The Divided Brain

ISSN 1362-1211 | No 101 | Winter 2009/10
Network
Review
JOURNAL OF THE SCIENTIFIC
AND MEDICAL NETWORK
INSIDE
Brain Hemispheres and Culture
Reclaiming a Life of Quality
Self and Death - Conference Report
Network Calendar 2009/10

Prof. James Austin: Zen-Brain Reflections. Colet House, with the Study Society (flier enclosed)
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, Noetic Sciences: Exploring the Frontiers of Consciousness.
Kensington Library, with the SPR (flier enclosed)
April 16th 18th
Mystics and Scientists 33 - Order out of Chaos: Possibilities for Transformation, Winchester
April 19th
Dialogue between Brother David Steindl-Rast OSB and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake:
Reinventing the Sacred. Maria Assumpta Centre (flier enclosed)
July 9th 11th
Network Annual Gathering: Towards an Integral World-View. New Place, Hampshire (flier enclosed)
August 27th 29th Body and Beyond 2 Mind as Healer, Mind as Destroyer. Latimer Place, Bucks (flier enclosed)
March 3rd
April 6th
LOCAL GROUPS
LONDON - CLAUDIA NIELSEN 0207 431 1177 or email
Claudia@cnielsen.eu
We meet at 38 Denning Rd NW3 1SU at 7.30 for an
8pm start when parking restrictions are lifted. Nearest tube
station is Hampstead (Northern Line) or Hampstead Heath
(Overground). Cost is 8 for members and 10 for guests.
Please confirm attendance so I can anticipate numbers.
Friends are always welcome. For more comprehensive
information on presentations (to include synopsis and
biographies) plus summaries of past ones, go to the London
Group page of the Network site at www.scimednet.org.
Please note that sometimes talks have to be rescheduled
and information is sent via email
Wednesday 27th Jan Dr. Oliver Robinson - The Case for
a Cosmic Idealism: Seven Steps
to Understanding the Universe
as Mind and the Mind-Dependent
Nature of Things
Tuesday 9th Feb Dr. James Le Fanu - Why Us?
Thursday 18th Mar Dr. Roger Woolger - C. G. Jung:
Scientist, Mystic and Prophet
Thursday 22nd April Anne Baring - The Call of the Cosmos
and the Great Work of Alchemy
Thursday 13th May Dr. Angela Voss - The Four Levels
of Interpretation: from science to
mysticism
OTHER GROUPS
(updates in email newsletter)

SWEDEN
Our next meeting will be held in sterlen 21-22 May
2010. Organizer is Gert Hyrks, gerth.hyrkas@telia.com
CAMBRIDGE
We meet next on Wednesday 13th January 2010 when
Dr Steve Minett willintroduce the topicFolk Psychology
--- from Monotheism to Evolutionary Psychology.
The origins of Folk Psychology can be traced to
monotheistic theology, as refined and articulated by
Descartes. It was later radically changed, first by
Nineteenth Century Science and then by Twentieth
Century Neuro-Philosophy. More recent commentators
have identified its influence on early Cognitivism, and
Evolutionary Psychologists and others are now suggesting
that it may have beneficial causal effects.
7.40 for 8pm start in Hazel Guests flat which is
44 Beaufort Place, Thompsons Lane, Cambridge
CB5 8AG. Tel: 01223 369148.
YORKSHIRE
The next meeting was fixed for March 6th 2010.
Please check email newsletter and website in case dates change.
Network Review Winter 2009/10
articles
All proposed contributions should

be sent to the Editor either:
2 Time to Raise our Game A personal view from the Chair John Clarke
1. By E-mail to dl@scimednet.org
3 The Divided Brain and the Making of the

Western World Iain McGilchrist
2. By post on CD as a Word or PDF

file. Disks should be labelled with
the file name and authors name;
all other files should be deleted.
If you are sending a disk, please
send hard copy as well.
Network REVIEW is
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Editor:
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Tel:
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7 Reclaiming a Life of Quality Brian Goodwin

11 Spiritual Alchemy: When Trauma and Turmoil Lead to
Spiritual Awakening Steve Taylor
15 The Participatory Turn - The Plurality of Religions and
the Spirit of Pluralism Jorge N. Ferrer
20 Interview with Fergus Capie Janine Edge
23 In Support of Empirical and Rational Research
Emma Nattress
reports
25 Beyond the Brain VIII: Self and Death
What Survives? Julian Candy
28 Towards a New Renaissance 3:
Harmonising Spirituality, Nature and Health
Berlin, 30 October- 1 November 2009
A Personal Account Claudia Nielsen
30 Science and Imagination - SMN Annual Gathering 3rd - 5th July 2009 - Lindors Country House Hotel
Max Payne
32 Towards an Understanding of the Primacy of
Consciousness James Le Fanu
correspondence
34 Astrology and Experience Kurt Dressler,
Rudolf H. Smit, Sue Lewis & Phoebe Wyss
34 Fostering the Process of Change George Henson
network news
35 Network news
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registered No. 4544694 England
Registered charity No. 1101171 UK
36 Members News
Network Manager: Charla Devereux
41 MEMBERS ARTICLES
37 LOCAL GROUP NEWS

43 NEWS AND NOTICES
ISSN 1362-1211 | No 101 | Winter 2009/10
Network
Review
JOURNAL OF THE SCIENTIFIC
AND MEDICAL NETWORK
review section
44 Science-Philosophy of Science
47 MEDICINE-HEALTH
51 PHILOSOPHY-RELIGION
56 PSYCHOLOGY-CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES
60 ECOLOGY-FUTURES STUDIES
INSIDE
Brain Hemispheres and Culture
Self and Death - Conference Report
61 GENERAL
63 BOOKS IN BRIEF
co n t e n t s
Notice to Contributors
2 Network Review Winter 2009/10
e d it o r ia l
Time to Raise our Game

A personal view from the Chair
John Clarke
xploring beyond the materialist

paradigm and reflecting on the
frontiers between science and
spirituality have always been central
aims of the Network. These aims have
been pursued by open-minded discussion
and in a spirit of respect and toleration
of many different viewpoints. We have
sought to be receptive towards new
observations and insights, and to avoid
association with any dogma or creed.
The current sense of crisis and
confusion, engendered by many different
social, economic, environmental and
religious factors, has added a sharp
sense of urgency to these aims, and
I believe the time is right to raise our
game. The Network needs to take on
with renewed urgency the task of a
fundamental questioning of the basic
values of our civilisation, and to confront
the need for a new world view, one that
is able to give us a new vision for the
future of the human race and planet
Earth. This is the ambitious project we
are now embarking on.
We are not alone in this ambition.
Over the past year the economic crisis
has encouraged many commentators,
from a variety of fields, to raise this very
issue, and many have argued that it is
not enough simply to get beyond the
present crisis and back to normal; we
must examine the fundamental attitudes
which have caused the problem in the
first place. It is our civilisation that is
in question, not just a set of economic
theories, and hence nothing less than
a fundamental reassessment of our
values and core beliefs is needed.
Of course, we are not single-handedly
going to change the world, even with
the help of like-minded individuals and
organisations. And I am sure we would all
recognise that a campaign to propagate a
single, absolute ideology, and to arrogate
to ourselves the sole custodianship of
Truth, would be pointless or worse. Nor
should we seek to become a politically
activist organisation or engage in factional
propaganda, which would be contrary to
the spirit of the SMN.
www.scimednet.org
Nevertheless I believe we have an

important role to play. There are several
good reasons for making this claim:
the SMN is in many ways a unique
organisation in that it attempts to build
a bridge between the objectives of
science and spirituality, and to integrate
these into the broad cultural and moral
concerns of society; our history and
our stated vision and aims give us a
broad philosophical perspective which
enables us to grapple with fundamental
issues; we maintain high professional
standards of inquiry and output; and
we are not afraid to address tough and
often unpopular issues that challenge
orthodoxy and conventional wisdom.
This means that the project, so far
as the SMN is concerned, does not
commit us to launching out into radically
new direction, or wandering off our well
established paths. I believe that the
quest for a new world-view is a natural
outcome of the thinking and speculation
that we have long been engaged in, out
of issues relating to holism, health,
consciousness, alternative traditions,
spiritual insight, scientific speculation.
All these are relevant, and the project
will not alter our normal programme of
events and publications.
In brief: working towards a better
world by addressing the need for a better
world-view is something we have been
doing since the Network was founded.
We now need to capitalise on this past,
and to use our experience to face the
demands of the future.
The issues we face are complex, to
say the least, and it will take time and
the contributions from our members and
from many other sources to give shape
to this project. The following benchmarks
might serve as a tentative framework:
tolerant approach, which implies
A
a spirit of understanding and
openness, a recognition of the
plurality of beliefs, and an attempt to
understand beliefs that are different
from our own.
balanced approach, which both

A
accepts the need for the rigorous
methods of the natural sciences and
at the same time acknowledges the
importance of imagination and intuition.
sense of community, namely the
A
celebration of the oneness of all
humanity, accompanied by a robust
commitment to justice, peace and
human rights.
n ecological approach, involving the
A
recognition of the close relationship
between the human and the natural
world, and our ethical commitment to
the latter.
n integrated approach, which
A
upholds the central place of mind
and values in human life.
spiritual approach, which affirms
A
the universal desire for a meaningful
life, for self-transformation,
and for an expansion of human
consciousness.
I put these forward as no more than
a sketch of the sort of basic ideals
which might inform and motivate us
in our attempt to rethink the values
of our civilisation. They are offered as
part of our ongoing discussion, and
as an invitation to all our members to
participate in this project.
Following the Manifesto for Change
by Oliver Robinson which featured in the
previous issue of the Review, a working
party has been formed, with Claudia
Nielsen as chair, to carry this project
forward, and as a first stage we are
working on a collection of essays on the
subject of a New Renaissance, with
contributions from members and others.
It was advertised in the same issue,
and will be published in 2010. The next
stage will be to invite other organisations
we think will be sympathetic to this
project to join with us in some kind of
associative arrangement. We will of
course be keeping you in touch with
developments.
a r t icle s
The Divided Brain

and the Making of the
Western World
Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist presents the second part of his thesis explained in his
recently published book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and
the Making of the Western World, reviewed later in this issue.
His background in English literature and medicine gives him a unique perspective
on the relationship between brain and culture.
n the April issue I suggested that there was a reason

that the brain is divided. It seems, in animals, that
there is a need to keep certain ways of attending to the
world apart. In animals and birds left hemisphere attention
enables them to focus narrowly on something that is needed.
It is purposeful and has an object a grain of seed, or
another animal that forms its prey. At the same time right
hemisphere attention is as open as possible to the world at
large, to whatever there is, without design or preconception:
helping them watch out for predators, but also to seek out
those to whom they have an attachment, mates and kin.
In man, too, the right hemisphere provides a broad
attention that takes in the whole of the available world,
while the left hemisphere has a narrowly focussed beam of
attention, focussed for the purposes of grasp, the function
of the right hand. And this has untold consequences for the
sort of world each creates for us. Attention is the basis of
our experience of the world. It is not a function alongside
other functions, but the basis for having a world at all, in
which those functions can be exercised. And, though it is
true that what it is we are attending to determines the type
of attention we pay, it is also importantly true that the type
of attention we pay determines what it is we see. The way
reality comes into being for us is like that famous picture by
M C Escher of hands that draw hands:
The Two Hemispheres: Recent

Advances in Neuroscience
So what has the exponential growth in brain research over

recent years actually revealed about hemisphere differences?
And what sort of a world does each create for us? Here I
am going to have to summarise what we know in almost
telegraphically compressed form. All I can say is that the
evidence is in my view both extensive and convincing, and
those who are interested will find the detail in my book.
As if to confirm that there is something quite distinct about
the ways the hemispheres work, we might just note that
there are differences in their structure and function at the
most basic level. The right hemisphere is longer, wider, and
generally larger, as well as heavier, than the left, a finding
that applies to all social mammals. The hemispheres also
differ in their sensitivity to particular neurotransmitters and
neurohormones, as well as in the neuronal architecture
and organisation, in ways that make sense in terms of the
neuropsychological differences. And what are they?
In the first place the nature of right hemisphere attention
means that whatever we experience comes to us first it
presences to us in unpreconceived freshness in the
right hemisphere. New experience of all kinds whether Whole
it be music, words, imaginary constructs, objects in the
environment, even skills comes to us first from the right
hemisphere, and is only later dealt with by the left hemisphere
once it becomes familiar.
The right hemisphere is better at making connections Focused
between things: it tends to see things whole, where the left
hemisphere sees the parts. This has further consequences.
The left hemisphere tends to see things more in the abstract,
where the right hemisphere sees them more embedded in the Abstract
real world context in which they occur. As a corollary, the right Real
hemisphere seems better able to appreciate actually existing
things in all their uniqueness, where the left hemisphere Uniqueness
schematises and generalises things into categories. But
since much of what matters in experience depends ultimately Categories
on not being snatched from the context in which alone it has (LH)
meaning, this is a vastly significant difference. All artistic and
spiritual experience perhaps everything truly important can
be implicit only; language, in making things explicit, reduces
everything to the same worn coinage, and, as Nietzsche said,
makes the uncommon common.
www.scimednet.org
a r t icle s
Tools
There is a mass of evidence that the left hemisphere
inanimated
things, basic is better attuned to tools, and to whatever is inanimate,
mechanical, or machine-like, and which it has itself made:
rhytm(LH)
such things are understandable in its own terms, because
Living
they were put together by it, piece by piece, and they are
things,
ideally suited to this kind of understanding. In contrast, the
organic
right hemisphere is adapted to dealing with living things,
changing,
which are flexible, organic, constantly changing, and which
music(RH) it has not made. The right hemisphere alone appears to
be able to appreciate the organic wholeness of a flowing
structure that changes over time, as in fact all living things
are; and in fact almost all aspects of the appreciation of time
are in the right hemisphere. By contrast, the left hemisphere
sees time as a succession of points, flow as a succession
of static moments, rather like the still frames of a cin film.
Everything, including living wholes, is put together from bits;
and if there are no clear bits, it will invent them.
It is therefore not surprising that the right hemisphere is far
Depth
more important than the left for the appreciation of music, an
perception
organic being that flows, which needs to be appreciated as
3D(RH)
a whole, and which exists almost entirely in betweenness.
The left hemisphere can appreciate rhythm, as long as it is
simple, but little else: melody, timbre and especially harmony
2D
Projections, are all largely right hemisphere-dependent, and so are
even complex rhythms, with cross-beats and syncopations
flat,
(professional musicians are an exception for a number of
detached
from us(LH) possible reasons that are interesting in themselves).
The visual equivalent of harmony could be said to be
depth of the visual field; the sense of depth is also
largely right-hemisphere-dependent, in keeping with the right
hemispheres world being one from which we are not isolated,
Emotions(RH) but with which we stand in an important relationship, whereas
the left hemisphere tends to see things flat, detached from
us, as they would be projected on a screen.
Anger and
While both hemispheres are involved in the expression
fake
and appreciation of emotion, the majority of our emotional
emotions(LH) life depends on the right hemisphere: the one emotion
that is robustly demonstrated to be more associated with
the left hemisphere is anger, though emotions that are
superficial, conscious or willed may be subserved by the left
Read
hemisphere. We express more with the left-side of the face,
emotions in
governed by the right hemisphere, and the left hemisphere
others(RH)
cannot read emotional facial expression or understand or
Recognizing
Recognizin remember emotional material as well as the right. In fact
persons(RH) the recognition of faces, discriminating their uniqueness,
g
persons(R interpreting their expressions, are all largely dependent on
Empathy,
H)
the right hemisphere. Above all the right hemisphere is more
cooperation(R
empathic: its stance towards others is less competitive, and
H)
more attuned to compassion and fellow-feeling. Although it
can deal well with the entire range of emotions, it is far better
attuned to sadness than the left hemisphere; and studies in
Emotion
children confirm that the capacity for sadness and empathy
autistic(LH)
are closely related.
The right hemisphere is more interested in what has
personal relevance for me, the left hemisphere in what
is impersonal. But it is still the right hemisphere that is
Past/future(R
better able to understand what is going on in other peoples
H)
heads, and to empathise, than the left hemisphere, which in
these respects is relatively autistic. Our sense of our self
is complex, but again the sense of ourselves as beings with
Integral(RH) a past and a future, as single beings with an enduring story
over time, is dependent on the right hemisphere (narrative
Differential(R
is appreciated by the right hemisphere, whereas the left
H)
hemisphere sees a mass of discrete episodes, which it often
gets out of sequence). The sense of ourselves as identified
with our conscious will may be more subserved by the left
Our acts are
hemisphere.
result of our
That our embodied nature enters into everything we do,
embodied
not
just our actions, or even our feelings, but our ability to
nature
reason, philosophise or engage in science, is something of
www.scimednet.org
which we have become more aware in the last 100 years.

The hemispheres have different ways of understanding the
body. Only the right hemisphere has a whole body image; the
left hemisphere sees the body as an assemblage of parts,
and as if it were an object in space alongside other objects,
rather than a mode of existence. For the right hemisphere,
we live the body; whereas for the left, we live in it, rather as
we drive a car.
Reasoning is by no means confined to the left hemisphere,
though sequential analysis largely is. Deductive reasoning,
many kinds of mathematical procedures and problem-solving,
and the phenomenon of sudden insight into the nature of
a complex construct, seem to be underwritten by the right
hemisphere, in fact by areas that cognitive science tells us
are also involved in the processing of emotion.
The intuitive moral sense is closely bound up with empathy
for others and seems to depend on part of the right frontal
cortex that is dysfunctional in psychopaths. Above all the
left hemisphere is over-optimistic, unrealistically positive in
its self-appraisal, and is in denial about its short-comings,
unreasonably certain that it understands things of which it
has little knowledge, and disinclined to change its mind. By
contrast the right hemisphere sees more, but is far more
inclined to self-doubt, is more uncertain of what it knows
and has no voice, since the motor speech centre (though
importantly not all of language) lies in the left hemisphere.
Unrelated
explosion
view (LH)
Assembly
, integral
view (RH)
Moral sense,
empathy(RH)
Don't
acknowledge
its shortcomings,
disinclined to
change
opinions (LH)
Speech(LH)
Summarising the Differences
If one had to characterise the difference overall, it is

something like this. Experience is forever in motion, ramifying
and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that
thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow, and one
can never step into the same river twice Heraclituss phrase
is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right
hemispheres world one will always be taken unawares by
experience, since nothing being ever repeated, nothing can
ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies,
stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping
outside the flow. Hence the brain has to attend to the world
in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring
two different worlds into being. In the one, that of the right
hemisphere, we experience the live, complex, embodied,
world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a
net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes,
a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other,
that of the left hemisphere, we experience our experience
in a special way: a re-presented version of it, containing
now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented
entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be
based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each
thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In
doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it
also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently
to learn and to make things. This gives us power.
These two aspects of the world are not symmetrically
opposed. They are not equivalent, for example, to the
subjective and objective points of view, concepts which are
themselves a product of, and already reflect one particular
way of being in the world which in fact, importantly, already
reflect a view of the world, such as only the left hemisphere
can take. The distinction I am trying to make is between, on
the one hand, the way in which we experience the world prereflectively, before we have had a chance to view it at all, or
divide it up into bits a world in which what later has come
to be thought of as subjective and objective are held in a
suspension which embraces each potential pole, and their
togetherness, together; and on the other hand, the world we
are more used to thinking of, in which subjective and objective
appear as separate poles. At its simplest, a world where
there is betweenness, and one where there is not. These
Flowing,
uniqueness,
whole(RH)
Static,
fragmented,
re-presented,
projected,
inert,
mechanical,
lifeless(LH)
Understandin
g, primary
learn(LH)
LH and RH
are not
'equivalent' or
symmetrically
opposed
RH 'analog',
LH 'digital'
a r t icle s
'betweenness
', 'definite' not
ways to think,
rather ways
to be
are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are
different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not
symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.
In my article in the April Review, I suggested that we
have developed language not for communication, not even
for thinking, but to enable a certain type of functional
manipulation of the world. Language is like the generals
map in his HQ, a representation of the world. It is no longer
present, but literally re-presented after the fact. What it
delivers is a useful fiction.
I believe the essential difference between the right
hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right
hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that
exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in
profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by,
the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other.
By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual
world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but selfcontained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it
powerful but also curiously impotent, because it is ultimately
only able to operate on, and to know, itself.
The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere
You might say, OK, here are two different ways of conceiving
the world: but how do you know that they are not equally valid?
I say that they are both very important both in fact essential
for our ability to lead civilised lives but not equally valid. And
there are many reasons why.
In the first place it is interesting that in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, both mathematics and physics (for
example Cantor, Boltzmann, Gdel, Bohr), and philosophy (I
am here thinking particularly of the American pragmatists,
Dewey & James, and the European phenomenologists,
Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and the later
Wittgenstein), though starting absolutely from the premises
of the left hemisphere, that sequential analysis will lead us
to the truth, have ended up with results that approximate
far more closely to which in fact confirm the validity of
the right hemispheres way of understanding the world, not
that of the left. That is in itself a remarkable fact, since
generally speaking the preconceptions with which you start will
determine where you end.
But there are other indications. Broad vigilant attention

must come before we can focus on one part of the field; we
see the whole before we see the parts, not put the whole
together from the parts; we experience everything at first
with the right hemisphere, not the left; language originates
in the body, and is implicit, not something that functions at
the abstract level, as something explicit; affect is primary, not
the result of calculation based on cognitive evaluation of the
parts; as Libet has demonstrated, the unconscious will, more
closely related to right hemisphere functioning, is well ahead
of anything our explicit verbalising consciousness can be
aware of; careful analysis of the relationship between speech
and gesture shows that both thought and its expression
actually originate in the right hemisphere, not in the left;
re-presentation necessarily relies on earlier presencing; and
even the mode of functioning of the nervous system itself
is more right-hemisphere-congruent than left-hemispherecongruent.
What the left hemisphere offers is then a valuable, but
intermediate process, one of unpacking what is there and
handing it back to the right hemisphere, where it can once
more be integrated into the experiential whole; much as the
painstaking, fragmentation and analysis of the sonata in
practice is reintegrated by the pianist in performance at a level
where he must no longer be aware of it.
That, at any rate, is how the two should work together: the
emissary reporting back to the Master, who alone can see the
broader picture. But the self-consistent rationalism of the left
hemisphere has convinced it that it does not need to concern
itself with what the right hemisphere knows: it believes it has
the whole story itself. And it has three great advantages. First,
it has control of the voice, and the means of argument the
three Ls, language, logic and linearity are all ultimately under
left-hemisphere control. It is like being the Berlusconi of the
brain, a political heavyweight who has control of the media. Of
course we tend to listen more to what it has to say. Second,
the self-consistent world of pure theory and ideas is like a hall
of mirrors: all attempts to escape are deflected back within.
The main paths that might have led us to something beyond
the intuitive wisdom embodied in tradition, the experience of
the natural world, arts, the body and religion are all emptied
of force by the abstracting, rationalising, ironising impact of
the world of self-consistent re-presentations that is yielded by
www.scimednet.org
We always
see the whole
before the
parts 1. RH,
2. LH
Unconscious
RH, thought
and
expression,
preprocessor
The emissary
and the
master
a r t icle s

the left hemisphere. The living presence becomes no longer
accessible. And, third, there is a tendency for positive feedback
to come into play instead of redressing the balance, we just
get more of the same.
Which brings me to the reason we cannot just view this
as of academic interest. For I believe the world in which we
live has become increasingly to reflect the view of the left
hemisphere alone.
The Evolution of Western Culture

A Thought Experiment
In Part II of the book, I look at the evolution of Western

culture, beginning in the ancient world with the extraordinary
efflorescence of culture in 6th century BC Athens, where it
seems to me, the two hemispheres worked as never before or
since in harmony; then at the decline associated with the rise
of the left hemisphere in the late Roman empire; and then, in
turn, at the seismic shifts that we call the Renaissance, the
Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial
Revolution, Modernism and Post-modernism. I believe that
they represent a power struggle between these two ways of
experiencing the world, and that we have ended up prisoners
of just one that of the left hemisphere alone.
Lets do a thought experiment. What would it look like if the
left hemisphere came to be the sole purveyor of our reality?
First of all, the whole picture would be unattainable: the
world would become a heap of bits. Its only meaning would
come through its capacity to be used. More narrowly focussed
attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and
technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the
substitution of information, and information gathering, for
knowledge, which comes through experience. Knowledge, in
its turn, would seem more real than what one might call
wisdom, which would seem too nebulous, something never to
be grasped. Knowledge that came through experience, and the
practical acquisition of embodied skill, would become suspect,
appearing either a threat or simply incomprehensible. It would
be replaced by tokens or representations, formal systems to
be evidenced by paper qualifications.
There would be a simultaneous increase in both abstraction
and reification, whereby the human body itself and we
ourselves, as well as the material world, and the works of
art we made to understand it, would become simultaneously
more conceptual and yet seen as mere things. The world as a
whole would become more virtualised, and our experience of
it would be increasingly through meta-representations of one
kind or another; fewer people would find themselves doing
work involving contact with anything in the real, lived world,
rather than with plans, strategies, paperwork, management
and bureaucratic procedures.
There would be a complete loss of the sense of uniqueness.
Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.
This would also have effects on the way the bureaucracies
would deal with human situations and with society at large.
Either/or would tend to be substituted for matters of degree,
and a certain inflexibility would result.
There would be a derogation of higher values, and a
cynicism about their status. Morality would come to be judged
at best on the basis of utilitarian calculation, at worst on the
basis of enlightened self-interest.
The impersonal would come to replace the personal.
There would be a focus on material things at the expense of
the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person
and person, and just as importantly between person and
place, the context in which each person belongs, would be
neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient
and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its
own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships
between members of society, and in societys relationship
with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would
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be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human

individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world.
Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and
equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others,
but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others.
The left hemisphere cannot trust and is prone to paranoia.
It needs to feel in control. We would expect government to
become obsessed with issues of security above all else, and
to seek total control.
Reasonableness would be replaced by rationality, and
perhaps the very concept of reasonableness might become
unintelligible. There would be a complete failure of common
sense, since it is intuitive and relies on both hemispheres
working together. One would expect a loss of insight, coupled
with an unwillingness to take responsibility, and this would
reinforce the left hemispheres tendency to a perhaps
dangerously unwarranted optimism. There would be a rise in
intolerance and inflexibility, an unwillingness to change track
or change ones mind.
We would expect there to be a resentment of, and a
deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder:
Webers disenchanted world. Religion would seem to be
mere fantasy. Art would be conceptualised, cerebralised; and
beauty ironised out of existence.
As a culture, we would come to discard tacit forms of
knowing altogether. There would be a remarkable difficulty
in understanding non-explicit meaning, and a downgrading of
non-verbal, non-explicit communication. Concomitant with this
would be a rise in explicitness, backed up by ever increasing
legislation, what de Tocqueville predicted as a network
of small complicated rules that would eventually strangle
democracy. As it became less possible to rely on a shared
and intuitive moral sense, or implicit contracts between
individuals, such rules would become ever more burdensome.
There would be a loss of tolerance for, and appreciation of the
value of, ambiguity. We would tend to be over-explicit in the
language we used to approach art and religion, accompanied
by a loss of their vital, implicit and metaphorical power.
Does that ring any bells? In terms of the fable with which I
began, the emissary, insightless as ever, appears to believe
it can see everything, do everything, alone. But it cannot:
on its own it is like a zombie, a sleepwalker ambling straight
towards the abyss, whistling a happy tune.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Fellow of the Royal College of
Psychiatrists, and has three times been elected a Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. He intended to read theology and
philosophy at Oxford, but was hi-jacked into reading English
literature, and published Against Criticism in 1982.
He retrained in medicine in order to understand better the
mind-body problem, and has been a neuroimaging researcher
at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and a Consultant Psychiatrist at
the Maudsley Hospital
S. Pietro Martire by Lorenzo Lotto
Brian Goodwin
This article by Brian Goodwin summarises his views on the importance of a science
of qualities, to which he devoted much thought. It has an interesting resonance with
the previous article and could readily be translated into these terms.
See also his last book, Natures Due.
he disappearance of organisms from contemporary

biology and the absence of mind from neuroscience
are, I believe, both connected with a deep conceptual
and methodological feature of Western Science. Cartesian
dualism and a reductionist methodology contribute to the
replacement of organisms by genetic networks and minds
by neural networks. However, these divide-and-conquer
strategies that are so effective at revealing the component
parts of complex systems are themselves related to a
more profound axiom that is often not even recognised as
an assumption. This relates to the status of subjective
experience in the study of natural processes. Galileo
assumed that reliable data for scientific statements about
natural phenomena are restricted to measurable quantities
such as mass, velocity, temperature, volume, and so on.
Such primary qualities, as John Locke was later to call them,
contrast with secondary qualities such as the experience of
colour, odour, pleasure or pain, which were considered to be
purely subjective aspects of human experience, arbitrarily
variable between individuals and therefore unsuitable as
descriptors of real natural process.
However, primary qualities originate in human experience
of force, weight, motion, etc., and so are also initially
subjective. They become objective only by a process
of intersubjective consensus whereby subjects compare
systematically the results of specific observations which
become known as measurement. Once such a methodology
has become established within a community of practitioners,
the role of subjective experience tends to recede into the
background, replaced by measuring devices which substitute
for human judgement and turn observation into something
regarded as real and reliable. Experience is thus withdrawn
from the objectively real and the world of scientific enquiry
takes on the characteristics of non-sentient matter in
motion, defined as activity without experience. The result is
the real world posited in modern science.

The resulting metaphysics and methodology work
well in the study of non-living processes, up to a point.
However, they run into severe difficulties in the study of life.
Simply put, we know that we humans experience qualities
such as pleasure and pain, or the colour and perfume of
a flower. We have such experiences through our bodies
and are consciously aware through our minds. These are
two aspects of one unity, the organism. But we assume
that life has evolved from non-sentient matter in motion.
The result is a logical conundrum: How can experiencing
subjects arise from non-sentient matter? This question has
no logically consistent answer except to deny the reality of
experience, a very high price to pay for particular assumptions
about reality. Is there not another way in which we can
simultaneously preserve the deep insights that have come
from modern science and save our experience as organisms

with body-minds that give us feelings and awareness?
One way of approaching a resolution to this dilemma
is to go back to the distinction made in science between
primary and secondary qualities, the former real, the latter
in some sense illusory. The argument that I shall pursue
here will take the following form. Organisms are wholes
that are centres of agency. To live is to act intentionally,
to discriminate and to experience. To accommodate within
science an understanding of the life with which we as
organisms are familiar it is necessary to acknowledge the
reality of qualitative experience. This leads to an expanded
conception of science that preserves all that is of value in
our tradition of exploring reality but avoids the unfortunate
conclusion that some of our deepest experiences are in
some sense unreal.
Organisms as Causally Efficacious

Wholes with Agency
Organisms have disappeared as fundamental entities, as
basic unities, from contemporary biology because they have
no real status as centres of causal agency. Organisms are
now considered to be generated by the genes they contain.
These genes have been selected by the external forces
of natural selection acting on the functional properties, or
characters, that allow the organism to survive and reproduce
more of its kind in a particular habitat. Thus organisms are
arbitrary aggregates of characters, generated by genes, which
collectively pass the survival test in a particular environment.
The characters clearly cohere within the physical body which
they define, but there is no causally efficacious unity that
transcends the properties of the interacting parts. This is the
sense in which organisms have disappeared from biology.
What would it mean for organisms to have causal efficacy
above and beyond that of their interacting parts? A definition
of this concept is given by Silberstein (1998) in his discussion
of emergent properties: qualitatively new properties of
systems or wholes that possess causal capacities that are
not reducible to any of the causal capacities of the parts. One
approach to the question of such properties in organisms is
to provide a systematic account of the relationships between
parts and whole during the development of the adult form
of an organism from a zygote (a fertilised egg). It can be
shown that organisms are more than functional unities in
which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a
particular function or set of functions, as in a machine. They
are also structural unities in which the parts exist for and
by means of one another, to use Kants descriptive phrase.
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That is to say, the component parts of an organism arise
from an undifferentiated unity, the zygote, by the progressive
emergence of distinct structures during the course of
embryonic development (morphogenesis). The initial unity
of the organism is maintained throughout this process and
into the adult form as a condition of dynamic coherence. The
traditional literature on embryonic development conforms
to this view (see, e.g., Waddington, 1956, Berrill, 1972).
A detailed description of morphogenesis as the emergence
of integrated wholes, articulated for a variety of different
types of organism and different aspects of embryonic
development, is given in Webster and Goodwin(1996). I will
not present details of the argument here, but simply point
to this evidence that organisms are generated as causally
efficacious unities, and the type of theory that is required to
account for it.
What about the claim that organisms are intentional
agents? A detailed argument elaborating on this concept can
be found in Kauffman (1999). His position has two aspects.
First, organisms are autonomous agents; that is, they are
organised systems with the property that they produce more
of the same organisation. The biological term for this is
reproduction. They are therefore logically closed systems
which are open to a flow of matter and energy across their
boundaries, on which they depend. Hence they are coupled
to their environments but not determined by them. Their
autonomy results from the self-defining logical closure which
perpetuates their distinctive type of organisation. Maturana
and Varela (1987) defined this as autopoiesis.
The second aspect of Kauffmans argument concerns
the nature of living agency. His phrase is: organisms take
action on their own behalf. They do so not by computing the
set of possible actions and optimising according to some
criterion, because the set of possibilities cannot be finitely
described in advance. Organisms live their lives, they do not
compute them. But what does it mean to live your life rather
than compute it? It means to make choices in some manner
that does not depend on algorithmic prespecification and
selection. That is, organisms function in ways that go beyond
mechanical causality and computation. How this can be
articulated in terms that are consistent with current science
(including quantum mechanics), or whether new principles
of action are required, is a question that cannot yet be
answered with any certainty. However, it seems clear that if
we are to have a concept of organisms that is consistent with
our own experience of intentionality and agency, and which
accommodates the observed properties and behaviour of
living beings, it is necessary to recognise that life embodies
a quality of sentience and experience that allows organisms
to act spontaneously and appropriately, to take action on
their own behalf. This is reflected in the coherence and
integrity of organisms, which we perceive through qualities.
To elaborate further on this, I shall now explore a particular
quality of whole organisms that we describe as health.
Dynamic Indicators of
Wholeness and Health
I take the position that there is a property of health of
the whole organism that cannot be described in terms of
the functioning and interactions of the constituent organs or
tissues or molecules - whatever level of parts one wishes to
consider. Furthermore, this property of the whole influences
the functioning of the parts in identifiable ways; that is,
it has causal efficacy. The absence of such a conception
from mainstream biology and medicine is evident from the
fact that there is no theory and practice of health taught
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to medical students that develops systematically such an

emergent property of the whole organism with which one can
work methodically. Health in the medical model is absence
of disease, not presence of a coherent state that can be
recognised and facilitated by an appropriate therapeutic
relationship.
Let me describe a recent development in the study of
health and disease that provides evidence of a dynamic
condition of the whole that transcends the properties of
parts in interaction. This comes from work on the complex
dynamics of the heartbeat. The mean heart rate of an
individual is reliably constant for any particular activity, such
as sitting still or lying or walking. However it turns out that
if one examines a series of heartbeats for any one of these
conditions, as recorded in an electrocardiogram, there is
considerable variability in the interval between successive
heartbeats. What came as something of a surprise was that
this variability is significantly greater in healthy individuals
than in people with various types of heart condition, such as
cardiac arrhythmias or congestive heart disease. In the latter
cases there is more regularity and order in the heart rate
than in healthy persons. This is a case in which too much
order, or the wrong kind of order, is a sign of danger!
It is possible that the irregularity of the interbeat intervals
in healthy individuals is a kind of noise resulting from
the sum of influences exerted on the heart by other
systems of the body - the nervous, respiratory, endocrine,
muscular and other systems whose activities modulate
heart rate. On the other hand, healthy variability might
carry within it some signature of a subtle dynamic order
that transcends the collective influences of these other
parts of the organism. Poon and Merrill (1997) claim that
the variability of the interbeat interval does not have the
characteristics of noise, but of deterministic chaos. The
order manifested by chaos is indeed subtle, the dynamics
being characterised by irregularity that is unpredictable but
mathematically determined by the properties of strange
attractors, which constrain the trajectories of motion within
bounds. The functional interpretation of this unexpected
physiological behaviour is as follows. The healthy heart
maintains continuous sensitivity to unpredictable demands
on it from the rest of the body by continuously changing its
rate so that it never gets stuck in a particular pattern of
dynamic order. A diseased heart, on the other hand, does
tend to fall into patterns of order which fail to respond to the
bodys constantly changing needs. We thus get the notion
of dynamic disease, and inappropriate order is indicative of
danger.
Do healthy people all share the same dynamic signature of
health, or are they healthy in distinctive ways? This question
was addressed by Ivanov et al (1996) in a study of people
suffering from sleep apnoea (interrupted breathing during
sleep) compared with matched healthy controls. They found
that while each healthy individual has a distinct pattern
of variability, they all share the same generic signature
of subtle dynamic order that is characteristic of chaotic
systems, characterised by self-similarity and the occurrence
of a well-defined scaling law of variations. Individuals with
sleep apnoea do not have this pattern. The property in
question can be characterised as a type of long-range order
or coherence that maintains a subtle balance of activity
in the heart such that a series of short interbeat intervals
tends to be followed by longer intervals. The origin of this
behaviour is not clear. It appears to reflect a property of the
whole organism that transcends the behaviour of its parts.
This points to a holistic aspect of the organism with causal
Reclaiming Qualities in Science

What type of theory and praxis go with the recognition of
organisms as causally efficacious, emergent wholes? The
argument that I shall now develop is logically independent
of whether or not one accepts the case that organisms
have whole emergent properties, though there is logical
consistency between them. How might we approach the
question of assessing the quality of life that an animal
has experienced in the past from observation of its
current behaviour? We actually do this frequently. On the
whole, people have little difficulty in choosing a dog from
a rescue home that exhibits behaviour indicative of a life
without serious deprivation or cruelty, which elicits fear and
aggression. However, we also make mistakes. That is, our
individual evaluations can be unreliable. Is there a way of
being systematic about such evaluations? One approach is
to develop a method of intersubjective consensus applicable
to this problem. This involves systematic comparison of
the evaluations made independently by different individuals
observing the same animal. I present here an example of
this type of study carried out by Wemelsfelder et al (1999)
on farm animals.
The study was carried out on two groups of pigs, one of
which had been living in barren conditions (a small pen with a
bare concrete floor) and the other in an enriched environment
(a large pen with straw and various objects to play with, such
as fresh branches, car tyres and metal chains). People were
asked to observe
the pigs behaving in
standard conditions
and to assess
their
behaviour
using
qualitative
descriptors of their
choice to describe
the pigs style of
behaviour.
This procedure
is known as Free
Choice
Profiling
and is widely used
in food science and
sensory research.
A
multivariate
statistical technique
called Generalised
Procrustes Analysis
was used to assess
consensus between
different observers
in their evaluations.
This identifies the
degree of clustering
of observer scoring patterns in a multidimensional space

using transformations that identify mathematical invariants
in the data. Analytical details are presented in the paper by
Wemelsfelder et al (1999).
The results of the pig study were very striking. There was
a high degree of consistency in the evaluations between
different people of pigs from the two groups, barren and
enriched. Evidently human beings are pretty good at
qualitative judgements of this kind. This is not surprising;
we live our lives primarily in terms of such judgements,
of one another and of situations generally. Where it can
be carried out, quantitative assessment is a very useful
addition to qualitative judgement, but often it is not possible
or convenient. In science, however, it is regarded as the sine
qua non of data acquisition.
The pig study employed an analytical procedure to
evaluate consensus between different observers. This
involves an effective blend of qualitative and quantitative
procedures. However, it is reasonable to suggest that a
group of practitioners who are focussed on the qualitative
assessment of animal behaviour could reach consensus
without this analytical step, after systematically cultivating
the development of evaluative skills. With or without the
analytical procedure, the evaluators would be practising a
systematic science of qualities. They would be using their
capacity for evaluation of the quality of life exhibited by
animals through observation of their behaviour. The primary
data used in this evaluation is not measurable with an
instrument; it requires a human subject as the observer,
assessing quality. This is not to argue that some purely
quantitative measure of behaviour might not subsequently
be found that correlates with the qualitative assessment.
However, the qualitative evaluation is necessarily primary
and would probably remain more reliable and effective for
this type of evaluation.
Doctors and therapists do something similar to this in
evaluating the health of the people that come to them
for healing. They pay attention to posture, tone of voice,
complexion, and other aspects of the person that reflect
the condition of the whole in ways that cannot be measured
by instruments. Quantitative data on body temperature,
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efficacy; i.e., the observed dynamic is an emergent property

of the whole that affects the parts, maintaining a condition
of coherence throughout the organism. These studies
are of considerable interest and importance in indicating
ways of diagnosing different conditions of the body by
a detailed dynamic analysis of particular physiological
variables. Traditional diagnostic procedures use a similar
approach, but the condition of the whole is observed through
a different aspect of dynamic behaviour of the organism. To
illustrate this, consider next an example that indicates the
procedure in a context that extends the notion of health to
include behaviour generally.
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heart rate, blood pressure, blood cell counts, etc., can
add significantly to a diagnosis, but qualitative evaluation
of the condition of health remains a very important aspect
of diagnostic skill which is developed through practice
and experience. It could be cultivated more systematically
during training by some type of intersubjective consensual
procedure of the kind described above in the pig study. This
would extend scientific data to include both quantitative and
qualitative information, without losing the essential scientific
principles of comparison of results within a community of
persons using agreed procedures of assessment. Qualitative
experience would then be recognised as a potentially
reliable indicator of real situations, subject to consensus
among trained practitioners.
There are many communities of investigators into qualitative
methodology that are already pursuing such procedures.
However, they work under the shadow of a science that has
honed the quantitative study of natural process to a very
fine art, while qualitative procedures, though by no means
new within science, are still being explored and developed.
Furthermore, the metaphysical assumptions about reality
that have emerged within conventional science exclude
qualities from the real and locate them within subjective,
hence idiosyncratic and objectively unreliable, experience.
A science of qualities requires a fundamental reappraisal
of the very nature of real process, because it recognises
experience as real and primary. But this is also required if
we are to accept the reality of our own experience as feeling,
intending, conscious organisms. If these properties are
real, then they can only arise from a reality that embodies
some form of sentience as the precursor of this condition;
otherwise they can be construed only as unintelligible
miracles of emergence from dead matter. It seems better
to extend our basic description of reality than to have to
believe in this type of miracle.
Qualities Require a New Science

The change required in our conception of reality to
accommodate subjective experience has been the subject
of many articles and I cannot add significantly to what has
already been said by others. However, I can indicate which
lines of argument I think will provide a metaphysical basis
for a science of qualities of the type sketched above. A
foundation for the requisite rethinking comes from the
writings of Bergson (1911) and Whitehead (1929), with
subsequent developments by Hartshorne (1972) and, most
recently, by Griffin (1998). The essentials of the position
are that matter has sentience and mind exists only
as an aspect of matter. What resolves these apparent
antinomies is process, in which present mind gives rise
to past matter as spent experience, to use the useful and
evocative phrases of de Quincey (1999). There is a rough
analogy here with electromagnetic waves as described in
Maxwells equations in which the electric field gives way to
the magnetic field which in turn generates the electric field
in a never-ending cycle of unfolding. Likewise mind and
matter transform one into the other, mind (experience,
sentience) being the creative pole that incorporates past
matter into a new unfolding involving a degree of freedom
and choice, this creative act then expiring in matter which
produces the conditions for a new creative emergence.
Working out the details of this new cosmology is a task
that will occupy many a philosopher and scientist, the two
areas of enquiry necessarily joining forces to define a new
conception of reality. But this new conception involves a
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union much more extensive than philosophy and science.

