Science Meets Religion Healing Spirit and the Scientific Paradigm Shift Is Religion Just Superstition? Natural Health Science and Religion: Is Dawkins right? Jung and the Collective Unconscious The God Confusion The Wisdom of the Trees A World Without Music Envisioning the Holistic Roots The material brain, the human soul and the cosmic spirit Living in a Spiritual World NDEs, OBEs and the Divine Spirit A New Look at the Philosophy of Education Medicine and Healthcare Spirituality and Religion The Fifth Dimension or God Without Religion

Science meets religion


If we were to ask someone the question: What unique feature makes us distinctively human?, most people would answer that it is our ability to reason and to express our thoughts through language. Yet the world is torn apart today by those who act only through emotion – a lust for power or belief in a man-made social structure we call religion.

If we are to find harmony amongst humankind, the time has come to put religion and the scripture on which it is based on a rational footing, and to cultivate a sense of our global connectedness spiritually as well as commercially. Some scripture represents a body of myths, traditions and rituals handed down through many generations. Other texts are the edited versions of the inspired insights of one man as to how we may best live a fulfilling life as individuals in social harmony. All scripture was created for a particular group of people at a particular time and place in social history.

What scripture does not represent is a unilateral and unequivocal version of truth that must be accepted by all people worldwide throughout all human history. What we regard as ‘faith’ is an emotional attachment to a particular set of principles. We have no reason to reject anyone else’s chosen path to fulfillment, unless it infringes on our freedom.

Humankind, since the dawn of our species as far as we are aware, has had a vision of a spiritual realm beyond that accessible to us through our five senses. They saw gods amongst the awesome power of the elements of Nature. They built temples and huge stone monuments like Stonehenge to these gods in the hope that they may look upon them favourably and make their lives less arduous. Sometimes the rocks and rivers themselves were deemed to have a mystic power, like Ayers Rock in Western Australia or the rock formations of Sedona in the American state of Arizona.

Mountains reached up to these sky-gods, so there was physical and spiritual closeness to deity to be found on the mountain tops. Thus in western scripture we are told that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai; Jesus went up into Mt. Hermon for his transfiguration; and Muhammad went up into the hills above Mecca to receive the words of Archangel Gabriel that became the Koran. Such high ground is a symbol of humankind’s belief that there is a ‘higher’ spiritual domain that exists above and beyond the earthly material existence of which our five senses are aware.

The spiritual messengers were often described as angels though, today, scientists and lay people alike tend to regard talk of ‘angels’ with extreme scepticism and regard such visions as fantastic nonsense.

Many of our religions of East and West, however, have a similar spiritual imagery as the focus of their faith. We have the Holy Spirit in Christianity, the Schechinah in the mystical belief system of Judaism; and in the East, Atman is the Hindu vision of the spiritual breath of Brahman, and the Universal Mind carries over the karma of one incarnation to the next for Buddhists. What is ‘soul’ but a tiny part of this cosmic spirituality within each of us? We express the feelings of our soul in religious devotion, in our altruistic concern for the welfare of others, and in the aesthetic part of our being through our enjoyment of music, literature or the beauty of Nature.

Shunning any notion of divine revelation, the rationalist philosophers through two millennia have envisaged this same spiritual domain in their own contexts. Thus, Plato thought that there were Ideas or Forms that provided the templates from which we derived our earthly notions. The English philosopher John Locke thought that there was a ‘real essence’ inaccessible to our senses that lay behind the ‘nominal essence’ of objects. The nominal essence was the collection of the properties we observed with our senses that allowed us to give names to things.

This concept of spirituality is not restricted in application just to individual people or things. German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel thought that there was a spirituality characteristic of every society that he called Geist. This caused people to act in unison at certain times to a much greater extent than would be expected from the statistically diverse range of human opinions and feelings. We have seen this in Britain in the huge political swings of the electorate in the 1979 and 1997 elections. We saw it in the outpouring of grief at the tragic death of Princess Diana.

The twentieth century psychologist Carl Jung thought that there was a ‘collective
unconscious’ that caused people to act in this way. Jung described two or more events occurring at the same time without causal connection (in the scientific sense) as synchronicity. Thoughts and feelings were transmitted through this spiritual domain from one individual to another. This communal empathy was described by the spiritual writer Peter Russell as synergy, and James Redfield, in his Celestine books, borrowed Jung’s term synchronicity to describe it.

In the wake of the revolution in physics in the early part of the twentieth century there is now even amongst a range of scientists a gradual realization that the foundations for a rational scientific explanation for psychic and spiritual phenomena may now lie within our grasp.

For several decades past, Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been investigating psychic phenomena and explaining some of his experimental results in terms of what he calls ‘morphic fields’ – essentially, a domain of spiritual energy to which we all have access for telepathic or empathic communication.

This is the realm with which psychics and mystics commune. It is the realm of individual souls of the living and the earthly departed, and of the Communal Soul of the

collective unconscious. It is indistinguishable from the spiritual domain of the philosophers, psychologists – and theologians!

Here surely is the basis for dialogue between warring ideologies. Many have this vision of a universal spirituality. All we need is the will to live in peace and not pursue the

belief that force of arms can change others with a different world-view and compel them to submit. If we are to achieve world peace, reason and dialogue must prevail!

Published in the Western Mail, Cardiff, Wales, UK, Wednesday 24th January 2007

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Healing spirit and the scientific paradigm shift

Developments in science over the last century have provided us with the realistic possibility of explaining spiritual and psychic phenomena in terms of rational science.Phenomena like spiritual healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, mystical vision and

communication with spirits in the afterlife, so long rejected by most scientists, are becoming increasingly the focus of experimental study.

If the still rather speculative ideas can be further substantiated, this will give immense comfort to the bereaved and to those nearing the end of earthly existence. It will also provide authentication of many of the practices familiar to indigenous peoples since the

evolution of our species, but which are still regarded with suspicion, if not rejected outright, by Establishment science, religion and medicine.

In living today we have become too attached to Establishment systems, perhaps because in enriching our lives with diversity they have also become more complicated. In many facets of our lives it is expected that we will follow established procedures – or perhaps, these simply represent the easiest, most readily available solutions.

If we are ill, it is expected that we will go to an orthodox medical practitioner to be

treated with government-approved synthetic drugs. If we have beliefs it is assumed that we will ‘belong to’ a formal organised religion.

When we seek knowledge, we turn to the empirical discoveries of science, because we have come to rely on the fact that each new observation will be fitted into an established theoretical framework. This way of looking at the world on the basis of a set of accepted principles scientists call a paradigm.

From time to time over the past four centuries of scientific exploration of the natural world, there has been a monumental shift in the existing paradigm. The medieval belief of Earth as the centre of the universe was replaced by the discoveries of Copernicus that Earth was just one of a number of planets revolving around a sun. We cannot conceive today what a huge shift in world-view this must have been for the scholars of the day, and it certainly met with great resistance from the Church.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, there was another monumental paradigm shift. The laws that governed the behaviour of objects in the material world, which had been established in the seventeenth century by Galileo and Isaac Newton, were found not to apply to the constituent particles of which those same material objects were

made up. These fundamental particles or atoms were not even indivisible and indestructible as had been believed for over two thousand years, and the strange behaviour of the constituents of atoms created the new paradigm of quantum physics.

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At first, even the physicists themselves couldn’t believe the findings of quantum physics because so often they seemed to defy the laws of common sense – like particles appearing successively in two different places without crossing the space between, or particles that behaved as particles only some of the time but then disappeared into waves of energy.

Gradually, this new world-view has provided explanations for events, not only in physics but in chemistry, in biochemistry and now even in realms previously consideredoutside the remit of science – that of psychic and mystical experiences.

So the new paradigm itself appeared a century ago. What is new now is an extension of its field of application that offers the possibility of bringing together ideas from philosophy, psychology, religion and science. We have heard much about the conflict between the world-views of science (objective rational empiricism) and religion (subjective divine revelation), and we are all too aware of the turmoil that is created by differences in outlook between different religions.

But we cannot thrive on conflict. We all live in the same universe, and the many faiths and reason cannot exist in parallel worlds, speaking different languages. The Earth is undergoing a transformation as a result of Man’s activity, and we must transformourselves with it. We need to heal the wounds we have created in Earth and in humankind.

The healing we need applies to our secular lives as well as to the religious, and on three fronts – individual, social and environmental. Individually, more and more people are falling victim to the addiction of alcohol or food. Obesity is now rated as a national epidemic in Britain and America. For several decades now, society has been indoctrinated by the advertising industry to want more and more material goods.

The whole purpose of advertising is to create envy and discontent, to make us feel inadequate or inferior if we do not have possessions on a par with those of our neighbours or work colleagues. We, and others, measure our success not by ourfulfilment at service to other people but by the goods we possess.

The third area of healing needing our attention is the natural environment. Our capitalist economic system is based on ‘growth’, and that means encouraging us all to buy more and more each year and to make equipment inoperable or obsolete as soon as possible. But all these manufacturing processes require energy and raw materials and, however ingenious we may be in finding new processing techniques, Earth’s finite limited resources are rapidly being used up.

The potentially unifying and healing aspect of the new scientific paradigm that I want to focus on here is the notion of Spirit. As I said above, the bits of atoms that behave like particles some of the time can also melt away into a sea of energy: and what is Spiritbut a field of cosmic energy?

Two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Plato suggested that all of our worldly concepts were a reflection of Ideas or Forms that served as our templates and which existed in a spiritual realm. The greatest of the Ideas was the Form of the Good, which is a simplistic vision of the God of western religion.

Another philosopher called Plotinus saw his deity as a spiritual World Soul. All we can know of the world of matter, said Plotinus, is what is in our mind: this is the only reality – which sounds very like something out of the religious philosophies of the East.

Religions of both East and West have a spiritual vision of deity. In Christianity, it is called the Holy Spirit. The Kabbalah, the mystical division of Judaism, describes the spiritual emanation of deity as the Schechinah, and she is often viewed as feminine. In Hinduism, Atman is regarded as the breath of their deity Brahman, while in Buddhism there is a Universal Mind to carry over the karma of each incarnation to the next. What is it that Spiritualist mediums commune with if not the spirits or souls of those who have departed earthly life? Other philosophers of the Enlightenment had their own visions of this spiritual domain. John Locke thought that behind the ‘nominal essence’ of each object – the collection of properties that caused us to give the object its name – there lay a ‘real essence’, forever unknown to our five senses. German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Locke’s real essence the noumenal dimension of the world lying behind the phenomenal aspect accessible to our five senses.

The psychologist Carl Jung, who was a firm believer in the reality of the spiritual component of existence, proposed that a ‘collective unconscious’ was part of the mind or spirit of every individual. We transmitted ideas, said Jung, through this spiritual dimension. The most persistent ideas, of symbolic significance in human life and recurring within many of the myths of religion, he called archetypes.

Philosophers, theologians, psychologists – all have had a vision of this spiritual domain relevant to the subject in which they were working. Now, quantum science has a concept that could explain rationally the nature of this all-pervading cosmic spirit.

Every particle of every atom continually pops in and out of material existence by

alternating the nature of its being with a packet of wave energy, in accordance with Einstein’s famous E = mc2 mass–energy relation.. This energy is called the zero point field, or z.p.f. for short. It fills in the spaces between the bits of the atom.

Our body, and especially our brain and spinal cord, is a mass of electric currents that travel not only along these nerves but also along the proteins that make up our tissues and the DNA that characterises our cells. Nobel Prizewinner Albert Szent-Györgyi was the first to suggest this half a century ago and now the mobility of these electric particles (called electrons) has been established by scientists, together with the activity of biophotons (light waves behaving as particles in the body). Where we have moving electrons, we also have a magnetic field.

We are a mass of such electromagnetic energy fields. We should not be surprised therefore if we find that some people are particularly susceptible to electronic equipment or overhead power cables. The z.p.f. is not only within every material atom of our bodies and of the air we breathe, of every plant and animal, of every mountain and river, it is also out in space, where it is more commonly referred to as the quantum vacuum. The halo of the z.p.f. around our bodies comprises the aura that can be detected by some sensitives.

When a clairvoyant ‘predicts’ the future, they are tuning in to this quantum vacuum that forms part of a continuum of space and time. Spiritual healers channel the energy from this same cosmic energy field into the chi of the patient through the chakras. Empathic people communicate their thoughts by telepathy through this spiritual energy field that Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls a morphic field. We have all gazed in awe and wonder at the myriad stars in the night sky, but cosmologists tell us that most of our universe is unknown to us in our mortal lives for it is undetectable by the appliances of science: they say it is made up of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ engaging in their own cosmic dance.

It may be that this is the domain of those who have left material earthly existence to transform into spiritual souls, but capable of assuming material form, as testified to by some mediums.

What this new scientific paradigm of quantum physics tells us is that the zero point field
is everywhere, in everything, at all times, and it is indistinguishable from Jung’s collective unconscious or the Holy Spirit or Atman, or Communal Soul. It is the all-pervading motivating Spirit of the universe. What a unifying healing vision this would be if only we could all embrace it.

Published in Healing Today, the magazine of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, Issue 108, May-July 2007 (www.nfsh.org.uk)

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Is religion just superstition?


Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford has taken issue with religion for some years now, the argument being that if we cannot subject religious experiences to the rigour of scientific double-blind tests, then it must be rejected as ‘superstitious nonsense’. Dawkins maintains that religion is an enemy of reason and the root of all evil as well.

Science has made the progress it has because similar experiments on similar materials are supposed to give identical results at different times and places. In practice however, there are always ‘experimental errors’ and human errors that have to be taken into account. Equipment doesn’t always behave in exactly the same way. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli was renowned for the disruptive effects he had on measuring equipment in any laboratory he visited, and some measuring apparatus can be sensitive to electromagnetic fields and humidity.

Furthermore, scientists of course are human and we are subject to the same errors and emotions as everyone else. It’s always satisfying when an experiment turns out exactly the way we planned, so we are all looking for a particular outcome, however objective and professional we try to be. The security in science comes from the repeatability of an experiment by different people.

Science has developed a technique for trying to eliminate human bias in assessing results and that is through what we call ‘the double blind test’. The double-blind test has become the standard scientific method of testing the validity of empirical evidence. The principle is that a neutral observer assigns numbers to some test materials or subjects and that neither the experimenters themselves nor the assessors of the results, nor the subjects themselves very often, know the identities of the subjects or the exact nature of the test until all the results have been analysed. Only then are the identities of the subjects disclosed, or patients are told whether or not they have received a drug or placebo, so that the success of the experiment can be evaluated impartially.

Religious experiences are most difficult to assess in this way. The subject knows whether or not they have had such an experience – there is no possibility of keeping them in the dark as to the nature of the trial, and the assessment of a mystical event has to be highly subjective, by its very nature. The affirmation of mystical events comes mainly from the fact that different people at different times and places have similar experiences – as is the case in a more restricted way with scientific experiments.

Also, just as herbal medicine has been established through thousands of years of successful use (probably with many calamities along the way in the early years!), so any claimed revelation or mystical experience has to be judged by its coherence and social value. Taking a completely pragmatic approach we have to ask: are the claims reasonable and do they work in practice for the enlightenment of the individual and cohesion of society?

In the pluralistic modern world, where we are all aware of many more faiths than that with which we were brought up by our parents, we are able to make choices – we can change our religious adherence to another faith, or to hold fast to a cosmic spirituality as our faith but to dispense with the dogma of a formal religion. This is what many within Britain are now doing. It provides a much more holistic world-view than if we insist on the veracity of any one set of religious principles. Inevitably, this implies that everyone else is wrong in their beliefs. An ancient eastern philosopher recommends that we

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Find enlightenment through heeding many points of view
Find ignorance through heeding few

Wei Zheng, Tang Dynasty

Making choices as to which religion most closely accords with our world-view and the life we wish to lead is using reason in assessing the claims of revelation by the prophets or seers. This is far removed from superstition, which is defined as ‘irrational belief in supernatural agency without evidence’.

Furthermore, we are not so much believing in a supernatural agency as believing that the words of one particular man contain a wisdom that we would benefit from following, whether those words represent divine revelation or not. And it is usually men who have served as prophets of the major world religions though, in the nineteenth century, Mary Baker Eddy claimed inspiration from the New Testament to found the Christian Science movement and Helena Blavatsky wrote her book The Secret Doctrine, under the guidance of her spirit guides Morya and Hoot Koomi, that provided the foundations of theosophy. In the East, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu and Kung Fu Tzu never claimed any kind of supernatural revelation for their wisdom.

There is ample evidence, some of it gathered under stringent scientific criteria, of the occurrence of events that are classed together as psychic events or psi. The most studied are forms of telepathy and Guy Lyon Playfair has written authoritatively on the subject in his book, Twin Telepathy. But there are numerous anecdotal accounts of clairvoyance or of contact with discarnate souls that have been verified as genuine by those concerned.

We are dealing here with evidence of individual human experiences and we cannot sensibly apply the same sort of criteria of verification and repeatability that we would do in science for experiments with test tubes or lumps of rock. Even when we turn to experiments with animals or animal tissues, there is much greater variability in results than when we examine inert materials. How much greater then must we expect variability to be when we deal with human subjects with their range of daily emotional experiences.

The potential energy field that underlies all matter at the quantum level has been suggested by several scientists as the medium through which psychic and mystical communication may occur. It is a concept that has been suggested in other fields of human endeavour, such as psychology and philosophy.

Carl Jung believed that the recurrence of certain mythical images he called archetypes, like an incarnate son of a sky god who is resurrected after death, takes place because humans possess a collective unconscious for the exchange of images through space and time. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake called a similar spiritual domain the morphic field.

The idea goes back to the dawn of human articulation of such ideas amongst the Greek philosophers. Plato believed that human concepts had their origin in a domain of the gods he called the Forms or Ideas. Our earthly concepts were a reflection of those held in the realm of a universal spirit.

Thus many people use reason in arriving at their religious beliefs. The spiritual dimension is an integral part of the human psyche and an all-pervading spiritual field of energy forms the ground of quantum physics. This is not superstition!

This essay was first published in the Tree of Life magazine in autumn 2007 (www.treeoflifemagazine.com) and a reworked version on the same theme was published in De Numine, the magazine of the Alister Hardy Society No.44 in Spring 2008 (www.studyspiritualexperiences.org).

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Natural health


In the Summer 2007 issue of the Action Against Allergy Newsletter, a medical practitioner in Bournemouth UK, Dr John Millward, made several valid points about the attitude of the medical profession to disease and to nutrition. In May of 2006, a group of physicians and scientists in Britain sent a letter to the chief executives of health trusts urging them to reject alternative medical treatments as ‘unproven or disproved’. In addition to being circulated within the NHS, the letter was also sent to Prince Charles, a known advocate of the use of alternative therapies.

Regrettably, the Oxford zoologist Professor Richard Dawkins has now extended his attack on religion to include alternative therapies as equally vacuous. We certainly need to be protected from bogus practitioners selling ‘snake oil’, but genuine therapists have a very real part to play in therapy of those who have some kind of biochemical or physiological imbalance that makes them feel less than well.

In orthodox ‘scientific’ medical practice there were 40,000 errors in drug administration in British hospitals in 2005 alone (National Patient Agency, 10 August 2006).

In America, there are approximately 7,000 deaths each year due to medication errors (www.amcp.org) , and the FDA states that there is at least one death each day and 1.3 million people injured each year due to medication errors (www.fda.org).

A professor of psychology at the University of California, Theodore Roszak, believes that much of the physical and mental illness prevalent in society today can be traced to a loss of spiritual connection with our natural environment and stress and pollution – particularly from alcohol and tobacco smoke – undoubtedly make a significant contribution.

It is also assumed incorrectly that the whole population has adequate nutrition. As Dr Millward said, it has been known for more than a century that deficiencies in certain trace elements or vitamins can produce debilitating disease.

One of those who first raised concerns about the quality of our food was Weston A. Price (1870-1948), a dentist who ran a practice in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early years of the 20th century. He gave this up in the early 1930s to travel the world with his wife exploring the lifestyles of native peoples who had not yet had their ecologically sound holistic existence disrupted by the intrusion of western capitalism.

He collected food samples from native diets and analyzed them in his laboratory. His findings, published in 1939, showed levels of micronutrients four to ten times that of foodstuffs in the American diet of the time.

Price’s work inspired the nutritionist Sally Fallon to set up her own organization, the Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington, D.C., and she has updated Price’s findings in a book of her own (Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing, Winona Lake, Indiana, revised 2nd edn, 2001).

Graham Harvey pointed out in his book, We Want Real Food (Constable, London, 2006), that the liberal use of agrochemicals has impoverished the soil to such an extent that plants are often unable to extract minerals from the soil, even if they are there. We need some university medical team to launch an epidemiological study of the levels of nutrients in the population in various parts of the country.

Pharmaceutical drugs have saved countless lives and reduced much suffering throughout the last century. But they should be used sparingly and alternative naturopathic remedies sought wherever possible, because the strain imposed on the immune system by the toxicity of these drugs can make patients more susceptible to adverse reactions to other xenobiotics (compounds not part of the body’s natural biochemical system). The overall load of these compounds can be more than the body can sustain.

The apparent association of autism and Crohn’s disease with MMR vaccination may well arise from such inability of the body’s immune system to cope with raising antibodies to three diseases at the same time. It would be surprising if we did not find some children who did not react adversely.

Many older people find they cannot tolerate the annual ‘flu vaccine for the same reason. Dr Millward’s suggestion of a nutritional deficiency as a factor in autism should also be taken seriously and investigated.

There are naturopathic alternatives available in health food stores all over the country that may be effective in treating some of the population’s common ailments.

The family of drugs called statins is very popular with doctors at present for reducing cholesterol levels in the blood and, provided the patient is able to metabolize them, they are quite effective. Statins work by inhibiting the production of cholesterol in the liver, most of all at night, but they also inhibit one of the body’s key metabolic agents, co-enzyme Q10. Statins frequently produce insomnia, myalgia (muscle pain in the legs or arms), and shortness of breath as side effects and can even damage muscle tissue (myopathy). When the patent was first granted for the use of statins it was recommended that doctors prescribe co-Q10 at the same time, to minimize their adverse effects, but this seems to be done only rarely.

