Consciousness of the universe
Rupert Sheldrake is the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project.
The Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained human abilities is supported by the Perrott-Warrick Fund, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.
Maybe Angels
A Confluence of Imagination and Rational Inquiry
An interview with Rupert Sheldrake
by Hal Blacker
I met controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake the night he and theologian Matthew Fox celebrated the publication of their new collection of dialogues, The Physics of Angels. I knew that Sheldrake was not afraid to challenge orthodoxy by entering realms of thought usually eschewed by other scientists. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge University, England, his most unorthodox work is not easily dismissed, even by his more traditional peers. His first major book, the controversial A New Science of Life, published in 1981, was called “the best candidate for burning there has been in years” by the prominent scientific journal Nature, but was simultaneously praised by the equally well respected New Scientist as “an important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality.” His work ever since has been notable for its revolutionary attempt to bring an awareness of the intelligent and living quality of what we often view as brute nature, for trying to heal the Cartesian split between the physical and the mental, and for adventurously crossing the well-guarded boundary between the worlds of science and spirituality. Still, I wondered how far a scientist could go before he had truly left science’s legitimate domain. Angels? Surely this must be a whimsical metaphor for something more rational, more in line with modernity, more, well, material.
Speaking with Sheldrake showed me I was wrong, in part. His belief in the possibility of the existence of angels, or of intelligences operating in the universe that are greater than our own, is not metaphorical. Nor is it tinged with the wishful fantasy which pervades so much of new age spirituality. Instead, it is the latest exploration of a visionary thinker who is unafraid to take the immense risks that go with entering the territory of the unknown.
In our conversation, Rupert Sheldrake revealed himself to be not only an innovative scientist but a man of impressive erudition in many other fields of learning, and also one whose scientific and philosophical investigation is fueled by a passionate concern for all of life. While some of his theories may seem more fanciful than factual, blurring the line between science and science fiction, speaking with him was a mind-expanding journey that had me, a few nights later, staring into a starry sky and wondering, despite myself, if there was someone or something out there staring back. More significant to our investigation of the relationship between scientific exploration and enlightenment, Rupert Sheldrake showed a quality that is rare in men of his intelligence and breadth of knowledge—a pervasive humility and respect for what is not known, and for that which it may never be possible for the intellect to grasp.
interview
WIE: The first question I want to ask you is, why angels? It seems like an unusual thing for a scientist to be talking about.
Rupert Sheldrake: I’m interested in the recovery of the sense of the life of nature. The thrust of all my work is to try to break out of the mechanistic view of nature as inanimate, dead and machinelike, which forces the whole of our understanding of nature into a machine metaphor. This is a very man-centered metaphor. Only people make machines. So looking at nature in this way projects one aspect of human activity onto the whole of nature. It’s an extremely limiting view of nature, and an alienating one.
Right from the beginning, since my book A New Science of Life was published, my aim has been to try to find a wider picture or paradigm for science that is not constricted to an inanimate, mechanistic view of things. In a way, the bigger picture is the idea of the whole universe as a living organism.
The big bang theory gives a picture of the origin of the universe in a small, undifferentiated, primal unity. The universe then expands and grows, and new forms and structures appear within it. This is more like a developing organism than like a machine. So implicitly we’ve got a new model of the universe as a developing organism.
Physics, also, has broken out of the old mechanistic universe. The old idea of determinism has given way to indeterminism and chaos theory. The old idea of the earth as dead has given way to Gaia, the idea of the living earth. The old idea of the universe as purposeless has been replaced by a new physics based on the notion of attractors, of things being drawn towards ends or goals. And the old idea of the universe as uncreative has given way to the idea of creative evolution, first in the realm of living things, through Darwin, and now we see that the whole cosmos is in creative evolution. So, if the whole universe is alive, if the universe is like a great organism, then everything within it is best understood as organisms rather than machines.
