Parker wrote the song above as a bitter commentary on the Vietnam war, but it serves as an accurate commentary on society in general. I was thinking about it the other day in reference to the disgusting artificial controversy over the mosque in New York.

The only reason that the controversy exists is because some people have been convinced that Islam is in some way a religion of terrorism and all Islamics are responsible for the World Trade Center attack. The fact that a number of American Islamics died in the attack is dismissed as unimportant. After all, Christians would never commit terrorist acts, so Islam must be special, right?

We have short memories, don’t we? One advantage of being older than dirt, in my grandkids terminology, is that I have a long memory. I remember the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland, which unfortunately have popped up again fairly recently. For those of you youngsters who don’t remember, just do a search on “northern Ireland terrorism” and see what you find.

What we’ve had there, for over 100 years, is Christian on Christian, Catholics versus Protestants. Although the Catholic IRA got most of the bad press, there were militant Protestant groups that fought back. This was a war on civilians, with car bombings, assassinations, attacks on shopping centers and other public gatherings. Many innocent people of both groups died. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

So does that mean that Catholics and Protestants are terrorist groups? There are many in the UK that thought so, one of many reasons that England is very irreligious. If it’s true that they’re terrorist groups, then isn’t it a problem that there are Christian churches even closer to the Trade Center site than the proposed Islamic Cultural Center?

Perhaps there’s a different explanation. Psychologists tell us that one of the most predictable characteristics of humans is the propensity to form groups and then create conflict between them. Us versus them. This can be merely amusing, as in football team rivalry, or it can lead to more serious consequences.

In Northern Ireland the groups are Catholic and Protestant but the conflict is not religious, it’s about political power. In the Middle East you see the same thing in the conflict between the Sunni and the Shiite – both Islam, but fighting over political power. In all these conflicts some members of both groups choose to use terrorism as a political weapon and justify it with religion. But that does NOT make the religion a terrorist organization! If it does, then we would have to label Christianity as a terrorist group, too.

The United States enshrined in its Constitution the idea that the government would be neutral on religion, specifically as a result of the founding fathers experiences with a state religion (Christianity) in Europe. As a result a wide variety of religions have flourished here freely and openly, adding a rich cultural mix to our country. I think it’s pretty funny that even today ignorant people, some with really loud voices, claim that we were founded as a Christian nation, when in fact the “freedom of religion” in the Constitution was put there to protect us from becoming a Christian nation.

The tendency to blame all of Islam for the actions of a political terrorist group is historically and intellectually repulsive. People from all religions and no religion have become terrorists. If we blame all of Islam for the World Trade Center we will be playing into the terrorist’s hands and slandering a whole group of mostly nice people who were just as horrified as anyone else in the US by those events.

As a side note, the most widely read poet in America is the 13th century Muslim scholar Rumi. Let’s not have short memories, eh?

It’s been interesting to follow the posts and comments on the Huffington Post’s Religion section recently. They’ve added a subject area of Science and Religion, as well as posts from a wide variety of religious traditions.

One things that I find interesting is that this Religion section has attracted a large number of atheist trolls, whose only contribution is to mock the articles and other people’s comments. (Note: “troll” is a term used in blogging and forums to refer to someone whose comments are designed to stir up anger and controversy, usually by condemning or insulting others, without adding anything to the discussion.) It’s a sad waste of energy.

The amusing part is that most of the trolls don’t even bother to read the post thoroughly, and so their snarky comments don’t even apply very well. Their most common assumption is that anyone writing about religion or spirituality must believe in a literal “old man in the sky” god and so that’s what they pick on. Or they pick on the historical sins and abuses of organized religion. In other words, low hanging fruit that doesn’t require them to actually think. Don’t they have anything else to do?

Anyway, I read a post today that pointed out that in fact all religions are not the same! As Louie said in Casablanca, “I’m shocked!” Even better, the post went on to point out that within each major western religion there exists a mystical tradition, and when the views of the mystics are compared we find that they are almost identical, not only with each other but with aspects of Eastern mystical traditions also.

