’ work as “trivia research” in a
burning world. Once again, I was
looking for consistency. While I was doing comparative brain/behavior research,
the museum’s smokestacks were belching black soot all over upper Manhattan even
as its pioneering exhibit on pollution, housed in an elaborate and expensive
maze of elegant Japanese architecture erected within the great hall, was
blaming pollution problems on people who littered. The exhibit, full of
sanitized plastic garbage heaps and other evidence, actually ended with a picture
of Pogo over a mirror, saying “The enemy is Us!” while a speaker admonished,
“Don’t drop that gum wrapper!”
I was livid and made
myself unpopular by pointing out this contradiction and growing even more
politically active. It was a
mystery to me how people could fail to understand the most basic economic
relationships between wealth and poverty, cheap imported goods and the
exploitation of foreign labor, corporate polluters and laws protecting them,
etc. Understanding the dire
situation of humanity in a win/lose world ever deeper in crises of poverty and
other social injustice, warfare, nuclear threat, pollution, desertification,
etc., I became convinced that economics and politics were more likely to answer
my big questions of who we humans were and where we were headed than
science.
While politics gave me
some hope for understanding and improving the world, science did not. It had revealed little other than that
humans were large mammals with big brains that had come up through the ranks of
Earth’s creatures by Darwinian struggles for survival and were doomed to
continue in endless competition and conflict by virtue of “human nature.” This
contradicted my childhood view of benign Nature and was no more inspiring than
the broader scientific worldview of an accidental and meaningless universe
running down to heat death by entropy.
While I could accept, at that time, a universe without “intention” or
God, I felt deep down that evolution could not have had such splendid results
if all nature were survival struggle amidst aggressive nastiness.
Ethology (the study of
animal behavior) was all the rage at the time, with one author after another
writing popular books to explain our human aggressions as our evolutionary
animal heritage. None of them seemed to have noticed that intra-species
aggression almost never leads to killing; that, on the other hand, other
species were internally prevented from killing their kind by elaborate built-in
rituals and limits that humans lacked.
This contradiction forced me to think and gave me an important insight:
that our big brains, explosively sudden on an evolutionary timeline, apparently
traded safe, inborn behavioral limits for risky freedom of choice on how to
behave. A corollary of this
proposition was that humans alone require ethical guidelines and have to devise
them culturally along with forms of governance.
Beyond the limits of
established science
One of the most difficult
limits of the official scientific worldview for me—in addition to its exclusion
of all human experience that cannot be measured by manmade instruments—was the
ban on values, the proud pronouncement of science as neutrally objective and
therefore value-free. I was fond
of pointing out that this constituted a hypocritical abandonment of responsibility,
since nothing in science except unused lab equipment and unused statistical
tools actually were value-free. Allowable
scientific questions and research were determined by funding, and scientific
funding in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was studying science, already came
largely from the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower had named
it in warning us against its power.
Obviously, the values of this complex determined what scientific efforts were
useful enough to fund, yet scientists, isolated in their laboratories, failed
to see science as a cultural endeavor in a cultural system, the values of which
limited its freedom as much as its own worldview did.
My natural bent toward
holistic systems thinking got me into trouble again and again. I was living in a culture that had
separated and boxed up just about everything—politics, economics, art, science,
religion, ethics, work, play, black people, white people, rich, poor, you name
it—even economics and money were separated. Anyone trying to undo these
carefully constructed separations was a troublemaker.
Another difficult limit in
science for me was the ban on anthropomorphism. This was the heresy of projecting
human characteristics onto Nature or empathizing with Nature as alive,
intelligent and feeling, the way I knew it to be from my childhood experience.
Scientifically, Nature was to be perceived as separate and independent of all
human thinking and feeling. A dog,
for example, had to be demonstrated to be conscious or intelligent by rigorous
definitions of the terms and equally rigorous and measurable experimental
testing, not because a human perceived it to be. Otherwise objectivity—the fundamental assumption that
natural phenomena are independent of us and can therefore be studied without
being affected by experimenters—would be undermined.
Philosophers of science,
paying attention to the discoveries of physics, were already recognizing the
impossibility of objectivity in an interconnected and participatory universe of
energy patterns2, but objectivity is a lynchpin of the official scientific
worldview, so its impossibility is still resisted despite actual research results ruling it
out3. Of course, while anthropomorphism was
taboo, perceiving Nature as mechanics, which I came to call mechanomorphism,
was
mandatory. Whenever I pointed out
that since humans had invented machinery, mechanomorphism was merely second-hand
anthropomorphism, I got only dirty or pitying looks.
My training in science
taught me love and respect for clear definitions and logical reasoning. Unfortunately, I eventually found the
very foundations of western science and many of its conclusions to be based on
faulty reasoning, as I will elaborate.
The good side of this was that it challenged me to work for years on a
better foundation for science.
While politics and economics had come to seem better qualified to help
me understand humanity and its future prospects than the science I was taught,
I still believed in science at some deep level and gradually realized that its
theory and practice could be and were being changed.
Meanwhile, the leftist
political groups I affiliated with over the years had proven to suffer from
in-house rivalries, hostilities and elitist practices, thus seeming to me ever
more incapable of bringing about the better world they preached. Leaving New York City for Boston in the
early Seventies, I worked on scientific research at Mass General Hospital, but
soon realized a normal scientific career was impossible for me with my growing
doubts and the feeling of swimming upstream against an impossible tide when
expressing them to colleagues.
A position as Juvenile
Justice Planner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts taught me that mainstream
politics were even more corrupt than radical politics, and I came close to
getting fired several times for standing on ethical principles. While I taught a couple of courses at
MIT and the University of Massachusetts around this time, without the formal
appointments that would have locked me into their “publish or perish” tenure
tracks, my fiercely independent spirit has kept me away from traditional
universities altogether ever since.
I seemed to be a social misfit all around!
In 1974, while on the
Juvenile Justice Planner job, I had a unique opportunity to travel to China
with nine other scientists through a political organization called Science for
the People that had been invited to send a delegation as official guests of the
National Science Association of the People’s Republic. This was a real adventure, as the US
did not have official diplomatic relations with China yet. We had to get visas through Canada and
the Chinese authorities did not stamp our passports, to keep us out of trouble
with our own authorities.
Along with the ethology of
human nature books of that time, other popular authors were bringing racism
back into purportedly scientific studies of intelligence just when our
political activity seemed to be ending racism. This pushed my thinking as well
into questions of just what was intelligence.
I queried Chinese scientists for their views on intelligence and was
told they had determined that motivation was a better indicator of aptitude
than standardized intelligence tests, and had therefore abandoned them.
It was only years later,
when I adopted Arthur Koestler’s concept of holons in holarchy—natural entities
embedded within each other, as, for example, the holarchies of
cells/organs/organ systems/bodies, or species/ecosystems/planets/star
systems/galaxies or individuals/families/communities/nations/world)—that I came
to my own definition of intelligence as measurable by the number of holarchic
layers and the length of time one takes into account for their well-being or
sustainability when making decisions.
