Why the Religious Fear–and Fight–Science… and Why it’s a Sad Mistake

by Ervin Laszlo on September 9, 2010

Religious people — and by this I mean people who are deeply committed to a religion and aspire to live in accordance with its scriptures — usually fear science: they suspect that science contradicts some of their cherished beliefs, beliefs they are asked to accept on faith. And because many believe that the best defense is offense, the religious often attack science and scientists, and widen the gulf that separates these branches of contemporary culture. This is regrettable, for throughout history every enduring culture embraced the best of its dominant religion, together with the rational and empirical ideas that made up the science of its time. The current gulf is all the more regrettable as it’s based on a fundamental misconception.  Indeed, on two misconceptions: of the nature of religion, as well as of science.

The average religious person identifies the religion that he or she espouses with the doctrines of that religion. These are the sacred scriptures created by the founders and prophets of that religion. For the most part they are centuries old, and contain sayings, episodes, and injunctions that are said to come from a higher, superhuman authority.

If it is its doctrines that make up a religion, then there are reasons for the faithful to fear science, or at least a dominant (mis)conception of science (and the misguided souls who embrace that misconception). It’s always possible that science will fail to recognize that the sayings, episodes, and injunctions that make up the literal content of the doctrines come from an undisputable superhuman authority. Scientists are not disposed to accept claims on faith; they are trained to ask for proof — for empirical proof.  If it’s not available, then they might say that the sayings, episodes and injunctions are unproven, and could be mistaken. In that case the religious would have good reason to fear science (or at least those who believe that science would pass judgment on the literal meaning of religious scriptures); their deepest convictions would be in question.

But this fear is unfounded.  It’s based on a misconception of the true nature both of religion, and of science.

Religion doesn’t simply consist of the doctrines that make up its sacred scriptures. There is far more to religion than that. And it’s not the case that science would take religious doctrines at face value and pronounce their content either true or false. There is far more to science than that.

Both religion and science are sourced in human experience. True, they are sourced in a different kind of experience, and science can tell us that they are conveyed by a different hemisphere of the brain: religion is right-hemispheric, and science, left-hemispheric. Human experience encompasses both.

Religion is based on the right-hemispheric experience of its founders, saints, and prophets. These must have been deep and vivid experiences, for they had a remarkable power to affect the heart and the mind of those around them. The founders, and even more their disciples, sought to communicate the substance of these experiences. They did so in the language, and with the concepts of their time. Their followers made the mistake of taking the record of the experiences for the essence of the experiences. They mistook the letter of religion for its spirit.

True scientists would not confound the record of a religious experience with the meaning of that experience. They would not judge a religion by the literal veracity of the sayings, episodes, and injunctions contained in its doctrines; they would ask about their roots in lived experience. And they would seek to understand that experience.

Analyzing the nature and meaning of religious experience is not a threat to the religious. On the contrary, it can prove to be a support. Because when the deep religious experience is analyzed with the methods of a science, a remarkable finding comes to light. The religious experience has aspects and elements that make it consistent with the world scientists discover on the basis of empirical experience.

Strange? Perhaps, but it is so. Psychiatrists such as Stanislav Grof find that in meditative, prayerful, or otherwise altered states of mind and consciousness people have access to the kind of mystical or transcendent realities that make up the substance of all great religions. This doesn’t mean that science can “verify” the metaphysical reality of these visions and entities. To establish their reality is not simply to see whether they correspond to the entities and processes that make up the content of valid scientific theories. It calls for careful reasoning and a further development of our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive powers of the brain, and of the consciousness associated with it. This development is already under way — among other things, recent attempts to discover the quantum-receptivity of microtubules and other subneuronal arrays in the brain point to it. It appears that we can apprehend far more of the reality in which we are embedded than we had thought. In addition to its standard information-processing circuits, the brain has quantum-receptive capacities, picking up information that’s instantaneous, multidimensional, and “nonlocal.”

Work in this area is still in progress, but we can be reasonably certain already that there are aspects and planes of human experience that far transcend the limits of everyday experience. As Shakespeare remarked, there are more things in this world than you and I had ever conceived.