Now this similarity is not new, it even has a name, The Perennial Philosophy, after the book of the same name by Aldous Huxley. The conclusion that we draw is that there is a transcendent aspect to reality that we can experience, and that the words we use about it may be dependent on our religious background, but the experience itself is the same.

When we look at this from a science viewpoint it makes perfect sense. We would expect that the closer we get to an accurate description of reality, the more similar the stories would be. So we can say that the differences in various religions are a measure of how far from being accurate they are.

This point, of course, was lost on the trolls. They are atheist fundamentalists, which means that they are right, everyone else is not only wrong but stupid, and we shouldn’t try to confuse them with facts. Too bad, because this transcendent aspect of reality is where consciousness and the physical world combine, and thus where we are likely to eventually connect science and spirituality. Physicists like Heisenberg and Bohm thought so, too.

I think that most of the Western world has seen Avatar by now, so I don’t think I’m going to ruin anyone’s experience by writing about it. But you can consider this a spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it.

I really enjoyed the movie on several levels. First, as a sci-fi adventure on a distant planet, it had all the juice. Strange creatures, mysterious dangers, astonishing special effects, lots of action and even a forbidden romance to top it off. Nobody’s gonna sleep through this movie.

Secondly, I had read about some interesting research the production team had done to guide them in the design of the aliens. It turns out there are things you can and cannot do with faces. The designers wanted faces that were human like, but distinctly alien, and found that there were some kinds of subtle changes that were perceived by people as frightening, repulsive or bizarre. So they had to consult with the latest science on the subject to find ways to make aliens that were empathetic, not disturbing. And they did.

And finally, I had heard that the plot was a thinly disguised environmentalist warning about the dangers of rampant exploitation of natural resources on a different planet much closer to home – Earth. And that was true, too. As someone who spends as much time in the outdoors as I can, I’m definitely sympathetic to that story line.

But not everyone is. And the reason that not everyone is as concerned about the environment has nothing to do with the facts or science. Let me explain.

I’m going to draw on the work of one of my personal favorite geniuses for this – Ken Wilber. Wilber developed an integral model of human development, which includes the idea of individual lines of development that proceed through levels of development. Different lines might includes such things as intellect, compassion, persistence, spirituality, empathy, determination, or other features. An individual can be on different levels for various lines of development.

One of the lines of development is what might be called “the circle of concern.” This is the composition of the group that matters to the individual at their particular level. We all start as infants at the level of concern for ourselves only. This circle widens as we get older to encompass more and more people.

But be clear about this – it is a growth in consciousness, not in knowledge! Knowledge is important but it does not determine consciousness. A brilliant scientist can find a cure for cancer or build better gas chambers. The circle of concern is very different.

Normally we grow to include our family in our circle of concern, then to include a social group or tribe, then perhaps our nation. This is as far as many people go.

But some go farther and include all of humankind in their circle, and perhaps then include all living creatures and the planet itself. Most people on Earth aren’t there yet, but a significant and growing segment of humanity is. It gave birth to the environmental movement.

You can see this divide in Avatar, where the aliens on Pandora are totally integrated into the planet and its ecosystem, while the invader’s circle of concern extends only to their own interests. It’s a vast gulf in consciousness.

You can see a similar divide right now in the public debate about climate science. The people at “nation” consciousness or below are fighting any attempt to take action on the climate by either denying the science or complaining that it’s too expensive and we can’t afford it. They express zero concern for the planet or other nation groups.

Movies like Avatar encourage people to expand their concern from their nation to the planet. But encourage is the operative word. You can’t brow beat or lecture people into higher consciousness. All you can do is invite them to “come on up!”

Trying to guilt someone into caring about the people in Bangladesh, or the Amazon rain forest, is hopeless if their circle of concern is too small. You have to show them how it will directly affect them for them to care. So that’s how you have to construct your arguments to be effective. Trying to make them care won’t work, no matter how emotionally compelling your story is.

In Avatar we get to watch several of the humans move into a planetary consciousness as they experience the life and people of Pandora. We know it can happen. As the movie sparks discussion it gives us the chance to invite people to a higher place. And that’s a good thing. What would you say your own circle of concern is?