There is a gentle herbal alternative to statins available and that is to use spreads, yoghurts or tablet supplements containing plant sterols and stanols. Plant stanols are also available in capsule form. In the human diet they appear to lower the undesirable LDL cholesterol while leaving the desirable HDL cholesterol unaffected.

Antioxidants like vitamin C, vitamin E, the flavonoids and xanthones also seem to have a beneficial effect in inhibiting atherosclerotic plaque formation. Vitamin C is to be found in all fresh fruit and vegetables. You can find flavonoids in citrus fruit, vegetables (especially onions), legumes and green tea, or again in capsule form if desired. Vitamin E is obtained from wheat germ and sunflower seeds and mangosteen is the best source of xanthones.

While cholesterol levels may well be an important factor aggravating arteriosclerosis (blocked blood vessels), there are other compounds, like homocysteine, the blood concentration of which is believed to be even more important, but this is never measured routinely.

High protein diets, especially those that include much red meat, tend to produce elevated homocysteine levels, which are known to be detrimental to health.

The usual treatment prescribed for osteoarthritis is to take pain-killers, as Lynne McTaggart says in her book, What Doctors Don’t Tell You: ‘Conventional medicine tends to take the view that there is no known cause or cure for arthritis, so all it can do with certainty is to alleviate your pain’ (McTaggart, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, Thorsons, London and San Francisco, 1996). These drugs all have damaging effects.

Paracetamol can be taken in only limited quantities because of its toxic effect on the liver. The non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) all produce irritation of the gut. The American FDA estimates that there may be up to a quarter of a million cases of gastric bleeding from use of NSAIDs each year, while in Britain about 4000 people die from taking NSAIDs each year.

Again, there is a naturopathic alternative. The natural compound glucosamine, taken with fish oils containing omega-3 fatty acids, may prove to be a safe and simple alternative in the treatment of osteoarthritis.

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There are some powerful allopathic drugs (like finasteride) available to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH – an enlarged prostate gland leading to difficulty with urination) that is common in men in later life, but all of them frequently produce some rather nasty side-effects. The gentle natural compound saw palmetto is just as effective with, generally, only mild or no side-effects.

Readers should note however that orthodox medical opinion is sharply divided on the treatment of BPH because such treatment may mask prostatic cancer. However, there is no reliable method of assessing prostate cancer, and the two basic treatments – surgery or radiotherapy – frequently result in impotence or incontinence or both, with no convincing evidence that such radical measures prolong life.

There have been quite extensive clinical trials on humans for the past decade or so on the use of extracts of Ginkgo biloba for the treatment of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and poor circulation. With fewer clinical trials so far, the xanthones from mangosteen have also proved to be effective.

The staff at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Boston, MA, have conducted research into mangosteen over the past decade. The results have been positive and side effects are generally few – mild headaches or gastrointestinal upsets. This is another example where a gentle herbal remedy may obviate the need to use more toxic synthetic pharmacological compounds.

There are undoubtedly health benefits from food sources rich in anti-oxidants, though there are also some more wary researchers, like Dr Ralph Moss who has published what he calls a friendly skeptical look at mangosteen (http://chetday.com/mangosteen.htm).

The overall guiding principle is to eat healthily with as much fibre, fruit and vegetables as your system can tolerate and to avoid completely if possible tobacco products, alcohol and any other synthetic ‘recreational’ drugs that are, in fact, even more toxic than many of the pharmaceutical preparations.

The bottom line is: Enjoy your food and take naturopathic medications to restore the balance if this has become disturbed!

Dr Jones is the author of The Tao of Holism, published by O Books early in February 2008. A fuller discussion of the above issues, with extensive references, may be found there.

A modified version of this article first appeared in the Action Against Allergy Newsletter No.91 for Winter 2007 (www.actionagainstallergy.co.uk).

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Science and Religion: Is Dawkins Right?

Report of lecture given by Howard Jones at University of Wales, Lampeter, published in De Numine, the newsletter for the members of the Alister Hardy Society.

On 28 May 2008, Dr Howard Jones, author of The Thoughtful Guide to God: Making Sense of the World's Biggest Idea and The Tao of Holism, spoke to us on Science and Religion: Is Dawkins Right?

An immediate impression Dr Jones gives as a speaker is of quiet authority and broad grasp, and he soon proved himself no narrow scientist. Surveying the history of scientific discovery within a succinct exposition of its evolving cultural context, he was even able to illustrate this breadth with an account from his own life. Like Kekulé, Howard solved a long-standing problem of biochemistry whilst in a meditative state, in this instance whilst listening to Bruckner's eighth symphony. Einstein, too, tells us that he conceived his theories by a picturing imagination rather than by verbal analysis.

As Howard reminded us at the beginning of his talk, some of our most significant scientific discoveries emerged out of the same process of envisioning which is the wellspring of dreams, meditation and creativity, from the deep recesses beneath our full consciousness upon which consciouness rides. This being so, Dawkins is out of step with his own community. Chris Clarke, Rupert Sheldrake, Ervin Laszlo and others have shown that quantum physics has altered our perception not only of the universe 'out there' but also of our own consciousness, and there are many ways of knowing that embrace both objective and subjective, the scientific and the spiritual.

Dawkins' views on religion are well known to some of his hearers but Howard had the task of speaking to an audience largely unknown to him. However, he succeeded in showing not only the irrationality of Dawkins' antagonism towards religion and his lack of philosophical grounding but also that, whilst Dawkins professes to be a 'card-carrying rationalist', in reality he lives more by a kind of faith than by reason. Dawkins ought to be well-equipped, and sufficiently informed, to understand what he scorns, but seems instead to believe that complacent ignorance and dogmatic assertion are sufficient to obliterate 'the world's biggest idea'.

The lecture showed a clarity of exposition, of delivery, of form, which was a relief and a pleasure but, limited by the clock, left us wishing to hear more on certain topics within its broad perspective. Howard demonstrated the holism he preaches, for the lecture was itself a whole, like a well-formed symphony.

At question time the comprehensiveness of Howard's grasp of subject and his urbane manner were demonstrated again. Unknown to many of us, one of his questioners had followed him from venue to venue intending to undermine his views and support those of Dawkins, an action which bespeaks the great strength of the holistic interpretation of what it is to be human which Howard was advocating. He handled the critic, who thought his lecture important enough to follow him to Lampeter, with humour and tact.

I'm pleased to report that we're to have the pleasure of hearing Howard again at the next Residential Conference for The Body MA at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His topic will be Envisioning the Holistic Way, and he plans to speak on how we arrived at our unholistic lifestyle following Newton, Descartes and Laplace, and what we might do, both as individuals and as a society, to get back on the holistic path. All will be welcome.

Dr Maureen Lockhart, Lecturer and Tutor, The Body MA, University of Wales, Lampeter. Website: www.studyspiritualexperiences.org.

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Jung and the collective unconscious



Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist who was brought up in a family background that included medical men, preachers and mystics. Jung was born in the small village of Kesswil, on the shores of Lake Constance in Switzerland, but before Carl was four, the family moved to Basel where Jung’s paternal grandfather, a respected physician, became Rector of Basel University.

Jung’s father was a Protestant pastor. His maternal grandfather was also a theologian but one who had a deep interest in the occult. His cousin, Hélène Preiswerk, was a medium and details of her seances were to form part of Jung’s Doctoral thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Experiences. This family background of spiritualism, theology and medicine was to shape Jung’s future career path and his world view.

Because his mother was rather emotionally unstable, the family home was far from providing him with a happy relaxed atmosphere. This drove young Carl within himself, which was not necessarily a bad thing for this introverted, introspective personality served him well in adulthood in understanding the minds of others as he had been driven to understand himself. He was much more at home in the personal world of dreams, day-dreams and mystical visions than in the external world of real people.

Jung’s first academic paper was presented to a student debating society at Basel University. It was called ‘On the Limits of the Exact Sciences’ and in this he criticized orthodox science for its inflexible materialism and reductionist approach.

At the start of his professional career Jung worked with Freud for six years, but then differences emerged in their approach to analysis which demanded that they go their separate ways.

Jung did share the views of Freud and Adler about the importance of the unconscious, but his views were rather different. Jung, like Freud, accepted the importance of the unconscious mind in shaping the development of the personality but, expanding on the ideas of Freud, Jung suggested a four-fold division of functions of the mind.

Jung defined the preconscious and conscious divisions of the mind in much the same way as Freud, but considered that the unconscious comprised two separate and distinct components. He defined the personal unconscious, which includes repressed wishes that are socially unacceptable and traumatic experiences, corresponding to the ‘unconscious’ of Freud’s first analysis of mind function. But then Jung postulated another division of mind called the collective unconscious.

It was Jung’s belief that we all have a predisposition to act in well defined ways under a particular set of circumstances. The reason we do this, he maintained, is because certain intuitive images are passed from each generation to the next, and even from one culture to another. These patterns of action or primordial images appeared in dreams or imaginings and found practical expression with recurrent themes found in myths, legends and rituals of many indigenous tribal groups whose spirituality had not been corrupted by technological advances.

He called these patterns of behaviour archetypes, which he defined as ‘a priori, inborn forms of ‘intuition’ . . . of perception and apprehension . . . Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns’.

The archetypes correspond to Plato’s Ideas or Forms that provide us with the templates for our conceptual notions. The realm in which the Ideas exist is effectively the same as the collective unconscious or Hegel’s Geist or Sheldrake’s morphic field, the spiritual medium through which the thoughts of one individual are transmitted through space and time to another.

Jung considered that the human propensities for religion and myth were universal expressions of these archetypes residing in the collective unconscious. Certain religious icons, like that of a divine redeemer son, may be found in Babylonian, Egyptian and even in Hindu and Mayan mythology as well as in Christianity.

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We are clearly shaped by both nature and nurture. Our genes may provide the predispositions to develop in a particular way, but our home environment and other external factors that we encounter on life’s journey will determine the path our lives take. Modern biological research indicates that these life events feed back information to the genetic material in every cell of our bodies.

We cannot alter the structure of our DNA but we can it seems modify the way it performs through changes in our RNA. It is in our response to the environment that we exhibit our ability to resonate with the domain of the collective unconscious.

Jung believed that as we grow older we develop a realization of our full potential in the state that he called individuation, achieving the whole spiritually content individual as part of society and the natural environment. We have achieved our material goals during the acquisitive phase and found contentment and meaning in our lives in the inquisitive phase. As ecologist Thomas Berry said: ‘Nothing is itself without everything else’. Individuation was the goal of life which Jung equated with wisdom.

Part of this process of individuation, said Jung, was admitting to ourselves, if we were male, that we had a gentler, more emotional, sensitive and compassionate side to our natures – qualities that we generally associate with our ideal feminine: Jung called this the anima. The corresponding quality in women, when they needed to be more aggressive or logical Jung called the animus – a reflection of how women thought the ideal man would behave.

Women still occupy a subordinate role in many societies: it is more difficult for them to be promoted, especially to top jobs, and they are usually paid significantly less, even for doing the same job, despite gestures by politicians at establishing equality with men. We still have a long way to go to enable women to play a fulfilling role in our society, to their detriment and ours generally.

Jung’s introversion was probably one reason for the personality clash that he had with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, who was certainly more of an extrovert. Another would have been that Freud, with his scientific training, was always looking backwards in time in the sense that he always sought causes and origins of things – a typical reductionist.

Jung, on the other hand, looked forwards in that he was a dreamer who was more concerned with an individual’s motives, goals and objectives (working towards individuation) and he envisaged some ideal unifying spiritual realm amongst humankind as a whole. The collective unconscious could be thought of as fulfilling just such a role.

As a spiritually oriented introvert personality, Jung had many psychic experiences himself and believed that many of his ideas came from his spirit guide that he called Philemon, an old man with a white beard and wings of a kingfisher – the archetype of the wise old man. The winged image recalls the Faravahar icon central to the Zoroastrian religion.

From these personal encounters, and the experiences described to him by Hélène Preiswerk, Jung had no doubt about the validity of psychic visions. When he was 68, Jung suffered a pulmonary embolism which nearly killed him. It was in this state that he had a near-death experience, with the usual concomitants of seeing oneself from afar (or, in Jung’s case, the whole planet Earth from out in space) and a certain resentment at being brought back to real existence again. Happily, he recovered and lived to within a month of his 86th birthday.

This essay was first published in the Winter 2008 edition of the Tree of Life magazine - www.treeoflifemagazine.com

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The God Confusion

God, Nature and Science

Over the last four centuries, the prevailing world-view amongst ordinary people has progressively changed in accord with social evolution. We can scarcely comprehend the culture shock of Copernicus’ discovery in the sixteenth century that Earth was one of a number of planets revolving around the sun, rather than the centre of the universe. This had been the Church’s view for well over a millennium and thence the view of lay people, for the Church was regarded as the authority on all matters, both spiritual and temporal. In this sense, the world-view up to that time was a holistic unity, as it has always been for indigenous peoples and adherents of some of the eastern religious philosophies: for them, all the material world is imbued with spirituality, so there are no separate domains of matter and spirit. From the outset, Western theology distanced itself from this pagan idea of deity within the natural world and focused on a transcendent and wholly inaccessible God.

After Copernicus (1473-1543), the idea of a world ordained and maintained by God was eroded – first, by the astronomical discoveries of Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century, then by the increasingly impressive man-made structures produced by the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and finally, by what seemed to many at the time as the coup de grâce, the theories of Darwin and Wallace, Lyell and Hutton in biology and geology in the nineteenth century. The theistic vision of God immanent in the human world was replaced by the deist God as Creator and Designer of a mechanical universe operating to His laws – laws that increasingly were unfolding to the investigations of scientists. We really did seem to be uncovering the mind of God.

English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) exhorted scientists to use the resources that Nature offered for the benefit of humankind to subdue ‘Nature with all her children, to bind her to your service and make her your slave [for] the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Now, not only was God remote from humankind but so too was the natural world. This was where our exploitation of the environment as something other than ourselves really began: we no longer regarded ourselves as a part of Nature but rather apart from it. Up to that time, we had always worked in harmony with the seasonal cycles of Nature, knowing that by desecrating Nature we endangered ourselves. Those societies that ignored this fact, like the Easter Islanders, perished.

In its enthusiasm to destroy the pagan god within the natural world all around us, western religion had to create prophets who were either in intimate communion with or who were actually incarnations of the deity, revealing His word to the world. However, in the age of increasing rationalisation that marked the Enlightenment, it was unsurprising that many rejected these wholly subjective revelatory world-views. Some went even further in their notion of deity maintaining that there was no longer a role for God at all, as Alister McGrath pointed out in his book The Twilight of Atheism [Doubleday, 2004].

Thus, in the West, there was now confusion as to which of three world-views – theism, deism or atheism – represented the actual state of affairs in the world, that is, which of these represented reality or truth. And there was still a fourth option: the nineteenth century biologist, T.H. Huxley, described as agnostics those who maintained that we have no way of deciding between these alternatives. As deism acknowledges a more restricted role for deity than that of theistic belief, the fundamental choice was really between theism and atheism – the existence (and possible ongoing participation) or non-existence of God, with agnosticism representing the fall-back position if the evidence suggested that no choice could be made.

From the seventeenth century on, in the material world it was science that people now looked to as the authority on truth. But while scientists have discovered a vast amount of information regarding those patterns of behaviour of the natural world that we describe as physical laws, we have uncovered no information that could unequivocally be interpreted as favouring one of our three theistic options. Though we can work on hypothetical model systems, we cannot explore these options rigorously by the methodology of science. We cannot conduct experiments to re-enact the exact conditions of Creation, and we cannot say what test would disprove the hypothesis of God as Creator, Designer or immanent presence.

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The fact that something has not been observed or explained does not disprove its existence. While we cannot establish the existence of God with the empirical certainty that, as scientists, we expect from our experiments, a lower degree of certainty might still be achievable. In his book, The Coherence of Theism [Oxford, 1977], the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne has used the inductive method of science to suggest that observation of the natural world and logical reasoning do indeed imply the existence of a deity. Using the standard theological first cause, design and morality arguments, Swinburne suggests that God is as plausible a hypothesis to explain the creation and apparent design of the universe as the quarks and superstrings that are used to explain the properties of matter.

Science has told us how many natural systems operate but not why they should behave in this way: science suggests immediately preceding physical causes but not philosophical reasons. The evolutionary theory of Darwin and Wallace provides a convincing explanation of the mechanism of species development but, despite its title, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) says nothing about the origins of life. The long-standing philosophical question of ‘why there is something rather than nothing’ which, despite its antiquity, has still been debated in recent months in the pages of the Catholic magazine The Tablet, is vacuous. From a secular viewpoint, even if science could tell us the ‘how’ of creation, it is beyond its remit to tell us the ‘why’. For the theist, to know the ‘why’ of Creation would mean getting inside the mind of God.

There is another issue. We can say nothing with any certainty about how physical systems originated nearly fourteen billion years ago from our vantage point within the system – and that for only a few million years. We can speculate about how it all began, as Stephen Weinberg did in his book, The First Three Minutes [Andre Deutch, 1977], but we can know nothing. Furthermore, as Kurt Gödel said of mathematics in his Incompleteness Theorem, we cannot define the bounds or limits of a system unless we can observe it from outside, which obviously we can never do in the case of the universe. Although the Big Bang theory of an instant of creation for the universe some 14 billion years ago is the favoured theory, it is by no means settled whether this was simply the creation of our present universe from nothing (and therefore the beginning of space and time), or whether the event occurred from some pre-existing eternal and infinite state of being such that there is an oscillation between creation and annihilation of the universe, or whether ours is one of many universes, or even whether the steady-state theory of continuous creation is at all applicable. The acceleration of the expanding universe has not been explained, and Fritz Zwicky’s dark matter and dark energy ideas still have to be fitted into the picture. There is a confusing array of scientific possibilities, all of which have implications for various religious systems and, most especially, for a role for divine participation.

Medieval theologians spent much time and energy trying to reconcile the world-view presented in their respective scriptures by revelation with the rationalism of the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. From the time of the Enlightenment, scripture had to be reconciled too with the empiricism of science. Since the Enlightenment the world-view represented by a literal reading of scripture, and especially the Bible, the core text of western religion, has been generally acknowledged as incompatible with either rationalism or empiricism. It is accepted by most theologians that scripture is essentially either myth and fable conveying age-old traditions of a particular social group or the moral message of a prophet at a particular time in human history as to how we should best live our lives as individuals and as a society. It follows that religions, like scripture, are man-made social institutions: religion is the externalised communal expression of emotionally held beliefs that represent the internalised faith of each adherent.

The very nature of deity is such that its form, too, must be created out of the human imagination though its existence can be inferred using the accepted arguments of natural theology, applying reason to evidence gathered from the five senses, as suggested by Swinburne.

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The reason versus revelation controversy

The controversy of a role for God and the validity and worth of scriptural revelation continues to this day. Whatever the truth of scripture, and however God is conceived, the subject of the Divine is an emotive topic of relevance to a huge proportion of the population of the world, particularly in the West.

In recent years, two Oxford academics have come to represent the opposing views of atheism and theism, respectively, Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath, so I shall concentrate on their writings. Dawkins (b.1941) is a zoologist who, for the past decade, has held the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. McGrath (b.1953) is now Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford but he trained originally in chemistry and biophysics. There are others who have added their voices to the controversy: Peter Atkins, a chemist at Oxford, supports the Dawkins view; Keith Ward, an Oxford evangelical Christian, supports McGrath. John Polkinghorne is another physicist turned Christian evangelist. As a generalisation, it is the biologists who most ardently believe that Darwinian theory can explain the emergence of life, the most complex of natural systems, and that God is therefore unnecessary, while the physicists, like Fritjof Capra [The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, 1975], see connections between the world-view of quantum physics and the mystical viewpoint of eastern religious philosophy.

The fact that several of the protagonists lined up against Dawkins are evangelical Christians does, however, raise another confusion. McGrath has recently published a three-volume treatise called A Scientific Theology (T & T Clark, 2001-3) and a distilled version called The Science of God (T & T Clark, 2004). In the latter (p.25) McGrath claims that ‘A scientific theology is based on traditional Christian orthodoxy’, and immediately the theological argument is both limited and undermined by being linked to Christianity. Those who reject Christianity are likely to reject the whole theology.

Any realistic theology must embrace at least Judaism and Islam and, with little extension of the concept of the Divine, Hinduism as well. One reason why Enlightenment scientists like Isaac Newton and philosophers like John Locke and J.S. Mill were anti-Trinitarians was that Christianity was considered to be the least rationally coherent of any of the major religions. Religion in general told people what to believe instead of allowing them to think for themselves. A belief in God therefore cannot logically be restricted to the Christian viewpoint. Locke and Newton were deists but in his book The Twilight of Atheism McGrath implies that they, together with Thomas Paine and the founding fathers of America were atheists. There has long been a view in mainstream Christianity that a belief in God necessarily demands belief in the divinity of Jesus.

The atheistic viewpoint has been presented by Richard Dawkins in many books over the past two decades, but most comprehensively in The God Delusion (Bantam/Transworld 2006). In this, and in two pairs of television programmes – ‘The Root of All Evil’ and ‘The Enemies of Reason’ – Dawkins presents not only the case against God and religion but a refutation of all mystical and psychic experiences on the grounds that they are individual and subjective and cannot be confirmed by others. Dawkins maintains that all such experiences are meaningful only to the subject and are totally meaningless to everyone else. Like the Enlightenment thinkers above, he supports the idea that people should be allowed to frame ideas for themselves through reason and not be given a set of rules and beliefs by an authoritarian religious system.