Then the next question that arises is: Well, if the universe is alive, if solar systems are alive, if galaxies are alive, if planets are alive, are they conscious? Or are they alive but unconscious, in the same way that perhaps a worm or a bacterium might be alive but unconscious? And, is the kind of life that may exist in the cosmos more conscious than ourselves or do we have to assume it’s a great deal less conscious than ourselves? Are we the smartest beings in the universe? Now the usual answer of science is yes. I think that’s a very improbable assumption. So, if we come to the idea of many forms of consciousness, if the galaxy has a life and a consciousness, then it would be a consciousness far greater than our own—greater in extent, greater in its implications and power, and in the spread of its activities. This, from the point of view of science, is a ridiculous idea, because science has wiped out consciousness from everything in the universe except human brains.
But there is in the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition and in all traditions, the idea of many beings with greater levels of consciousness than our own. In the Western traditions they are called angels. So, in my book with Matthew Fox, The Physics of Angels, our aim was to explore what the Western tradition actually has to say to us about angels, and see what relevance that might have in the context of new cosmology.
My interest is in a new view of science, where we see the universe as alive, and in an exploration of what it could mean to see that there are forms of consciousness above the human consciousness. If one thinks of a divine consciousness embracing all things, and then this human consciousness here, the traditional view is that there are many, many other levels and kinds of consciousness in between. It’s not that you leap straight from divine consciousness to human consciousness, with nothing but brute matter in between.
WIE: When you are speaking about consciousness, do you mean self-awareness?
RS: I think that self-awareness comes about through mutual awareness. I don’t think self-awareness arises within a kind of solipsistic world of navel gazing. “Consciousness” means, literally, con scire, to know with, or to know together. I think that the reason that we are conscious is because we are interconscious in relationship to other people. Consciousness is shared, and I don’t think an individual human being, without language and without relationship with other people or any other thing, would be conscious. I think that consciousness has to be understood in relationship, not as a kind of isolated thing. And, since I’m Christian, the model of consciousness that I like particularly in the Christian tradition is the notion of the Holy Trinity. Divine consciousness is not just an undifferentiated unity in the Christian tradition. It’s one of relationship and it always has relationship within it.
I think that if a galaxy is conscious, then its consciousness would depend on its relationship to the stars and solar systems within it, and also, probably, its relationship with other galaxies. There’d be a kind of intersubjectivity of galaxies, a communion or community of galaxies.
WIE: Last night, when you and Matthew Fox were celebrating the publication of The Physics of Angels, you spoke about the possibility of the sun being conscious. You said that the sun is a complex system with a great deal of electromagnetic activity, and so is the brain. So, like the brain, the sun might be conscious. When you talk about galaxies or the sun being conscious, how literally do you mean this?
RS: Well I do mean it literally but it’s difficult to know about any form of consciousness other than one’s own, and even that is a mystery. I don’t know what your consciousness is like, let alone the consciousness of a dog or a cat or a bird. Even with organisms we know are alive and probably aware, it’s hard to penetrate the inner life of their consciousness. But since you speak English, I would imagine quite a lot of it depends on the English language, as my own does. The sun presumably doesn’t speak English and doesn’t have language of the human kind at all. And it’s very hard for us to imagine what any consciousness is like that isn’t formulated on human language. A dog’s consciousness or a dolphin’s consciousness is obviously not formulated in terms of human language and it’s a great exercise of the imagination to try to imagine what their consciousness is like. So I think the consciousness of the sun is so beyond anything that we are normally aware of ourselves, it’s extremely difficult to form an image of what it might be.
I think one could say that the scale of interest of the sun would presumably be, first and foremost, the solar system. I think we’d have to think of the consciousness of the sun as not embedded just within the sun but as something that would be centered in the sun but extends through the solar system, just as our own consciousness is not confined to the inside of our heads but spreads out to our entire perceptual world around us and links us to everything we relate to. So I would imagine the solar consciousness embraces the whole solar system and also its relationship to the other stars and the whole galaxy, because the sun is not an isolated unit, nor is the solar system. It’s part of a larger organism, it’s like a cell within the body of the galaxy.