Thanks to perceptive health journalist Alison Rose Levy I just found out about a conference held last week by Deepak Chopra and Rustum Roy that brought together scientists from a multitude of disciplines to discuss life at the frontiers of science.
One comment from her article that summed up the foundational conflict in the sciences today was this one:

‘Unfortunately, said Larry Dossey, “We’re up against an old science in which consciousness is local, finite, and physical with no direction, and no meaning. One prominent scientist called humans nothing but computers made of meat.”’

The battle between real science and the science that is blinded by the artificial division of Decartes continues, but eventually the truth will win out. As someone once said, “Science advances not discovery by discovery, but funeral by funeral.”

You can read Levy’s full article on the conference here:
http://healthjournalistblog.com/212
I recommend you do. It’s pretty interesting.

I’ve been reading a book from the Institute of Noetic Sciences – IONS – titled “Living Deeply.” It’s a study of the process of transformation in people’s lives, the kind of transformation that is life changing because it changes our consciousness, or our world view.

The authors define consciousness as how we perceive the world, including both our conscious and unconscious perceptions. Then they make this comment: “To a great extent, our worldview determines what we’re capable of seeing, and therefore determines our perception of reality.”

They illustrate this with an example from the life of Charles Darwin. As a young man Darwin hunted for fossils with a geologist, Adam Sedgwick, in the valleys and gorges which they thought had been created by the Biblical great Flood. Both of them completely missed the obvious signs of glacial activity all around them – the scratched rocks, the moraines, etc. Darwin later said that the signs were so conspicuous that they might as well have labels on them. It’s a great example of how even two observant scientists can miss the obvious if it doesn’t conform to their world view.

We see that today, as Dean Radin points out in “Entangled Minds”, when otherwise brilliant scientists insist that non-local properties of the mind are bogus, in spite of mountains of research to the contrary.

Of course, this effect on the theology side is also quite well documented. People can spout nonsense without even hearing themselves, so powerful is their world view. Here’s an example from our local paper, which runs articles from various preachers on Fridays. The writer was deploring “modern theology” for having departed from the Bible, which in his opinion was clear and easily understood by anyone who could read. He asserted:

“It would seem strange to any honest heart that a metaphorical sign would be used to confirm a reality. The truth of the matter is Jesus did die, was buried on Friday and rose on Sunday morning. Those who know and understand the Bible understand Jesus was in the grave for three literal days and three literal nights.”

In this case his world view, or consciousness, interfered with his ability to count to three. Since the Bible accounts tell us that Jesus was buried around sundown on Friday, and raised before dawn on Sunday, counting that as three literal days is a stretch. It’s only 48 hours. But, heck, it’s parts of three days, so we’ll let him stretch it. But there is no way to get three nights, and he seems oblivious of that fact!

That’s exactly the kind of world view induced blindness that Darwin suffered, and from which we all suffer. The ancient person who first noted that humility is a virtue had probably just gotten caught in it. It’s a reminder to bring “beginner’s mind” to every new idea.

“All successful men have agreed in one thing — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

At a news conference at the United Nations a few years ago, the 2006 Templeton Prize was awarded to John Barrow, a distinguished cosmologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England. The $1.4 million prize is given each year to a living person to honor the advancement of knowledge in spiritual matters.

In the course of his career, Barrow has tapped mathematics, physics and astronomy to raise interesting questions about time, space and matter to challenge both scientists and theologians to understand the universe.

In 1986, Barrow co-authored “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”, a ground breaking book that investigated anthropic principles across physics, chemistry, cosmology, astronomy, history and theology.

What is the “anthropic principle”, you might ask? Well, it’s the principle, first proposed by theoretical physicist Robert Dicke and later named by astrophysicist Brandon Carter, that the universe seems specifically designed to support carbon based life. If even small changes were introduced in any of the various constants of science – like the force of an electric charge, the attraction of gravity – the universe as we know it would not exist. And neither would we.