With qualities and feelings as essential aspects of science,
the door is open to a rethinking of the relation between
the arts and the sciences in our culture. The move will be
beyond holistic science to a holistic culture. However, there
is a great deal of work to be done if we are to get there in
an effective way. As the Sufi poet, Rumi, put it:
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,
While the real work is done outside
By someone digging in the ground.
Acknowledgement:
I am grateful to Stuart and Elisabeth Kauffman for
inspiration, assistance and hospitality during the writing
of this essay, and to Franoise Wemelsfelder for useful
comments.
The late Professor Brian Goodwin was Professor of Biology

at the Open University, Scholar in Residence at Schumacher
College and Founder of the MSc in Holistic Science. He was a
Vice-President of the Network.
References
Bergson, H. (1911) Creative Evolution. Trans. A. Mitchell. New
York: Henry Holt and Co.
Berrill, N.J. (1972). Developmental Biology. New York: Sinauer
Associates
Griffin, D.R. (1998). Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness,
Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Hartshorne, C. (1972). Whiteheads Philosophy: Selected
Essays, 1935-1970. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Ivanov, P. Ch., Rosenblum, M.G., Peng, C-K, Mietus, J., Havlin,
S., Stanley, H.E., and Goldberger, A. L. (1996). Scaling
behaviour of heartbeat intervals obtained by wavelet-based
time-series analysis. Nature 383, 323-327.
Kauffman, S.A. (1999). Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Maturana, H., and Varela, F. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge.
Boston: Shambala.
Poon, C-S., and Merrill, C.K. (1997). Decrease of cardiac chaos
in congestive heart failure. Nature 389, 492-495.
de Quincey, C. (1999). Past matter, present mind; a
convergence of worldviews. J. Consc. Studies 6, 91-106.
Silberstein, M. (1998). Emergence and the mind-body problem.
J. Consc. Studies 5, 464-482
Waddington, C.H. (1956). The Principles of Embryology.
London: Allen and Unwin.
Webster, G. and Goodwin, B. (1996). Form and Transformation;
Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wemelsfelder, F., Hunter, E.A., Mendl, M.T., and Lawrence,
A.B. (1999). The spontaneous qualitative assessment of
behavioural expressions in pigs: first exploration of a novel
methodology for integrative animal welfare measurement.
Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929). Process and Reality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
11
Steve Taylor
Here Steve explores the nature of spiritual experiences, following on the work of
Sir Alister Hardy and others. He concludes that we dont have to suffer in order
to have spiritual experiences or become enlightened and that there is a middle
way between extreme suffering and a life of attachment. He recommends that we
should try to make sure that were always partly rooted inside ourselves, so that
we never give ourselves completely away to the world.
piritual experiences are overwhelmingly positive

experiences. They are experiences of rapture, in which
we perceive reality at a heightened intensity, feel
a powerful sense of inner well-being, experience a sense
of oneness with our surroundings and become aware of
a force of benevolence and harmony which pervades the
cosmos. When the experience is especially intense, the
whole phenomenal world may dissolve into an ocean of
blissful spiritual radiance, which we realise is the ground of
all reality, the source from which the phenomenal world has
arisen, and the real nature of our being.
It seems almost paradoxical, then, that these experiences
are frequently induced by states of intense despair,
depression, or mental turmoil. Many Network readers will
be familiar with the work of Alister Hardy, who established
the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford University
in 1969 (now based at the University of Lampeter in Wales).
When Hardy analysed the triggers of spiritual or religious
experiences, he found that the most common trigger of them
was depression and despair. 18% of the experiences were
apparently triggered by this, compared to 13% by prayer
or meditation and 12% by natural beauty. Here is a typical
report of such an experience collected by the unit:
I was going through a period of doubt and disillusion with
life and torn by conflictQuite suddenly I felt lifted beyond
all the turmoil and conflict. There was no visual image and
I knew I was sitting on a bench in the park, but I felt as if
I was lifted above the world and looking down on it. The
disillusion and cynicism were gone, and I felt compassion
suffusing my whole being, compassion for all people on
earth. I was possessed by a peace that I have never felt
before or since 1.
Over the last few years I have been collecting reports of
spiritual experiences (or awakening experiences, as I prefer
to call them), and have also found that many of them were
triggered by trauma and turmoil. For example, several years
ago, a colleague of mine went through a long period of inner
turmoil due to confusion about his sexuality, which led to
the breakdown of his marriage. This triggered the following
experience, which occurred during his last family holiday:
There were quite a few people around but it was as if

everyone else disappeared. Everything just ceased to be.
I lost all sense of time. I lost myself. I had a feeling of being
totally at one with nature, with a massive sense of peace.
I was a part of the scene. There was no me anymore. I
was just sitting there watching the sun set over the desert,
aware of the enormity of life, the power of nature, and I never
wanted it to end.
Permanent Transformation
As well as one of the most common, these states of
turmoil may be the most powerful trigger of awakening
experiences, in the sense that the experiences they give rise
to are usually of a very intense kind. The experiences are
sometimes so powerful that they lead to permanent change
of being, and even a permanent state of enlightenment.
A recent student of mine a senior lady told me how,
30 years ago, she was in a very distraught state due to the
breakdown of her marriage. As a church-going Christian,
she felt that she had let herself and God down badly,
and felt extremely guilty. She rang the rector of her local
church to ask for help and he told her, You are claiming
your rights! She was not quite sure what he meant, but
suddenly her guilt and pain dissolved away and she had
a powerful mystical experience which is still very vivid:
There was a spinning sensation in my head and the top of
my head seemed to open up I felt a sense of being one
with the universeThere was silence between me and the
rector but I felt that He [God] was there. She feels that
this experience changed her permanently, that she has
never been the same person since. As she describes it,
A change had taken place in me. I was on a high which
has lasted the honeymoon stage gradually faded but I
was no longer the person I was. That person is still within
me and carries me through life with a wisdom which still
surprises me. (Her italics)
As a part of my research for a new book, I have found
many examples of this permanent transformation: an
alcoholic who reached rock bottom and lost everything
but then became liberated; a woman who has lived in a
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Spiritual Alchemy: When

Trauma and Turmoil Lead to
Spiritual Awakening
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state of wakefulness ever since being told she had breast
cancer; and a man who became paralysed after falling from
a bridge onto a river bed, who struggled for months with
pain and despair, then underwent a spiritual rebirth and
now lives in a state of permanent bliss.
Its also very significant that many great spiritual teachers
or gurus have found enlightenment after intense periods
of mental torment. The most enlightened person I know
personally is an 87 year-old spiritual teacher called Russel
Williams, who has been the president of the Manchester
Buddhist Society for over half a century. Russel had his
first major enlightenment experience as a young man, after
a long period of frustration. As he describes it:
I was in a state of desperation, very annoyed with myself.
There was something I knew that I knew but couldnt
get access to. There was something inside me that had
to come out but wouldnt. I was pushing it further and
further away.
ventually I was so desperate I shouted out somebody
E
help me! Somebody dropped a blanket over me and Ive
never known such peace in all my life. It lasted three
days. I was a completely different person inside. There
was a sense of freedom and peace. And that freedom
and peace have continued inside me right until now.
The contemporary spiritual teacher and author Eckhart
Tolle had a similar awakening experience. He writes that
until his thirtieth year he lived in an almost continuous
anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression.
One night he woke up with a feeling of absolute dread
inside him and felt a strong desire to kill himself. This
triggered a powerful spiritual experience, in which he was
drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy, and
which led to a state of enlightenment:
verything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come
E
into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty
bottle, marvelling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.
T he next day I walked around the city in utter amazement
at the miracles of life on earth, as if I had just been born
into this world. 2
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini
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The Sources of Spiritual Experiences

In order to understand these experiences, we need to
understand how spiritual experiences are caused. In my
view, there are two basic sources of them, which produce
two fundamentally different types of experience.
The first are wild, ecstatic experiences caused by a
disruption of the homeostasis of the human organism.
These can occur as a result of fasting, sleep deprivation,
drugs, breathing exercises, pain, dancing, and so on. All
of these activities can put us out of homeostasis by
changing our body temperature, blood pressure or metabolic
rate, causing dehydration and exhaustion or chemical
changes and when this happens theres a chance that
well experience a higher state of consciousness. (Although
this certainly doesnt always happen, of course. Most of the
time the only effect that depriving yourself of sleep and food
often has is to make you feel miserably tired and hungry.)
The second type of spiritual experiences are more serene
and calm states which occur when there is an intensification
and stillness of life-energy inside us. This can happen
in any situation when were very relaxed, when theres
peacefulness around us, and when the mental chatter
inside our heads fades away. In meditation, we make a
conscious effort to intensify and still our life-energy by being
inactive, by withdrawing our attention from the world around
us, and by focusing on a mantra (or a candle flame or on our
breathing or any other object) to slow down and quieten our
mental chatter. As a result, meditation is probably the most
effective way of generating spiritual experiences.
However, the experiences can also happen more
spontaneously in natural surroundings, for example, when
theres peacefulness around you and the beauty of nature
has a similar effect to a mantra in meditation, focusing your
attention and quietening your mental chatter. They often
occur when people are listening to music or contemplating
works of art. Certain sports are also very conducive to
spiritual experiences, such as long-distance running or
swimming. This is also probably part of the reason why
spiritual experiences can occur during or after sex. The
sheer pleasure of sex can have the effect of shifting our
attention away from our ego-minds, which may fall silent as
a result.
In my view, spiritual experiences induced by despair or
mental turmoil belong to this second type. Perhaps the key to
understanding the experiences is the concept of attachment.
Normally, as human beings we are psychologically attached
to a large number of constructs, such as hopes and
ambitions for the future, beliefs and ideas concerning life
and the world, the knowledge we have accumulated, and
our image of ourselves, including our sense of status, our
appearance and accomplishments and achievements. These
are accoutrements which become attached to the sense of
self but which are not actually a part of our true nature. At the
same time, there are more tangible attachments, such as
possessions, jobs, and other human beings whose approval
and attention we might crave. These are the building blocks
of the ego. We feel that we are someone because we have
hopes, beliefs, status, a job and possessions and because
other people give us approval.
However, in states of despair and depression all of or
at least some of these psychological attachments are
broken. This is the very reason why you are in despair:
because the constructs youve been depending for your wellbeing have been removed; the scaffolding which supported
your sense of identity has fallen away. Hopes and beliefs
are revealed as illusions; your possessions and status have
uddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light.

S
I was seized with an ecstasy beyond descriptionA wind,
not of air, but of spirit [blew through me]. In great, clean
strength it blew right through me. Then came the blazing
thought, You are a free man.A great peace stole over
me andI became acutely conscious of a presence which
seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the
shores of a new world. 4
Wilsons attachments had been destroyed by his addiction.
Every external kind of support relationships, status,
hopes and illusions had dissolved away, so that he was
completely desolate and completely free. In the words of
Stan Grof, speaking generally of alcoholics and addicts who
reach this point, the person is left naked, with nothing but
the core of his or her being. 5
But this may also be, at a deeper level, connected to an
intensification of life-energy. Attachments to possessions
or to other human beings consume our life-energy. Simply
maintaining the attachments uses up life-energy for
example, the constant effort to sustain our wealth and
status, to defend our beliefs against other peoples, or to
keep the approval of others. And in a more subtle way,
these attachments exist as psychological forms which
are present within our minds even when we arent aware of
them. You can picture them as a whole network of forms
which constitute one overall structure of attachment within
our psyche. And there has to be a continual expenditure of
energy to maintain this structure, in the same way that there
has to be a continual input of energy to maintain the physical
structure of the body.
As a result, when these attachments dissolve there is a
sudden release of a large portion of life-energy. And now that
this structure of attachment no longer fills our psyche, there
is a sudden new clarity and openness inside us, a new sense
of wholeness. Our life-energy becomes intensified and stilled,
and therefore we have a powerful spiritual experience.
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been taken away, your friends or lovers have rejected you. As

a result, you feel naked and lost, as if your identity has been
destroyed. But at this very point you are, paradoxically, close
to a state of liberation. You are in a state of detachment.
Your Self has been released from external constructs. In an
instant, therefore, the pain of despair and desolation can
switch into a state of freedom and joy.
This is close to the interpretation which Russel Williams
and Eckhart Tolle have given of their awakening experiences.
According to Russel, his enlightenment experience was a
matter of letting go of everything which I thought was me.
The frustration was so much that my old self has to give
way. While according to Eckhart Tolle, his experience was a
death of the sense of self which lived through identifications,
identifications with my story, things around me in the world.
Something arose at that moment that was a sense of deep
and intense stillness and aliveness, beingness. 3 In other
words, both of these teachers see their enlightenment
experiences in terms of detachment.
This may be why some severe alcoholics and other addicts
have powerful awakening experiences when their addiction
has destroyed their lives and they can no longer sustain
themselves with hopes or illusions. One of the founders
of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, had this experience,
when he was lying in hospital after a drinking binge, in a
state of mental and physical collapse. According to his
biographer, there was nothing ahead but death or madness.
This was the finish, the jumping off place. But then, in
Wilsons own words
13
Encountering Death
This is also why encountering death is such a powerful
trigger of spiritual experiences. Like states of despair and
depression, facing death may occasionally induce a state of
detachment, in which the individual spontaneously releases
herself from psychological attachments. The German Zen
Buddhist Karlfried von Durckheim experienced this during
the First World War, when being surrounded by death
made him aware of that there was a part of his being
which transcended physical extinction. Later, he collected
reports of similar experiences during the Second World War,
and found that they were surprisingly common. He found
examples amongst soldiers who believed they were about to
die on the battlefield, inmates of concentration camps who
had lost all hope or survival, and people who were convinced
they were about to die in bombing raids. 6
Such realisations can also occur after a person is
diagnosed with a fatal illness, and is told they only have
a certain amount of time left to live. Initially he or she
experiences feelings of bitterness and despair, which may
give way to a sense of serenity and acceptance and a new
spiritual perception. When, in 1994, the English playwright
Dennis Potter discovered he was dying of prostate cancer he
paradoxically became happier and more at peace with the
world than he had ever been before, and also developed an
intense awareness of the nowness of his experience and the
beautiful is-ness of the world. As he said during an interview
shortly before he died:
e forget that life can only be defined in the present
W
tense. It is is is. And it is now only
That nowness becomes so vivid to me that in a perverse
sort of way Im serene. I can celebrate life...The nowness
of everything is absolutely wonderful...The fact is that if
you see, in the present tense boy, can you see it; boy,
can you celebrate it. 7
Many people who return from encounters with death either
because a threat passes or they make a miraculous recovery
undergo a permanent spiritual shift. Of course, this is one
the most significant features of near-death experiences.
Most of those who undergo the experience gain a new
spiritual outlook, becoming less materialistic and egotistical
and more compassionate, more concerned with helping and
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serving others than fulfilling their own desires and ambitions.
They are no longer afraid of death, they develop either new
or intensified religious and spiritual beliefs (though realising
the inadequacy of organised religion), and may even develop
paranormal abilities. They also report a much greater
capacity for joy, and a heightened appreciation of beauty. 8
These effects may not only be due to the content of the NDE
e.g. the sense of profound well-being, an encounter with a
being of light or deceased relatives, or the life-review but
also to a simple and direct encounter with death.
Like intense despair and desolation, imminent death
dissolves psychological attachments. If you know you are
going to die soon, there can be no more hopes or ambitions
for you. Your possessions, your successes, the status
and the knowledge youve accumulated can have no more
meaning, now that you are going to be separated from them
forever. The normal worries and concerns of daily life fade
away for you too, as does your attachment to your career and
to the people whose approval you sought.
This is why, initially at least, facing death is a painful
experience. You are stripped of the externalities which give
you your sense of identity, security and well-being. You
are literally reduced to nothing. Many people do not move
beyond this pain; for them the process of dying is simply a
depressing and devastating experience, not redeemed by
any sense of joy or meaning. But for some people this state
of enforced detachment brings about a shift to a spiritual
state. As the attachments dissolve, there is a sudden
intensification and stilling of life-energy, enabling the dying
person to look at the world with fresh, child-like vision, to
experience serenity and peace inside, and to become aware
of their essential oneness with the cosmos.
Long Term Spiritual Development

We can look at long term spiritual development in these
terms too. Many spiritual teachers have told us that in order
to find God or to become one with our true self or with the
universe, we have to detach ourselves from possessions,
social status and ambitions. Spiritual development means
gradually becoming naked, emptying the soul so that
the fullness of the spirit can enter. In order to do this,
throughout history spiritual seekers have turned away from
the everyday world of work and families and chosen to live
in the forest, desert or monastery. In all spiritual traditions,
adepts are expected to practice voluntary poverty, to have
a bare minimum of possessions, and to live without any
unnecessary comforts and luxuries. They are expected to
make spiritual development the only goal of their life, and not
to have worldly ambitions for fame, success or power.
We can see this life of renunciation as an attempt to
avoid the energy-drainage caused by attachments, so that
the seekers could generate a permanently high level of lifeenergy, and therefore a permanently spiritual state. This
underlying purpose of this process of conscious detachment
was noted by the scholar of mysticism Evelyn Underhill,
who described it as a process of stripping or purging away
of those superfluous, unreal, and harmful things which
dissipate the precious energies of the self. 9 The practice of
voluntary poverty, for example, can be seen as a method of
stopping our life-energy being drained away by possessions.
As Meister Eckhart wrote, There are men who completely
dissipate the powers of the soul in the outward man. These
are the people who direct all their aims and intelligence
towards transient possessions. 10 And many mystics
and spiritual teachers would say the same of ambitions,
relationships and worldly pleasures.
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This process of detachment is equivalent to the long

periods of suffering and turmoil endured by Eckhart Tolle and
Russel Williams before their enlightenment experiences. The
only difference is that for them this happened involuntarily,
whereas mystics undertake this process consciously.
The mystics made themselves suffer, while they simply
suffered.
So where does this leave us? Does it mean that we have
to suffer in order to have spiritual experiences or become
enlightened? Do we have to make our lives as barren and
miserable as possible, to renounce the world, take vows of
silence and sleep on cold stone floors for years?
Of course not there is a middle way between this extreme
suffering and a life of attachment. As we live our lives, we
should try to make sure that we dont become too dependent
upon externalities like money, status, hopes, beliefs, our
self-image and other people. We should try to make sure that
were always partly rooted inside ourselves, so that we never
give ourselves completely away to the world. We should
remember that the only true source of well-being lies inside
us, and that to attach ourselves to externalities means
losing touch with this. Through making a conscious effort to
remain self-sufficient and connected to our true selves, our
beings will be open and free, and there will always be space
for Spirit to flow through.
References
1. Hardy, A. (1979). The Spiritual Nature of Man. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
2. Tolle, E. (1999). The Power of Now. London: Hodder And
Staughton, p.2.
3. Ibid.
4. In Walsh, R. (ed.) (1993.) Paths beyond Ego, New York:
Tarcher, pp.146.
5. Ibid., pp.146-7.
6. Watts. A. (1973). In my own Way. London: Cape.
7. Fenwick, P. & E. (1995). The Truth in the Light. London:
Headline, p.201.
8. see Fenwick, op. cit; Grey, M. (1985) Return from Death.
London: Arkana.
9. Underhill, E. (1911/1960) Mysticism. London: Methuen,
p.204.
10.Meister Eckhart: From whom God Hid Nothing (1996). Ed.
David ONeal. Boston:Shambhala, p.117.
Steve Taylor is the author of The Fall and Making Time.

His new book Waking From Sleep: the Sources of Spiritual
Experiences and how to Make them Permanent will be
published by Hay House in March 2010. For more information
see www.stevenmtaylor.com. He is collecting further cases of
spiritual awakening induced by turmoil and desolation,
or encounters with death. If you would be willing to share such
an experience with Steve, please contact him at
essytaylor@yahoo.com.
15
Jorge N. Ferrer
Here Jorge Ferrer discusses the shortcomings of the main forms of religious
pluralism that have been proposed as an antidote to modernism. He introduces
the participatory turn in the study of spirituality and religion, showing how it
can help us to develop a fresh appreciation of religious diversity. He then offers
some practical orientations to assess the validity of spiritual truths and outlines a
participatory critical theory of religion.
hen David B. Barret, the main editor of the massive

World Christian Encyclopedia, was asked what he
had learnt about religious change in the world after
several decades of research, he responded with the following:
We have identified nine thousand and nine hundred distinct
and separate religions in the world, increasing by two or
three religions every day. Although there may be something
to celebrate in this spiritual diversity and ongoing innovation,
it is also clear that the existence of many conflicting religious
visions of reality and human nature is a major cause of the
prevailing skepticism toward religious and spiritual truth
claims. Against the background of modernist assumptions
about a singular objective reality, it is understandable that
the presence of a plurality of mutually exclusive accounts
leads to the confident dismissal of religious explanations.
It is as if contemporary culture has succumbed to the
Cartesian anxiety behind what W. E. Hocking called the
scandal of plurality, the worry that if there are so many
divergent claims to ultimate truth, then perhaps none is
right. This competitive predicament among religious beliefs
is not only a philosophical or existential problem; it has also
profoundly affected how people from different credos engage
one another and, even today, plays an important role in many
interreligious conflicts, quarrels, and even holy wars. As the
theologian Hans Kng famously said, there cannot be global
peace without peace among religions; to which we may add
that there might not be complete peace among religions
without ending the competition among religions.
Typical responses to the scandal of religious plurality
tend to fall along a continuum between two drastically
opposite positions. At one end of the spectrum, materialistic,
scientifically-minded, and nonreligionist scholars retort to
the plurality of religious world views to downplay or dismiss
altogether the cognitive value of religious knowledge claims,
regarding religions as cultural fabrications which, like art
pieces or culinary dishes, can be extremely diverse and even
personally edifying but never the bearers of any objective
truth whatsoever. At the other end, spiritual practitioners,
theologians, and religionist scholars vigorously defend the
cognitive value of religion, addressing the problem of religious
pluralism by either endorsing the exclusive (or ultimately
superior) truth of their preferred tradition or developing
universalist understandings that seek to reconcile the

conflicting spiritual truths within one or another encompassing
system. As I showed in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A
Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (SUNY Press, 2002),
however, most universalist visions of human spirituality tend
to distort the essential message of the various religious
traditions, hierarchically favouring certain spiritual truths over
others and raising serious obstacles for interreligious harmony
and open-ended spiritual inquiry.
My intention is this essay is to first uncover the spiritual
narcissism characteristic of our shared historical approach
to religious differences, as well as briefly discuss the
shortcomings of the main forms of religious pluralism that
have been proposed as its antidote. Second, I introduce the
participatory turn in the study of spirituality and religion,
showing how it can help us to develop a fresh appreciation
of religious diversity that eschews the dogmatism and
competitiveness involved in privileging any particular tradition
over the rest without falling into cultural-linguistic or naturalistic
reductionisms. Then I offer some practical orientations to
assess the validity of spiritual truths and outline the contours
of a participatory critical theory of religion. To conclude, I
suggest that a participatory approach to religion not only
fosters our spiritual individuation in the context of a shared
spiritual human family, but also turns the problem of religious
plurality into a celebration of the spirit of pluralism.
Uncovering our Spiritual Narcissism

A few marginal voices notwithstanding, the search for a
common core, universal essence, or single metaphysical
world behind the multiplicity of religious experiences and
cosmologies can be regarded as over. Whether guided by
the exclusivist intuitionism of traditionalism or the fideism of
theological agendas, the outcome - and too often the intended
goal - of such universalist projects was unambiguous: the
privileging of one particular spiritual or religious system over
all others. In addition to universalism, the other attempts to
explain religious divergences have typically taken one of the
three following routes: exclusivism (my religion is the only
true one, the rest are false), inclusivism (my religion is the
most accurate or complete, the rest are lower or partial),
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The Participatory Turn

The Plurality of Religions and
the Spirit of Pluralism
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and ecumenical pluralism (there may be real differences
between our religions, but all lead ultimately to the same
end).
The many problems of religious exclusivism are well
known. It easily fosters religious intolerance, fundamentalist
tendencies, and prevents a reciprocal and symmetrical
encounter with the other where divergent spiritual viewpoints
may be regarded as enriching options or genuine alternatives.
In the wake of the scope of contemporary theodiversity,
the defence of the absolute cognitive superiority of one
single tradition over all others is more dubious than ever.
Inclusivist and ecumenically pluralist approaches suffer
from similar difficulties in that they tend to conceal claims
for the supremacy of one or another religious tradition,
ultimately collapsing into the dogmatism of exclusivist
stances. Consider, for example, the Dalai Lamas defence
of the need of a plurality of religions. While celebrating the
existence of different religions to accommodate the diversity
of human dispositions, he contends that final spiritual
liberation can only be achieved through the emptiness
practices of his own school of Tibetan Buddhism, implicitly
situating all other spiritual choices as lower. In a way,
the various ways we have approached religious diversity
exclusivism, inclusivism, and ecumenical pluralism can be
situated along a continuum ranging from more gross to more
subtle forms of spiritual narcissism, which elevate ones
favoured tradition or spiritual choice as superior.
The bottom line is that, explicitly or implicitly, religious
traditions have persistently looked down upon one another,
each believing that their truth is more complete or final, and
that their path is the only or most effective one to achieve
full salvation or enlightenment. Let us now look at several
types of religious pluralism that have been proposed in
response to this disconcerting situation.
The Varieties of Religious Pluralism

Religious pluralism comes in many guises and fashions.
Before suggesting a participatory remedy to our spiritual
narcissism in dealing with religious difference, I critically
review here four major types of religious pluralism: ecumenical,
soteriological, postmodern, and metaphysical.
As we have seen, ecumenical pluralism admits genuine
differences among religious beliefs and practices, but
maintains that they all ultimately lead to the same end.
The problem with this apparently tolerant stance is that,
whenever its proponents describe such religious goal, they
invariably do it in terms that favour one or another specific
tradition (e.g., union with God, nondual liberation, and so
forth). This is why ecumenical pluralism not only degenerates
into exclusivist or inclusivist stances, but also trivialises the
encounter with the other after all, whats the point of
engaging in interfaith exchanges if we already know that we
are all heading toward the same goal? The contradictions
of pluralistic approaches that postulate an equivalent endpoint for all traditions have been pointed out by students
of religion for decades. A genuine religious pluralism, it is
today widely accepted, needs to acknowledge the existence
of alternative religious aims, and putting all religions on a
single scale will not do it.
In response to these concerns, a number of scholars
have proposed a soteriological pluralism that envisions a
multiplicity of irreducible salvations associated with the
various religious traditions. Due to their diverse ultimate
visions of reality and personhood, religious traditions
stress the cultivation of particular human potentials or
competences (e.g., access to visionary worlds, mind/body
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integration, expansion of consciousness, transcendence

of the body, and so forth), which naturally leads to distinct
human transformations and states of freedom. A variant
of this approach is the postulation of a limited number
of independent but equiprimordial religious goals and
conceptually possible ultimate realities, for example, theism
(in its various forms), monistic nondualism ( la Advaita
Vedanta), and process nondualism (such as Yogacara
Buddhisms). The soteriological approach to religious
difference, however, remains agnostic about the ontological
status of spiritual realities, being therefore pluralistic
only at a phenomenological level (i.e., admitting different
human spiritual fulfillments), but not at an ontological or
metaphysical one (i.e., at the level of spiritual realities).
The combination of pluralism and metaphysical agnosticism
is also a chief feature of the postmodern solution to the
problem of conflicting truth claims in religion. The translation
of religious realities into cultural-linguistic fabrications allows
postmodern scholars to explain interreligious differences as
the predictable upshot of the worlds various religious beliefs,
practices, vocabularies, or language games. Postmodern
pluralism denies or brackets the ontological status of the
referents of religious language, which are usually seen
as meaningless, obscure, or parasitic upon the despotic
dogmatism of traditional religious metaphysics. Further,
even if such spiritual realities were to exist, our human
cognitive apparatus would only allow us to know our culturally
and linguistically mediated experience of them. Postmodern
pluralism recognises a genuine plurality of religious goals,
but at the cost of either stripping religious claims of any
extra-linguistic veridicality or denying that we can know such
truths even if they exist.
A notable exception to this trend is the metaphysical or
deep pluralism advocated by some process theologians.
Relying on Alfred North Whiteheads distinction between
Gods unchanging Being and Gods changing Becoming,
this proposal defends the existence of two ontological
or metaphysical religious ultimates to which the various
traditions are geared: God, which corresponds to the Biblical
Yahveh, the Buddhist Sambhogakaya, and Advaita Vedantas
Saguna Brahman; and Creativity, which corresponds to
Meister Eckharts Godhead, the Buddhist emptiness and
Dharmakaya, and Advaita Vedantas Nirguna Brahman. A
third possible ultimate, the cosmos itself, is at times added
in connection to Taoism and indigenous spiritualities that
venerate the sacredness of the natural world. In addition
to operating within a theistic framework adverse to many
traditions, however, deep pluralism not only establishes
highly dubious equivalencies among religious goals (e.g.,
Buddhist emptiness and Advaitas Nirguna Brahman), but
also forces the rich diversity of religious ultimates into the
arguably Procrustean moulds of Gods unchanging Being
and changing Becoming.
The Participatory Turn

Can we take the plurality of religions seriously today
without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products
or incomplete facets of a single spiritual truth or universe? I
believe that we can and in the anthology I recently co-edited
with Jacob H. Sherman, The Participatory Turn: Spirituality,
Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press, 2008), we are
calling this third way possible the participatory turn in the
study of religion and spirituality.
Briefly, the participatory turn argues for an understanding
of the sacred that approaches religious phenomena,
experiences, and insights as co-created events. Such
the very ontological autonomy and integrity of the mystery

itself? Response: given the rich variety of incompatible
spiritual ultimates and the contradictions involved in any
conciliatory strategy, I submit that it is only by promoting
the cocreative role of human cognition to the very heart
and summit of each spiritual universe that we can preserve
the ultimate unity of the mysteryotherwise we would be
facing the arguably equally unsatisfactory alternative of
having to either reduce spiritual universes to fabrications
of the human imagination or posit an indefinite number of
isolated spiritual universes. By conceiving spiritual universes
and ultimates as the outcome of a process of participatory
cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and
an undetermined spiritual power, however, we rescue the
ultimate unity of the mystery while simultaneously affirming
its ontological richness and overcoming the reductionisms of
cultural-linguistic, psychological, and biologically naturalistic
explanations of religion.
What I am proposing here, then, is that different spiritual
ultimates can be co-created through intentional or spontaneous
participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery,
spiritual power, and/or generative force of life or reality. This
participatory perspective does not contend that there are two,
three, or any limited quantity of pre-given spiritual ultimates,
but rather that the radical openness, interrelatedness, and
creativity of the mystery and/or the cosmos allows for the
participatory cocreation of an indefinite number of selfdisclosures of reality and corresponding religious worlds.
These worlds are not statically closed but fundamentally
dynamic and open to the continued transformation resulting
(at least in part) from the creative impact of human visionary
imagination and religious endeavors.
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events can engage the entire range of human faculties (e.g.,

rational, imaginal, somatic, aesthetic, contemplative, and
so forth) with the creative unfolding of reality or the mystery
in the enactment or bringing forth of ontologically rich
religious worlds. Put somewhat differently, we suggest that
religious and spiritual phenomena are participatory in
the sense that they can emerge from the interaction of all
human attributes and a creative spiritual power or dynamism
of life. More specifically, we propose that religious worlds
and phenomena, such as the Kabbalistic four realms, the
various Buddhist cosmologies, or Teresas seven mansions,
come into existence out of a process of participatory
cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and
the generative force of life and/or the spirit.
But, how far are we willing to go in affirming the cocreative
role of the human in spiritual matters? To be sure, most
scholars may be today ready to allow that particular spiritual
states (e.g., the Buddhist jhanas, Teresas mansions, or
the various yogi samadhis), spiritual visions (e.g., Ezekiels
Divine Chariot, Hildegards visionary experience of the Trinity,
or Black Elks Great Vision), and spiritual landscapes or
cosmologies (e.g., the Buddha lands, the Heavenly Halls of
Merkavah mysticism, or the diverse astral domains posited by
Western esoteric schools) are largely or entirely constructed.
Nevertheless, I suspect that many religious scholars and
practitioners may feel more reticent in the case of spiritual
entities (such as the Tibetan daikinis, the Christian angels, or
the various Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon) and,
in particular, in the case of ultimate principles and personae
(such as the Biblical Yaveh, the Buddhist sunnyata, or the
Hindu Brahman). Would not accepting their co-created nature
undermine not only the claims of most traditions, but also
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In the context of the dilemmas posed by religious
pluralism, one of the advantages of a participatory account
of religious knowing is that it frees religious thinking from the
presupposition of a single, predetermined ultimate reality that
binds it to reductionistic, exclusivist, or dogmatic formulations.
Once we do away with this assumption, on the one hand, and
recognise the ontologically creative role of spiritual cognition,
on the other, the multiplicity of religious truth claims stops
being a source of metaphysical agnosticism and becomes
entirely natural, perhaps even essential. If we choose to see
the various spiritual ultimates not as competing to match a
pre-given spiritual referent but as creative transformations
of an undetermined mystery, then the conflict over claims of
alternative religious truths vanishes like a mirage. Rather than
being a source of conflict or a cause for considerate tolerance,
the diversity of spiritual truths and cosmologies becomes a
reason for wonder and celebration wonder inspired by the
inexhaustible creative power of the mystery and celebration
of our participatory role in such creativity, as well as of
the emerging possibilities for mutual enrichment that arise
out of the encounter of traditions. In short, a participatory
approach to religion seek to enact with body, mind, heart,
and consciousness a creative spirituality that lets a thousand
spiritual flowers bloom.
Although this may at first sound like a rather anything
goes approach to religious claims, I hold to the contrary
that recognising a diversity of co-created religious worlds
in fact asks us to be more perspicuous in discerning their
differences and merits. Because such worlds are not simply
given but involve us as agents and co-creators, we are not
off the ethical hook where religion is concerned but instead
inevitably make cosmo-political and moral choices in all our
religious actions. The next two sections elaborate on this
crucial point.
The Validity of Spiritual Truths

It cannot be stressed strongly enough that rejecting a
pre-given spiritual ultimate referent does not prevent us
from making qualitative distinctions in spiritual matters. To
be sure, like beautiful porcelains made out of amorphous
clay, traditions cannot be qualitatively ranked according to
their accuracy in representing some imagined (accessible or
inaccessible) original template. However, this does not mean
that we cannot discriminate between more evocative, skilful,
or sophisticated artifacts.
Whereas the participatory turn renders meaningless the
postulation of qualitative distinctions among traditions
according to a priori doctrines or a prearranged hierarchy
of spiritual insights, these comparative grounds can be
sought in a variety of practical fruits (existential, cognitive,
emotional, interpersonal), perhaps anchored around two
basic orientations: the egocentrism test (i.e., to what
extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice free its
practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and
self-centredness?) and the dissociation test (i.e., to what
extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice foster the
integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person?). As
I see it, this approach invites a more nuanced, contextual,
and complex evaluation of religious claims based on the
recognition that traditions, like human beings, are likely to
be both higher and lower in relation to one another, but in
different regards (e.g., fostering contemplative competences,
ecological awareness, mind/body integration, and so forth).
It is important then not to understand the ideal of a reciprocal
and symmetrical encounter among traditions in terms of a
trivialising or relativistic egalitarianism. By contrast, a truly
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symmetrical encounter can only take place when traditions

open themselves to teach and be taught, fertilise and be
fertilised, transform and be transformed.
Two important qualifications need to be made about these
suggested guidelines. The first relates to the fact that some
spiritual paths and liberations may be more adequate for
different psychological and cultural dispositions (as well as
for the same individual at distinct developmental junctures),
but this does not make them universally superior or inferior.
The well-known four yogas of Hinduism (reflection, devotion,
action, and experimentation) come quickly to mind in this
regard, as do other spiritual typologies that can be found
in other traditions. The second qualification refers to the
complex difficulties inherent in any proposal of cross-cultural
criteria for religious truth. It should be obvious, for example,
that my emphasis on the overcoming of narcissism and selfcenteredness, although arguably central to most spiritual
traditions, may not be shared by all. Even more poignantly,
it is likely that most religious traditions would not rank too
highly in terms of the dissociation test; for example, gross
or subtle forms of repression, control, or strict regulation of
the human body and its vital/sexual energies (versus the
promotion of their autonomous maturation, integration, and
participation in spiritual knowing) are rather the norm in most
past and present contemplative endeavours.
Towards a Participatory Critical

Theory of Religion
The embodied and integrative impetus of the participatory
turn is foundational for the development of a participatory
critical theory of religion. From a participatory standpoint,
the history of religions can be read, in part, as a story of the
joys and sorrows of human dissociation. From ascetically
enacted mystical ecstasies to world-denying monistic
realisations, and from heart-expanding sexual sublimation
to the moral struggles (and failures) of ancient and modern
mystics and spiritual teachers, human spirituality has been
characterised by an overriding impulse toward a liberation
of consciousness that has too often taken place at the
cost of the underdevelopment, subordination, or control of
essential human attributes such as the body or sexuality.
Even contemporary religious leaders and teachers across
traditions tend to display an uneven development that
arguably reflects this generalised spiritual bias; for example,
high level cognitive and spiritual functioning combined with
ethically conventional or even dysfunctional interpersonal,
emotional, or sexual behaviour.
Furthermore, it is likely that many past and present spiritual
visions are to some extent the product of dissociated
ways of knowing ways that emerge predominantly from
accessing certain forms of transcendent consciousness but
in disconnection from more immanent spiritual sources. For
example, spiritual visions that hold that body and world are
ultimately illusory (or lower, or impure, or a hindrance to
spiritual liberation) arguably derive from states of being in
which the sense of self mainly or exclusively identifies with
subtle energies of consciousness, getting uprooted from
the body and immanent spiritual life. From this existential
stance, it is understandable, and perhaps inevitable, that
both body and world are seen as illusory or defective. In
contrast, when our somatic and vital worlds are invited to
participate in our spiritual lives, making our sense of identity
permeable to only to transcendent awareness but also
immanent spiritual energies, then body and world become
spiritually significant realities that are recognised as crucial
for human and cosmic spiritual fruition.
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This account does not seek to excoriate past spiritualities,

which may have been at times though by no means always
perfectly legitimate and perhaps even necessary in their
particular times and contexts, but merely to highlight the
historical rarity of a fully embodied or integrative spirituality.
At any rate, a participatory approach to spirituality and
religion needs to be critical of oppressive, repressive,
and dissociative religious beliefs, attitudes, practices, and
institutional dynamics.
Spiritual Individuation in a Common

Spiritual Family
Let me conclude this essay with some reflections on the
future of world religion and spirituality. Briefly, to embrace
our participatory role in religious knowing may lead to a shift
from searching for a global spirituality organised around
a single ultimate vision to recognising an already existent
spiritual human family that branches out from the same
creative root. Traditions may then be able to find their
longed-for unity not so much in a single spiritual megasystem
or global vision, but in their common roots that is, in that
deep bond constituted by the undetermined dimension of the
mystery (or the generative power of life, if one prefers more
naturalistic terms) in which all traditions participate in the
cocreation of their spiritual insights and cosmologies.
Like members of a healthy family, religious people may
then stop attempting to impose their particular beliefs
on others and might instead become a supportive and
enriching force for the spiritual individuation of other
practitioners, both within and outside their traditions. This
mutual empowerment of spiritual creativity may lead to the
emergence of not only a rich variety of coherent spiritual
perspectives that can potentially be equally aligned to
the mystery, but also a human community formed by fully
differentiated spiritual individuals. Situated at the creative
nexus of immanent and transcendent spiritual energies,
spiritually individuated persons might become unique
embodiments of the mystery capable of co-creating novel
spiritual understandings, practices, and even expanded
states of freedom. If we accept this approach, it is plausible
to conjecture that our religious future may bear witness
to a greater than ever plurality of creative visionary and
existential spiritual developments. This account would be
consistent with a view of the mystery, the cosmos, and/or
spirit as moving from a primordial state of undifferentiated
unity towards one of infinite differentiation-in-communion.
The affirmation of our shared spiritual family may be
accompanied by the search for a common nonabsolutist
and contextually sensitive global ethics. It is important to
stress that this global ethics cannot arise out of our highly
ambiguous moral religious past, but needs to be forged in the
fire of contemporary interreligious dialogue and cooperative
spiritual inquiry. In other words, it is likely that any future
global ethics will not be grounded in our past spiritual history
but in our critical reflection on such history in the context
of our present-day moral intuitions (for example, about the
pitfalls of religious dogmatism, fanaticism, narcissism, and
dissociation). It may be more sensible, however, to search
for a global pattern of civility that does not lay down who is
right and who is wrong but rather determines how peacefully
the differing spiritual traditions can live together. In any case,
besides its obvious relevance for regulating cross-cultural and
interreligious conflicts, the adoption of global guidelines
including guidelines about how to cope with disagreement
is crucial to address some of the most challenging issues
of our global village, such as the exploitation of women
and children, the increasing polarization of rich and poor,

the environmental crisis, coping with cultural and ethnic
diversity, and fairness in international business.
To conclude, I propose that the question of religious
pluralism can be satisfactorily answered by affirming the
generative power of life or the mystery, as well as of
our participatory role in its creative unfolding. The time
has come, I believe, to let go of our spiritual narcissism
and hold our spiritual convictions in a more humble,
discriminating, and perhaps spiritually seasoned manner
one that recognises the plausibility of a multiplicity of
spiritual truths and religious worlds while offering grounds
for the critical appraisal of dissociative, repressive, and/
or oppressive religious expressions, beliefs and practices.
To envision religious manifestations as the outcome of our
cocreative communion with an undetermined spiritual power
or dynamism of life allows affirming a plurality of ontologically
rich religious worlds without falling into any of todays
fashionable reductionisms. The many challenges raised by
the plurality of religions can only be met by embracing fully
the critical spirit of pluralism.
References
Extracted, with some original passages, from J. N. Ferrer &
J. H. Sherman, eds., The Participatory Turn: Spirituality,
Mysticism, Religious Studies, State University of New
York Press, October 2008 (http://sunypress.edu/details.
asp?id=61696).
The author would like to thank Jacob H. Sherman for his helpful
feedback and editorial advice.
Jorge N. Ferrer, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of EastWest Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies,
San Francisco, and author of Revisioning Transpersonal
Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality,
State University of New York Press, 2002. Prof. Ferrer offers
talks and workshops on integral spirituality and education both
nationally and internationally.
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Interview with Fergus Capie