WIE: Professor Huston Smith, who has written a great deal about science and religion, is skeptical about the usefulness of science in the area of spirituality. Because science is so dependent on the experimental method, he doubts that it can either prove or disprove the existence of consciousnesses superior to our own since if such superior beings exist, we would not be able to compel them to submit to our scientific experiments. Do you feel that the existence of beings with consciousness superior or greater than our own can be scientifically proven?
RS: I don’t agree with Huston Smith that the only way we can study things scientifically is by compelling things to submit to our experiments, because if that were true the whole of astronomy wouldn’t exist. We can’t do experiments on galaxies. We can’t tweak a galaxy to see which way it goes, or give an electric shock to a solar system to see whether it jerks in a particular way. All the standard experimental methods have never applied to astronomy. Astronomy is an observational science, not an experimental one. I think that the emphasis on the experimental method in science is somewhat misplaced in Huston Smith’s view, because the paradigmatic science, the science from which the scientific revolution was born, is astronomy, and astronomy is not an experimental science in the sense of altering variables, controlling conditions, and so on.
I think we are in the same position with respect to the consciousness of the stars and the celestial bodies as we are in relation to astronomy itself. We can’t do experiments on the sun or on the galaxy or on other galaxies. We can only observe them, and learn from what we observe. But if there is a consciousness of the sun, it might actually be slightly easier because it might be something we can interact with. We’d have to interact with it through our consciousness, rather than through physical instruments.
I could learn a lot about what’s going on in your body from electroencephalographs and electrocardiograms and that kind of thing, but I still wouldn’t know what was going on in your consciousness. The only way of really finding out about that would be by meeting you, being with you, talking to you, empathizing or whatever. So I think the same would apply to the consciousness of the sun or the galaxy or the celestial beings. If we are going to communicate with them we are going to have to do it by means of our own consciousness, through consciousness, possibly by some kind of intergalactic telepathy. This is obviously not within the present methodology of physical science. But that doesn’t mean that it’s totally beyond investigation forever.
WIE: So you are suggesting bringing consciousness into the study of what we normally consider to be inanimate matter and inanimate systems?
RS: Well, I think that we have to bring consciousness into our study of consciousness and, obviously, if we assume the sun and the galaxy are inanimate, then the issue doesn’t arise. If we just explore the possibility that they are conscious, then the possibility arises of actual conscious communication with them. Now, how that might happen I don’t know. To me, there are a lot of rather unwelcome attempts at conscious communication in the cacophony of channeling that’s going on at the moment. You know, people who claim to be channeling the Pleiades and that kind of thing. In a way, this is a dangerous path because it would be an open invitation to California channelers to start telling us what the stars are thinking. So, how it might happen I don’t know. I haven’t started this investigation myself but, if I did start it, I think that the first thing would be to look through the traditions—the Hindu tradition, the Buddhist tradition, Native American traditions, native traditions around the world—at what people have said and thought about their relation to the stars. Most traditions have the idea that human beings are linked to the stars and that human consciousness is linked to them. In Japan the emperor is supposed to be descended from the sun. The whole pyramid cult and the pharaoh cult were based on the idea that the soul of the dead pharaoh could be projected up into the stars, particularly into the constellation of Orion. The new theory of the pyramids, which I find convincing, is that the three pyramids in Giza are a model on Earth of the belt of Orion. They thought the consciousness of the pharaohs was projected out into that constellation, and that somehow those stars, or that region of the heavens, was specially related to the land of Egypt, to the consciousness of the pharaohs and to the highest consciousness which they could conceive of human beings attaining.
So there’s a great deal in the history of religion and in mythology that tells us something about what people thought in the past. And these are people who probably spent a great deal of time over many generations actually relating to the stars, probably by lying out at night actually looking at them, observing them very closely. No one now looks at the stars. Astronomers have fancy telescopes that take radio readings that go into computers. Astrologers, who are interested in stellar patterns, never look at the stars, they just look at Macintosh screens to see what the ephemeris says. The number of people who actually look at the stars and know them nowadays is vanishingly small—a few amateur astronomers, a few old-style celestial navigators who have been trained in the Navy or something. Otherwise most modern people haven’t a clue. So there are very few people around today who have that kind of living relationship with the stellar realm.