Entering on a plane that is deeper or higher than that of everyday experience is what the religious experience is all about.  And trying to understand how we can connect with that plane is one of the most exciting tasks facing science today.

The sincere religious has nothing to fear from the genuine scientist. On the contrary, the religious and the scientist have much to learn from each other. Together they will achieve a better understanding of the deep reality that surrounds us, and grounds our own existence. Isn’t it time to begin to explore that reality together — instead of fearing and fighting each other?

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The G-20 Vision is Obsolete

by Ervin Laszlo on July 8, 2010

Where there is no vision, the people perish
Proverbs 29:18

One can’t solve a problem with the same level
of consciousness at which the problem arose
Albert Einstein

The final statements of the June 2010 Canada meetings of the G-8 and the G-20 make for impressive reading (G-8 Muskoka Declaration – Recovery and New Beginnings, 25-26 June, and The G-20 Toronto Summit Declaration, June 26-27). They contain a long list of marvelous commitments through which the leaders of the advanced world decide to join forces to ensure a better future for all.

All is well then?  Hardly. A closer look reveals major problems.

First of all, the flawless harmony communicated in the Declarations was not mirrored in the actual debates. There was little agreement on how to move forward, with the U.S. insisting on additional public spending to re-launch recovery, and the UK and the other European nations opting for budgetary cutbacks as the way to move forward. The proposals of the member states also had a tacit “beggar-thy-neighbor” dimension: if implemented they would serve the given nation’s economy, without much regard for the sacrifices incurred by the others.

But the real problem is not the attempt to hide or smooth over internal disagreements—that’s normal procedure for international bodies. The problem is that the objectives espoused by the G-8, and the larger G-20 that incorporates the G-8, are one-sided, as if only money matters and economic growth of the kind we have known in the past can solve all problems. This suggests a vision that’s terminally out of date.

In the G-20 vision the world is made up of nation-states and groups of nation-states, with national governments in charge of ensuring the national interest. Except for some frills and half-hearted regulations, the national interest is business-as-usual economic interest. The governments are to bring about “recovery,” “renewed stability” and “balanced growth” in their national economies, and international cooperation is intended to rebalance the economic and financial system that the crises of the recent past has unbalanced.

The G-8 and G-20 leaders do not seem to realize that recovering and re-establishing the economic-financial order of the past is to re-create a system that’s structurally unstable and no longer sustainable. They do not seem to entertain the possibility that what the world needs is not more of the same, but something radically different. A thorough transformation.

In a world where a third of the people live in abject poverty, as many if not more face critical water shortages, and where the atmosphere heats up, the climate changes, sea levels rise, and the processes enabling the regeneration of vital biological resources are seriously impaired, a classical economic focus is not just inadequate, it’s obsolete. We have seen what reliance on the open market produces: abject poverty for billions, and inequality of the kind where the wealth of a few hundred billionaires equals the income on which half the world’s population has to subsist. With this classical vision, the people, at least the poorer and less powerful elements of the people, will perish.

Obviously, putting more money into humanitarian projects, such as reducing infant and under-five morality, is good and necessary. But “recovery”—in the sense of recovering the kind of system and the kind of growth that characterized the last several decades—is not. As hardly any serious economist would contest any longer, this will only lead to more and bigger crises, and ultimately to breakdown.

Can we expect the recognition of the need for urgent and deep-seated transformation to dawn in the mind of the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation-states? Evidently not. A thorough transformation would—or is very likely to—place in question the legitimacy of the very order that brought them to power and maintains them in power.

Re-launching the kind of growth that the world experienced in the late 20th century is not the way to go in the 21st century. The dilemma is not whether to let states and peoples undergo imminent crises, or attempt to postpone the onset of these crises; here the choice is clear. The real dilemma is whether to lead the transformation to a more sustainable system, or to be overwhelmed by the collapse of the existing one. Leading the transformation offers an opportunity for sustained leadership to those who can still steer the present system, whereas a failure here would surely lead to their demise.