The Haudenosaunee (called Iroquois by the white man), for example, took the well-being
of families, communities and ecosystems over seven generations into account in
their deliberations, which is something of an intelligence record in my book of
cultures. Because of this
intelligence, they made peace among warring nations and devised a Great Law of
Peace that became the basis for our own US Constitution, largely through the
efforts of Benjamin Franklin4.
The Chinese had a
definition of science that puzzled us westerners; they called science “the
summation of the knowledge of the people” and said it “walked on two legs.”
These “legs” were the knowledge of ordinary people and the work of professional
scientists. We were there at the
end of the Cultural Revolution, during which university buildings had been
closed as professors, along with students, were sent to the countryside to
learn from peasants. From their
perspective, universities were still alive and functioning under these new
circumstances. The Chinese were
very open with us and fulfilled our request to meet with such professors on
farms, where they told us of discoveries made by peasants, in crossing plants,
for example, that were theoretically impossible. Their job when they went back to their labs would be to show
scientifically why they had been possible.
This began to explain the Chinese definition of science.
Over a decade later, I
asked an indigenous friend, Dr. Greg Cajete5 of the Santa Clara Tewa pueblo in
New Mexico, what he saw as the difference between his science and ours, given that he
was trained in both. He replied
that the white man isolates pieces of Nature and takes them into the laboratory
for study because his goal is to control them, while the red man goes into
Nature to study then in context because his goal is to integrate with
them.
The Chinese authorities
did not send professors into the countryside as punishment, but because they
genuinely believed that poor peasants had rich scientific knowledge through
their practical experience within Nature. This proved true and many
ecologically sound techniques of natural pest control and soil management, for
example, came out of this venture.
This was my first experience of recognizing “indigenous” science as
valid, more on which later.
China was rebuilding
itself from the ground up without foreign capital investments—a policy that
paid off handsomely when China became a strong enough and attractive enough
economy in its own right to be able to negotiate terms with foreign investors
as equals. This financial
independence is an important development in our world that has not happened in
most other underdeveloped countries since World War II.
A third confirmation of
the value of respecting people’s practical scientific experiments and knowledge
came for me from various articles in The Ecologist magazine, World Bank reports and
many other sources showing that all over the world ordinary peasants and
indigenous peoples had evolved sound scientific practices in agriculture that
far outweighed our own modern knowledge.
While Green Revolution production figures deliberately distorted results
in their favor, the truth was that production was higher and more sustainable
in traditional systems. In Bali
and India, the World Bank’s projects created such agricultural disasters they
had to withdraw to let people go back to their old methods.
In the late Eighties I
helped found the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network, in the process of which
I learned as much science from indigenous people as I had in universities, and
in the Nineties I lived in the Peruvian Andes for a year, confirming that the
Incas had developed one of the most successful agricultural sciences in all the
world, but that is getting ahead of my story.
Back in Boston from China,
an encounter with a very impressive psychic turned my quest for understanding
quite suddenly down a totally different track. Having left religion along with home at sixteen, when I
began university, had made it easier to accept the scientific worldview without
conflict, but now I was questioning both science and politics in my search for
a larger, more meaningful worldview.
This psychic and new friends I met in her classes, plunged me into
esoteric study, reading everything from the esoteric classics to modern
accounts of out-of-body, after-death and reincarnation experiences, along with
what was then called “paraphysics”—attempts to explain all manner of “psychic
phenomena” within the scientific worldview by stretching its limits.
Thus my disappointment with
science led me to its explorative fringes, where I continued to seek scientific
explanations of the world and humanity within it among those who had broken out
of the official taboos. The
paraphysicists certainly had some interesting and even exciting theories. One of them, Itzhak Bentov6, whom I had the privilege to meet,
had a very appealing wave theory of the universe as a giant toroidal
black/white hole in continuous creation, the first such theory I encountered,
having only a vague memory of hearing about Lord Kelvin’s “smoke ring
universe.” I now see such theories
cropping up again and find them the most influential physics theories in my own
evolving scientific model of a living universe.
After considerable effort
and repeated failure, I succeeded in having my own out-of-body
experiences. Biofeedback devices,
which I had first encountered in graduate school, were available for some
informal research. With their help
I explained my OOBEs to myself in terms of alignment between the frequencies of
the powerful mechanical aortic heartbeat waves and slow brain waves. But this did not answer the question of
whether I was really leaving my body behind through such physiological
synchronies or whether they happened “only” in my mind, as a state of consciousness
induced by those physiological events, as mainstream science would insist.
I wrestled with this
enigma for years before realizing, one day, that all my experience is limited to what
my consciousness can perceive, and therefore is within my consciousness, as all experience of all humans is! It took this dive into esoteric
experience and years of contemplation of it to understand that through it I had
made a hugely important observation with major implications for scientific
modeling of our universe, as I will describe later.
Over the years, I have had
quite a few “anomalous” experiences I would have repressed or ignored had I not
expanded my worldview into the esoteric beyond the limits of science. Just as an example, twice in my life I
have read a published piece of literature that had not yet been put into
print. One was a book by marine
biologist and epigrapher Barry Fell7, put into my hands by a childhood
friend who had become a geologist.
He gave it to me on the only visit I ever paid to his home as an adult,
while I was pregnant with my son, so the year is not mistakable. Only many years later when I no longer
had that particular copy of the book did I have the wonderful opportunity to
meet Barry Fell personally and discover that this book had never been published
until over a decade after I read it.
The same happened with James Lovelock’s first journal article on Gaia,
which was put into my hands during my post-doc at the AMNH, therefore in early
1971 at the latest, though it later proved—again, on meeting the author—to have
been published for the first time only in 19728. Such anomalous personal experiences were instrumental in
forcing me to change my worldview to accommodate them, so they could become
unusual, yet normal events.
The most fun I had with
science during my Boston years was when I was hired by WGBH-TV to write
educational materials for the NOVA/HORIZON series. Discovering that I already
knew something about the field of expertise behind every program topic, I
realized how broad my interests were, how many areas I had explored and how
great my need was for a worldview that made sense of all human experience.
A separate WGBH assignment
was writing a book to go with a proposed film on public education for
physically and mentally challenged youth. I set out across the US to interview
the best teachers in this field and had the great privilege of meeting
profoundly handicapped people who impressed me as highly evolved souls. I was also amazed to discover that even
deeply challenged students tended to achieve whatever their teachers believed
they could achieve. It might have
been difficult for me to understand this had it not been so consistent with a
worldview I was resonating with strongly in the then new and fascinating “Seth
books” by Jane Roberts, published in the Seventies and into the Eighties, still
being reprinted today9.
Seth, a discarnate entity
dictating about a dozen books through Jane, title by title and sentence by
sentence as her husband Rob wrote them down over the years, taught a
consciousness-based universe, introducing the concept of humans creating
reality from beliefs, both individually and as cultures. It was the broadest, most coherent,
internally consistent and intellectually satisfying worldview I had
encountered, yet classed as esoteric literature because of its unusual
origins. Seth spoke eloquently on
cosmic physics, chemistry, psychology, biology, medicine, sociology, evolution,
human history, religion, philosophy, politics, art and other subjects. Many later channelers seemed highly
influenced by Jane’s material, but, for me, none could add anything to it. Jane, who, as a poet and novelist, had
little knowledge herself of any of these fields, did not call her own
dictations channeling and in Seth’s voice consistently urged people to doubt
the material and think things through on their own.