WIE: You are suggesting making direct contact with what one is studying in a way that sounds much more experiential than the way science is usually done.
RS: Well, science starts from direct contact and then it gets more and more into details. The science of animals and plants starts with observing animals and plants. Natural history is the starting point of any science, and that starts through direct contact. Linnaeus didn’t classify all the families of flowering plants by looking at their cells under a microscope or grinding them up and isolating their enzymes. He did it by looking at them, by holding them, touching them, feeling them, seeing them growing in the field or squashed onto herbarium sheets. He was looking at the actual plant form. We have to start from direct contact and experience. That’s the basis of our primary knowledge of things.
WIE: What do you think of the view of neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that evolution is without purpose or design and is the result of blind chance and natural selection?
RS: I think this is an act of faith on their part. It’s not scientifically proven that it is without design—it is simply their assumption to start with. They want to believe that it is without purpose or design and so they say so. They are materialists and, as materialists, their view of the universe, their philosophy, has no place for purpose or design in evolution. Without looking at a single piece of evidence or data, they can deduce that it has no purpose or design because it follows from the premise from which their entire world philosophy starts.
I think that they are tied up in a way of looking at the world which starts not from observation but from dogma. I don’t think there’s anything in science itself that can tell us that evolution has no purpose or design. Maybe there’s nothing that can prove scientifically that it does have purpose or design either. What we see is a variety of organisms amazingly well adapted to their environment. We see in evolution an amazingly creative process. Their philosophy says this is just chance and natural selection. But there are other evolutionary philosophers who say, “Okay, natural selection plays a part, it weeds out unfit organisms. But the creative process in evolution is a mystery.”
Creativity is not blind chance. It’s only blind chance if you start with the dogma that it has to be blind chance—the materialist dogma. Alfred Russel Wallace who, together with Charles Darwin, discovered the principle of natural selection and founded evolutionary theory, ended up with the idea that evolution was guided by intelligent spirits, that the creative side of evolution was guided by an immanent creative intelligence, or many kinds of intelligences, within the natural world. And that’s just as compatible with the evolutionary facts as the neo-Darwinist dogmas. However, even if evolution is guided by intelligent spirits or—just to put it more generally—by intelligence immanent in nature, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this immanent intelligence is working in accordance with an overall master plan or that human cultural evolution is guided by an intelligence immanent in human beings. You know, every innovation, every gadget that’s invented, every new advertising slogan, every new book that’s written, every new piece of music or work of art that’s made, is guided by a creative intelligence. But that doesn’t mean that we know where we are going. It doesn’t mean that these creative intelligences are working in accordance with some master plan for the destiny of humanity. Mostly they are working in accordance with much more short-term goals.
So for me, it’s an open question as to whether the intelligence that underlies the creativity in life is working in accordance with some fixed goal for the end of evolution. I don’t get that impression. If you look at the diversity of life—several million species of beetles, for example, on this planet—you get the impression that there’s a kind of creativity for its own sake, a proliferation of form and variety. It’s not at all clear why there should be so many millions of species of beetles. A quote I like is J. B. S. Haldane’s reply when someone asked him, “Mr. Haldane, you have spent so many years studying life. What do your studies of life tell you about the nature of God?” “Sir,” Haldane answered, “He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Any narrowly anthropocentric view of evolution, the kind of view of evolution that sees it all moving towards the evolution of humanity—the idea that the whole universe came into existence so that life could evolve on Earth, so that human beings could come into existence here, so that smart guys could be professors in major American universities—is very gratifying to our collective ego. But it doesn’t explain why you needed millions of species of beetles and countless species of ants and termites in the tropical rainforests, existing for tens or hundreds of millions of years before human beings arrived on the scene. Why is all that necessary for the evolution of human intelligence? Especially since we are driving thousands of species a week to extinction and most people don’t even know they existed in the first place. It’s a great mystery as to why life and evolution should involve such an incredible proliferation of diversity and creativity.
