Chapter Five

In the Mirror of Science

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality…. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

—Carl Sagan

In their excellent survey The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom of Nature, writers Robert Augros and George Stanciu describe how the logical structure of science is founded on physics and builds up to the life sciences and psychology. We can follow that structure to sketch how the cutting edge that’s often called “new science” echoes and supports the wisdom tradition wherever science as we understand it—the systematic exploration of the outside, or objective world—overlaps with the science of the world within. We have seen how remarkably the wisdom tradition remains consistent in its essential findings across all cultures and all ages. This chapter gives us a glimpse of how that tradition as a whole is also consistent with science. Setting aside those ideologues who reject any science that’s inconvenient for their position, science is still, as futurist Willis Harman called it, the “knowledge validating system” of our civilization. It was by ignoring the scientific consensus formed as early as the 1970’s (or suppressing it, as the extractive industries did) that we landed in the present climate emergency. We don’t want to ignore the science where it supports the climate struggle or the new story.

THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Gandhi’s role as interpreter of the perennial philosophy—our “new” story, in contemporary terms—as a transmitter of its core teachings from a culture where these were still relatively well upheld to a civilization where they had been all but forgotten, rests on two qualifications. For one, he was the activist par excellence. You could say he charted the course for today’s insurrectionary movements, more and more of which are recognizing the strategic advantages of nonviolence. In this, Gandhi stood out among most of his predecessors in India’s spiritual tradition, who rarely entered the word of politics. Secondly, and much more within that tradition, he had an entirely scientific outlook: “The claim that I have made is neither extraordinary nor exclusive. God will rule the lives of all those who will surrender themselves without reservation to him. Here is no question of hallucination [as a friend had suggested]. I have stated a simple scientific law that can be verified by anyone who will undertake the necessary preparations …”⁶⁶

We would call the event he’s describing here one of his most mystical experiences. He had heard the voice of God telling him to undertake what became known as the epic fast against separate electorates for caste Hindus and “untouchables” in September 1932. Yet he sees it in entirely scientific terms. (Incidentally, it worked.)

The world I was taught to believe in could be said to rest on Newton’s physics, Darwin’s evolution, and Freud’s psychology, which eventually led to the demoralizing theory of innate aggression and what’s been called our culture of narcissism. Why should we care about others if they’re completely separate from us? Why should we care about the planet if it’s an inert object? Why should we care about anything but our own gratification if there’s no particular meaning to life?

Then it all changed.

Max Planck was, like his friend Albert Einstein, a gifted musician. In 1874, in fact, the young Planck had been advised by his physics professor in Munich, Philipp von Jolly, not to waste his time going into physics, since in this field almost everything was already discovered, and all that remained was to fill a few holes. But Planck was okay with filling the holes, so he stuck with physics—and about sixteen years later discovered the newest thing that ever hit Western science: that electromagnetic energy—say, light or gravity or electricity, fundamental units of reality—comes not in a continuous flow, as it appears to do in ordinary observation, but in discrete “packets,” officially termed quanta. It was pure serendipity, as the best science often is. He was simply trying to account for a puzzle in what scientists call black body radiation (a “black body” is a body that absorbs energy completely), and in order to make the equations work, he hit on the idea of introducing a constant: Planck’s constant, h. He thought this constant would be factored out once he solved the equations. Was he ever wrong! What he dreamed up as a mere mathematical tool showed that energy is actually discontinuous or, if you will, “pixelated,” the way the pixels on a computer screen are perceived as continuous but aren’t.

Einstein was already working on his even more famous equation that demonstrated that energy and matter are essentially interchangeable. (Planck’s is E=hv; Einstein’s is, of course, E=mc².) The earth-shaking implication of these parallel discoveries is that the continuity with which we experience the world is much like the impression created by a series of still photographs that we see as a moving picture. In fact, a famous sage of modern India, Sri Ramana Maharshi, used this very analogy to explain why we see life and experience our thoughts as real, when they are really a series of discrete “instants” that the Indian tradition, Hindu and Buddhist, called channas.

The breathtaking implications are not obvious for the lay person (like myself). Let’s back up a second.