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The idea of communal sharing of an individual’s subjective experience through claimed revelation as a basis for a system of morality is regarded by Dawkins as nonsensical at best and, at worst, as in the religious indoctrination of children, as actually evil. Many atrocities have indeed been committed in the name of religion, but many other acts of genocide have been racist obsessions, as with Hitler, or committed overtly for the acquisition of power by atheists, like Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. Evil is not the preserve of religious fanatics though they may be its most prominent contemporary exemplars. Dawkins ignores the benefits derived from religion – a guide to morality for individuals, a cohesive ethical structure for many societies and a reaching out to the ineffable that has created so many inspirational works of art. Religion has provoked great evil, but it has also provided a spiritual basis for faith for many more millions of ordinary people and for artisans, and it has continued to exist despite the passionate predictions of its demise by atheists or rationalists.

Empirical observations by the five senses made coherent by rational thought that comprises the technique of science have given us a vast amount of detail about how the world works. But this is not the only route to knowledge. All knowledge gained in other ways cannot be dismissed either as worthless superstition or delusion. We all have, to varying extents, three routes to knowledge of the world – empiricism, rationalism and intuition. These can function for each of us as individuals or we can accept the respected authority of others. One of the definitions of ‘faith’ is ‘belief in the testimony of another’. This is how most of us regard the facts of science or the theorems of mathematics. Even scientists and mathematicians must themselves have faith in the abilities of their fellow professionals in other specialist fields.

The essence of the science and religion controversy hinges on the fact that all statements in mathematics and science are amenable in principle to verification (or falsification) by others with sufficient expertise. The difficulty in assessing the truth of mystical and psychic experiences is that they are intrinsically subjective and rarely verifiable by others. There is, however, an increasing body of evidence, some of it gathered by the standard ‘double-blind’ technique of science, of the validity of the effectiveness of prayer, the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance, and even communication with the disincarnate. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence gathered over many centuries from around the world. The psychic ability of shamans, prophets and seers has been a fundamental component of human social evolution in both secular and religious matters.

Until the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century, what is now described as alternative or complementary medicine was the only available method of treatment of illness, except for dramatic intervention by surgery in extreme cases. In its earliest days herbal medicine must have developed to a large extent through ‘trial-and-error’ using the intuitive knowledge of tribal ‘medicine men’; such techniques have established many effective treatments without the use of ‘the scientific method’.

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Pharmaceutical preparations have saved countless lives and reduced much suffering over the last century – but they also have their drawbacks; alternative therapies, in the right hands, are certainly not the ineffectual nonsense that Dawkins would have us believe. Using the orthodox ‘scientific’ medical practice that Dawkins champions, there were 40,000 errors in drug administration in British hospitals in 2005 alone [National Patient Agency, 10 August 2006]. In America, one report says that there are approximately 7,000 deaths each year due to medication errors [www.amcp.org], while the FDA states that there is at least one death each day and 1.3 million people injured each year due to medication errors [www.fda.org]. Adverse drug reactions remain at least the third or fourth biggest killer in the western world, and more recent studies suggest they may be the biggest killer [G. Null et al. Death by Medicine, Nutrition Institute of America, New York, 2003]. Millions of people in the West turn to alternative therapies as a last resort and secure successful treatment when orthodox drug regimens are ineffective or side effects of allopathic drugs are intolerable.

Complementary medical techniques have a long history of successful use. Eastern medical practitioners have for many generations used meridians of the energy they describe as chi to induce anaesthesia by acupuncture. Dowsers and shamans tune in to comparable energy fields or ley lines in the Earth in their practices. All attempts to describe these energy fields in terms of the four fields of energy described by western science have so far failed. This does not mean either that fields of chi do not exist or that a fifth field of nature will not one day become amenable to our methods of scientific study. For the present, what can be said with certainty is that this field is real inasmuch as it has practical applications in our everyday lives. The conclusion that we should draw from these results is that much alternative medicine that was initially based largely on intuition has been shown by traditional practice to be effective and should not be dismissed simply because it has often not been verified by scientific methodology. Alternative or complementary medicine that Dawkins decries as ‘meaningless superstition’ can in some cases be a great deal safer and more effective than synthetic drugs, provided of course it is used by qualified practitioners.

There is also reputable evidence for the validity of clairvoyance and mediumship going back to the works in the early twentieth century of Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Liverpool University, and William Crookes, F.R.S. (1832-1919), who made pioneering discoveries in both physics and chemistry. These were not gullible men and they would certainly have been conscious of the effect that involvement with psychic phenomena would have on their professional reputations.

There have been numerous books about the afterlife in recent decades but some of the more recent and academically robust include those by psychologist Gary Schwartz [The Afterlife Experiments, Atria, 2002], and by Victor Zammit, formerly a lawyer with the Supreme Court of New South Wales and High Court of Australia [A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife, Ganmell Pty, 1996] – again, a man whose profession demanded conclusions based on evidence. Psychology professor David Fontana has also presented an account of the evidence for continued disincarnate existence in Is There An Afterlife? [O Books, 2005].

These books relate accounts of information provided by mediums or clairvoyants that is claimed to come from the world of the disincarnate. Logically, such claims are in no way different from those of sages and prophets whose insights have given us the Neviim of the Judaic Tenakh, the Islamic Qur’an, the Pali Canon of The Buddha, or The Secret Doctrine of Helena Blavatsky on which theosophy is founded. All such scripture is an account of subjective but intuitive experience to which we subscribe through emotionally held beliefs.

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In The Dawkins Delusion [SPCK, 2007], McGrath criticises Dawkins’ book for its hyperbole and emotional charge. Yet, even when professional theologians like McGrath write about their subject, they find it difficult to be objective because their emotionally held beliefs get in the way of their rational ideas. Dawkins is criticised for not defining what he means by ‘delusion’. Now ‘delusion’ is a common enough word in the English language, but Dawkins gives not one but two definitions on p.5 of his book. Dawkins is further taken to task for calling Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ ‘proofs’ of the existence of God. Says McGrath: ‘At no point does Aquinas speak of these as being ‘proofs’ for God’s existence’. That is simply incorrect. In Chapter 1 of the concise version of Summa Theologiae edited by Timothy McDermott [Methuen, 1991] we read the section heading: ‘That there is a God needs proof’ and, in the text, that ‘There are five ways of proving there is a God’. McGrath continues: ‘... rather they [the ‘proofs’] are to be seen as a demonstration of the inner coherence of belief in God’ – just as Swinburne demonstrated using the inductive methods of science. To describe such beliefs in mystical or psychic events as ‘delusion’ implies that they are ill-founded which, as I have explained above, is not necessarily the case. I have emphasised these points to illustrate my contention that evangelical Christians can be as biased or prejudiced in their assessments as fundamentalist atheists.

Although criticised by McGrath, Dawkins’ definition of faith as ‘blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence’ is in fact precisely how many people do accept religious scripture, with the latter part of the definition applying more perhaps to fundamentalist religion. In a talk given in Swansea last October, taking issue with Dawkins, Dr Rowan Williams said that belief in God was ‘a matter of faith and unconditional’, and that ‘religion cannot be approached scientifically’. But this makes religious faith no different from fantasy or imagination – it is just an emotional feeling. Even secular faith in our doctors or politicians is at least grounded in reason. The one feature that gives validity to any belief is reason. Beliefs that are wholly subjective and without either rational or empirical support to which others can assent are indistinguishable from imagination, fantasy or even self-delusion: intuitive insights can be validated only by practical reason. The basic argument against fundamentalist religious belief is precisely that it shows blind trust in certain ideas as truth even in the face of rational or empirical evidence to the contrary, just as Dawkins claims.

The healing spirit

Scripture is seen by many, depending on their religious viewpoint, as the word of God. However, no scripture can logically represent an unequivocal, unilateral world-view because we are all aware now of a multitude of different religions in the world, many of which claim their own unique but mutually incompatible versions of divine wisdom. Which religion we grow up with and accept as ‘truth’ is a matter at first of the geography of our birth, the beliefs of our parents and the society in which they live. In the global context, we must accept rationally that no one religion is any truer than another: they are simply alternative paths to enlightenment that we choose emotionally to follow.

Surely the divisions that produce such hatred between different religions will never be healed, nor the seeming irreconcilability of science and religion, of reason and revelation, be resolved until reason is accepted as an integral component of faith. Scientists and theologians alike regard humankind as the highest pinnacle of the evolutionary process, and the defining characteristic of humanity is our quality of mind. A rational world-view indicates that scriptures and the religions based on them are man-made, however inspired their source. There is ample anecdotal and scientifically based evidence to indicate the existence of a universal spiritual domain. To embrace this cosmic spiritual energy would bring us all once more within the realm of the natural environment that gave us birth and of which we have always remained a part, irrespective of our religious beliefs.

Science can neither disprove nor prove, in the logical mathematical sense, the existence of God, but the grandeur of the universe that inspires the awe and wonder of humankind implies the existence of an overarching guiding force. Such beliefs suggest a way through the confusion of religions and are much more than imagination or fantasy, and certainly not delusions.

This article appeared in The Scientific and Medical Network Review, No. 96, Spring 2008 and in The Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, January 2009 (published in Bloomfield Connecticut, USA).

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The wisdom of the trees

The Wisdom of the Trees

Trees have been on Earth for more than 300 million years. Throughout human civilization they have been associated with magic and ritual because it was believed that they were imbued with spirituality, and spirituality has always been associated with wisdom. Because trees were usually much longer-living than humans it was believed that they retained knowledge from one generation to the next and, as a result, that they were home to the spirits of past generations with the wisdom they possessed. As Karen Armstrong says: ‘Trees, stones and heavenly bodies were never objects of worship in themselves but were revered because they were epiphanies of a hidden force that could be seen powerfully at work in all natural phenomena, giving people intimations of another, more potent reality’. Even in our highly rational day-to-day existence, most of us feel a sense of enhanced spirituality when walking through woodland.

Historical Beauty

Trees, shrubs and plants of all kinds have always been admired as a source of spiritual uplift. The Egyptian pharaohs all had extensive gardens attached to their palaces and the wealthiest in Egyptian society had pleasure gardens on a smaller scale. There were few inhabitants in Roman society who did not have a garden attached to their home, both for the growing of herbs and for aesthetic pleasure.

The ancient Greeks had their green spaces too, but mostly outside of the metropolis because running water was not generally available to Greek urban areas until after the Roman conquest. Beautiful gardens and courtyards embellished with fountains and running water were a feature of the homes of the caliphs and even public areas in Cordoba and Toledo at their zenith during the Moorish reign in Al-Andalus.

In the 21st century, gardening remains one of the most popular of hobbies and city dwellers often prize their window-boxes. The setting up of National Parks and Country Parks is a symbol of our increasing awareness of our need for green spaces that preserve our natural landscape, and psychologists believe that many of the behavioural problems of children today would decrease if they spent more time playing in green spaces.

Myth and Wisdom

Trees and shrubs and grasses have thus played a vital role in the social lives of all early cultures as they do for people today. The Celts are just one group who venerated trees as repositories of knowledge and memory and the domicile of spirits. Only their spiritual leaders, the Druids, were allowed to harvest the mistletoe that grew symbiotically on the oak, willow, rowan, maple or hazel; the mistletoe and the oak itself had special spiritual significance. Mistletoe must have seemed a particularly magical plant to early pagans as it grew high up on a tree but had no roots in earth. To kiss a maiden wearing a crown of mistletoe in her hair would bring good fortune, and for a couple to kiss under a bunch of mistletoe would bless their union – a custom we reserve now for Christmas.

The old Scandinavian word ‘vid’ means wood or forest but it has given us a number of words associated with knowledge or wisdom: witan (Old English: to know), wissen (German: to know), ‘wits’, ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, and there are other examples of the association of trees and knowledge. The beech tree has a special claim to be associated with knowledge and wisdom. The beech together with the yew were the woods favoured for the creation of ogham sticks and runes, though the latter more commonly found are made of more durable metal or stone. The ancient ogham and runic alphabets were line symbols carved on wood or stone that were used by the bards for passing secret messages to one another. They were also used for divination by Celts, and by Germanic tribes in central Europe and Scandinavia from at least 1200 BCE. In divination, the Druids would gather together a selection of ogham sticks in their hands, ask a question of the spirits, then cast the sticks or runes on the ground. The Druid would then make a prognostication depending on what combination of symbols were uppermost. The ogham sticks and runes are the European counterpart of the book of I Ching (‘The Changes’) used from earliest times in the East and still in use today in China and Japan.

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In Scandinavia and Germany, the different runes, of which up to three were selected in each throw, were associated with one of 24 Norse deities. Again, each rune combination or raedan (which gives us our English words ‘reading’ and ‘riddle’) had to be interpreted by the tribal seer. The etymology of trees, wood, knowledge and wisdom is frequently linked from our pagan heritage. In German, the beech tree is die Buche and the word for book, of the same origin, is der Buch, while a letter of the alphabet is der Buchstabe, literally ‘beech sticks’, indicating their ogham background. In modern Swedish the word bok can mean either beech tree or book.

Specific trees that are native to certain geographical areas often become associated with local myth, folklore and spirituality. The baobab tree is venerated in Africa as the Tree of Life because its massive trunk can hold many litres of water – enough to sustain a small village for some days – so providing a very practical spiritual image.

North American Indians refer to trees as ‘our standing brothers and sisters’. The monkey-puzzle tree, Araucaria, is so venerated by a native tribe in Chile that they take their name, Pehuenche, from the tree (pehuen – monkey-puzzle; che – people). The tree is used as a food source for the tribe with bread made from ground seeds, while the resin is used medicinally – another Tree of Life!

Religious Significance

Other trees have significance in other contemporary religions. The banyan tree, one of the Ficus (fig) genera, is linked with Brahma, creator of the universe in the sacred Hindu scriptures, the Vedas and Upanishads. The banyan is therefore the Tree of Knowledge. Before effigies of the Buddha started to appear in the 2nd century CE, the Buddha was represented by a wheel (indicating the unity of all that is) or a pipal tree. The pipal and banyan are revered throughout Asia, as is the ginkgo tree.

After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, every living thing within several miles of the epicentre was destroyed – except for four ginkgo trees, the closest less than a mile away from the epicentre, that survived and began to blossom again in the following spring. All four trees still flourish today and, not surprisingly, the ginkgo is therefore regarded by the Japanese people as a symbol of hope.

Pagan Beliefs

Since the time of the ancient Greeks at least the longevity, the girth and dark density of the yew has been associated with death and transfiguration into immortal soul. The yew tree, Taxus, was associated with the pagan season of Samhain, when the gates between the worlds of the living and the dead were open. This is why so many graveyards to the present day have yew trees growing within them. It also probably has something to do with the fact that most parts of the tree are very poisonous. Because of their longevity through successive human generations, yew trees are also associated with the continuity of the life process. Samhain occurs at the end of October and beginning of November, to mark the beginning of winter: it therefore includes Halloween which we still celebrate with ghostly images.

The juniper tree was regarded by Germanic pagan tribes as a watchful sentinel, no doubt because of its erect habit. It was an intermediary between the mortal and spirit world. The modern German word for a juniper, der Wacholder, reflects this (German: wachen – to be awake, alert).

The tree may be viewed as an allegory of the human individual – the trunk represents the individuated self, the roots are the ancestors and their traditions from which the self develops, the branches are the connections we make with the physical and spiritual world, and the leaves that are shed each autumn to nourish the ground beneath are the thoughts and ideas that we disperse to nourish humankind as a whole. All trees are truly Trees of Life and purveyors of wisdom.

This article was published in The Tree of Life Magazine in Summer 2008.


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A World Without Music

A World without Music

Imagine a world without music or poetry or fiction of any kind. This sounds like some kind of Orwellian nightmare, but such a world was partially created in Afghanistan under the Taliban as this extremist Islamic group forbade the playing of music of any kind. There are many scientists today who regard science or even their own specialty
subject as omnicompetent and able to provide all meaningful paths to knowledge, so that activities like poetry are quite useless. Poetry books may just as well be burned along with books on religion as such texts only provide ‘entertaining self-deception’. We are told that while ‘poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates’. Some scientists seem to counter their insecurity by portraying their subject as unintelligible to anybody other than specialists in the same field: this is especially true of physics which now involves much high-powered mathematics.

The publicity surrounding the four television programmes by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has highlighted what the English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures. In two pairs of programmes Dawkins has taken issue first with religion

then with alternative or complementary medicine as being vacuous. He sees anything outside of scientific rationalism as fantasy or nonsensical superstition. Because of his eloquence and easy style of presentation, Dawkins has become something of a figurehead for this philosophical movement, but he is by no means its only representative or even the most extreme. A fellow Oxford don, chemistry professor Peter Atkins, who is quoted above, takes an even more aggressive stance towards frivolous activities like poetry.

But science is not omnipotent: it does not provide the only route to meaningful knowledge. There is a deeper wisdom that touches the spirit and this can only be provided by mystical experience and an awareness of the aesthetic dimension of

human existence. Our ability to reason is far above that of other animals, largely because of our sophisticated language skills, but it is the humanities that comprise the defining characteristic of being human.

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Musical forms

Deryck Cooke in his book The Language of Music described music as ‘the most articulate language of the unconscious . . . the expression of man’s deepest self’. Cooke believed that music reflected qualities of other arts – of architecture in its formal pseudo-mathematical structure, of literature in its expression of emotion, and of painting in the representation of physical objects. These qualities are reflected in music as it evolved from the medieval period to the present-day.

The music of the medieval, baroque and classical periods prized formal structure: sonata form, the string quartet and the symphony all developed during the 18th century classical period with composers such as Joseph Haydn and W.A. Mozart. The Romantic period in music, as in literature, focused on the expression of emotion. The use of minor keys became a feature of music intended to convey sadness or nostalgia. The Impressionists in music, like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, were so-called because their output generated the same kind of aesthetic atmosphere as their artistic counterparts, Claude Monet and his contemporaries – a nebulous mysticism. Debussy and Ravel are to music what Monet and Sisley were to painting. In the 20th century,

with the arrival of serialism, structure or form again became dominant, but the emotionalism expressed in the previous century in music refused to die out and tonal romantic compositions are still among the most popular today.

Music, like poetry, reflects the ambience of the society in which it is created. The Romantic poets expressed their unease at what they saw as the cold precision of Enlightenment rationality and of the graft and grime of the Industrial Revolution. European music of the 19th century is full of the warmth of emotional feeling of the Romantic movement. Much English music of the 20th century is redolent of the soft and verdant countryside that inspired its composition, often expressed through lush strings and gentle woodwind. Russian music of the same period however is characteristically

harsh, often dissonant, and full of percussion and blaring brass, reflecting the ethos of the cold and brutal Communist regime.

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The Emotional Element

Music is surely the most expressive of the creative arts in conveying human emotion. Appreciation of painting is instantaneous, though that is not to say that other layers of meaning do not emerge with subsequent study. The enjoyment of poetry is an extended experience but is essentially solitary. Music provides extended aesthetic pleasure that can be shared socially with others and to a greater extent than poetry or
painting.

The realm of music provides perhaps the most intense and universal source of spiritual joy, and recent research suggests that it may well improve cognitive skill too. For both the composition and the appreciation of music involve the emotions and the intellect of composer and listener. Music represents soul-to-soul communion between composer and listener. As conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim commented in his first Reith Lecture: ‘Music can and should become something that is used not only to escape from the world but rather to understand it’.

Moved by the Spirit

Many creative artists, composers and writers believe that the creative process, though expressed by the individual, has its source in the spiritual domain. Austrian composer Gustav Mahler was one who saw the process of composition as part of this mystical interaction. When speaking of his Second Symphony, popularly known as The Resurrection, he said: ‘Creative activity and the genesis of a work are mystical from start to finish, since one acts unconsciously, as if prompted from outside, and then one can hardly conceive how the result has come into being’ and ‘For me, the conception of the work never involved the laying down of a process, but at the most of a feeling ...The parallelism between life and music may be deeper and wider than we are yet in a position to understand’.

In an interview on U.S. TV, the Russian born composer Igor Stravinsky said of his composition of The Rite of Spring: ‘I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I was a vessel through which Le Sacre [de Printemps] passed’. These composers believe that such creative inspiration derives from an external spiritual source and that they tap into that spiritual domain in their compositions. Cellist Steven Isserlis similarly sees a divine origin for inspired composition. In an interview with Oliver Condy for the BBC’s Music Magazine, Isserlis was asked about his preparation for performance as to whether or not he listened to other recorded performances. Indicating his preference to go back to the manuscripts themselves Isserlis commented: ‘Why get your instruction from a vicar when you have a chance to talk to God?’Many writers feel this same sense of inspiration derived from the spiritual realm. Looking over what has been written, we may not be able to trace a logical path: the ideas have simply materialized from air, as it were, channelled through mind and body, just as Mahler expressed above. Music has been used since earliest times as an integral part of many tribal and folk traditions, such as religious ceremonies and gatherings for rites of passage. Such ceremonies frequently involve dance as well, as another expression of spiritual communion.

In other spheres, we can touch the soul of the universe through our sense of awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of Nature, and through the fulfilment of human loving. It is not necessary to have visions of the divine in order to become aware of aconnection with our spirituality. It is not the dogma and ritual of organized religion that provide the spiritual dimension of holistic living but this experience and expression of innate spirituality for which music provides the most universal medium.

Many healers use music as an accompaniment to their healing; dentists use it to soothe their patients, and there are surgeons who claim that it is beneficial to the smooth running of operations in theatre; it is especially good for patients if surgery is to be performed under local anaesthetic or acupuncture. For the rest of us, once the ear is
attuned to music, it can be the most powerful agent for reducing stress and producing relaxation and joy.

Immersion in the aesthetic world of music, poetry, painting, or natural beauty allowsus, for a while, to become independent of the physical world that rules our everyday lives to seek and hopefully find joy in a personal psychic dimension of our own. We can do as the mystics of Eastern religious philosophy encourage us to do and lose ourselves in

our own meditative paradise within the material world – to enter our own mystical castle as St Teresa and contemporary mystic Carolyn Myss would say.