In a recent symposium of
leading edge Ph.D. scientists, I found the courage to ask how many were
familiar with the Seth books and more than half raised their hands. All of Jane
Roberts papers are archived at Yale University and are still much visited there
by people from all over the world. As I write this chapter I am scheduled to
speak once more at an annual regional Seth conference (the Rocky Mountain Seth Conference). When the mechanistic worldview has been
honored and laid to rest at last, I believe its successor will owe more than
ever acknowledged to the mysterious Jane Roberts/Seth alliance.
Midlife Retirement
In retrospect, one of the
best decisions I have made in my life was to take a “midlife retirement” in
Greece, that turned out to last from the end of the Seventies, when my children
had grown up, to the beginning of the Nineties, when I returned with a book
published in New York and a new fledgling career in development.
As a dear friend and MIT
colleague said on my return, “How dare you take off for a thirteen year holiday
in the Greek Islands and come back ahead of those of us who kept our noses to
the academic grindstone?!” I had
certainly not intended that, but I came to accept that he was right and that it
had happened precisely because I did not stay in academia, with all its categorizing and
separation of “disciplines” and constraints on free thinking. Without those limits I was able eventually
to write my own evolving story of a living Cosmos in which the Earth is an
evolving living entity and human history a coherent pattern of development
within its living context.
There were so many
benefits of that retirement period leading up to writing that book that it is
difficult to describe them. I went
to Greece with the intention of staying only two years or so, though I sold my
house to do it, writing novels to explain the human condition to myself. This was partly because I felt science
had failed me in my search and partly because I was greatly inspired by having
met and spent time with Henry Miller, whose great love of Greece and marvelous
philosophy are wonderfully expressed in his book The Colossus of Maroussi. It is also the case that it had not crossed my mind that I could
pursue science on
Greek islands, though, in the end, Greece gave me back, in fullest measure, my
original motivation for pursuing science along with the leisurely opportunity I
needed to evolve my own version of evolution biology and its relevance to
humanity at present.
Greece felt very quickly
like home and looked very much like all of Earth to me, with its three-fourths
sea and one-fourth pinkish-beige pieces of land and island. I called it MidEarth, literally the name of the
Mediterranean Sea, because it was culturally and geographically a link between
East and West as well as between North and South. During my first few weeks there, before I even settled down,
two anomalous experiences proved the magical nature of this land.
The first happened in
Epidaurus on my first visit by boat and a Greek bus that dropped me some five
kilometers from the gate in early morning mists lifting from fields of
blood-red poppies beneath olive trees as far as I could see. I cried with joy at their beauty,
thrilled to be the first to arrive that day at the great ancient theater with
its magnificent acoustics. A few
years later, I would be among the twenty thousand people it held to watch
Eirini Papa (Irene Papas to Hollywood) perform Greek drama there under a full
moon, dressed in black robes, greeted after the play by Melina Mercouri, just
appointed minister of culture, stepping off a helicopter in a gold lamė
pant suit to rush out on stage.
But this day I was alone
in the vast theatre and amazed how the sun-whitened bare bones ruins of temples
and hotels could still reveal the original splendor of the grand healing spa
this was, with its colorfully painted buildings adorned with stone friezes of
lions and flowers, fountains, statues and chariot race tracks, the gayety of
comedy played alongside tragedy in deep psychological lessons about the actions
of gods and mortals in a layered universe where everything affected everything
else. The Greeks were naturally systemic thinkers.
Preparing to continue from
there by bus to Nauplion, my next stop on this three-day tour, I went to the
government pavilion near the theatre intending to cash a travelers check, only
to find there was no place to do that, no way at all to get any cash. Banks had not been open before I left
my island, and I had only a few coins in my pocket, not nearly enough for the
Nauplion bus. I was completely
stymied by this unforeseen dilemma, having no way to go on, nowhere to sleep,
and, with nothing else to do, spent
my last coins on a Greek brandy.
As I sipped it, an agitated waiter suddenly ran up to me, grabbed my arm
and pulled me from my chair. I had
no idea what I had done to offend him and get myself thrown out. He dragged me to the door and pointed
into the road, as though to yell “Get lost!” at me, when I saw it—a bank on
wheels had pulled up! A vehicle
like an old RV with a side door and a clerk inside, who cashed my travelers
check. I stepped off dazed by the
cash in my hands and watched it pull away again without attracting the
attention of anyone else. The
waiter still looked shocked himself as I regained the presence to thank Hermes
the Trickster, the god of travels, for this magical good fortune. In all my
years in Greece, I never saw such a “bank” again! I also thought of Seth, who taught that we manifest our
realities…
The second anomalous incident
happened within a few weeks later on the Greek island of Kos, considered the
birthplace of the twins Apollo and Aphrodite. Kos is tiny and there were only a handful of day-trip
tourists among the ruins as there were no hotels on the island. Walking across a flat field of sand
with a friend, I was picking up various seedpods and small shells in spiral form,
marveling at how many versions there could be of this elementary form, which
was to become so important in my model of the universe. My reverie took me deep into a cosmos
of wheeling galaxies when suddenly the sand some twenty yards from us whirled up
into the air forming a perfect funnel that swept a graceful curve in our
direction and smacked right into us.
As the day was otherwise
completely calm, without so much as a breeze, my friend, getting the
connection, asked in amazement “How did you do that?” I replied, “I didn’t!” and
then, on further reflection, added, “But I may have attracted it.” He looked at me strangely and asked,
“Does the motion in a vortex go inward or outward?” Without having thought
about it for a moment, I shot back “Both ways!” I knew this with a certainty—that it had to be centripetal and centrifugal
at once. Never having taken a
single physics course, I could not explain it; I simply knew it as it surfaced
in my consciousness then and there on the island of the Twins. I was really
sure now that the vortex was the real key to how the universe worked, though it
took much longer to figure out how.
I mention these two
incidents, as I did the matter of reading things before they were in print,
because they were such startling clues that reality was far more malleable than
materialist science had taught me it was, and that it was very powerfully
linked to my own consciousness. It
was one thing to find the Seth books intellectually appealing; it was quite
another to have their concepts confirmed so dramatically that they became
undeniable.
Mostly, after that, I
lived in Greece very simply and less eventfully, in a small old stone house
with relatively few possessions. I
fixed up the house, gathered fuel wood with a borrowed donkey, washed clothes
by hand, went fishing, carried water from wells, cooked more simply, took long
walks alone gathering wild greens and mushrooms along the way by day, thrilling
to bright moon and stars by night, generally appreciating a very close
relationship with my natural setting and enjoying Greek social life with its
music and fellowship.