Janine Edge
Following the 2008 AGM Conference on Fundamentalism in Science and
Religion, and recent articles in The Review on The God Confusion, Janine Edge
interviews Rev Fergus Capie. Fergus is founder and director of the London Inter
Faith Centre, which he describes as a meeting place for those of all faiths and of
none. This interview addresses some of the same issues as Jorge Ferrer outlines
above. Janine is a mediator and Chairman of the SMN Charitable Trust.
Janine: I would like to start with finding out a bit about

you personally and in particular how you square your own
religious beliefs with acceptance of other religions?
Fergus: I was brought up in a Christian community where
(like many others) it was acceptable to consider your own
religious position to be right and that of others to be wrong.
I suppose it was only when I moved in ministry from Oxford
to East London, that my first-hand encounter with those of
other faiths, especially Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, gave
me a fresh challenge. It was then I became convinced that
if we can but be `true to self and open to others` then, in
the words of your question, we might move towards squaring
our own position with acceptance of others. For me it is a
paradox. The greater the depth of my experience of others,
the further I am led into my Christian and Christ-centred
life while at the same time becoming more open to those
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with different beliefs. It would be easy to say that this was

because I found things in common with other religions,
but for me, looking for the lowest common denominator
is not the way forward. It is true that exposure to insights
from other religions whether it be the Brahman-Atman
connection in strands of Hinduism, or the Islamic emphasis
on the one-ness and transcendence of God, or the powerful
Sikh constant remembrance of the name of God, or Buddhist
insights on the nature of the self have all enriched my own
life. Further, some of my Christian spiritual practices have
been informed by contact with other religions, particularly
those involving meditation and silence. But were I to sum up
squaring my position with those that are different, I would
say it happens via a sort of paradox, and I do not think it is
avoiding the issue to say so.
then that, I think, can but be creative and helpful both for
those immediately involved and for the wider world.
Janine: What has been most effective in bringing those of
different faiths together at the centre?
Fergus: My definition of interfaith is faiths in encounter
and the issues raised thereby. In my experience it is not
necessarily the most effective route if the encounters are
about faith. So, for example, we have music events. As a
result of these three young musicians, a Muslim, a Bahai
and a Sikh have met and now work together. On the one
hand they are fully acknowledge each others faith and on
the other each are putting the faith part of their identity into
a wider perspective. One of the dangers of our interfaith
project is that we overplay the faith element in personal
identity. The fact is that there are multiple aspects to our
identity, and having events which are not focussed on interfaith issues helps to redress this balance.
Janine: What events do you hold which do focus on
interfaith issues?
Fergus: Well, we offer a variety of contexts for meeting
ranging from informal gatherings such as faith neutral
meditations and study groups, to formal conferences and
courses. For example over the last decade we have run three
2-year courses, taught by those of different faiths, giving a
certificate in Interfaith Relations. Many of those attending
had roles in education or society and this course has given
them the confidence to enable greater cross faith interaction
to occur. One representative of a non Christian faith attending
the Centre once said to me we never meet except at your
place. So I have found that events at the centre sometimes
enable different ideological groupings from within one faith
to come together, thus building cohesion. This in turn may
help interfaith relations. Perhaps as much as anything else I
believe that if you designate a space for a particular activity,
that can help legitimise the activity. In one sense creating
the space at the interfaith centre has done just that.
Janine: This comes back to a recurring theme in our
conversation, namely that giving permission to each person
to be true to their own faith actually helps inter-faith
relations, as opposed to trying to ignore or reduce the
difference between religions.
Fergus: Yes, and by way of example on that, a Muslim
friend of mine applied for the post of Deputy Head Teacher
of a Church of England School. After morning assembly,
the Head Teacher apologised for the explicitly Christian
content of the assembly. My Muslim friend said that he was
saddened by this. He had known when he had applied for
the job that it was a Church of England School and expected
them to worship God in the Christian way. He said to me
I could never apologise or deny my faith in that way. On
another occasion, at a gathering where those of other faiths
had been attending, we sang a very explicitly `Christ-as-God`
hymn. When someone enquired later in conversation about
the sensitivity of that, a Muslim colleague replied If that
is what you believe, then sing it. In my experience, lack of
clarity and confidence in your own faith does not help inter
faith relating at the faith level.
Janine: You say on your website that you are might like to
be thought of more as an inter-ideological, than as an inter
faith centre. What do you mean by that?
Fergus: The inter faith impetus in this country emerged
largely from responding to the presence of those of other
faiths, through the pattern of immigration to the UK in the
post war period. But all the other-than-Christian faiths in
the UK put together, account for only about 10% of the
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Janine: I take it from what you say that you are not a
relativist when it comes to religion. By which I mean you
would consider it simplistic to say that all religions are a
version of the same truth?
Fergus: You are right. I am not a relativist as for me that
would suggest there would be a single frame of reference.
I was once asked by a Christian colleague Can Buddhists
be saved? The sense in which the idea of `saved` was
being used may work well in the context of Christianity,
but in my view could be a sort of category mistake outside
such a context. In other words for me this question may not
be the best place to start. There are a number of ways of
accounting for the religions, and we could for a moment look
at three. The first could be described as propositionalist,
namely that religious truths are propositions about ultimate
reality, `handed down from above`. The second could be
described as an experiential-expressive approach. Starting
from inner experience, the forms of religion are taken to
be objectifications of core human feelings and attitudes. I
suspect this may have become the default position of many
Western liberal Christians and thereby the basis for many
of the assumptions of a western inter-faith impetus, as well
indeed as underlying assumptions within current related UK
government policy. But I favour a third approach which may
be described as cultural-linguistic, as outlined by George
Lindbeck in his Nature of Doctrine. This proposes that
each religion could be accounted for as a sort of language,
which thus has its own discrete grammar. Such an account
enables us to work with contradiction, without needing to
find commonality. This would remove the need to explain one
religion in terms of another as each is then accorded its own
integrity as a system.
Janine: There might be an analogy here with science which
originally was seen as a description of actual reality but now
there are many different accounts of its epistemological
status. One is that it is a codification of inter-subjective
experience and another is the social constructionist
interpretation. But just as scientists often find the idea of
science as just a social construction unsatisfactory, do
you not find the idea of Christianity defined by culture and
language inadequate?
Fergus: That is not quite a correct description of what
Lindbeck is saying because for him the languages of religions
are idioms both for constructing reality and living life. I would
be more comfortable with saying that on the one hand I
see Christianity as expressed via culture and language and
the same time not as being limited or wholly encapsulated
by them. There is perhaps a sense in which adherents of
any religion see its insights as existing precisely to help us
break through the limits imposed by culture and language.
Lindbeck`s use of the concept of `cultural-linguistic` allows
us to see by analogy something of how religions `work` and
can be accounted for.
Janine: So the fact that one religious language is different
from another is explicable, and should in theory be less
troubling, because each has as its purpose the construction
of a way of living and each is pointing beyond itself (indeed
beyond the idea of a definable reality). But what does your
experience show is the key to tolerance between those of
different faiths?
Fergus: Were tolerance to mean a sort of `anything
goes` in the sense that being tolerant is to be uninterested
in and indifferent to the other, then its potential for being
constructive could be missed. However when it can mean an
active accommodation of and engagement with difference,
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population. What of the other 90%? What of the significant
numbers of thought-out views, be they within aspects of
Humanism or Secularism, or within the spectrum of New Age
and New Spiritualities. What of them? We are developing
projects towards their inclusion, such as our Who Owns
Britain? series of seminars which looks at both the secular
and the spiritual/religious dimensions of our society.
Janine: What then do you think is the role of New Age
spirituality in interfaith relations?
Fergus: Initially interfaith relating needed to be about
the main faiths but I think it can now be extended to
include New Age and New Spirituality. Within the New Age
movement I personally see a plus and possibly a minus.
The plus is that it can offer a way of challenging materialism
and gives a spiritual alternative outside the boundaries
of traditional religion. In this respect new age spirituality
is both salutary and can have a new constructive angle,
such as on environmental and gender issues. I have
two reservations on New Age spirituality. The first is that
this form of spirituality can become like some of the less
attractive features of a consumer society, including a type
of shopping for a spirituality which suits me and gives me
freedom - shopping for spiritual self-fulfilment. Secondly, this
`spirituality shopping` can be problematic and on occasions
in my experience potentially dangerous if the shopper is
working outside any known grammar of spiritual practice,
mixing elements that first arose in different times and places
which may never have been intended to be combined. There
is a way in which time and consensus can give a tradition
authenticity and a proper container.
Janine: What about those such as Deepak Chopra, Wayne
Dyer and Eckhart Tolle who seem to have evolved a new form
of spirituality which many are finding fulfilling? Are these
examples of new age spirituality not based in any particular
religion?
Fergus: They may not appear to be based in any particular
tradition, but no one works out of a vacuum and these and
other writers also have a sort of place and lineage. So, for
example, someone like Wayne Dyer seems to me to have
the European Jewish-Christian post-Enlightenment story in
his background however `free` he may seem in his writing.
(I greatly appreciate some of what he has written, such as
parts of The Power of Intention.)
Janine: You have talked about how you involve those of no
established religion but how do you approach fundamentalists
when you encounter them through the centre?
Fergus: As you may imagine, an inter faith centre is not the
first port of call for a fundamentalist. Having said that, we
have striven to engage with the more conservative elements
of each faith. It is easy to think that we have to help people
to be less fundamental in their religion, but then we fail
to register the force of its significance from their point of
view. They see the world as losing purpose through lack of
a particular view they hold. It seems they may rather lose
their own life to the end of a potentially better human future,
as they see it, rather than soften their view within liberal
compromise which could then lead to further degeneration of
civilisation. Our desire to soften fundamentalism could almost
become its own sort of fundamentalism. I would also just like
to point out that people can be fundamentalist in their belief
but be against any kind of political extremism or violence. I
think that two constructive approaches to fundamentalism
would be first, to work towards understanding it better; and
second, to promote wherever possible (and this is not at all
easy) the increased contact between those we consider to
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be fundamentalist and their wider social context; be it family,

local or wider religious community. When people have come
to me with concerns about a member of their family whom
they fear perhaps becoming fundamentalist, they also note
that that the individual concerned is becoming somehow
more remote from the family and less connected to the
mainstream of their community.
Janine: We also encounter fundamentalism in science;
particularly the view that science renders religious truth
superfluous or just plain wrong. How for you do religious
belief and the scientific world view fit together?
Fergus: I suppose I see them to be different approaches
to similar issues: again in terms of George Lindbeck,
different `grammars`. The writers of the Genesis accounts
of creation were expressing theological truth. They were not
seeking to record observable phenomena. To what extent we
can re-image the cosmos, taking insights from both science
and religion (as in the work of someone like Richard Tarnas)
may continue to be a challenge. Within all this, in my view,
God can be seen as the ultimate locus of energy in a world
constantly recreating itself.
Janine: Why is it that you think even scientists become
fundamental in their views, by which I mean the view that
science is the only form of truth.
Fergus: Well this is a complex subject but I think it is
again about meaning and purpose. If scientists gain a
definite sense of purpose from asserting that scientific law
is the only truth, who knows, perhaps they may become
fundamentalist about it?
Janine: Do you think religious relativism (by which I mean
the idea that all religions are versions of the truth and none
the truth) could actually be unhelpful to interfaith relations?
Fergus: I fully accept peoples desire to emphasise what is
held in common to the end of greater cooperation and mutual
understanding. However, I think the longer term solutions
may be better found through accepting and working with
difference. What I think is important is to have a reasonable
awareness of ones own position and how it came to be
(most people on the planet belong to the tradition into which
they were born). Only then one can interact with and learn
from others with ones own self constantly growing and
changing thereby.
Janine: In other words understanding your own religious
position is the first step to knowing yourself and therefore
both honouring and transcending it when interacting with
others? I take it from what you have just said that you do
not think the idea of a perennial philosophy will resolve
differences between religions?
Fergus: The perennial philosophy is interesting in a
number of respects, but the moment you say that the
different religions are to be seen in terms of that view then
you are in effect saying you ought to see it this way. So,
constructive as the idea of the perennial philosophy may be,
it would be difficult to imagine how it could actually resolve
difference as it would promote a single view of how to do so.
It would virtually become its own religion. Good old human
nature would surely kick in and before long, hey presto, you
would have The Temple of The Perennial Philosophy with the
first schism about a generation down the line. Are you a
conservative perennialist or a liberal perennialist? You dont
mean youre one of them? - and back to square one we
would go. No. True to self and open to others is my own
hope and prayer for where we may go on all this.
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In Support of Empirical
and Rational Research
Emma Nattress
he Spring issue of Network Review contained a number

of articles which referred to Richard Dawkins and his
denial of mystical or psychic experiences. Of particular
interest was Howards Jones article The God Confusion.
In The God Confusion, Jones notes that Dawkins denial is
based on his belief that mystical and psychic experiences
cannot be confirmed by others. In adopting this stance
Dawkins appears to be amongst those who argue that the
failure of replication (the inability of the experiencers of
such phenomena to replicate or repeat their experience on
demand) precludes the existence of the supernormal. In the
same article Dr. Jones draws attention to Rowan Williams
opinion that religion cannot be approached scientifically
and argues that without rational or empirical support beliefs
are indistinguishable from imagination. This point is well
made and prompted me to provide a brief account of my
MPhil Thesis, Psychic Phenomena, Meditation, Perception,
Actuality An Australian Study (completed in 2007).
My study was a secular (in the sense that it had no specific
religious connotation) and empirical study of reported psychic
phenomena. It used a questionnaire that involved the

matching of perceptions with specific class characteristics
rather than an examination of psychic phenomena as such.
The questionnaire was based on a medical diagnostic model.
Its findings were benchmarked against a previous study and
compared with other empirical studies conducted in Britain
and America. The thesis, which was inspired by the problem
of replication, asked the question do people (ordinary
Australians) experience psychic phenomena?
There are many ways to replicate and one of the more
interesting ways has been suggested by physicist and
mathematician, Gerhard Wassermann. Wassermann argues
that medical case histories (like case histories of psychic
phenomena), vary in precise detail from case to case
but also, for the same illness, share striking common
class characteristics which make diagnosis possible for
each particular class of illness. And, for the purposes of
research, case reports of spontaneously occurring psychic
phenomena of a specific class, resemble and can be
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a r t icle s

considered as valid a research tool as human medical case
histories of a particular type of illness. Wassermann does
not suggest that experience of mystical and/or psychic
phenomena is an illness. In support of his thesis on Shadow
Matter, Wasserman examined 81 case histories of recorded
incidents where people had encountered a paranormal
experience and concluded that because of the similarity of
the reports that there is ground to believe in the actuality
of the experience. The research design for my study built
upon Wassermanns methodology but instead of relying on
a comparison of recorded case histories utilised a medical
diagnostic model.
Diagnostic models have been developed by medical
authorities to promote best practice diagnostic standards.
Some complex medical conditions resemble psychospiritual
experiences in that they have many symptoms which
can be confused with a range of other conditions and
there is no single specific laboratory test which can
identify them. To deal with conditions such as Fibromyalgia,
which fulfils the above conditions and others like Amoebic
Meningitis, which if untreated can kill within twenty-four
hours, doctors have observed a range of signs that are
repeatable characteristics of these conditions and from
these observations have developed guidelines and criteria.
Confirmation that the patients experience replicates these
signs or class characteristics enables the medical practioner
to make an accurate diagnosis i.e. confirm the actuality of
the condition.
My diagnostic model took the form or a survey which
presented a series of class characteristics to a group of
100 Australians. The characteristics chosen were those
associated with six experiences generally recognised as being
of a psychic nature: the out-of-body/near-death experience,
clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, and the seeing
of auras/photism. Since the content of psychic experience
may on occasions over lap, each of these six characteristics
might be considered as a being a class characteristic and
psychic phenomenon in itself or as a class characteristic
generic to a larger and more complex psychic phenomenon
(compare the simple experience of hearing a voice with the
content of near-death experience). The object of the study
was to discover how many individuals within the group
evinced the specific characteristics. This proactive approach,
in seeking information from people irrespective of their
experience of psychic phenomena, is comparable with that
of Kenneth Ring. Rings systematic collection of accounts
from adults who had come close to death (there was no
stipulation that they had to have had any experiences) played
an important role in validating Kbler-Ross and Moodys
near-death experience research.
The results of this first survey (Nattress 1), in which
60% of respondents reported that they had recognised
and personally experienced one or more of the specifically
described phenomena, were then validated by presenting the
same questionnaire to a random sample of 135 postgraduate
students, currently enrolled at Murdoch University, Western
Australia. The results of the Murdoch survey, in which 64%
of participants reported that they had personally experienced
one or more of the listed class characteristics, were then
quantitatively and qualitatively compared with Nattress 1.

The comparability of the two Australian studies, together
with the percentages of respondents who described and
experienced each psychic phenomenon confirmed the
commonality of each experience. This commonality was further
supported by comparison between the Australian surveys
qualitative reports of contemporary psychic phenomena and
detailed descriptions of psychic and/or mystical phenomena
included in four British and one American, more directly
religious studies. Thereby, addressing the scientific criterion
of replication and clearly validating Wassermanns hypothesis
that: because of the similarity of the reports, there is ground
to believe in the actuality of the experiences.
The secular Australian study also yielded other interesting
results some of which were theistically and mystically
orientated. These other results, which provide substantial
material for future research, appear to indicate that there
is no reason why religion which is, after all, only the means
by which human beings approach God should not be
approached scientifically.
References
Wassermann, Gerhard D, Shadow Matter and Psychic
Phenomena, Oxford: Mandrake, 1993.

Wassermann hypothesises that man consists of an ordinary

matter body and, in addition, a Shadow Matter Body which
includes a Shadow Matter Brain. Furthermore, that after
the death of the ordinary matter body the Shadow Matter
Body and its Shadow Matter Brain could live on possibly
indefinitely. The persistence of Shadow Matter could account
for a number of psychic phenomena such as: ghosts, out-ofbody experiences etc.
Nattress, Emma, The First One Hundred, An Inquiry into the
Actuality of Psychic Phenomena (unpublished work (2002).
Ring, Kenneth, Life at Death: Scientific Investigation of the

Near-Death Experience, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan,
1980.
Kbler-Ross, Elizabeth, On Life After Death, Berkley, CA:
Celestial Arts, 1991.
Moody, Raymond, Life After Life, Covington, GA: Mockingbird,
1975.
(1) Hardy, Alister, The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study in
Contemporary Religious Experience, Oxford: Clarenden
Press, 1979; (2) Hay, David, Exploring Inner SpaceIs God
still possible in the twentieth century? Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1982; (3) Beardsworth, Timothy,
A Sense of Presence, Oxford: The Religious Experience
Research Unit, 1979; (4) Pupynin Olga and Simon Brodbeck,
Religious Experience in London, Lampeter: Religious
Experience Research Centre, 2001.
Twemlow, Stuart W, Glen O Gabbard and Fowler C Jones,
The Out-of-Body Experience: Phenomemology in Robert A
Monroe, Far Journeys, New York: Broadway Books 2001,
274-290.
Emma Nattress is a former senior researcher and analyst. She

holds degrees from Murdoch University, Western Australia (B.A.,
Southeast Asian Studies and M.Phil., Theology). Her current
doctoral research focuses on contemporary mystical experience.
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25
Julian Candy
University of Kent at Canterbury 21 - 23 August 2009
ourteen years ago we gathered at

St Johns College Cambridge for the
first Beyond the Brain conference.
The powerful impetus generated on that
occasion has fuelled further meetings
every other year, three in all last century
and five this. So this years event marks
the beginning of a second set of seven,
providing an apposite moment to take
stock. Has the cultural climate shifted?
Were topics and themes discussed this
year that could not have featured 14
years ago? Do we now have a clearer
and more complete map of the territory
that lies beyond the brain, or indeed
beyond the grave? Can we speak of
progress?
At first glance we might note with

satisfaction the contrast between the titles
of the first and eighth Conferences: New
Avenues in Consciousness Research
and Self and Death What Survives?
One cautious and non-specific, the other
much more focussed and daring to
assume the fact of survival.
But then some of us may recall
that opening address in 1995 by
Willis Harman, then President of the
Institute of Noetic Sciences, who
so sadly died between the first and
second Conferences. He had written
extensively about what he called the new
metaphysical foundations of modern
science. At that first Conference he
talked about the need to change the
assumptions and presuppositions that
make up the central myth of our culture,

but to change it wisely, without falling
back into superstition. He described
the beginnings of a unifying vision that
might draw together emerging findings,
in for example the understanding of the
causal efficacy of consciousness and
the role of non-local effects in psychical
research, with the already established
discoveries of science.
Against this background we may wonder
whether we can speak of progress. What
today are our metaphysical foundations?
Do we have a coherent, or indeed an
evolving, central myth? How far on are
we with the journey that brings us closer
to a unifying vision? So let us return to
the eighth Conference.
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reports
Beyond the Brain VIII: Self

and Death What Survives?
reports

To anticipate a little my conclusion,
the physical setting for this meeting
was curiously appropriate to its
content. We arrived on a showery
Friday afternoon to face daunting
difficulties in locating reception, the
accommodation, the dining hall, the
lecture theatre, all spread over three
separate sites. Especially if elderly
or disabled, as many were, getting
from place to place, even later during
the weekend when we hoped we knew
where we were going, was often a
lengthy and frustrating procedure. A
signposting for disabled access led
no further than to a long featureless
corridor. Room numbering failed to
conform to the conventional integer
sequence. Vast windows gave sudden
provocative glimpses of a distant and
unattainable city clustered round its
cathedral, far below and bathed in
damp sunshine. Yet as it turned out
the accommodation was comfortable,
the food particularly tasty, the lecture
hall quite satisfactory, the format and
presentations of high quality (thanks for the eighth time - to our indefatigable
Programme Director David Lorimer), the
technical and general arrangements
excellent (thanks to Martin Redfern
and Charla Devereux), and the city
was Canterbury, for some of us the
spiritual centre of England.
Following custom, on the first
evening David Lorimer introduced the
topic before enabling the speakers
to introduce themselves. He noted,
following Freud, our inability to envision
our own death, an event that Freud as
an atheist took to imply extinction,
though many at this conference might
regard it as a process of transition or
even transformation. Much evidence
suggested enhancement rather than
diminution of awareness once the
body had dropped away.
The following morning we enjoyed
a lucid and balanced presentation of
some of that evidence by Professor
Bruce Greyson, Director of the
Institute of Perceptual Studies at
the University of Virginia. Belief in
post-mortem survival is based not
on wishful thinking but on much
experiential evidence. Founded forty
years ago by Dr Ian Stephenson, his
Institute continues to amass data
relating to previous lives of people
now living, to people now dead who
continue to manifest to the living,
and to the independence of the mind
from the brain, including near death
experiences. He outlined some of Dr
Stephensons meticulous work with
young children who manifest cognitive
and personality characteristics of
deceased people unknown to them,
www.scimednet.org
sometimes including birthmarks and

bodily features relating to the mode
of death.
He recounted striking
examples of drop-in apparitions
who manifest unexpectedly through
mediums with subsequently verified
accounts of events quite unknown
to those present. While evidence
that mind may function separately
from brain provides only indirect
evidence of post-mortem survival, it
is nonetheless a necessary if not
sufficient condition -- and it is there in
profusion, from demented people who
become lucid before death, through
severe hydrocephalics with normal
intelligence, to complex, vivid and
verifiable NDEs while heart and brain
are stopped and the body is empty
of blood.
One of the strengths of Professor
Graysons presentation lay for me
in the depth of detail he gave to the
tales he told, by many of which both
he and his audience were visibly much
moved. Our next speaker, Dr Peter
Fenwick, impressed us rather with
the range and variety of accounts he
provided, drawn from his now extensive
research into End of Life Experiences.
He spoke of premonitions of death,
death bed visitations and dreams,
death bed scenes, cultural attitudes to
death, readiness for death in relation
to a life task, coincidences, and
the odd behaviour of animals and of
mechanisms such as clocks. He then
turned to the hospital and hospice
management of death, drawing on
carers accounts of ELEs: their initial
difficulty and later relief at talking
about these relatively common events
with investigators and colleagues, and
the lack of training for those who
assist professionally at the process of
death. Death is a profoundly spiritual
experience, and yet its significance
both in itself and for life is still ignored
and marginalised. The evidence he
presented amply justified his plea that
it should be brought into much clearer
focus, both scientific and cultural.
A plea we ignore at our peril.
However, as a commentator from
the floor pointed out, neither of the
first two speakers really addressed the
question of the nature of that element
of the self that survives. Certainly
we have massive evidence that
something survives, but how should
we characterise it? In the afternoon
Dr Andrew Powell, founder chair of
the Spirituality and Psychiatry Special
Interest Group of the Royal College
of Psychiatrists, which co-sponsored
the conference, began to address
this issue.
Speaking calmly and
clearly, he used his experience of
past lives, both his own and those of

patients, to illuminate the distinction
between the mundane self, which
as its name suggests is of the earth
and dies with the body, and the soul
self, which does not. Whether or not
reincarnation is a reality, recollecting
past lives can sometimes foster
evolution and growth of the soul self,
provided unfinished business is dealt
with, reconciliation achieved, and the
death itself worked through.
His
stance was gently pragmatic rather
than dogmatic, reminiscent of the
inclusive and pluralistic many spiritual
worlds approach of Jorge Ferrer rather
than the more hierarchical and unitary
perennial philosophic construction of
Ken Wilber.
After tea Professor Betty Kovacs
continued the theme of personal
disclosure in sharing with us some
of the remarkable and enlightening
experiences surrounding the death, in
separate car accidents, of her mother,
husband and son, all within a three year
period. Following an early vision, she
characterised herself as an academic
who before these experiences was
addicted to the rational mind, for
ever requiring one more proof, one
more demonstration of the spiritual
nature of the universe. Her husband
she described as initially a natural
sceptic who could not understand
or share those early experiences.
Then a series of pre-cognitive dreams,
waking visions and synchronicities,
many shared between herself and her
husband and involving the presence of
her son after his death, transformed
all of them, bringing to her the
understanding that the whole universe
is alive, alive with love. The miracle
of death is that there is nothing but
life, to paraphrase the title of her
book. Concern about the earth in its
current struggle to bring forth a new
form of our species is reflected in the
characteristics of many of the souls
now coming to incarnation.
Some might consider that the
contributor to the conference who
provided the most satisfying and
synthesising answer to the question
posed by the title was Sir John
Tavener. He also provided continuity,
in that his composition of the piece
of music we heard after dinner
on Saturday was provoked by the
striking conversation between him
and musician Paul Robertson that
took place on the Saturday evening
two years ago at Beyond the Brain
Conference VII at Bath. In introducing
a recording of this recently premiered
work, entitled Towards Silence, Paul
told us of the serious indeed life-

illusion, where we meet with people
of like mind to conjure up a world of
our making and from which it may be
that if we choose we can reincarnate;
and then on further to the glorious
plane of colour and to the formless
planes beyond. In my fathers house
are many mansions as David aptly
quoted, and one might add dont get
stuck in one room -- the principle of
non-attachment applies as much in
the next world as in this: dont be
attached to results; angels fly because
they take themselves lightly.
In addition to the formal sessions,
we had the opportunity to debate
Conference themes in small groups,
and also enjoyed a partial and
tantalising viewing of a documentary
based on the Scole report, that
concerns a long series of remarkable
conversations between a group of
the living and a cohort of the dead.
In closing the conference David
Lorimer remarked how natural it was
for us to want to know a little of what
may await us when we die. He hoped,
though not it struck me with much
confidence, that after this weekend we
might have a better conception of the
map of the territory that lies beyond
the grave. My impression was that
although the delegates generally much
appreciated what they heard, and
enjoyed the Conference, the individual
presentations, however powerful and
intriguing, lacked explicit coherence
amongst themselves and thus did not
yet offer, to use Willis Harmans terms,
an emergent unifying vision, much
less a central myth. Rather like the
physical arrangements, each element
was good, even excellent, in itself but
did not readily come together with the
rest of the set-up to make a convenient
and easily functioning whole. The
difference of course is that the physical

arrangements can be improved and
given a little trouble a map devised
to show their relationships clearly and
unambiguously. My personal inkling
is that what lies beyond the brain and
beyond the grave cannot be mapped
because there is no territory: after all
territory relates to the earth and to
the persistence and consistency that
the dimensions of space and time
imply. This does not mean that we
must do without a vision or a myth, nor
does it deny that that there was much
implicit overlap between the different
accounts, but it does suggest that we
look towards Jorge Ferrer rather than
Ken Wilber to be our guide: streams
that feed the many-shored ocean of
spirituality rather than quadrants and
levels that tower progressively over
each other; both/and logic rather than
either/or.
So in two years time I hope that we
shall meet in a place where sleeping,
eating and participating are located
no more than a stones throw apart,
to discuss how we may preserve and
nurture that ocean of spirituality rather
than how we may clamber further up a
possibly illusory and perhaps only too
individual mountain of enlightenment.
Julian Candy is a retired psychiatrist
who worked for 30 years in the NHS.
Since retirement he has served as a
Trustee of a hospice and as a Council
member of the SMN. He is a Founding
Member of the Spirituality and
Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the
Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has
always been puzzled by consciousness,
and maintains an interest in the poet and
scientist Goethe.
www.scimednet.org
reports
threatening illnesses that recently had

struck both Sir John and himself, and
from which Sir John is so sadly not yet
fully recovered. The work comprises
four movements that may be called
Waking State, Dream State, Deep
Sleep and Unity, and draws on the
resources of four string quartets
and a large Tibetan bowl. Listening
to it provided an indescribable yet
fulfilling counterpoise to the words
that overflowed around us for the rest
of the weekend.
Next morning Portuguese diplomat
Dr Anabela Cardoso told us of
her remarkable experiences with
Instrumental TransCommunication
(ITC). This it appears is a term
referring to the emergence chiefly of
voices against background noise in
electronic devices such as radios.
These phenomena are thought to be
one way that people who have died
attempt to communicate with us, the
living. Although she found it somewhat
difficult to convey the impact of her
results, given that her examples were
chiefly in Portuguese and necessarily
within a noisy ambience, she provided
a useful and interesting account
of recent growth in this field. As
Paul Devereux commented during
questions, messages that emerge
through the modulation of steady
noise have occurred through history,
as far back if not further than oracles
in ancient Greece whose utterances
were to be heard in the little cave
behind a waterfall.
Our last speaker was Dr David
Fontana. His was the most systematic
attempt to answer the question posed
by our title, and indeed to describe
the characteristics of the life that
awaits the element of us that survives
in the afterlife. He drew confidently
and fluently on a very wide range
of sources, from the great spiritual
traditions
through
mediumistic
accounts to experiences of his own
with a playful poltergeist, painting a
picture of an hereafter in which at
least initially we retain our personal
characteristics while we continue to
absorb and benefit from the lessons
of this world as we pass through the
four lower planes of the hereafter.
Our state of mind at the time of death
may well significantly influence in
what sort of place we find ourselves:
violent death or suicide may tie the
bewildered and distressed subject to
the earth as a haunting spirit, trapped
until they call for help. However,
progression through the lowest
planes of repentance and remorse
(sometimes pictured as Hades or
purgatory) will lead to the plane of
27
reports
Towards a New Renaissance 3:

Harmonising Spirituality,
Nature and Health
Berlin, 30 October- 1 November 2009
A Personal Account Claudia Nielsen
Berlin in early November was resplendent! Very cold, but the weather was beautiful!
erlin was also preparing to

celebrate the 20th anniversary
of the collapse of the Wall,
which kept West Berlin an island within
communist East Germany. I could
not forget that, as I walked around
the area in which the conference was
held, close to Friedrich Strasse, which
in a bygone time was part of East
Berlin. I walked along it just short of
20 years ago with my son, who was
then 14 on a visit shortly after those
momentous days when the Wall was
breached. It was however still mostly
there and I remember the bleakness
of the streets, the crumbling buildings
which had been so obviously glorious
in a distant past, the fearful corridors
of Check Point Charlie, through which
my son and I walked, following what
must have been fearful footsteps of
other less lucky people than us! Today
this monument to peoples misguided
exercise in power and control is gone,
and Friedrich Strasse is a bustling high
class commercial centre, a symbol of
the triumph of Western democracy and
capitalism.
This setting was not unconnected
with what we came here to discuss.
Our conference was organised
in association with the Faculty of
Agriculture and Horticulture of the
Humbolt Universitaet , and sponsored
by the Schweisfurth Foundation, an
organisation which over the last 20
years has been involved in research
and promotion of sustainable and
ecological means in food production,
animal welfare and general land care.
Over the weekend we heard a number
of presentations, given by speakers
from a variety of backgrounds. Most
of the presentations addressed
the politico-economic origins of the
difficulties we are facing regarding
the production of food, and explored
in different ways the culture which
www.scimednet.org
gave rise to the unsustainability of the

current situation. Karl Marx was quoted
more than once, not for the solutions
he proposed, but for having identified
issues which are still with us. Many
speakers addressed epistemological
issues, and education as a central
need for correct action was mentioned
often too. In spite of the critical tone
of most of the presentations, they all,
without exception, offered a vision for
a way forward.
One of the main themes to emerge,
is that a shift in consciousness is
necessary, informed by a greater
focus on understanding. Prof. Henryk
Skolimowski, Prof of Philosophy and
Chair of Eco-Philosophy at the University
of Lodz pointed out that 150 years
ago the interpretation of the world
undertaken by philosophy intended to
create heaven on earth. In our effort
to achieve this we have become so
industrious that we have tipped the
balance and are now creating hell
on earth. To redress the balance, a
whole new epistemological approach is
required in which it is recognised that
ecology is more than just environmental
protection; it is a vision rooted in
spirituality. Other speakers endorsed
this view: Heiner Benking suggested
that harmonisation, the aim embodied
in the title of the conference, required
us to step out of ones point of view to
examine an issue, and make an effort
to understand what unites different
positions, rather than what divides
them and Prof. Chris Muth mentioned
the need not only for good knowledge,
but also for good action.
The politico-economic system which
gave rise to this current situation came
under scrutiny by various speakers
and for Prof. Johannes Heinrichs the
ecological problems lie ultimately in
the nature of Western democracy. He
made the point, which has struck
me personally so often, that because

Western societies depend structurally
on economics, our kind of democracy
is not based on human rights and
values, but on stock markets. The
activities of large corporations, whose
raison dtre is to bring in ever higher
profits to fulfil the expectations of
their shareholders, frequently sacrifice
ethical and moral values in exchange
for the ever greater pressure to
increase their market share. Many of
those large corporations are involved
in the production of food.
Speaking about the politics of
food, Charla Devereux gave us the
shocking example - Monsanto, who
developed a terminator gene in seeds
of plants resistant to pests. Whereas
normally farmers keep seeds from
one crop to start the next, the sterility
of Monsantos seeds ensures that
farmers need to come back to them for
new supplies.
Although it is true that Monsanto have

put a halt on this technology, the fact
that such a major player can even think
along these lines betrays values which
are patently morally compromised. This
theme was taken further by David
Lorimer, who referred to Karl Marxs
insight that the capitalist system
runs counter to natural agriculture
because profits are privatised whereas
environmental, health and social costs
are socialised. If this was a pertinent
consideration then, how much more
so today! We were also reminded

A shift in consciousness is clearly
necessary to reconnect us to spiritual
values that inform us as human
beings. This was evident in the distant
past when cultures invested the land
with meaning, and as Paul Devereux
said, the land was the living book in
which myths are inscribed. Developing
this theme Paul showed pictures of
simulacra, landscapes of recognisable
shapes in Nature, which were seen
as sacred. The idea of course is
not to revert to the past, but to find
values congruent with the present to
reconnect us with our environment.
Many of our values in the West come
from the Bible and Johannis Heimrath,
suggested that the New Renaissance
must endeavour to follow in the same
steps of the Enlightenment which freed
us from superstition. He wants religions
to examine their texts and identify
statements that continue to foster
superstitions and teachings which are
unsustainable in the 21st century. We
must furthermore become aware that
this hubristic attitude and the culture
of greed in which we live is rooted in
our shadow side, and Matthias Ruff
suggested that work with the personal
as well as the collective shadow must
be part of any model of right action
designed to take us forward towards a
more feasible future.
Other speakers gave very interesting

presentations, Dr. Marina Wilhelm, a
linguist suggested that understanding
etymology will help us connect at a
deeper level with the original meaning
of words and consequently with the
spiritual principle which gave rise to
those words. Stephan Otto promoted
evolutionary management, suggesting
that companies follow a model which
parallels what we know of evolution
and Dr. Leszek Sosnowski explained
the role Descartes in the principles
towards which Western society bows.
From Romila Santosh we heard about
the philosophy of Ayurveda in relation
to health and living, Dr. Ove Sviden
told us about the importance of
peace for Sweden, and his personal
commitment to this principle and Prof.
Ed Sarath pointed out that the arts
also have a role in bringing about a
more conscientious future, and that
education must be in the forefront of
any proposal for the way forward.
reports
that many scientists are funded by

these large corporations and are
therefore unlikely to be independent,
with everything that this may entail!
Another depressing consequence of
the system is that maximizing profits
will typically mean below the poverty
line level of wages to workers in export
industries in developing countries,
animals forced to produce ever more
per individual irrespective of their
suffering, the depletion of soil due
to lack of regeneration, pollution by
fertilisers and pesticides etc.
In our materialistic world we have
lost the respect for Nature. This was
underlined most clearly by two speakers
intimately involved in land husbandry:
Prof Franz-Theo Gottwald and Dr.
Stephan Krall. Although Franz-Theo
comes from a perspective of abundance
and Stephan from one of scarcity, both
identified the same problems and behind
their diverse worldview, their solutions
were similar. Franz-Theo proposes that
as soon as we understand that the land
can produce enough for everyone, we
can find the solutions. Stephan on the
other hand provided us with statistics
showing the unsustainability of the
situation, for instance the relentless
growth in population on the one hand
and limited arable land in the world on
the other. (One of the consequences,
which I heard for the first time, is
the policy of land grabbing by which
countries - China and South Korea for
instance - are buying large swathes of
land in Africa to produce food to be
shipped back to their country!) Being
very familiar with those problems which
are central to their professional lives,
both speakers agreed that the solution
must come from a worldwide change of
attitude.
Both speakers pointed to the need
to minimize the consumption of meat
and dairy produce, as this large scale
industry is totally unsustainable in a
whole range of ways, from the use
of land to grow cattle food, to the
vast use of water now already a
scarce resource. Both speakers also
pointed to the need to bring production
and consumption geographically closer
together, minimising transportation
costs, and both agreed that a more
respectful treatment of the land,
to include the soil, crops, natural
resources is important, an aspect in
which the Schweisfurth Foundation of
Prof. Gottwald is deeply involved. Other
speakers referred to these aspects also
and Stephan pointed out that much of
the way forward is within the area of
politics indicating that we, the ordinary
people have power. This point was also
made by Charla who reminded us that
Rachel Carsons book Silent Spring led
directly to the banning of DDT.
29
Ed also delighted us with some

jazz on Friday, and again on Saturday
evening, when we were the guests of
Franz-Theo who hosted a delightful
dinner at an organic restaurant. Berlin
was an excellent venue, not least
because it stands as a symbol of
the defeat of communism and the
victory of democracy. On this, its 20th
anniversary though, we were forced to
look at the other side of the coin, and
realise that the same system which
brought freedom, wealth and affluence
to so many, is also indicted with bringing
many more people catastrophically
close to ill health and even death, as
well as ruining the soil and inflicting
suffering on animals and so on. And to
cap this picture of gloom, as Stephan
Krall reminded us, the even sadder
reality is that the affluent nations of
the north are likely to suffer much less
with climate change than the already
impoverished nations of the south.
This is morally unacceptable!
The conference portrayed the current
situation with all its challenges and
concerns. It is clear that only when
we realise exactly where we are will
it be possible to decide where we
want to go - then a change of attitude
becomes plausible. Different solutions
have been proposed and although a
change of attitude at corporate level
is imperative, it is at personal level
that the real power lies in bringing
about the critical mass necessary for
the values of the New Renaissance to
take hold. Green shoots of this shift of
consciousness can be seen in various
ways, not least in the fact that this
conference was one of many taking
place around the world looking at
different aspects of the current reality
This feels positive and empowering.
Claudia Nielsen is a
psychotherapist and a Vice-President
of the Network.
www.scimednet.org
reports
Science and Imagination

SMN Annual Gathering
3rd - 5th July 2009 - Lindors Country House Hotel
Max Payne
he AGM took place in the idyllic

surroundings of the Forest of
Dean during an interval of fine
sunny weather. It all added to an
enjoyable week-end. Proceedings
opened on the Friday with a challenging
exercise in deconstruction delivered
with oratorical brilliance by Lance
Butler. Using the linguistic philosophy
of Derrida he dissolved away the
certainties that many members of
the SMN might hold dear, and ended
in a state of total nihilism which
he equated with the transcendental
negativity to which Zen Buddhism
aspires. The talk aroused the most
enjoyable controversy which continued
until late in the evening.
On Saturday Marilyn Monk gave a
www.scimednet.org
fascinating insight into the connection

between mind and body. The DNA of
the genome is the hardware which
determines the workings of the body.
But the genes can be switched on
or off by chemical agents that are
the epigenetic program. In turn there
is evidence to suggest that this
epigenetic program can be affected by
emotional and environmental factors.
In this way there is a path way from
the inner subjective aspect of mind to
the outer objective expression of the
body. Not only has this implications for
prophylactic medicine, but it suggests
a new neo-Larmarckian interpretation
of biological evolution. Keith Beasley
followed with an exploration of
meditation techniques. He advocated
a discipline of active visualisation, in

contrast to one pointed concentration.
Unlike those who merely talk, he put
his insights to a practical test. His
audience were invited to undertake
the two meditations there and then,
and afterwards report their results.
Exactly half the meeting agreed with
him.
Iain McGilchrist followed with The
Divided Brain & the Making of the
Western World. He examined the
neurological paradox that the frontal
cortex of the brain is divided into a right
and left hemisphere, and yet it has a
network of connections between the
two. Functions are not crudely divided
between the hemispheres, both can
carry out the dominant functions
thought that the question was worthy

of further investigation.
In past years the opening slot in
the evening entertainment has been
taken by Di Clift with guitar and song.
In Dis absence Parmita opened the
proceedings with a lovely rendering
of a Bengali song by Tagore. This
followed by songs from Keith Wakelam
and Chris Lyons, jokes from Jacqui
Nielsen, recorder pieces by Clement
Jewitt, a reading of one of her own
poems by Diana Williams, a comic
reading by David Lorimer, and a music
quiz arranged by John Clarke. The
evening was rounded off by a Styrian
folk song by Bernard Harrer. The

Network magic worked again.
After the relaxed delight of the
Saturday evening, Sunday morning
was the time for the serious work of
the AGM. Chris Lyons explained how
the SMN had the British disease. Like
the government, and too many of the
people, the Network was spending
more money than it was getting in.
Chairman John Clarke led the AGM into
a serious discussion about what we
were to do about it. As a background
the AGM was given a paper on Crisis
as Opportunity: Seizing the moment for
a New Global Renaissance. Discussion
in groups produced many thoughtful
suggestions for the Board to follow up.
These included the Chairmans project
to make a network of networks so that
the SMN could act as a condensing
seed group to bring together all the other
groups seeking a new paradigm for the
21st century. On the other hand there
were many suggestions for bottom-up
activity including the resolution that
each SMN member should strive to
recruit a new extra member. However
perhaps the most important conclusion
was the unanimous agreement that we
were not going to allow any financial
blip to get in the way of the dynamic
progress of the SMN.
Max Payne is a Vice-President
of the Network and is seen second from
the right below, with Peter Fenwick and
John Clarke in the foreground..
www.scimednet.org
reports
of the other, yet there is a subtle

difference in the separate operation of
the hemispheres which may determine
the balance of a personality, and
indeed of a whole civilisation. The right
hemisphere is the intuitive synthetic
unifier, and the left hemisphere is
the rational analytic operator. Both
are necessary, and both hemispheres
control all functions, but the right
balance is when the right hemisphere
is the master. Our Western civilisation
suffers from an excessive dominance
by the left hemisphere.
After lunch the Gathering adjourned
to a contemplative walk around the
picturesque ruins of Tintern Abbey
to be followed by an evocative
reading of Wordsworths poem. With
a rapid switch from the right to the
left hemisphere Keith Wakelam
ended the formal proceedings with a
sophisticated analysis of the use in
modern physics of imaginary numbers
( using i the square root of -1). He
suggested that they were used as
a device to conceal the possibilities
of alternative non standard views
of physical reality such as Bohms
hidden variable or dark matter.
In the interval before Saturday
dinner Furug Neyzi demonstrated her
researches into the aura. As a psychic
she would claim to see an individuals
aura, and she was anxious to
investigate electronic apparatus which
gave coloured pictures of chakras and
auras on a monitor. The aim was to
see if there was any correlation. Many
attendees collaborated, and it was
31
32 Network Review Summer 2008
reports
Towards an Understanding of
the Primacy of Consciousness
James Le Fanu
owards was very much the

operant word in this well
attended conference at
the School of Economic Science on
11th October. For, while the gist of
the supposition of The Primacy of
Consciousness can be understood in
juxtaposition to the many intellectual
and philosophical difficulties posed by
its antithesis The Primacy of Existence
(or Matter), the term consciousness
itself proved rather too elastic, and its
non-materiality too elusive, to defy any
satisfactory conclusion.
Graham Dunstan Martin in full flow

www.scimednet.org
Thus the concept of consciousness

was variously equated, depending
on its context, with the grand
philosophical position that Mind
precedes Matter associated in the
Western tradition with Plato and
the German transcendentalists
and in Hindu spiritual writings the
Upanishads with Atman (that which
shines) as the cause of everything
exists. At other times consciousness
was deployed in the (relatively) more
restricted sense of the sense of
awareness or subjective experience

whose relationship to the material
brain the Australian philosopher
David Chalmers has described
(without understatement) as the hard
problem.
Still the proposition of
the primacy of consciousness in
either context could scarcely be more
relevant in the light of the systematic
inability of neuroscience over the past
twenty years to provide an adequate
explanation of the human experience.
Professor Dennis Blejer, an
engineering physicist associated with
the School of Practical Philosophy and
Meditation in Boston in an ambitious
opening contribution sought to reconcile
the intellectual presuppositions of
Western science with the mystical
Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta
on the grounds that both involved a
search for truth based on deep insight
or observations integrated through
the power of reason. The paradox
here, Professor Blejer argued, is that
the laws of nature, though inferred
through the methodology of science,
are themselves not amenable to
scientific verification. They are rather
axiomatic in the sense that they
are of eternal validity. This applies
most obviously to Euclids laws of
geometry but also Newtons laws of
motion, the laws of thermodynamics,
electromagnetism, relativity theory
and quantum mechanics. There is,
he suggested, a clear parallel here
with consciousness (in the sense of
subjective awareness) that is similarly
axiomatic in that it is a primary fact of
human experience, yet not susceptible
to scientific verification.
The implications of this parallelism
are certainly intriguing but, more
contentiously perhaps, Professor Blejer
then went on to claim that the much
broader concept of consciousness in
Hindu philosophy that equates it with
Brahman (Brahman is real, the world
is an illusion, the self is not different
from the Brahman) might similarly be
considered axiomatic.
Network Review Summer 2008
the primacy of consciousness. They

may affirm the experiential nature
of the world, but none assert that
experience, let alone consciousness,
is itself the fundamental reality.
Tony Morris posed the substantial
question that if, as he put it,
consciousness is so great, why is
there no evidence of it elsewhere in
the universe why has it only emerged
within this type of bipeds on a little
planet on the edge of a minor galaxy?
Rather, he claimed, we invented the
notion of consciousness to replace
God, which serves the same purpose
being an exercise in wishful thinking,
a mental defence against knowledge
or our own mortality.
The meeting closed with a vigorous
discussion between speakers and
participants with yet more reflections
on why, no matter how persuasive
the arguments for the primacy of
consciousness, it is difficult to
establish what this might entail
without lapsing into ineffective or
inconsequential speculation. Graham
Martin reminded the conference
you will never find consciousness,
because consciousness is doing the
looking.
Dr. James Le Fanu combines practice
as a family doctor in South London with
writing a twice weekly column for the
Daily Telegraph. His books include
The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
that won the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize and, published this year, Why
Us?: How Science Rediscovered the
Mystery of Ourselves (quite wonderfully
refreshing A N Wilson).
www.scimednet.org
reports
The anti-materialist philosopher