This original version is now know as the “Weak Anthropic Principle” since it really doesn’t make much of a statement by saying that the universe has to be the way it is or we wouldn’t be here to notice. However it has since been joined by three other versions that are much more interesting.

Carter also proposed the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the universe must have those properties that allow intelligent life to develop within it at some stage of its history. This was later joined by the Final Anthropic Principle that asserts that once intelligent life has developed it will never die out. These two, although science based, are considered more speculative.

The fourth one, though, is the one I consider the most interesting. It’s called the Participatory Anthropic Principle and it states that the universe had to develop intelligent life of some form because consciousness is required to bring the universe into physical existence.

It’s the observer effect on a grand scale, and advocated by some very prominent scientists. The late John Wheeler of Princeton, who said that we live in a “participatory universe” and his friend Andre Linde of Stanford who says “you cannot have the universe without an observer” are two of them.

So we, or beings like us, are necessary to have a universe made manifest. Wheeler believed that there might be sections of the cosmos that were still just probability clouds because no conscious observer had ever looked at them. So what does that mean for us?

In his acceptance speech, Barrow said, “Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely spiritual quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe – with order that can be understood and relied upon – emerged largely out of belief about the nature of God. Out of these beliefs came confidence that there was an unchanging order behind the appearances that was worth studying.”

Do you see the importance of that? It’s not just that the universe is friendly to conscious life forms like us. The universe is also logical and understandable by us, so we can learn how it works and make our lives better. The more we know, the more we thrive.

Some people still want to believe in chance and luck. If that was how it worked, we’d be powerless, wouldn’t we? How could we improve our lives in a world of random chance? No, like Emerson said, to be successful, we have to be causationists. The universe works by law, and it works by law because it’s founded at a deep level upon consciousness.

It’s not often that human society goes through a radical change in world view. In fact, that last time it happened was about 400 years ago. Then, as now, most people were completely oblivious to the transformation while it was happening but within just a few generations people were looking at the world quite differently.

At that time, of course, Copernicus, and after him Galileo, were demolishing the idea that the Earth was the center of the Universe. But that by itself was not the major change. The radical change was the invalidation of Scholasticism, in which truth was established by reference to the opinions of authority figures, and replaced by the process of observation and experiment, which we call the scientific method.

What was so important about this was that over time it changed the way everyone looked at truth, not just scientists. And it was made possible by the contribution of Descartes, who “solved” the Church/science conflict by proposing that science deals with matter, and the Church deals with spirit/mind, and they don’t overlap, therefore they don’t conflict.

So the Church could go its merry way as Scholastics, appealing to the authority of ancient mythic documents and the Church leadership, and the scientists (and the rest of society) could use observation and experiment.

But there was one hitch in this idea of parallel realms of truth, and that was the mind. It was declared by the Church to be a part of the soul, spiritual and intangible, untouchable by science. But it was declared by science to be nothing more than something that happens when a brain gets complicated enough. The mind was just an “epiphenomenon” arising out of the matter of the brain. The common thread in the beliefs of both the Church and science was that the mind and matter didn’t interact (unless it was a “miracle.”)

The duality of Decartes was maintained via these assumptions for almost 400 years. And for most science it worked quite well. We’ve learned a great deal about the physical universe using a strict materialist perspective. But starting about 100 years ago discoveries on the leading edge of physics began casting doubts on the ability of materialism to explain everything.

Enter the Observer……

You can see my previous post on Consciousness and Physics for a summary of what’s happened since. But I believe that we’re in the middle of a shift in world view that will not only unify science and mind, but eventually affect the way that all of society thinks in a radical transformation similar to the Copernican revolution. And that’s a good thing.

Thanks to Dean Radin for the link to this recent talk by Bernard Haisch on quantum physics and consciousness. Parts of it are more technical, but not excessively so. The talk is a video – about 30 min. I’d not heard about the Leggett experiment because it’s so relatively recent.

Society for Scientific Exploration

I was inspired to write this article by an exchange of comments on a science blog that I got involved with a while back. It reminded me of how similar people are regardless of their education and point of view, and how fundamentalist behavior can be found just about anywhere.