In Greece I learned to
undo the nagging Puritan ethic that something useful had to be done every
minute of the day. It was
difficult for me to learn the fine Greek art of sitting and doing nothing but
pass the time. I was often bored,
impatient, guilty and amazed at how much time Greeks could “waste”. While I had learned to consider time a
precious and limited commodity, they saw time as abundant and unlimited. After a few years and lots of practice,
I was actually able to spend hours in thought without guilt. I learned that
good thinking and writing take time to incubate. Most important, I discovered the real value of letting my
mind empty so new thoughts could appear in it.
This came most easily at
sea for days and nights on end with fishermen. At first I spent all my time aboard the fishing kaiki, which I had bought as an
investment, reading whenever I wasn't helping or preparing food. Gradually I discovered that inspiration
comes best when the mind is completely lulled by the rocking waves, at peace
with the endless sea and sky.
Sometimes at night, when the fishermen slept soundly as cats dropped
about the deck, I could find no comfortable position on the hard planks. I
would sit up, surrounded by pitch-black sky and sea with no demarcation between
them and contemplate my place between the stars and the bioluminescent plankton
in the dark waters. Aware of the
tremendous difference in their sizes, though they looked so much the same, I
knew I was half way between the macrocosm and the microcosm. I will say more about this unique
cosmic position when describing the scientific model of a living universe I am
presently developing (see last section).
These experiences seemed
mystical and led to writing poetry and philosophizing essays in addition to my
novels. I did write three novels
before I went back to scientific pursuits, committing two of them to flames
before returning to the US. They
were a great way to undo the elitist scientific language—some would call it
jargon—I had learned in graduate school.
As I lived among simple
rural Greek farmers and fishermen, none of whom had more than a few year’s
schooling or spoke any English, I had lost all my identity as a professional
scientist and could not even describe myself as a novelist. My neighbors were clearly puzzled about
all the books in my little rented stone house, never having seen any books
except in school as children. My
linguistic expression, given the difficulties of the Greek language, was that
of a toddler first learning to speak, only very gradually being able to share
the simplest possible stories of my life and ideas. This also contributed to turning my English writings into
simpler story-telling form in good ancient Greek tradition!
Back in the US in the
Nineties, Paul Ray identified and interviewed me as a Cultural Creative10, calling my Greek years a shamanic
journey into the underworld. At
first shocked by this interpretation, I came to see its validity. I had stripped myself first of
occupation, house and possessions to make the journey to Greece, then stripped
myself of identity through lack of language, all typical of a shamanic rebirth
or recreation of self.
One of the greatest
lessons I learned in Greece was about cultural assumptions. I was aware of the literature on
anthropology that advocated dropping all cultural assumptions and definitions
when trying to understand a new culture and was determined to do that as I
integrated myself into Greek island life.
I had no idea, however, how difficult a task that was, even with the
best intentions. Ten years into
the process I was still uncovering my most ordinary assumptions. For example, I assumed all people had
the same definition of a “problem” as something amiss to be solved, only to
discover after many misunderstandings and cultural blunders that something
amiss may be a problem but is not necessarily perceived as something to be solved. One result of this difference is that
Greeks do not run for pain-killers when in pain, nor to therapists if they are
not happy. Their entire outlook on
and expectation of life is profoundly different from ours by virtue of this one
different definition! On the
whole, I found Greeks to be a happier people because they were always surprised
by life’s joys rather than obsessively worrying about what was wrong with them
if they had problems and/or were not happy.
From the time I arrived in
Greece, I would fling my arms out to the mysterious heavens at night crying
“Use Me!” as a kind of non-religious prayer to Whatever might hear it. One day, still effectively a novelist
and essayist, I was walking among wild cyclamen in the lovely pine forested
hills of my small island when a walking stick insect fell out of a tree and
onto my sleeve. Tears welled up in
my eyes as I welcomed this utterly unexpected guest reminder of my childhood,
when I had gathered up and played with many a walking stick. I had not seen one since. Instantly I knew that I still wanted to
understand Nature scientifically and decided to write a book for small children
telling the story of Earth’s evolution.
It was not that I suddenly wanted to become a children’s book author,
but because I felt that one had to be very true with children and that this
would give me the opportunity to tell the story as clearly and simply as
possible.
Return to science and
home
I searched for relevant
information in the few books I had brought with me after giving most of my
library away and began writing to publishers and universities, begging for
articles from scientists whose addresses I was creating from
bibliographies. I wanted such
up-to-date information that no Athens library would have been worth the boat
rides required to get to them, but it turned out that my Greek stamps attracted
attention and articles actually began and continued to arrive for me at the
local post office. The book went
from an edition for five-year-olds to one for ten to fifteen-year-olds and
eventually into what I still see as my “grownup book.” The first version was the most
difficult, as no one I could find had put the Earth’s story into a coherent
scientific sequence. Even Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who deeply influenced
me with their Gaia Hypothesis11—the most holistic analysis of Earth’s evolution available—had
not done this, as Lynn was focused just on bacterial origins and Jim had been
describing how the Gaian planetary system of life and non-life interacted at
present.
I sent the young people’s
version of the book to Lovelock in England and to Margulis in Boston for
review. Both answered with very kind praise and while I was working on the
adult version—easier, having the basic story done, to fill in details from the
scientific work I was receiving—Jim Lovelock actually came to visit me on my
island for over a week. Soon
after, by now the late Eighties, I was invited to three annual Gaia Conferences
organized in England by Edward (Teddy) Goldsmith, founder/editor of The
Ecologist magazine
mentioned earlier. This gave me
connections back into a scientific community making real progress toward a more
holistic understanding of Earth.
Jim Lovelock became a
paragon for me because he was proving that universities, laboratories and
grants were not necessary to doing good science. In his countryside kitchen, on a very modest household
budget, he had made his own lab equipment, inventing and engineering the
Nuclear Capture Device that soon became extremely important to environmental
science and medicine, then hitch-hiked all the way to Antarctica on a research
vessel to take ocean measurements over a large portion of Earth to back up his
planetary scientific hypothesis!
Somehow this validated my own pursuit of science on my small remote
island.
The first time I visited
Jim in Cornwall, he gave me a small paperback book that was inscribed to him
with the words “Closet Gaia, love, Lynn.” The
book was about the work of the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky12, who had seen life as a “transform
of rock”—as slow geological activity transforming itself into more rapid
metabolic activity. I shouted the
proverbial Greek Eurika! at reading this, for Vernadsky gave me the seamless world of
geobiology.
The Chilean biologists
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, working at MIT and the University of
Paris respectively, gave me their new definition of life as Autopoiesis—literally Greek for
self-creation. If living systems
were autopoietic, creating themselves continually, then mechanical systems, I
reasoned, should be called allopoietic, meaning “other created,” because they require
external inventors. This
distinction contributed a great deal to many essays that developed my thinking
and led to my seeing whirlpools, proto-galaxies, galaxies, whirling atoms and
particles, all as self-organizing, form-maintaining living entities along with
the Earth that ever created itself anew from the same materials in cycles of
magma to crust to magma, water vapor to rain to rivers to oceans to water
vapor, soil to creatures to soil, etc.
Erich Jantsch’s work on the self-organizing universe13 fit my developing thought
beautifully and many other scientists filled in many other pieces over time.