The crux of the matter is that initiating the processes that would lead us to the needed transformation calls for a kind of vision the G-20 doesn’t now possess. Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that produced the problem. A kind of vision that could solve today’s problems demands a new level of consciousness—a consciousness that inspires and motivates cooperation not only by national governments, and not only in the economic and financial domain, but also in the domains of ecology, technology, education, public information, cultural contact and communication. A consciousness that in today’s world the basic precondition of peace and sustainability, and even of enduring prosperity, is wide-ranging cooperation based on a solidarity that embraces transformation. A consciousness, in the last count, of the interdependence and oneness of all the people on this spaceship Earth, and the oneness of our shared destiny.

The “games” the G-20 should be playing are not inter-national games where either I win and you lose, or you win and I lose. They must be trans-national games where everyone wins. Because unless all the people win, all the people will lose. Sooner and more dramatically than the G-20 seems to believe.

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Ten Questions to Test Your Consciousness

by Ervin Laszlo on June 13, 2010

Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem. His insight applies also to the domain of consciousness: we can’t solve the problems of our time with the same kind of consciousness that created them. We live in global times, yet most of us have a tribal kind of consciousness – it’s me or you, my group or yours, and whoever isn’t with us is against us. The continuation of tribal consciousness is nothing less than a recipe for disaster in a world of nuclear weapons, environmental devastation, increasing population and dwindling resources.

There can be no doubt: if we’re going to live sustainably and in peace with each other, we must all shift from a tribal to a planetary consciousness.

But just what is planetary consciousness? Here is how we defined it in the Manifesto on Planetary Consciousness that I drafted with the Dalai Lama and other luminaries of the Club of Budapest in 1996:

“Planetary consciousness is knowing as well as feeling the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind, and the conscious adoption of the ethic and the ethos that this entails.”

It was our conclusion at that time that the evolution of planetary consciousness was the foundational imperative for the survival of the human species. I remain more convinced than ever that this is the case.

But what do you think? Assuming you agree that we must evolve beyond tribalism if we are to survive, would you consider yourself to have planetary consciousness? Here are ten questions that I believe, if answered honestly, will tell you whether you do.

Do you –

1. Satisfy your basic needs without diminishing other people’s chances of satisfying theirs?

2. Pursue your own happiness with due regard for the similar pursuit of others?

3. Respect the right to economic development for all people, wherever they live and whatever their ethnic origin or belief system?

4. Live in a way that respects the integrity of nature around you?

5. Work with like-minded people to safeguard and restore your local environment?

6. Require your government to relate to other nations peacefully and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing the legitimate aspirations of all the members of the international community?

7. Buy from companies that accept responsibility for stakeholders at all levels of the supply chain?

8. Consume media that provides unbiased information relevant to you and your community?

9. Do something to help at least one other person escape the hopeless struggles and abject humiliations of extreme poverty?

10. Believe all young people are entitled to the education they need to be productive members of their community?

Answering these ten questions with an honest yes doesn’t call for money or power. It calls for dedication and solidarity, for the spirit that creates true community, both locally and globally.

The evolution of planetary consciousness is without question an imperative for human survival on our planet. In its absence it’s difficult to see how all seven billion of us will be able to live in peace—or even just survive. To paraphrase Gandhi, “Live consciously, so that all of us may live.”

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The Dis-ease of the Western Mind

by Ervin Laszlo on May 3, 2010

When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he replied he thought it was a good idea. It is indeed a good idea because it’s not entirely a reality. Western civilization—more exactly, the Western mind that creates the civilization—has a serious disease. It’s a “dis-ease” that affects all of us of in the West. And now we can have a better idea of what’s behind it.

Take merely these characteristics of the Western mind:

  • it sees things as separate, each thing on its own, connected merely by mechanistic relations of cause and effect;
  • it’s competitive: each individual is on his or her own, making his or her way in an impersonal and indifferent world;
  • it disconnects the mind from the body: the mind only “drives” or “manages” the body as it would a car or an organization;
  • it best understands the things it has itself creates: artificial, synthetic things, that can be readily and unambiguously manipulated;
  • it disconnects the human from the natural; nature itself becomes the “environment” that humans can manage and manipulate to serve their interests;
  • it categorizes, schematizes people and things, viewing them as abstract entities rather than as existing, living realities;
  • it deals with the representations of people and things rather than with our living experience people and things;
  • and it views all things, nature included, as mechanistic kinds of systems, put together from their parts and capable of being manipulated by acting on their parts.