The great physicists of the early nineteenth century, Germans and others, saw themselves not as specialists but as philosophers exploring the very roots of natural science. When Erwin Schrödinger, for example, wrote What Is Life? after fleeing the Nazis in 1944, he claimed that the title was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but in fact he had strong interests in Eastern religion and for a time was head of the physics department in Allahabad, India. The genius to whom we owe the principle of uncertainty, Werner Heisenberg, wrote Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science in 1958. Ernst Mach, whose exposure of deep flaws in Newtonian mechanics strongly influenced Einstein, was himself influenced by Indian philosophy.⁶⁷ Whether India had a direct influence on these developments, or it was simply time for the mechanistic Zeitgeist to get out of the way, a fundamental change was happening. Planck’s discovery of the discontinuity of nature, of matter and energy, at the subatomic level liberated us from Newton’s billiard ball model of material reality, with its forces acting on objects with resulting predictable movement and acceleration. It is only the huge number of quantum entities (quons, as Nick Herbert calls them, or qubits, as most physicists today call them) in anything as big as a bacterium that makes the effect of such a force seem totally predictable.

But if random forces are not what makes the world go round, what does? Quantum research showed that we live in what they call a participatory universe, where in any act of observation on the quantum level the observer influences what’s observed. It’s not the case that an objective, material reality really exists “out there” whether we’re observing it or not. In other words, our consciousness of the world has an impact on the world. The mature Planck saw what was really happening: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness … Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”⁶⁸

THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE MATERIAL TUNNEL

Don’t be concerned if, like me, you can’t follow the actual science behind these discoveries, not to mention the mathematics (of which I am entirely innocent). Realizing the significance of what is now called the new physics, a number of brilliant physicists—Fritjof Capra, David Bohm, Nick Herbert, Brian Swimme, Henry Stapp, and others—have very clearly spelled out the consequences for laypersons like myself. With their help, we can go through the same shock of finding out that, as Schrödinger says, “We have to surrender the notion of the real external world. Alien as it seems to everyday thinking, [it] is absolutely essential.”⁶⁹ We journey with them from shock to intrigue, and finally to a picture that’s utterly inspiring.

We are being given back a world in which all reality is interconnected, since consciousness pervades everything (in fact, is everything), and in which, far from being meaningless specks in a vast randomness, we are cocreators of a universe that is as much within as around us. My colleague Henry Stapp succinctly described the interconnectedness, not to say unity, of the quantum universe in a paper he developed at Berkeley back in 1989 (my emphasis): “The actual things from which the universe is built are not persisting entities … but are rather sudden events called quantum jumps … and the quantum jump is intrinsically a shift of the entire universe.”⁷⁰

In the macroscopic world of what is now called classical science, an electron has to be either a wave or a particle. In the quantum world of the new science, it is something that will appear as a wave or a particle depending on what you’re looking for—that is, depending on the equipment you set up to detect it. In other words, again, your consciousness plays a role in (the appearance of) the reality around us. It is not a physical world, purely and simply, but what Stapp and others call psychophysical:

That senseless mechanical conception of the universe, and of your role within it, is a relic of the classical principles that were found early in the twentieth century to be incompatible with a host of irrefutable experimental findings. To cope with that massive failure of the classical precepts, physicists of the twentieth century replaced that earlier understanding of nature by a profoundly different one called quantum mechanics. The newer theory accounts, with spectacular accuracy, for all well-established empirical data, both new and old, and describes a dynamically integrated psychophysical reality in which a person’s mental intensions are not fixed by the prior physical reality, but can influence that person’s upcoming bodily actions in the mentally intended way…⁷¹

Simply put, we have free will.