My
own book, now called EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, begins with words written on the
Greek Island of Angistri where I wrote its original version:
This book is a work of philosophy in the original sense
of a search for wisdom, for practical guidance in human affairs through
understanding the natural order of the cosmos to which we belong. It bears
little resemblance to what we have come to call philosophy since that effort
was separated from natural science and became more an intellectual exercise in
understanding than a practical guide for living.
So steeped was I in Greek
culture I did not mention that philosophia was actually the ancient Greek word for the later
Latin scientia. Philosophy was natural science, the study of
Nature, while physis—the Greek word for nature itself—was taken to designate what European
scientists so much later came to see as the fundamental science of nature:
physics. Though I knew
nothing of ancient Greek science in my youth, my big questions of who we were,
where we came from and where we were headed drove me to science in search of
wisdom to guide humanity on our path into the future. Because I was disappointed in this quest, I determined to
answer these questions for myself, within the expanding scientific framework I
was now developing.
To develop a new
scientific model or worldview as a framework for the human journey, I had to
think of the whole universe, Earth within it and humanity within the Earth as a
coherent living system with system dynamics. It was not a formal study of system dynamics that inspired
me, since this field was still new, but my own mental exercises in thinking
holistically and systemically, far away from the academic culture that had
separated scientific disciplines into ever smaller fragments and whose
professors did not exactly encourage minds questioning the most basic
assumptions on which their careers had been built.
Yet as soon as I abandoned
novels to weave my scientific story, anonymous but powerful academic
authorities started looking over my shoulders again to see just what it was
that I was writing and whether I was inserting the proper footnotes. I did not get rid of them until the day
my son, who had come to live in Greece himself, said to me, “I hope you’ll
stand on the courage of your convictions, Mom, and not fill your book with
footnotes nobody wants to read.
Just tell your story!”
I pondered the story of
western science again and again—of modern physics born of European scientists’
love of mechanics, which gave us a lifeless universe modeled on machinery. Was this fundamental assumption of a
lifeless, mechanical universe really a “self-evident truth” as scientific
assumptions are supposed to be?
Descartes, the leading architect of the scientific worldview expounded
in graduate schools to this day, came close to a consciousness-based science,
rather than one of material mechanism, in the famous meditation leading him to
pronounce Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” But in his great love for the practical translations of math
into machinery, he chose instead to separate mind from matter, naming God “the
Grand Engineer” who put a piece of God-mind into his favorite engineered robot,
so that man, too, could think and invent machinery that would eventually be as
complex and lifelike as God’s! It
seemed to me this was God in the image of man, rather than the other way
around!
In my own words, Descartes
had made nature allopoietic, with only man as autopoietic by the grace of
God. (Woman was pure robot like
other animals in his scheme of things.)
True to Greek myth, if not to Greek science, God the father was
overthrown by his obstreperous, if inventive, human sons, who determined that
their fine minds were not God-given after all, but had arisen, like their
bodies, from a long series of fortuitous local accidents within an accidental
universe. It had to be accidental to explain it
without a purposeful inventor, without purpose of any kind! This new version of the universe had
miraculously exploded out of nothing and, despite the staggering amount of
impressive natural machinery, including man himself, that it gave rise to on
its meaningless journey, was headed back into nothingness by the great Law of
Entropy.
While Descartes had
understood that there can be no machine without a conscious and intelligent
inventor, his followers eventually explained away the magic of life emerging
from non-life, consciousness from non-consciousness and intelligence from
non-intelligence by coupling non-equilibrium thermodynamics with random
accident, as, for example, in Ilya Prigogine’s work14. But, it seemed to me, this foundation for science was
utterly illogical! Machines, by
definition, are purposive devices invented by intelligent beings and assembled
from parts to carry out specific tasks.
They do not “arise” by accidental particle or atomic collisions, and no saying they
did can make it so. If nature is
mechanism, logically it must have an inventor as Descartes proposed; if there is no
inventor, it cannot be machinery.
Nevertheless, historically
the materialist reductionist science of celestial and biological mechanics had
practical applications in engineering, so while it was anathema to the Church,
which had been ruling European society through the allegiance of governing
royalty and was not happy with scientific rejection of God, science was
extremely appealing to a rising European bourgeoisie building an industrial
revolution. Thus science gained
the power to spread its materialist worldview throughout society and was
eventually elevated to a kind of secular priesthood in its own right. Within its ranks, theoretical
physicists are an elite that appears to have special dispensation for proposing
very far-out theories of How Things Are.
Biologists, however, have been second-level scientists, subject to the
“established” laws of physics to the point where life’s amazing capacities for
generating ever new creatures and ecosystems had to be defined as negentropy, a temporary swimming upstream
that could increase order locally within the drearily deteriorating universe’s
entropic process toward heat death.
Negentropy is credited with
the descent of man, according to Darwin, his predecessors and his followers, as
the natural creature of an evolutionary process of accidental events and
survival struggles over billions of years. This story of biological evolution has become virtually
axiomatic in the scientific worldview, though its recognition of man as this
kind of evolved creature has had questionable social benefits, justifying the
exploitation of fellow humans, often cruelly, along with the rest of the
natural world, which is now suffering a degree of devastation that threatens
even human survival. The lack of moral accountability of science for social
interpretations of Darwinism, along with its failure to see the grave
inadequacy of the Darwinian hypothesis, has led to social ills from chaining
children to machines for the sake of profits to the Holocaust and, even now, to
the current tyranny of the quarterly bottom line competition that pushes large
corporations to dishonest accounting and to exploiting the cheapest possible
third-world labor under inhuman conditions. The entrenched neo-Darwinian belief that man is doomed to
perpetually hostile competition—the scientific belief underlying these social
ills—is, as I will attempt to show, a serious misinterpretation of the
evolutionary record.
The definition of autopoiesis
as life led me quickly to see that the universe could be described more
elegantly and logically as self-creating living systems, from tiny living
particle and atom vortices to the greatest of galactic vortices and the entire
universe itself. To be continually
self-creating, vortices had to have a medium to feed on or be self-contained in
the form of toroids, as in Lord Kelvin’s smoke-ring universe, quite popular
with physicists until Einstein stole away their attention. When I got back to the US, I discussed
this with physicist Hal Puthoff, a pioneer in zero-point energy (ZPE) research15 and he thought it entirely plausible since atoms
indeed feed off ZPE to maintain themselves. Another colleague, Foster Gamble, is currently developing a
detailed model of atoms as clusters of vortices.
I pondered the question: What if Galileo had looked down through
the new lenses of his day arranged into a microscope, so he could see into a
drop of pond water teeming with gyrating life forms instead of up through a
telescope into the heavens, already conceived in his time as celestial
mechanics? Might biology, rather
than physics, have become the leading science into whose models all others must
fit themselves? Might scientists
then have seen life not as a rare temporary and accidental occurrence within
the inevitably destructive tide of entropy, but as the fundamental nature of an
exuberantly creative universe?