WIE: If one thinks of the universe as having immanent intelligence, or as pervaded by consciousness or guiding intelligence, or thinks of God as the mind of the universe as a whole, a troubling question arises. How can one explain the apparent cruelty of much of nature, the fact that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” as the poet said?
RS: Well, I think if there’s a universe of diversity and of becoming, which is what our universe is, then all things are mortal. Nothing lasts forever in a universe of becoming. If we lived in a frozen, crystalline universe where nothing ever changed, I daresay there’d be no claws and no blood. But the nature of existence, as we see it in the universe, is that all things come to an end and are recycled. Even the most long-lasting things we know of, like stars, come to an end. The forms in which things come into being have a limited lifespan, so all organisms are going to die sooner or later. And it’s the very nature of animal life that animals make their living by eating plants or other animals. So, if you are going to have animals which by their very nature have to eat other organisms, you’re going to have red claws and teeth somewhere or other. Plants make their living by getting energy from the sun, but even plants don’t live forever either. Decay, disease, death and suffering are built into the very nature of an evolutionary universe of this kind. So, if we have an evolutionary universe in which change and development are built in, in which there is a constant becoming of forms and dissolution of forms, these are inevitable features. The God of such a universe, the consciousness of such a universe, has to encompass these kinds of processes. You could, perhaps, have a different kind of universe, as I said, where everything is frozen in crystalline unity forever. But that would be a different sort of universe, a universe without becoming, without development, and also without creativity. It seems to me an inevitable consequence of the kind of universe we have that there’s going to be red teeth and claws around, and suffering, disease and death.
WIE: For many people that’s somehow inconsistent with the idea that the universe is ultimately a whole which is intelligent and good.
RS: I don’t see any reason why an intelligent, good, whole has to be thought of as a frozen, timeless being. This is a Greek conception of God, not a Jewish one. The Jewish conception of God is God working in time and history and process. The Greek conception is a kind of Platonic version of something totally disembodied, totally detached from the natural world, floating above space and time in an eternal changelessness. No doubt that’s one aspect of the Divine Being, a kind of absolute sense of being rather than becoming. I think that’s a pole of divinity. But there’s another side of divinity which has to do with becoming, process, time, and that’s something that’s strongly emphasized in the Jewish and the Christian tradition but not so much in the Eastern traditions. All of us, whether we like it or not, are shaped by this Western sense of process, becoming, of the meaning of history and of things developing and changing in time. If one wants a God who’s not involved in time in that kind of a way, then there are religious paths that are based on that view. One can view the whole of creation as a terrible mistake, as nothing but a series of endless, futile cycles of becoming and birth and death, and rebirth and redeath and so on, going on and on forever. Then the only answer is a kind of vertical takeoff into a realm of timeless being where you just forget all this and leave it behind you.
When I was living in India I found that some Hindu teachers took that view, and some of the Theravada Buddhists take that view. Their whole aim is to detach themselves entirely from this world of becoming and undergo a vertical takeoff of individual salvation. I don’t think that view is deeply attractive to most Westerners. We are too embedded, perhaps, in cultural conditioning about wanting to help people or save the world, or do something. It’s built into our whole culture. Maybe it’s just a different way of responding to the sense of the divine. But I think that the Western sense of divinity is one where suffering and process are inherent in it all. In the Christian view this is extremely clear. Jesus was crucified on the cross. It’s not about a God totally removed from suffering, process, history and so on, but one who actually has an aspect of his being within it all.
WIE: Do you find that this Western view is more supported by science, particularly by the scientific theory of evolution, than the other view?
RS: Well, I would say that the whole of the Western evolutionary view says that the entire world, the entire universe, is in a process of development and change in time, that there’s an historical process of development inherent in it all. In most Indian and Buddhist traditions, as well as in that of the ancient Greeks, you have a cyclical view of history. There is just an endless recurrence of cycles. Only in the Jewish religion, and in derivative religions like Islam and Christianity, do you have this very strong emphasis on process and time. And now the West comes up with evolutionary theory, and suddenly it turns out that this is the process of not just biological life on Earth but the entire universe. Is this a vast cultural projection and justification of our religious assumptions? Or is it a fantastic confirmation of them from science? It’s hard to know which.