Thus it was that an entirely new science began to emerge, as scientists—some gingerly, some with a sense of wonder—began one after another to walk through the door thrown open by this revelation of a subatomic world utterly unlike the mechanical, predictable universe of classical science—or of our day-to-day experience. A number of scientists, led by Einstein himself, tried to show that the bizarre quantum nature of reality was not how the world really is; it must be just an artifact of how we describe it at the quantum level. Not the territory, just a convenient map. But these efforts backfired. Through some important experiments—ironically, the most important being the one that Einstein himself designed with colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen—to disprove this pixelated model of reality, they instead proved it. The French physicist Alain Aspect found out a way to conduct their brilliant thought-experiment—namely, by firing a stream of photons (the quantum particles responsible for light) in opposite directions from a single source to a type of crystal where each photon would break in one of two ways. In a classical world there would be no correlation between the sets going one way or the other, since they were travelling apart at the speed of light and no signal could communicate to photon A which way photon A.1 broke. Einstein again: nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But according to a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement,” they should still be in communication: Einstein’s dreaded “spooky actions at a distance.” The correlation that quantum theory predicted is exactly what they found.

This meant that the world we live in is nonlocal, in scientific language—meaning that an event happening anywhere somehow happens everywhere (as Stapp tells us in the preceding quote). Now call to mind King’s famous assertion, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, that “injustice anywhere damages justice everywhere.”

Nonlocality is the mirror in which scientists see what mystics have been trying to tell us down the corridors of time: that all life is one.

The primacy of consciousness—that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental nature of reality—is what makes nonlocality, aka the absolute unity of life, possible. Matter won’t do that for you. Consciousness (think capital “C” consciousness) is the all-pervasive, infinitely creative reality, not limited in time or space. It is not to be confused with my consciousness, as in, “I am conscious of the tree outside my window,” which is an infinitesimal splinter of absolute consciousness. And this primacy of Consciousness was a given throughout India’s long spiritual heritage, so much so that it was condensed into a two-word formula in the earliest stratum of Indian tradition: prajñānām brahmaḥ, “Brahman (the Supreme Reality) is consciousness.” We have just heard it echoed by Max Planck in his famous declaration that matter is derivative from consciousness.

It perhaps shouldn’t surprise us any more to find this strikingly similar language in a relatively more recent Indian text, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (sometimes called the Vāsiṣṭha Rāmāyana): “Everything here [that is, in the world] is pure consciousness; minus pure consciousness nothing is.”⁷²

This text, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, was compiled in the middle ages from much earlier material. It is one of the most scientific in Indian literature (though it’s studded with innumerable mythological and sometimes fantastic stories). It says, for example: “The remark of even a child is to be accepted if it is in accordance with reason; but the remark of even Brahmā himself, the creator of the world, is to be rejected like a piece of straw if it does not accord with reason.”⁷³ In the index of an excellent modern translation, entries for the word “consciousness” fill two columns. I’ve chosen the following specimens practically at random: “The entire universe is but pure consciousness, as it was and as it is. Even when there is a perception of notions and concepts, that consciousness alone exists.” And “the manifestation of ignorance known as ‘the objective universe.’”⁷⁴

Make no mistake: from our standpoint, there definitely is a world out there, and it is extremely important how we relate to it. But it’s definitely not what it seems. It is not separate from us; it is not a given (as we perceive it) that cannot be altered. It is not primarily or exclusively matter. By some awesome mystery, it is consciousness taking the form of energy to create the appearance of matter.

It is puzzling, but far easier to imagine how consciousness might create inert matter than to imagine the reverse. In the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, which many consider the most important and authentic-sounding of the noncanonical gospels, Jesus says, “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is amazing, but if spirit came into being because of the body, it is even more amazing. I am amazed, though, at how such great wealth [i.e. spirit] has settled into such poverty [the body].”⁷⁵

The best explanation for the merely “amazing” possibility that consciousness (spirit) has become matter (flesh) in both quantum theory and the Vedanta is, it really hasn’t. Instead, what we’re dealing with is appearance. Appearance—specifically, the appearance of change and separateness in the phenomenal world—is not entirely real, but not entirely unreal, either; it is just that, an appearance. In Vedanta this is the famous doctrine of māyā. The world of things and people, of creatures and changes, is real for us, to be sure; it is extremely important that we learn to relate to it correctly. But it does not have an absolute reality; it will, as Jesus says, pass away, just as our bodies will resolve back into their constituent elements at the time of death, and new bodies will be called forth from those elements in a cycle that will endure as long as the propitious environment of the planet can be maintained. We are a critical part of maintaining it so that progress can go on.