Graham Dunstan Martin, author
of Does it Matter and Living with
Purpose in his contribution The
Case for Mind as the Maker of the
Universe: a philosophical perspective
approached the issue of the primacy of
consciousness from a rather different,
if perhaps more readily accessible,
perspective. He first drew attention
to the fragility and intellectual
inconsistencies
of
materialist
explanations of consciousness. This
is most apparent in its inability to
account for the raw sensory material
of conscious experience, or qualia
as perceived through the senses.
There is an absolute gulf between
the electrochemical message and the
subjective experience, he argued,
once something passes from the
world of physical processes over the
threshold of consciousness, [the
scientists] physical instruments fall
silent.
This obviously leads to the question
of the origin of consciousness and
the inadequacy of having to suppose it
must have evolved from unconscious
(non purposive) matter. It is just as
probable that it did not so evolve (at
least in the sense that evolution is
commonly interpreted) but rather that
consciousness is the fundamental
property of the universe, so
fundamental indeed that the universe
could as readily have been created by
consciousness.
The evidence for this proposition
is in the first instance logical, in the
sense that the universe must have
had a beginning thus requiring it to
have been brought into existence by
some non material force. Martin also
claimed it can be inferred empirically
from the experience of mystics of
both Eastern and Western traditions.
From them we learn the universe
is a vast living unity, with which our
consciousness is linked at a deep
level. This Whole is ineffable: it is
utterly beyond normal comprehension;
it possesses power, timelessness,
bliss, knowledge and benevolence.
The third main speaker, Dr Elisabet

Sahtouris, prolific author and member
of the World Wisdom Council, described
how though trained as a scientist
she became disillusioned with the
immensely influential Darwinian
perspective that we inhabit a nonliving universe from which by some
miracle life emerged from non-life,
intelligence from non-intelligence. The
reverse, she maintains, is the case.
We inhabit a living universe where
consciousness is not, as commonly
portrayed, a late emergent product
of materialist evolution but its exact
opposite. This in turn has profound
implications for the prevailing
materialist version of biology where
rather we should suppose that our
cells know what they are doing and
the genome is intelligent.
There was a rather more critical
tone to the prepared five minute
contribution from the floor of the
afternoon session.
David Lawton
from Manchester, while conceding
that consciousness is not merely a
secondary attribute of highly evolved
creatures, took issue with the
reasoning behind two assumptions that
are often cited in favour of its primacy.
The first is the filter hypothesis
of brain functioning to account for
subjective experience as opposed to
the conventional generative model
with the supposition it acts as a
transmission device picking up the
messages from consciousness and
translating them into individuals
perceptions. Next he challenged the
claim that the insights from mystical
traditions offer empirical support for
33
co r r e s p o n d e n ce
34 Network Review Summer 2008
Astrology and Experience

Kurt Dressler adds:
or an experienced astrologer it wouldnt even be necessary to

search for five-minute differences between birth charts to arrive
at quite different interpretations of one and the same chart.
I know enough about the rules applied by them to enable me to
correlate any one and the same arbitrarily chosen birth chart with any
number of different sets of character traits. To gain more flexibility in
doing this astrologers have over the centuries incorporated more and
more elements into their charts, starting with the newly discovered
outer planets Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, knots of the lunar orbit, variety
of systems defining the limits of houses and of angular tolerances
applied to aspects and other features. The more honest astrologers
admit that results depend on intuition rather than on rational analysis,
and intuition apparently doesnt work in double blind tests.
From: Rudolf H. Smit, rudolf.h.smit@hccnet.nl

I read your brief opinion on astrology in the latest issue of the
Network Review (page 35. Although I have been a successful
astrologer myself, I can only agree with your assessment. Since
2000 I am running a website: www.astrology-and-science.comwhich
has been named the best site on the subject by the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific. You will find lots and lots of material that will
corroborate your findings. In any case, you can read my life story on
this site: Astrology, my passion, my life, my personal disaster.
From: Phoebe Wyss, astrophoebe@btinternet.com

In an extract from a letter, published under Correspondence in the
Network Review Winter 2009/10, Kurt Dressler describes how his
experience as the father of identical twins whose personalities are
as different as is imaginable, has led him to question the validity
of astrology.
He says astrologers explain this by stressing the time differences
between twins births. Although, he says, in a minority of cases the
divergence in birth times produces different rising signs and house
cusps, that cause different personality traits, Kurt argues rightly
that these variations are mostly too minute to make a noticeable
difference.
I believe Kurt has raised a very important issue here, as it takes
us deep into the mystery of how astrology works. And it does work,
otherwise I would not have spent thirty years of my life studying it,
and working as a consulting astrologer. During this time Ive had
many opportunities to compare the patterns in twins horoscopes
with their manifestation in personalities and life stories. Also my
grandmother was a twin and, as she was very unlike her sister, from
early on I was intrigued by the question of how the same birth chart
could apply to both. That led me on the quest to understand how
astrology works, which led me to join the SMN, and out of my current
understanding, which is a work in progress, I would like to offer the

following explanation.
In the majority of cases the birth charts of twins are closely alike, as
they are born on an average of fifteen minutes apart. Exceptions are
when the ascendant changes signs between the births of the first and
second twin. The contiguous signs in the zodiac are very dissimilar,
so a different ascendant, also giving different house cusps, will result
in different personality traits. I remember one client with a Sagittarius
sun and Aquarius rising. She was outgoing, sociable and had many
friends. Her twin, however, who had Pisces rising, was introverted
and led a retired life devoted to her spiritual path. The two twins thus
appeared as different as imaginable. I have other similar cases on my
files. More generally, it seems that we are not separate from others
as we believe, but each individual person is part of the greater human
field. For further details see: www.astrophoebe.com. A longer version
of this letter with other examples and an explanation of archetypal
astrology can be found under Members Articles.
From: Sue Lewis, suelewis7@tiscali.co.uk, www.api-uk.org

In response to Kurt Dresslers dismissal of astrology based on his
experience of bringing up twins born within five minutes of each other,
I would like to make the following points:
Professor Dressler states that as his twins were born five minutes
apart they have identical charts and denigrates the suggestion made
by astrologers that five minutes can make a difference, e.g. change of
Ascendant, change of Moon sign etc., but he does not make it clear
whether or not their charts have been drawn up and whether any such
differences exist.
Research has found that twins brought up in separate environments
can show more similarities than twins brought up together who may
develop complementary characteristics to stimulate each other.
Birth chart interpretations are sensitive to minute details and
individuals can be operating at different levels of awareness.
Although people have been observing skies and recording
the interaction between macrocosm and microcosm since time
immemorial astrology does not usually perform well in scientific tests.
Nevertheless significant results concerning athletes, scientists and
politicians were obtained from statistical research undertaken by
Michel and Franoise Gauquelin.
The Astrological Psychology developed by the Swiss astrologers
Bruno and Louise Huber was founded on research and contact with
the psychosynthesis clients of Roberto Assagioli.
Insofar as the astrological chart provides not only a guide to selfunderstanding but also a framework of reference that opens a way to
understanding the wider world beyond immediate consciousness it is
a worthy topic for consideration by Scientific and Medical Network.
Fostering the Process of Change

From: George Henson, George_Henson@hotmail.com
The Review 100 and Manifesto for Change I found most
stimulating -- particularly the emphasis on practicalities. The whole
process of change in world views, values and our attitudes to
working more closely together is quite complex. As one instance,
individuals and whole organisations often resist changes of such
depth, without acknowledging the fears and resentments arising
from the proposed changes. Pressures and publicity aggravate,
but deeply sincere wishes to help and skilful means can heal. Then
logical discussions become possible. Building these skills involves
learning from experience, informed by neuroscience, management
models, proven codes of practice and of course empathy.
A start could be in small groups of SMN members sharing
understandings of the change processes. Then local groups could
share experiences and research results before suggesting guidelines for a handbook to be published eventually. It might be called
Wisdom in Practice: guide-lines for people and organisations! An
www.scimednet.org
example may be useful. Members in Australia might look at the

work done by their International Centre for Vocational Education
and Training. Some years ago the Centre assisted a national
programme aimed to assist development of professional people in
the knowledge era. It emphasised wisdom leadership at all levels.
Published think pieces explored the relationships between wisdom
and spirituality as affected by defined alternative organisational
cultures. I encountered this work via www.icvet.tafensw.edu.au/
ezine/year_2006/nov_dec/thinkpiece_business_wisdom
The researcher was Maret Staren with links to an executive
summary of the whole work and to Miller & Miller on wisdom &
spirituality. Via these materials I sketched guidelines for fostering
deep changes as sketched above. I am still studying the validity
of those sketches. Others may wish to do the same. I am working
in Lancaster University on related matters and might form a small
group of nearby Members, if needed.
Network Review Summer 2008
SMN BOOK CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY

Many thanks to those members who have submitted proposed chapters for the
book. The final editorial selection will be made in January, and the book will
be published by Floris Books with a launch conference in early November. Any
submissions not selected will be posted on the website.
TOM WELCH DONATION
The Network has received a substantial donation from the estate of Lt Col Tom
Welch, who died last year. Toms career spanned a great range of activities,
including that of tank commander and farmer. Tom was a man of strong will and
determined action, a leader and initiator of many projects. Finding the Findhorn
Community in Scotland, and living there for three years in the mid-1970s, as
one of the Foundations directors, opened Tom to another world that he had
previously only allowed himself to glimpse.
For the rest of his life, Tom searched for knowledge of the spiritual world that
he knew to lie within and beyond the physical world. He combined this quest
with a love of the rest of the natural world, and a wish to play his part in making
the earth habitable for future generations. Like all of us, Tom found the contrary
leanings of his nature, the perfectionist commanding officer and the ardent
spiritual pilgrim, sometimes irreconcilable. He was a good friend to many people
and one of the kindest of men, always with a twinkle in his eye.
PERSPECTIVES
March 6th, 2010, Oxford Quakers Meeting House, 43 St. Giles Road, Oxford
Charla Devereux writes: This is the first in what may be a series of Tough Talks
on Tough Topics, inaugurating a SMN Oxford Local Group. It will be a one-day
event with three speakers. The idea behind the Perspectives events is to have
expert speakers present differing perspectives on given questions. We feel
that a serious debate from different angles on a given topic can often reveal
unexpected insights.
This first event takes on the question: Do We Know Our Own Minds? an
inquiry into the nature of consciousness. Two of the speakers will be Serena
Roney-Dougal and Paul Devereux. The third speaker, who will be a major figure
on the more reductionist approach to consciousness, is still under negotiation
at the time we go to press. Also scheduled will be properly adequate time for
debate between speakers and the audience, the members of which are seen
very much as participants in Perspectives. A reduced rate will be available
for students. Although there have been many conferences on the nature of
consciousness, there have been surprisingly few open debates in one place like
this on the topic.
For further information contact the office on 01608 652000 or email charla@
scimednet.org
NEW MEMBERS, August - December 2009
We welcome the following members who have joined us since August:
NAME
Abrams, Erik
Arts, Julie
Baillie, Richard
Bennett, Ruth
Braidwood, Cameron
Brett-Taylor, Carole
Carter, David
Catto, Neil
Chamberlain, David
Charlton, Valerie
Christina, Lynn
Collins, Mick
Colls Hammond, Jennifer
Corrall, David
Crampton, Frances
Cranbourne-Rosser, Melody
Cusden-Ross,Matty
Davey, Edmund
Downing, John
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and Office Procedures
Please help your administration

office to run smoothly and so help
you efficiently:
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(address, telephone number,
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n use your membership number
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Subscriptions
Because SMNs accounting year ends in

December, it needs subscriptions to be
paid in January, before it incurs the cost of
providing members services for the year.
Regardless when you paid your subscription
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network news
NETWORK NEWS
35
network news

Fabrikant, Rivka
Faire, Marie
Frost, Chris
Gabriel, Agnes Margaret
Garcia-Cantu, Ross
Gibbons, Julie
Goodship, Stuart
Gordon, David
Greyson, Bruce
Gurr, Roger
Hackwood, Keith
Hammond, Christopher
Hatzimihail, Katerina
Hope, Janet
Hopthrow, Lizzie
Howard, Jennifer
Jackson, Nannette
Jaeger, Diane Mary
Janes, Hilarie
Johnson, Brenda
Kilcullen, Evelyn
Kilmartin, Lynda
King, Paul
Knudsen, Jakob
Koetser, Harry
Koetser, Marion
Kossatz, Gunnar
Kseyinoglu, Mustafa
Leek, Rita
March, Thierry
Millard, Colin Michael
Morrison, Catherine
Moss, Lorraine
Naydler, Jeremy
Newman, Jeffrey
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Parkins, Eric
Pool, John
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Riley, Gillian
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Sayer, Mark
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Sharratt, Mark
Shaw, John Howard
Shearer, Pauline
Sheehan, Michael
Silverman, Andrew
Slaughter, Jeremy
Smythies, John
Spaas, Godelieve
Taylor, Stephen
Tornes, Tordis
Tregwin, Tina
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BRYCE TAYLOR Bryce@oasishumanrelations.org.uk
Evolutionary Consciousness
and Contemporary Spirituality:
A call to engage in a new
initiative background taken
together contemporary
spirituality, spiritual emergence
and evolutionary consciousness
express a sense of space and
openness, and also create
a field of activity that can be
contested and dialogued over
as well as experimented with
and researched. The interest
in these three complementary
aspects of the shift in
consciousness that is taking
place has brought Oasis and
its work to a new stage in its thinking.
First, contemporary spirituality: here we have a
useful term that is particularly easy on the ear and not
threatening, which can create a vehicle for many different
kinds of practices, views, beliefs and faiths to travel if
not on the same road then in a similar overall direction.
Secondly, spiritual emergence: is a valuable description
of how meaning-making becomes increasingly important
to people at varying stages in their lives as a result of any
number of events, experience or circumstances. Spiritual
emergence arises out of the search for, and is a way
in which to move towards, evolutionary consciousness.
Frequently the process of spiritual emergence is anything
but easy or takes the form of a smooth transition.
Thirdly, evolutionary consciousness similarly leaves open
to the imagination just what it might mean (though it is
a bit more of a mouthful than contemporary spirituality).
Essentially, if human consciousness is the most evolved
aspect of creation on this planet (dont you just shudder
when you realise that?), then we are it and we had better
get on with it a good deal more seriously than we have.
These themes overlap in a way that Oasis could usefully
contribute towards evolving. There is a role for assisting
people to identify where meaning lies and to help them find
it. I see this as a facilitative contribution.
Oasis would like to respond and to help create a small
team of facilitators who would initiate people into useful
dialogue and exploration about their experience (from a
Whole Person Learning perspective); help them set up
useful experiments to test out their views and to provide
some useful structure to gain deeper experience of some
of the foundation stones for inquiry meditation, chanting
all in a light touch way and as an illustration of the rich
treasure house of what is available.
CHERYL HUNT - BASS
The British Association for the
Study of Spirituality (BASS) is
in the process of establishing
itself as a collaboration of
existing centres and individual
researchers whose area of
interest is in some aspect of the
study of spirituality. Its intention
is promote interdisciplinary and
inter-professional understanding
in this field; it welcomes
international perspectives and
BEATA BISHOP
New Gerson Centre in Hungary
The first Gerson Health Centre in Europe has been opened
in Hungary in a protected area of natural beauty 30 km
outside Budapest. Here two-week residential courses are
being held on the theory and practice of the nutritionbased Gerson Therapy. Accredited by the Gerson Institute
of California, the Centre is of interest to cancer patients
and others suffering from chronic degenerative diseases,
or those wanting to learn about prevention and an optimal
lifestyle. Full details from info@gerson.hu
LOCAL GROUP NEWS

Swedish Group
BO AHRENFELT +46470126 00
Our next meeting will be held in sterlen 21-22 May 2009.
Organizer is Gert Hyrks, gerth.hyrkas@telia.com
Bo Ahrenfelt writes:
The Swedish National group held the autumn meeting
in Mullsj 4-5 September hosted by Jens Allwood. Jens
had invited Jan Brmark as speaker. Jan is Dr. philos,
professor in Theory of Science, Department of Theory of
science and research, Gteborg University, Sweden. Has
published books and articles on Abraham Maslow, the
psychology of self actualization, anthropology of knowledge
and ethno-medicine.
He has done research on interdisciplinary sciences,
nursing care research, Tibetan Buddhist medicine, Western
traditions in psychotherapy and psychology of science. I
expected an interesting day, and I certainly got it! On the
Friday evening we had informal talks together with good food
and wine, which is our tradition in the Swedish group. We
also always do a brief but quite personal presentation of
ourselves to get us in an open mood.
Jan started off on the Saturday by discussing how
Buddhism can be interpreted from a Western point of
view and within our traditional concepts. As a religion or
as soteriology, as philosophy or as ontology. From my
point of view I agree with Jan that Buddhism is indeed a
philosophy, particularly of change and can be used even in
management training and organisational development as
well as on individual basis. Jan pointed out that it can also
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membership. The development of BASS is currently being

carried forward by a working Executive with a view to moving
to the election of officers in 2010.
BASS will host an international conference, Spirituality
in a Changing World, from 4-6 May 2010, at Cumberland
Lodge in Windsor Great Park, London, in association with
the National Spirituality and Mental Health Forum. The
conference is concerned with the relevance of spirituality
for the socio-economic, political, and cultural challenges
of contemporary society on the global stage. Keynote
speakers include Linda Woodhead, Bob Neimeyer, Rebecca
Nye, Samuel Feemster, Harold Koenig and Ursula King.
Further details can be obtained from Jane McAteer at the
University of Hull ( j.mcateer@hull.ac.uk).
BASS is also working with Pier Professional (formerly
Pavilion Journals) to develop a new journal focusing on the
study of spirituality and its implications for professional
practices. Contact Cheryl Hunt at the University of Exeter
for details, and to discuss potential contributions ( c.hunt@
exeter.ac.uk).
37
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be seen as a form of psychotherapy, as it is a way how
we can manage affect and psychological pain in everyday
life, or it can be used as a psychology and a way to better
mental and bodily health. And as many of our members
are aware of, mindfulness meditation is today used in
very traditional psychiatry against depression and panic
disorders for example. The benefits for our body-selves are
today also beyond doubt.
Emotions are not bad and they are a part of every second
of our lives. They give us important information about the
situation we are in and about ourselves. The challenge and
goal for training is not to be a slave under them and act
from a reactive position without control. The metaphor he
used was that just as water flows off from the lotus flower
can negative affect be released from our minds, which is
a very good thing as these emotions and affects have a
system impact and can cause illnesses and disease.
After that Jan discussed meditation as a method
that starts in intellectual training and analysis before it
takes us beyond the intellect. Our concepts are usually
static but reality is dynamic. From conceptualization and
everyday boundaries of consciousness, we go beyond our
concepts as well as our intellectual analysis where we
can experience our true nature. Anyone meditating has
experienced how meditation can free our dynamic creativity
and we find new ways of handling life and work.
Motivation was another aspect of Buddhism he
emphasized as it decides the field of perception that we
choose to become aware of. Modern perception research
has proven this point valid. The old saying is correct, we
see what we want to see, even if it is an unconscious
process most of the time. Then he continued to talk about
the four Noble truths, the eight-fold path, our Buddha
nature and the relativity of absolute truth.
As he himself is within the Tibetan tradition he gave us
an interesting lecture of the four schools. The older way,
Tsongkhapa, Gelopa and the oral tradition and how the
education is organised to become a Geshe. It became quite
clear to me that one of their basic pedagogic perspectives
is badly needed within the Swedish school system, in our
universities, organisations and companies. The training
is structured as a diagnostic process. Listen, reflect and
meditate. One should listen as an ill person gets medicine.
To take it on board and to learn with the right motivation.
Here I came to think about Antonovsky and his SOC, sense
of coherence. Reflect on and question what you hear and
test it. Dont take anything for granted. Bite the gold coin!
As we all know, to understand the words does not mean
that we have understood the meaning.
The last part, meditation, is an integrative process where
we take on board and accept the things we have listened
to, questioned and reflected upon. It is a developmental
process not so far away from psychotherapy and personal
development. The big difference from our Western view,
as I see it, is that we emphasize a strong and separate
ego, while in the Buddhist tradition they emphasized
egolessness, a pathology in our psychiatry. As Western
psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists have
a lot to learn from Buddhism regarding their concepts of
emptiness and egolessness. Many times I think we stop
when the Great journey into the true nature of mind and
consciousness begins. This might even save the world one
day! At the end of a very interesting day Jan talked about
Tibetan medicine. To study medicine, he claimed, is a way
to study Buddhism.
Irish Group
JACQUI NIELSEN - +353 (876) 488748
On 12th September Professor Ivor Browne, F.R.C.P.I.,
F.R.C.Psych., M.Sc., D.P.M. , a member of the Network, gave
a talk to the Ireland Group on the subject of Delayed Onset
PTSD.
The central thesis put forward by the speaker was that
When something happens we do not fully experience it
as it happens
The integration of experience is a process, taking place
over time, involving neurophysiological and somatic
work
There is a common misunderstanding of unresolved
traumatic experience as repressed memory. This leads to
the description of subsequent surfacing of such experience
to consciousness as reliving or remembering when it may
more properly be understood as delayed experiencing for the
first time.
When an event takes place we may not fully experience
it as it happens. We do take an impression of the raw
experience, otherwise it would no longer exist within us. But
integration fails to progress beyond this point. This is why
such experiences, if activated years later, are experienced as
happening now.The experience breaks through and causes
flashbacks, nightmares, etc. This triggers painful emotional
responses, which the individual once again tries to suspend,
but now only partially successfully.This then gives rise to the
full-blown syndrome of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Freuds original position was to accept patients accounts
of early sexual abuse as real and to ascribe all cases of
neurosis to such experience in childhood but in the spring
of 1897 he changed his stance owing to the reaction his
theory provoked. His new explanation, already promoted by
Fournier and Brouardel, was to ascribe patients accounts
of childhood sexual abuse to fantasy. This was the genesis
of psychoanalysis and it set back the awareness of the
frequency and serious consequences of sexual abuse by a
century.
In the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual the distinction between acute, chronic and delayed
onset PTSD is now accepted. A long period, often of
many years, may elapse following the trauma, before
the emergence of the acute symptoms of PTSD. During
this latent phase patients may show few symptoms,
only a constricted life pattern, with recurrent episodes of
depression. Activation may occur due to another trauma of
a similar kind e.g. a person who was sexually abused as a
child may in adult life be raped.
But the Activation need not be a further serious traumatic
episode. It can be something as simple as the first night in
the marriage bed, or watching a TV programme about sexual
abuse. This for most people may be entirely normal. But
because this touched the sensitive frozen experience, for
this person, the effect may be catastrophic and unleash fullblown PTSD.
Once Activation has taken place the individual is now in
a dysfunctional state, unable to maintain the freeze so as
to be able to cope, but, on the other hand, unable to fully
experience and integrate the blocked trauma of many years
earlier. When a person is subjected to the same traumatic
experience again, and again. e.g. where there is incestuous
abuse within the family, the child is faced with an impossible
situation. Dissociation is then likely to supervene with a
splitting of the personality. In this way the two dimensions
of the personality continue to learn and develop quite
separately - one visible and available to consciousness, the
other hidden and only likely to appear when activated.
The phenomenon of revictimisation is that many patients
suffering from Post Traumatic Stress seem to be stuck as if
Cambridge Group
HAZEL GUEST 01223 369148
On 11th November Dr Patricia Fara of Clare Collegespoke
onthe topic What is Science?. She started witha
historical summary and then progressed to current
issues,refraining from actually answering the question in
her title butinstead raising a number of related questions.
The discussion was, as usual, lively and focussed.
We meet next on Wednesday 13th January 2010 when
Dr Steve Minett willintroduce the topicFolk Psychology --from Monotheism to Evolutionary Psychology.
The origins of Folk Psychology can be traced to
monotheistic theology, as refined and articulated by
Descartes. It was later radically changed, first by
Nineteenth Century Science and then by Twentieth
Century Neuro-Philosophy. More recent commentators
have identified its influence on early Cognitivism, and
Evolutionary Psychologists and others are now suggesting
that it may have beneficial causal effects.
7.40 for 8pm start in Hazel Guests flat which is
44 Beaufort Place, Thompsons Lane, Cambridge CB5 8AG.
Tel: 01223 369148.
London Group
CLAUDIA NIELSEN 0207 431 1177
The talks below have been recorded and members can hear
or download them from Summaries of Previous Events of the
London Group page of the Networks website.
August - Medicine and Modernity: from Botticelli to Botulus
In his talk Dr. Athar Yawar, a member of the Board of the
SMN, psychiatrist and former senior editor of The Lancet,
expanded on his view that although scientific and medical
knowledge has advanced exponentially over last 200 years,
so has dissatisfaction with medicine. Many rigorously
validated treatments have been developed over the years
but we are sicker than ever. We have worldwide more mental
illnesses, infectious diseases, malnutrition, chronic and
degenerative illnesses etc. Modernity sees science as the
only credible source of knowledge. Just like modern science,
in which we distance ourselves from the object studied,
modern medicine has moved away from the humanity of
the patient. Modernity has left us with a medicine without
soul and without a choice, for it excludes competing
worldviews, and yet, although a body of knowledge can be
coherent and consistent within its own terms it can never be
comprehensive for there are an infinite number of ways to
look at something. Modern medicine is unambiguous in its
view that people are matter and illness happens when the
structure of matter breaks down.
This is an epistemological belief held even in the absence
of evidence for, as Athar pointed out, nobody has ever
proven that the most common mental illnesses are caused
by neurotransmitter imbalances. But we hold this belief as
an article of faith. Athar, on the other hand, acknowledges
that modern medicine has the ability to ease much suffering
with things like anaesthesia, antibiotics, pain killers, etc
yet, the further away we go from problems of brute matter,

e.g. a broken bone, the less effective we are in handling
suffering. The broken heart for instance gets treated by
anti-depressants which cut us off from our own emotions.
Even more deplorable is the fact that nowadays it is difficult
to do good science in medicine without the backing of the
state or of multinational corporations who have their own
agendas. The result is that we are treated with toxins rather
than tonics and the trials which validate those drugs are
themselves often questionable.
September The World is our Cloister: the modern religious life
Following a childhood of devotion, Jennifer Kavanagh
abandoned her Anglican faith at the age of 18. She was
a literary agent for many years until she started to feel
disillusioned at the same time as she started to feel the
need to re-engage with her spirituality. A life of faith she
feels, is not a rational choice but an inner felt need. Realising
that everyone may have different experiences and ways of
expressing their faith, hers is in a connecting principle a
life force something deep within every part of Creation and
when she is aware and open she sometimes gets a glimpse
of this connection which becomes a guiding force in her life.
Jennifer is a Quaker and silence is the fundamental way for
her to connect with this principle. By silence she means more
than lack of spoken word, it is a stillness, a withdrawal from
communication.
Jennifer was baptised Anglican, born of an agnostic Russian
Jewish mother and an atheist father and she is interested in
commonality of faith, rather than religion. Wanting to know
how other people experience their faith Jennifer wrote a book
with the same title as the talk, for which she interviewed a
number of people. Her view is that beliefs, practices and
creeds divide us whereas the quest for the divine, the attempt
to live a faith a spiritual life can be universal. Although
spiritual direction is important she is interested in people
without labels - people who pick and mix, which although can
be quite superficial, she recognises that it can also be a deep
search for authenticity. She talked about prayer, which has a
different meaning for her than what is generally understood.
In her prayers she does not ask for results as she does not
know what the right outcome should be. Thy will be done
the only thing that can be said will be done anyway, but she
uses it as a way of aligning herself.
Prayer for her is therefore about this intention and also
about mindfulness, which she endeavours as a way of life.
She does not separate the sacred and the secular which
paradoxically she says, is one of the hardest as well as the
simplest thing to do. The moral aspect of faith, involves being
true to ones values and principles, which for her includes
a withdrawal from news and media, which she knows well
having worked in the industry for many years.
And then there is work. A spiritual life involves a life of service
for others, and in her case it is work in the field of prison
reform, conflict resolution and micro-credit in Africa. She is
also working on her third book.
October Science and
Imagination
Prof. Marilyn Monk, UCL
Emeritus Professor of
Molecular Embryology at the
Institute of Child Health and
a member of the Board of
Directors of the SMN, told
us that scientists stand shy
of accepting an engagement
with imagination because
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there were a theme running through their life. They continue

to be subjected to the same kind of traumatic experience,
over and over again. (e.g. where there has been sexual abuse
early in childhood, one finds the person being abused by
others in adolescence and then perhaps subjected to rape or
other kinds of sexual abuse again and again in adult life.)
This is an abridged version of my report on Ivors talk. The
full report has been posted on the SMN website in the Irish
Group area.
39
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imagination can lead to belief! Imagination is the mental
faculty of forming images of external objects not present
to the senses and this can lead to belief - the acceptance
of an imagined object as true - and for this reason
the concept is drummed out of young scientists. But
imagination is necessary to postulate a hypothesis and
the one she presented is in two parts: that epigenetic
programming determines life view, and that the reverse
may be also true, that this programming can be reversed by
changing life view. Epigenetic programming is the software
of our genome, determining which genes are on and which
are off.
DNA can be modified in various ways and Marilyns
scientific work has involved the modification of one of the
components of DNA the methylation of the DNA base
cytosine. Methylation has the effect of turning a gene off.
Studies with animal models have shown that this process is
reversible. Rat pups with bad mothers have methylated their
glucocorticoid receptor gene in the hippocampus and are in
a constant state of stress. When however these pups are
moved to a good mum, this can be reversed. Similarly, recent
studies on suicide victims have shown that methylation of the
glucocoticoid receptor gene in the hippocampus was present
in people who had a childhood of abuse. Imagination may
be the key to reverse this process of programming by early
experience of the environment to a lifetime of stress and
compromised well-being. Imagination triggers ones neurology
and physiology in the same way as the real experience.
Evidence of its power exists for example in the success
of sports psychology and psychoneuroimmunology, both
based on the power of suggestion, sometimes erroneously
dismissed as placebo effect.
Brain imaging studies show that the same areas in
the brain fire up whether the individual is having an
experience in the external world or inwardly, as a product
of imagination. Mirror neurones seem to show that we
can even experience the world by affinity, through the
experience of others. In the past, people have debated
the influences of Nature (genes we inherit) versus Nurture
(conditioning by the environment). But these are not
competing influences and it is more relevant to consider
the constant interplay of our genes with the environment.
This interface is the epigenome. The epigenome determines
our lived experience. It is a continuous dynamic interplay
and we have the power to change our environment as
well as the way we experience our environment. Could our
imagination may be trained to re- programme our genes?
Research on this part of the hypothesis would need to
be undertaken by professionals in the areas of molecular
biology and cognitive neuroscientists.
November (1) - The Master and his Emissary
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrists fascinating new book
identifies a most interesting phenomenon, how the different
hemispheric skills influenced Western culture. In his talk,
Iain started by describing the first half of the book in which
he examines those different skills and how they influence
our ways of being and behaving as individuals. Although
the two hemispheres have specific skills, in healthy
people they work together in balance and make their own
unique contribution to the individuals world. To illustrate
the differences, Iain explained that the right hemisphere
apprehends the world whereas the left evaluates and
plans sequences of actions. The right hemisphere is
open, without preconceptions of what it is trying to do,
and therefore is subject to a negative feedback loop,
meaning that if something pushes it too far one way, it will
compensate towards the other to try to correct that. The
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left hemisphere on the other hand is focusing on something

which it has already prioritized, and as a result, the more
one uses it, the more one narrows the focus resulting in a
positive feedback loop, i.e., the more we do it, the more we
have to do it, a loop from which it is hard to escape!
Both hemispheres have their job to do, each dealing with
an aspect of the world we need. The right hemisphere is
primary, the Master of the title, which is betrayed by the
left, its emissary. The Master needs to trust, to believe in
his emissary, knowing all the while that that trust may be
abused. The emissary knows, but knows wrongly that he is
invulnerable. If the relationship holds, they are invincible;
but if it is abused it is not just the Master that suffers, but
both of them, since the emissary owes his existence to the
Master (p. 428). This struggle of hemispheric tendencies
is explored in the context of Western civilization where the
balance has at times, not been kept in equilibrium.
In the second half of the book Iain examines specific
periods of Western civilization beginning with the ancient
world of Athens and Rome, through to the present,
showing how those hemispheric aptitudes determined the
tendencies of the times. In the ancient world it can be said
that the right and left hemisphere were working in balance.
When we get to Socrates and Plato things start to go wrong
with the more subtle, nuanced living sense of the world
being replaced by a bureaucratic, militaristic, regimented
attitude. Evidence of these swings can be seen in the arts
and we were shown some striking examples. For example
in contemporary paintings of the Renaissance we note right
hemispheric tendencies whereas the Reformation is very
clearly under left hemispheric control. The presentation
sparked a very interesting discussion, with insightful
questions and comments.
November (2) - Blackfoot Worldview and Its Quantum
Implications
Prof. Leroy Little Bear from the Blackfoot Confederacy
was an invited speaker at our SMN conference on the
Legacy of David Bohm. Leroy founded the Native American
Studies Dept of the University of Lethbridge. He met David
Bohm and had many conversations with him in which
they explored the similarities of the Blackfoot worldview
and Bohms theory of implicate and explicate order. The
Blackfoot are a Native American Indian tribe with very
different worldview from that of the colonizers who came
from Europe. Although much of the Western values have
had to be adopted by the culture, the Blackfoot maintain
their relationship with the world according in their own
ancient tradition, with their customs and ceremonies.
The core of their worldview is that everything is in flux.
Creation is in a state of flux, everything moves, changes,
Manchester Group
CHRISTINA HEATON - christinaheaton@msn.com
The Manchester Group met in Rawtenstall on Sunday 13th
September 2009. Robert Ginsburg spoke in the morning
on The Medicine of the Future. The presentation gave
an overview of Nikolai Levashovs approach to healing:
a system that uses exclusively the power of the mind to
heal. No drugs or surgery are necessary and distance
between healer and client is immaterial. Three medically
documented case histories were given and followed by a
demonstration of healing on two volunteers. Questions,
answers and discussion followed. Robert Ginsburg
practiced law for twenty years in the USA before becoming
a Levashov student. For more information see Robert
Ginsburgs website www.robertginsburg.com.
In the afternoon Max Payne reported on the current plans
and directions presented at the SMN AGM and by reference
to the article by Oliver Robinson, John Clarke and David
Lorimer, A Manifesto for Change, in the current Network
Review. A thorough discussion followed.
Scottish Group
DAVID LORIMER 01333 340490
On November 4, the Scottish group gathered for a talk by
Prof Michael Northcott of Edinburgh University based on his
book A Moral Climate in which he discusses environmental
ethics with particular reference to global warming. He began
with an analysis of beliefs around these questions, pointing
out that the Scottish government policy of spending 1
billion on new roads was inconsistent with their stance on
climate change, showing how economic growth currently
trumps ecological concerns. He defined our overall context
in terms of space as well as time, with special emphasis on
intergenerational justice. He also mentioned other factors
such as shifting our focus towards well-being and the fact

that 40 % of households are now single, which increases the
overall rate of consumption. On long-term trends, he pointed
out that previous fluctuations have been within an overall
envelope of half a degree, and the current prospect was for
a much greater variation than that. The situation is likely to
call for a great deal of human ingenuity and resilience.
Yorkshire Group
Max Payne writes: Meeting 17 October 2009
The meeting took place at 16 Burnt Stones Grove,
Sheffield. and enjoyed two interesting and stimulating
talks. Mike King gave a talk on Secularism. Although
philosophers might yearn for a monistic unity, the cultural
reality was that to do full justice to the whole range of
human experience, it was necessary to recognise that
science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. Each
is valid in its own sphere, and neither should intrude into
the domain of the other. The thinkers of the Enlightenment
wanted to improve, not to eradicate religion, but the
project went off track and modern disbelief is the result.
Secularism should mean a recognition the spiritual impulse
while retaining all the critical insights of science.
After a buffet lunch David Lawton talked about The Bodily
survival of Bodily Death. He suggested that most theories
of survival presumed a filter theory of the body. The brain
filtered the souls consciousness into matter, and after death
the soul floated off into a non-bodily existence. The evidence
from Near Death Experiences, and Out of Body Experiences all
suggested the existence sensory awarenesses and there were
many cases of probable reincarnation where someone had
a body which bore scars or disabilities relating to a previous
life. Granted survival after death , there was discussion about
how this might be possible. Some theory of an etheric body
seemed the most plausible answer.
The next meeting was fixed for March 6th 2010.
MEMBERS ARTICLES AND

ARTICLES OF INTEREST
All the articles listed below are available electronically on

the members side of the website or online if referenced.
SCIENCE/PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Transcendental Vitalism, Physics and the Paranormal
David Lawton (40 pp.) A much more extensive treatment
following Davids article published last year.
Empirie und Intuition - Die wissenschaftliche Methode
Dr. Stephan Krall (5 pp., from Tattva Viveka, N 41,
November 2009, pp. 70-74)
The content of the article is an overview on the
development of scientific thinking and the description of the
current approach in research, the scientific empiricism.
It highlights the critics on this method by thinkers as Paul
Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn. The paper describes the
role that intuition has played in science and its perception
by science as well as its role in spiritual thinking i. e.
Buddhism.
Transfigural Foundations for a New Physics of Natural
Diversity - The Variable Inclusion of Gravitational Space in
Electromagnetic Flow-Form
Lere Shakunle and Alan Rayner (14 pp.)
Evolution, Involution, and Revolution
Paul Hague (8 pp.)
Lives of Meaning: Organismal Intelligence and the Origin
of Design in Nature
R.I. Vane-Wright (27 pp. from Intelligent Faith)
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transforms a perspective familiar to quantum physicists.