WIE: Do you feel that there is an objective truth ascertainable through science, or is all of science possibly a projection of certain basic assumptions?
RS: I think all of science is the projection of certain basic assumptions. You start from a hypothesis and your hypothesis has a plausibility depending on your assumptions. The universe is reflexive—in other words, it reflects what we are looking for. If you believe the most important thing in the universe is polarity, you can see it everywhere—you know, heads and feet, north and south poles, roots and shoots in plants. If you think the most important thing is trinities, threes, you can find threes everywhere you look. If you think it’s fours you find fours—the four points of the compass, squares, corners and so on. You’re always meeting people who have got philosophies where the secret of life is this or that, and you can find plenty of evidence for all of these philosophies.
The universe can reflect an infinite number of points of view, it seems. But in science the way that you decide between competing views is by means of experiments. In philosophy you can have rival schools of thought that go on for thousands of years. But in science the general rule of the game is that if you have one hypothesis and someone else has another, you can actually say, “Okay, now can we do an experiment to find out which is better?” You have a kind of contest, and by agreeing on the experiment and doing it you ask nature to decide which is the better hypothesis. It’s like an oracle. You ask a question of nature and the answer comes back from the experiment. The experiment doesn’t always resolve the question. There are always disputed points of view in science. But you can resolve some things in science.
Evolutionary theory says that if there were many forms of life in the past that don’t exist now, they should have left various traces. And indeed, you look and there are all these bones of animals that no longer exist buried in the earth in strata and layers and this seems like pretty good evidence of change in time. Then you have the idea that all forms of life are related, and that all animals and plants within a given family are related to each other. And when you look at their DNA and their proteins, you find those are all related, that there is a family resemblance even at the molecular level.
I think the evidence is pretty plausible for this process of development in time. So I think that some things are indeed supported by evidence and you can decide certain questions by evidence. There are some more metaphysical questions that you can’t, like “Is there a purpose in evolution?” That’s not the kind of question that’s easy to decide by evidence.
WIE: Do you feel that having certain ultimate beliefs or assumptions, even if they cannot actually be proven or disproven by science, can inform science, or open it up to other realms that it might not be open to without them?
RS: Well, science is inevitably based on assumptions about the nature of the universe. In the seventeenth century the view that most scientists started from was a kind of neoplatonic conception of God, where there’s a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature. In this view, the mind of God is filled with mathematical equations and mathematical forms which are what ultimately shape and govern the whole of nature. The conventional scientific assumption of universal changeless laws of nature is simply derived from this neoplatonic theology of the seventeenth century. Most scientists have eliminated the mind of God from the world machine, but what they are left with is the ghost of the mind of that God, which is the idea of eternal laws of nature, fixed forever and applying to the whole universe. The big bang theory itself depends on this assumption. You assume that the laws of nature observed over the last fifty years in the laboratories on Earth apply throughout the entire fifteen-billion-year history of the entire universe, without variation, in every single part of the universe, even parts as yet unobserved by our extralarge arrays of radio telescopes. And, on this assumption, you then crank back the calculations to arrive at the big bang. But the assumption of universal laws of nature that never change, that have all been there from the beginning, is a pure assumption. There’s no empirical evidence for it whatever.
Insofar as people have tried to study the laws and constants of nature on Earth, they vary. I mean, we are always updating our view of the laws of nature and the so-called constants, like the speed of light. If you look at the data, they’ve actually fluctuated wildly over the last fifty or a hundred years in which they’ve been studied. These fluctuations have been dismissed as experimental errors. But in my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World I actually go through the history of the fundamental constants, and I discuss how constant are the fundamental constants. The empirical evidence shows they are not very constant. The assumption is that, okay, if the empirical facts show variation, the empirical facts must be wrong because we know they are constant, because they are constants. Science is based, through and through, on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the universe, and this one of eternal laws and unvarying constants is in fact, in my opinion, very questionable.