It’s a lovely paradox: because the world is more separate than we thought—it’s made up of discontinuous changes in matter/energy—it’s not separate at all.

LIVING PLANET, LIVING NATURE

The concept of a paradigm shift, according to Thomas Kuhn, is that science does not work simply from discovered facts; it works from scientists’ perception of these facts. The “classic,” “Darwinian” theory of evolution was a perfect example. The fact is, Darwin did not simply say that evolution proceeds by random mutation and the survival of the fittest. Instead, it is critical to consider also the Zeitgeist or “sensibility of the age.” This Zeitgeist functioned in the same way that bias functions—it makes people inclined to interpret information selectively and according to a fixed, preexisting worldview. Darwin’s message was filtered through the lens of this bias, and sadly misinterpreted. Darwin had that impression from his early observations (themselves colored by the materialist bent of the times), but he outgrew it. Interesting that we are only now realizing this: Darwin himself did not end up believing that evolution could be fully explained as a mechanical combination of random mutation and survival of the fittest (meaning the most aggressive). As David Loye points out, Origin of Species pertains mainly to prehumans, and there survival of the fittest is featured; however, in The Descent of Man, in which Darwin deals with human evolution, he actually apologizes for the stress on survival theory. “Selfishness” is mentioned only twelve times (in 848 pages), whereas “love” appears ninety-five times, “moral sensitivity” ninety-two, and “mind” ninety.⁷⁶ “Survival of the fittest”? It is found twice.⁷⁷

But it was too late. Others were already busy throwing out the baby—the sense of a human universe, alive with feeling and purpose—with the bathwater—that is, with the rigidity and dogma that had taken over the intellectual life of Europe. A strictly mechanistic theory of evolution was too good (and too convenient) to not be right. It seemed to fit perfectly with the mechanical model of Newtonian physics and to justify social Darwinism, a social order based on competition wherein F. Y. Edgeworth could declare, without fear of contradiction, as the first principle of economics that every agent is actuated only by self-interest.

The old story was a solid edifice built on material physics, leading to competition biology and innate aggression as the inescapable mark of the human beast. The new story is just as consistent in going from consciousness-based physics to an image of evolution that is at least as cooperative as it is competitive—in fact, increasingly so—and predicts the possibility of a far different human community.

FROM STICKING POINT TO TIPPING POINT: THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Frans de Waal is one of the most distinguished scientists of our time. His highly readable books, like Peacemaking Among Primates, Good Natured, and The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society are pioneering this shift in the important field of animal behavior. For years he tried to disprove what’s called veneer theory, the Freudian theory that we are essentially cruel and “actuated by self-interest,” with only a thin veneer of civilization between us and our worst behavior. Here is de Waal: “I grew tired of the battle against veneer. But then a curious thing happened: the theory vaporized. Rather than dying from a slow, feverish illness, veneer theory suffered a massive heart attack. I don’t quite understand how and why this happened.”⁷⁸ As de Waal says in his introduction to Douglas Fry’s War, Peace, and Human Nature, veneer theory is massively contradicted by the evidence from prehistory, paleoanthropology, and his own field.

In speaking with filmmaker Lou Zweier, de Waal noted,

And around the year 2000 all of a sudden we started to see … that people did not accept the notion anymore that we have selfish genes and we are selfishly programmed and all of this. People started to talk about humans as a cooperative species…. We are actually quite cooperative. … Cooperation is actually very widespread in the animal kingdom. There are actually very few animals who have survived without some form of cooperation. And so this whole notion that deep down you’re bad, kind of the original sin idea: that’s sort of out the window now.

Wouldn’t we all like to understand how and why this happened, apparently effortlessly! In any case, this shows that despite the old paradigm’s near-total endorsement by popular culture, education, politicians, and some scientists, its grip may be loosening. This is a tribute to human intelligence—and our will to live!

But it’s clear that veneer theory’s sudden death makes intellectual room for a brilliant reversal that has yet to happen, outside the wisdom tradition: to stand veneer on its head. Violence is a veneer; when people are civil and kind to each other, they’re actually revealing what it means to be human.