Instead of projecting a
universe of mechanism without inventor, assembling blindly through collisions
of particles, then atoms and molecules, until a few such aggregates came
magically to life and further evolved by accidental mutations, I proposed that
there is reason to see the whole universe as alive, self-organizing at multiple
fractal levels of living complexity—as reflexive systems learning to play with
possibilities in the intelligent co-creation of complex evolving systems.
It seemed more reasonable to
project our life onto the entire universe than our non-living machinery, which
is a derivative extension of human capability and therefore a truly emerging
phenomenon, rather than a fundamental
one. I found it possible to create
a coherent scientific model of a living universe, a model that is not only
justified by the findings of science, but can lead to the wisdom required to
build a better human life on and for our planet Earth as the ancient Greeks
intuited it should.
Reentry and continuing adventure
Before I left Greece, I
organized a large Earth Celebration event in Athens that was covered by MTV, my
book was published in New York and I got invitations to speak in England,
Scotland, The Soviet Union, the US and Costa Rica. Jim Lovelock had sent me a used computer to replace my
trusty old typewriter and although the Internet had not yet reached the Greek
islands, I had moved to Hydra, which had a lawyer’s office where I could send
and receive faxes.
The conclusion I had
reached in the book was that we humans will have to learn very quickly to
organize ourselves by the principles of living systems within the larger living
system of our planet or do ourselves in as a species. It became obvious to me that indigenous cultures know far
more about this than western industrial culture does, so I set out to learn
from them, soon getting involved in forming the Worldwide Indigenous Science
Network, with meetings in Mexico, Calgary, Canada and Taos, New Mexico.
I began to feel South
America calling to me. Alan
Ereira's BBC film on the Kogi Indians of Columbia, Message from the Heart of
the World: the Elder Brother Speaks, had a profound effect on me when I saw it in Greece so I
looked up Alan in London, and soon had an invitation to visit the Kogi with a
friend in New York who knew them as well. Though I did not go, I soon responded
to my dearest oldest friend's invitation to come live with her in Tucson,
Arizona while I worked on reentry.
The year was 1991.
Reentry shock! It was much
harder than I'd anticipated, much harder than had been the entry into Greek
culture. I felt like the proverbial fish out of water—sometimes literally in my
hunger for the sea. From Tucson I
visited Hopiland to continue work I'd begun with Hopi elders, especially Thomas
Banyacya, to help him tell the Hopi Prophecy in the U.N. General Assembly after
the 43-year effort to do so made by the Hopi and their many helpers. In 1992, I was unexpectedly asked by
the UN in Geneva to participate in an international congress on indigenous
peoples in Chile as an advisor, just before the big “Rio ‘92” UN meeting on the
environment, where I had been asked to be a “Wisdom Keeper” in the company of
many wonderful religious and indigenous people. Since I had no job or income, these invitations seemed a
magical answer to the call of South America I was feeling so strongly. I then moved to Washington DC on an
inner call, where I got involved with hosting an annual Native Prayer Vigil
between the Washington Monument and the White House that still happens each
October.
In Washington, I woke
suddenly one morning in 1994, having heard a voice that said "Go to the
June solstice festival in Peru with Mazatl!" No visual images, just that
voice. Mazatl is Aztec, a sacred musician and artist. Tracking him, I discovered that six other people had had the
same dream call, as had Mazatl himself, who cancelled a concert with Peter
Gabriel to take us! Two days later
a check big enough for the trip showed up in my mail—a small grant I’d applied
for and never heard about—and I spent it all to go without a moment’s
hesitation.
Just before this trip, I
went to Ireland to speak at the International Transpersonal Association
meetings in Killarney. The
preceding year I had met the crew of Roger Payne’s whale-watching yacht in Key
West, Florida, while visiting a friend there, and had tried to recruit enough
paid passengers for a Galapagos cruise in hopes of gaining my own free
passage. After failing miserably
despite the strong intention I held for that to happen, a man who heard my talk
in Ireland came up to me afterwards and invited me to teach biology seminars
while following whales a year later, aboard the ocean-going, whale-watching
sailboat of his California-based marine biology research institute!
Again, intention had
produced results, if form an unanticipated direction. Again and again I have
been shown that this is the essence of what we call magic: the paradoxical
focus of desire or intent while at the same time letting go of the outcome. It
isn't easy to desire and let go of the desire simultaneously, but when we
achieve it, it works!
The colorful crowds of the
June solstice festival in Cusco, Peru (winter there, with crisp bright sunny
days), awesome Machu Picchu, the splendor of Lake Titicaca, pre-Incan Tihuanaco
in Bolivia were all new wonders for me.
While walking a street in Cusco one day shortly before we left, the
inner voice spoke once again, telling me to come back there in the fall for at
least six months. I was very
reluctant, as it would be the rainy season and I knew almost no one, did not
speak any Spanish and did not want to start over that way in yet another
culture, however attractive it was.
I fought the relentless inner call for twenty-four hours, then succumbed
and announced my plan to return. Needless to say, the money to do so showed up,
and permitted me to stay there almost a year on what would have been gone in a
few months in Washington.
While there I had a unique
opportunity to make a difficult trek with indigenous friends over a 5,000 meter
(16,250 ft) high snow-covered pass to visit a traditional Andean community
never yet visited by even an anthropologist16. I had made almost only indigenous Quechua friends in Cusco,
learned Spanish, investigated Inca history and started an indigenous coalition
devoted to restoring Inca agriculture—possibly the finest and most extensive
agricultural experimentation and development in the history of the world—as
well as to reviving traditional medical knowledge, music, weaving, storytelling
and other aspects of Inca culture.
I was also informally
adopted by a fourteen-year-old medicine priest in training named Puma, who
introduced me to his marvelous grandfather teacher and all his family. By the following year, I had Puma
lecturing and teaching workshops in the US, where he became very active in
leadership youth groups devoted to ecology and indigenous wisdom. As I write this he is 23 and just
completing his training, which began at age three with dream teachers and
continued from age six, when he was struck by lightning—an Andean sign of a
medicine man—and his grandfather took over his training.
All of these and other
experiences in indigenous worlds contributed enormously to my understanding of
humans in nature, of interspecies communications, of the deep spiritual
consciousness of all nature, of the awesome scientific knowledge indigenous
people gained all over the world.
They also gave me my own spirituality in ways I like to think of fondly
of as “reverse missionizing,” though it was never, ever pushed on me. Rather, it happened naturally, because
their spirituality, undivided from the rest of their lives, was so reminiscent
of my childhood experiences in nature.
Not long after I returned
from Peru and resettled in California, where I had taught the whale-watch
biology seminars for one delicious summer, that wonderful Renaissance man,
Willis Harman, then president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by
moon-walking astronaut Edgar Mitchell, asked me to write a book with him on how
biology and society would change if we acknowledged consciousness as the source
of material evolution rather than its late emergent product. I was delighted by the opportunity to
formalize this worldview, which I had come to but not stated publicly, and the
book, Biology Revisioned17, was written as a dialogue between us, continuing, in a sense, the
dialogues we had had by fax during my last years in Greece.