A lot of my own work is based on the assumption that the so-called laws of nature may not have been fixed through all time. In an evolutionary universe, why shouldn’t they evolve? And in fact, my own view is that they are not laws at all. They are more like habits. There’s a kind of memory in nature and these habits of nature evolve as time goes on. They are not fixed laws that were all there from the beginning—a position that can never be proved by experiment, but can only be assumed as an axiom. Yet most scientists take this for granted, as an unquestioned assumption. So I think science is based on all sorts of assumptions about nature which are essentially theological or metaphysical. In point of fact, most of the ones that science is dominated by at the moment come from a particular kind of theology common in the seventeenth century, this very Greek neoplatonic theology of God as beyond all space and time, with a mind that is eternally full of changeless mathematical ideas, and with the universe coming forth from that kind of mathematical God. If you don’t call it “God,” you just call it the laws of nature, or mathematical reality or something. But this is the assumption. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg and all the leading physicists of today, including Einstein, all subscribe to this kind of view. Even though they wouldn’t call it “God,” they believe the ultimate reality is a timeless mathematical realm.
WIE: It sounds like the kind of universe you are describing is much more dynamic and also more mysterious.
RS: Yes. Their universe is the universe of rationalism. It’s the idea that the ultimate reality is a rational mathematical mind. The only really valid form of human thought is rational mathematical thought as exercised by great mathematicians and Nobel prize winning physicists, and all the rest is kind of messy detail that hasn’t yet been sorted out. The truth, for them, lies in this ultimate mathematical reason. It’s mysterious in its way, and it’s founded on a kind of mysticism. This view started with Pythagoras in ancient Greece; it all comes from the Pythagorean mystery school, which was a mystical school of thought. So, implicit in conventional science is indeed a kind of mystical insight. But many scientists have lost sight of its mystical origins and it’s just become a kind of dogma.
WIE: It seems that the universe they have created is much more fixed than what you are suggesting.
RS: Yes, even though science itself has revealed that the universe is evolving. The data have revealed that the whole universe is radically evolutionary, even though these assumptions are still in place that it’s radically nonevolutionary. That’s why there’s a big conflict within science from its own findings. My own work starts from this conflict, saying, “Okay, let’s take seriously the evolutionary nature of reality.” Then we have to question the idea that it’s all based on totally fixed unquestioned mathematical laws.
WIE: I understand that you taught at Cambridge University for ten years. What compelled you to leave traditional academia and strike out into the more risky, unorthodox and uncharted waters that you have been exploring since then? And what role has spiritual practice and experience played in this journey?
RS: When I was at Cambridge I was very conscious of the great limitations of biological theory. Although I enjoyed doing research and teaching biology there, I became increasingly aware that the mechanistic theory of nature was a very limited way of looking at things. It didn’t correspond to the fullness of what living things were doing. Just grinding them up and isolating enzymes and so on tells you something about organisms, but it doesn’t tell you how they relate to each other in societies, how they behave in the wild, and that kind of thing. All of that perpetually eludes this reductionistic kind of science.
Then, to find out more about tropical botany, I spent a year in Malaysia, where I worked at the University of Malaysia. This was in 1968. On my way there, I traveled through India for three months. That had a huge impact on me. I suddenly saw this astonishing culture which I found completely fascinating, which had riches and depths beyond anything I had ever been taught about in England.
I got interested in meditation and when I got back to England I did Transcendental Meditation for a while. Then I got into other forms of Indian meditation. I didn’t want to go on with the narrow, reductionist science at Cambridge, and the scientific community there was so committed to this narrow view. So I found a job in India, at an international agricultural institute, where I could do real science, working on Indian crops, that might potentially be useful, and at the same time live in India, which was where I wanted to be. I spent four or five years living and working in Hyderabad, at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semiarid Tropics, where I was the crop physiologist. During this time I had the opportunity to find out about Sufism, because of the Sufis in Hyderabad, and about Hindu philosophy. Gurus came through giving discourses and I visited various ashrams. But I actually found myself most drawn to ordinary Hinduism: the pujas, the people’s practice of making offerings to sacred plants in the mornings, the greeting of the sun in the morning, the pilgrimages to temples and sacred places, the holy trees, holy rats, holy cows, and holy snakes, and that kind of thing. I just liked the sacralization of nature and the earth which I found there. I’d gone there interested in the higher reaches of Hindu philosophy and meditation and actually found myself drawn to what most sophisticated Hindus despised—the folk practices of Hinduism. That drew me the most, and that I found most attractive because it involved a kind of sacralization of the earth and a different attitude toward nature and matter and life.