These traits add up to a dis-ease; to the long-discussed malaise of civilization—of Western civilization. Other civilizations have their own problems and failings, but the above traits are typically those of the Western mind: of the civilization created by the Western mind.

Are these traits purely accidental, just the way the typical Western mind happens to work?

A historical analysis can furnish an explanation why this particular mindset came to dominate the West. The main reason appears to be the separation of the world of values, feelings and spirit from the world of fact and reason at the dawn of the modern age. Following the famous trial of Giordano Bruno, the Church claimed for itself authority over the world of value, feeling and spirit, and allowed science and scientists to investigate the world of fact through reasoning based on observation and experiment.

The original covenant between science and church, concluded on the part of science by Galileo, was reinforced and made into an unquestioned precept by the radical separation of the two worlds by René Descartes. According to Cartesian philosophy there is a complete disjunction between the physical world “outside” the mind (the world of “extended substance” res extensa) from the thinking, feeling world “within” (the thinking substance, res cogitans). Science made great progress by dissecting the outside world into parts and manipulating the parts: this became the basis of modern technology. And the West fell in love with technology, more exactly, with the powers over people and nature conferred by technology. It relegated the felt “inside” world of value, feeling and spirit to religion and spirituality, to be celebrated on Sundays and holidays. It made the manipulation of the “outside” world its true concern: the woof and wharf of modern economics and politics, the way relations between people, and between people and nature are decided and conducted.

This historical backdrop might explain how it is that the West ended up with an impersonal, mechanical, atomized world as its “real” world. But it doesn’t say how the Western mind actually operates; why it sees the world as an impersonal, mechanical aggregate of atomistic parts. But cognitive neuroscience can tell us more.

Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, and the other pioneers of split-brain research founded the discipline of cognitive neuroscience. They discovered that we have two brains and not just one. We have the right brain and the left brain, more exactly, the right and the left hemisphere of the neocortex. The two brains are different in their functioning, and even in their anatomy. The right hemisphere is wider, longer, larger and heavier than the left. It’s also different in its sensitivity to neurotransmitters and neurohormones, and has a different neuronal structure and organization. It’s differently “tuned“ to our experience.

It’s important to realize that the world is not given in experience in its pristine purity, “just the way it is.” Our input from the senses is organized, interpreted by our brain, with the result that the same sensory stimulus can give rise to very different experiences, very different interpretations. (Think of the famous drawing used by psychologists, where you can see either an elegant young woman, or an old hag.) Our two brains “see” the world each in its own way, and these ways are different. The reason that we have something like a single world-picture is because one of the two brains is dominant. In the West, the left brain is dominant. And here is the clue to the “dis-ease” of the Western mind.

In his seminal book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist asked, what would it look like if our left brain were the sole purveyor of reality? The whole world would be a heap of bits and pieces; its only meaning would come through its capacity to be used. Our attention would be narrowly focused on the individual bits and pieces, with increasing specialization bringing more and more familiarity with less and less. Information and information-gathering would be substituted for knowledge gained by actual experience. And the kind of knowledge we would gain would be rooted in representations of reality, by abstract cognitive schemes that would seem more “real” than the things we actually experience.

Does this world seem familiar? That shouldn’t surprise you: the left-hemisphere’s view of the world is by and large the Western mind’s view of the world. There are people and things in this world, but there is no “betweenness”—they are connected only by relations of cause and effect, by how one thing affects another, by what one person “does” to another. This world is centered on, and is best when it deals with, the things we ourselves have created. It’s a competitive world, where everyone is separate, and everyone is out for him- or herself. And it’s an impersonal and uncaring world, where to think that there is meaning feeling, and purpose is merely to project one’s own subjective feelings into an impersonal “objective” reality.