The process never stops. This flux consists of energy waves
and in the particle/wave duality the Blackfoot are wave
thinkers whereas western scientists are mostly particle
thinkers. We as human beings, manifest a particular
combination of waves in relationship with each other, which
express our own individuality. These waves are Spirit and
death is understood not as the disappearance of the waves,
but the dissipation of that particular combination. The flux
also relates to the notion of relationship in which everything
and everyone is interconnected, man, animal, plant, rock,
everything with their particular wave combination. Nothing is
inanimate, everything has Spirit.
Successful living is to surf the flux as it changes and
transforms, identifying regular patterns to use as reference,
always knowing that things will change. Another important
principle of the Blackfoot is renewal. Whereas we in the
West are constantly looking to progress onto the next thing,
to move on from where we are, the Blackfoot focus on the
renewal of that pattern which has proved to be successful.
Most of the ceremonies are renewal ceremonies in which
they try to maintain those things that make for continuing
existence. The ceremonies are therefore age-old, and so
are the songs they sing and stories they tell. The aim is for
stability in change. Another difference is regarding time, and
space. Whereas we in the West think in dichotomies, such
as day/night, good/bad etc, for the Blackfoot such clear
boundaries do not exist and everything is part of everything
else or merges into everything else. Blackfoot language has
no nouns, nothing that can be pinned down, everything is
moving, transforming. Whereas time is major reference for
us, for the Blackfoot the significance is in place and space.
It was a wonderful insight into a culture with a worldview
which resonated with many people in the room!
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MEDICINE-HEALTH
Under Pressure: Homeopathy UK and its Detractors
Lionel R. Milgrom (6 pp., published online in English and
German)
Though homeopathy has been in successful and continuous
use for well over 200 years, in the United Kingdom it is
under growing pressure, from scientific detractors and
sections of the media. As such, homeopathys free National
Health Service provision is threatened because it is derided
as unproven, unscientific, and even deadly. While
refuting these and other detractions, this paper considers
possible reasons for the current plight of homeopathy UK.
The Psychosocial Genomics of Therapeutic Hypnosis,
Psychotherapy, and Rehabilitation
Ernest Lawrence Rossi (18 pp.)
Shen Foundation Vision Statement (4 pp.). Global Healing
through Personal Health and Responsibility. Following their
recent conference in Findhorn, this vision statement has
been posted on www.shenfoundation.net The Dilemante Professor
Prof. Dr. Mayank Jyoti (3 pp.) A report by an Indian
member on the state of pharmacy.
PSYCHOLOGY-CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES
Corroboration of the Dentures Anecdote Involving
Veridical Perception in a Near-Death Experience
Rudolf H. Smit (15 pp. from Journal of Near-Death Studies,
Fall 2008) Further investigation of the remarkable story
first published in Dr. Pim van Lommels landmark Lancet
article.
Four Ostensible Near-Death Experiences of Roman Times
with Peculiar Features: Mistake Cases, Correction Cases,
Xenoglossy, and a Prediction
Michael Nahm, Ph.D. (13 pp., from Journal of Near-Death
Studies, Summer 2009)
Geistige Klarheit von psychisch kranken Menschen kurz
vor ihrem Tod - Ein unbeachtetes und unverstandenes
Mysterium
Dr. Michael Nahm und Prof. Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson (5 pp.
from the regular SMN Tattwa Viveka column)
Cy Grant (6 pp.)
The dreamer is consciousness itself... To awaken within
the Dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within
the dream a more benign and wondrous dream arise. This
is the new earth. Eckhart Tolle
Four papers by John Rowan:
Meaning and Meaninglessness (8 pp.)
Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy: Self-Deception in
California? (13 pp.)
Transpersonal and Integral in Psychotherapy (13 pp.)
Is it Possible to Work at the Causal Level
in Therapy? (14 pp.)
An Introduction to Deep Memory Process
Simon Heathcote (3 pp.)
GENERAL
The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government
Jonathon Porritt (56 pp.) Trenchant observations from
the retiring Director of the UK Sustainable Development
Commission.
Adjusting the Language of Authority
to Engender Social Cohesion in Lebanon and Beyond A Vital Role for Educators
Alexandra Asseily (10 pp.) Paper given recently at the
American University of Beirut at the Education for Social
Cohesion Conference.
A Return to Being Human
Hardin Tibbs (16 pp.)
This research paper proposes the concept of the general
ecosystema novel pattern of economic and social
organization based on a holistic reassessment of human
needs and a reintegration of our sense of what it is to be
human.
How the Mind and the Brain Co-Create Each Other Daily:
Mind-Brain-Gene Research on the Foundations of
Consciousness, Creativity, Imagination, and Psychotherapy
Ernest Lawrence Rossi and Kathryn Lane Rossi (33 pp.)
Hans-Peter Drr Laudatio

Jakob von Uexkll, (3 pp.) Hamburg, World Future Council
AGM 2009, eulogy to celebrate the 80th birthday of the
former Director of the Max Planck Institute.
The Future Orientation of Constructive Memory:

An Evolutionary Perspective on Therapeutic Hypnosis and
Brief Psychotherapy
Ernest Rossi, Roxanna Erickson-Klein,
and Kathryn Rossi (8 pp.)
Thomas Berry An Overview

Ervin Laszlo (5 pp.) Introduction to a recent book.
Creativity and the Nature of the Numinosum:

The Psychosocial Genomics of Jungs Transcendent
Function in Art, Science, Spirit, and Psychotherapy
Ernest Lawrence Rossi (5 pp. interview from Milton
Erickson Foundation newsletter, Spring 2009)
Towards the Primacy of Consciousness Meeting The
Case for Mind as the Maker of the Universe
Graham Dunstan Martin (17 pp.)
Scientific Conference Examines Afterlife Evidence
Lew Sutton (4 pp.) Additional report on the Beyond the
Brain Canterbury meeting.
Awake in the Dream an Essay
www.scimednet.org
Spiritual Reflections on Copenhagen

Caroline Myss (5 pp.)
Special Presidential Briefing for
President Barack Obama (7 pp.)
Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence The Disclosure Project (2 pp.)
Both by Steven M. Greer, MD giving background to the US
Government UFO cover-up and calling for an intelligence
amnesty.
A Model of Value-Based Democracy as Condition of
Ecological Sustainability
Johannes Heinrichs (7 pp.). A paper presented in Berlin.
Intelligent Design: Aphorisms and Apothegms for a New

Architecture
Isaac Benjamin (1 p.) Some wry observations here.
Online papers by Anthony Judge:
www.laetusinpraesens.org
Overpopulation Debate as a Psychosocial Hazard
development of safety guidelines from handling other
hazardous materials http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/
musings/psyhaz.php
Existential Embodiment of Externalities
radical cognitive engagement with environmental
categories and disciplines http://www.laetusinpraesens.
org/musings/exisembo.php
We are on the Brink of Failure Responding to Planetary
Crises http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/brink.php
Lipoproblems: Developing a Strategy Omitting a Key
Problem: the systemic challenge of climate change and
resource issues
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/lipoprob.php
Us and Them: Relating to Challenging Others patterns in
the shadow dance between good and evil
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/usthem.php
NEWS and NOTICES

Viktor Schauberger DVD
A new DVD is available on the
life and work of forester Viktor
Schauberger, whose principle
of comprehending and copying
Nature has never been more
relevant. This DVD covers
his life and work, which was
continued by his son Walter
and now his grandson Joerg.
There is some fascinating
old footage, for instance of
the log flumes designed by
Schauberger. His agricultural
approach and the use of
copper tools is explained, as well as
techniques of regulating water flow in rivers and
other devices connected with water and energy.
See www.schauberger-velag.at
Regeneration an Earth Saving Evolution
A very informative Australian DVD about how biological
farming builds healthier soils. The philosophy builds on
that of Sir Albert Howard in connecting healthy soil with
healthy plants, animals and humans. There are interviews
with scientists as well as farmers who have put these
approaches into practice. The use of biological fertilisers can
increase overall yield as well as maintaining bacterial activity
in the soil and enhancing water retention levels. This is so
obviously the future of agriculture, working with rather than
against Nature. See www.lifeworksfoundation.com
The Great Courses

A compendium of courses from universities around
the world, covering a wide range of disciplines: science
and mathematics, art and music, literature, history, and
economics. Some courses have as many as 36 lectures
in the series, for instance understanding the brain or
great ideas in psychology.
See www.shopgreatcourses.co.uk
Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale
Mary-Evelyn Tucker writes: One of the great leaders
in this movement for transformative change passed
away this year on June 1st.Thomas Berry was
our teacher, guide, and collaborator for some 40
years.The celebrations of his life and legacy have been
numerous.The Memorial service the Forum organized
at the Cathedral of Saint
John the Divine in New
York drew more than
one thousand people.It
was filled with music,
joy, and a sense of the
participation of the whole
Earth community (www.
thomasberry.org). His two
last books of essays carry
forward his reflections on
the worlds religions The
Sacred Universe and on
Christianity The Christian
Future and the Fate of
Earth.
The year concluded
with two significant
interreligious events.
The first, held at Windsor
Castle in England, was
hosted by Prince Philip and UN Secretary General,
Ban Ki-moon, and was organized by the Alliance
of Religions and Conservation (ARC).It featured
environmental commitments of selected representatives
from the worlds religions (www.windsor2009.org). The
second, sponsored by the Council for the Parliament of
the Worlds Religions, was held in Melbourne, Australia,
titled Making a World of Difference: Hearing Each Other,
Healing the Earth.The Forum organized panels on world
religions and ecology, The Earth Charter, Thomas Berrys
Thought, and the films Renewal, Numen, The Arctic:
The Consequences of Human Folly, and Journey of the
Universe (www.parliamentofreligions.org).
See www.yale.edu/religionandecology
Charter for Compassion
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all
religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us
always to treat all others as we wish to be treated
ourselves. We therefore call upon all men and women
to restore compassion to the centre of morality and
religion. We urgently need to make compassion a clear,
luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world.
Rooted in a principled determination to transcend
selfishness, compassion can break down political,
dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of
our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to
human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the
path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation
of a just economy and a peaceful global community.
See www.charterforcompassion.org
www.scimednet.org
network news
From Stanley Spencers Resurrection

to John Coltranes Ascension
Andrew Burniston (7 pp.). A personal reflection on the
artist and musician. Andrew also lived in Cookham, the
home and idyll of Sir Stanley Spencer.
43
b o o k r e v ie w s
book reviews
Books in this section can be purchased via the Network web site (www.scimednet.org) from
Amazon.co.uk and the Network will receive a 10% commission. In addition, the Network
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science-philosophy
of science
A Distance Between
David Lorimer
THE MASTER AND

HIS EMISSARY: The
Divided Brain and
the Making of the
Western World
Iain McGilchrist (SMN)
Yale, 2009, 597 pp., 25, h/b
ISBN 978 0 300 1 4878 7
Twenty years in the making, this

seminal book has been well worth
the wait and could scarcely have
been researched and written in less
time. It has to be one of the most
significant books published in 2009,
since it addresses so directly the
ways in which we understand the
world and the systemic predicament
of Western culture. I first met
Iain in the early 1980s when his
brother, like myself, was teaching
at Winchester College. Iain was
coming to the end of his seven-year
prize Fellowship at All Souls College,
Oxford. In 1982, he published his
first book, Against Criticism, in
which he argued against what he
saw as the destructive analytical
tendency in literary criticism, which
www.scimednet.org
failed to recognise that the initial

apprehension of a work of art or
literature was intuitive, on which
subsequent analysis was built. This
theme reappears in his new book, as
will become clear below. The present
book is arguably the most important
contribution to come out of the
interdisciplinary brilliance of All Souls
in a generation, and is a tribute to
the possibility of wide reading that
the fellowship enables. Ironically, the
dreaming spires are mainly focused
on what Iain characterises as left
hemisphere thinking, and yet this
book is a triumph of the integration
of both hemispheres, which is as
education should be.
Readers will have read the articles
based on the book, published in
April and in this issue, and will
be familiar with the outline of the
argument. To recap, the book falls
into two parts, the first of which
deals with the neuroscience of the
two hemispheres, and the second
with the cultural implications of
the relative dominance of one
particular hemisphere in a historical
period. The divided brain of the
title indicates that human beings
have two distinctive takes on the
world, mediated by the left and right
hemispheres respectively. There
are evolutionary reasons, explained
in the book, for why this should be
the case, right the way through the
animal kingdom.
Iain explains that the right
hemisphere gives the overall
context, apprehends things as a
whole and is able to take in the
new. The proper co-operation of
the hemispheres involves the
grounding and integrating role of
the right hemisphere, with detail
added by the left hemisphere and
returned to the right for a further
integration, or, as the Germans
put it, Aufhebung. This means that
philosophy should begin and end
in the right hemisphere rather than
being a purely left hemisphere
activity as it tends to be, especially
in Oxford. A particularly striking
chapter argues for the primacy of
the right hemisphere, an idea which
may initially come as a surprise to
the reader, who is used to hearing

the left brain referred to as the
dominant hemisphere. The primacy
of the right hemisphere implies the
primacy of the whole over the part,
of the implicit over the explicit and
of experience over abstraction.
Philosophy (and indeed science)
as practised, however, is a largely
left hemisphere activity. As Iain
points out, philosophers spend
a good deal of time inspecting
processes that are normally implicit,
unconscious and intuitive, which
means that they examine life of the
right hemisphere from the standpoint
of the left. This leads to a startling
observation that philosophers, like
schizophrenics, have a problem
with the sense of self, a theme
which is elaborated at length later
in the book on the relation between
madness and modernism. The
left hemisphere, although it uses
mechanistic metaphors, does not
really understand the nature of
metaphor, which can carry us across
(as is its real meaning) a gap that
language itself creates: metaphor is
languages cure for the ills entailed
on us by language. Philosophers
like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
Scheler and Wittgenstein were
aware of the limitations of linear,
sequential analysis and sought
to go beyond it, with descriptive
philosophy, in a sense, giving way to
evocative poetry.
Science, too, as ordinarily
practised, is largely a left
hemisphere activity. The very
metaphor of the body and brain
as a machine is quintessentially
left hemisphere, as it makes the
organism into a non-living thing,
abstracting it from the immediate
world of experience. Moreover, the
left hemisphere is self-referential,
only comfortable dealing with
familiar ideas and intensely
suspicious of the new. This has far
reaching implications for paradigm
shifts, with which most readers will
be familiar: a rigid dogmatism that
refuses to countenance a new way
of understanding, and is inordinately
sure of itself. As Iain remarks on
a couple of occasions, the only

certainty is that those believe they
are certainly right are certainly
wrong. All this means that the basis
of the mechanistic metaphor is not
questioned by the left hemisphere.
The absurdity of this is revealed
in some split brain experiments
where it becomes apparent that
the structure of a syllogism is
more important as a criterion of
truth than the components of the
argument. It is the right hemisphere
that understands jokes, irony and
context.
None of this should give the
impression that the book is simply
an apologia for the right hemisphere,
and that Iain does not believe in
the crucial importance of rigorous
analysis. If his points come across
strongly, it is because we are in
a severely unbalanced cultural
situation. A further critical theme
is that of empathy, another quality
intrinsic to the right hemisphere. As
Iain indicates, empathy is intrinsic
to morality, linking us to others so
that we may imaginatively inhabit
their experience, which is the lived
basis of imitation. Anglo-American
philosophers and scientists
do not understand empathy,
untouched as they are by European
phenomenologists like MerleauPonty, who understand mutuality,
reciprocity and fellow-feeling as
expressed through the body and
the emotions. All this helps the
reader realise that the category of
Being is critically absent from British
philosophy, which has confined itself
to (a rather disembodied) mind.
Culturally, if we had an empathic
connection with Nature, then we
would be incapable of devastating
our habitat in the way we have.
Here, the left hemisphere science of
manipulation meets the economics
of exploitation and the politics of
short-term expediency.
It is hard in a short review to
convey the staggering erudition and
scintillating intelligence of this book.
There are 135 pages in small
print of notes and bibliography.
In the first half, the reader not only
learns about functions of left and
right hemisphere thinking, but also
considers the origins of language
in relation to music, the nature of
time, and the way in which Greek
logical paradoxes are resolved by
a right hemisphere perspective
which does not divide time up into
discrete points. The arguments for
the primacy of the right hemisphere
are I believe persuasive, as are his
explanations for the triumph of the

left hemisphere. We realise that a
sense of depth is incompatible with
cold detachment, as illustrated in
a commentary on the 18th century
paintings of Claude Lorrain. Lorrain
is one of a great many artists
referred to and indeed illustrated.
In the second half, which is
a book in itself, the reader is
taken on a journey through the
evolution of Western culture,
beginning with the ancient Greeks,
moving through the Renaissance
and the Reformation, then to the
Enlightenment, Romanticism and
the Industrial Revolution, before
arriving at the modern and postmodern worlds. One understands
how the primacy of the hemispheres
as understood in particular cultures
has alternated, usually between
a more or less balanced situation
and over-predominance of left
hemisphere thinking, which reflects
our current cultural situation. There
are etymological digressions on the
meaning of Greek terms referring
to knowledge, reflections on preSocratic philosophers, especially
Heraclitus, the implications of
Platos separation of the eternal
from the phenomenological, the
association of Cartesian philosophy
with schizophrenic attitudes, the
scientific work of Goethe and the
parallels between the Reformation
in which the Flesh became Word
- the triumph of the literal - and
the rise of scientific materialism
and the infallible Word of Science,
which has inherited a corresponding
dogmatism unless allied to the
subtle reconciling properties of the
right hemisphere.
One remedy lies in the notion of
betweenness or transparency; for
mediaeval Catholics, the symbol was
transparent to the transcendent,
but Protestants swept this all away
as idolatry, rejecting metaphorical
understanding. Wordsworth and
Hopkins understood this relation
of betweenness, as did Goethe,
whose poetry and scientific writings
are quoted. Also Hegel, whose
articulation of individuation within
union is extraordinarily acute.
Music provides an exemplar of
betweenness in its interplay between
silence and sound. The right
hemisphere pays attention to the
other, generating this relationship
of betweenness, which turns out
to be crucial to our happiness,
depending as it does on the breadth
and depth of our social connections.
45
Interestingly, betweenness imply

what he calls necessary distance,
the foundation of empathy. So, for
instance, in the development of
Greek culture, both these processes
proceeded together, with a
remarkable development of empathy
and philosophical acumen.
Reflecting on our somewhat
bleak contemporary cultural
landscape, Iain shows how the
predominance of left hemisphere
thinking has pervaded the visual
arts, music, philosophy and
science. Modernist concepts
and mechanistic metaphors
are rife, as is reductionism,
alienation, fragmentation and
decontextualisation. The parallels
between madness and modernism,
featured in the work of Louis
Sass, are particularly striking,
especially given the increase in
mental illness over the last 50
years. Our bureaucratic systems
are impersonal, aiming at control
and manipulation, dehumanising
the individual and imposing a drab
uniformity. Body, spirit and art
are all under attack, as is beauty;
however, the sense of beauty is
not culturally bound, but is rather
intrinsic to human perception.
It is no exaggeration to say
that this quite remarkable book
will radically change the way you
understand the world and yourself.
Ironically, some left hemisphere
dominated reviewers of this book
have already unwittingly proved
its thesis by reacting to it in
exactly the way in which the book
predicts, taking exception to the
legitimate criticisms of exclusively
left hemisphere thinking. It must be
obvious to most readers that our
culture is seriously out of balance,
not only in itself, but also in relation
to Nature. More of the same kind of
thinking will not move us forward.
We need less detachment and more
empathy, recovering our connection
to ourselves, each other and the
world around us. As Iain observes,
both science and art need to
become more human and humane.
Reading this book, to which you
will want to return on a regular
basis (one reading cannot possibly
exhaust its multifaceted insights) will
help you better understand reality
and the way we experience and
represent it. It is a genuine tour de
force, a monumental achievement - I
can think of no one else who could
have conceived, let alone written a
book of such penetrating brilliance.
www.scimednet.org

Exploring Complexity
Country with a Local
Max Boisot
COMPLEXITY: A
Guided Tour
Melanie Mitchell
Oxford University Press, 2009,
$29.95, 347 pp., h/b ISBN 978 0 19 512441 5
Although complexity is strongly

associated with the emergence of
life and intelligence, it constitutes
a dimension of all phenomena: the
purely physical, the biological, and the
social. The vast increases in computing
power achieved over the past four
decades have allowed researchers
to tackle complexity in its own right
rather than artificially reducing it
so as to achieve conceptual and
computational tractability. This timely
book by, Melanie Mitchell, one of the
main players on the complexity scene,
offers an elegant and accessible guide
to the subject.
The book subdivides into five parts.
In Part I Mitchell defines a complex
system either as one in which
large networks of components with
no central control and simple rules
of operation give rise to complex
collective behavior, sophisticated
information processing, and adaptation
via learning or evolution or as one
that exhibits nontrivial emergent
and self-organising behaviours. The
first definition takes us from order to
complexity, the second from complexity
to order. Mitchell then offers some
background on four of the subject
areas that make up the complexity
field: information, computation,
dynamics and chaos, and evolution.
She points out that since people will
vary in the complexity that they will
impute to an object or process, no
one has yet been able to come up
with a general measure complexity.
In Parts II to IV Mitchell describes
how these four subject areas relate to
each other, and in particular, how life
and evolution can now be simulated in
computers. In chapters 8 and 9, she
shows how life and evolution might
show up inside computers and in
chapter 10 at how far computation might
itself be said to occur in nature. With
the development of self-reproducing
computer programmes and genetic
algorithms, the notion of computation
is increasingly being invoked to explain
the behaviour of natural systems. This,
of course, is hardly a new idea. What
today we call complex systems can
trace its ancestry back to the work
being carried out in the 1950s and
60s in cybernetics and the related
www.scimednet.org
field of systems science. Both dealt

with systems, with their boundaries,
and in the case of cybernetics, with
their information-driven feedback
processes.
Mitchell usefully points out that
the major thrust of complex systems
research has been the exploration
of simple idea models, designed to
gain insights into general concepts
without the need to make detailed
predictions about any specific aspect
of their behaviour. This exploratory
way of using models is relatively
new and one of the fruits of the
increased computational power at
our disposal. Mitchell therefore looks
at the prospects for the computer
modelling of complex systems,
as well as at some of the perils
involved in applying such models.
The power of computational modelling
is further illustrated in Part IV of
the book, where Mitchell explores
the new science of networks. She
brings out the deep commonalities
being discovered among systems as
disparate as social communities, the
Internet, epidemics, and metabolic
systems in organisms. Some of these
commonalities have even suggested
to the theoretical biologist Stuart
Kauffman that natural selection is in
principle not necessary to create a
complex living creature.
Finally, in the last concluding Part,
V, Mitchell discusses the search
for general complexity principles.
The book comes across as more
focused on the natural than on the
social sciences. Given that this is
where complexity thinking has so far
enjoyed its greatest successes, this
seems reasonable. One criticism that
a Europe-based (but not necessarily
Eurocentric) reviewer might make
of the book, however, is that the
European contribution to the field is
seriously underplayed. The Santa Fe
Institute, created in 1984 to study
complex systems, takes centre stage,
and key figures like Prigogine, Haken,
and Von Foerster, barely get a passing

mention. At the end of the book,
Mitchell briefly refers to Prigogine
and Haken as the authors of more
recent approaches to general theories
of complex systems. More recent
approaches? Their work predates the
creation of the Santa Fe Institute
- in Prigogines case by more than
a decade. Indeed, Prigogine was
awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in
non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
One the positive side, the book
is clearly written and well furnished
with examples. Mitchell explains the
sophisticated concepts that underpin
representations of chaotic systems
such as the logistic map or bifurcation
diagrams clearly and simply. She also
offers a straightforward presentation
of the second law of thermodynamics.
Another merit of the book is that
it introduces a historical and
biographical element into the story of
complexity together with photos of the
individuals who contributed to it. This
lightens up the text for those whose
concentration might flag. It presents
complexity as emerging naturally as
a dimension of a range of problems
that scientists in various disciplines
are engaged with.
Complexity research is a broad
church, accommodating a wide
variety of interests. This is not really
surprising since, in the absence of
some single, overarching theory, it is
not yet a unified discipline. Mitchell
has provided a valuable overview
of the diversity of its practices and
practitioners in an accessible language
that will appeal to academics and
practitioners alike.
Max Boisot, ESADE, University of
Ramon Llull Barcelona
The Milton of British

Physics
William Waldegrave
THE STRANGEST MAN:

The Hidden Life of
Paul Dirac, Quantum
Genius
Graham Farmelo
Faber, 2009, 560 pp., 9.99, p/b
ISBN 978 0 571 222865
In 1933, when Albert Einstein

became the first staff member of
the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, he was asked
who he wanted to join him. The
first name on his lips was a British
physicist Paul Dirac.
A few months later, Dirac, at 31,
became the youngest theoretician
to win the physics Nobel Prize.
MEDICINE-HEALTH
Health Care is
Americas Big Moral
Issue
Martin Lockley
THE HEALING OF
AMERICA
T. R Reid
Penguin Press, New York, 2009,
277 pp., $ 25.95, h/b ISBN 1 978 1 59420 234 6
According to the World Health

Organisation (WHO) America spends
far more on health care, as a % of
GNP, than any other developed
nation. One might expect good
results, but the WHO ranks America
only number 36 among the best
health care systems in the world.
When measuring the fairness of
the system America ranks 54th out
of 191, behind Bangladesh and the
Maldives, and just slightly ahead
of Chad and Rwanda. Worse, the
Commonwealth Fund (a private U.S
foundation) ranks America 23rd out
of 23 among developed nations when
it comes to universal coverage (and
neonatal infant mortality). In no other
developed country are insurance
companies allowed to deny coverage,
and in no other nation do people go
bankrupt as a result of astronomical
medical bills. In America the
annual figure is around 700,000,
while annual deaths from treatable
maladies, as a result of lack of
insurance, reaches at least 20,000.
Although the American health
care system is in dire straits, and
burdened by extraordinary costs,
complexity, unfairness, greed,
immoral business and lobbying
practices and strident political
wrangling, The Healing of America
is a model of clarity, among the
ever-growing list of titles lamenting
this strange American sickness.
The author T.R. Reid, a former
Washington Post chief of both the
Tokyo and London bureaus, speaks
with considerable authority on
comparative health care systems.
Having lived in France and Germany
as well as Japan and the UK he
structures his book around his
personal experience with health care
systems in these countries, as well
as in India, Canada and the USA. He
used his own old shoulder injury as
a controlled experiment, taking it to
doctors in a half dozen countries to
find out what they would recommend
and what it would cost to treat.
The comparisons are revealing
www.scimednet.org
Although he is little known today,

he is quite possibly the greatest
British mind of the 20th century.
If Newton was the Shakespeare of
British physics, Dirac was its Milton,
the most fascinating and enigmatic
of all our great scientists. And he
now has a biography to match his
talents: a wonderful book by Graham
Farmelo. The story it tells is moving,
sometimes comic, sometimes
infinitely sad, and goes to the roots
of what we mean by truth in science.
Dirac was an odd and difficult
man. Born in Bristol in 1902, he
had a troubled relationship with his
father, and with his brother, who
committed suicide. The anecdotes
about his lack of empathy are
legion: at St Johns, the Cambridge
college where he spent most of his
career, he was asked where he was
going on holiday. After some 20
minutes, he replied: Why do you
want to know? On another occasion,
answering questions after a lecture,
an audience member said, Dr Dirac,
I didnt understand the equation on
the top-right of the blackboard. Dirac
said nothing. After a minute, he was
asked if hed like to answer the
question. Dirac replied: It wasnt a
question, it was a comment.
Diracs overwhelming concern was
mastering not social niceties, then,
but the fundamental laws of nature.
As Farmelo puts it, the discovery of
quantum mechanics knifed open a
sack of mathematical gemstones
and it was Dirac who gathered
the most diamonds. Whereas
Newton spent the majority of his life
researching alchemy, or Christian
doctrine, Dirac was obsessed with
his equations, despising subjects
such as philosophy. (His verdict on

Wittgenstein, a contemporary at
Cambridge, was: Awful man. Never
stopped talking.)
And yet Diracs brand of theoretical
physics, and the way he saw the
world, was so close to philosophy.
He was convinced that the more
beautiful an equation, the more
likely it was to be accurate in other
words, he saw a picture of the world
that was of such beauty that it had
to be true.
His great equation for the electron
an improbable marriage of relativity
and quantum theory only worked
if you assumed that there was such
a thing as an anti-electron. His
colleagues mocked the idea, but Dirac
stuck to his guns: the maths was so
harmonious that reality had to reflect
it. He was dramatically proved right:
the anti-electron was soon discovered
experimentally, and shortly after the
concept of anti-matter became a
cornerstone of physics.
Such achievements should have
brought lasting fame but, as
Farmelo illustrates, Dirac made
things difficult for those wanting
to lionise him. When he arrived to
collect the Nobel Prize in 1933,
there was a marvellous kerfuffle.
He and his mother sat quietly in the
stations waiting room, failing to
realise that the host of increasingly
alarmed grandees lined up along
the platform were there as his
welcoming committee.
I had my own encounter with
Dirac a few decades later. As a
parliamentary candidate in his home
town of Bristol, I was shocked
at how obscure he had become,
compared with Brunel. So I set up a
prize for maths at the local school,
and wrote to Dirac asking to use his
name. He was pleased, and asked
also for some pictures of his alma
mater. When I came to St Johns to
deliver them, however, I saw that
he had the outer door closed, which
signalled that he didnt want to be
disturbed.
Knowing his reputation, I was
too timid to knock, and so missed
my chance to meet the greatest
British mind of the century. Thanks
to Graham Farmelos wonderful new
book, a new generation will have the
chance to realise just how foolish I
was.
Lord Waldegrave is chairman of
trustees at the Science Museum and
Provost of Eton College. This review,
reprinted by kind permission, first
appeared in the Daily Telegraph.
47
rather than odious, and despite

the distracting and misleading
propaganda put out through the
American media, by special interests,
it is clear that Americans are finally
aware that they face a political
problem that has reached crisis
proportions. They see that other
developed countries have better
and cheaper systems that give
their citizens greater security and
significantly increased longevity. Reid
stresses, therefore, that the crisis is
fundamentally a moral one. Should
we guarantee medical treatment to
everyone who needs it? Or should
we let Americans die from lack of
access to health care? He frequently
cites Chinese born Harvard Professor
William Hsiao, author of Getting
Health Reform Right who specialises
in advising countries on setting up
health care systems and insists that
you have to know that countrys
basic ethical values.
In making his comparisons Reid
gives us interesting potted histories
of the origin of health care systems
beginning with the German Bismarck
system, in 1881, which the famous
Iron Chancellor called a programme
of applied Christianity creating
a means for the more fortunate
Germans to care for the least of their
brethren. As Japan emerged from
mid nineteenth century isolationism,
emperor Meiji looked around the
world for models of reform in
agriculture and education, and by
the end of the century had settled
on the Bismarck Model for health
care. In describing the origins of
the British National Health Service
(NHS) through American eyes Reid
labels it the Beveridge model and
credits Lord William Beveridge and
Nye Bevan for coming together from
the opposite poles of the British
class divide so that Beveridge
a reforming intellectual - could
design, and Bevan muscle into
existence, an NHS system of which
most Brits are enormously proud.
Americans may not know their hit
www.scimednet.org
series ER (no connection to the Royal

Family) derived from the British TV
drama Casualty, and that Mills and
Boon, the nations biggest publisher
of romance novels, has a division
that specialises in NHS love stories.
Alas, love and pride are in rather
short supply in Americas health care
systems.
For a European, Japanese,
Canadian, Indian or even a Cuban
patient living in America it is difficult
to understand that the system
here is so broken. Americans
have been trying to fix it without
success since the end of World War
II. Resistance at first came from
the doctors, but now mostly comes
from the insurance companies
and their powerful lobbyists. Ever
since the war, opponents of
reform have used the bogus label
of socialised medicine to scare
a gullible public into thinking that
somehow the government will take
over and so reverse Americas hard
won independence. This term was
popularised by a public relations firm
working for the American Medical
Association in 1947. Ironically,
the most popular and efficient
American health care programmes
are Medicare, the Veterans Affairs
Dept., and the services provided to
Native Americans all government
run programmes!
Thus concludes Reid that America
labours under five myths about health
care systems overseas. 1) Its all
socialised medicine elsewhere. 2)
They ration care and choice creating
long waiting lists. 3) They are
wasteful, bureaucratic systems. 4)
Health insurance companies have
to be cruel, and 5) Other systems
are too foreign for the USA. Frankly,
as Reid implies, all this is utter
nonsense attributable to ignorance
on the part of the populace and wilful
ignorance on the part of politicians
and lobbyists, all reluctant to admit
the failure of a system that the rest
of the world would never tolerate.
Ironically America already has at
least four different systems. For
Native Americans, veterans and
those in active service America is
Britain or Cuba! For those over 65
the USA is Canada. For working
people under 65 it is, in principle,
Germany, France or Japan. But for
the 45 million currently uninsured
America is like Cambodia or rural
India. The problem in a nutshell is
that the United States maintains so
many separate systems for separate
classes of people [and] relies so
heavily on for profit private insurance
companies to pay the bills. All other
[developed] countries have settled

on one model for everybody, on the
theory that it is simpler, cheaper and
fairer. This again is doubly ironic
in a country that prides itself on
having abolished the class system.
The problem is evidently the shadow
class system and callous greed
created by the almighty dollar and
unregulated free enterprise.
Reid brings necessary clarity to
this complex problem. If his clear
exposition of the problem were
understood by enough Americans,
who were swayed by the moral
imperative of fairness and the
benefits of prevention, longevity,
increased efficiency and substantial
GNP savings, he might just play
a part in The Healing of America.
Watch this space for the debate is
in full swing, and everyone agrees
something must be done. It may just
be true as Leonard Cohen once wrote
that in America the heart has got to
open in fundamental way [and]
democracy is coming to the USA.
Professor Martin Lockley teaches
palaentology and consciousness
studies at the University of Colorado.
Overkill: the Dangerous

World of American
Medicine
Martin Lockley
OVERTREATED
Shannon Brownlee
Bloomsbury 2007, 350p., $25.95
h/b ISBN-13: 978 1 58234 580 2,
$16.00 p/b
ISBN-10: 978 1 58234 579 6
Given the raging debate over

American health care, I might
have titled this review Who Killed
Michael Jackson? Is it really true
that 50,000 Americans are killed
every year by iatrogenic disease,
as Deepak Chopra claimed in The
New Physics of Healing (1990). In
Overtreated, Shannon Brownlee gives
the lesser total of 30,000 victims
of unnecessary (i.e., lethal) overtreatment still twice the annual
murder rate! Moreover, Americans
pay a huge individual and collective
($700 million) price for the dubious
privilege of often brutal, dangerous
and extravagantly-priced treatment
such as high dose chemotherapy
with bone marrow transplant given
to 40,000 women for breast cancer.
According to Browlee 9,000 died as
a direct result before the procedure
was found to be no better than
standard treatment. No better
evidently may again mean lethal.
The plot of the Hollywood thriller

put preventable, unforced hospital
error as a leading cause of death,
ahead even of >43,000 automobile
fatalities. Wrong drugs, wrong
dosages and lethal cocktails
do the most damage. California
Cardiologists Chae Hyun Moon and
Fidel Realyvasquez performed such
aggressive, invasive and unnecessary
operations that 167 patients died
during cardiac surgery or shortly
after. Eventually, in 2006, the State
Medical Board revoked these doctors
licenses, and the practices parent
company paid some $60 million to
settle charges of Medicare fraud, and
another $395 million in restitution
to victims. Meanwhile between 1993
and 2003 hospitals closed 425
Emergency Rooms that were losing
money through treating too many
uninsured patients. Frighteningly,
those who attempted to bring costs
down, or expose fraud, as in the
California case, were punished or
ostracised while the for-profit culture
continued to blossom.
Emil Frei and William Peters were
ardent advocates of high dose
chemotherapy and bone marrow
transplants, which only rarely
arrest or cure cancer. Treatments
costing between $150-500K
caused insurance companies to
balk. When patients trawled the
medical literature to find justification
for the efficacy of procedures the
floodgates were opened. But as
insurance companies were forced
to pay they raised premiums and
denied coverage to high risk patients.
Meanwhile lawyers learned that most
patients did not need the procedures
and that they would virtually all die
within a few years.
American medicine loves expensive
gadgets and has a slavish belief
in technology. Hospitals demand
the latest CT and MRI equipment.
Drug and equipment reps encourage
patients to ask for scans and
drugs, paying some doctors
labelled drug whores to give
public lectures promoting corporate
products. Although, in the 1980s
most pharmaceutical companies
were against direct advertising to the
consumer because of the very real
possibility of causing harm to the
patient. lobbyists whittled away
the rules in the name of commercial
free speech until legislation actually
allowed corporations to fund the
FDA!!. By 2005 drug companies were
spending $3 billion a year (more
than the 2009 Pfizer fine) on direct
advertising to consumers. Calling
[this] advertising is like calling
D-Day a bunch of guys wading in the
surf. The profit potential by 2002

gave the top 10 pharmaceutical
companies profits equal to all other
490 Fortune 500 companies. This
is irresistible to unscrupulous and
unregulated corporations. Soon the
gullible public was warned that it
was suffering from a slew of new
diseases ranging from insomnia,
restless leg syndrome, social anxiety
disorder and yes! even erectile
dysfunction. The latter is soothingly
and euphemistically labelled as E.D.,
with the ambiguous message read
rapidly in the ads final seconds
consult your doctor for an erection
lasting more than four hours. (Great
prime-time T.V viewing for the kids)!
In case such arousal creates a social
anxiety disorder, there is always the
possibility of a cocktail of drugs that
could quite literally terminate both
conditions by inducing heart attack or
liver failure!
All this corporate creation of
disease begins as a marketing
ploy and ends in a lethal reality for
which the perpetrators are not held
responsible (though perhaps Michael
Jacksons doctors will not get off
scot-free). It is ironic and frightening
that the medical profession is
responsible for such new vocabulary
as elder abuse and for ignoring the
fact that the challenges of the very
old are spiritual, not medical. The
problem is that somebody needs to
keep watch on the whole patient.
Such a broken system highlights
the urgent need for change, and
thank goodness we see signs of
what Leonard Cohen called Americas
spiritual thirst for authentic
democratic change. This manifests
in films, outrage, books like this
one, and Overdo$ed America,
(Abramson 2004), journals that at
last begin to root out and reject
bogus corporate-funded studies, and
constructive grass roots efforts to
create evidence- and patient-based
medicine. Some systems like the
Veterans Health Administration
actually work well, and recently
desperate Americas have looked to
Europe and Canada to find systems
that actually work, and in comparison
with America, save their nations
as much as 10% of GNP. Without
radical change America could spend
50% of its GNP on health care by
2050. Yet 68% of Republicans and
32% of Democrats claim the country
had the best health care in the
world. What world is this? A world
where revered artists like Michael
Jackson are killed by drug overdoses
administered by their own doctors who then face murder charges!?
www.scimednet.org
The Fugitive (Warner Bros 1993)

has a pharmaceutical corporation
covering up test evidence of the
dangerous side effects of their
powerful drugs. Brownlees first
chapter chronicles just such a reallife, 1960s episode involving David
Wennberg who tried to blow the
whistle on Orabilex. This drug was
linked to 25 cases of kidney failure
in Washington DC hospitals alone,
but the corporation never passed on
hospital reports to the FDA (Food and
Drug Administration), nor did the FDA
respond when Wennberg reported
to them directly. The drug was only
withdrawn after Wennberg took the
evidence to the Senate and White
House. As I write Pfizer has just
been fined 2.3 billion by the FDA for
marketing unapproved drugs
Continued failure to institute
universal health insurance and health
care is deep rooted, and began in
the post war decade with strong AMA
opposition. Wennberg again made
doctors mad as hell by exposing far
too many unnecessary procedures.
Practically every woman over the
age of fifty in the area around the
University of Vermont Department
of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
had been relieved of her uterus.
Wennberg dubbed such local medical
industries the surgical signatures
of a region. As doctors began raising
fees, Medicare costs and insurance
premiums rose until, today, the
inflationary spiral is out of control
driven by for-profit hospitals and
insurance lobbyists. A sure sign of
trouble manifests where hospitals
began hiring vice presidents
for marketing and branding, and
approving construction of VIP suites.
Chapter 2 brands the hospital as
the most dangerous place to find
oneself. Conservative estimates
49

To Hell and Back on
SSRIs
Beata Bishop
DYING FOR A CURE

Rebekah Beddoe
Hammersmith Press Ltd, 2009,
284 pp., 12.99, p/b.
ISBN 978 1 905140 25 1
In whose interest are these drugs

prescribed? asks the author on
p.114 of her riveting book, but the
question should also appear on the
cover. The whole story adds up to a
fully documented, searingly honest
indictment of drug-based psychiatry
that often causes worse problems
than the ones it is supposed to cure.
The Australian Rebekah Beddoe
was 28, living happily with her partner
and moving up steadily in her career
when she became pregnant. It was a
blow, with her partner being less than
pleased, but she went through with it
and in 1999 gave birth to a beautiful,
healthy baby girl. Unfortunately the
baby cried and screamed much of
the time, breastfeeding was difficult,
and eventually the inexperienced new
mother became exhausted enough
to ask for help from her GP. He
offered to refer her to the mother and
baby unit of a local general hospital
for respite and training in coping
strategies with fractious babies, which
she was happy to accept, but as she
was leaving, the GP also handed her
a small box of antidepressant tablets
to set you back on track. Without
any formal assessment, prescription
or much knowledge of the patient, he
just issued a snap diagnosis of postnatal depression and put her on drug
treatment.
Thats how Rebekah Beddoes
three year long nightmare began.
At the hospital she was put in the
care of Max, a weird psychiatrist who
broke all the rules of professional
conduct: he insisted on close body
contact, hugged and cuddled the
patient and convinced her that she
needed to exhume and confront
some dreadful childhood trauma in
order to get well. Meanwhile the first
lot of medication had begun to work,
clouding her perception so much
that she became dependent on Max
and accepted his instructions and
prescriptions unquestioningly.
Things quickly went from bad to
worse. After her first panic attack
her medication was increased. This
established a cast-iron pattern.
Every time she showed signs of
deterioration or a new symptom,
more and more new drugs were
added to her daily intake, until she
www.scimednet.org
was on eight different kinds and

on the verge of madness. Baby
Jemima had to be cared for by
Rebekahs mother and long-suffering
partner, while she gradually sank into
repeated savage self-harming, heavy
drinking, chain-smoking, overdosing
and violence, alternating with apathy
and a sense of deadness. In and
out of several hospitals, emergency
wards, prison-like locked high risk
sections, undergoing ECT, getting
involved with a heroin addict and
taking some stuff herself hers was
an increasingly fast descent into a
lonely inferno, where death seemed
to be the only way out.
Meanwhile she also developed
diabetes mellitus and akathisia,
a distressing condition of feverish
restlessness, anxiety and excitement,
marked by rapid walking up, down
and in circles, unable to relax.
Max, perhaps realising his errors in
treating Rebekah, suddenly withdrew
and refused to see her again. His
successor, Dr Maartens was cold,
austere and unresponsive, and
diagnosed her suffering from bipolar
mood disorder (formerly known as
manic depression), a serious lifelong
condition normally controlled with
lithium.
At this apparently hopeless
moment something unexpected
intervened. One of the drugs caused
the patient to put on 8 kg in two
weeks; shortly afterwards she gained
20 kilos and found her obesity
so disgusting that she went on a
drastic diet. Weeks later, although
half starved, she still hadnt lost
any weight, and driven by ordinary
feminine vanity can it be the last
quality we women lose when all else
is gone? she checked the side
effects of her drugs and found that
all eight of them were likely to cause
weight gain. So she decided to cut
out two without letting on, and not
only lost 5 kilos in a week, but her
blood sugar levels became normal,
too. As she went on reducing her
intake in secret, against doctors
orders, her agitation and anxiety
subsided, she could once again
sleep, sit still and read a book, and
experience the return of her normal
abilities. Withdrawal symptoms
varied. Some drugs caused hardly
any, others left her distressed,
but eventually she became almost
drug-free and after reading Toxic
Psychiatry, a whistle-blowing work
by psychiatrist Dr Peter Breggin,
she realised that her psychiatrists,
especially the current one, had
actually caused all her life-threatening
problems, first by misdiagnosing her
condition and then by treating her

with a cocktail of powerful, addictive
and totally unnecessary SSRI drugs.
It was a shocking, barely credible
discovery, but it spurred her on to
research the damning evidence of the
harm done by psychiatric drugs. She
amassed a huge amount of material
the references alone fill 23 pages.
Her findings are interwoven with the
main narrative; so are her mothers
diary entries, recording the suffering
and incomprehensible personality
changes of her daughter. The effect
is distressing yet almost hypnotic;
this book should be required reading
for medical students and some
hope practising psychiatrists.
Rebekahs story has a happy
ending. Now in her thirties and
fully restored to health, she lives
in Melbourne with her husband and
two children. But she is one of the
few lucky ones. If she hadnt dared
to take responsibility for her own
life and go against her dictatorial
psychiatrists orders, she could still
be one of the hapless thousands
struggling with the side effects of
psychotropic drugs. (In Britain some
two million people are taking them
at present; according to official
estimates, 2 per cent, namely
40,000 patients have a severe
negative reaction to them.)
This is powerful stuff, likely to
evoke searching questions. How,
when, and on whose authority have
normal human emotions been
turned into chemical imbalances in
the brain, needing drug treatment?
Sadness, depression, anxiety,
worry can hit anyone, and with
good reason. As a psychotherapist
I know that in most cases all that
is needed to relieve such justified
painful emotions is total attentive
listening, patience, time, empathy,
common sense and good boundaries.
But counselling is hard to obtain on
philosophy-religion
What is Enlightenment?
Mike King
AMERICAN GURU:
A Story of Love,
Betrayal and
Healing Former
Students of Andrew
Cohen Speak Out
William Yenner
Epigraph Books, 2009, 170 pp.,
10.37, p/b - ISBN: 098 2453051
11 DAYS AT THE EDGE