This was quite a shock to me at first. But I was intrigued by it and it played for me a very important role in giving me a broader view of things. Then I realized that I couldn’t be a Hindu because I wasn’t Indian, and it would be ridiculous to go back to England dressed up in Indian clothes and pretending to be Indian. I visited a few gurus and asked their advice on my spiritual quest. And one or two of them said something I never expected them to say: “You come from a Christian background, you should find a Christian path. All paths lead to God and that’s your path because that’s your ancestral path.” This actually came to make a lot of sense to me. Then later, I met Father Bede Griffiths, who was my main teacher in India, and I lived in his ashram for a year and a half. He was a Benedictine monk who lived in India and followed many aspects of Indian spirituality while remaining a Westerner with Western views. He was a bridge for me between these two cultures and helped me reconnect with the mystical traditions of Christianity, the core of the Christian tradition which I hadn’t really heard about as a child. So that, for me, was the way that I returned to a Western way of looking at things after a total of seven years in India. It took me a long way, going through that Indian path, and coming back.
Then, when I was living in India, I became very friendly with Krishnamurti, and later I saw quite a lot of him. I found him very refreshing. But there were some problems with his approach. He was very good at asking questions, but he wasn’t very good at suggesting answers, and I think that a lot of people got quite lost as a result of his teachings. But I had a lot of fun being with him and I liked him a lot personally. India played an important part in all this, and my time there, which combined doing Western-style science with living in India, was for me the right solution at the time. It meant I could do both. It provided a way of being in both worlds.
WIE: That actually leads me to my last question. Do you feel it is possible to be wholly committed to science and spirituality at the same time?
RS: Oh yes, definitely. I think that many of the great scientists in the past have been very spiritual in their way of life. Michael Faraday, for example, who discovered electromagnetism, was an extremely spiritual man, an extremely good man. Newton was preoccupied as much with the nature of the divine, and the divine will and purpose and presence in the universe, as he was with science. Even Descartes was very interested in theology and spirituality. If you look back through the history of science, many of the greatest scientists have in fact combined these two. There have also been scientists who have been dogmatic atheists, but most of them I wouldn’t number among the greatest in the history of science. Darwin was an atheist in the end, but he wasn’t a dogmatic one. He was quite a moderate and rather sorrowful atheist. The Dawkinses and the T. H. Huxleys and so on are the propagandists of atheism rather than the original creative spirits. They are the evangelists of this atheistic view—they are not the great creative spirits in science.
My own view is that science as a method of inquiry involves learning by experience. That’s really what it’s about. There’s nothing in that that is incompatible with the spiritual life because I think the spiritual life involves learning from experience as well. What is incompatible with the spiritual life is a dogmatic atheism and materialism which has come to dominate particular parts of modern science and, for some scientists, has come to be identified with science itself. But this is a paradigm. Scientific models of reality change, but science goes on even so. Before the 1960s most people believed that the universe was eternal; after that they got the view of an evolving cosmos. Before Darwin most scientists believed that the world was created in 4004 b.c.; after Darwin most have had a much expanded view of time. So it’s not a particular set of ideas or doctrines which constitute science. It’s a method of inquiry, the idea of building on what has gone before and exploring by experiment, and also an openness to new ideas. And that, I think, is completely compatible with a spiritual view of things. I don’t think you can prove some of these spiritual truths by scientific means. Science is a limited method of inquiry. It looks at the repetitive aspects of the natural world, so its sphere of interest is relatively confined. Spiritual experience would involve the limits of consciousness and the nature of consciousness. It overlaps with science in the realm of psychology to some extent. So spiritual inquiry has a broader sphere and science a narrower sphere. But I don’t see any incompatibility between the two.
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