The world of the right brain would be a very different world. While having only the right brain available to us we couldn’t analyze things and express them in language, our experience would be filled with many positive things. We would be making connections between things, seeing the world around us as a whole in which people and things are organic parts. We would be attending directly to our experience, seeing people and things in their presented uniqueness. We would be living in our body, feeling ourselves one with it and the world that surrounds and embeds it. The sense of time, the “flow” of things, would be primary, and we would enjoy experiences where this flow is evident, such as narration, theatre, dance, and music. Because of the betweenness connecting us to the world, we would be more empathetic, tuned to compassion and fellow-feeling, and concern with all things in nature. And our empathies would get a powerful boost by our being aware of our intuitions, of our subtle communication with the world beyond the range of our bodily senses. This perception is within the compass of the nonlocal quantum-receptivity of the sub-neuronal networks of our brain, but is repressed by the narrow rationality of our left hemisphere.

This right-brain world would seem more familiar to traditional people than to most of us in Western civilization. But to many of us it might seem more like regress rather than progress, for it would mean giving up much of our technical prowess and manipulative skills. However, this would not be necessary: we could also combine the world of our right brain with the world of the left. We could hand the things and events presented to our world-tuned right brain to the left for analysis, formulation, and communication, and then allow our right brain to place it in context, so we could reach an integral assessment, and a balanced way of responding. We would see the forest, and still find our way among the trees.

The dis-ease of the Western mind is a product of historical circumstance. But it’s not fated; we could overcome our one-sided heritage of the past. The key to it is using our brain more fully. This would give us a consciousness where the broad, holistic world of the right brain is linked with the pragmatic, skillful world of the left. This “broadband” consciousness without loss of acuity is the hallmark of what I called Quantum Consciousness.  QC could be the next step in the evolution of the human mind, and it could be our salvation. Moving toward it by balancing your own approach to reality would be a good beginning toward curing the dis-ease of the Western mind.

Published at Huffington Post

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Design? Yes. Evolution? Yes. Contradiction? No. Then Why the Controversy?

by Ervin Laszlo April 14, 2010

The debate among conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews (the “creationists”) and natural scientists and the science-minded public (the “evolutionists”) centers on biological evolution. But on a deeper look, it concerns the universe in which life has evolved—or in which it was created. And, as I will argue, on this level there is no contradiction between [...]

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Cosmic Symphony — A Deeper Look at Quantum Consciousness

by Ervin Laszlo April 9, 2010

The rise of quantum consciousness could be the biggest step our species has taken since it came down from the trees. It would bring us to a new stage of species maturity — and could also enable us to surmount the problems that threaten our life and our future. But just what is quantum consciousness [...]

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Quantum Consciousness — our evolution, our salvation

by Ervin Laszlo April 3, 2010

In the first post of this series I promised to explore the wider implications of our having a quantum computer in our head. What does this revolutionary understanding of the capacities of the human brain mean for our life and our future? Here I call “quantum consciousness” the consciousness we access when we use the [...]

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Quantum brain, spirituality, and the mind of God

by Ervin Laszlo March 24, 2010

When our brain, (“a quantum computer” as I said in my previous posts),  connects us to the world, that experience of connection is the same source where artists and even scientists find inspiration and creativity. The quantum connection of our brain can serve us as a subtle but trustworthy compass—one known to traditional peoples and [...]

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Using your quantum brain to connect to the world

by Ervin Laszlo March 17, 2010

In my last post (“If Your Brain Is a Quantum Computer, Can It Connect You to the World?) I said that your brain—as all normal human brains—can connect to the Akashic information field of the cosmos because it is a quantum computer capable of operating and communicating in quantum resonance mode. Yet in today’s world [...]

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If your brain is a quantum computer, can it connect you to the world?

by Ervin Laszlo March 12, 2010

Could it be that the Internet mirrors something about how we really communicate (or could communicate) with each other and with the world? I’d like you to consider the possibility that nature embodies within herself a kind of Internet, and that through our brain we might be able to communicate with it. (I have discussed the [...]

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