Michael Wombacher
Findhorn Press, 2008, 512 pp.,
11.69, p/b - ISBN: 184 4091368
What is enlightenment? (That is,

enlightenment of the kind pursued
by the Buddha, rather than the
Western philosophical movement.)
This question has occupied me for
over thirty years, so I was interested
to receive two books about Andrew
Cohen, the American guru and founder
of What Is Enlightenment? magazine
(now re-launched as EnlightenNext
magazine). The first book, by William
Yenner, is a compilation of writings
from ex-students of Cohen lambasting
him as a failure and fraud, while
the second book is the account by
an enthusiastic student of a Cohen
retreat held in 2005. The first book
is a short and easy read, while the
latter is long and will probably only
appeal to the hardened aficionado of
such literature. When discussing the
project with Cohen Wombacher told
him that the two books that had left
the greatest spiritual impression on
him were Irina Tweedies Daughter of
Fire and Nisargadatta Maharajs I Am
That. Wombachers book is indeed
in that tradition, and I would add one
more: The Gospel of Ramakrishna.
These works all give a day-by-day
account of life with the guru, though
of course the question posed by
Yenners book is whether Cohen

should be included amongst the ranks
of respectable gurus or not. Yenner
was with Cohen for thirteen years, and
his book is perhaps the third serious
work to attempt to debunk Cohen, the
first and most remarkable of which
is the one by Cohens own mother
(Luna Tarlo), called with superb
irony Mother of God. Yenners book
includes an interview with Tarlo,
and sections by other disaffected
students. Right at the outset Yenner
states that he joined willingly, but his
commitment turned into an enforced
enlistment in the service of an
individual bent on total control.
Yenner sets out the questions at
the heart of the guru phenomenon,
including: What is the nature of
enlightenment, and is devotion to
a guru the surest way to attain it?
The fact is that the guru principle
has not travelled well from its natural
environment in the East to the West. If
we turn to seventh-century Hindu sage
Shankara, we find it uncontroversial
in his setting for him to state that the
three greatest advantages in life are
human birth, the longing for liberation,
and discipleship to an illumined
teacher. An examination of the Indian
guru tradition shows that it rarely fell
into the controversy that Western
gurus are prone to, but there is a rich
Western literature on the failings of
the modern guru. So what are the
charges that Yenner levies at Cohen?
Is Cohen merely on a control-trip?
Certainly the evidence he puts forward
is compelling, and many people on
finishing his book will be persuaded
that Cohen is a fraud. But, on turning
to Wombachers book if one has
the patience to complete it one is
left with a quite different impression.
What then can one use to arbitrate
between the two claims effectively put
forward in these books?
I would suggest two factors are
important here. Firstly, how seriously
does one take enlightenment in
the first place? If it is anything less
than a passion, then one might be
perfectly safe to accept Yenners
warning and have nothing to do with
Cohen. On the other hand, if one
finds it a really serious question then
one might need to look more closely
at both books. Yenners book has a
foreword by the well-known author on
Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor, who
claims that his early acquaintance
with Cohen led him to foretell that
it would all end badly. Yet, if Cohen
is as arrogant and domineering as
is claimed, why did he publish an
interview with Batchelor in an issue of
What is Enlightenment? It is clear that
www.scimednet.org
the NHS on the grounds of cost (as

if antidepressants were for free),
at present a patient has to wait for
eighteen months to see a therapist,
and even then may be limited to
a few sessions of CBT (Cognitive
behavioural therapy), not always the
right modality.
In his foreword Professor David
Healy, director of North Wales
Department of Psychological
Medicine, states flatly that drugs
like antidepressants (cause) the
greatest amount of damage to the
greatest number of people; these are
the real abuses, the real dramas.
Which leads on to the true villain
of the piece, the pharmaceutical
industry with its relentless, merciless
expansion into more and more areas
of medicine, medical training and
research, supported by an army of
lobbyists and by well paid unethical
doctors and scientists who lend
their names to articles and studies
that the drug companies themselves
have produced. New products are
described as safe and beneficial, the
negative results of clinical trials are
not mentioned. This practice is wellknown, scandalous and outrageous.
It is a perfect illustration of deceptive
authorship practices for commercial
reasons, wrote M.Larkin in The
Lancet (July 1999).
Doctors are also to blame for the
severe overuse of SSRIs, a practice
strongly encouraged by Big Pharma,
but they have neither the training
nor the time to deal with depressed
patients in any other way. Also, as
some GPs freely admit, receiving a
prescription reassures most patients
and makes them compliant or, with
a bit of bad luck, suicidal.
The only hope against a worsening
culture of over-medication for
depression and other emotional
problems is the emergence of the
so-called expert patients, the ones
who research their condition and
the available options of treatment,
who dare to ask questions and
voice doubts in the surgery and take
responsibility for their own health.
Let the last word belong to Rebekah
Beddoe:
Of course, the decision to take or
not take a medical treatment for your
emotional issues must ultimately be
yours I would never wish a person
be denied the relief a medication
might bring them but each and
every one of us deserves to be able
to base this decision on the facts,
not just on drug company marketing
dressed up as medical science.
Beata Bishop is author of
A Time to Heal.
51

the two men have very different views
on enlightenment, but the discussion
is courteous, and readers are left
to make their own minds up. Indeed
the eighteen years of the magazine
provide a resource for enlightenment
unparalleled in the modern world,
and, although Cohen is the editor and
appears in articles and interviews,
practically every contemporary voice
on the subject has been aired at one
time or another. If one is serious
about enlightenment, one would at
least have to acknowledge Cohens
contribution here.
The second clue comes from
Yenner, and, I have to admit it was a
surprise to me. He suggests that we
should consider Andrew as a teacher
in the crazy wisdom tradition, which
would include gurus like Gurdjieff
and Rajneesh. I first encountered
the term crazy wisdom in Georg
Feuersteins excellent book on gurus,
Holy Madness, but it had never
occurred to me to apply it to Cohen.
Yenner comes to the conclusion that
crazy wisdom gurus are inclined to
apply all kinds of bizarre pressure on
their students, but that Cohen, even
if he is to be included alongside such
teachers as Gurdjieff, is exceptionally
ham-handed in wielding authority.
Wombachers book shows otherwise,
but of course the retreat is effectively
a public forum, and only Cohens
closer students know what goes in
private. Perhaps Cohen is as arbitrarily
cruel as the accounts suggest. From
Cohens point of view however, we
gather that students like Yenner are
seen as those who cant take the
pressure, and are collectively labelled
the shadow sangha.
Now, perhaps we are deeply
committed to the idea of
enlightenment, but are not drawn to
the crazy wisdom tradition. Further,
the allegations of bullying by Cohens
former students and mother
suggest to us that he should be
discounted as a significant figure in
the field of enlightenment. Is there
then anything more than Cohens
admittedly ground-breaking magazine
series, particularly for the SMN to
be interested in? Wombachers book
illustrates what this could be. It is
Cohens insistence on evolution.
Cohen was invited to speak at
the SMN Mystics and Scientists
conference in 2004, but, as I recall,
said little about this, concentrating
instead on an account of his own
awakening. His presentation seemed
to divide the conference almost
equally for and against him, but the
relation of his thought to evolutionary
science and the work, for example of
www.scimednet.org
Teilhard de Chardin, got lost. However

in Wombachers book this issue
crops up again and again. (I have to
admit being divided over the question,
for example how is it possible that
enlightenment has evolved since
the time of the Buddha?) Cohens
own spiritual lineage is through his
master Poonjaji to the world-renowned
Ramana Maharshi, and mingles
perhaps with his Judaic heritage.
Hence in a dialogue with Rupert
Sheldrake (an extract of which can
be found on You Tube) the question
of evolutionary telos is explored in
both scientific and East-West religious
terms. In this and other sources we
glimpse the possibility that Cohens
thesis is both deeply considered and
significant for our time. Wombachers
book gives many examples of where
the implications of evolutionary
enlightenment are worked out on the
spiritual path that Cohen teaches.
In conclusion I would say that
these two books between them pose
a problem worthy of attention. If
Cohen were only a guru with some
disgruntled former students, the
issue would be of little interest. But,
because of his magazine series,
and because of his exploration of
evolutionary enlightenment, we are left
with this question: does his brilliance
in reframing enlightenment in the
modern context suggest we should
have sympathy with discontented
students but somehow ignore them
in considering his work, or do their
complaints suggest that we should
discount the work as the product of a
deeply flawed man?
Dr. Mike Kings most recent
book is Postsecularism: the Hidden
Challenge of Extremism, reviewed in
the last issue.
Transcendental
Materialism?
Chris Lyons
THE EVOLUTION OF GOD

Robert Wright
Little, Brown 2009, 567 pp., $25.99,
h/b ISBN 978 0 316 73491 2
This is the third book in which

Robert Wright expounds his idea that,
beginning from a purely materialist
standpoint, meaning, teleology and
even divinity, can be discerned in the
world.
In his book The Moral Animal
(1994), he showed how love and
compassion can be plausibly
explained by evolutionary theory
alone. Beginning with a mothers
loving feelings for her children,
empathy extends to other family
members through the mechanism

of kin selection, and then, through
the process of reciprocal altruism,
to include friends and neighbours.
In Nonzero (2000), he traces the
development of human societies from
hunter-gatherer groups to villages,
chiefdoms, city-states and empires,
to demonstrate how Game Theory,
particularly the dynamics of nonzero-sumness, can explain that, as
technological advances bring people
into ever closer contact, and with it
the opportunities for co-operation,
their circle of consideration and
compassion gradually, if fitfully,
expands, till becoming global.
In the present book he turns
his attention to God, and asks
whether religions in the modern
world (can) reconcile themselves
to one another and to science. He
believes they can, and contends
that if the ever expanding circle of
human compassion is driven by
natural selection and game theory,
it suggests that the moral sense is
transcendent of humans and built
into the fabric of the universe itself.
He sees in this an intimation of
something that might be called God.
Its a different idea of God from the
theistic one held by most believers,
but it provides some compass for
orientating our moral direction. It
also avoids the problem of how an
omnipotent, loving God can allow evil,
and its congruent with our scientific
understanding of the world.
But if science can be reconciled to
a world-view that can be legitimately
described as religious, there
remains the problem of how the
different religions, particularly the
three Abrahamic ones, can ever
be reconciled with each other. To
tackle this he embarks on a history
of religion that fills most of the

theology, but to get the right political
conditions operating on the ground.
His further conclusion, however,
is that whilst the gods were human
inventions and illusions, the idea
has been so modified and refined
throughout the ages that it has taken
on transcendent validity.
On the one hand, I think gods
arose as illusions, and that the
subsequent history of the idea
of god is, in some sense, the
evolution of an illusion. On the
other hand: (1) the story of this
evolution itself points to the
existence of something you can
meaningfully call divinity; and (2)
the illusion, in the course of
evolving, has gotten streamlined
in a way that moved it closer
to plausibility. In both of these
senses, the illusion has gotten
less and less illusory.
The book is an ambitious attempt
to reconcile religion with science, and
religions with each other. Whether it
succeeds will depend upon the extent
to which the authors perspective is
attractive to either the scientific or
religious communities. Nevertheless,
its an engaging perspective, and
one, I think, that thinking people
should try on for size.
Dr. Chris Lyons is a GP and a
member of the SMN Board.
God: The Case for

the Defence
Max Payne
GOD AND THE NEW

ATHEISM
John F. Haught
WJP Press, 124 pp., 11.99, p/b ISBN 10:0 664 23304 X
FAITH AND ITS CRITICS

David Ferguson
Oxford, 195 pp., $16.99, p/b ISBN 978 0 19 956938 0
A FINE -TUNED
UNIVERSE
Alister E. McGrath
WJP Press, 262 pp., 26.99, p/b ISBN-10: 0 664 23310 4
Here are three vigorous counter

blasts to Richard Dawkins militant
atheism. Ferguson is the most
philosophical, McGrath the most
theological, and Haught the most
polemical. All argue that belief in
the personal Christian God is not
inconsistent with modern science,
and that the deepest human values
point require a Divine being to

validate them. After considering these
arguments in defence of God, an
impartial agnostic may be inclined to
return the canny Scots verdict of Not
Proven. The prosecutions case has
been undermined, but this does not
mean that the defendant is innocent.
Both Ferguson and Haught argue
that a systematic materialism must
destroy human values. Haught mocks
Dawkins apparent assumption that
the values of Liberal democracy could
survive his soft line atheist world view.
Real hard line atheists like Nietzsche
and Sartre openly proclaim that the
death of God leads to moral nihilism.
Not only does moral goodness go,
but scientific truth as well. Michael
Polanyi pointed out long ago that hard
scientific material objectivity depends
upon the prior personal moral
commitment of the scientist to self
critical impartial truth.
McGrath suggests a new approach
to natural theology. Traditional natural
theology in the style of Paleys
Divine Watchmaker argued from the
presence of design in nature to the
existence of a Divine Creator. McGrath
accepts that this argument does not
work, but reverses the direction. Given
the standpoint of orthodox Trinitarian
Christianity it is possible to declare
that not only is it consistent with
modern science, but that it can give
a meaning and purpose to science,
which science itself lacks. His point is
the so called Anthropic principle. The
whole universe as we know it requires
that the fundamental parameters
of the forces of nature have to be
precisely as they are for human life
on this planet to exist. The possibility
against chance of these parameters
being exactly so is a number larger
than the number of subatomic
particles in the entire universe.
The materialist thinks we are here
by a fantastic statistical fluke, but
Trinitarian orthodoxy proclaims that
we, the universe and everything are
all here by Gods design. It is a good
argument, and better than materialists
give it credit.
But is Trinitarian orthodoxy
consistent with modern science?
The elephant in the living room is
the Fall. The religion in question is
not Jesusism, the religion of love
preached by Jesus of Nazareth. It is
Christianity, the religion invented by
St. Paul. Christos is a Greek word
never used by the Aramaic speaking
Jesus. Christos is the Son of God who
was sacrificed on the Cross to atone
for the sin of Adam, and for which God
punished all Adams descendants.
The whole doctrine of the Atonement
www.scimednet.org
books five hundred plus pages. He

starts with the shamanic practices
of hunter-gatherer communities,
but thereafter focuses mainly
on the development of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam with only
occasional references to Hinduism
and the religions of East Asia. The
author is erudite, and the book well
researched. The style though is
easy, and the text peppered with his
wry wit, (in reference to a tribe in
central Australia, he quips one of
the shamans jobs was ensuring that
solar eclipses would be temporary
nice work if you can get it.).
His thesis is that when people
feel threatened are in zero-sum
relationships with their neighbours
- their gods (and scriptures) are
belligerent, but when they have
something to gain from being
co-operative are in non-zerosum relationship their gods and
scriptures take on a more tolerant
tone. Thus in the age of Josiah, the
Book of Deuteronomy has Yahweh
saying of the Hittites, Amorites,
Canaanites and Perrizites you must
not let anything that breathes remain
alive. You shall annihilate them.
Whereas later, after the Exile, when
Israel and its neighbours had all
been pacified and become part of the
Persian Empire, we have a kindlier
Yahweh saying to Jonah, of their
ancient foes, the Assyrians, Should I
not be concerned about Nineveh, that
great city in which there are more
than a hundred and twenty thousand
persons He gives similar examples
in the life of Muhammad, contrasting
his gentler pronouncements during
the Meccan period with the more
intolerant ones when, in the Medinan
period, hed acquired political clout.
He likewise explains the rapid spread
of Christianity (which he regards as
largely the invention of St Paul) to the
well developed communications of
the Roman Empire and the additional
opportunities for non-zero-sum
relationships that they facilitated.
His conclusion is that throughout
history humans have invented gods
in their own image, and that whether
they were tolerant or belligerent
depended not on eternal truths,
but on what was going on on the
ground; principally, whether they
were in zero-sum or non-zero-sum
relationships with their neighbours.
Furthermore, in our own day, and in
like manner, the scriptures of these
ancient faiths will be cherry-picked for
their tolerant or belligerent passages
for the very same reasons. The way
to avoid religious strife, therefore,
is to not worry too much about the
53
is scientifically false, morally

objectionable, and theologically
confused. There never was a separate
creation of man in the Garden of
Eden. Mankind is the product of 2
billion years of biological evolution.
Sometimes simple people see issues
plainly, while the sophisticated hide
away in a tangle of details. American
fundamentalists see a clear conflict
between science and scriptural
Christianity, and choose scripture.
McGrath has a 35 page index to his
bibliography, and dodges the issue.
Haught solves the problem of
scripture at the end of his book with
the argument that demolishes much
of that which went before. God is
loving and also vengeful. He presides
over the wasteful process of biological
evolution with its suffering and
extinction of entire species, and is
also the loving Father of mankind. He
defiantly proclaims that scriptural truth
far transcends the limited, pedantic,
rational intellectual questioning of
materialist science. Which is precisely
what Dawkins is saying from the
opposite direction.
Ferguson has a more subtle
answer to the scriptural question.
In laudable attempt to persuade
Christians and Moslems to regard
each others scriptures with respect,
he argues that sacred writings have
to be interpreted according to high
spiritual principles. What matters
is faith, not the detailed words that
arouse faith. The question then
arises of what these higher spiritual
principles are? Are we left with
nothing but a vacuous religiosity?
What is significant in these three
books is what they do not say.
They all leave aside any detailed
consideration of the fundamental
question of whether or not mind
www.scimednet.org
can be totally reduced to matter. If

it can, then all question of religion
disappears. If it cannot, then further
and higher dimensions of reality
beckon. All scripture is only a second
or third hand account of the spiritual
experiences of saints, prophets, seers
or Incarnations. In defending the
possible existence of the Divine, none
of these authors go on to examine
the nature of first hand mystical
experience from which such scripture
derives. All of them consider God in
terms of the Anthropomorphic Deity
of the Abrahamic tradition, and so
they go through elaborately casuistical
arguments to make biological
evolution consistent with a Bible that
starts with the book of Genesis. None
examine alternative Eastern answers
to the nature of the Divine, yet the
Vedantic kalpas and mahakalpas,
and days and nights of Brahm,
accommodate evolutionary biology,
and modern cosmology very easily.
Faced with the looming problems
of the 21st century, there are those
who seek for a spiritual vision to
inspire mankind to face the future.
The evidence of these books is that
traditional orthodox Christianity will
find it difficult to provide the answer.
Max Payne is a Vice-President of
the Network. As you read this, he will
be in New Zealand to celebrate his
80th birthday.
Not Good Enough

Lance St John Butler
REASON, FAITH
AND REVOLUTION:
Reflections on the
God Debate
Terry Eagleton
Yale UP, 2009, 200 pp., $25, h/b
ISBN 978 0300 151 794
The Network has always been a

place to be brave in and we should
welcome this extraordinarily brave
book. I read it twice straight through
and I havent felt impelled to do
that since John Grays similarly
iconoclastic Straw Dogs.
Eagleton was the paid-up Marxist
scourge of university English of
the 1980s. His Literary Theory: An
Introduction of 1983 sold a million
copies mostly to undergraduates
bemused by Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Cultural Materialism
and the rest. It wasnt the best
book in the field but it was wellwritten (read funny) and took a
comprehensible line; even if this
was dubious (after all, the ongoing
socialist experiment that Eagleton
appeared to be endorsing was about
to collapse under the weight of its

own mountains of lugubrious yet
murderous piffle) it has the huge
merit that even undergraduates could
actually understand it.
Talking of brave, Eagleton left
Oxford (how many dons ever quite
manage that?) and went a bit
quiet after the fall of European
communism, but now he has
redeemed himself triumphantly by
managing to bring off the amazing
trick of re-thinking the Enlightenment,
Christianity and the Way We Live Now
while still remaining consistent with
his earlier positions. This is thinking
of no mean order.
This book shows us that we
need to think harder and better
perhaps some of the softer edges
of the Network approach need to be
sharpened up for instance. Eagleton
will not let us away with a religion
involving just niceness; he points out
our persistently superstitious view of
God (and thats just the agnostics
and atheists among us); he asks
what the Enlightenment actually did
to the notion of Reason; and he
never lets us forget the forgotten or
forbidden arenas outside the pale of
rationalist thinking: the body, politics,
experience, suffering, the marginal,
our laziness, our self-loathing.
Here is a heady, unfamiliar world
of self-contradiction (ours, not
Eagletons) in which the Christian
Right clamours for war, the Dawkins
atheists set up a Satanic mirrorimage of a God not to believe in,
we support one illiberal and vilely
autocratic regime after another in
the name of protecting freedom,
values are just the decoration
that we add to the market, and
globalisation has taken over from any
other form of universal or catholic
faith while pretending somehow to
be in congruence with those faiths
themselves.
It is above all the figure of Jesus
that bestrides this intoxicating book
like a colossus. Or rather, not at all
like a colossus, more like a piece
of tortured meat. Pages 19 to 29
of the volume (it consists of four
essays, originally lectures, very much
a la Matthew Arnolds Culture and
Anarchy), in the section entitled The
Scum of the Earth, are a real tour
de force of theological writing. I dont
think anything has ever given me a
better insight into what Jesus could
and should mean for us. He is not
a ruler, not a lawgiver, not powerful
(far from it), not bourgeois, not even
pleasant, not easy, not soft. He is
a bleeding carcase through whom
we can see, as very few of us do

Practical Spirituality
David Lorimer
LIVING DEEPLY
Marilyn Mandala Schlitz et al
(eds)
Noetic Books, 2007, 231 pp.,
$16.95, p/b ISBN 978 1 57724
533 6
ESSENTIAL
SPIRITUALITY
Roger Walsh
John Wiley, 1999, 305 pp., $15.95,
p/b ISBN 0 471 39216 2
Living Deeply summarises the

results of a research study conducted
by the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
involving 150 hours of interviews with
leading spiritual teachers. Writing
in the foreword, Buddhist scholar
Robert Thurman observes that each
of us has the capacity to move from
a dominator worldview to one where
we regard life as a precious gift. This
involves an enhanced sense of unity
and connection and the management
of ones mind. With consciousness
transformation, we can become more
aware of how interconnected we are
with all other beings. At one level,
this is at a move from a left to right
hemisphere function, since it is the
right hemisphere which mediates
our sense of connectedness and
empathy. The fact that we are living
in a left hemisphere dominated
society is amply demonstrated by Iain
McGilchrists book reviewed above. It
is also the message of the book and
speech by Jill Bolte-Taylor, with which
many members will be familiar (see
TED talks).
The most important shift is one
of identity discovering who you
really are at a deeper level. The

researchers tried to probe this
question over a 10-year period and
report their findings in a series of
chapters containing extracts from
many interviews. These include the
various doorways to transformation
including pain, hitting the bottom,
noetic experiences, psychedelics,
experiences in nature or just seeing
the extraordinary in the ordinary: the
awakening state is very ordinary. It
is falling in love with the ordinary.
It doesnt need to be special. The
ordinary is the divine. We also need
to prepare the soil through attention,
intention, repetition, curiosity,
creativity and silence. These will
provide the best conditions for seeds
to grow. Then there are descriptions
of paths and practices, along with
a discussion of the importance of
practice and even regarding life
as practice and practice as life.
As we progress, we become more
aware of the universal within us,
the I becomes We and we regard
everything as sacred. In addition, as
Stan Grof points out, you realise
that the roots of global problem
are built into the very structure of
human personality, and to work out
problems in the world we have to
start from ourselves, undergo deep
psychospiritual transformation.
Roger Walshs book has been on
my shelves for a number of years,
and makes a wonderful complement
to Living Deeply. It proposes seven
central practices to awaken heart
and mind, exercises from the worlds
religions to cultivate kindness, love,
joy, peace, vision, wisdom and
generosity. The book was rightly
widely acclaimed when it came out,
and Roger sent me a copy. There is a
foreword by the Dalai Lama in which
he points out that striving for power
and possessions drives us further
from inner peace and happiness.
The qualities that form the focus
of the book are to be found in all
the living religions and the path
enables us to find a deeper level of
identity, our true Self. The approach
is underpinned by some core claims
from the perennial philosophy,
that there are two realms of reality
in which we partake, that human
beings can recognise their divine
spark and sacred ground, which can
then be realised. In a normal state
of consciousness we are only half
awake or half-grown, depending on
which of the many metaphors one
uses.
There is a Buddhist slant in
the book owing to the authors
background, but then there is a great
www.scimednet.org
see, that it is in our squalor, our

scumminess, that we reveal our
frailty and our need for a god quite
other than that of the Judaism of
the time or of Dawkins today, and
that we are caught up in The Law
(rather than the Lacanian Real that
is Desire.) Gods true law is justice
and compassion but The Law will
not tolerate that and inclines to
reduce adherents of the true law to
the flayed and bloody scapegoat of
Calvary. The primary masochism
known as religion yearns for The
Law and for punishment both in
the sense of being punished and
of course, of punishing. But the
secret god that is Jesus is quite the
opposite of this.
So Eagleton is a Blakean, turning
us away from Nobodaddy to that
other god, the helpless, vulnerable
animal that is Jesus and ourselves.
Eternal life here would be the escape
from The Law, self-liberation from
the selfs desire to hug its chains,
and participation, perhaps literal
participation, in Jesus death as well
as his life. His death was an act
of solidarity with the destitute and
dispossessed. As Eagleton points
out, Crucifixion was reserved by the
Romans for political offences alone
and the political gesture of Jesus is on
behalf not of humanity and its sins
(Jesus has very little to say about sin
at all) but on behalf of the shit of the
earth the scum and refuse of society
who constitute the cornerstone of the
new form of humanity known as the
kingdom of God.
This is astonishingly well-put and it
feels, quite inexorably, a more Jesuslike take on the Jesus story than is
usually proposed. Beside it Dawkins
and his ilk (Christopher Hitchens is
Eagletons other main target) seem
pale, defensive optimists.
It took an astute and passionate
thinker to see through the truths
of evolutionism and the truths of
reason, which are truths after all,
and, with immense energy, to break
almost all moulds of thought at once
and lead us to a place that in our
hearts we have always known was
there, the place caught in Kurtzs
famous cry The horror! the horror!,
and force us to look at it steadily and
look at it whole, but without despair.
I cannot recommend this book
strongly enough. If you think that
reason or benevolent agnosticism
or human comfort or the market or
Sunday religion are, well, anyway,
good enough, you will think again.
Prof. Lance Butler is Professor
of British Literature at the University
of Pau.
55

deal to be learned from Buddhist
contemplative practices. Each of the
seven practices has a number of
chapters devoted to it, with a series
of practical exercises to pursue as
one refines ones consciousness
towards a state of wisdom and
service, which is why generosity and
spirit in action come at the end of
the book. Returning to the theme
of the ordinary already referred
to above, one suggestion is to
transform daily activities into sacred
rituals, something that one finds in
the Celtic tradition and also in the
writings of the 17th century French
monk Brother Lawrence, who simply
practised the presence of God.
Both books contain valuable advice
for practitioners: one is to make a
start, or restart if you have left off.
Making practice the first priority of
the day is also extremely important
before other things take over. And,
if you can keep this up for about 25
days, then you will have formed a
new habit and continuing practice
is much easier. Finally, we can
dedicate our practice to all beings,
expanding our circle of kindness and
compassion in the process. Either
or both of these books will get you
started on a transformative journey.
psychologyconsciousness
studies
Imagination, Values and
Culture
Rowan Williams
CHILDHOOD,
WELL-BEING AND A
THERAPEUTIC ETHOS
Richard House (SMN) and Del
Loewenthal (eds)
Karnac Books, 2009, 254 pp.,
19.99, p/b ISBN 978 1 855
756335
No-one can now ignore the fact that

a serious debate about the welfare
of children has at last begun in our
society. And, appropriately, it has
started to open up a wider debate
about the nature of learning and
even the nature of human maturity.
The essays in this collection are
significant not only for what they say
about childhood but for what they
invite us to think about human growth
and well-being in general.
So in this volume you will find
some searching reflections on
what we do to the growing human
consciousness by certain styles of
www.scimednet.org
education. Several contributors make

a powerful case for resisting the
pervasive drift towards measurable
skills and tightly defined goals for
(especially) primary schoolchildren.
Richard House, in a very challenging
piece, appeals to Rudolf Steiners
theories to underline the dangers of
treating the childs consciousness
as simply a limited and inadequate
version of the adults, and argues
that the best way to keep therapists
in work indefinitely is to perpetuate
this error. And whether or not the
reader will share the Steinerean
perspective, it seems undeniable that
one of the roots of the expanding
and well-documented unhappiness
of children and young people in our
culture is the sheer impatience we
exhibit with the long period of latency
that characterises the human animal.
We want to supply a storehouse of
useful skills and to measure their
acquisition at every step. But what
if that biologically unusual latency
is in fact itself a treasury for human
well-being? What if hurrying children
through it is one of the most effective
forms of deprivation we could devise?
If therapy is one of the key
words in this collection, the other
is play. Therapy, so the editors
argue, is not a matter of damage
limitationnor does it necessarily
imply that we begin by assuming a
state of victimage or diminution on
the part of all young people. Rather,
it is to do with attempts to heal an
entire social climate that is unduly
obsessed with outcomes and panicky
about wasting productive time,
focused overwhelmingly on fantasies
of individual success and damagingly
clumsy in most of what it seems to
think about relationships. And in this
light, the connection of therapy with
play becomes clear. Play (as the
essays in Part IV particularly show)
allows the growing consciousness
to establish a very particular kind of
relation with the world of physical
stimuli: it allows you to think that it
might be different. It develops the
what if? function in the mindthe
function that in the long run permits
art, science, and even politics, and
a bit paradoxically, strengthens our
awareness of what is specifically in
front of our noses by challenging us
to think it away and remake it. This
is not a matter of acquiring skills
that will enable us to solve problems,
but of nurturing the imagination that
will make us constantly wonder if we
are asking the right questions of our
world. And it is in this imaginative
maturity that we discover what is
distinctive in our humanity and why
our humanity, with all its pain and

frustration, can be an opportunity for
joy.
The freedom of the imagination,
the freedom to ask whether we are
asking the right questions and to
reconstruct the world in speech and
image and vision, is of course an
essentially spiritual thing. For the
Christian believer, spiritual is not
a word that designates simply some
distinct quality or territory in the
individual subject; it is a word deeply
imbued with resonances to do with
connection or communion. A spiritual
education is not one in which we are
shown how to cultivate certain highly
satisfying and even useful private
experiences, but one that exposes us
to connections, possible and actual,
with other subjects, with the material
world we inhabit and ultimately with
its source. The discussion in these
pages of spirituality in education
assumes, refreshingly, that the
capacity to rethink the world, to see
it differently through the imagination,
is bound up with the capacity to
see yourself as connected in ways
you did not choose with a whole
environment, human and non-human.
Behind the back of the conscious
ego lie all sorts of links, life-giving
and also at times frightening, which
make us who we are; imagination
allows us a glimpse of that rich and
elusive hinterland, and without it we
shall both wreck our own selfhood
and ravage our environment and our
human relations. Whether or not all
this opens on to the wider horizon
of relatedness to the ultimately
mysterious life of the creator is
something about which these authors
will not agree, any more than readers
will. But it is important that the
question be recognised for what it
is, a serious one that asks about the
framing of our whole imaginative life.
Kathryn Ecclestone casts a sharp
and sceptical eye on an approach
which, disturbed by all that we
have identified so far, comes to
see education and nurture as
fundamentally problem-driven so
much so that it casts children in the
light of helpless and shrunken souls
who require endless therapeutic
attention. Education, she argues,
is thus distorted into a constant
struggle to make the world easier
for its injured and hyper-sensitive
subjects. It is, as the editors
acknowledge, a salutary warning.
Talk about emotional literacy can
turn into a recipe for emotional
illiteracy if it refuses to deal with the
challenges of managing the reality of
others, the inevitability of frustration,

anything else, the threat of the void
we suspect in ourselves as modern
or postmodern adults, unclear as to
whether we really have anything to
value.
Which may mean that we
ourselves, modern and postmodern
adults, have been deprived of some
of that spiritually serious playfulness
that allows us to approach the world
as if it were a place of possibilities
and unexpected affinities, as well
as a place of profound challenge
and potential pain, to be reworked
through the imagination. If this
excellent collection helps us think
through not only the needs of
our children but our own often
unacknowledged needs, it will have
achieved a very great deal. But
meanwhile we owe much to the
authors and editors of such a varied,
engaging, and outspoken guide to
our ills and puzzles, and to what we
might need to address them, at last,
with greater honesty.
Dr. Rowan Williams, FBA, is
Archbishop of Canterbury. Foreword
reprinted with permission.
Groundhog Day in
Perpetuum?
Robert Charman
IS THERE LIFE
AFTER DEATH? The
Extraordinary
Science of What
Happens When
You Die
Anthony Peake (SMN)
Arcturus Publishing Ltd, 2007,
416 pp., 9.99, p/b ISBN 978 0 572 03227 2
THE DAEMON; A
Guide to Your
Extraordinary
Secret Self
Anthony Peake (SMN)
Arcturus Publishing Ltd. 2008,
336 pp., 9.99, p/b ISBN 978 1 84837 079 1
Wikipedia tells us that Anthony

Peake (1954 - ) is a pseudoscientist
and parapsychologist. To be one is
bad enough, but to be both together!
Before he went to the academic bad
Peake obtained a dual honours degree
in sociology and history from the
University of Warwick, with subsequent
postgraduate
qualifications
in
personnel management and labour
law. He is a qualified psychometrician,
working in business over many years.
His stated interests do include
parapsychology, along with the
and the tough edges of choice. But

the concern of other authors here
is certainly not to collude with the
idea of a diminished self or to
propose that the ideal educational
process is one in which individual
emotional states are to be cosseted
or indulged. Properly understood,
there is much in common between a
good deal of what Ecclestone argues
and the rest of the book: education
is how we equip children for
transforming their thinking and acting
and for relating with both celebration
and critique to the world they inhabit.
Sue Palmer and Sue Gerhardt
summarise their invaluable
researches in their contributions
here, showing in different ways the
complex interweaving of patterns of
imaginative and affective deprivation
with neurophysiological problems
and behavioural disorders. For those
who apparently want to trivialise
the question of childrens well-being
(young people have always said
theyre unhappy; children just grow
up however you bring them up; we
cant over-protect our children by
going along with their complaints;
and so on), the concrete evidence,
medical and statistical, represented
in these as in many other chapters
ought to give pause.
But the resistance to such
evidence suggests the uncomfortable
conclusion that quite a lot of
commentators in the UK at the
moment are still reluctant to
approach these issues with care
and openness and that this is
sometimes expressed in terms
that imply a positive dislike or fear
of children and young people. Why
this should be is a question that
deserves a whole series of further
essays. But here is one way into
the issue. Our uneasiness with
our children that is to say, the
uneasiness over-represented in public
comment and media rhetoric, if not
corresponding very exactly to how
any one of us is likely to feel with
particular young people is rooted
in our own uneasiness as to what it
is we want to communicate to the
next generation. The presence of the
young reminds us painfully that we
have little or no wisdom to transmit.
As a culture, we are individualistic
and focused on short-term
gratifications or at least that is the
public rhetoric we allow and indulge
in advertising or entertainment. But
not to have any clarity about what
we believe worth transmitting is a
sobering and unpleasant condition.
The threat that so many claim to see
in the young is in fact, as much as
57
sociology of religion and the sociology

of language, but in these two books
he also undertakes a masterly,
fully referenced, review of the wider
fields of the neurosciences, clinical
psychology, particularly concerning
strange experiences in epilepsy,
parapsychology, OBEs and NDEs, the
nature of time and the implications
of quantum physics before putting
forward an intriguing, and therefore
controversial, theory as to our
continuing existence. The following
summary does not do justice to his
gift for lucid exposition.
Although we each experience ourself
in the singular as I, a wealth of
research in clinical psychology and the
neurosciences, especially in split brain
research, has demonstrated beyond
all doubt that we are composed of
two separate selves, one based in the
left hemisphere of the brain and the
other in the right hemisphere. The two
hemispheres communicate through a
transverse bridge of nerve fibres called
the corpus callosum. This bridge is cut
in split brain operations for some
forms of intractable epilepsy, and it
has been found that each hemisphere
remains as a separate, conscious,
self. Peake has called our everyday
self the Eidolon or lower self, from
the Greek eidos meaning form or
phantom. The Eidolon lives in our
chattering, rationalising, organising,
getting things done, left hemisphere.
This is the I of everyday life that
interacts with the left brained Is
of everyone else. The quieter, non
chattering, musical, artistic, spatially
perceptive, intuitive, right hemisphere
houses, says Peake, the Daemon
or Higher Self, from the Greek
daimon, meaning knowing spirit, as
in Socratess daimon that he would
5www.scimednet.org

often turn to for advice. The Daemon
is the all seeing, all understanding, all
remembering partner of the Eidolon
who plays a crucial role in his theory
of repeated survival.
Mind, says Peake, is not a separate
entity from brain. Mind as a noun
may be convenient shorthand, but
it is a misnomer, implying a static
object, whereas it should be the
verb minding, as in walking. Mental
activity is a continuing process
generated by the brain and dependent
upon the brain. Peake supports Karl
Pribrams theory that the function
of the brain is to convert sensory
input into the changing imagery of
a subjective hologram that is our
immediate reality because it is,
quite literally, us. Pribram links his
theory with David Bohms proposal
that the universe itself is an ever
changing, informational hologram, in
which each is related to all. We take
time, especially clock time, as a
given, comprised of past, present,
and future in endless flow, and it is
true that we have various brain and
body clocks that synchronise our
bodys metabolic functions in a daily
cycle. Physicists, however, talk of
time as a dimension, not as a flow
because time, like length, breadth
and height, just is. Peake explores
the fascinating literature of case
histories and psychological research
demonstrating beyond all reasonable
doubt that time is a very variable form
of subjective experiencing, controlled
by the changing chemistry of the
brain. In sudden danger time can
stand still. Alternatively, when we are
absorbed in something it can pass
in a flash.
Central to Peakes survival
hypothesis is the Many Worlds, or
Multiverse, interpretation of reality in
which there is not just one universe
but an endless plurality of universes
whereby whenever a quantum choice is
made in one universe, the alternative
is worked out in other universes and
so ad infinitum. Peake quotes physicist
De Witt as saying Every quantum
transition taking place on every star,
in every galaxy, and in every remote
corner of the universe is splitting our
local world on earth into myriad copies
of itself. Many experiments appear to
confirm this statement. Schrodingers
Cat is alive in one universe and dead
in another as at the point of death
in one universe, the universe splits
into two for life in another universe.
The multiverse interpretation is now a
mainstream hypothesis in theoretical
physics, especially in cosmological
speculation. Allied to this theory is
physicist Wheelers 1983 proposal
www.scimednet.org
known as Wheelers Participatory

Universe whereby the conscious
observer brings about the universe
they are conscious of, even to the
many preceding events that must
occur to make this possible. This
gives consciousness a central role in
the universe. These interpretations run
counter to the commonsense given
of our everyday world in which time
flows, night follows day, and cause is
followed by effect.
Now we turn to Peakes controversial
theory of repeated personal survival.
To the age old question of Self and
Death - What Survives? There are two
age old answers - Nothing, because
death equals total extinction, or A
disembodied self, the latter allowing
for endless speculative variants on
possible outcomes from ghosts,
communication through mediums,
spiritual journeys, heaven, hell, or
reincarnation. Peake has proposed a
third answer to the effect of Nothing in
this universe but everything in another
universe, and another, and another.
Peakes theory, therefore, stands or
falls in the first instance upon whether
the many-worlds, or multiverse
interpretation of the quantum universe
is correct. As conscious beings we are
an integral part of the universe, says
Peake, so this interpretation must
apply to ourselves at the moment of
death. We can never die because the
option of not dying must be realised
in another universe. Our brain and
body will die and dissolve back into
its constituent material elements, but
we will die out of this universe to be
reborn in another universe. Contrary to
spiritualist belief we have no ability to
operate in a brainless, bodiless state
as we are dependent upon our brain,
so we need to integrate ourselves
into a new brain and body, and we
will find that in a parallel universe
that operates on the same physical
principles, looks the same as this
one, and is at a parallel moment in
time as our conception and birth.
How is this life-preserving transition
from one universe to another achieved?
What happens when we are seen
by observers as about to die in this
universe? During the brief moment
preceding brain death the brain releases
a flood of opioid neurohormones that
causes a dramatic slowing down of
subjective time to a point of suspense
where we disengage from, or fall out
of (Peakes description), the timeline
of conscious observers in this universe
to realise the option of life and a new
timeline in another universe. At the
moment of brain death and psychic
transition the Daemon comes into
its own, rewinding its Eidolons Life
Review into a new beginning in which it

is transported back to the point where
the embryo becomes a person and the
you-to-be becomes the baby-to-be in
another universe. In this universe your
life sequence from birth to brain death
will operate in subjective real time as
it does now. You will relive the same
sequence of your life as if for the first
time with, for most of us, no memory
of a previous life. The Daemon that
silently shares your life unwinds from
its memory your Life Review in a new
real time but can intervene to provide
opportunities for change.
To recapitulate. In this universe
your body and brain die in the sense
that they stop functioning and so, to
living observers, do you. Your funeral
takes place because, as far as your
friends, relatives, and the community
are concerned, you have disappeared
from this universe and are therefore
dead, but in another universe you, as
combined Eidolon and Daemon, are
reborn from brain A into brain B as
a new you. Referring to Greek myth
Peake terms his theory Cheating the
Ferryman. The film Groundhog Day,
in which weather man Phil Connors
endures endless 7am repeats, but
whose options change during each
rerun, affords a useful analogy.
The Daemon, as richly explored
in his second book, guides and
prompts our life, and is the agent
of repeated survival. Psi, in all its
forms, is a function of the Daemon.
Precognitive and dj vu experiences,
or an apparently irrational urge to
do A instead of sensible B which, in
retrospect, turns out to have been the
right course of action, are when the
Daemon intervenes in this life from
its memory of what happened in the
previous life. It feels like precognition
but is actually memory. From the many
examples of Daemon intervention as
Peake interprets it, I will quote one
intriguing instance. In 1749 the opera
composer Christolph Gluck was visiting
friends in Ghent and had enjoyed a
very convivial meal at the local tavern.
Bidding his friends good night he
started to walk back to his lodgings
and suddenly noticed a strangely
familiar figure walking not far ahead of
the same height and shape as himself
and wearing the same clothes. His
rising sense of uneasy alarm turned
into outright fear as he saw, in a
momentary full glimpse, that it was
his double. He then saw his double
take out a key and enter his lodging
house. Rushing back to the tavern
he told his friends what he had seen
and begged a bed for the night from
one of them. Next morning they met
and made their way to his lodgings,
As Far As We Can Get

Lance St John Butler
LIFE AFTER DEATH:

WHAT SHOULD WE
EXPECT?
David Fontana (SMN)
Watkins Publishing, 2009, 10.99,
p/b ISBN 978 1 905857 97 5
In the matter of Life After Death

I think we have got as far as we
are going to get under present
circumstances, and David Fontanas
book, coming on the heels of his
own Is There an Afterlife? (and
Anthony Peakes Is There Life after
Death?) demonstrates pretty much
where that is.
Since the 1840s and the advent

of modern spiritualism, and a
fortiori since the founding of the
various Psychical Research bodies
in the 1880s and 90s, a fairly
coherent picture has built up of
the possibility and possible nature
of survival. We have mediumistic
and channelled evidence, NDE
accounts, Death-bed Visions,
After-Death Communications,
the reincarnation material and
Instrumental Transcommunication.
Some parts of this seemed to loom
large in the earlier period, other
parts had to wait for developments
which came later in the 20th
century such as dedicated scholarly
research (Ian Stevensons studies
of reincarnation), or technological
advances (improved resuscitation
techniques in hospitals for more
NDEs).
These bodies of evidence have
become steadily more voluminous
but the overall picture we have of
the afterlife has not greatly changed.
Communications from the other side
have neither become laughably oldfashioned, thin and dubious (there is
new material coming in all the time
after all) but nor have they become
gleamingly modern and solidly
convincing to all observers. They
have been in a more-or-less steady
state. The result of this is that
Fontana is able to range freely over
150 years of evidence and research,
quoting William James and the Scole
Report for instance, separated as
they are by a good century, almost
in the same breath.
Thats fine indeed, that is simply
how it is - but it is a little odd.
How many other fields of research
show that kind of consistency, or
should one say stasis? In Survival
Studies there is new evidence and
new material, and there are new
ways of gathering that evidence and
material, but the arguments between
sceptics and those who think there
is something real being investigated
stand almost exactly where they did.
One side can point to paranormal
phenomena of a convincing kind, the
other side can either ignore them
(parapsychology not being part of
mainstream serious discourse) or
propose alternative explanations
which, although often rather sketchy,
will satisfy most sceptics.
Fontana takes us through some
of the material with a focus on what
life after death might actually be
like. It seems to be a thought-world
in which, for instance, on the lower
levels, we seem to have bodies, but
in which, as we ascend, we learn
that they are only thought bodies or

a species of illusion. His emphasis
is both on what is suggested by
the evidence (gleaned from good
mediums, convincing NDEs and
children) and what has been the
opinion of religious thinkers over
the centuries so St Isaac the
Syrian and Severus of Ravenna rub
shoulders with Erlundur Haraldsson
and Kenneth Ring , and we get
the Bardo Thodol alongside Helen
Wambach and Tom Harrison. I think
this eclecticism is justified among
the open-minded but I fear it will cut
little ice with those whose noses
are already hard; the good logic of
arguments based for instance on
evidence that is unknown to anybody
present at a sance, or unknown to
a reincarnation claimant before he
has made his claim, might stagger
the sceptic, but the quotation of
sayings from St Luke probably only
dubiously attributable to Jesus will
not.
So Fontana is perhaps, and
perhaps deliberately, preaching
to the converted. After all, he is
probably the best-informed expert
on survival in the country if not on
the planet and he is in the strange
position of being engaged in a
field that, while it produces a lot of
evidence, might not refer to anything
at all. This book will send those
seeking more information to many
good sources but it will send those
who are unconvinced back into their
corners still growling.
It is worth asking why Survival
Studies (in spite of recent
developments in certain universities
in the UK and US I think I have
invented those capitals) should
be in this strange static position
where it has grown in size for so
many decades without moving
on at the level of paradigm or
convincingness. I think the answer,
interestingly, tends to support the
notion that there is something in
it all. If there were nothing in the
theory of Survival, as for instance
there was nothing in Phrenology,
then, like Phrenology, it would have
died a quiet death. The fact that
it has not been dispatched by the
mainstream intellectual consensus
is significant. On the other hand
the fact that it has such difficulty in
operating as a convincing discourse
is attributable to a particular quality
in the evidence. To give only one
aspect of this peculiarity: science
demands the replicability of results
and it may just be that dead people
communicate accurately one day,
falsely the next and not at all the
www.scimednet.org
only to find a large commotion going

on inside with people peering into his
bedroom. As they looked in they saw
a massive hole in the ceiling through
which a huge roof beam had fallen and
crashed onto his now smashed bed.
According to Peake, Glucks Daemon
remembered that in his previous life
it had been the real Gluck who had
met this untimely death. To avoid
this fate and allow him to fulfil his
musical potential the Daemon had
created in Glucks mind an image
of his Doppelganger to frighten him
into returning to his friends and seek
a bed elsewhere. In 1749 Gluck was
35, had not yet married, and had not
yet fulfilled his creative potential in
reforming the rather moribund opera
of his time by composing his Orfeo
ed Euridice, Alceste, and Iphignie
en Tauride masterpieces. In this life,
thanks to his Daemon, he lived to do
so.
Peakes Cheating the Ferryman
theory challenges our traditional
thinking on life, death, and possible
thereafters, and will raise many
questions in your mind. For example,
does this multiverse theory apply to all
animals, whether apes, mice, birds or
fishes? It should do in principle as the
final option is the same for them as it
is for us. Alexander the Great must,
surely, ride Bucephalus again. Does it
really account for apparent mediumistic
communication? Whatever your
views I do urge you to read his two
books because, whether his theory
stands up to scrutiny or not, his
ability to present and explain findings
drawn from across the sciences and
interweave them with fascinating
case histories is truly impressive.
Maybe Wikipedia needs to revise its
somewhat dismissive assessment
of his academic standing and, by
association, its similarly dismissive
assessment of parapsychology.
59

third. NDEs are hard to repeat at will
or in the laboratory.
Perhaps, then, we need to move
to a different logical paradigm
altogether here, one in which the
vague (for much of Fontanas book
is about the vague, the temporary,
the illusory as they are manifested
both here and on the other side)
must be allowed its place. After all,
strict science of the 19th-century
kind is not the only show in town.
The poststructuralist attack on
certainty, for instance, is not a Gallic
conspiracy against Anglo-Saxon
pragmatic realism; it is the most
profoundly radical philosophy since
Plato. We may need to learn to think
differently, with less certainty, and
in that different thinking notions of
otherness or death or life are
already under heavy fire.
ecology-futures
studies
The Reality Revolution
David Lorimer
QUANTUM SHIFT IN THE