Science has come to present a view that only matter is real; the numinous is subjective and meaningless to others. But the mystical is as much uniquely characteristic of what it is to be human as the rationality of philosophy and science. There is no material stuff called culture or pleasure or joy, but our life would be unfulfilled without them. Though other animals can indicate clearly whether they are contented or stressed, aesthetic experiences are uniquely human aspects of a holistic life. Religious ideologies can be divisive, but music speaks to all nations and creeds in an international language. A world without music and the humanities is cold and arid, whatever knowledge rationality gives us and whatever material benefits our scientific and technical skills may provide for us.

Published in Kindred Spirit magazine, May/June 2008 and Tree of Life magazine, Summer 2008

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Envisioning the Holistic: (Lampeter Oct 08)

In the West, holism is a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.

Elsewhere, it is very old – it is the philosophy of indigenous ‘primitive’ societies and of societies in the East.
It has been the practice of these cultures to live in harmony with one another and with their environment, as far as possible.

In the West (and particularly in Christianity, which has been our predominant religion in the last several centuries) we have focused on individualism (salvation through Jesus), and the acquisition of knowledge (through science) and material goods (Industrial Revolution).
The whole western philosophy is individualistic, materialistic and competitive.
We judge a person’s success by their material possessions – what Erich Fromm described as the having mode rather than being [Fromm].

In the East, traditionally, it is societal cohesion and cooperation that are paramount. There is much greater respect for family responsibilities and for the wisdom of the elderly.
The transformation of Ladakh corrupted by western capitalism as described by Helena Norberg-Hodge is a prime example of this different philosophy of life [Norberg-Hodge]

Holism implies relationships. Modern technology is encouraging people to have virtual electronic relationships rather than face-to-face ones.

Western religion is dominated by scriptures that tell people what to think and how to behave.

In the West, the deity is outside the natural world, outside humankind, and can only be accessed through the good offices of priests and rabbis and imams.

In eastern and indigenous religions, people are encouraged to find their own way spiritually, guided by the words of their shamans and sages like The Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius or tribal elders.

Irrespective of whether or not the religion embraces a view of deity, there is respect for the natural world (ahimsa) of which humankind is a part.
In the West, Man and God and Nature are separate;
with indigenous peoples they are one.

It is this holistic vision we need to recapture – less religion and more spirituality: religion is divisive; spirituality is potentially unifying.

Medieval theologians tried to reconcile the rational knowledge of Greek philosophers, often inspired by Eastern wisdom, with the knowledge claimed by the respective prophets through revelation, each presenting different versions of ‘truth’.
Religion had to defend the revelatory claims of scripture against rationalism.

Then in the Renaissance and still to the present day, religion has encountered a new threat from the rise of a new form of rationalism in science.
It is not only religion that has taken us away from holism. The philosophers of the Enlightenment and the rise of science also took us down this path away from holism.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620) suggested studying complex objects in Nature one part at a time with the tacit assumption that they would perform in the same way in the complete object - reductionism.
The idea of mutual interaction of components was not considered.
The purpose was to “subdue Nature with all her children, to bind her to your service and make her your slave [for] the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” [Quinton, Vickers].

This reductionist approach may apply to William Paley’s pocket-watch on the heath, and to many other inanimate objects, but it most certainly does not apply to living organisms, and least so to humans.
The human body is not just a machine.

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Human creativity in music and literature, social interaction, law-making, and the economic structure of nations, to quote just a few examples, cannot be reduced to particle physics.
We can distinguish between those aspects of brain function that can in some sense be evaluated quantitatively – by IQ tests for example – and which we describe as functions of mind. This is the physical mind, located in the brain during earthly life.
Then there are those brain functions that deal with ethics and morality, imagination, intuition, insight, aesthetic appreciation, and such, that many describe as soul: this is the spiritual mind.

The emotional aspect of individual behaviour can perhaps be regarded as the intermediary between the rational mind and the spiritual soul:
Physical self (body) – rational self (mind) – emotional self – spiritual self (soul)

It is not just an assembly of individual cells that composes a symphony or falls in love; it is a human being, an organism possessed of continual creativity.

Living cells continuously interact and thereby create complexity and give rise to the emergence of new properties [Capra].

We are creatures composed of and immersed in a sea of cosmic spiritual, e.m. and quantum energy and our cells are therefore continuously interacting with this energy.
We should not be surprised if some people fall ill from the influence of man-made e.m. fields.

The structure of our DNA is determined through conception, but its function is continually influenced throughout our lives through the operation of RNA [Lipton].

Darwinian evolution provides the ‘nature’ influence on our personality while the Lamarckian mechanism of inheritance of acquired characteristics contributes to the ‘nurture’ component that shapes our personality through the nature of our environment and that of our parents.

Instead of arguing about the religious validity of our evolutionary origins of where we came from we need to look forward and envision what we can be in a new cooperative, spiritual, holistic world view developing fully the enormous resource we have of human potential.

Reductionism takes no account of human being and becoming.

Galileo (1564-1642) and Newton (1642-1727) and Laplace (1749-1827) described the natural world in terms of rules or immutable laws that all objects followed – determinism. [Gillispie; Gleik]

There are certainly regularities or laws of Nature; but much that happens is intrinsically unpredictable.
The world is not entirely deterministic, for if it were there would be no human creativity or free will.
This creativity means that we have a responsibility in shaping our own lives and those of others.

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The universe is organised chaos – it contains both order and randomness.

But events in the universe are not totally random (as many life scientists believe), for this would demand that they were totally independent (while the world is increasingly interdependent);
and that the conditions under which they occur should never change (whereas evolution is all about change and we are surrounded by change in every aspect of our lives).

There are laws or regularities behind many seemingly random natural numbers or events, like pi (p = 3.14159), or phi (F = 1.618 033 = ½(1+v5)), or in the law of radioactive decay. These correspond to Plato’s world of Forms. Where there is pattern, we have a relationship [Davies, Thirring].

So, in the universe, we have order and chaos blended together.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650): Discourse on the Method of the Sciences (1637); Meditations (1641). By suggesting that the human body is essentially a material object (res extensa) with a controlling mind or soul (res cogitans) he created the philosophies of materialism and dualism which have influenced science to the present day [Descartes].

The interaction between mind and body was not understood and therefore ignored – ‘science’ and medicine dealt only with the material body; the spiritual mind was the province of religion.
These philosophies - revelation, individualism, reductionism, determinism, materialism, dualism - have dominated religion and science, medicine and education for the intervening centuries since they were proposed and have turned the West away from holism.

The result is the emergence over these last four centuries of two world views: Religion and Science, each contributing to the current non-holistic world-view.

But there is only one God, one humanity, one truth.

Religion deals with different aspects of human life than science, but it cannot conflict with it.
Religion and science must find compatible world views.
Religion must take account of science, but equally science must have regard for the spiritual dimension of humanity and not dismiss it as nonsensical superstition.
Scientism is unacceptable – the view that the only truth is scientific truth.
We must envision a new holistic world-view that provides a spiritual basis for our existence that currently is provided by religion. This is the challenge we must overcome to envision a new holistic world view. As the 20th century German theologian Dorothee Sölle [1929-2003] said: “Religion in the third millennium will either be mystical or dead.”

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The Holistic Way forward

This unifying spiritual base already exists. In science it is called the quantum field or zero point field. We also have gravitational fields and e.m. fields, all representing ‘action at a distance’.

Religions too have their spiritual view of the divine: The Holy Ghost, Ruach, Dhat, Atman, Universal Mind, the Nature spirits of paganism or Shinto .

Establishment science has not accepted the existence of spiritual or psychic phenomena described as psi, describing them as ‘paranormal’ or ‘supernatural’ where in fact they are both normal and natural.
Science and medicine like religion must have faith in things unseen, as researchers in quantum physics do already.
Solid material objects are really full of space – not empty space but space filled with fields of energy. All of matter interacts by ‘action at a distance’, that is, things that don’t come into contact interact with one another. This makes the idea that each of us interacts with everyone else on the planet through universal love, conveyed on a cosmic energy field, easier to comprehend.
Establishment or allopathic medicine treats the body by reductionist principles, one organ or system at a time, where complementary medicine deals holistically with the whole individual.
Training in medicine needs to be reformed to take account of the new holistic paradigm in science and what we now know about the interaction of mind and body.
Having a positive vision of one’s body and health promotes healing [Benson, Dossey, Dyer, Hamilton, Hay].
Those at the top of the hierarchies in science and medicine are too comfortable to change unless the public at large demand such a change.
There are successful holistic healing techniques that science, in the existing paradigm, is not equipped to handle.
The meridians or nadis that acupuncturists have worked with successfully for thousands of years have no counterpart in allopathic medicine.
The same is true of the chakras and koshas that are at the core of spiritual healing.
The nadis of the body have their counterpart in the ley lines of the Earth that dowsers can detect.
Formal acceptance of holistic concepts by science and medicine should only enhance their status, certainly not erode them. At present, the ‘health service’ is actually a sickness service, almost entirely devoted to treatment of illness rather than its prevention.
People turn to complementary therapies despite the costs involved because of the failings of orthodox medicine to prove effective treatment for their ailments and the unpleasant and sometimes fatal side-effects of medication.
As the costs of naturopathic medicines are usually considerably less than that of pharmaceuticals, and certainly less costly and less traumatic than surgery, both state and patients would benefit.
Patients are much more involved in their treatment in complementary therapy than in allopathic medicine. Complementary medicine works best when it is accompanied by self-belief.

The more books and other promotional material there are on the dangers of abusing the body with drugs like tobacco and alcohol, and pharmaceutical drugs, the more likely we are to inform and persuade people of the dangers and to get those in positions of authority to envision a new holistic paradigm.
We have to encourage scientists and medical authorities to be more open minded and accept that we must embrace a holistic world-view that gets away from the reductionism, determinism, materialism, dualism and the past four centuries.
Our health system is now a commercial enterprise, the success of which is judged by quantity rather than quality.
Our educational system in schools is based on cramming in facts rather than teaching values, to secure top places in competitive ‘league tables’.

Our economic system is based on material growth and the welfare of those in the system or served by the system is of secondary importance. Profit should be incidental; it is the wellbeing of the employees, customers and clients that should be paramount.

Happiness, the goal of human existence, consists of the pursuit of pleasure and health, the avoidance of pain and sickness, and the achievement of fulfilment of our goals in life, to be at ease with our place in the world and the meaning of our existence – which involves the mental and spiritual as much as the physical.

To improve our wellbeing as individuals and achieve a holistic vision of ourselves in the world - what Jung called individuation and what G.W.F. Hegel called Selbstgewusstsein - will require metanoia, self-transformation, to be what we truly are and to fulfil our potential [Fordham, Tacey, Stevens].

We need to encourage a sense of oneness with divinity and with all of creation, a belief in what Whitehead and Hartshorne called Process Theology, that we are a part of the cosmic creative energy, that there is a fragment of divinity within all of us as soul, and that our every thought and action contributes to this cosmic energy [Freeman, Whitehead].

We have just begun to embark upon the stage of evolution that Teilhard de Chardin called noogenesis, where we each embrace a universal consciousness [Chardin].

Until we can envision this of ourselves as individuals, and encourage others to do the same, we will not be able to change the bureaucratic systems that rule our society.

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Bibliography

Jeff Astley, David Brown and Ann Loades (eds), Problems in Theology 4: Science
and Religion – A selection of key readings, T & T Clark, 2004.
Peter Barrett, Science and Theology since Copernicus, T & T Clark, 2004.
Mario Beauregard & Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the
existence of the soul, HarperCollins, New York, 2007.
Herbert Benson, Timeless Healing, Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, London, 1975; The Web of Life,
Anchor-Doubleday, New York, 1996; The Hidden Connections, HarperCollins,
London, 2002.
Pierre Teihard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, London, 1959.
Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, Penguin, London, 2006.
Rene Descartes, Meditations & Discourse on the Method, Penguin, 2007.
Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The power of prayer and the practice of medicine, Harper-
Collins, 1994; Healing Beyond the Body, Shambala Publications, 2001.
Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, Hay House, 2005.
David Fontana, Is There An Afterlife? A comprehensive overview of the evidence,
O Books, Winchester, 2005.
Frieda Fordham, An Introduction to Jung’s Philosophy, Penguin, 3rd edn 1966.
Anthony Freeman, God in Us, SCM Press, 1993.
Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? Jonathan Cape, London, 1978.
Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: A life in exact science,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1997.
James Gleik, Isaac Newton, HarperCollins, London, 2004.
Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How consciousness creates the material world,
Tarcher/Putnam, 1995.
David Hamilton, It’s the Thought That Counts, Hay House, 2005.
Louise Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, Hay House, 1984; The Power Is Within You,
Hay House, 1991.
Esther and Jerry Hicks, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent, Hay House, 2006.
Howard Jones, The Thoughtful Guide to God, O Books, Winchester, 2006;
The Tao of Holism, O Books, Winchester, 2008.
Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A new view of science, reason and religion,
Basic Books, 2008.
Ervin Laszlo, The Creative Cosmos: A unified view of matter, life and mind, Floris Books,
Edinburgh, 1993.
Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, Cygnus Books, 2005.
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures, Century, London, 1991.
A.R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science, Oxford, 1979.
John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, SPCK, London, 1988; Reason and Reality,
SPCK, London, 1991.
Anthony Quinton, Francis Bacon, Oxford, 1980.
Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life, Blond and Briggs, London, 1981;
The Presence of the Past, William Collins, London, 1988.
Anthony Stevens, Jung, Oxford, 1994.
David Tacey, How To Read Jung, Granta, London, 2006.
Walter Thirring, Cosmic Impressions: Traces of God in the laws of nature, Molden Verlag,
2004 (in German); English edn. Templeton Foundation Press, 2007.
Brian Vickers (ed.), Francis Bacon: The major works, Oxford, 2002.
A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York, 1929.

This was presented as a lecture as part of the Body MA Course at University of Wales Trinity-St David's, Lampeter.

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Roots

Our roots as individuals are grounded in our family history. As a social group, we look to the myths and traditions of the tribe, the stories of long-departed ancestors told around the camp fire of an evening, or family anecdotes shared in an intimate home setting. The scriptures of East and West are often tales that were transmitted orally by the elders of the tribe, the sages and shamans, through many generations before they were written down for posterity to form a record of traditions that were thought worth preserving.

The handing down of tribal traditions from one generation to the next plays a part in shaping the current society as it is, and this sense of continuity with the past is an essential component of a stable society. It also establishes a bond between the material world of the present and the spiritual world of the past and it is as important today as it ever has been that we should be aware of our history – it is part of the wholeness of our lives.

The word ‘myth’ comes from the Greek word mythos meaning, as it does in English, an ancient imaginary story with symbolic meaning for a group of people. It is closely related to the terms ‘mystery’ (Greek: mysterion) and ‘mystical’, from the Greek mystikos, an initiate. The myths and traditions are what bind a social group, whether it is a band of religious adherents or a national or tribal group.
Tradition is important whether it is viewed religiously or secularly. There are many who believe that one key issue underlying many of the problems in society today is that we have rejected the myths of scripture as untenable or irrelevant without having defined and absorbed a new world-view, a ‘new story’, of universal spirituality and wholeness to take its place.

There are some myths that are universal, like the tales of Cinderella, the downtrodden and exploited servant, or Faust, an appropriate symbol of our times as a man who seeks power or pleasure at the expense of his soul. There are other tales that are strongly representative of a national culture, like the Mabinogion of Wales and the Kalevala of Finland. The word ‘mabinogion’ is derived from the Welsh word mab, meaning son, and it is translated as ‘tales of a boy hero’ or simply ‘the bard’s tales’. The Mabinogion is a collection of eleven tales that were transmitted orally through the ages until they were preserved in written form in medieval times and in the native tongue as the White Book of Rhydderch (1300-1325) and the Red Book of Hergest (1375-1425). They remained little known, even in Wales, until they were translated into English in the mid-19th century by Lady Charlotte Guest. Like many myths, they are allegorical tales of good and evil, of love, loyalty, trust, betrayal, and heroism.
The Kalevala were compiled in the 19th century by Elias Lönnrot (1804-1884), who was a district health officer in the eastern region of Finland. They were a great source of inspiration to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and several of his tone poems have tales from the Kalevala as their theme. The set of thirty-two poems were published in their first edition in 1835 from poems spoken or sung to Lönnrot or one of his contemporaries during the field trips they made to rural areas over the course of fifteen years. A second edition of the Kalevala was published in 1849 containing fifty poems. The rhythm or metre of the poems is trochaic, as in Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha, which is also a tale of a native people. There is much internal rhyme and alliteration in the poetry, similar to that found in Welsh poetry where it is called cynghanedd. The word ‘Kalevala’ means ‘land of Kaleva’ or ‘land of heroes’. The suffix ‘-la’ indicates place in Finnish. In Welsh, place is indicated by the suffix ‘-fa’: for example, a doctor is meddyg and their surgery is meddygfa. There are similar linguistic developments in different cultures that are not directly related to one another suggesting some deeper underlying spiritual connection – what psychologist Carl Jung called archetypes transmitted via the collective unconscious.

Other secular myths with strong national connections are the tales of the journeying of Odysseus after the fall of Troy, presented by Homer in the Greek epic poem, the Odyssey, while the Norse and Germanic people have their Niebelungenlied that inspired the creation of The Ring tetralogy from Richard Wagner. Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, to mention but two, collected traditional folk songs from different parts of England and created much inspiring music from them. The 19th century was a time of nationalistic pride during which other European composers – Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok, for example – were also inspired to preserve traditional melodies of the homeland before they were extinguished by our increasingly materialistic society. The chanting of psalms and singing of hymns have a similar function in the Jewish or Christian religions – a bonding within the group as well as reinforcing a link with the past. One wonders how much of the search for hedonistic pleasures we see so often in our young people derives from the sense of rootlessness generated by dysfunctional or broken families.

Myth, scripture and religion may be human in origin but they constitute an essential and ongoing part of the cultural development of humankind and cohesion of tribes and nations. Those who decry religion as ‘worthless superstition’ ignore this essential cohesive element. Myth has its source in humankind’s creative imagination inspired by spiritual insight and intuition. It presents moral tales and encourages a world view beyond that of sensory experience: this is one of the distinguishing features of humankind. Myths and folk tales are not created to provide us just with an escape from reality; they represent humankind’s attempt to live our lives more fully and give us new insights into the meaning of our earthly existence. In our materialistic existence we have lost sight of this spiritual dimension of holistic living: the material and the spiritual should be one, as it is still for native peoples.

We cannot live fulfilling lives only on the material plane and myths transport us to other times and places, often to confront creatures that represent ideas of beauty, fear, evil, loyalty, betrayal or other expressions of human emotions. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are traditional myths that we tell to children to fire their imaginations and often to teach a moral message. The recent popularity of such fantasy tales as The Lord of the Rings, the Tales of Narnia and Harry Potter testify to the excitement children feel for such stories. As Sue Palmer points out in her book Toxic Childhood, ‘they’re ideal for introducing children to the rhythms of language and tuning their ears to language sounds’. As nursery rhymes are usually sung, she stresses the ‘huge importance of music and song in developing children’s social and communication skills’. The reciting or singing of myths to children by parents or the elders of a tribe perpetuates their traditions and brings children into the social context of the whole community, and it is this sense of community, of belonging – the holistic ethos – that is so lacking in society today.

First published in Carmarthen U3A Musings 2

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The material brain, the human soul and the cosmic spirit

Today we can describe the human body at several different levels of detail. We can talk of the whole person – body, mind and spirit – and their relationship with other human beings on the planet. We can describe the individual in terms of the functioning or dysfunction of the organs of their bodies. We can go into still further detail of the biochemistry of the molecules that comprise these organs. Then, at the most fundamental level of description we have at present, we can talk about the constituents of those molecules, their energies and interactions.

Science has made the progress that it has by applying this principle of reductionism – looking at parts of the world in ever greater detail. As a result, science and its application in technology have given us the quality of life that most of us in the West are able to enjoy today. We have come to rely on science as the bedrock of our rational understanding of the way the world works. But, reductionism has its limitations, and rarely more so than with regard to the human body. At a social and economic level, humankind is increasingly inter-related and in those spheres of activity the complementary holistic approach is essential. The holistic approach is equally important when we consider medical problems of the individual.

Body, mind and spirit are not three separately functioning parts of a human being. Physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists such as Larry Dossey, Jeffrey Schwartz and Herbert Benson have shown how profoundly interactive are the material brain and the non-material mind. Not only does mind to some extent emerge from brain function, but mind can also have a physiological effect on the structure of the brain. Neurophysiologists Mario Beauregard and Andrew Newberg have shown that spiritual experiences produce measurable physiological effects and structural changes in the brain. Dossey has also shown how prayer and envisaging well-being towards other individuals can have beneficial effects on the health of both the sender and receiver. Conversely, living with an attitude of malevolence or anger does harm to the health of that individual and certainly no benefit to others.

Psychologist Charles Tart, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and several others have shown how thoughts and images can be received by some individuals having been transmitted from elsewhere through time and space. This is a fine example of the archetypes or universal images envisaged by psychologist C.J. Jung as capable of being transmitted through the spiritual domain of the collective unconscious. Jung was focussing primarily on the religious symbols that recur in different civilizations at various times in human development, even though these social groups had no direct contact with each other. Sheldrake envisaged what he described as a morphic field as the medium for this non-material communication between individuals, that could even involve animals under some conditions. But the concept of ideas being imposed on some kind of time-independent universal consciousness is identical in these two approaches.

Science and its application in medicine have made huge strides in understanding the functioning of the human body at a materialist level. But materialism too must be tempered with idealism ? the recognition that we are not automatons or even, ultimately, machines. The aesthetic or spiritual dimension is an integral part of the functioning of most individuals, be it as religious observance or appreciation of music and poetry or of the natural world, or experience of one of the kinds of psychic communication. Until relatively recently, the mind and consciousness have been almost excluded from scientific study because they were considered outside the remit of the subject – they were non-material and subjective entities and therefore unlikely to meet the requirements of universal repeated testing and observation, or even quantitative measurement.