The discussion was started by a news item about the Texas School Board narrowly defeating an attempt by Young Earth creationists to force the teaching of science in Texas to include material that cast doubt on the scientific validity of evolution. It was a narrow margin for sure – a tie vote that kept the creationist amendment from passing.

The same week there was another news item reporting that the United Nations Human Rights group approved a proposal from a group of Islamist states to recommend that all criticism of religions be outlawed. The only religion mentioned by name was Islam.

Both of these items, plus the comments about them on the science blog, got me thinking about what fundamentalist thinking really is.  The term originated in the 1920’s in the USA from a conservative Protestant religious movement inspired by a small book called “The Five Fundamentals of the Faith.” Over the years it has come to be associated with the strict literal religious beliefs often practiced by that movement. But I’ve noticed that fundamentalist behavior can be found in any belief system, not just in religions, and it is marked by a few common characteristics.

The first characteristic is commitment to a set of basic beliefs which are not open to discussion. Usually in religions they are based on some sacred text or teachings, but they can come from anywhere. The important thing is that they are not open to discussion, other than the kind that says “I’m gonna show you what an idiot you are.”

A second characteristic is a strong intolerance for any other point of view. In fact, people holding other points of view are usually demonized as heathen, or evil, or just plain stupid, as I mentioned above.

A third characteristic is that fundamentalists do not want to associate with people holding other points of view, to the point where, in extreme cases, they actually want to kill them. This makes dialogue very difficult, to say the least. In the present day it seems that only Islamic fundamentalists are that way, but a brief tour through the history of Christianity and other belief systems would illustrate much of the same behavior. Fortunately most fundamentalists are not nearly that extreme, but they do usually choose to associate only with their own kind and as a result are not often exposed to other points of view.

Fourth, they are usually convinced that they are members of a special privileged group that has some kind of elite status either now or in the afterlife. This is what gives them the right to look down on or set straight everyone else. They have the truth, and they have the right to proclaim it. A great illustration of this attitude is a popular bumper sticker that reads, “God said it, I believe it, That settles it!”

Fifth, within any larger group of religions or secular associations, the fundamentalists are the most noticeable because they are the loudest and most insistent about their views. Because they are certain they are right and everyone else is a sinner or idiot, or both, they try to monopolize the debate around anything of importance to them. That can lead others to think that everyone in that larger group feels that way, when in fact it’s just a loud, opinionated, and sometimes dangerous minority.

We can see this last principle at work today in the news, since the Christian fundamentalists are very active in public affairs, such as the Texas school controversy and Republican Party politics. This can lead observers to conclude that all spiritually minded people are scientifically ignorant and rabid right wingers. Fortunately this is not true, as the many friends and fellow ministers (my wife is a minister) that we know would  attest. Our friends are mostly scientifically aware, and politically moderate and diverse. But quiet about it.

The same is true within the Muslim community. When we lived in Kansas City we had the opportunity to attend an interfaith dinner put on the local Muslims. They were a delightful group and quite disturbed by the bad rap that all Muslims were getting from the actions of the fundamentalists. The Muslims have a real PR problem here in the west because most Americans know little about Islam and its history and so have no way of evaluating the actions of the Islamic fundamentalists, some of whom are running countries with nuclear weapons. That’s rightfully a scary situation. And it’s these Islamic fundamentalists that want to prohibit public discussions of their actions. I can’t blame them. If my actions included some of the things they do in the name of God, like “honor killings” of women, I wouldn’t want to discuss them either! The important point is that they do not represent all Muslims, any more than Young Earth creationists represent all Christians.

I was kind of amused when I found that fundamentalism exists in the science community, too. When I participated in a discussion of the Texas school controversy on a science blog it was quickly apparent that some of the participants were convinced that all people who weren’t atheists were Christian fundamentalists. They didn’t appear to realize that there were millions of people with both a diversity of spiritual beliefs, and scientific expertise. They thought anyone who went to church was a Young Earth creationist. Their position was a very fundamentalist one – they were ignorant of other points of view, believed atheism was the only valid spiritual path and anyone not on it was an idiot. They saw themselves as superior and elite. Actually I thought it was pretty funny that these guys could believe that they were superior to fundamentalists by using fundamentalist behavior.