A GLANCE AT THE GENETICS

What happened in the field of genetics was, in a way, parallel to the intellectual history of atomic science. Just as atoms, in Newton’s famous picture, were supposed to be solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, genes were supposed to be relatively stable units of information that determined many characteristics of the organism carrying them and even programmed their behavior. Democritus and other Greek philosophers had held that nature must be composed of atoms (a Greek word meaning “indivisible”). Newton said they had to be hard, massy, impenetrable, and changeless particles—and sure enough, this was triumphantly confirmed (or so it seemed) by Einstein’s discovery of the atom and Rutherford and Bohr’s models of it. Then came Planck, a mere decade after Einstein, revealing that the atom isn’t a hard, massy, and so on thing—in fact, it’s not a “thing” at all, properly speaking.

With genes, the rude awakening took a little longer, but it followed the same trajectory from triumphant physicality to—mystery. Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) saw that there had to be “units of inheritance,” leading to the founding of modern genetics and eventually the discovery of actual genes that were assumed to make us what we are. From there it did not take long, again, for geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) to discover that when you get what she famously called a “feeling for the organism” (corn, in her case) you see that DNA—the long molecules organized into chromosomes, segments of which are recognized as genes—contains what she called transposable elements (TEs) that move about, and do so at least partly in response to stress on the organism. That was half a century ago. While McClintock’s work met with the usual rebuffs that pioneers are heir to, it redounds to the great credit of science that in 1983 she became the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Scientists now know that over forty times as much DNA is devoted to the TEs as McClintock was aware of in her day. Her results have been extended by many researchers, including Eshel Ben-Jacob, who describes the genomes of bacterial colonies as group minds that respond intelligently to stress on their colonies.⁷⁹ In a Washington Post article titled “Breaking the Human Code” (note the misleading “old story” title), of particular interest is this observation by Gene Myers, the computer scientist who actually assembled the genome map (my emphasis): “The system is extremely complex. It’s like it was designed. There’s a huge intelligence there. I don’t see that as being unscientific. Others may, but not me.”⁸⁰

However we may understand the intelligence Myers refers to, in an important 1988 paper, John Cairns was able to show that a keystone of the Darwinian theory of evolution, random mutation, is quite misleading. Genes don’t just pop off into random mutations; they respond to their environment with, as Cairns calls it, adaptive mutation. In the end, the mechanistic model of evolution simply has not held up. It failed to account for what evolutionists actually observe, such as sudden jumps in evolution, sometimes across species, or the fact that genes, which the media still claim determine not only our physical traits but subtleties of behavior and outlook, determine no such thing. Genes could no more do that than the books on the library stacks can jump off the shelf and tell us what to think. Now that scientists can describe in detail how genes are in fact libraries of information that are read by proteins in a long chain of events, they are beginning to suspect that our belief, how we perceive the world around us, is a critical part of that chain.⁸¹ Precisely what the Bhagavad Gita stated, in words that no longer seem fantastical: yach śraddhā, sa eva saḥ (“what your deep belief is, that you are”).

The Nun Study pointed us to that discovery some time ago,⁸² and doctors know it by experience. When one of the nuns, Sister Mary, was pushing one hundred, she complained to her doctor, “You doctors with your pills are keeping me alive.” But he knew better: “No sister, your attitude is keeping you alive.” Today geneticists have been able to trace the molecular pathway through which belief threads its way through the body to genes, specifically to the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes that determine when and whether it’s time for that chromosome to die. We who work on the new story have long been talking about the fundamental importance of story in how we see the world: now scientists can show how it even molds our physical being.