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To a great extent, it is the findings of those scientists I mentioned above that have started to change attitudes within mainstream science. Neuroplasticity of brain structure and function has been experimentally demonstrated by several neurophysiologists. Now, brain function can conveniently be described as being broadly of two kinds. There is the material and mortal function, described by mind, which records and interprets the input of the five senses. This function can be measured and, to some extent, can be quantified by IQ tests, speed in performing calculations, faculty for learning languages or playing a musical instrument, and so forth. But there is also another aspect of brain function that is spiritual, and which empirical evidence suggests is immortal. These different functions of mind have been described by the American psychologist Howard Gardner as different kinds of intelligence. This capacity for aesthetic appreciation is the human quality that many would describe as soul. As yet, no way has been found to quantify this faculty so it remains a qualitative function of the brain in the living human that persists in the discarnate individual. Although MRI scans can tell us which part of the brain is responding to, say, a symphony by Mozart or Mahler, we have no way of telling why any particular individual should get more pleasure from one or the other. A holistic description of human beings, individually or collectively, must therefore embrace body, mind and spirit.

One of the challenges of the last few decades has been to give an account of the concepts of consciousness and soul that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. Spiritual experience is only one of a number of events described as psychic phenomena that have come to be studied in a science of their own, parapsychology. Sir Alister Hardy, a biologist who set up a research unit at the University of Oxford to collect data on spiritual experiences, set out a classification of such experiences in his book, The Spiritual Nature of Man. The most scientifically tested of these are telepathy, clairvoyance, pre- and post-cognition, psychokinesis and spiritual or psychic healing. The last of these has been extensively explored in the clinical setting by Larry Dossey. In general though, the biologists have been very reluctant to recognize these human abilities: rather, biologists were content to dismiss them as imaginary or fraudulent or untestable, even though the empirical observations have often been reported by people of undisputed scientific eminence for over a century.

It is to the physicists that we must turn to find scientific support for the notion of soul or spirit. According to American physicist Henry Stapp, the same theoretical concepts can be applied to interpret the activity of mind. Quantum physics is a century old now and it is in this specialism that the theoretical basis for the notions of an individual and collective spiritual energy can be found.

From the early 19th century on, we thought we had found the ultimate constituents of matter in the atoms described by John Dalton. A century later, we found that atoms could be broken up into still smaller components – the proton, electron and neutron that together make up the basic structure of an atom. For a time, these were thought to be the ultimate particles of matter: but now we know about quarks that make up the proton and neutron. It was also found that we needed some kind of energetic glue to hold all these subatomic particles together, in addition to the so-called strong force that held protons and neutrons together in the core or nucleus of an atom. This ‘glue’ is called the zero point energy field. It takes its name from the fact that it is the only energy left in an atom at the zero point of temperature (zero Kelvin or –273°C).

The zero point field (zpf) penetrates every atom of matter in the universe – solid, liquid or gas. It is in our bodies and in the air we breathe. It is the fundamental wave energy component of de Broglie’s wave–particle duality and of Einstein’s mass–energy relationship. At root, the objects of the whole material world are simply our images of the coherence of packets of the zpf. It is the world the eastern mystics describe as maya. A famous Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment, Bishop George Berkeley, went so far as to say that the only knowledge we had of the existence of the material world was though our perception of it. These ideas were presented to the human mind by what Berkeley called God but which our 21st century scientist might describe as the universal spiritual energy field.

Shortly before Berkeley wrote his seminal thesis, the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke described our sensory interpretation of the world as comprising a ‘nominal essence’ of every object (those qualities we observe to give objects their names), but behind which there was a ‘real essence’ that gave rise to those qualities but which was forever inaccessible to the rational mind. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called these same qualities, respectively, the ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ aspects of our material world.

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Most significantly, the zpf is the medium through which the neurons of the central nervous system can function. The nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord send their messages mostly by electrons travelling along the length of a nerve cell, jumping over the gap (synapse) at the end (sometimes accompanied by the release of chemicals) and on to the next neuron. Everywhere that we have moving electrons (actually, they never stand still!), we have the zpf. Our brains are full of the stuff. This is accompanied by another energy field created by the streams of electrons called the electromagnetic energy field.

Now, philosophers have debated and agonised for four centuries over how the lump of cells representing the matter of the brain could generate the non-material entity we call mind or thought or consciousness. Modern neurophysiology has it that it is the passage of the electrons through a neuron, or more likely a whole network of neurons, that produces an idea. It is somewhat comparable to the parenchymal cells of the gut joining forces to produce what we describe as digestion. Give them a morsel of food and they will get to work on it. The only ‘outside’ influence is that from time to time some chemical messengers called hormones will direct operations. It is the individual chemical reactions comprising metabolism that we collectively describe as ‘digestion’. It is the name we give to the function of an organ (or collection of organs, since liver, kidneys, etc. are all involved). Similarly, ‘mind’ is the name we give to the function of the brain at a material level.

‘Thinking’ then, generating ideas, is just what neural cells do when electrons pass through them. ‘Consciousness’ is our awareness of these ideas in the brain both during internal processes and in interpreting the input from the five senses. The brain function we describe as the physical (but non-material) mind is the result of the passage of streams of electrons through a collection of neurons. These ideas or mental images can be triggered by sensory input, or they can be triggered by other neural pathways (association of ideas), or they can simply appear spontaneously – what we mean when we say ‘it just popped into my mind’. ‘Memory’ refers to the collection of neural pathways already established and available for recall from the unconscious database.

These neural processes can be observed by others through the technique of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Measurement of brain wave activity using EEGs indicates that spiritual people, shamans, mystics, mediums and others who are able to generate deep meditative states for themselves display significantly more theta wave activity in the 4-7 Hz range than those of us who spend most of our time in the active beta wave state at 12-30 Hz. So much for the physical mind that essentially dies with the mortal death of the body.

We can understand what triggers ideas when we have sensory input. These impressions give us our mental representations of the physical world. If an idea arises spontaneously, we have no need to account for a ‘cause’. Electrons are coursing through the neurons of the central nervous system continuously while we are alive, so it would not be surprising if one piece of circuitry here and there represented an idea. If some networks are already in contact with one another, we can see where one idea might lead to another.

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What we must consider is that particularly important instance of neural function when we create an original thought or decide to search for one of these neural pathways buried in the memory of the unconscious mind or, indeed, make any decision. If we are to avoid ‘infinite regress’, we must account for the original thought in a succession of neural processes and our mental recognition and interpretation of it. The triggering of that original idea, even if recalled from memory, must itself also come from a neural process, and this is the process we call Will. The American philosopher-psychologist William James described it as an ‘act of volition’. Living some fifty years before James, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called this mental driving force der Wille,

The zpf that is associated with the human body is inextinguishable: it is infinite and eternal. This is the component of mind that we describe as the immortal soul. It accompanies us in every moment of our life on Earth and continues on in the discarnate spirit after what we regard materially as death. It is the collective unconscious described by Jung as source of the archetypes, and there are many other comparable descriptions. Rupert Sheldrake calls it the morphic field; for Ervin Laszlo it is the akashic field of eastern mysticism. It is the spiritual God of western religion and the Brahman or the Infinite Mind of the East. It is the World Soul or Communal Soul to which we turn for guidance and inspiration. It is that spiritual Source with which we commune in prayer and of which our individual souls are parts. It is the representation of that cosmic energy that spiritual healers draw on to treat their patients, and through which other psychic events are transmitted. It is the spiritual realm with which mediums commune and which holds the spiritual images of the discarnate. To live in harmony with this cosmic spirit, with constant awareness of its presence, is a more holistic attitude than many on the planet display at present. It is also an attitude we surely must cultivate if we are to save planet Earth from annihilation.

As early as 400 years BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato suggested in his Theory of Forms or Ideas that all our learning comes to us from a previous incarnation. There are spiritual templates for the ideas that we call upon in mortal life. Now we know that we have to learn to walk and talk, to learn the information that we need to pass examinations, and so on, in each lifetime. But Plato was thinking beyond this. It is our spiritual learning that progresses with each incarnation, learning that we take from the spiritual to the mortal plane. This is what the eastern mystics call karma – the actions of each soul that must be learned through life, or lives, on Earth, to be refined in the afterlife.

When we create original ideas, especially if these are particularly constructive and creative, our zpf communes with the cosmic zpf – tunes into it, if you will. The greater the harmony or resonance between our individual zpf (as soul) and the cosmic soul, the more inspired and creative the thought is likely to be. All original works of art, poetry, literature or music come into being in this way. Of course, the material brain still has to learn the practical techniques of creating works of art, or of writing music, or lines of poetry. That same mystical insight has created works of scripture and great mathematical and scientific theories. Scientists and mathematicians still have to learn the fundamentals of their subject through the material brain, but it is the creative leaps that come in moments of cosmic inspiration. In the field of parapsychology, the psychic or medium captures the images of another person or place by tuning in to this cosmic spiritual zpf energy. As energy has no directionality of time associated with it, the medium is capable of tuning in to events of past, present or future.
We can all tune into this cosmic spirit at any time under the direction of Will but mediums and those who can enter deep meditative states can reach into higher levels of spiritual consciousness.

Will or Volition involves focusing our own neurons and their associated soul so that they resonate with cosmic soul. An act of Will is a conscious gathering together of neural pathways that are there already, and bringing these unconscious pathways into the conscious mind. Not every trivial decision in our lives necessitates our tuning into cosmic soul. Many habitual actions, like driving or knitting or walking, have become so ingrained in our mental processes that only the appropriate mental stimulus is needed to provoke the relevant pathways of the physical brain into action. Here, the material functions of mind can operate quite successfully without the input of cosmic energy. But communication with the cosmic spirit is an essential mechanism of psychic, spiritual, numinous or mystical experience or inspired creativity for that aspect of human activity we describe as soul. It gives us our holistic spiritual inter-connectedness with every other human soul on the planet, with Earth itself, and with those who have moved on to the higher spiritual planes of the discarnate.

Published in the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Connecticut, USA, July 2011
Revised text: De Numine, magazine of the Alister Hardy Society, No. 51,
Autumn 2011


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Living in a Spiritual World

The name of Roger Sperry will probably not be as familiar to readers as that of, say, Isaac Newton or even Richard Dawkins. But, in the 1960s, Sperry pioneered a quiet revolution in the science of the mind, a revolution that has created ripples in philosophy, psychology and parapsychology.

Sperry’s idea was simple – that consciousness, or conscious awareness, was simply an innate property of the brain, more specifically, of the neurons or nerve cells that make up the tissue of the brain. Science has thrived for four centuries working on a principle of materialism, that is, that interactions between the solid objects of the world are the only things scientists can study, and the results of those studies depend on how objects interact with the five senses.

Now, for the first time, Sperry suggested that mind or consciousness could also produce physical effects – on the brain itself and on the rest of the human body. Other psychologists have since extended Sperry’s studies to show that the mind can also affect other human minds (through telepathy and other psychic phenomena), and even have effects on animals, on plants and, under certain circumstances, on inanimate objects. This idea of an all-pervading spiritual energy is described philosophically as idealism. It corresponds to the eastern mystical vision of the world as maya.

If this sounds nonsensical, let me say that science has discovered the existence of a new kind of energy field through which these kinds of interactions probably occur. This was unknown in the 19th century and its existence has only emerged since the development of 20th century quantum physics. Psychologists, and even more especially philosophers, have agonised for centuries over how a non-material entity could possibly interact with a physical or material one, in particular, how could mind emerge from or interact with the brain? But Newton and Michael Faraday showed centuries ago that invisible gravitational and electromagnetic ‘fields’ could interact with matter, like planets and magnets. So the idea that this new field, called the quantum field or zero point field, could interact with human brains as minds was not really that bizarre.

Mind functions by the passage of tiny bits of atoms called electrons running along the neurons and jumping over the gaps (synapses) between them. This happens continuously in a live human body. These neural pathways we call thoughts or ideas. When we learn something, a new neural pathway gets established. This stays dormant in the (unconscious) mind as memory until we want to recall it. The act of recall is brought about by acts of volition or (free) will. Will can be triggered by some other neural pathway (association of ideas), or by some sensory input (something we see or hear), or can arise by chance (it just ‘pops into our minds’ as we say).

When mind interacts with the external quantum field, especially in creation of works of art, literature or music, we often call this ‘inspiration’. If it warns us of forthcoming (sometimes dangerous) events we call it ‘intuition’. If we experience a feeling of transcending our everyday world, perhaps in meditative states and perhaps accompanied by some religious vision, we call it ‘mystical insight’. This function of ‘mind’ many people describe as ‘soul’.

Newton and scientists up to the 20th century thought that the workings of the natural world could all eventually be expressed neatly by mathematical equations. Scientists describe this world-view as determinism. But the fundamental bits of atoms have very different properties to those of the Newtonian world. They operate a policy of indeterminism – it is a world of statistical probabilities rather than mathematical certainties. This indeterminism is an intrinsic property of the electrons whizzing every moment through the neurons in our brain.

Science has made such good progress by selecting bits of the natural world to study one at a time – a philosophy of reductionism. Now science is moving more into a policy of seeing how all the bits interact and work together – holism. So mind and matter are not separate entities but are interconnected parts of this wonderful world we live in. Let us hope that Sperry is enjoying the advances his spiritual vision has created.

Published in Labyrinth magazine, June/July 2011

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NDEs, OBEs and the Divine Spirit: A critique of the views of Professor Michael Marsh

Michael Marsh, now a professor of theology at Oxford University but formerly an academic medical researcher, has written a book on these psychic experiences that essentially interprets them in a materialistic way as ‘brain-state phenomena’ rather than as ‘glimpses of immortality’. Indeed, his interpretation of the data that Sir Alister Hardy used as the basis of his book The Spiritual Nature of Man (1979) leads Marsh to the conclusion (De Numine No. 50, Spring 2011) that they ‘represent anomalous phenomenology engineered as subjects’ brains recover from immediately preceding insults . . . merely offering this-worldly bizarreness and banality’. From this it is obvious that Professor Marsh does not believe NDEs or OBEs give us any information whatever about the afterlife or divine spirit, however envisaged.

Dr Penny Sartori has already given us a highly critical but insightful review (De Numine No.51, Autumn 2011) of Professor Marsh’s book1. Unlike Dr Sartori or Professor Marsh I have only a limited background in medicine so my comments are derived from my experience in physical sciences and philosophy; but I think there are still other points that can be made critical of Marsh’s dismissal of NDEs and OBEs as any kind of spiritual experience. Furthermore, my comments relate only to Marsh’s AHS Open Day Address given in November 2010 and précised in the De Numine article, though this summarises the conclusions reached in the book.

First, even though he worked from accounts of NDEs rather than interviews with patients who have experienced them, Marsh is quite incorrect in stating that NDEs ‘are due to mental activity taking place as brains rapidly recover during the waking process’ after traumatic experiences. Many books on these experiences relate events and detailed conversations that occur throughout, say, serious operations where the patient is in a totally unconscious state as assessed by medical criteria for several hours. They certainly do not relate only to ‘minutes or seconds . . . only when subjects are awakening’ from unconsciousness: ‘memories are not made when subjects are ‘unconscious’’ says Marsh – this is patently incorrect. Prospective hospital research by Prof Bruce Greyson, Pim Van Lommel, Schwaninger et al, Sam Parnia and Penny Sartori – although in its infancy - is highlighting that NDEs and OBEs can no longer be dismissed. The Sartori book The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study published by Edwin Mellen Press 2008, showed that some patients were clearly accessing information and reporting things that were occurring during a time when they were deeply unconscious.

Cardiologist Pim van Lommel2 cites examples of patients pronounced clinically dead, some for five minutes or more before being resuscitated. They are often able to give detailed accounts of the measures taken during that time to revive them. Cardiologist Michael Sabom has described similar experiences3. As this is the key point in Marsh’s arguments and the premise is fundamentally flawed, the whole thesis constructed on this basis is without foundation. In recent years, Michael Tymn4 and Lisa Williams5 have given us mediumistic accounts of an afterlife whose characteristics correspond closely to those described by NDE subjects in this book.

Marsh claims: ‘critical review of NDE language reveals its bizarreness and banality’. In fact, the language used in describing NDE states after a medical trauma is usually a layperson’s account of medical procedures and equipment. Furthermore, many NDEs and OBEs reveal details of a spiritual state that often embraces visions of God or avatars or, in secular matters, precognition or clairvoyance of often traumatic events presently occurring, or even in the future, to close relatives. Marsh says they are ‘mere trivialities, worldly memories – from Hollywood or Sunday school.’ As children as young as four or five can experience NDEs with some of the characteristics of adult experiences6,7, this spiritual devaluation of the experience is also quite unfounded. Most persons are spiritually uplifted by an NDE and live the rest of their lives in a more holistic way, so the experience is far from trivial.

There are documented cases from reliable subjects, often verified by other onlookers of integrity which provide further evidence that the events related are often of great significance. Swedenborg’s clairvoyance of a fire in Stockholm when he was giving a dinner party many miles away was confirmed by the other party guests and is a well-known example. There are documented records of people who were intending to travel on the Titanic’s fateful voyage who made written accounts in diaries of premonitions of impending disaster.

Marsh compares the brain state during these experiences as being like the ‘double-aspect consciousness common to lucid dreaming and epilepsy’. My son suffered from epilepsy for several years and I have for many years been subject to lucid dreaming. The experiences that I and my son have had were nothing like those reported by NDE or OBE subjects. This is confirmed by van Lommel’s study. There is no ‘double-aspect consciousness’ in NDEs: in anaesthesia or death, the conscious mind is stilled; only the unconscious soul is active. Furthermore, in OBEs or shared NDEs, subjects are usually fully conscious but may still experience some of these phenomena.

Professor Marsh refers to Dr. Raymond Moody’s classic book Life After Life (1975) but not to Glimpses of Eternity8 that describes shared death experiences. Here, groups of people who are physically close, and usually but not always emotionally close, to a dying individual, but who are all in a fully wide-awake state, individually report some of the phenomena described by NDE or OBE subjects.

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‘NDE phenomenology is culturally-determined, historically and geographically’ says Marsh: why should this count against their validity as spiritual experiences? Would we not expect souls in the spiritual domain, especially if only temporarily, to relate to Jesus or Mary or Muhammad or even to pagan gods and goddesses as they did in earthly life?

Marsh’s desire to replace what he calls ‘Hardy’s panentheism’ interpretation of these phenomena by ‘a more robust footing in the ‘Otherness’ of God, envisioned as triune hypostatic inter-relationships of Father, Son and Spirit’ does nothing to support his case.
As indicated by several authors of books on the subject, while there are certainly culturally-influenced aspects of NDEs, there are certain features that are remarkably uniform between adherents of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths in the west and the mystical religious philosophies of the east. ‘The relationality of the Godhead to creation is exhibited through the dual nature of Jesus who is at once intrinsic to the Triune Godhead, but also incarnate Man, thereby bridging humanity and creation to the divine’, says Marsh. Surely any role for Jesus in interpretation of these phenomena is an irrelevance to Jews, Islamists, Hindus and atheists who all report having similar NDEs. There is nothing whatever specifically Christian about NDEs or OBEs. The argument is confounded rather than illuminated by any interpretation in terms of a uniquely Christian viewpoint.

Humanity and the divine are bridged far more closely by the concept of a panentheistic divine cosmic spirit in which, as souls, we all participate than by invoking Jesus as intermediary. Hardy’s process theology, in which human souls are regarded as part of the divine cosmic spirit – a concept so disparaged by Marsh – represents a far more coherent interpretation of these and other psychic events. Furthermore, it is one that is more compatible with modern theoretical science than with a biblical viewpoint which even many theologians now accept is largely allegorical man-made myth.

Professor Marsh has concentrated exclusively on NDEs and OBEs in his thesis. However, these are only one or two aspects of psychic phenomena. Certainly, because subjects claim to see ‘Jesus in white robes’ or ‘the face of God’ during the events, this cannot by itself be regarded as a ‘glimpse of immortality.’ What they do indicate clearly is that it is possible for people to undergo mental experiences that are inexplicable on the materialist world view of pre-20th century science.

To get a more balanced view of the phenomena we must surely take into account other psychic events in fully alert subjects, particularly those who claim to have some form of spiritual psychic vision. The consistency between the reports of an afterlife provided by mediums4,5 and that of NDEs and OBEs is surely significant – it may not constitute proof, but it is certainly very persuasive evidence, for those who are open-minded and not ingrained materialists, of an eternal spiritual domain to which we are all apprenticed in mortal life.

Both Sabom and van Lommel, as well as Mark Fox9, and Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick10 interpret NDEs and OBEs as having far more spiritual significance than Marsh attributes to them. The state of being during NDEs and OBEs cannot be satisfactorily explained in materialist physiological terms: it is certainly not confined to a few moments before full consciousness and its effects on the subjects are anything but bizarre and banal. The outstanding success of some spiritual healers, especially those who have no medical training themselves but claim to have medically qualified spirit guides11, is surely further evidence of a continuing existence of human souls in the afterlife, functioning as spiritual guides.

1 Michael N. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, Oxford University Press, 2010.
2 Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, HarperCollins, 2010.
3 Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death, Corgi, 1982.
4 Michael Tymn, The Articulate Dead: They brought the spirit world alive, Galde Press, Lakeville, Minnesota, 2008.
5 Lisa Williams, The Survival of the Soul, Hay House, 2011.
6 M. Morse and P. Perry, Closer to the Light, Villard Books, New York, 1990.
7 P.M.H. Atwater, The New Children and Near-Death Experiences, Bear and Co., Rochester, VT, 2003.
8 Raymond Moody, Glimpses of Eternity: An investigation into shared death experiences, Rider, 2010.
9 Mark Fox, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience, Routledge, 2003.
10 Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: Investigation of over 300 near-death experiences, Berkley Books, New York, 1995.
11 See the books by J. Bernard Hutton on the work of medium George Chapman working through ophthalmic surgeon Mr Wiliam Lang (Healing Hands, Virgin, 1995) and medium Mrs Leah Doctors working through a 15th century Chinese surgeon called Dr. Fu Lin Chang (The Healing Power, Leslie Frewin, 1975).