Since then I’ve seen signs of the same behavior among scientists when confronted with evidence that challenges materialism as the basis of science. There’s a community of self-proclaimed “skeptics” that are completely closed minded about consciousness, parapsychology, precognition and other mind-matter topics, regardless of the results of many well designed research projects that show significant results. This attitude was expressed by an  researcher quoted in one of the books I’ve been studying who, when asked about something in the parapsychology arena, said determinedly, “I don’t believe it’s true! And even if it was true, I still wouldn’t believe it!” That’s a fundamentalist position, for sure!

So, what’s the solution to this kind of conflict? I like the approach that Ken Wilber took. He tells of making a breakthrough in his synthesis of a “theory of everything” when, instead of trying to figure out who was right and who was wrong, he realized that everybody was right, about something. If we can remember to approach every difference of opinion from the place of looking to see where the other person is right about something, we’ll not only learn things we might have missed, we’ll also contribute to harmony. People love to be heard, and to have their opinions valued. We can do that without having to agree with everything they say.

In science, for the last 200 years the dominant belief underlying the description of the universe has been materialism – the belief that the universe’s basic structure is matter and everything that exists has developed from matter blindly following natural laws of evolution. This includes human consciousness and our inner sense of self, which are seen as illusions created when the brain gets complex enough. But there are real problems with the materialist view that remain ignored or unsolved.

The most well known of these problems comes from quantum mechanics, and it’s called the observer effect. In quantum theory, which has been verified many, many times, the smallest parts of matter, and also light, only exist as waves of probabilities until they are observed or measured. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but it creates a problem for the materialists. If consciousness is an accidental result of a complex brain (an “epiphenomenon”) then why is it seemingly a central causative agent in physics? Recent experiments have made this problem worse as experimenters have shown quantum effects on larger and larger pieces of matter, such as big carbon “buckyballs.”

Another challenge to materialism has come from experiments demonstrating the nonlocal properties of mind; that is, the ability of mind to act on matter at a distance. This is best demonstrated by the ongoing results of the Global Consciousness Project, started at Princeton University. Originated by Robert Jahn and carried on by Roger Nelson, this project uses a Random Event Generator that is based on a quantum event. In essence, a computer looks at the REG at regular intervals to see if the event, which is completely random, has happened. It’s like a quantum coin flip happening many times per second, and over time should be equally heads and tails.

Experiments with individuals, and later with group meditations, showed that they could cause significant deviations in the statistical pattern. In addition, a worldwide network of REGs has shown responses to significant world events including Princess Diana’s funeral and the 9/11 attack.

Enter the “new” theory, which can be simply described as asserting that the material universe is made from consciousness. This viewpoint has been popularized by a Discover magazine article a few years ago titled “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” In it, the author quoted eminent physicist John Wheeler as saying, “We are not bystanders on the cosmic stage, but shapers and creators living in a participatory universe” and Stanford physicist Andre Linde as saying, “I can’t imagine a theory of everything that ignores consciousness.”

Today the challenges to materialism from scientists are becoming hard to ignore. In addition to Wheeler and Linde, theoretical physicist Amit Goswami has written “The Self Aware Universe” which I consider the best complete analysis of physics, consciousness and spirituality that I’ve found. Recently eminent medical doctor and researcher Robert Lanza and astronomer Bob Berman published “Biocentrism” with again the central thesis that the universe is created by consciousness.

This conflict is not new; the deficiencies of materialism have bothered some scientists for the last century. For example, Max Planck, the father of quantum theory has said, “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force…We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Planck sounds very much like Charles Fillmore who wrote in 1936, “Divine Mind is the one and only reality..Everything in the universe had its origin in Mind… The idea is the most important factor in every act…Men formulate thoughts and thoughts move the world.”

We can see from these quotes that both science and the “perennial” spirituality are converging on a description of reality that centers on consciousness, on Mind.