"It's not as if anyone's saying science is completely wrong," counters Beverly Rubik. "Conventional science is appropriate within a conventional framework. But there can be other sciences which exist outside of that box. We need multiple ways of inquiry that accord with—and I realize this will sound odd—our levels of being. Our usual practice of science is based on the lowest common denominator of human consciousness: of feeling separated from the rest of universe.
"What's missing," she says, "is attention to the inner state of the investigator. We've been pretending we're neutral, playing dead, putting our feet in concrete shoes and saying we can't jump. It's time to try on some different footwear."
One Causality Project member told me, "the study of consciousness may require scientists who are willing to risk being transformed in the process of observation." Fetzer Foundation president, Robert Lehman, concurs: "We'll need investigators who can work more according to an old medieval notion: that to observe nature's deeper secrets, you must personally strive to create 'eyes to see, ears to hear.'"
The Buddhist monks whose meditations raise their skin temperatures are not just performing a stunning biofeedback experiment but are, they tell us, practicing an inner science of compassion. The purpose of their inquiries into the body's most arcane chemistries is to transcend divisions between self and other, subject and object dualities that one Buddhist translation refers to as "primitive beliefs about reality." Similarly, physicists at Princeton's PEAR lab, whose experiments seem to indicate that mind may affect subatomic particles, have concluded there is now "a need on the part of science to soften the boundary between 'I' and 'not I.'"
The Buddhist monks, and increasingly some adventurous physicists, biologists, and doctors, represent a radical new model of science, one that does not posit inviolable distinctions between spirit and matter, perceiver and perceived. The new paradigm may well deem any models of reality that deny the intersubjectivity of existence to be fundamentally unscientific.
The glory of science has always been its commitment to "follow the data" on a quest for the unadorned, replicable, verifiable truth. But what if the data have begun leading us to a truth more marvelous than we, in our scientific "reality" of isolated egos, dead physical nature, and decoupled mind and body, have imagined?
Here at the close of the second millennium, sometime between the world-fragmenting fall from Babel and the Last Trump, we search for a unifying Theory of Everything, still ignorant—in some ways, willfully—of where we ourselves fit into the astonishing world of cells, particles, and parsecs we have discovered. Too often, perhaps, our measure of mind, body, and nature has been a little like pre-Columbian maps of a flat Earth: cutting off boundaries at the visible horizon, ignoring the Mercator projections of the soul, consigning the psyche's deeps and expanses to "Here Lie Dragons."
Medicine, once the crown jewel of reductionist scientism, has improbably opened up an unexpected vista. Its newly discovered mind-body pathways are leading to the largely unexplored terrain of the human spirit. We seem to suddenly be on the cusp of a moment foreseen by Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology: "I have conviction," he wrote, "that when Physiology will be far enough advanced, the poet, the philosopher, and the physiologist will all understand each other." Surely, the late Buckminster Fuller—syncretic thinker extraordinaire—would have understood. Asked where a proper investigation of the human condition should commence, he answered without hesitation: "You start with the universe."
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