Published in De Numine, magazine of the Alister Hardy Society, No. 52, Spring 2012

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A New Look at the Philosophy of Education

On education by examination

Something seems to have gone awry with the education system in Britain. Once, our schools were the envy of the world: now, we have industrial employers bemoaning the fact that too many applicants lack fundamental skills in numeracy, literacy and communication. Certainly, grammatical and punctuation errors abound on radio and television. Those in universities responsible for selecting entrants to degree courses say they have difficulty in assessing the quality of applicants for places because even the top grades at A-level are not an adequate criterion for differentiation of students. So keen are universities to accept overseas students that undergraduates are entering on courses without even a basic knowledge of English. The Royal Society of Chemistry has even gone so far as to suggest that Examination Boards be fined heavily if they make their examination papers in chemistry too easy in order to secure higher grades for their Board, particularly by minimizing the amount of mathematics required. It is generally agreed by teachers and psychologists in the developed world that the education of children is failing badly. Journalist Nicholas Pyke reports that ‘targets set in 1997 have never yet been hit’ for some Key Stages.

Yet we have had successive governments in Britain telling us that GCSE and A-level pass rates and grades have improved by some two to three percent each year for the past two decades. Over the same period, Examination Boards have insisted that standards of test papers have not fallen. If there have indeed been improvements of 2–3% in the skills of candidates from state schools for more than twenty years — giving an increase in skill of well over 50% overall – this does not reflect well on the standards attained by those of us who qualified half a century ago.

One factor that undoubtedly contributes to ‘better’ results is that pupils are now drilled for quite specific examination questions where previously they were taught many different topics within a subject, from which examination questions would be extracted. Today, examination questions are often very similar, year after year, so that rote learning of certain topics has a much greater chance of producing correct answers, though not necessarily contributing to a better understanding of, or enthusiasm for, the subject as a whole. The policy at present is not so much the education of the child by stimulating the excitement of learning but rather the attainment of examination results that will push the school up the league tables. As a result, many children are just simply bored with the tedium of school learning, especially since lessons only rarely come close to the excitement of DVDs and computer graphics in their presentation.
Furthermore, fifty years go pupils sat a maximum of 8 ‘O’-levels. Now, sitting 13 GCSEs is not uncommon for the best students. With a school day that is no longer, how can subject material increase by more than 50% without a decrease in detailed knowledge in each subject. Yet standards haven’t fallen, the government says: that is not what teachers and employers say! Even the BBC, once regarded as a paragon of model English, daily displays slovenly use of our language.

There is now also an educational philosophy that no pupil should ‘fail’ — hence we have results that indicate that almost everyone passes everything. But children do need to be given a fair assessment of their abilities so that they can come to terms with their shortcomings in some areas and try to address them. There will be some subjects in which they are strong and others in which they are weak. To heap praise continually on children even when they are academically weak does them no service at all and simply leads to confusion. If they know that they are not making the required effort, but still ‘passing’ examinations, there is little incentive to make greater effort. If they are making their best efforts but understanding still eludes them, then the teacher has to adopt a new approach or the pupil’s efforts must be directed elsewhere — to regard such pupils as successful undermines the whole purpose of the examinations.

The philosophy that no child must ever fail is misguided. We all ‘fail’ at times in life, but we learn from failure as much as we do from success, if not more since it can send us in a more rewarding direction. One could adopt a viewpoint that says that there really is no such thing as failure — only different degrees of success. But is this attitude really helpful to students getting grades F and U in GCSE subjects, even if few do?
The ultimate purpose of schooling is to prepare children for life, to gain satisfaction and happiness for themselves and those with whom they interact. Knowing there are fields in which they are unlikely to succeed provides an opportunity for them to redirect their efforts as early as possible into areas where they will be rewarded with success and fulfilment. Achieving happiness and fulfilment is surely the ultimate goal. Psychologists tell us that happiness stems from achieving pleasure, avoiding pain and, most of all, from securing fulfilment.

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Putting subjects in perspective

It is important that all students should have some understanding of science, and Foundation Level examinations in mathematics and science have been introduced for this purpose. However, these syllabuses really are very fundamental (!) and much of the material formerly comprising the Intermediate Level syllabus has now been omitted. In particular, many of the topics involving serious mathematical calculations have now disappeared from the sciences. Even more basic material – like simultaneous and quadratic equations in algebra, compound interest calculations in arithmetic, all trigonometry and circle geometry – have now been discarded from Foundation mathematics. Nevertheless, students can still attain the lowest of the top three grades that are regarded as indicating a satisfactory level of basic competence in the subjects. Having taught these subjects for the past forty years, I would disagree. I do not think that such Foundation Level passes indicate any meaningful grasp whatsoever of the relevant subjects and it is confusing, both for students and prospective employers, to suggest that candidates have a basic grasp of the subjects concerned, either in mathematics or science.

In mathematics and, more particularly, in science, with which I am most familiar, there has also been increasing emphasis on making the subjects more ‘relevant’ to applications in industry. Of course, we must train up-coming students in the skills they need to take their place in industry, or to teach the next generation. However, one consequence of this has been that the history of the subjects has almost completely disappeared from the syllabus. The history of science is a fundamental part of the development of the subject. Science seems no longer to be taught as the evolution of constantly changing ideas about how the world works but as a body of incontrovertible facts that must be learnt (rather than necessarily understood) in order to pass examinations. In the extreme attitude of scientism, science is regarded as the only means we have of discovering facts about the natural world. One result of this is that lay people are confused when different scientific ‘experts’ give conflicting advice; this has led to a diminishing of respect for science and those who practice it — arising from a lack of understanding of the true nature of the subject. There is no time to dwell on the philosophy of science in the race to cram in the requisite body of facts so that examination results can be seen to be making continual progress. Indeed, a case could be made for adding philosophy as a subject in itself, were there not an already overcrowded school curriculum.

If time were spent on teaching something of the history and philosophy of science, this would give students a feeling for how important the sciences have been, and still are, in the development of western society and why they were studying the subject, quite apart from gaining qualifications. The time taken away from cramming facts would be amply repaid in having happier and better motivated pupils. It is so much easier to learn facts if there are pegs on which to hang the information: learning facts in isolation is very difficult. This would also provide an opportunity to put into perspective the current media clamour about how technology has ruined the planet. It would make students aware that science and technology have huge sociological, economic and environmental impacts that cannot always be foreseen at the inception or implementation of a new idea or discovery. These have to be taken into consideration subsequently as far as possible in exploring the industrial development of any scientific idea. It should also give students a greater sense of excitement about science and the contribution they could make to human social history, an excitement they could hardly get from mere assimilation of ‘useful’ facts.

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The beginnings of enlightenment

But all of this is at secondary and tertiary level education. Let us start at the beginning. The place to begin inculcating the fundamental principles of an ecologically sustainable holistic world-view embracing science, the humanities and spirituality is within primary education. The Italian educationalist, Maria Montessori (1870-1952), had the foresight to realize that the process of shaping young minds to be happy and successful contributors to society should begin in primary school: ‘We shall walk together on this path of life. For all things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity’. What a wonderful message to convey to little five or six year olds as they begin their exploration of the wonders of the world!

Children must learn even at primary level that learning requires effort, that not all rewards are immediate, that resources must be shared, and that the needs of others must not be ignored. The idea of instant gratification has now become such a common attitude within society, for both children and adults, that everyone expects their wishes will be immediately granted. This is one of the reasons for the ever increasing amount of personal debt in the population – they have been taught at school, and thence as adults, to expect that they will get whatever they want with the minimum of effort, and that education itself is a business for which they will have to pay dearly if they go on to tertiary education. It is now accepted that graduates will start their working lives with several tens of thousands of pounds or dollars of debt that will have to be paid off, if they can find a job: and having a degree is no guarantee of employment.

There is also an increasing tendency for denial of responsibility. Why should parents bother about the nurture of their children? — many feel that that is the school’s and the state’s job. Why bother about dieting? — any illness will be sorted out by modern medicine. Deferred or delayed gratification and acceptance of social responsibility are such important principles to inculcate into children from the very earliest age if we want them to become responsible members of adult society. These are the kinds of principles prevalent in Montessori and other private schools, but only in the best of state-run schools.

Montessori schools, and schools at secondary level run along lines originally set out by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), both stress the spiritual aspect of life and the societal role of the children as adults. These principles are allowed to operate alongside the practical and rational learning, but always there is encouragement for children to be enthusiastic about the material they are learning. Contented children have insatiable curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, so they need only to be guided along the right channels to learn in a safe and peaceful environment.

Reading is a skill that is finding increasing emphasis in schools once again, and it is long overdue. Reading stimulates the imagination by the creation of mental pictures from words in black and white on a page and as such it helps develop those all important neural networks in the brain. However, reading has become too passive and too slow a pastime for many children today, indoctrinated by television and videos with their constantly changing images. Children who read fluently typically show better performance in all of their subjects. Fortunately, after a few decades when it was abandoned at the behest of educational theorists, the phonics system of reading is now back in primary schools (where children learn to read by learning the sound of individual letters). Learning to read and speak a second language at primary level would broaden this skill even further.

While learning to walk and talk comes naturally, learning to read and write are applied skills that require focused attention. The effort required by the child is itself an emotionally rewarding process and teaches them that prolonged effort may be needed to fulfil some of life’s achievements — deferred gratification again. The debate as to whether language is a product of nature or nurture continues, but recent research suggests that the basic ability for language is genetically programmed. Nevertheless, the onus is on parents, teachers and the students themselves to make the most of any ability that they have through inheritance: nature lays the foundations; nurture builds up the fabric of knowledge.

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Setting the right examples

Alongside instruction in school, children need right examples to follow from parents at home. Children will take little notice of admonishments not to take drugs unless the home environment supports this, with parents setting the example. An increasingly overweight adult population with higher levels of diabetes is hardly the kind of role model we want our children to follow. There is too much overindulgence and irresponsibility amongst adults in living hedonistically; we cannot then expect overstretched medical resources to sort out the problems that will undoubtedly occur. This is not the philosophy of life to teach to our children.

Prerequisites for learning are a healthy diet that avoids junk food and drugs, adequate exercise and sleep, judicious use of television and computers for entertainment and learning, time spent with parents and other family adults in reading and talking, and adopting a relaxed lifestyle and a holistic moral outlook that avoids any specific religious indoctrination. Many children are being encouraged to live the kind of frantic lifestyle of their parents. Lots of activity to use up that bountiful energy in childhood, and the opening up of as many experiences as possible are great, as long as there are times too for quiet reading, talking and reflection.

Television ‘soaps’ present a highly damaging example of human behaviour. A large proportion of the exchanges in these episodes are aggressive with the combatants continually shouting and swearing at one another. We could be spending our time in much more constructive and meaningful activities that would contribute to our happiness and well-being. As Sue Palmer says in her book Toxic Childhood: ‘It would help a lot if television — the window through which we now all see the world — could reflect the advantages of healthy social interaction, rather than concentrating so much attention on dysfunctional relationships and social breakdown.’ As she says, family breakdown has now become so commonplace that it has become a form of entertainment. If children are led to believe that this is the way differences of opinion are resolved in the adult world, we cannot be surprised if they are aggressive to teachers and fellow pupils.

However much the liberals may scream ‘censorship’, it is difficult to see who else but the government has the power and the duty to influence this if we do not want to encourage a nation of illiterate delinquent adolescents. The majority of pupils just want to get on with their learning in peace, but those few who are led astray by these poor role models can disrupt a class or even a whole school. Discipline in schools has long since deteriorated to the point where some pupils now feel they need to carry weapons for their own protection. From being one of the most satisfying of careers, teaching has now become one of the most stressful.

With no form of sanctions available to discipline children, and faced for political reasons with mixed-ability classes, teachers have to spend a disproportionate amount of time with recalcitrant pupils at the expense of teaching the orderly majority. Everybody suffers; so we cannot be surprised if educational standards in state schools decline, whatever the examination results indicate. Treating people differently because they are different is not elitism. It is equality of opportunity that is required, not necessarily equality of treatment.

The issue of school discipline is but one of the social problems that governments in Britain and America have scarcely begun to address. With adults too often having to work away from home for long periods, or commute great distances, there is insufficient time or energy left for parents to spend with children. It is up to employers to see that their staff live, say, within 15 miles of the workplace so that the employees are in a better mental state to do their work and can have more time and energy for family and recreation. In rural areas of course, this might not be possible. With increased marital breakup there are often fewer older family members able to baby-sit or tell stories, both fictional and factual from their earlier life, to the children. Story-telling, family or ancestral tales, and tribal myths are such an important part of making a growing child feel part of the society in which they live. They accustom a child to the vocabulary and grammar of the language as well as immersing them in the practices of their own or other families or social groups. Including classes on relationships would be a valuable part of every secondary school curriculum.

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Small is more effective

Many smaller village primary schools in Britain have been closed and moderately sized secondary schools amalgamated. The theory has been that bigger schools allow more opportunities for a diversity of subjects for the pupils. But all pupils do not need all of these facilities at this age and there are huge drawbacks. Where once, teachers knew their pupils well enough to know their strengths and weaknesses, there are now so many students in a school that any kind of individual rapport is very difficult. The result is that the pupil feels isolated, alienated and less valued, especially if coming from a single-parent home or one where both parents work, where contact time with adults is likely to be more limited. The most important single quality of life that we must provide for our children is that of security — at home and in school. This is far more important than providing availability of a wide range of specialist subjects at secondary level in huge schools. There is time enough for that in college education at tertiary level.
Because of the relative inaccessibility of such large schools, instead of being able to walk or cycle to school, children now must be bussed in or brought in cars by parents because the distances they have to travel to these centralized schools are so much greater, which means less exercise for pupils and more traffic congestion and pollution.
In the older educational system, boys and girls were usually educated separately. It is probably preferable socially to have boys and girls educated together because psychologists now accept that there are certain traits that, in general, are to be found more often in boys or girls, respectively. Each gender then learns about social interaction with the other in co-educational schools. From an academic viewpoint, however, boys and girls probably benefit from single-sex education so that, at least in school hours, the influence of adolescent hormones in attracting a mate is not paramount. The best of both approaches could be achieved if instruction in lessons were to be given to boys and girls separately in adjacently located schools, and then seeing that there were adequate social opportunities for the two sexes to mix socially, say at lunch breaks or in after-school activities.

Comprehensive schools were created in Britain to eliminate the supposedly divisive structure of grammar schools and so-called ‘secondary-modern’ schools. The principle was that all children should be treated equally. But this was muddle-headed thinking by politicians and their educational advisors. Children should not be treated equally but given equal opportunities and treated, each according to his or her own needs, as in the Montessori and Steiner schools. Some children are largely self-motivated while others need coercion to study, especially during adolescence. Some thrive on challenging academic study while others have more aptitude for practical pursuits. This may seem obvious; but the two-tier system of grammar and secondary-modern schools catered for this difference in approach very well while many comprehensive schools do not have staff or time in the curriculum to cater for such differences in outlook.

Another great disaster of comprehensive education has been mixed-ability teaching. In classes of over 30 pupils, which are the norm, it is quite impossible for a teacher to provide enough stimulation to the brightest pupils while, at the same time, giving enough attention to the less able, so that they too can keep up with the flow of a lesson. If the less able include physically impaired children, the situation is exacerbated. Such children are supposed to have a ‘helper’ sitting beside them to help them along, but cuts in funding have meant that such a helper is often not present. The result is that disabled children are bored and frustrated and, more often than not, become disruptive as they seek the attention they so desperately want and need. They are also frequently made the target of derision by able-bodied students, thus further diminishing their self-esteem.

The idea of putting disabled students with able-bodied pupils, because this is how they will have to live in society, is ill-conceived. Although introduced ostensibly for the benefit of the students there is little doubt that it was really implemented as a cost-saving measure so that special schools could be dispensed with. Again, the opportunity for disabled children to live amongst those who are able-bodied can be left to the time when pupils leave school having had a sound and secure secondary schooling. It is within the power of government to correct some of these anomalies if only they would put the welfare of the people they govern before the quest for political power, in-between elections.

Government policy in both health and education has been towards centralisation: concentration of resources suggests greater value out of the education budget, and this is the overriding goal. But children are not impersonal units and neither is education a business; and the first step in improving standards in education must surely be to return as far as possible to pupil-friendly smaller schools where pupils and teachers have time to establish some rapport Then pupils can once again feel secure in the knowledge that they are an integral part of the school as an institution, and take a pride in their contribution to its wellbeing. Hopefully, this might also reduce the incidence of bullying, victimization and other violent behaviour. What we need is a much more holistic approach to education to consider other aspects of a child’s development besides academic performance, and government must surely take the lead in this. We have had many changes in syllabus and structure of examinations over the past twenty years in Britain. The election of a new government provides an ideal opportunity to change the philosophy of primary and secondary education.

Bibliography

Bailey, Richard (2009), The Philosophy of Education: An introduction, Continuum, London.
Martin, Paul (2006), Making Happy People, HarperCollins, London.
Palmer, Sue (2006), Toxic Childhood, Orion, London.
Woods, Ronald and Barrow, Robin (2006), An Introduction to Philosophy of Education
(4th edn), Routledge, London.
http://www.emie.ac.uk/publications/annual-survey-of-trends.cfm (a survey of primary
schools)
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/14-19/ (on secondary education policy)
http://www.ascl.org.uk/ (information on secondary schools from heads of schools and
colleges)
Published on the Scientific & Medical Network website (www.scimednet.org) 2012

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Medicine and Healthcare

By Howard Jones with Jennifer Jones

There is no doubt that our healthcare system is in crisis regardless of the sterling work of those working within it. It is trying to cope with too many people calling on its services, the numerous medical advances in pharmaceutical preparations, and complex and expensive equipment and treatment regimes developed over the last twenty to thirty years. With the limitations of the funding available, even a bottomless pit of money would still not bring it to a state of balance.

Our original view of the health service has not changed fundamentally since its inception – that it would always provide healthcare free at the point of delivery for anyone who needed it. If we wish to bring our healthcare system out of crisis, we have to introduce a period of radical re-education of each individual, both within and outside of the health service, to reduce the demands made upon it. The words ‘each individual’ are used advisedly because this is not one of the ubiquitous and never-ending target-based government solutions to the healthcare crisis, but one that is more personal to each and every one of us.

The twentieth century philosophy

The development of the pharmaceutical industry, leading to its disproportionately large influence today, has moved medicine inexorably away from its naturopathic roots. This was all we had (besides surgery) until the twentieth century, but now the opposite extreme of allopathic medicine has become the first-line treatment in both Britain and America. We now rely almost totally on drugs for the resolution of the symptoms of ill health. The vast majority of drugs do not cure us of anything; they only mask the symptoms so that we may carry on with our lives with as little inconvenience as possible. This is not to say that we should not use drugs, but a balance of treatments, with far more emphasis on naturopathic medicine, addressing causes rather than treatments, would be far less radical, less expensive and often just as effective, with fewer of the toxic side effects, now so common that they have given rise to the whole sub-discipline of iatrogenic medicine. However, this also requires a new attitude to health amongst the general population.

When we visit the doctor’s surgery, we expect to leave with a prescription. If we experience side effects from a drug for a particular condition, doctors often have available another drug to counteract these ill-effects. Doctors need to be more aware of the different reactions to drugs by different people, accept patients as individuals, be prepared to listen to the patient and adjust their prescription regimes accordingly, and not be led unthinkingly by promotion literature from drug companies. Taking prescribed medicine puts the responsibility for our health onto the doctor: we need individuals to take responsibility themselves for their wellbeing.
If it is a choice between adjusting our diet and lifestyle to resolve an imbalance in the body or taking a pill, the pill will win out at present for too many people. In a series on British television in 2008, aimed at undermining naturopathic remedies as valueless in most cases, an eminent professor (of obstetrics and gynaecology!) said she would take a pill to lower her cholesterol rather than bother about adjusting her diet. This attitude, expressed by a prominent academic, encourages people to take the easy option, without regard for the deleterious side-effects — it is a demand for instant gratification, much like that in so many other aspects of our lives today, and avoidance of individual responsibility.

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A new cultural ethos

We have lost sight of the fact that each of us has a body that is the most incredible creation: if we allow it to, it will function in harmony with the rest of nature for over seven decades. The body works quite efficiently even when there is an imbalance, and there are numerous examples of those with serious or debilitating medical conditions who achieve enormous satisfaction and success in their lives. Our bodies co-operate with us to live successfully through what can only be described as our abuse of them — but we have come to accept this miracle as a normal state of affairs. We take our bodies for granted.

If we wish to spend less time resolving the health issues we have created in our bodies, we have to stop abusing them and start respecting them as vital organisms for a successful, creative and enjoyable life: in other words, we have to take responsibility and exercise a degree of self-control.

As individuals, we need to understand that, if we do not want to spend a large proportion of our later life in pain and discomfort, attending hospital appointments and staying in hospital for treatment, we have to change our view of our bodies and how we treat them. The simple fact is that a lack of respect and love for our bodies causes us ill health: we no longer live in harmony with nature. It is a principle of holistic ayurvedic medicine to regard our bodies as a sacred part of the natural world, and a large component of ayurveda is naturopathy.

Equally, we need to have respect for our loved ones who have to live with us while we go through our health crises — giving us the love we need on an emotional level and the practical help with our everyday lives. Allowing ourselves to become ill through undisciplined behaviour places a huge stress on all of those around us, and includes the financial issue of perhaps not being able to earn our living and support others. Many people assume that, after they have poisoned their bodies with alcohol, tobacco, and other ‘recreational’ drugs, everyone will rally round and support them. By eating convenience ‘fast’ food, our bodies may well not be in a sufficiently robust state to deal with these assaults.

Another sociological aspect of ill health is the drain on the resources of the wider community. Ill health costs money that is found from the taxes we all pay into the public purse. Some of those whose illnesses are genetic or develop in early life are experiencing a lack of funding for their treatment because it is being spent on those whose illnesses develop as a result of their irresponsible and hedonistic lifestyle. Whilst this shortage of funds is not evident in all areas, as the population rises, resources will have to be spread even more thinly and this situation is likely to occur more frequently. There is already a triage system for surgical treatment, and this will have to become more ruthless unless people take more care of themselves.