GLOBAL BRAIN
Ervin Laszlo (SMN)
Inner Traditions, 2008, $14.95, p/b
ISBN 978 1594 77233 7
Written before the full force of the

financial and economic storm hit
us, this book assumes even greater
relevance for Resurgence readers
trying to understand the underlying
dynamics of our situation and see
beyond the repair and continue
or business as usual perspective.
Newspaper pundits are displaying
more humility than a year ago, and
now admit that they dont know
how it will all end. They struggle
to understand the current crisis in
terms of previous crises such as
occurred in 1929, 1987 or in the
early 90s. However, we also need
to assess the extent to which the
current crisis is unprecedented.
Population pressure was far less
intense and natural resources far
more abundant 80 years ago than
now.
In a series of books published
over the last 10 years, Ervin Laszlo
has refined and extended his
understanding of our predicament.
In this book, he examines the
possibility of what he calls a
quantum shift in the global brain,
defining the global brain as the
quasi energy- and informationprocessing network created by 6
www.scimednet.org
1/2 billion humans on the planet

interacting on many levels. A
quantum shift in the global brain
is a sudden and fundamental
transformation in the relations of
a significant segment of the 6 1/2
billion humans to each other and to
nature, what he calls a macroshift
- not only in society but also in
our understanding of the nature
of reality through a paradigm shift
in science. It is these two shifts
together that constitute what he
calls a reality revolution.
The book is divided into three
parts: the first describes macroshift
in society, the second looks at
paradigm shift in science and the
third explains the ways in which
the Club of Budapest is initiating
Globalshift. This gives the reader
both a theoretical and practical
understanding of our situation and
its possibilities. The question we
are facing is one of evolution or
extinction. Business as usual is
inherently unsustainable and is likely
to lead to increasing instability and
breakdown in all spheres of human
activity -- social, financial, economic,
political and ecological. However,
another scenario describes timely
transformation in which we create
a sustainable and co-operative
world. We all recognise that global
problems demand global solutions,
but there lurks a danger that the
solutions will be imposed from
above rather than evolving from
below. It is increasingly apparent
that we have reached a bifurcation
point in which the elements of
breakdown can potentially be
transmuted into the components of
a breakthrough. Ervin explains this in
terms of five phases of a macroshift,

namely trigger, transformation,
critical or chaos, breakdown and
breakthrough. Needless to say this
is an uncomfortable process but
the roots of unsustainability make it
almost inevitable.
Reflecting on our current
modality of extensive growth based
on conquest, colonisation and
consumption, Ervin analyses nine
outdated beliefs and six dangerous
myths (e.g. nature is inexhaustible
and is like a giant mechanism)
before suggesting 10 new
commandments of a timely vision
and the path towards a planetary
ethic. These values and perceptions
will be familiar and congenial to
Resurgence readers, who will
also appreciate his maximum
code of acting so as to maximise
the sustained persistence of the
biosphere and the minimum code of
living so that others can also live.
This reflects the emergence of a new
culture of Holos, corresponding
to the worldview of the cultural
creatives.
Significantly, both spiritual
and scientific perspectives are
coming together in a new vision
of wholeness involving the cosmic
plenum, non-locality and coherence.
The old picture of isolated atoms
and particles is now being
replaced by a more integrated
and interconnected view, which
intrinsically includes the nature
of human consciousness. Here,
Ervin proposes a new theory of
the Akashic Field incorporating
the totality of information and
consciousness. In an intriguing
annex, he extends this theory to
discarnate communication, which
he experienced at first hand. He is
reluctant to envisage the idea of
surviving soul, but rather proposes
that our memories live on as an
autonomous hologram leaving
a trace in the plenum. This is a
more sophisticated version of the
psychic soup hypothesis, but I
dont think it successfully accounts
for real interactions between the
incarnate and the discarnate, which
imply continued development of
consciousness. The overall message
of the book, however unlikely this
seems at present, is that humanity
is a system capable of rapid
transformation. We will soon enough
discover whether this is true.
This review first appeared online
in Resurgence.
Bringing Learning
to Life
David Lorimer
WHATS THE POINT OF

SCHOOL?
Guy Claxton
Oneworld, 2009, 210 pp., 12.99,
p/b ISBN 978 1 85168 603 2
Guy Claxton has been active at

the interface between psychology
and education for many years. In
this groundbreaking book, he brings
these fields together to propose
a new culture for education based
on the development of enthusiastic
learners rather than students skilled
at reproducing content under exam
conditions. His starting point is
that schools are currently failing
students, not only because only 44%
reach the target of five A-C grade
GCSEs, but also the disaffected
attitude towards school among many
young people and their deteriorating
mental health, as indicated in
a number of recent reports.
Interestingly, the overall rhetorical
framework now contains many sound
principles, originally emanating
from the Scottish system with its
emphasis on the four capacities
of successful learners, confident
individuals responsible citizens
and active contributors. However,
the real difficulty is translating
these principles into the culture of
schools themselves. Guy shows how
a century of educational reforms
has failed to do this, and that
headteachers do not believe that
the aims of education are currently
being achieved.
Underlying the issues we now face
is a series of outdated metaphors
of the school as monastery and
factory. The second metaphor is the
most damaging, as it encourages a
production line analysis of education
in terms of input and output to the
extent that the tail of assessment
wags the dog of teaching and
learning. In universities, students
are now treated as customers on
the receiving end of transferable
skills. It is all very well to emphasise
the role of education in producing
a world-class workforce, but this
neglects the essential dimension,
which is about how to expand
the capacities of young people.
In this respect, Guy finds models
of fixed ability unhelpful in that
they classify students instead of
focusing on expanding their capacity

to learn; this means a shift from a
content-driven to a learning-driven
approach. Instead of the factory, Guy
proposes two new metaphors, that
of the Learning Gymnasium and the
Exploratory, suggesting that we see
education as a form of epistemic
apprenticeship. And, even if not all
are cut out for academic success,
all can get better at learning.
In these new contexts, he puts
forward a series of character traits
and qualities that can be cultivated
by schools: curiosity, courage,
exploration and investigation,
experimentation, imagination,
reasoning, sociability and reflection.
These qualities are able to relate
the life of the school with real life
after school and model ways in
which successful learning actually
takes place. Prof Joan Rudduck of
Cambridge has found that secondary
school students are hungry for
what she calls the three Rs and the
three Cs: responsibility, respect and
real, and choice, challenge and
collaboration. This does not mean
solving problems of carefully graded
difficulty, as Guy puts it, but rather
a challenge to get something useful
done, probably in collaboration with
other people. Moreover, the sense
of satisfaction and happiness is
derived from overcoming these kinds
of challenges; and I know from my
own work that young people admire
those whose achievements require
vision and perseverance.
As Director of the Centre for RealWorld Learning at the University of
Winchester, Guy has had a chance
to test some of these ideas out in
schools, and early results indicate
that the change of culture also
improves exam performance. Young
people themselves are very clear
about the kind of school they would
like to see, and it corresponds
closely with the ideas in this book.
In addition, the very force of new
technology encourages them to
carry out their own research; of
course, this has its own dangers of
plagiarism, but with the development
of the eight qualities students
will be able to make good use of
Internet resources. The structural
obstacle comes in the form of
politicians trying to improve the
system, which is usually interpreted
in terms of content and assessment
frameworks rather than fostering the
language of learning throughout the
education system.
Towards the end of the book,

there is a useful chapter of tips
for parents to enable their children
to become successful learners.
Guy warns of the perils of praise,
suggesting that we concentrate on
effort rather than attainment. He
also points out some interesting
research findings in the way in which
results are interpreted for boys and
girls. Boys who are good at maths
tend to be told that their results are
because they are good at it, while
poor performance is taken as an
indicator of lack of effort. For girls,
however, the remarks receive an
effort attribution, while low marks
are interpreted as a lack of ability.
The net effect is that boys tend to
improve more, so we really have to
be careful about our feedback.
Encouragingly, the book has
already been endorsed by many
leading educationalists, and one
can only hope that ministers and
opposition politicians concerned
with education will pack this book
into their holiday reading. They
should heed the warning given by
Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the Childrens
Commissioner for England, when
he asks what is the purpose of
education? Is it for the attainment
of government targets, or is it to
provide children with the life skills
to become confident adults? In our
fast moving world, we need to take
account of the most recent findings
in psychology and neuroscience and
incorporate these in our models
of learning as applied in schools.
This brilliant book shows the way,
as its subtitle puts it, that we can
rediscover the heart of education.
www.scimednet.org
general
61

Thompson Transforms
into Teacher
Martin Lockley
TRANSFORMING
HISTORY: A NEW
CURRICULUM FOR A
PLANETARY CULTURE
William Irwin Thompson
Lindisfarne Books, 2009,
157 pp., $20.00, p/b
ISBN 1 978 1 58420 069 7
In Transforming History Thompson

turns teacher and proposes a
curriculum adhering to Haeckels
biogenetic law that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny: i.e. aiming
to match the stages of the childs
cognitive evolution to the stages
of cultural evolution. Thompson
proposes that the entire (American)
school curriculum, from Kindergarten
through 12th grade, should review the
history of the human species from
pre-Ice Age origins to the present era
of globalisation. While this ambitious
12-13 year-long history lesson could
be construed as a historians bias,
Thompson envisions all traditional
subjects, woven into an epic historyof-humanity tapestry, calibrated
with sound Waldorf-style child
developmental principles. Hopefully
a healthy awareness of physical,
emotional, intellectual and spiritual
dynamics would mitigate insidious
developmental problems ranging from
Attention Deficit Disorder to math
anxiety. As Swiss psychologist Remo
Largo said. You cant make the grass
grow faster by pulling it upward.
Anyone familiar with his previous
work, will find the introduction to
this book vintage Thompson. He
reminds us of the accelerating tempo
of evolution through Hominisation (4
million -200,000 B.C.E), Symbolisation
(200-10K), Agriculturalisation (103.5K), Civilisation (3.5K B.C.E- 1500
C.E.), Industrialisation (1500-1945)
and Planetisation (1945 present).
Here, Teilhards term Planetisation
is given appropriate, historical
priority over the now-more-familiar
term globalisation. Like Teilhard,
and even Einstein who advocated
a world government, Thompson is
among a growing number of integral
cultural philosophers looking beyond
nationalism, patriotism and other
factionalisms to a more coherent
planetary culture that celebrates
our common humanity. Thompson
also defines seven evolutionary
cultural ecologies: Sylvian (primate
evolution), Savannahan/lacustrine/
coastal (Australopithecus to Homo
www.scimednet.org
erectus), Glacial (archaic to modern

Homo sapiens), Riverine (ancient
civilisations), Mediterranean or
Transcontinental (classic civilisations),
Oceanic (modern industrial nation
states) and Biospheric (planetary
noetic polities). He supplements these
6- and 7-fold evolutionary schemes
additional 5-fold schemes including
Gebsers Archaic, Magical Mythical,
Mental and Integral consciousness
structures, its several corollaries or
equivalents like Marshall McLuans
modes of communication (Oral, Script
Alphabetic, Print and Electronic),
what he calls identities (Sanguinal,
Territorial, Linguistic, Economic and
Noetic) and what he terms artisticmathematic mentalities (Arithmetic,
Geometric, Algebraic, Galilean
Dynamic and Complex Dynamic). For
good measure the complex dynamical
systems exhibit three possible modes
or attractors: point, periodic and
chaotic. Though some may find these
lists repetitive (I dont), they have the
advantage of being easily blended
and shuffled to give us a rich overview
of how humanity is a multi-layered,
evolutionary, organism or system
made up of a dynamic and creative
flux of individual, collective linguistic
and cognitive faculties, identities and
consciousness structures.
Thompsons entertaining but
light scholarly erudition betrays
his Celtic love of language. Words
like fabulation, angelology,
thaumaturgical (=miraculous) and
amphyctyony (= a league of Greek
states) embellish his pithy turn of
phrase and his digs at the monolithic
establishment. So the History
Channelis really the War Channel
and speeches by Lynne Cheney calling
for the elimination of multiculturalism
in our public schools and a purified
curriculum of America First [make
the] school systems the battlefield
in which the dying ethnicities of
the past fight for three dimensional
space in a scientific world that has
already moved beyond into the
multiple dimensions of astrophysics.
Thompson has already foreseen and
described the heat of the phase
shift that is causing the meltdown
or catastrophic restructuring of the
biosphere, the ever-more-helpless
territorial nation-state, and the
human body, under assault from
pharmaceutical, industrial and
genetic pollution. Even poor Edward
Wilson, Harvards ant specialist
and biodiversity guru, is depicted
as so unable to comprehend Stuart
Kauffmans science of complexity
mentality, that their dialog is like
a Catholic cardinal and Descartes

discussing the Renaissance, with
cardinal Wilson dogmatically insisting
that the outmoded scientism
mentality is adequate for all times
and circumstances. Perhaps William
doth protest too much, and Edwards
other contributions deserve better
approbation.
Thompson never explicitly states
whether this curriculum is designed
only for American schools, where
it is undoubtedly needed, as parts
of the country are stuck in preEnlightenment religious mentalities
or, as the books subtitle would imply,
is it for the entire planetary culture.
Thompsons soaring and idealistic
intellectual vision is undoubtedly
holistic and well-intentioned but,
one wonders how quickly and
widely it could be implemented,
given the huge variability in cultural
mentalities across the planet.
Presumably implementation would
require Waldorf-style teacher training
programs, and fundamental changes
in the administration of educational
infrastructure. Although Thompson
does not discuss the global growth
of Waldorf schools, from less then
100 in the 1970s, to about 1000
today, the trend is very promising and
verifies Steiners prescient predictions
about achieving critical mass.
I would be the last to decry
Thompsons visionary idealism.
Indeed, I was tickled to find that his
appendix appears under the label
of An evolution of consciousness
curriculum. (The same title as the
university course Ive taught for 10
years in Colorado)! His vision is
more high-falutin, intellectual and
global than that embodied in grass
roots programs like Learning for Life
which aim to build and strengthen
character in the contexts of the
family, education and employment
thus making a real difference to the
lives and character development of
both learners and the professionals.
(www.learningforlife.org.uk).
Nevertheless there are undoubtedly
many interesting convergent threads.
Perhaps Thompson is right about
the complex dynamical systems
instability that he has often discussed
in reference to the weather,
biosphere and financial systems,
not to mention mentalities and
consciousness structures. Ideally
inducing a consciousness paradigm
shift in early education could have
rapid and revolutionary results. If
so, Thompsons desired and much
needed transformative revolution may
come about sooner that we think.
63
David Lorimer
Science/Philosophy of Science
Seeing through Illusions
by Richard L Gregory
Oxford University Press 2009, 253 pp., 16.99, h/b.
Written by one of the foremost researchers into the nature of illusions, this
book provides fascinating insights into how the brain perceives the world,
conditioned as we are not only by our own previous experience but also by
the process of evolution itself. Earlier ways of seeing still remain embedded
in the brain, and can be revealed by careful experiments. The scope of the
book includes philosophy and art as well as neuroscience and psychological
case studies. The key lies in our interpretation of the world. Gregory
examines paradigms of perception, blindness, various forms of ambiguity
such as flipping (the Necker tube is a well-known example), and different
types of cognitive distortion. Authoritative and compelling.
Branches: Natures Patterns, A Tapestry in Three Parts

by Philip Ball
This is the third in a series of books (the last two have been reviewed in
earlier issues) about patterns in nature. Branching and interconnection
are found throughout nature, for instance in snowflakes, trees, rivers and
crystals; and many patterns of fractal, recurring at many scales. The book
examines the underlying principles that produce such patterns or moulding
factors that shape the world, revealing striking parallels between different
phenomena. The six chapters discuss different aspects of branching,
beginning with the nature of the snowflake and moving through water, trees,
leaves and web worlds. The result is a fascinating tour. Like the other two
books, I feel that the study could have been produced in a different and
more attractive format with more illustrations in colour and fewer black-andwhite diagrams.
Space and Counterspace
by Nick C. Thomas
Floris Books 2008, 128 pp., 14.99, p/b.
This is a book building on the work of Rudolf Steiner on counterspace,
which formed part of his scientific approach incorporating a deeper level
of perception and based originally on his understanding of the science of
Goethe. In particular, modern science is a science of quantities rather than
quality, and has great difficulty dealing with qualia, which, after all, form
the basis of our everyday experience. The author discusses our experience
of seeing blue as an example, maintaining that this cannot be dismissed
as merely subjective. Quoting Heisenberg on Goethe, it is clear that the
physicist understood that Goethes more direct contact with nature would
have to be foregone in the interests of clearly understanding a wide range of
mathematical relationships. This book probes more deeply and its content
is relatively technical and more easily understood by trained scientists, who
will appreciate the wide range of application of these insights in relation to
gravity, time, chemistry, astronomy and cosmology.
Thinking in Systems
by Donella H. Meadows
Earthscan Ltd 2008, 218 pp., p/b.
Donella Meadows (1941-2001) was a well-known systems theorist who
worked for three decades on the limits of growth agenda. This book
was completed in the mid-1990s and is based on seminars she gave
in universities and elsewhere. It is an excellent introduction to the field,
and one that should be read by politicians around the world. Just as it
suggests in the first chapter, managers do not solve problems, rather they
manage messes -- complex systems of changing problems that interact
with each other. This requires systems thinking if one is not to be caught
up in unintended consequences. There is an important chapter on leverage
points, or places to intervene in a system. Interestingly, Jimmy Carter tried
a systems approach when he was president, but found it difficult to get
across to the public. At the end there is a useful glossary and summary of
systems principles.
The Selfish Genius How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwins

by Fern Elsdon-Baker
Icon Books Ltd 2009, 282 pp., 8.99, p/b.
This study by a philosopher of evolutionary theory enables the general reader

to understand more about the history of evolution, the nature of neo-Darwinism
and the scientific disagreements within the field in relation to Richard
Dawkinss position. The author writes as a fellow scientist from a secular
background, and whose main contention is that the public understanding of
evolutionary theory has been overly influenced by Dawkinss work, and that
there are other competing explanations, for instance from Stephen Jay Gould.
Within the context of the Network, Brian Goodwins main argument was against
the narrowness of the Dawkins selfish gene, contending that the organism had
been forgotten and that a science of qualities was necessary to counterbalance
the emphasis on quantity. The strength of the book is in enabling the general
reader to understand the wider scientific context of the debate and the sterility
of a stand-off between science and religion. It was surprising that the publishers
did not see fit to provide an index; indeed, there are only references within the
notes rather than a separate bibliography.
Medicine/Health
The Reconnection - Heal Others, Heal Yourself
by Dr. Eric Pearl
Hay House Publishers 2001, 222 pp., 9.99, p/b.
An autobiographical account of the therapeutic journey of a chiropractor into a

healing practice. The book begins with an account of one such healing where
the result was so rapid as to be nothing short of miraculous. The reconnection
in question is remembering our identity with the Source and allowing what he
calls the transfer of information in terms of energy to the healee thereby
restoring the person to spiritual wholeness. In this perspective, healing is a
decision arrived at between the patient and the Universe - the healer is an
intermediary. This is a book for those in therapeutic practice and those who
would like a new angle on the meaning of healing.
My Path
by Carolien van Leusden (SMN)

Carolien van Leusden, 144 pp., p/b.
A personal and inspiring account of how the author survived secondary
breast cancer by combining conventional and complementary treatments,
changing her diet and following spiritual guidance. As a nurse herself from a
medical family, the story is well informed and is written as a diary so that the
reader can appreciate the events as they unfold, sharing both the anguish
and the breakthroughs at all levels, psychological, emotional, physical and
spiritual. The lessons from the book are the perennial ones that we need to
live in the present with courage and love, and also to be able to reach out
for the support we need and which we can in turn give out.
Movement Medicine
by Susannah & Ya Acov Darling Khan

Subtitled bring the life of the dance into the dance of your life, this book
is the result of many years of research and teaching across a number of
traditions. It is a meditation practice rooted in traditions of ecstatic dance,
and is promoted as suitable for anybody in a body. It is certainly true that
movement and dance can reach new parts of our being. The structure of
the book includes the dance of creation, the journey of empowerment,
the journey of responsibility and living the dream. Within this are the four
elements and what they call the nine gateways as a journey to the soul
and a means of embodying your essential self. There are many practical
exercises which form part of the workshops put on by the authors. The
intent of the book can be summed up with the words of a Colombian
Shaman: the only really important thing is that you can look yourself
straight in the eye and know that you have lived from your truth and integrity.
Have faith in your truth. Follow it with love.
www.scimednet.org
b o o ks in b r ie f
books in brief

The Function of the Orgasms
by Michael Odent (SMN)

21st Century Information 2009, 149 pp., 7.99, p/b.
Following on from his work on what he calls the scientification of love,
this book, with its subtitle the highways to transcendence will radically
revise your understanding of orgasms. Note the plural, for a start: here he
focuses on the fetus ejection reflex, male and female orgasms in genital
sexuality, and the milk ejection reflex, drawing various parallels along the
way. Interestingly, the word climax in Greek originally meant a ladder; but
there are other etymological associations too, with shame and guilt and
fear. Pubic hair in German is Schamhaare. These associations go deep, as
Michels historical analysis of the political repression of sexuality shows.
parameters of a just war in the Christian tradition, along with a penetrating

essay on the legacy of Machiavelli. The situation in Afghanistan owes a
good deal to realpolitik as practised from Machiavelli to Clausewitz to
Kissinger. Merton characterises the state of mind of his time, and indeed of
ours, as one of truculence and suspicion, based on fear. In such a mood,
it becomes difficult to see any other solution than violence. On another
page he remarks that military logic frequently demands a new and more
ruthless policy, arguing that this will save lives and enable a swifter end to
the war. This sounds chillingly familiar, and Im sure that Obama will have
heard this repeatedly. For Merton, the winner is war, with the same ruthless
inhumanity on both sides. In Copenhagen, we are trying to formulate the
interests of our common humanity - a logic that should be extended to all
fields as we recognise our oneness and interdependence.
A key theme running through the book is a central role of oxytocin in all
orgasmic and ecstatic states. This is released in normal childbirth, but
not in Caesareans, during sexual arousal and during breastfeeding; so
the decline in natural births and breastfeeding also implies a decline in
bonding between mothers and children, with all which that implies. The
link between transcendence and ecstatic states involves intense activity of
the archaic primitive brain, while the neocortex is put to rest; and the term
peak experience carries its own connotations. After an interesting chapter
on parallels between humans, dolphins and bonobos, Michel discusses
orgasmophobia and its relation to shame, already mentioned above. Here
the thesis touches on that of Riane Eislers Sacred Pleasure. He finishes
with pessimistic and optimistic scenarios about the future of love, putting
forward suggestions for reversing current cultural conditioning, based on his
long first-hand experience. It is no exaggeration when he argues that the
future of civilisation is at stake.
Where is Heaven?
Philosophy/Religion
When Philosophers Rule:

Ficino on Platos Republic, Laws, & Epinomis
Introducing American Religion
by Charles H Lippy
Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group 2009, 268 pp., 16.99.
An exemplary and highly readable textbook on this topic covering every
conceivable aspect of American religion. It begins with native American
understandings as well as key elements in African tribal religions and
varieties within Christianity. The approach is then historical, tracing the
evolution of religious forms and practices from colonisation through the
revolution, the civil war and into the late 20th century picture of pluralism.
Each chapter is introduced with a summary of the main topics covered
then there are summary boxes throughout the text. Chapters end with
key points you need to know, discussion questions and further reading.
Although Network readers will not need all this information, it does make
the contents of the book easy to absorb.
Faith in the Fool:

Risk and Delight in the Christian Adventure
by Angela Ashwin
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. 2009, 187 pp., p/b.
I found this a refreshing and indeed disarming book as it is relatively rare to
find a book on the fool written from a Christian perspective. Some readers
will remember that St Paul defined Christianity as a form of folly to the wise,
but the fool is always a subversive figure who draws on a deeper wisdom
and puts us in touch with the spontaneous child. Various themes emerge,
including the value of uselessness (that delight of the fool), the mirage of
perfection, the uncluttered fool who is not attached possessions, and the
vulnerable fool who grows through suffering and may be foolish in generosity
and forgiveness. She also draws on her own everyday experiences as
well as the work of other writers, providing points to ponder at the end of
each chapter. Within a structure of somewhat rigid expectations, this is a
liberating book which many spiritually inclined people will celebrate.
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
by Thomas Merton
Orbis Books 2004, 165 pp., 16.00, p/b.
It is fitting and a trifle ironic that I am writing this short review on the day
when Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, having
recently committed a further 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Merton would
surely have objected to this in the strongest possible terms, for the same
reasons that he voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Indeed, his
extraordinary death in a shower in Bangkok in December 1968 may well
have been an accident engineered by the intelligence services in order
to rid themselves of a thorn in their side. Mertons writings on peace are
extraordinarily powerful - he saw them as an expression of his prophetic
mission and his conviction that the vitality of the Church depends precisely
on spiritual renewal, uninterrupted, continuous, and deep. In this context,
he did not believe that monks should be in the rear with the baggage,
but rather part of the advance guard. Needless to say, the nuclear issue
is at the forefront of these essays, but there is much discussion of the
www.scimednet.org
by Alexander Gorbenko
RG Publishing 2009, 150 pp., p/b.
The author of this book is a Russian Quaker who is also a Swedenborgian

scholar interested in mysticism and the scientific work of Constantine
Korotkov who has done some Kirlian photography with recently deceased
people. The book begins with some comparative definitions of heaven,
moving on to a discussion of the terms universe, life and self. The author
asks what actually survives bodily death in terms of soul, mind, aura or
spiritual body, drawing on the work of a number of scholars will be known
to readers such as Chris Clarke, Max Velmans, David Chalmers and John
Polkinghorne. He concludes that what we call mental in the physical world
becomes environmental beyond death, in other words that we continue to
exist in a mind-dependent or imaginal world, which is hinted at it through the
sciences of quantum theory, information theory and the study of complexity.
A stimulating and unusual discussion.
by Arthur Farndell
Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd 2009, 180 pp.,
18.95, h/b.
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was a key figure in the Renaissance era as a

philosopher, scholar, a priest, physician and musician. He made available
to the West the Corpus Hermeticum as well as the works of Plato, which
he quoted in his sermons in Florence Cathedral. It is quite surprising that
this is the first English translation of Ficinos commentaries on Platos
Republic and the Laws, as well as a lesser-known work. The translator
has been associated with the School of Economic Science for nearly 50
years, and its principal, Ian Mason, contributes the Foreword. He sees the
importance of this work to our time in terms of self-government, taking
control of ones inner life (these two dialogues are fundamentally about
government, the latter written by Plato in his old age). As one would expect,
the commentaries are erudite and well-informed, referring to neo-Platonic
literature as well as to Plato himself. Of particular interest are his remarks
on the allegory of the care if, where he refers to light being threefold -- divine,
intellectual and visible. He also provides a commentary on the Myth of Er,
giving his view on why this is conveyed as a story rather than a philosophical
analysis. The structure follows the original books, and the whole work is
dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, his patron. This is a rich new seam for
students of the perennial philosophy.
Creative Wisdom Ancient and Modern, Self

Enlightenment and Liberation
by Tahasa Falconar (SMN)

Non-Aristotelian Publishing 2009, 143 pp., p/b.
This print on demand book revises and updates some of the authors
previous work on non-Aristotelian thinking based on the work of Count
Alfred Korzybski who argued that creativity is essentially what we would now
call the right hemisphere function, whether one is referring to Einstein or
Rumi. The book ranges widely over themes including ancient and modern
wisdom - there is a good discussion of Seneca, Epictetus and Thoreau - and
enlightenment with Ramana Maharishi and Maharaj. The author also points
out that much of our schooling is based on words and memory, which
bypasses real and immediate insight and experience. The font and layout
of the print on demand format does not make the book easy to read, but
there is plenty to engage the reader interested in the full spectrum of ways
of knowing.
Swedenborgs Secret - A Biography
by Lars Berquist
Swedenborg Society 2005, 516 pp., h/b.
Lars Bergquist is a former Swedish diplomat who has translated Chinese,

Italian and French poetry and prose into Swedish. This is the English
translation of a highly acclaimed biography of Emanuel Swedenborg, which
came out in 1999 and is the first definitive, full-length biography for 50
years. For those readers unacquainted with this enlightenment genius,
this beautifully produced book provides the ideal introduction to the man
Religion Politics Evangelism
by P C Jena
Imprint Academic 2009, 138 pp., 8.99, p/b.
Edited by Member Dick Vane-Wright, this radical book by an Indian

Christian challenges churches to participate in political action as an
integral expression of evangelism; interestingly, the same point of view
was put by one of the candidates to become rector of our local church. The
key contention in this book is that religion has historically been controlled
by political ideologies, which in turn shape the nature of evangelism: rightwing fundamentalism in the USA is a conspicuous contemporary example.
The author is clear that people cannot call themselves spiritual if their
actions reflect unjust practices - this calls for searching self-examination.
The word best characterising his approach is the Greek diakonia, which
I must confess was new to me. It means ministry to the poor and is the
manifestation of divine love, as explained by Jesus himself. It implies a
prophetic stance critical of existing social structures which all too often
co-opt religion for other ends - as Constantine did in the fourth century.
The author is equally critical of the role of modern media and political
propaganda associated with the war on terror. This distracts attention
from the situation of city dwellers in slums, a reality only too apparent
in India. In this context, the author reminds us that Christianity is now
predominantly a non-Western religion and that Pentecostalism is a
dynamic force in the impoverished cities. Jena highlights the theological
rediscovery of politics and outlines his own view of hope and witness in
political action, reflected in his own work with the Urban Rural Mission.
This is a powerful and passionate book.
Soul Survivor
by Bruce and Andrea Leininger with Ken Gross

A very interesting account of the ostensible reincarnation of a World War

II fighter pilot. As with many such stories, James Leuninger began to have
memories and nightmares about dying in a fighter plane which was on fire,
and which he could not get out of. Over the course of time, many verifiable
details came to light, which the young boy could not possibly have known.
This enabled the parents to identify the pilot as James Huston. The book
is written as a narrative, carrying the reader along with some extraordinary
details and the profound effect this experience had on the belief system
of his parents, especially the father as a Christian searching for a rational
explanation not involving reincarnation. It contains some original drawings
and photos of other officers identified by James and who were also killed.
There are some poignant reunions, when James recognises and names one
of his old comrades from the sound of his voice. It is an extraordinary story
and one of the most evidential cases on record.
Rivers of Time
by Cy Grant (SMN)
Naked Light 2008, 95 pp., 7.00, p/b.
These poems span a period of over 60 years, and are ably introduced by Ian
Dieffenthaller. Some describe his experiences in the air force during the war,
while others reflect wider philosophical concerns, his interests in the Tao
Te Ching and his role as a champion of the dreaming black soul in a white
materialistic culture. Cy makes very creative use of language and rhythm.
Here is the first part of his poem Silence
To say that which is unsaid
is like throwing a pebble
breaking the pool of silence
words alone are as inadequate
as a lack of words;
silence is not a lack of words.
tears dissolve the eyes
as love the senses.
The poems are powerful and evocative, showing how words and their
combination can reach beyond normal explicit meanings.
Lighting a Candle
by Kathleen Raine and Temenos

Temenos Academy Review 2008, 223 pp., p/b.
Many readers will be familiar with the work of Kathleen Raine and Temenos,
whose Review I review every year. This book consists of a series of over
40 tributes to her, along with her own inaugural address at the Temenos
Academy in 1991. Pride of place goes to the eulogy by the Prince of Wales
at the service of Thanksgiving for her life, when he identifies with her own
ambition to reverse the premises of materialism in our culture, which
she referred to as the Great Battle. Among the best-known names in this
collection are Wendell Berry, Thetis Blacker (who writes about her prowess
at cooking and even provides some of her recipes), Keith Critchlow, Satish
Kumar, John Lane, the Bishop of London and Sir Stephen Lamport. As
private secretary to the Prince of Wales it was one of his jobs to arrange a
fortnightly delivery of organic vegetables from Highgrove. The contribution
from Sir John Tavener is a musical score for which a magnifying glass is
required in order to decipher even the dedication. This is a book which
anyone who knew Kathleen will treasure and want to read.
The Future of the Ancient World

by Jeremy Naydler (SMN)
Inner Traditions International 2009, 311 pp., $19.95, p/b.
Following his last book on Egypt, The Temple of the Cosmos, this new book
by Jeremy Naydler is a series of essays based on talks given over the last
15 years. The themes are wide ranging, including ancient Egypt and the soul
of the West, sacred art, modern esotericism, epistemology, the importance
of the ear in relation to the eye, early Christianity and divination. Central to
Jeremys concerns is the way in which our modern culture has lost touch
with nature and the spiritual world. He urges us to reconnect with invisible
realms and develop a new participatory awareness: I believe it is one of the
great tasks of our time, and the future, to rediscover and live in conscious
connection with the nonphysical, invisible worlds. Otherwise we simply live
in one half of reality rather than the whole of reality. For him, the cosmos
that surrounds us is full of soul, which we can learn to feel again through
rather than in contrast with modern cosmology. Likewise, we already live
within the interior world beyond death without necessarily being aware of
it. The book is full of rich insights into history and culture that enable us to
understand our own story and decide which elements need to be carried
forward into the future.
Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion

by William Fish
Oxford University Press Inc 2009, 198 pp., 28.99, h/b.
A technical book defending a nave realist theory of perception by
incorporating analyses of three kinds of visual experience in terms of
perceptions, hallucinations and illusions. I find it ironic that the author
begins his book with a quote from the Cambridge philosopher CD Broad,
who was president of the Society for Psychical Research, but nowhere
mentions the kind of experiences which Broad himself took an interest in
such as apparitions and out of body experiences.
From Cells to Souls and Beyond Changing Portraits of Human

by Malcolm Jeeves, Editor
William Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2004, 266 pp., 19.99, p/b.
A sophisticated set of essays bringing scientists and theologians
together to consider a range of interpretations of human nature and
representing, biological and medical sciences, psychiatry, psychology,
genetics, philosophy, theology and biblical scholarship. Central to the
concerns raised are developments in genetics and neuroscience, which
raise ethical and religious questions such as: would a cloned individual
have their own distinct identity? When do we become and when do we
cease to be persons? Can there ever be a real freedom of choice? What
is the relationship between spiritual experience and brain processes? Do
genes play a role in religion and values? How do we evaluate Christian
visions? What can Christianity offer in terms of an interpretation of
personhood? The editor then brings the strands together in the last piece,
noting the centrality of personal agency, the importance of relatedness,
and the emphasis on embodied spirituality. An important volume for
anyone considering the deeper questions of human identity posed by
science and philosophy.
Open Spaces, Sacred Places

by Tom Stoner and Carolyn Rapp
TKF Foundation 2008, 191 pp., 24.95, p/b.
The Spirit of this beautiful book can be captured in a quotation from John
Muir: climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Natures peace will
flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own
freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away
from you like the leaves of autumn. The healing power of nature and
gardens is underestimated in modern medicine, an insight that underlies
the projects described in this remarkable and wonderfully illustrated
book. The chapters describe how people have created green public
spaces for contemplation and refreshment and which will help heal the
community. Tom and Kitty Stoner founded the TKF Foundation in 1996 after
experiencing the healing power of nature in their lives. Since then, more
than 100 open sacred spaces have been created. One of the most striking
was a meditation garden at the Western Correctional Institution, where one
of the inmates said that making this garden was a chance on him to do
something positive. Buy this book, and be inspired yourself!
www.scimednet.org
and his influence. The book helps rescue Swedenborg from the margins
of European thought by demonstrating his role as a founding father of
modern esoteric spirituality. His stand-off with Kant (or rather Kants with
Swedenborg) represented a clash in ways of knowing with which we are
now much more familiar. Swedenborgs unique distinction was to combine
his intuitive visionary capacity with his analytical and empirical gifts as
a scientist.
65

G.K. Chesterton, Theologian
by Aidan Nichols OP
GK Chesterton was one of the leading and most versatile Catholic minds
of the 20th century, one of whose books helped convert CS Lewis to
Christianity. The author is a lecturer at Cambridge University and this book
is based on lectures given at Oxford in memory of John Paul II. As such,
its most immediate appeal will be to Catholic readers but it introduces
Chesterton to the general reader in a wider context with discussions
on the nature of spirituality and secularism. I particularly enjoyed the
quotation from Father Brown that I can believe the impossible, but not the
improbable, which, incidentally he also relates to the incredible.
Studies in the Gospels Volume 1
by Emil Bock
Emil Bock was a leading light in the early days of the Christian Community,
which is rooted in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. These studies originally
appeared in a series of newsletters at a time when the author was also
making a new translation of the Gospels from Greek. Rudolf Steiners
perspective those beyond the normal limits of biblical criticism and
materialistic understandings, reinstating the importance of what he called
the supersensible, in the light of which the miracles of Christ can be
understood afresh. Bock examines differences between the consciousness
of the various evangelists, and he uses Steiners scheme of three stages in
spiritual perception, namely imagination, inspiration and intuition as means
of deepening his own understanding. The topics covered are very broad,
including parables, miracles, the Sermon on the Mount, John the Baptist,
Judas and Peter. I found his comments on the Beatitudes especially
interesting in shedding new light on their layers of meaning.
Home Tonight:
Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal
by Henri J M Nouwen
Henri Nouwens original book on the Prodigal Son is one of his best-known
works, and this is a sequel based on workshops he gave when he returned
to his community at LArche in Toronto after a period of breakdown and
soul-searching. He describes the enormous impression made on him
by Rembrandts painting, which hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St
Petersburg. He contemplated its many layers of meaning, especially the
depiction of the magnanimous father and the repentant son, which evokes
enormous tenderness and compassion. Nouwen notes that Rembrandt
himself had suffered enormously in the period before he painted the picture.
The book is beautifully crafted, elaborating the themes of the story and
creating spiritual exercises around them, including the practices of listening,
journaling and communing. Besides the main text, there are some wonderful
apposite quotations, including some from Jean Vanier, which add to the
richness of texture and provide ample material for spiritual reflection.
2159 AD - A History of Christianity
by Craig Borlase
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. 2009, 255 pp., 9.99, p/b.
This unusual book outlines the history of Christianity from the perspective
of 150 years hence. The first 12 chapters are in the past and the last
four in the future. The text is highly readable and the originality of the
book consists in its forecast of the future with an accompanying timeline
including such events as a global flu epidemic, droughts and water wars
(not until the 2090s); on the theological side there are schisms firstly in the
Anglican Communion, then in the Catholic Church where the Vatican loses
its independent status. The details of these discussions make stimulating
reading, but perhaps the most surprising forecast is the dramatic
conversion of Richard Dawkins to the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church,
described as an obscure branch of Orthodox Christianity. Needless to say,
his last book charts this religious conversion and is entitled, appropriately,
The Learning Gene.
nature as sacred challenges the distinction between matter and spirit,

secular and sacred. The 14 essays range widely across this terrain, and the
authors are mapped in relation to each other at the end of the book. The
reader comes away with an enhanced and more subtle understanding of the
way in which philosophers and scientists understand nature, which will form
the cultural backdrop to any new relationship with nature.
Sun of gOd
by Gregory Sams
Weiser Publications 2009, 232 pp., $17.95, p/b.
More than 10 years ago, Rupert Sheldrake arranged a meeting in Devon
to ask the question, is the sun conscious? And in 1999, the Sun was
the theme of the Mystics and Scientists conference. This book raises all
these questions again, and its premise is that Sun is a large complex
system with some form of self governing intelligence. It is a living being,
aware of itself and its place in the universe...its power of consciousness
is so far beyond what we enjoy that it should be accorded deity status of
a high order. For millennia, human beings had an animistic outlook on the
world, and many worshipped the sun as the source of light and life. Blake
still understood this, but the modern mechanistic outlook regards the sun
as little more than a molten mass, and would certainly balk at attributing
any intelligence to it. Sams suggests that we need to recover this more
ancient understanding, but in the light of the self-organising consciousness
that underlies everything. And if the sun is in any way conscious, then it is
possible to communicate with it. At the very least, we can be filled with a
sense of gratitude for the life and warmth and sustenance that we gain from
the sun. This is a wide ranging and thought-provoking book.
Patterns of Eternity:
Sacred Geometry and the Starcut Diagram
by Malcolm Stewart
The front cover of this beautiful and profound book depicts the starcut
diagram, which is a way of demonstrating an internal geometry of the
square by creating triangles from each corner to the opposite apex.
The thesis, which I find persuasive, is that this diagram underlies many
developments of sacred geometry in different parts of the world. The author
takes the reader on a cultural adventure from Pythagoras to the Pyramids,
from the Vedic fire altar to Chinese shamanism, from Sufism to Raphael. All
of this is beautifully illustrated with both diagrams and photographs, so that
the reader is able to understand the subtleties of the geometric patterns as
well and the way in which they have been put into practice. The underlying
harmonic of this shape could contribute a healing presence to our jangled
and fragmented consciousness; the book is an outstanding achievement
and deserves a wide readership.
Angels in my Hair
by Lorna Byrne
Arrow Books 2008, 325 pp., 6.99, p/b.
Lorna Byrne is a contemporary Irish mystic, and this book is her fascinating
autobiography starting from her early childhood where she was already
seeing angels and spirits. At one level, her life is very normal, but her
perceptions make it exceptional. As a girl, she explains the nature of God
to her friend Marian, asking her if she sees the beautiful finch with all its
golden colours, remarking that the bird is like God, encouraging her to look
at it closely and see its beauty and perfection. She recounts an accident
where two boys are killed by a truck, but she sees this from inside, the
boys becoming luminous at the moment of death. She explains that death
for most humans is a continuous flow from one life to another, in perfect
harmony. She receives a beautiful prayer from the Archangel Michael, whom
she perceives as a radiant force beyond our comprehension. At the end of
the book, she entreats Mother Mary to appear more widely in the world. The
message of this book, and many others reviewed in this publication, is that
there are hidden and subtle dimensions to our existence, which enables us
to understand the context of life more deeply and realise that we are not
trapped within a purely physical system.
Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion
by James D Proctor
Templeton Foundation Press 2009, 371 pp., h/b.
A stimulating set of essays examining possible relationships between

the three terms in the title -- nature, science and religion. The point of
departure is that many claims about the nature of nature have negative
social consequences expressed in terms of, for instance, racial prejudice.
Interestingly, the word nature as meaning the physical world as a whole did
not come into usage until the 17th century. Then there is the use of the term
to refer to human nature with inner and outer dimensions. More specifically,
five visions of nature are presented: evolutionary nature, emergent nature,
malleable nature, nature as sacred and nature as culture. The editor points
out how each of these five visions challenges a different metaphysical
dichotomy, for instance malleable nature expressed in biotechnology
challenges the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, while
www.scimednet.org
Psychology/Parapsychology
Cosmic Ordering: the Next Step
by Barbel Mohr
In spite of the marketing hype, there is some underlying wisdom in this

book drawing on the ancient Hawaiian technique of hooponopono and
involving both self-healing and empathy, as well as more generally the
relationship between what we call inner and outer. The path involves
love, forgiveness and responsibility in maintaining a personal connection
to the universe through gratitude and acceptance. It encourages the
formation of new patterns of behaviour, which in turn will bring about
Virtuous Living Fufilling your Individual Purpose in Life
and an essay on the influence of Gnosticism and Christian mysticism

on Roberto Assagioli, which has an interesting section on the Cathars.
Anyone interested in the human psychospiritual journey will find much
food for thought.
Love and its Disappointment

by David Brazier (SMN)
O Books, 2009, 199 pp., 11.99, p/b.
This book is written on the basis that we are spiritual beings and that
our purpose is to live life fully devoted to God in a spirit of love and
service. The sentence that particular struck me was that we should
always strive to be kinder than necessary because everyone we meet
is fighting some kind of battle. The people who will get most out of
the book are those who share the authors perspective on God; it is
refreshing to see the word virtue used so explicitly and to reflect on
the explanation of 12 natural laws. Interestingly, the book as a whole
is something to the channelled wisdom of Silver Birch, which I have not
read for many years.
An explanation of the meaning of life, therapy and art by an author who

has already written on Carl Rogers and Zen. He takes the position that
love is the primary drive in human life, that psychotherapy is an art,
that art is therapeutic; hence both therapy and art are forms of love,
which is essentially expressed as esteem. However, as we know, love
encounters obstacles, giving rise to frustration, which is then expressed
in art. Brazier proposes what he calls other centred therapy in order to
emphasise that the therapist is client-centred and the client is dealing
with others in her own life, reaching beyond herself. The book goes on
to explain the context of this new theory, the nature of esteem, the
troubles of the artist, dimensions of love and issues of transference and
technique. He concludes that the effectiveness of Rogers approach is in
fact due to the functioning of love and esteem. The book mainly aimed at
practitioners, but contains much of interest for the general reader.
The Radiant Warrior
Love in a Time of Broken Heart
by Belinda Joubert
O Books 2009, 178 pp., 9.99, p/b.
by Jason Chan, with Jane Rogers