I had also republished the
book written in Greece as EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, which introduced not only the
concept of holons in holarchy (mentioned earlier) but a very important and
basic cycle of evolution from individuation through tension and conflicts to
negotiations and collaborative schemes leading to higher biological unity,
exemplified in the evolution of the nucleated cell dominating the second half
of Earth’s evolution as a collaborative enterprise of previously hostile
archebacteria, which dominated the first half. This species maturation cycle links the well-known Type I
and Type III ecosystems—the first made of young aggressive species, the latter
of mature cooperative species—to show their underlying progression. In an article called “The Biology of
Globalization”18, I extended this analysis of the evolutionary cycle to
describing the human process of globalization. Because Darwin did not see beyond endless hostilities over
survival in nature, the emergence of this pattern of maturation to the less
visible but profoundly cooperative schemes of mature ecosystems such as coral
reefs, prairies and rainforests is very relevant for our own species, now being
called to such maturity. It is
simply not the case that we are doomed to endless competitive empire building
and warfare, whether by dictators, nation states or multi-national
corporations. Rather, it is our
evolutionary heritage and imperative to grow up as a species, to find our way
to being a cooperative, healthy global family!
Another book opportunity
came when I was asked to write the text of a book illustrated by an exhibit of
Earth’s evolution created at Hewlett-Packard and called (like the book) A
Walk Through Time: from Stardust to Us19, with an introductory chapter by Brian Swimme. While the publisher—Wiley, in New
York—was concerned about scientific reputation and did not permit the use of
the word consciousness in describing nature, I was able to describe nature as intelligent from the get-go and
to update neo-Darwinism to show Earth as a living entity in evolution, with an
ecological systems perspective, rather than a view of individual species in
their habitats.
Because businesses, like other
social institutions, are now suffering from having been modeled on mechanisms
rather than living systems, and because ecosystems are ever more easily seen as
wonderfully efficient and effective economic systems that allocate, transform,
consume and recycle resources, living systems are of ever more interest in the
business world20. Thus my
speaking engagements around the globe have included opportunities to speak to
management in big businesses such as Siemens, Hewlett-Packard and Boeing, as
well as to Brazilian businesses and MBA programs in the US and Brazil. But I also speak to many other kinds of
organizations suffering the same “mechanical failure,” from government agencies
and universities to the World Bank, as well as to traditional religious organizations,
such as Catholic and Episcopalian, to newer religions, such as Unity and
Religious Science, and was invited onto a science panel at the World Parliament
of Religions in South Africa.
Some of my most precious
experiences have been when priests or nuns have actually asked me to help them
update their theology by helping them think through new concepts of God and
religion. If those practicing
traditional religions based on revelations can be open to scientific thinking,
then perhaps science can follow suit and open to the deep inner knowledge to be
found in religious belief and practice.
Toward a scientific
model of a living universe
My very favorite activities are symposia of like-minded scientists and philosophers gathering to share and work out new scientific worldviews or paradigms. Through these wonderful dialogues it is ever more obvious to me that the revolution happening in science is forcing reconsideration of its most fundamental assumptions, that is, of the basic beliefs supporting the current scientific model of our universe or cosmos and ourselves within it.
Western science set itself the task of describing
reality—an objective world that could be studied without changing it. But quantum physics and other
scientific research has shown objectivity to be an illusion as mentioned
earlier, so even our concept of reality must be called into question. My biggest breakthrough on this matter
came from meeting one indigenous culture after another, such as, for example,
Lakota, Australian aboriginal and Peruvian Andean Runakuna (Quechua), that saw
reality as the totality of human experience while recognizing there were other
realities for the other living beings of the universe and wide differences even
in human experience of the world.
Thus their world or universe models were omnicentric, with each sensing
being at the center and the social/scientific task to find a shareable public
description of reality for humans that respected individual deviations from it
as equally real.
This made a great deal of sense to me because of the
recognition reported earlier that no one, not even any scientist, has ever had
any experience of the world outside of his or her consciousness, and some
important ones, such as Gregory Bateson22 and Harvard’s Nobel Laureate
biologist George Wald23 had seen consciousness or mind in all of biological
evolution. Thus, our scientific
models of the universe must begin with consciousness and can only be formulated
as models of human experience of the universe. As western science was developed, the scientists (almost
exclusively men) were so enamored of the increase in human power that came from
the inventions of math and its translation into physical mechanism, that they
projected these inventions onto the whole universe, with God as temporary
inventor before dropping Him.
As I worked on the requirements for an Integral Science
from my own perspective, I felt a strong need to end the sharp distinction
between physics and biology, to avoid having either one forced into the mold of
the other. Rather, I seek out new
models of cosmic physics that are naturally compatible with seeing the universe
as embedded living systems. Since
familiar biological life forms—from nucleic acids to bodies—take on
fundamentally toroidal (vorticular) structure, which is the simplest structure
meeting the definition of autopoiesis and is evident in proto-galactic clouds,
galaxies and planetary energy configurations such as Earth’s electromagnetic
field and surface weather patterns, I gravitate toward cosmic physics models
that begin with this elementary living geometry.
The beauty and usefulness of
autopoiesis as a definition of life lies precisely in helping us see beyond our
narrow focus on familiar life forms to their relationship with both smaller and
larger entities from subatomic to galactic. The simplest entities I could find
that fit the definition were a whirlpool in a river, a tornado, a
proto-galactic cloud. I reasoned that any differential gradient, whether in
water, our atmosphere, the supernova dust cloud that gave rise to Earth or the
earliest universe itself, would cause things literally to curl in on
themselves—to form vortices that held their form as matter/energy was pulled
into and spat out again by them.
Having come to a vortex
theory of an autopoietic living universe—a universe of self-creating living
geometry—I gravitated toward physicists working with vorticular, toroidal
models of macrocosm and/or microcosm, especially looking for models with
two-way (centripetal/centrifugal) motion. It is apparent that more and more
physicists are coming to see
inwardly and outwardly spiraling waves as the very essence of cosmic creation.
Exciting maverick
physicists such as Walter Russell, Itzhak Bentov and Nassim Haramein24, see the universal processes of
creation and destruction as closely coupled and mutually necessary. In their unified field physics, these
processes are radiation and gravity or entropy and centropy; their biological
version is anabolism and catabolism.
In Haramein’s model of black/white wholes as the fundamental nature of
all entities in the universe at all scalar levels (what I would call holarchic
levels)—i.e. particles, atoms, cells, bodies, planets, stars, galaxies and the
entire universe—fluctuations in the density differentials of the vacuum or ZPE
(zero point energy field) at the event horizons of particles change their
geometries and thus those of their atoms in turn, giving rise to the different
elements of the chemical table. If
the dynamic entropy/centropy balance shifts too far towards centropy, particles
disappear back into the vacuum; if the balance shifts too far in the other
direction (away from the centropy holding them together) the particles
composing atoms become increasingly radioactive. The table of elements ends
just before the dynamic balance is lost altogether, dissipating particles as
unfettered radiation.