In defence of the average person, it is not altogether surprising that people have over-indulged in substances like alcohol and tobacco when successive governments have given advertisers of these products free-rein because of the vast quantities of tax these addictions brought into their coffers. Unfortunately, politicians were not astute enough to realize that the health issues created by this over-indulgence have cost the country more than the taxes collected. We have known of the dangers of smoking for half a century, and of passive smoking for at least two decades, but what a battle it has been to get smoking banned in public places! Alcohol abuse has been linked to cancers of the oesophagus and gut, but the response of the government in Britain was to de-restrict alcohol sales, with the unsurprising result of an increase in alcohol-related crime and drunkenness.

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Many people are considered to be stoic in their acceptance of the chronic ill health they have created but if, as a society, we began to view their conditions as the result of their irresponsible and hedonistic behaviour, this would perhaps bring a more balanced approach to healthcare and would bring social pressure to bear on those who abuse their bodies with drugs. At present, such people are described as ‘victims’ – as if their condition was forced on them by others.

This is not to say that we should be unsympathetic but rather that we should encourage each individual to take responsibility for their own body and their health. The health service and the media have achieved a certain amount of success by providing information on maintaining health, despite pitifully small amounts of funding for health promotion, but no real emphasis has ever been placed on this aspect of individual responsibility. Establishing promotional systems for guidance on preventative medicine, diet and lifestyle should be a high priority for any future government, and such advice should begin in schools.

Private medical insurances cover only a limited range of illnesses, outside of which the insured person has to provide the financial resources for treatment or use social healthcare systems. If we set up life insurance and we then take our own life, our loved ones do not benefit financially: we accept these rules as reasonable. Yet, effectively, we expect others to compensate us for reducing the quality and longevity of our lives by our own deleterious lifestyle choices. We have, in effect, shirked our personal responsibility to maintain a healthy body: yet we perceive it as our right that someone else will find the financial resources to keep us alive with a reasonable quality of life, or compensate our loved ones if we die.

The new organizational ethos

The strongest and most effective part of the healthcare system is in acute care – emergency services. This is where the British National Health Service excels. But it is chronic care that costs the most money and this is where healthcare systems are not as effective. The huge demand for chronic care is largely due to the results of the abuse of our bodies, and treatment is less effective because these illnesses can rarely be cured; the symptoms can only be reduced or alleviated. The pharmaceutical industry’s very lucrative interventions in chronic illness can keep patients functioning in moderate health for many years, during which time the pharmaceutical bill may well rise to a much higher level than the patients’ contributions made in taxes during their working lives.

Another view of the health service is that it is there to extend our lives for as long as possible. A large proportion of the population is fearful of ill health, and indeed their own mortality, and yet an individual’s quest for survival tends not to include changes in behaviour until they are confronted with the realities of ill-health, and perhaps not even then for some. Traditionally, medicine has, quite rightly, been practised to save lives but the emphasis now is on prolonging life at any cost, whatever that may be. Most would agree that it is the quality of life that is paramount rather than our longevity. Death of the body is a natural part of life that we can never avoid but we are presented with many opportunities to avoid much ill health.

Although the use of the name, National Health Service, would indicate an organization that maintains good health, it has never been viewed in this way. In everyone’s mind it is a ‘national sickness service’. The medical profession has virtually no interaction at all with healthy people: doctors and surgeons intervene only when people are ill! Even many of those who work in the healthcare system offer poor role models for patients, a significant number of them being smokers or overweight, if not obese. The beginning of the opportunity to bring the health service back into balance, out of its current crisis, is to change our perception to one of a service offered by exemplary role models in preventative medicine to maintain good health, with the continued availability of excellent emergency treatment facilities.

The change in our thinking suggested above may seem harsh, but we have to face the realities at some point. Already, sick people are prioritized for treatment because of a lack of funds. Up to now, we have been in denial about the ability of our healthcare system to cope with the rising population, and particularly the increase in life expectancy, and the emerging and expensive treatments that every patient would wish to have available to them when they need them. Prevarication over any issue puts us in the position of having to apply crisis management to the situation and this is always radical and painful – our healthcare system is no exception.

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A different approach

There is another aspect of re-education that could help to ameliorate some of the pain of the changes that will inevitably have to take place if we are to maintain a system of healthcare. It is obvious that we are all here on this planet living together and that we do not live in isolation. Whatever we do impacts on other people, mentally and physically.

Many people have the view that what they do with their lives, and their bodies, is entirely their own affair. If they choose to abuse their bodies, it is nobody’s business but their own. But, in a very real sense, their actions have a massive impact on the rest of the population: emotionally for family, friends and co-workers; economically, both at a personal and public level; psychologically in terms of their own and others’ mindset as a result of their perception of the illness and its effects.

Part of our re-education is about remembering that we are all here together on this planet for our own individual lifetimes, regardless of how long or short, painful or happy they may be. Taking responsibility for our own good health is essential for our development and evolution, personally and on a global level. Whether we like it or not, we are inextricably linked to one another. We have come to stress too much our rights as individuals with too little regard for our duties and responsibilities as a society.
Taking this a step further, re-educating individuals needs to include a sense of our not being alone, because we are all part of the interactive natural environment, however you view it depending on your scientific, religious or spiritual beliefs. We are, in effect and in reality, all one. Our societies are based on fear — of ill health, our mortality, terrorism, strangers and many other perceptions. Denial of the effects of alcohol abuse, of smoking or other drug taking is an expression of fear of facing the inevitable consequences and a refusal to exert self-control. When we take responsibility for our bodies, we take action — and action is the fastest way of evaporating fear. When we take responsibility for any one thing in our lives, it makes it easier to do the same for other areas. When we reduce or lose our fear, when we face the consequences of our denial, we can start accepting and loving the bodies we are in.

Whatever we care about, we take care of: those who love their cars and houses spend many hours cleaning and looking after them; those who love their gardens spend time tending them; those who enjoy other hobbies make the time to pursue them. It is simple — these people have a passion for something. Sometimes their passion for something outside of themselves far outweighs their passion for their own well-being. We must be encouraged to have a passion for being healthy for as large a part of our lives as we can, for without health we are unable to pursue our other activities.
This can be facilitated by our healthcare system in providing different types of treatments that have a preventative effect; this would include both orthodox and complementary therapies. Weekly massages, reflexology treatments, acupuncture, healing and many other complementary therapies give us the opportunity to show our bodies gratitude for the efficient job they do in keeping us functional and pain-free. When ill health arises, which it can in even the healthiest person, the health service would then have the financial resources to offer orthodox and complementary treatments to explore the root cause of the imbalance and resolve it, if possible.

We would also have financial and other resources available to help all of those with terminal illness, offering palliative care for as long as it is needed in an environment that is compassionate, calm and loving. The passing from this life does not need to be frightening or even uncomfortable if the appropriate care and counselling are given.
The resulting redeployment of financial resources would reduce inequalities in the level of care provided throughout the country so that everyone would have the security of knowing that their taxes were being well spent to provide them with whatever care they need when they needed it. This philosophy encourages people to look after their bodies and at a lower cost to the health service because complementary treatments are often significantly cheaper than allopathic drugs or treatments, often just as effective and without the unpleasant side-effects that so often accompany allopathic medication.

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Many people offer the argument that complementary therapies take longer to have effect — and this is true, because they are gentler. However, if we are already encouraging people to look after their bodies, there is a greater likelihood that imbalances will be identified earlier because of patients’ greater awareness, allowing complementary treatments to be offered as an initial response. Currently, many people pursue complementary therapies only after they have exhausted everything the orthodox medical profession has to offer, having experienced little or no success in resolving their health issues. Frequently they are at a point in their illness where nothing more can be done other than to make them comfortable enough to be able to live with their condition for as long as they can — and this may be the case for many years. Complementary treatments can be very effective in this scenario. However, using complementary therapies when more aggressive orthodox treatment has failed is asking for a higher level of success than can reasonably be expected. To denigrate complementary therapies on the basis of this type of experience is irrational. A new philosophy of maintaining health rather than only treating diseases that develop as a result of neglect or abuse of the body would incorporate the idea that a gentler but deeper treatment requires more time to have effect and this could become acceptable as a regime for improvement. The success of complementary therapies needs to be statistically assessed, without preconceived notions that they are without scientific basis.

The medical profession and complementary therapists are aware that their respective treatments are not panaceas. Many of both types of treatments have not been tested sufficiently extensively in every case to say whether or not they are effective or appropriate: for example, in the investigation of the synergistic action of two or more drugs, or in using standard scientific investigative methods to allow meaningful assessment of therapies whose mode of action is not yet fully understood. However, the most important criterion in assessing a treatment must be whether patients find it helpful.

We are not astute or aware enough yet as a species to know everything about the human body and how it works, or how we can resolve or treat every single condition. We have to have the humility and integrity to admit this so that we can take some issues on trust. For example, acupuncture is not understood by many in the orthodox medical profession but it is becoming acceptable as a valid treatment in some medical facilities. The suggestion that teaching patients how to relax when they were suffering from stress-related emotional illnesses was viewed with scepticism some years ago, but now it is being offered in many areas of the healthcare system. If we see that a particular treatment is helpful to patients and can resolve or relieve their health imbalances, this is truly evidence-based medicine. Subjecting it to analysis and ‘scientific’ testing will not make it any more or less valid as a treatment. We have to use our intelligence and the traditional skill that the training for doctors prizes most highly — that of observation — whether the treatment is complementary or orthodox.
Doctors and complementary therapists have a common goal in trying to help patients as best they can to either resolve their health challenges or, if this is not possible, to help them to experience as good a quality of life as they can. The two groups of practitioners are close in many ways — and yet there is a massive divide that is based largely on perceptions and egos. We need to become aware of and emphasize the similarities rather than fight about the differences if we truly have the health of the population at the heart of our endeavours.

We need to educate each individual in our society, starting in primary schools, to take responsibility for their bodies — and to enjoy that responsibility. This philosophy is likely to have an effect in every aspect of our lives as we grow and develop. Once the majority of people understand and relish the opportunity to take responsibility generally, the demands on all our public services would be reduced dramatically. Many common diseases such as asthma, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer have strong environmental and life-style elements of causation. Research has shown that, with will, we can use mind to guide our bodies to health.

There are so many areas where individuals are clearly not taking responsibility for their behaviour and the way they choose to live. Many complain about a ‘nanny state’, where the government has too much control over our individual lives; but that is how it has to be if we are not prepared to look after ourselves as individuals so that we place burdens on others. Those giving dietary advice have even been described as ‘food Nazis’. Freedom lies in becoming as self-sufficient and supportive of our fellow travellers in this life as possible so that we accept and practise what is the reality ? that we are all linked and we are all one, spiritually and practically.

We have tried the ‘business’ approach to resolving the issues within the healthcare system and this has been only partially successful. We now need to draw on a spiritual dimension to work alongside the business model in a compassionate and balanced approach to healthcare if the health service is to survive into the end of the 21st century.

Bibliography

Benson, Herbert (1997), Timeless Healing: The power and biology of belief, Simon
& Schuster, New York.
DiStefano, Vincent (2006) Holism and Complementary Medicine, Allen and Unwin
Academic, London.
Ernst, E., Pittler, M.H., Wider, B. and Boddy, K. (2008) Handbook of Complementary
Medicine, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hackshaw, A.K. (1998) Lung cancer and passive smoking, Stat. Methods Med. Res.
7(2), 119-136.
Janson, C. (2004) The effect of passive smoking on respiratory health in children and adults,
Int. J. Tuberculosis Lung Dis. 8(5), 510-516.
McTaggart, Lynne (1996; 2nd edn. 2005) What Doctors Don’t Tell You, Thorsons
(HarperCollins), London.
Matthews, Sian, Brasnett, Laura, and Smith, Jonathan (2006) Underage drinking, Home
Office Findings 277
Morrison, Judith H. (2001) The Book of Ayurveda, Gaia Books (Octopus), London.
Prousky, Jonathan (2008), Principles and Practices of Naturopathic Clinical Nutrition, CCNM Press, Toronto, Canada.
Smith, M.J. and Logan, A.C. (2002) Naturopathy, Med. Clin. North Amer. 86(1), 173-184.
Vork, K.L., Broadwin, R.C. and Blaisdell, R.T. (2007) Developing asthma in childhood fromexposure to second-hand tobacco smoke, Envir. Health Perspect. 115(10), 1394-1400.
Published on the Scientific & Medical Network website (www.scimednet.org) 2012

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Spirituality and Religion

The twilight of religion

Church attendance in Britain and North America is steadily in decline – relevant data are easily accessible on the Internet. The number of those who regularly attended church in the USA in 1968 stood at 1.6 million but by 2006 this figure had fallen to less than 900,000. In Britain, the situation is even more marked where between 1980 and 2009, church attendance has fallen from 12% to 6% of the population. There are several factors that might have contributed to this. Over the past quarter century or so, many more activities have become available on Sundays, the traditional day for church attendance in a predominantly Christian society. In Britain, shops and public houses are open and there are a variety of sporting events that people can attend or participate in. With continually increasing commercial pressure for greater productivity and profitability, if people are not actually working on Sunday, it gives them a day to catch up on chores that they have had little time or energy to do during the week.

In the West, people have traditionally looked to their God as a protector or, to put it in Freudian terms, a father figure. However, the protector image has worn a little thin for many people as the world has developed overwhelming problems, like family breakdown and social unrest resulting from a decline in moral values, global warming and other pending environmental catastrophes and, most recently, the collapse in the economic framework of western capitalism. Many people can see that these challenges are of our own making – exacerbated by weak and ineffectual government, perhaps – and realize that they cannot turn to some mythical sky-god to solve these problems.
But I suspect that the main reason for lower church attendance has more to do with emotional disenchantment with organized dogmatic religion. We live in a rational technological age and, ever since the scientific discoveries of the 17th to 19th centuries, our world-view has been shaped by these discoveries. Science has come to be regarded as the source of truth about the natural world; and moral values are not stressed either in the home or in school as they were a century ago. There is a certain cynicism about the moral impact that religion could possibly have in a society so committed to materialist values. Too many religions and churches are more concerned with ritual and dogma than the spirituality that was claimed as the basis for the faiths.
Perhaps religion only has a future if those at the head of the faiths show integrity and honesty in their leadership by acknowledging that all religion and scripture is man-made! The scriptures may well have an extra-corporeal source of inspiration, like all creative art, but the words on the page were all written down, transmitted and translated by human hands. Religions are bureaucratic power structures that were set up for propaganda to give a base for the indoctrination of the people. Many people have lost respect for religion because it is no longer regarded as representing truth but simply one particular point of view as to how we should lead our lives, and it is irrelevant in resolving the major world crises.

Our mistrust of politicians is partly because of their extensive use of ‘spin’, a euphemism for lies, deceit and distorted truth. The distrust of dogmatic religion is another expression of the same psychological condition. As with Humpty Dumpty in his confrontation with Alice, there are many for whom the word ‘truth’ means whatever they want it to mean. Thus, religious fundamentalists believe in the truth of their scriptures and the words of their respective prophets; but adherents of other religions will almost inevitably disagree. This does not imply however that there are no fundamental truths underlying the mythical fabric of scripture. While the symbolism and formulations of mathematics, like the theorems of Euclid, Pythagoras or Fermat, are man-made, the relationships themselves are eternal truths. There may well be similar eternal moral truths (like some of the Ten Commandments) behind the myths woven around the stories of scripture, which certainly contain many historical truths. The incompatibilities between the scriptures of the various religions of the world make adherence to any one of them as ‘Truth’ logically incoherent.

Psychologists define denial as ‘a primitive form of repression in which anxiety-filled external events are barred from awareness.’ Sigmund Freud recognised that an attitude of denial in his patients was one of their psychological defence mechanisms when ideas or sense impressions conflicted disturbingly with the established psyche. Denial is an expression of fear to face reality, and fear is an undesirable psychological trait. The refusal to accept the true nature of scripture and religion is such an attitude, like those who deny being alcoholics, or warnings of the dangers of smoking, or the threat of global warming. Many people effect their denial through compartmentalization. They use their telephones and computers, undergo surgery, fly off to their exotic holidays quite happy to trust the validity of science, medicine and technology. But in their religious beliefs, they reject science and rationalism and choose instead to believe in scriptural myths as truth. In a scientific age, denial of the realities of science and belief in scripture as truth become more difficult.

But a life lived in denial is a twilight world, for sooner or later for the wellbeing of the individual and others, those in denial must face the truth of the situation. The alcoholic must confront his or her demons if they are not to die prematurely having lived a less than fulfilling life. Those who participate in activities heedless of global warming will contribute to eventual disaster for us all. Similarly, those who believe that their scripture represents irrefutable divine truth close their minds to the common ideals they share with adherents of other faiths and rob the world of the potential to resolve some of the conflicts that continually plague our planet.

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Religion and faith

Disenchantment with the role of religion does not mean that there has to be a decline in spiritual faith. Although many equate faith and religion, there is a clear distinction. While religion is an external, man-made expression of beliefs that are shared socially through ritual and prayer, faith is an internalized belief system that governs our attitude to the world and increasingly finds no need to have expression through authoritarian orthodox religious systems. Dogmatic religion is intrinsically divisive for it is based on the scriptures that prescribe how humankind should live; but these ideals were allegedly revealed to various prophets for a particular people at a specific time and place in human history. There is no reason why such proscriptions should be relevant to people world-wide two millennia and more later.

The essential difference between religion as we know it in the West and the spirituality associated with eastern belief systems is that western religion is authoritarian: instructions for behaviour are passed down from a supposed God, to a number of prophets in the Bible or the Koran and thence to the people through clerics, rabbis, priests and imams. In the East, the words of the prophet are to be taken only as a guide. How they are interpreted and enacted is up to each individual, though guidance is available if required from the sages of each faith. In the West, our morality is determined for us by the external authority of the Church or Mosque, by the Bible or Koran. In the East, works like the Pali Canon of Buddhism and the Tao Te Ching of Taoism are texts to be read and meditated on, but not to be regarded as any kind of instruction manual.

The inspiration behind the life-styles recommended in the East is a universal and all-embracing spirituality not an anthropomorphic father figure or his supposed incarnation on Earth. The earthly incarnation of a sky-god that believers often regard as uniquely Christian was in fact a common belief in Hinduism and in ancient Egypt, long before the lifetime of Jesus. The ‘chi-rho’ symbol Christians have taken as their own is found on the tombs of Mesopotamia. The view of Jesus as divine was set up by the Church Fathers at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and is peculiar to Christians. The fact that this interpretation is unacceptable to Jews and Muslims immediately sets up a barrier to meaningful cohesion between the different western religions. Jesus was in fact simply a healer, prophet, shaman and sage like many others.

In those cultures that westerners often regard as pagan, simply because they reject this anthropomorphic sky-god and the divine incarnation, there is a great sense of cohesion within the cultural group and a close affinity with and respect for the natural world, ahimsa. In the West, following the recommendations of Francis Bacon to exploit nature for the betterment of humankind, the natural world is viewed primarily as a purely material entity, and this attitude has produced the profligacy we have seen in the West since the Industrial Revolution. In Cartesian dualism, which underpins science, there is mind or soul, and there is the material world of the body. In eastern monism, all is one. This is a crucial difference between the world-views of East and West, between spiritual faith in the unity of the world and dogmatic religion with its divisions between God and Man and Nature.

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The idea of a cosmic spirituality

Spirituality is a concept that should find resonances with people of any religion, or even atheists and humanists. In Christianity, we have the idea of God interacting with humankind through the Holy Spirit. In Islam, particularly Sufism, there is Dhat, the spiritual essence of the world from which all has sprung and into which all will eventually merge. In Judaism we find the spirit of God described in Exodus as ruach elohim, the cloud of the Lord that filled the tabernacle. The western God, although described with anthropomorphic qualities, is conceived as pure spirit in all three major religions.

In Spiritualism, adherents seek guidance from their cosmic spirit through communication with discarnate souls. Pagans and adherents of Shinto have numerous male or female gods whose spirits are distributed throughout the natural world. In Hinduism we find Atman, the breath or spirit of Brahman, which is the ultimate spiritual reality from which the created universe has emerged. In some other eastern religions, where there is no God as understood in the West, Buddhists and Taoists acknowledge a Universal Mind that holds a record of the karma of each individual from one incarnation to the next until nirvana is achieved through samsara or cycle of successive reincarnations. Here, consciousness is all: the material world is only maya, often translated as ‘illusion’ though it really means that the only reality is human consciousness — all we can say of the world is what we perceive. Although he was a bishop of the Christian Church, philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) was so close to eastern mystical philosophy when he contended that ‘esse ist percipi’ — to exist is to be perceived. Some contemporary physicists regard this consciousness as primary to material creation.

In the secular domain, some other philosophers have suggested a very similar concept: an unknowable spiritual base to the material world. John Locke called it the real essence of the world that gave rise to the nominal essence – the material properties that we are aware of with our senses which we use to give objects their names. Immanuel Kant had a similar idea calling these two realms the noumenal and the phenomenal, respectively. Arthur Schopenhauer, very much influenced by eastern religion, described the world as will and idea or representation: there is our will or self (mind, consciousness), the subject of experience, and that which is perceived — the ideas or representations of the material world.

Carl Gustav Jung, one of the most influential of psychologists of the twentieth century postulated the existence of a ‘collective unconscious’, a pooling of human unconscious minds through space and time. It is through our access to this spiritual domain that certain important icons and metaphors recur in unconnected social groups. These ubiquitous symbols Jung called ‘archetypes’. The archetypes are the realities that the human mind creates out of this universal spiritual field, described by contemporary Cambridge biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, as the morphic field.