As mentioned earlier, in the new biology explicated by Augros and Stanciu, the factor of cooperation is at least as important as competition was in the pseudo-Darwinian model. In fact, not only in the animal kingdom but even for plants, cooperation runs through the whole story of evolution, ever gaining on the competition factor as that story unfolds. When futurist and evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris examined the entire sweep of evolution—from the first entities we regard as living, to nucleated cells, to multicellular organisms, and finally to the complex life forms we’re familiar with today—she discovered a consistent pattern: at each big jump, there was a dramatic shift from competition to cooperation. Otherwise the species would (and some have) exhaust its environment and die off. Sobering! And it also gives pause that until she started asking this question, few had seen this connection, despite the volumes of highly skilled research on evolution. The “survival of the fittest” outlook unconsciously suppressed this kind of discovery, but now it’s making up for the lost time—in many quarters. More and more scientists today are getting comfortable with the term for us coined by Harvard’s Martin Nowak: supercooperators.⁸³ As Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner, director of the campus’s Social Interaction Lab and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, has said, we are a profoundly caretaking species, and this might be the defining characteristic of our human evolution.⁸⁴ He points out that Darwin himself said, in his first book, In Defense of Man, that sympathy is our strongest instinct. We are getting close to Gandhi’s bold declaration that nonviolence is “the law of our species.”

THE HUMAN WORLD

In the New Scientist for January 23, 2016, on page 18, you will find an article on a dig at Nataruk, Kenya, uncovering remains of a hunter-gatherer community that flourished ten thousand years ago, where some kind of mayhem occurred. The headline is really catchy: “WAR? ’Twas ever thus.” But read on. Later, it emerges that the site is the only known evidence of a prehistoric massacre of hunter-gatherer people. In other words, even where science is telling a story of peace, the writer feels he has to present it as a story of war. Paradigms don’t die easily. This one has succeeded in burying the other side of the coin as deep as those dead ancestors. But this won’t go on much longer. Prehistory clearly shows that for 99 percent of human and prehuman history we lived as small band gatherer-hunters (SBGH) (the usual order now, because we’ve learned that gathering was much more important than hunting). Cooperation was common among groups, in which often relatives and even others lived together surprisingly well, solving problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence.⁸⁵

It would be most enjoyable to survey, even cursorily, the massive data from a wide variety of fields on human empathy, cooperation, longing for service and meaning, and the like, but this would take us beyond our present scope. Three experiments in neuroscience will at least give a flavor of this new vision (for more, see our www.scienceofnonviolence.org).

First, in 1988 in Parma, Italy, scientists were using the new technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to trace which neurons were activated when a monkey picked up a nut and ate it. During a lull in the experiment, another researcher happened to walk by and, seeing the dish of nuts, helped himself to a few. No surprise there. But a huge surprise followed, for the researchers saw, on the screen that was still turned on, that exactly the same neurons fired in the monkey’s brain when it observed a person eating the nuts as did when the animal actually ate some nuts itself. Thanks to this new highly accurate and noninvasive technique (and unconsciously, perhaps, thanks to the emerging new paradigm), the scientists had stumbled on what are now called mirror neurons: highly specialized motor neurons that precisely reflect the actions—and, it turns out, even the emotions and intentions—of another creature. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist who has worked extensively on mirror neurons, writes, “We have evolved to connect deeply with other human beings. Among other things this means that although we commonly think of pain as a fundamentally private experience, our brain actually treats it as an experience shared with others.”⁸⁶ This fact has led psychologist Rachel McNair to coin a term for the condition of those who injure others; she called it perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS), which today has come to be called “moral injury.” It accounts for the high suicide rates of soldiers and is also documented extensively in executioners, perpetrators of domestic violence, and others.⁸⁷ Recently it has shown up in drone operators, such that three-quarters of them show signs of PTSD, and so many have walked off the job that the army is hard-pressed to keep the deadly things flying.⁸⁸ This was supposed to be a form of combat so remote from the actual harm it caused that it would create a PlayStation attitude to killing, in the words of Philip Alston, the former United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. The army, in fact, uses video games—the same ones being played by our children!—to “prepare” (that is, desensitize) recruits.⁸⁹ (Although there is certainly research that fails to find a connection between media and violent acting out.⁹⁰ My thanks to Nic Albert for directing me to this reference.)