Cosmic objects never exist in
isolation, so their internal dynamic balance must be held within the complex
sea of wave interactions among all objects at all scalar levels. These
interactions must surely affect the internal dynamics of any entity, either
disrupting or enhancing them. The work of Wolff and of Schwarz25, as well as that of Haramein, has made this clear.
Bacteria, protists (single nucleated cell creatures), multi-celled creatures, ecosystems and the Earth itself can be seen as five fractal or holarchic levels of biological systems. The scalar location of all Earth’s
creatures—from bacteria to
baleen whales—at a size level halfway between the microcosm and the macrocosm
cannot be accidental. Rather, it
can be seen that they evolved precisely in the most complex possible region of
entropy/centropy dynamics in the universe. Earth’s surface (or event horizon) must also be subject to
standing waves produced by the interference patterns of colliding Earth and
solar radiation, Earth and galactic radiation, Earth and supercluster
radiation. If the vacuum energy gradients prove to be particularly steep at
Earth’s surface, where temperature, water, carbon and materials mobility
provide other favorable conditions, toroids within toroids within toroids can
curl up into complex life forms as nowhere else in the universe, except other
planetary surfaces with similar conditions.
This model thus holds out the
possibility of a completely new approach to explaining the origin of the
biological creatures of Earth—to which science has, until now, restricted the
category life (opposed to non-life). From a
physical perspective, we may be able to see planetary creatures as a special
case of autopoietic complexity arising through the unique interaction of energy
gradients in patterns of wave interference at the surfaces (event horizons) of
planets with particular compositions and conditions determined by their
energetic relationships with their star and universal bodies at other scalar
levels.
Cosmic autopoiesis—the
self-creation of a living universe—thus promises to become an elegant view of
the whole, with essentially the same production and recycling process at all scalar or fractal levels,
and uniquely complex life forms generated at planetary surfaces. Thus my explorations, unfettered by the
limits I was taught as a scientist, brought me back to my passionate belief in
science and enabled me to begin work on a coherent and self-consistent model of
a living universe26
that will undoubtedly keep evolving for the rest of my life in this particular
world.
Footnotes
1.
This
worldview is somewhat elaborated in the last section of this chapter and may be
found as “A Tentative Model of a
Living Universe, Parts I and II,” at
http://via-visioninaction.org in the Articles section under my name.
2.
Objectivity—the
presupposition that there is some kind of reality independent of
individual perceptions--asserts
that there are facts which transcend subjective reality. This concept was
championed by theorists, such as John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber, and later challenged by Polanyi, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others.
3.
Wiseman,
R. & Schlitz, M. (1998) Experimenter effects and the Remote Detection of
Staring, Journal Of Parapsychology, 61, 197-208
is a good example of such research.
4.
This
was scarcely acknowledged before the late 1970s and is detailed in Lyons, Oren. et al. 1992. Exiled in
the Land of the Free.
Democracy, Indian Nations and the United States Constitution. Santa Fe, NM:
Clear Light.
5.
See
the fine book on indigenous education by Cajete, Gregory. 1994. Look to the
Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Durango, CO: Kivaki Press.
6.
Bentov,
Itzhak. 1977. Stalking the Wild Pendulum. NewYork: E.P.Dutton.
7.
Barry
Fell was a Harvard marine biologist who deciphered rock and tablet
inscriptions, including the Minoan Phaistos Disk, and became an internationally
acknowledged, though somewhat controversial, epigrapher. The book was America
B.C. New York:
Wallaby Books, Simon & Schuster. It had been given to me in late 1961 or
early 1962 though it was not published until 1976, a year after his textbook on
marine biology. Fell’s other books on epigraphy are Saga America, Times Books, and Bronze Age
America, Little,
Brown & Company.
8.
Lovelock,
J. E. 1972. "Gaia As Seen through the Atmosphere." Atmospheric
Environment 6 (579). This was Jim Lovelock’s first journal article on Gaia, which
I read in that journal at the AMNH well over a year before it was published.
9.
Among
my favorite books by Jane Roberts are: The Nature of Personal Reality, 1974 and
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, 1981, both republished in 1994
and 1995 respectibely by Amber-Allen: San Rafael, CA.
10. Ray, Paul and Anderson, Sherry.
2000. The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the
World. New York:
Harmony Books.
11. Lovelock and Margulis’ frst books
on the Gaia hypothesis were:
Lovelock, J. E. 1982. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press
and Margulis, L. 1982. Early Life. Boston: Science Books International. More are listed in the bibliography.
12. This book was: Lapo, A. V. 1982. Traces of Bygone
Biospheres.
Moscow: Mir Publishers. See also Vernadsky, Vladimir (1926, 1896) The
Biosphere. Published originally in 1926; reprinted
U.S. edition 1986. Oracle, AZ: Synergistic Press.
13. Jantsch, E. 1980. The
Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging
Paradigm of Evolution.
Oxford, England: Pergamon Press.
14. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle
Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam.
15. Puthoff, Harold. 1990.
"Everything for Nothing." New Scientist. 28 July.
16. An account of this trek may be
found under the name “Journey to Hapu” by scrolling down my website: http://www.ratical.org.lifeweb
17. Harman, Willis and Sahtouris,
Elisabet. 1998. Biology Revisioned. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
18. Sahtouris, Elisabet. 1997. "The Biology of
Globalization," in Perspectives on Business and Global Change , Journal
of the World Business Academy. September.
19. Sahtouris, Elisabet, with Liebes,
Sid and Swimme, Brian. 1998. A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us. NY: Wiley. (Liebes is listed as
first author.)
20. See, for example, Paul Hawkens’ The
Ecology of Commerce.
1993. New York: Harper, and
Kiuchi, Takashi and Shireman, Bill. 2002. What We Learned in the Rainforest. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler
21. Sahtouris, Elisabet. 2000. EarthDance:
Living Systems in Evolution. iUniverse.com A complete copy of this book is also
available free at my website: http://www.ratical.org/lifeweb
22. Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary
Unity. New York:
Dutton.
23. Wald, George. 1984 Life and Mind in
the Universe, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, Quantum Biology Symposium No.11
24. Russell, Walter, The Universal
One. 1926, 1978.
The University of Science and Philosophy: Waynesboro, VA; Russell, Walter, The Secret of Light. 1947,1994. The University of
Science and Philosophy: Waynesboro, VA; Haramein, Nassim. 2002. “The Role of
the Vacuum Structure on a Revised Bootstrap Model of the GUT Scheme.” Bull.
Amer. Phys. Soc. AB06, 1154; Haramein, Nassim. 2001. “The Scaling Equation from
Micro to Macro Cosmos in Terms of Frequency vs. Radius ω (R)” Paper presented at the
American Physics Society Meetings, Texas 2001; Haramein, Nassim. 2002. “Fundamental
Dynamics of Black Hole Physics.” Bull. Amer. Phys. Soc. AB06, 1154; Bentov is cited in (6) above.
25. Wolff, Milo (2002) Origin of the
Natural Laws in a Binary Universe. Technotran Press: Manhattan Beach, CA;
Schwatrz, Gary and Linda Russek (1999) The Living Energy Universe. Hampton Roads: Charlottesville,
VA
26. See (1) above.
________________________________
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