Scientists are divided about the whole concept of spirituality. Some, especially the life scientists like Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins, are thoroughgoing materialists. They believe that any suggestion of a spiritual agency acting to affect in any way the creation, design or operation of the universe represents a return to the concept of animism. This idea was quite popular with some thinkers like biologist Hans Driesch and philosopher Henri Bergson in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of animism or hylozoism was that there is an indefinable spiritual essence within all living things that cannot be expressed using just materialistic terminology and concepts. Human creativity in music, art and literature; morality and ethics in social interaction; law-making; and the economic interaction of nations, to quote just a few examples, are holistic and certainly cannot be reduced to explanations in classical physics in any meaningful way. Quantum theory has shown us that the world is not entirely deterministic, for if it were there would be no human creativity or free will.

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Today, life scientists talk in terms of the emergence of complexity in higher organisms arising spontaneously through purely physical forces of interaction between molecules — the natural propensity of the fundamental particles and energies comprising matter to turn chaos into order, components of the primordial soup into polymers of proteins, carbohydrates and nucleic acids. There are systems even in the world of inorganic chemistry, which the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine described as dissipative systems, that are capable of some degree of self-organization. We are faced with the unacceptable premise (to materialist scientists) that there is indeed an external agency capable of providing the necessary energy in closed systems (those without external energy input) to seemingly defy the laws of entropy. This propensity for spontaneous self-organization is one of the functions envisaged by some scientists for the wholly inter-penetrating cosmic spiritual energy known as the quantum field energy.

Since the development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century, many physicists have become more amenable to the idea of an essentially spiritual universe. In his Gifford Lectures of 1927, physicist Arthur Eddington saw human consciousness, as expressed by mind, as the intermediate between the unknowable world of quantum interactions and the material world of the senses: ‘The stuff of the world is mind stuff’. Thus, mind, consciousness and spirit become the fount of material creation: Creation stories are the bedrock of religion, and spirituality is the epitome of deity.

In The Tao of Physics, physicist Fritjof Capra drew parallels between the quantum world-view of the cosmic dance of fundamental particles and energy described in the West and the religious philosophy of the East with its view of human existence as one of universal interaction between the individuals of humankind and the natural world that surrounds us. The 14th Dalai Lama has endorsed this relation between Buddhism and modern physics in that both stress the interconnectedness of all that is. Every event in the universe on the micro and thence the macro scale is an example of the cosmic spiritual interaction. For religious adherents, this would be like saying that God is always and everywhere immanent in the world.

In 1980, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, American-born quantum physicist David Bohm elaborated on the holographic metaphor of the human mind that had been created by Karl Pribram. In Pribram’s model, each unit of the brain (that Wilder Penfield had called an engram) encodes within it the information contained in the whole organ, rather like a hologram. Bohm extended this idea to suggest that the whole universe ‘is not to be understood solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects (e.g. in rows) or as a regular arrangement of events (e.g in a series). Rather, a total order is contained in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time . . . the classical idea of the separability of the world into distinct but interacting parts is no longer valid or relevant.’

This is an even more fundamental concept of a holistic world interacting at the subatomic level. Cosmic spirit represents the implicate order; the material world is the explicate. What more graphic portrayal of spiritual deity could there be?

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Cosmic spirituality and human interaction

Over the past quarter-century, psychologist Charles T. Tart has shown how the phenomena described as psi, such as telepathy and spiritual healing, have given us clear experimental evidence of the existence of a means of human communication that cannot be scientifically explained by materialist Newtonian and Cartesian models. Once again we are introduced to the concept of cosmic spirituality. This is a hypothetical concept as valid as any other scientific notion proposed to explain experimental observations — like quarks and superstrings, which have never been observed. It is important that this should not be regarded as the ‘God of the Gaps’ — an idea, regarded with such disdain by many materialist scientists, that ‘God’ is dragged in as explanation when all rational argument has failed to provide an explanation. The concept of a universal spiritual energy is in fact entirely compatible with twentieth-century quantum physics. It is the potential energy of the universe with which all matter continually interacts at the sub-atomic level in every moment of its existence — the quantum field energy or zero point field. It is the energy of consciousness.
Physicist Amit Goswami, the psychologists Trish Pfeiffer and John Mack, and many mystics like Swami Abhayananda see the material world as having developed from a primordial cosmic consciousness. Goswami also sees the development of cosmic consciousness as part of the process of evolution. This is an extension of the ideas expressed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that evolution has progressed through the stages of geogenesis (creation of the material of the universe), biogenesis (of life), psychogenesis (of mind and consciousness), and now noogenesis (of osmic soul) in which there is a global empathy between all peoples of the planet, cf. Jung’s collective unconscious.

The polymath Dean Radin has argued that there is ample evidence for ‘interaction at a distance’ between human minds to explain psychic interaction. This is comparable to gravitational and e.m. fields on the macro scale and, on the micro scale, to the inter-particle action at a distance proposed by Einstein and his colleagues in the EPR experiment. In 1872, the English polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911) was one of the first to investigate the power of prayer. Over the past couple of decades, American physician Larry Dossey has investigated this subject extensively from a clinical viewpoint and again the evidence is persuasive of the existence of human interaction that is not confined to our usual concepts of space and time. There are also clear indications that prayer and psi effects like telepathy do not always work, but instead of dismissing their existence completely it would be a worthwhile enterprise for scientists to investigate the necessary conditions for success. Rupert Sheldrake has done precisely that, as elaborated in some of his books. The idea of an eternal and infinite consciousness also suggests a possible resolution to the problem of what could exist before the Big Bang, and what our expanding universe expands into if all of space is here.

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Many have expressed the view that if we dispense with religion or God, the world will be left without a basis for morality. But the morality of human interactions depends on what is within our hearts, or within our souls if that is a concept to which people can relate. The cosmic spirit at the human level may be regarded as a Communal Soul, a community of the souls, the spiritual essences, of the living and discarnate. There is no need to dispense with scripture or religion, as long as scripture is seen for what it is – the inspired sayings of one or more men (or occasionally, a woman) interwoven with traditional rituals and, in the Bible, historical events. A ‘religion’ based on spirituality does not then need a hierarchy of officials to enforce these subjective views of the prophets as if they necessarily represented some kind of eternal and divine truth. I hesitate to use the word ‘religion’ in this context because that is inevitably associated with scripture and dogma. Spirituality is a religion only insofar as it is shared communally. The concept of cosmic spirit, as described by philosophers, psychologists and scientists, is a far more rational basis for belief and religion than the subjective views expressed by the myths and fables of scripture.

In process theology, A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne saw a divinity not forever unchanging and remote from humankind, as envisaged in most western religions, but one that evolved by interaction with and within humanity. Biologists wedded to materialism say that our lifelong behaviour is determined at conception by the structure of our DNA. But recent research by Bruce Lipton and others involved in epigenetics research have shown that while the structure of DNA does not usually change, its biochemical action is constantly affected by our environment through interaction with RNA, and this, it is suggested, is where cosmic consciousness comes in. Mind or individual consciousness, a component of the collective unconscious, and thus also a part of cosmic spirituality, influences the RNA in the body and thereby is capable of producing physical changes — through meditation, prayer and spiritual healing, for example, and also by attitudes of love for our fellow Man. This may well be how interaction between people separated in space or time occurs through the morphic field described by Sheldrake, and how prayer becomes effective. More immediately, it is thought to be the way that spiritual healing is effective, and how spontaneous remission of potentially lethal diseases is achieved through meditation and positive thought. Thus, nurture as well as nature both play a part in shaping our behaviour and world-view. In this way, cosmic spirit, regarded as divine by theists, evolves with human spiritual evolution, as suggested by Teilhard de Chardin and in process theology.

We have seen how the idea of some form of all-embracing cosmic spirit is consistent with the views of scientists, philosophers and psychologists and is, at root, a concept fundamental to a number of theistic and atheistic beliefs. It is found in the belief systems of indigenous peoples and in the sophisticated paradigms of contemporary physics. There is surely no more cohesive concept than this to serve as a basis for inter-faith discussions. This is a fundamental idea which has the potential also to forge a link between science and religion, so often held to be incompatible as bases of world-views. The evidence for the existence of an effective and interactive spirituality or cosmic energy is overwhelming. While the cosmic spirit concept may not be compatible with orthodox dogmatic religion, nor with Newtonian science, it is time for acceptance and promotion of spirituality rather than scriptural religion to provide some unity to our increasingly fragmented and socially uneasy world.

Bibliography

Abhayananda, Swami (2007) Mysticism and Science, O Books, Winchester, UK. (2008) The Divine Universe, iUniverse, Bloomington, Indiana.
Capra, Fritjof (1975). The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, London.
Dossey, Larry (1993). Healing Words, HarperCollins, San Francisco. (2009). Healing Beyond the Body, Piatkus, London.
Goswami, Amit (1993). The Self-aware Universe: How consciousness creates the material
world, Putnam, New York. (2008). Creative Evolution, Quest, Wheaton, Illinois.
Hartshorne. Charles (1948). The Divine Relativity: A social concept of God, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Lipton, Bruce (2005). The Biology of Belief, Elite Books, Santa Rosa, California;
Cygnus Books, Llandeilo, Wales, UK.
Pfeiffer, Trish and Mack, John (2007) Mind Before Matter: Visions of a new science of consciousness, O Books, Winchester, UK.
Radin, Dean (1997). The Conscious Universe, HarperCollins, New York. (2006). Entangled Minds, Simon and Schuster, New York.
Rossi, Ernest (2002). The Psychobiology of Gene Expression, W.W. Norton, New York.
Tart, Charles T. (1997). Body, Mind, Spirit, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, Virginia. (2009). The End of Materialism, New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, California.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1955). Le Phenoméne Humain, Editions du Seuil, Paris; Engl. transl. (1959). The Phenomenon of Man, William Collins, London.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929). Process and Reality, Macmillan, London.
Published on the Scientific & Medical Network website (www.scimednet.org) 2012

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The Fifth Dimension or God Without Religion

The science of today recognises four dimensions accessible to human consciousness – three dimensions of space and one of time. Science also describes four forces in the natural world – gravity, the electromagnetic (e.m.) or Coulombic force, and the strong and weak forces found within an atom. Three of these are forces of attraction and only the e.m. force may create attraction or repulsion. Every force has its region of space in which it is active called its field: so we also have four types of field. This is the world according to conventional science – also known as Newtonian-Cartesian science – which, as yet, has hardly begun to embrace the notions of spirituality, soul or parapsychology.

But many scientists – mostly physicists, a few biologists and physicians, and some psychologists – have been actively investigating the nature of psychic experiences using, where possible, the methodology of science. The spiritual field which gives rise to phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, pre-and post-cognition and mediumship generally has been described by futurist Ervin Laszlo as the fifth field of nature. Laszlo also calls this spiritual energy the akashic field, borrowing a Sanskrit term from the Ayurveda philosophy of India. The theologian John Hick has described the psychic realm as the fifth dimension.

The information we have about the earliest pagan civilizations suggests that veneration of natural objects – trees, rocks, rivers, or other locations on Earth, or sun and moon – was of great significance in their lives. Earthly objects were, in some sense, symbols of the greater spiritual force that controlled the seasons, night and day, the wind and the rain. But as Karen Armstrong says in her book A Short History of Myth: ‘Trees, stones and heavenly bodies were never objects of worship in themselves but were revered because they were epiphanies of a hidden force that could be seen powerfully at work in all natural phenomena, giving people intimations of another, more potent reality’. Myths, rituals and traditions from these early civilizations link each generation with its past history and with the ancestors whose practices and beliefs gave rise to the society of the present generation. Myths put individuals and their society in the larger context of social evolution and give us a deeper insight into the meaning of life. The tales of scripture serve this purpose in religion, and stories such as those of C.S. Lewis and of J.R.R. Tolkien provide modern myths and fantasies for us today.

As suggested by Plato in his Theory of Forms, every natural object is the image of its heavenly counterpart. Trees, and even more so rocks, are venerated partly because they are so much more long-lived than humans and therefore are believed to hold a spiritual record of the past – the akashic field. The rocks out of which pagan temples were constructed were formed in the earliest eras of Earth’s history and even trees have been on Earth for more than 300 million years. The old Scandinavian word ‘vid’ means wood or forest but it has given us a number of words associated with knowledge or wisdom: witan (Old English: to know), wissen (German: to know), ‘wits’, ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, and there are other examples of the association of trees and knowledge.

Long before the lives of Euclid (fl. ca. 300 BCE) or Pythagoras (fl. ca. 500 BCE), ancient civilizations had extensive knowledge of geometry and astronomy and what we would now describe as civil engineering. Without this information they would never have been able, nor had the incentive, to build their megalithic temples to honour their gods, for the manpower required to raise these monuments was enormous and such as to demand huge motivation and skill. The construction of such structures is a clear indication that these peoples believed that there existed a numinous realm beyond the physical – a realm inhabited by the ancestors, whose lives they wished to honour: it was also the domain of the gods. The psychologists tell us that most of humankind needs to believe in such a transcendent and holistic reality for both emotional and intellectual satisfaction.

Many pagan nations lived with this kind of spiritual ethos before they were invaded and exploited by the expansion of western materialism and western religious beliefs. This world-view represented a deity without religion as we know it today. However, this kind of nature worship was totally unacceptable to early Christianity and the Church did all it could to eliminate animism from people’s beliefs – though it took over many pagan rituals as its own and built its churches at pagan sacred places, just in case there was some effective spiritual energy concentrated there.

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Modern determination to raise the living standards of such ‘primitive’ people has meant that we have influenced them politically, economically, theologically and ideologically, so that many ancient traditions have been lost in the process. Keith Critchlow, a professor of art and architecture whose studies equally embrace anthropology and archaeology, believes that ‘the greatest threat our modern industrial culture poses for mankind is the denial of its spiritual heritage’. The native culture of the inhabitants of the Australian outback that has been destroyed by the imposition of western values are recalled nostalgically by the elders amongst the aborigines as The Great Forgetting. The citizens of Ladakh in the Himalayas led a hard and primitive but peaceful life until the imposition of western ideas of ‘progress’; this has seen animosity, corruption and materialism arise in a society where formerly there was cooperation, fellowship and spirituality.

Spirituality is the core of religion, although it tends to be acknowledged as such mainly by the more mystical sects in each faith. The feature that unites all interpretations of spirituality, and which characterizes deity in east and west, is the oneness of existence. We find this spirituality and unity emphasized more in eastern rather than western faiths, which focus more on scripture and dogma.

Although Hinduism is a monotheistic religion, with one Supreme Being, Brahman, as a deity who created the universe, it gave rise in the so-called Axial Age of the 1st millennium BCE to several other faiths that are either nominally atheistic (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism) or polytheistic (Shinto). Significantly, Brahman is often worshipped as light, one of the forms of energy, or as universal soul, Atman. Where Christianity accepts only one incarnation of its God as Jesus, Hinduism has many forms or avatars of Brahman. It is something of a contradiction that it is the spirituality of these often atheistic eastern faiths that is closest to the notion of a cosmic spiritual energy that is emerging from contemporary science. It is the (often unacknowledged) fundamental basis of all western religion – a deity as Holy Spirit – and of the eastern religious philosophies as formative Universal Mind.

It was the French Jesuit palaeontologist, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who envisaged the evolution of the world as proceeding through four stages. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he described this series of stages as a progression in the evolution of consciousness. First there was geogenesis, the creation of the land and the sea; then came biogenesis, the creation of life forms; this was followed by psychogenesis, the development of thinking beings. Now we are in the stage of noogenesis, the evolution of mind into what may be identified as Universal Mind, Communal Soul or an all-pervading deity as Holy Spirit. This theistic interpretation is equally capable of a secular interpretation as the all-pervading interactive potential energy field associated with matter. The noosphere is made up of loving souls in harmony with one another without the strife between nations or religions that we see presently on Earth – a point in evolution that Teilhard described as the Omega Point. The increasing acceptance of continuing discarnate existence is part of this spiritual transformation.

One of the great social changes that demonstrated the evolution of human consciousness began around the 12th century, flourishing from the 14th century onwards. A new cultural revolution in the arts began in Florence and spread to other Italian city states and thence to the rest of Europe over the next few centuries. Since the 19th century this rebirth of learning has been known as the Renaissance. Because it placed human needs and interests at the centre of social activities it is also known as humanism – not quite the same thing but another philosophy that concentrated on human experience and human freedom of will rather than considering ourselves as puppets of deity. In the 18th century, realization of the primacy of human emotions in shaping our thoughts and deeds gave rise to Romanticism; then in the 19th century, a new variant of humanism appeared in existentialism.

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Humanists and existentialists may be either religious or secular. One of the most significant of the atheistic existentialists was Edmund Husserl. Husserl based his philosophy on first-person experience – the phenomena that were accessible to human consciousness. The foundation of an experience is its intentionality – it has to be directed at some thing or idea. Schopenhauer called this process Will and William James described it as Volition. For an experience to become imprinted on memory, or even to be actively processed by the mind, intention must be accompanied by attention – directed concentration on the object of consciousness. Edmund Husserl regarded intentionality as ‘the fundamental property of consciousness’. Contemporary writers such as Wayne Dyer, Herbert Benson, Lynne McTaggart, Louise Hay and others describe it simply as ‘intention’. It is this same attention or focussed intention that produces the benefits of spiritual healing or prayer, directs our individual biochemistry towards health or sickness, and allows psychic communication through telepathy, clairvoyance and mediumship. One result of this focus on the primacy of human consciousness is that many have abandoned orthodox religion.

If we dispense with formal religion, does this give rise necessarily to an atheistic world-view? It depends on how we define God. The New Age world-view of deity does not portray the God of the Old Testament, who in the Pentateuch is portrayed as a vengeful and unforgiving God, inhuman enough to demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his devotion. It does not represent the God of the New Testament who is uniquely incarnated in Jesus Christ, for this would exclude most of humankind, past and present, as believers. Nor is it the God of Islam described as Allah, who again is restrictively but uniquely defined by the qualities and practices elaborated in the Qur’an.

The mind and soul of all humankind can commune with this cosmic spirit through the phenomena we describe as psi or psychic events. For the religious adherent, it is the deity described by the process theology of A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. However, it can be thought of equally as the secular and impersonal quantum energy field or fifth dimension of the natural world.

The deity of New Age spirituality is conceived as a genderless but creative cosmic energy, infinite and eternal. It contributed to the evolution of the universe and continues to contribute to the evolution of human consciousness through prayer and meditation. It is close in spirit to the Tao of eastern philosophy:

The Tao is like a well: used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I do not know who gave it birth.
It is older than God.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 4; trans. Stephen Mitchell

The Tao is the entelechy envisaged by Aristotle – the force that turns possibility or potential into actuality. These worlds of possibility give us the (virtual) many worlds of contemporary science.

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As Teilhard predicted, the consciousness of humankind is slowly evolving towards a greater realization that this spirituality not only provides the reason for existence in our everyday lives on Earth but continues for us as individuals in the afterlife, where it and we can continue to evolve. There have been a number of recent books that have described the evidence for the existence of the afterlife from communications with mediums, such as those by Michael Tymn, Roy Stemman and Victor Zammit. The pictures of the afterlife that mediums convey has much in common with the visions of people who experience near-death or out-of-body experiences, or the even more startling shared body experiences. Eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Michael Marsh or Rodney Cotterill who deny the existence of the spiritual realm for lack of ‘scientific proof’ are simply in denial. Quite apart from the huge mass of anecdotal evidence of our continued discarnate existence, there is as much sensory and rational evidence of the existence of the psychic realm as any scientist could reasonably expect for a phenomenon involving human subjects.

How many creative artists have claimed that their inspiration came from a source beyond themselves. Before we dismiss this as a romantic illusion, we do well to think about the phenomenon of spiritual healing or energy therapy. It has been known for many years in orthodox medicine that a patient’s attitude of mind or belief has a remarkable effect on their physical health, an effect that could be either positive or negative.

But healing effects can also be brought about by another person. Some sensitives seem to be able to channel what they describe as cosmic energy or chi (qi) through their minds or hands to produce distant or contact healing of patients. There are mediums without any medical knowledge, like George Chapman or Leah Doctors, who commune with discarnate medical practitioners to produce healing effects of physical conditions, such as blindness, or potentially terminal diseases like diabetes. Cases such as these have been described in a couple of books by journalist J. Bernard Hutton. It is impossible for sceptics to dismiss healing of serious maladies such as these as ‘psychosomatic’ healings or ‘spontaneous remission’, and ‘misdiagnosis’ of such conditions is hardly feasible: nor does dismissal of any such cures as ‘placebo effects’ explain anything.

This fifth field of cosmic spiritual energy is not the ‘God-of-the-gaps’ so derided by materialist scientists. An agency such as that elaborated here is as plausible an explanation of psychic phenomena as the quarks and strings invoked as explanations of quantum science. We live in an essentially rational world; so to have an interpretation of numinous and psychic phenomena that is compatible with modern science should provide additional confidence to those who still find ideas of psi, soul and the afterlife quite astonishing. For those whose beliefs entail deity, there could be no more rational candidate than this creative and eternal Infinite Mind.

Armstrong, Karen, A Short History of Myth, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2005.
Critchlow, Keith, Time Stands Still: New light on megalithic science, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2007.
Hutton, J. Bernard, Healing Hands, W.H. Allen, 1966; Virgin Publishing, 1995; The Healing Power, Leslie Frewin, London, 1975.
Stemman, Roy, Spirit Communication: A comprehensive guide to the extraordinary world of mediums, psychics and the afterlife, Piatkus, London, 2005.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, 1959; (Engl. trans.by Bernard Wall of ‘Le Phenoméne Humain’, Editions de Seuil, 1955).
Tymn, Michael, The Articulate Dead, Galde Press, Lakeville, Minnesota, 2008; The Afterlife
Revealed, White Crow Books, Guildford, UK, 2010; The Afterlife Explorers, Vol.1, White Crow Books, 2010.
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York, 1929.
Zammit, Victor, A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife, Ganmell, Sydney, 1996.

Published in The Journal of Spirituality and Consciousness Studies, Connecticut, USA, January 2013

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