We keep making the same mistake: not realizing that it’s the mind, the imagination that responds to the idea of killing—you don’t have to actually see it with your physical eyes much less carry it out yourself. Our awareness of others cannot be effaced. It is an inbuilt warning against violence, which we may choose not to heed but is nonetheless registering in our nervous system and deeper consciousness. Former Marine Corps Company Commander and now outspoken peace advocate and policy analyst Matthew Hoh has the final word on what really causes veteran suicides, in an important article he published on veteran’s day, 2019. Moral injury goes beyond just damage to the soul or spirit, Hoh says, but leads to “a deconstruction of one’s own self. In my own case it was as if the foundations of my life, my existence, were cut out from underneath me. This is what drove me to suicidality” ⁹¹ (emphasis added). You can condition people to deny their humanity, but you cannot condition them to make it go away.

Second, in an intriguing experiment lead by Mexican psychologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, two subjects meditated side by side in the same room for about twenty minutes and then were separated.⁹² It is known that meditating can cause harmonic activities in subjects’ brains, which is interesting enough. Here, however, they were separated and sometimes put in different buildings. One of the two subjects was shown flashes of light. That subject’s brain activated accordingly—but so did the brain of the meditation partner in the other building! The experimenters then arranged to have one subject in what’s called a Faraday chamber: a lead-lined room from which no electromagnetic radiation can escape. No cell phone reception in that room. And the result? Most of their partners still showed the same response in brain activity, as if they were still in the same room! Grinberg-Zylberbaum and his colleagues consider this a case of transferred potential occurring through quantum entanglement: the phenomenon whereby quantum elements, such as light photons fired off from the same source but in opposite directions, remain mysteriously in contact even though there’s no known way they can communicate. However we explain it, or fail to, it is a glimpse into the essential oneness of the spiritual dimension of our nature.

As a final example, if I sit in front of a computer screen and am shown the face of someone I don’t know who’s of a different race from mine, the limbic system in the midbrain, especially the amygdala in that system, is activated, the psycho-physiological result of which is a fight-or-flight reaction. But two researchers at Princeton, Susan Fiske and Mary Wheeler, had a hunch this was not an inevitable reaction. And sure enough, if the subject was primed to consider a benign question, such as “Does this person like coffee or tea?” the fight-or-flight reaction was often suppressed. Even the aggressive, self-protective responses built into us by evolution can be overridden by our attitude, particularly in this case by humanization. Whether someone drinks coffee or tea is a personal characteristic that lifts one out of racial stereotypes.⁹³

CONCLUSION

We can simplify—but not, I think, misrepresent—the great shift from matter to consciousness and the life science that follows by saying that (1) the material physics of Newton is yielding to the consciousness-based world of Planck, Bohr, and the others; (2) the “survival of the fittest” evolution of pseudo-Darwinism is yielding to the mature Darwin and a host of others; (3) Freud is being decisively replaced by behaviorists like de Waal and the new field of “positive psychology”; and finally, (4) the selfish science of Edgeworth, Hobbes, and company is yielding to the implications for human nature revealed in the life and work of Gandhi and King and their followers.

In the mirror of science, we meet the same selves that we have glimpsed, so far, in the wisdom tradition: we are body, mind, and spirit (or consciousness; primarily that, in fact); we are able to control our own destiny to a significant degree; we have as yet untapped and largely unsuspected inner resources, are deeply interconnected with one another and the web of life, and are not by any means “there yet” in terms of our spiritual, social, or political evolution.

No doubt our descendants centuries hence will look back and see that we too had our limitations and prejudices, but this new picture now emerging has two great advantages over its predecessor: it’s thoroughly consistent with all the great traditions of human wisdom, and it lights a beacon of hope where the former model was leading us to a world of unimaginable disaster. Thank God we caught it in time.

At a 2019 meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Jane Goodall, who has done so much to make us aware of the wonderful life of animals, was asked how it could be that in a world with so much intelligence we still have so much poverty, so much inequality—in a word, such cruelty. She said that the link has been broken between intelligence and wisdom, which she defined, quite correctly, as compassion, kindness, and feelings of that kind. We have all the knowledge we need now to reconnect that link.

The breakthroughs made possible by Planck and Einstein happened in the nick of time. Call it accident or divine grace; they have, in effect, given us back the wisdom tradition just when we needed it most—when without its guidance we seemed to lack the basic wisdom needed to stay alive.