Jason Chan is a Tai Chi and Chi Kung master and a lifelong Taoist. His
co-author, Jane Rogers is a former lecturer in social policy, who now
works with him. Her contributions, often at the end of chapters, relate
her own unfolding development as she enters more deeply into Jasons
practice. The book has an authentic ring of genuine experience and
progression, moving through awakening, healing and empowerment to
dynamic surrender. Themes covered include meditation, transcending
emotions, understanding relationships, forgiveness, abundance, trust
and service. The goal is formulated as the return to pure consciousness
and the realisation that we are all one with everything. The rest is
the human journey with its process of awakening and the evolving
understanding of the nature and commitment of a radiant warrior.
Seeds of Transformation a 52 step journey towards enlightenment

by Maggie Erotokritou
Findhorn Press 2007, 121 pp., 7.99, p/b.
A powerful practical book for self growth and the transformation of

consciousness, where each seed is likened to a mantra planted
in consciousness which then grows into new thought forms. The
format describes the quality on the left-hand page and provides
further reflections on the right. Then there are intermittent reviews
which formulate the seeds in terms of affirmations. The seeds or
qualities include harmony, peace, vision, understanding, the process
of refinement, intention, flow, creativity, abundance, and gratitude and
manyothers. The aim is to live with vision, entering into the flow of life.
Interested readers can also consult www livingwithvision.com.
Vision: Awakening your Potential

to Create a Better World
by Peter L Benson
Templeton Foundation Press 2009, 120 pp., 8.99, p/b.
A book that evokes the life and work of Sir John Templeton himself as
a visionary embodying a higher purpose. It addresses both the personal
and social, giving guidance on creating ones own personal vision
as a pull towards the future. The book is interspersed with inspiring
quotations, for instance from Gabriel Garcia Marquez who says that it is
not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They
grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. He explains how spirit
animates and connects us all, and that love is the unifying force in the
universe, on which we ourselves can draw and express in our lives. An
inspiring little book.
Psychosynthesis New Perspectives

and Creative Research
by Will Parfitt (ed)

PS Avalon 2009, 275 pp., 13.00, p/b.
This is an edited selection from the Synthesist Journal covering a broad

range of topics. The editor provides an introduction to psychosynthesis
and the topics covered reflect both a professional and cultural
approach and are therefore suitable for a wider readership. Among the
contributions is poetic exploration of the hidden mythical depths of Harry
Potter, the correspondence between existentialism and alchemy, the
comparison between psychosynthesis models and Biblical literature,
Benig Mauger (SMN)

Soul Connections, 208, 331 pp., no price given
See www.soul-connections.com
By her own account, this is the most personal of the authors three
books. It arose in the aftermath of the break-up of a relationship which
she had expected to last, plunging her into the depths for a new and
more profound exploration of love, including Divine Love. As she writes,
it is at times of profound vulnerability that a deeper intelligence emerges
and life renews itself. So the book as a whole is a spiritual journey which
can help others understand patterns in their emotional relationships as
they relate to their parents, to stories or myths and to the process of
reconciling the masculine and feminine within.
Like David Braziers book reviewed above, love is seen as a primary
drive in overcoming our sense of separation and achieving wholeness.
Interestingly, she drew her inspiration not so much from psychology
books as from mystics and poets like Rilke, who is quoted often. One
notable feature of the book is the way in which it is interspersed with
stories, real and imaginary, to highlight the issues. One of her clients
was able to initiate a dialogue with her unborn baby, in the course of
which she understood what gift the child would have brought her and
that she was not ready to become a mother herself before resolving
some further issues with her own mother. In the chapter on healing
broken hearts, there is some particularly good advice on soul work
that can be done in the metaphorical desert as one patiently waits for
the seeds to germinate in the new cycle. The book is full of spiritual
and emotional wisdom of the kind which can only be gained through
experience and reflective understanding.
Happiness Around the World

by Carol Graham
Oxford University Press 2009, 240 pp., 14.99, p/b.
Taking as its point of departure the paradox of happy peasants and
miserable millionaires, this book represents a considerable advance
on earlier popular studies with its wider cross-cultural scope. Many
studies have stemmed from the so-called Easterlin paradox revealing
that while within countries wealthier people are on average happier than
the poor, there is little relationship across countries between increases
in per capita incomes and average happiness levels. This field is at
the intersection between psychology, sociology and economics and has
become a major focus of attention in the UK since the publication of
Richard Layards book in 2005.
The author discusses the economics of happiness, and reports that the
determinants of happiness around the world are very similar. She then
considers various aspects of happiness in relation to health, inequality
and poverty and ways in which friends, freedom, crime and corruption
affect happiness. She is cautious in drawing practical implications from
her study, although she does stress the importance of non-income
variables in the overall formulation of policy. If one combines the three
recognised components of contentment, welfare and dignity, then
they can form a basis for policy proposals and the development of
more adequate indicators of well-being; finally, one should not neglect
resilience, since the author highlights the remarkable human capacity to
adapt to the most extreme of circumstances.
www.scimednet.org
alterations in outer circumstances. The key insight is the way in which

other people mirror processes going on in ourselves so that if we feel
the resonance within ourselves, then the relationship may well change:
we ask ourselves what our own motivation for the behaviour of the other
person might be, healing this motive within ourselves, so that the other
person can take care of themselves. Anecdotally, there are some very
interesting results where healer working on themselves resulted in the
healing of patients on which he was focusing in on distant hospital.
67

involved in the funding of this agency. See www.eurosolar.org
Future Studies/Economics/
Ecology
Eco-logical!
by Joanna Yarrow
Duncan Baird Publishers 2009, 128 pp., 7.99, p/b.
A colourful and lively book aiming to present the key ecological issues
in an accessible fashion, with arguments on both sides of controversial
questions: so-called eco-dilemmas. The various sections deal with
resources, population, climate, waste, cities, energy, travel, organic food
and farming and ethical consumption. Statistics show the development of
various trends, and the choices we face are clearly articulated. Pitched at an
introductory level, this is a book we can use to help inform our choices.
Tescopoly
by Andrew Simms
Constable & Company Limited 2007, 372 pp., 7.99, p/b.
Andrew Simms is the Director of the New Economics Foundation, and is
ideally placed to have written this eye-opening book. I imagine that nearly
every reader of this review shops, at least occasionally, at Tesco. Readers
are probably not aware that the Tesco capital in Scotland is Inverness,
with three stores already and a further one applied for. Perhaps the central
economic dynamic in the book is the relationship between scale or size
and economic clout. The larger you are, the more power and influence you
have, both economically and politically. In addition, the book documents
the evisceration of local communities and shops all over the world by the
installation of supermarkets. The dynamic of capitalism also encourages
further concentration in market shares, reflecting the global supply chain.
This process is associated with globalisation and the encouragement of
international trade at the expense of local economies.
For developing countries, this means making hard choices between growing
food for their own citizens and for export. If we return to the power issue
already mentioned, then supermarkets are in a position to put pressure
on producers and those who work for them, with the result that many
commodity prices have actually fallen in the last 30 years. This means
that the developed countries cheap food is effectively paid for by poverty
in developing countries. Moreover, this food needs to be transported
around the world -- it takes up a large proportion of air freight and creates
corresponding carbon emissions. The good news is that something can be
done about this and indeed is being done in certain localities, on which
the author reports. There is a great deal more that could be done by way
of regulation, which he spells out, and which many other countries have
implemented. At a local level, campaigns have been organised to oppose
planning permission for new supermarkets. In the long run, we ourselves as
consumers make choices; this is a difficult one, since, for reasons already
outlined, supermarkets can offer the lowest prices every little bit helps.
This book is a real wake-up call to encourage us to support local shops
where we can rather than the supermarket juggernauts, which Tesco is the
largest in Britain, and rapidly expanding abroad.
Sakhnin
by Jan Martin Bang

This portrait of an environmental project in northern Israel is an inspiring
beacon of hope. It is run by a dedicated group of Arabs and Jews, and
teaches environmental awareness to local students. Its centrepiece is a
waste water management system where the water is used to irrigate local
farmland. Lavishly illustrated, this book brings the whole operation alive
with vivid portraits of those people central to the enterprise as well as
photographs of the work that has been going on. More broadly, the book
is dedicated to a wider quest for peace based on Rudolf Steiners idea of
social threefolding in terms of liberty, fraternity and equality or the three
aspects of peace - cultural, economic and political.
The Long Road to IRENA
by Eurosolar and WCRE

Ponte Press 2009, 136 pp., p/b.
IRENA Is the International Renewable Energy Agency, which was finally
incorporated this year after a campaign of nearly 20 years initiated by
Hermann Scheer, MEP, who spoke at our Mystics and Scientists conference
on the Sun in 1999. Appropriately, he is president of Eurosolar and one of the
leading proponents of renewable energy who has been a driving force behind
the microgeneration measures introduced by the German Federal government
to encourage small-scale investment in renewables. The political point behind
IRENA is to provide a prestigious international body as a counterweight to
the International Atomic Agency and the lobbying power of fossil fuels. The
documents provide a route map and endocrinology or major speeches given
along the way, culminating in the founding conference in January of this
year and an interview with Hermann Scheer explaining the arduous process
www.scimednet.org
In Resonance with Nature
by Hans Andeweg
Subtitled holistic healing for plants and land, this book summarises the
work of a Dutch biologist in restoring the vitality of habitats through what
he calls eco-therapy. The two parts deal with diagnosis and therapy,
analysing life force energy in number of places and exploring theoretical
ideas from Sheldrake to Reich and the Huna. Each chapter contains
practical exercises for the reader, including using a pendulum for energy
diagnosis and perceiving at a distance. In the therapeutic section, green
fingers are explained in terms of giving energy to plants, and the use
of music, colours and symbols is elaborated. There is also a separate
chapter on crop circles and one on radionics. This is a difficult book
for the general reader with a great deal of technical detail, and I had
the impression that this kind of material would be easier to absorb
through personal contact. Nevertheless, those interested in healing the
landscape will find much practical advice.
Climate Change and Energy Insecurity
by Felix Dodds et al (eds)

Earthscan Ltd 2009, 282 pp., 19.99, p/b.
In the spring of 2005,the International Futures Forum conducted some

research on the relationship between climate change and energy
security, projecting 50 years into the past and 50 into the future. In
the event, few people were able to see much beyond 2020, but the
longer term perspective is vital in order to inform present decisions and
actions. The relationship between climate change and energy security
is much more widely recognised four years on, especially if one just
extrapolates current trends without any revolution in energy provision,
since the burning of fossil fuels is a major driver of climate change.
Revisioning security to include environmental dimensions is essential.
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges,
beginning with future energy stability and moving on to an analysis
of climate insecurity, including an essay by Lord Stern and papers on
the future of food and water. The third and most extensive section
explores avenues for preventative diplomacy from a number of different
perspectives, including that of the so-called green new deal. All this
represents a very thorough briefing on the issues.
The Sustainability Mirage
by John Foster
A radical and challenging work with an all too plausible thesis,

considering the current negotiations going on in Copenhagen. The author
points out the remarkable speed with which the concept of sustainable
development has become mainstream, but argues that it is structurally
unsound and may be undermining the possibility of taking serious action
on climate change and other environmental issues. The problem, as he
points out, is that the trade-off between present and future will always
tend to collapse in favour of the present under the pressure of current
economic and political concerns. This in turn means that our actions will
always fall short and targets will be moved into the future. Instead of
a long sustainability, the author proposes a deep sustainability starting
in the present and using the levers of government frameworks and
capitalist incentives. Only then do we have a chance of moving beyond
the constantly receding mirage.
Climate Change - the Science, Impacts and

Solutions
by A. Barrie Pittock
This is the most comprehensive book on climate change I have yet

come across, and must count as the single volume to buy if you want
an overview of every aspect of the topic. The author, an Australian,
has been working in the field for 40 years, publishing his first paper
on climate change as far back as 1972. Readers will be familiar with
the overall ecological, economic and political issues and scenarios,
especially in view of recent debates. While giving both sides of the
arguments on key issues, he also provides the necessary facts on which
interpretations are based. This process circumvents the cherry picking
approach where the whole balance of evidence is not considered that
people do not apply the same scepticism to their own favourite set
of facts, or else create a false dichotomy between combating climate
change and other global problems.The book begins with a discussion of
why climate change matters, meaning onto lessons from the past and
the nature of future scenarios and projections. The author observes that
uncertainty is inevitable, but that risk is certain, and that delaying our
responses will certainly increase our risks. He surveys what specific
climate changes are likely and the impacts that these will have. He
then considers measures of adaptation and mitigation and the larger
context of climate change in terms of air, land, water and population
growth. Finally, he moves on to the politics of greenhouse emissions
State of the World 2009 - Confronting Climate Change

by Worldwatch Institute
Published every year in 28 languages, this book always represents

essential reading, in this case focusing on the topical issue of climate
change and within an overall context of progress towards a sustainable
future. The tone, while always realistic in its diagnosis, is nevertheless
oriented towards positive measures and the capacity of politicians to carry
things through. Various essays examine the options, covering farming and
land use, energy, adaptation and resilience, and political dimensions of
securing a viable deal. In the middle, there are 22 short pieces on factors
related to climate change such as security, biodiversity, health, trade,
carbon capture, geo-engineering and shifting values. Aside from scientific
and technical considerations, the most pressing issue is our ability to
undertake the necessary transformational changes, which will have to be
driven from below - see the review of Blessed Unrest below.
Climate Change and Aviation
by Stefan Gossling and Paul Upham

A comprehensive and timely book on a vital topic at the interface between

the environment and our economic system dedicated to continuous growth.
As people increasingly realise, the political difficulty is that of reconciling
the immense popularity of aviation with its growing environmental damage
and significant contribution to global warming. Although many of the
contributions are relatively technical, the issues are easy to understand.
The four parts are devoted to aviation and atmosphere, drivers and trends,
socio-economics and politics, and mitigation. The opening chapter sets the
scene and argues the case for an integrated perspective which the book
provides. The science is described in detail, as are the drivers, in particular
the emergence of low-cost airlines, which have done so much to change
aviation and travel patterns with their familiar business model, which is
increasingly being adopted by other airlines. The last chapter provides
an overview of policy options in terms of regulation, market incentives,
environmental taxes, emissions charges, subsidies and tradable permits.
The authors provide an evaluation of these various policy options, but they
warn that the growth in demand for travel could easily consume all the
emissions savings from other sectors of the economy. The real dilemma
for governments is that absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
will only be possible if growth in aviation is reduced. This in turn will require
co-ordinated international action, but national governments will be tempted
to evade regulations in orders take advantage in their own interest.
The Atlas of Climate Change Mapping the Worlds Greatest
by Kirstin Dow and Thomas E Downing

Endorsed by none other than the Foreign & Commonwealth Office as an

essential overview, this richly illustrated book enables the general reader
to get to grips with the issues. It is divided into six parts: signs of change,
forcing change, driving climate change, expected consequences, responding
to change and committing to solutions. Then at the end there are extensive
climate change data. The maps and charts bring the issues to life, for
instance in terms of food security, threats to health and cultural losses.
It is striking that so much of the threat to food security is concentrated in
Africa. The drivers of climate change are considered in detail, as are the
possible responses to change and issues such as the relationship between
carbon dioxide and economic growth. Measures for adapting and mitigating
change will both be required, as will personal as well as public action. The
format of the book makes it a suitable textbook for schools.
Chill: a Reassessment of Global Warming Theory

by Peter Taylor
Clairview Books 2009, 404 pp., 14.99, p/b.
There has been much discussion in the press recently about leaked
e-mails from the climate research centre in East Anglia, which has raised
the question about the degree of consensus among climate scientists
about global warming, and the extent to which this has been manipulated.
This book takes a dissenting view from the majority, arguing that the key
computer simulations are flawed and that researchers have fed into the
political process in return for further funding. Taylors own argument is
that the main driver of recent global warming has been an unprecedented
combination of natural events, and that we may be facing a greater threat of
cooling than warming. Sceptics have always argued that natural causes can
account for the data, a contention strongly contested by the majority. Taylor
adduces satellite data as evidence to contradict global warming theory, and
contends that changing patterns in cloud cover can explain the warming,
an argument which he also applies to the Arctic. The second part deals
with the politics, and sheds light on the collective psychology of scientists,
which tends to overrule dissent and brand opponents as heretics. Few
non-specialists have the time to study a 400 page book; indeed one would
need to study several such books in order to be sure of ones ground.
For me, however, whatever the rights and wrongs of the arguments, the
main point is that the human footprint on nature has been excessive, and
that measures need to be taken to restore the earth rather than continue
business as usual. Interested readers can consult www.ethos-uk.com.
Before it is too Late

by Aurelio Peccei and Daisaku Ikeda
I B Tauris & Co Ltd 2009, 155 pp., h/b.
A book which had a huge influence on me 30 years ago was a
dialogue between Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda called Choose Life,
representing Toynbees mature reflections on the human condition and its
relation to the planet. Toynbee was then in his 80s, while Ikeda was still
in his 40s. This dialogue is not dissimilar in scope, and engages Aurelio
Peccei, the founder of the Club of Rome. First published 25 years ago, it is
still chillingly relevant and a reflection of how little underlying progress has
been made in addressing the world problematique - the interconnected set
of challenges we face, or, as Peccei puts it causes, problems and solutions
are all interlinked in one great continuum.
As with Toynbee, the authors call for an individual renewal of vision and values
from within at the same time as deeply reflecting on our relationship with
nature - Peccei himself asserts that our oneness with Nature is the primary
element of our being. However, as he observes, we are paradoxically in our
most dangerous situation at the peak of our power, so that we are inclined
to do what we can do, not what we ought to do, prioritising technology
over the biosphere and neglecting the mismatch between our technological
sophistication and our behavioural obsolescence. Nothing, he insists, can be
lasting until and unless we succeed in re-establishing peace and harmony
with Nature. This, he maintains, along with Thomas Berry, is the Great Work
or the basic imperative of our age, which ought to be a primary consideration
at Copenhagen. The dialogues explore this possibility.
Blessed Unrest
by Paul Hawken
Penguin/Viking Books, 342 pp., $16, p/b.
Readers may recall the commencement address by Paul Hawken printed
in the last issue. When asked if he is pessimistic or optimistic about the
future, he always says that if you look at the science and arent pessimistic,
you dont have the correct data. However, if you meet the people in this
unnamed movement and arent optimistic, you havent got a heart. This
movement he refers to consists of millions of people dedicated to change in
an organic, self organising manner, and together they constitute the largest
social movement in history, which aims to restore grace, justice and beauty
to the world. They represent the World Social Forum rather than the World
Economic Forum: glocalisation rather than the current form of globalisation.
Our greatest resource is our capacity to adapt, leading the author to
conclude that evolution is optimism in action. The first part of the book
describes our overall situation and the areas in which people are working,
while the second, in the form of an appendix, describes in more detail the
activities of NGOs and the number involved. All this makes very encouraging
reading and can be followed up on www.blessedunrest.com
Blackout
by Richard Heinberg
Clairview Books 2009, 208 pp., 12.99, p/b.
This is the latest of a number of books by Richard Heinberg on aspects of
the energy crisis. He concentrates on coal, which fuels more than 30% of
UK electricity production and 50% in the US. Recently, many people have
been turning to coal as a possible solution to our energy problems. Indeed,
the growth of China and India has been largely fuelled by it. Heinberg
focuses on three issues: potential scarcity, cost and quality (including
transport costs), and climate effects. This brings into play the relationship
between the environment and the economy, between pollution and growth.
The book is a thorough examination of the use of coal around the world,
and addresses the role of new coal technologies. He finishes by looking at
three potential scenarios, the maximum burn rate (this is the default), the
clean solution involving storage of carbon emissions, and a post-carbon
transition leading to widespread adoption of renewable energies. His takehome message is that we need not have further energy price fluctuations
once we rely on resources that are continually replenished and have
adopted a no-growth economic paradigm. This last option does not look
likely in the short-term so it is more probable that we will go down one of
the first two routes.
www.scimednet.org
and the ways in which the international community has addressed

these in relation to national interests. His own favoured approach is
activism rather than nihilism or market fundamentalism. Forecasts and
prophecies are calls to action and only become self-fulfilling if ignored.
Although the environmental crisis is the largest collective challenge we
have faced, humans are extraordinarily resourceful and ingenious - but
we will need a new worldview and understanding of our relationship to
nature and that between ecology and economics in order to forge longterm sustainability.
69

Viktor Schauberger: A Life of Learning from Nature
by Jane Cobbald
A new edition of a book I reviewed in 2005. Readers unfamiliar with

Schauberger will find this an excellent place to start. The author integrates
biographical insights and explains the context in which his work arose.
The text is also interspersed with some stimulating quotations and hand
drawings: a bird does not fly - it is flown. A fish does not swim - it is swum.
She brings out the influence of Goethe in a way that clarifies the parallels
with contemporary Goethean science. Schaubergers basic vision and
philosophy was to understand the processes of nature from within, and
then to devise technologies that imitated these processes. He contended
that modern civilisation is based on destructive forms of energy use and
technological exploitation, which can only take us down a correspondingly
destructive path. As one who is convinced that our attitude to nature
must undergo a complete revolution, I regard the work of Schauberger as
essential reading.
The Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar 2010

by Maria & Matthias Thun
This annual publication is the practical guide for who want to farm and
garden biodynamically. There are useful notes for new readers and
a number of special features, including this time the care of bees,
Anthroposophical insights into honey, water management in crop production
and water storage and soil fertility. There is also a recipe for rye bread. The
book is illustrated with a number of small photos as well as charts and is
based on nearly 50 years of search and experience. This year, for the first
time, there is an equivalent for North America.
The World of Organic Agriculture
by Helga Willer, Minouyussefi-Menzler & Neil Sorensen (eds)

Earthscan Ltd 2008, 267 pp., 40.00, h/b.
This annual publication documents statistics and trends around the world
in organic agriculture, and is chock full of fascinating data. Australia has
more organic land -- over five times as much -- as the next country, China.
The leading European country is Italy with 1.1 million hectares, of which a
quarter is olives. There are graphs indicating the growth in the global market
for organic food and drink as well as of land under organic cultivation. In
Europe, the two leading consumers of organic food are Germany and the
UK, but Switzerland has the highest per capita consumption. In Europe as
a whole there are nearly 204,000 organic farms, which represents about
a quarter of the worlds total. To put this in perspective, European organic
farms occupy 1.6% of the European agricultural area and 4% in the EU.
Similar detailed statistics and charts are provided for other parts of the
world. This is not a book for the general reader, but an extremely useful
point of reference which should be available in your local library.
eating us so much. A curious but rather disturbing thought as one thinks

of the lusciousness of the cherry. One of my high points (literally) was a
memorable, even timeless afternoon I spent in France in July 1970 picking
and eating cherries right up in a tree.
Insider Voices: Human Dimensions of Low Carbon

Technology
by Peter Reason (ed) SMN
Earthscan Publications Ltd, 129 pp., p/b.
A report on a piece of action research carried out at Bath University. The

format is novel in using colour coding for the reader to identify who is
speaking and what links to make between different elements in the report.
The research assumptions are set out at the beginning, as is the nature of
action research, which may be unfamiliar to many people. There follows an
account of six action research engagements across a number of sectors
including food, biogas, engineering, heating technology, energy and clothing.
The reader gets a multi dimensional impression of the processes and
outcomes and is then led into the theoretical section which discusses the
social shaping of technology, a sociotechnical transition framework, various
forms of power and resistance to change, and even different narratives,
which clearly determine what people can see and which connections they
make. The final section uses the four quadrant model of Ken Wilber. The
report suggests ten ingredients for low carbon change which include building
networks and relationships, systemic thinking and amplifying feedback so
as to drive the change process. This leads in turn to the formulation of key
issues for policymakers and research funders. The really interesting thing
about this piece of work is the methodology and the subtle insights which
emerge from it. My guess is that many of the recommendations could be
applied to other issues and in other circumstances.
Local Food How to Make it Happen in Your Community

by Tamzin Pinkerton & Rob Hopkins
Green Books Ltd 2009, 216 pp., 12.95, p/b.
This is the third in a series of Transition Books authored or co-authored by

Rob Hopkins. The keyword in the Transition Movement is localisation, as
opposed to globalisation (some say glocalisation), and here the emphasis is
on creating local food initiatives, which are springing up all over the country.
Only this weekend, my wife has been involved in a cooking demonstration
at a local food fair, and we have our own local farm shops and local farmers
markets. The strength of this book is that it provides a guide about how to
make local food happen in your community, with chapters and examples on
every conceivable aspect including allotment provision, community gardens
and orchards, food co-operatives, local food guides, school projects on local
food and local food events. The background to the transition movement
is explained, as is the centrality of food, with plenty of inspiring real-life
stories. There is no doubt that the movement has momentum, and this
book will provide an invaluable resource for those interested in replicating
existing successful initiatives.
The Biofuel Delusion
by Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi

Earthscan Ltd 2009, 318 pp., 49.95, h/b.
Subtitled the fallacy of large-scale agro-biofuel production, this
comprehensive volume is surely the textbook for the field. They did not
take long for people to catch on to be disadvantages of biofuel production,
especially that it uses land that could otherwise produce food, which then
has the effect of raising food prices. However, as my review of Robert
Allbritons the book in the last issue showed, the key driver of capitalism
is short-term profit rather than long-term sustainability. In this case, it
would have been good if knowledge had preceded policy, but it is equally
clear that the policies, notably in the EU, have been captured by corporate
interests with their strong lobbying activity on the part of car manufacturers,
oil companies and biotechnology interests. A good book to order for your
local library.
Nature Spirits of the Trees
by Wolfgang Weirauch and Verena Stael von Holstein

A very unusual book, the fruit of Verenas ability to communicate with
nature spirits and to translate their elemental language into human terms.
The format is one of dialogue with the spirits of different kinds of tree.
If this sounds outlandish, the results are coherent and timely, adding a
different voice to concerns over environmental degradation. Trees are highly
rhythmical, and the book makes clear that we have disturbed many of their
rhythms and therefore compromised their immune systems, rendering
them more susceptible to disease. Chestnut trees communicate exactly
this point, claiming that they can no longer defend themselves against the
chestnut leaf miner - this is apparent in some of our own horse chestnut
trees, two of which have died in the last two years. The text indicates that
it is good for these trees if there are people who feel responsible for them,
as this helps them to stay rhythmic. Sweet cherry trees state that they are
unable to ripen sufficiently with wet springs and excessively dry summers
so we cannot form fruits properly any more and creatures dont enjoy
www.scimednet.org
Education
Dyslexia: Learning Disorder or Creative Gift?
by Cornelia Jantzen
The books subtitle issues its rhetorical challenge, and invites readers to
revise their understanding of dyslexia. The American Ronald Davis has
been working as a pioneer in the field for over 30 years and articulates
eight abilities shared by dyslexics such as enhanced awareness of the
environment, thinking in pictures, highly developed intuition and vivid
imagination. Interestingly, this correlates with right hemisphere thinking
and is arguably only stigmatised in a left hemisphere dominated society.
It appears that Rudolf Steiner was himself dyslexic and his lectures and
way of thinking shed an interesting light on the field and informed his
own teaching methods, which have been carried forward in the Waldorf
education programmes. No one reading this book will think about dyslexia
in the same way again.
Navigating the Terrain of Childhood
by Jack Petrash
Subtitled a guidebook for meaningful parenting and heartfelt discipline,

this is a book which every parent will want to read and reflect on. All parents
know that the path of development contains both precious moments and
difficult situations, challenges that test us to the limit, so that, as one of
the chapters puts it, parenting can be seen as a path of inner development.
The author uses the metaphor of a journey across America to describe the
various phases and stages of child development. Parents will naturally
look at the chapters applying particularly to the ages of their own children,
even adult. But reading the book through enables one to gain a better
understanding of the journey as a whole and to be wary of overcompensating
The Spirit of Adventure - Towards a Better World . . .

by Colin Mortlock
Outdoor Integrity Publishing Limited 2009, 290 pp.,
14.95, p/b.
Colin Mortlock has been involved in outdoor adventure all his life, and is
now in his 70s. For him, outdoor adventure is also an inner adventure
as we discover more about ourselves and others. The book is partly
autobiographical, and contains many episodes that help make his points.
The big questions of who we are, where we are going and how we get there
are at the forefront of his consideration, as are values, virtues and the
corresponding vices. It was with a sense of dj vu that I looked down his
list of values and virtues, which corresponds almost exactly to those found
on the Learning for Life website. His explanation of qualities associated
with each virtue and vice is extremely helpful, as are the stories from
his own experience that illustrate them. There is an extended section on
wisdom and specific wisdom that one can derive from nature. In the wider
context, life is seen as a quest for beauty, love and friendship, and the
author stresses the importance of transcendent experiences. There are
great many inspiring quotations in the text, many from writers who have
also inspired me. There is even an index of authors quoted. I can think of
no better volume giving insight into the relationship between inner and outer
aspects of life. It is a book to which I shall return often.
Learning for Tomorrow

by Bryce Taylor (SMN)
Oasis Press 2007, 256 pp., p/b.
This book is essential reading for everyone concerned with the deeper issues
of learning in terms of structure, context, process, group dynamics and
outcomes. Based on a subtle understanding and a vast range of experience
and building on the work of such people as John Heron, Carl Rogers and
John Rowan, the reader travels through some new landscapes on a journey
that involves all the faculties. Individuals are no mere spectators, but rather
they are involved in what they are going to learn, how they learn it, and how
the process of reflection and peer assessment will be carried out. There is
a focus on interpersonal needs such as inclusion, control, collaboration and
openness, all of which will invariably emerge in the course of a two or three
day process. This makes participants much more sensitive to others and
their reactions, along similar lines to Bohm dialogues.
The peer principle, an educational expression of equality, is a key element
in this approach and is explained in detail in the expectation that tough,
open, honest confrontation is the norm to be aimed at, which many people
will initially find uncomfortable. The situation is essentially co-operative,
participative, emergent, open-ended, experiential and co-creative. Much of
the rest of the book is taken up with explanations of learning in groups,
facilitating groups, assessing the process and formulating accreditation. By
the end of the book, the reader is in no doubt that whole person learning
is a radical new paradigm which has extensive implications for all kinds of
education. This is a not only a comprehensive overview but also a landmark
in this new field.
General
A Rosslyn Treasury
by P L Snow
A book about stories and legends depicted in the sculptures of Rosslyn
Chapel near Edinburgh; the place has always been one of pilgrimage,
but more intensively in the last 20 years. The building dates back to the
15th century, with some pieces as early as 1446. The pilgrim will find
much to reflect on within the building. This book gives a brief history
before recounting twenty stories connected with the sculptures. There are
chapters with black-and-white illustrations on the Green Man, Melchizidek,
Elijah, the Three Kings, the Templars, Manis dualism and the legend of the
Holy Grail. The author suggests that this building needs to be understood
at three levels: physical, spiritual and divine; this is the meaning of sacred
art as a way of raising consciousness to the divine by means of physical
manifestation.
The Oxford Guide to Etymology

by Philip Durkin
Oxford University Press 2009, 347 pp., h/b.
Essential reading for anyone who, like me, is fascinated with the history
of words and their meanings. The author is eminently qualified as
principal etymologist of the Oxford English Dictionary. The chapters cover
such topics as word formation, lexical borrowing, change in word form
and semantic change. The book begins with a couple of examples, one
of which is the English word friar, related to the French frere and the
Latin frater then the English brother, both in form and meaning. Another
example further into the book is the change of meaning in English word
quaint. The current meaning dates from the mid-18th century, but in
earlier periods it meant cunning or crafty; also pretty or dainty. Meanings
overlap and gradually fall into disuse as new meanings emerge. There
are also sections on etymologies of names of people and places. A
fascinating and authoritative work.
Gods, Genes and Consciousness

by Paul Von Ward (SMN)
Hampton Roads Publishing Company 2004, 410 pp., p/b.
Subtitled the 21st-century challenge: redefining the human response to
advanced beings, this is an ambitious and wide-ranging work making
the case for non-human intervention in human history. These advanced
beings (ABs) have taken many forms and still do, such as divine beings,
guardian angels, ETs and other forms of intelligence. Interestingly,
scientists, religious leaders and governments have all tended to take
the view that the existence of such beings should be ignored or denied.
This is partly to do with the suppression of subtler ways of knowing and
the insistence that the physical world is a closed system.
Scientists still find it hard to come to terms with parapsychology, while
the US government has not yet come clean on the existence of UFOs
and extra terrestrial intelligence, all of which is amply documented in
this book. Admitting officially that these other forms of intelligence do
indeed exist would be a massive paradigm shift, and I cant help thinking
that something of this magnitude becomes increasingly necessary, all
the more so when combined with the admonitions from ABs that we
should live peacefully, take care of the earth and love one another.
Beware, however, of future propagandist manipulations of this kind of
information in order to keep humanity in a state of fear. Liberation from
fear is true liberation.
Turning Points
by Julia Ogilvy
Lion Hudson PLC 2009, 192 pp., 8.99, p/b.
At the beginning of this book is a quotation from Epictetus: we cannot
choose our circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond
to them. It is a fitting commentary on the eleven life stories and
turning points presented in this searching book. Julia begins with our
own story of transformation from successful businesswoman to social
entrepreneur, in part triggered by the death of a friends child and
being opened up to the tough realities endured by many young people
in Scotland and elsewhere. Turning inwards, she found her faith, as
did a number of the other people featured in the book, the best-known
of whom are the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof. After
reading Gordon Browns story about the short life and death of his
daughter Jennifer, one understands how pain can be transformative and
galvanise new forms of action. The interview with Geldof is very different,
as he is the only subject to come across as a pretty militant atheist but
driven to do what he could about famine in Africa.
Two of the subjects are young people connected with Julias work with
the volunteering charity Project Scotland, and show how young people
can turn themselves around from grim conditions. Perhaps the most
charismatic story is that of Chris Moon, whose work in various parts of
the world -- including clearing landmines and losing his leg -- has brought
him close to death on a number of occasions. Summarising his two key
turning points and what they have taught him, he comments that we
need to take responsibility for who we are, where we are and work out
where we want to be and how to get there. Secondly, remember that
life is all about people, about loving and being loved and making the
best of life and connecting with like-minded people. Finally, persistence
is key as one needs to keep on getting up when one has fallen over.
Reading this book will cause you to reflect on your own priorities and
sense of direction, and whether there is more you could do in terms of
service, without forgetting the quality of your relationships with those
closest to you.
www.scimednet.org
for the methods of our parents; hence the emphasis on heartfelt discipline.
An intriguing section is headed the complaint department when children
begin to complain about various family obligations, partly as a way of
beginning to assert their independence. If there is bonding, there is also
letting go, which is the other half of love. I was struck by the authors
advice that two key ingredients of raising healthy teenagers are purposeful,
challenging activities and meaningful contact with adults in situations of
responsibility. This makes it more likely that teenagers will feel good about
themselves, and we will feel good about them.
71

The Elixir of Immortality
When Wine Tastes Best 2010
Alchemy is perhaps the most ancient spiritual science, which has been
practised for centuries in different cultures. The authors quest began
with an American called David Hudson, who in 1989 claimed to have
discovered a new form of matter that initially defied scientific assays
but which was eventually found to consist of gold and platinum. He
took this white powder along to the local vet, who injected it into some
terminally ill dogs; they subsequently recovered and were tumour free
within a few weeks. The book explores various traditions of alchemy,
bringing the story right up to date with recent experiments conducted
with Hudsons chemist. He has not yet arrived at the elixir of life,
but gives some substantial clues about the procedure. Traditionally,
alchemists never revealed any of their secrets, partly because putting
such power in the hands of humanity as a whole would be a leap of
faith, as, like all other advances, these techniques could fall into the
wrong hands. However, it may not be long before we hear more about
this hidden science, which could provide an antidote to many of the
diseases of civilisation. And with the right intentions, the capacity to
create gold and platinum could give us the opportunity and resources
to help create a new culture.
Readers will recall that the authors produce an annual biodynamic

sowing and planting calendar, reviewed elsewhere in this issue. In this
small pocket guide and biodynamic calendar, they advise which days
are optimum for drinking wine, and which days to avoid. We are told that
both Tesco and Marks & Spencer now only hold tastings for wine critics
on the best days according to this calendar. These are called fruit and
flower days, corresponding in the guide to yellow or red. As it happens,
Christmas day is one to avoid, so you will be able to judge yourself how
good you thought your wine tasted.
by Robert E Cox
Inner Traditions International 2009, 193 pp., p/b.
The Wild Places
by Robert Macfarlane
Granta Publications Ltd 2007, 340 pp., 8.99, p/b.
Some readers will have read Robert Macfarlanes first book, Mountains
of the Mind, and they will certainly be enthralled by its sequel. The
author set out to ask if there are any genuinely wild places left
in Britain and Ireland. The answer is emphatically positive, as he
evokes in a series of exquisitely delineated journeys into different
landscapes, memories and histories. He sleeps out and swims in
some rugged landscapes, bringing his experiences intensely alive
to the reader. Beginning not far from his home in Cambridge with a
wonderful description of sitting up a beech tree, he travels to some of
the farthest points in our islands, following in the footsteps of other
famous travel writers, to whose ranks he himself now belongs. This is
a book to savour, relishing the rhythm and beauty of the authors prose
and the breadth of his literary reference.
Many Miles to Go
by Brian Tracy
Entrepreneur Press 2007, 292 pp., $19.95, p/b.
Brian Tracy is well known for his personal and professional development
programmes. In the book he tells the epic story the journey he made
with two other friends across the Sahara desert in the mid-1960s when
he was in his early 20s. The book is billed as a modern parable from
business and is accompanied by commentary drawing out the lessons
from the various situations in which the young men find themselves.
It is a gripping tale in its own right, of challenges met and difficulties
overcome. One also comes to appreciate the extraordinary hostility of
the desert in the heat of the sun and the absolute necessity of drinking
large quantities of water. The core themes are the development of
character and a sense of responsibility. At the end of the book are
seven principles for lifelong success, which can apply to any situation.
Then there are a series of inspiring quotations, among which are
Aristotle: Wisdom is a combination of experience plus reflection. And
Goethe: to have more, we must first be more. An inspiring read at a
number of different levels.
The Ape of Sorrows - From Stranger to Destroyer:

The Inside Story of Humans
by Maurice Rowdon
iUniverse Inc 2008, 320 pp., $23.95, p/b.
A book of extraordinary originality by a writer who was both a historian

and philosopher, and who died earlier this year. It examines human
behaviour through the lens of animal intelligence, making the point
that the measure of any animals intelligence is whether it leaves its
habitat enhanced or depleted. By this criterion, humans are singularly
unintelligent, even if in a subtle way. The author argues that the very
nature of civilisation has been defined by separating out the human
mind from animal minds, and pretending that we are not animals at all.
Combined with apocalyptic and enlightenment ideas that a better future
can be attained implicitly through withdrawing from the habitat in order
to create this new world, civilised humans have cut themselves off and
gone about destroying their habitat along with other living things. We
now face the dark side of the brain or the shadow and along with it the
greatest challenge to civilisation, what Thomas Berry called The Great
Work of formulating a constructive human presence on the earth.
www.scimednet.org
by Maria & Matthias Thun

Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

by Ned Sherrin
Oxford University Press, 536 pp., 12.99, p/b.
Fourth edition of what is becoming a classic work in the field the first
to appear since the death of the editor, who compiled the first edition
in 1994. The entries are organised by themes -- 200 of them -- with
over 5,000 quotations in all. These appear in front, with an index of
subjects at the back, thus enabling the reader to navigate around the
book. The book can be opened at any page, for instance telegrams,
where one reads: on arriving in Venice -- streets flooded, please advise.
Or Chestertons appeal to his wife: am in Market Harborough, where
ought I to be? Or Dorothy Parker to Mrs Sherwood on the arrival of her
baby: good work, Mary, we all knew you had it in you. Under Science we
find Arthur C Clarke: if an elderly but distinguished scientist says that
something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that
it is impossible he is very probably wrong. A great collection to dip in
and out of.
The Ends of Life Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England
by Sir Keith Thomas, FBA

Sir Keith Thomas is the author of the seminal Religion and the Decline
of Magic, which he published nearly 40 years ago. His period has always
been early modern England, and here he examines ideas about how we
should live, dating from the early 16th to the late 18th centuries. He
begins with an 1818 advertisement by Coleridge for a course of lectures
on the history of philosophy, to be held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern
in the Strand: what, and for what am I made? What can I, and what
ought I to do, to make myself? And in what relations do I stand to the
world and to my fellow men? Although this is the stuff of philosophy,
most people are too engaged in everyday living to ask themselves such
questions. Thomas chooses six concerns which people of that epoch
regarded as central to a life well lived: military prowess, work, wealth,
reputation, personal relationships, and the afterlife. With the help of
an amazing array of primary sources, he paints a picture of the ways
in which these values shaped lives, with a particular emphasis on
how the views and practices of ordinary people relate to the writings of
contemporary philosophers and theologians. Reading the book from the
vantage point of the early 21st century enables the reader to reflect on
continuities and differences in outlook.
Death and Dying

The Case against Reincarnation
by James Webster (SMN)

Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd 2009, 249 pp., p/b.
This book brings together a compendium of arguments against
reincarnation as a hypothesis or doctrine. The author takes a spiritualist
view that we survive physical death, but contends that this form of
immortality is logically incompatible with reincarnation. He quotes a
variety of interesting sources and correspondence with various friends
and colleagues, including Arthur Oram, whom some members may
remember. I have been familiar for some time that Swedenborg explained
apparent cases of reincarnation in his day as a form of possession, an
argument also considered by Ian Stevenson in his research. The main
question at issue is that of identity, and perhaps one has to take a both/
and approach rather than an either-or. Is it possible for Jenny Cockell to
be fully herself and to have been the Irishwoman she remembers in her
book? The author does not think so. He also has to explain Stevensons
cases as a form of temporary possession, a hypothesis which Stevenson
does consider, but does not for him have the same explanatory value as
reincarnation, given the further correspondence between memories and
birthmarks. There is a good piece by Stephen Clarke summarising the
arguments against reincarnation, but they bring the reader right back to
the identity question. We may never know the answer for sure.
The Hamblin Trust
at Bosham House, Bosham, West Sussex PO18 8PJ
Working with the spirit of the times

In the spirit of the timeless
Founded by Sussex Saint, Henry Thomas Hamblin,
The Hamblin Hall is a registered charity dedicated
to enriching peoples lives through Right Thinking.
We have members all over the world.
Come and explore our beautiful Sanctuary nestled
in several acres of grounds
We offer:
M
embership (19/year)
includes bi-monthly magazine.
O
ur comprehensive programme of Mind, Body &
Spirit related workshops and talks. Join our book,
meditation and practitioners groups.
H
all, library and consultancy rooms for spiritual
education, complementary therapies, workshops
and talks.
Contact us for free magazine and more information

We are open 5 days a week from 9am 5pm
All welcome
Tel: 01243 572109
email: office@thehamblinvision.org.uk
or visit: www.thehamblintrust.org.uk
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim,

not Hindu
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion or cultural system.
I am not from the East or the West,
not out of the ocean
or up from the ground,
not natural or ethereal,
not composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world
or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve
or any origin story.
My place is placeless,
a trace of the traceless.
Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one
and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner,
only that breath
breathing human being.
A Forum for Contemporary Spirituality
presents a residential weekend workshop

for spiritual seekers
Spiritual Practice in Daily Life

in the Light of the Great Traditions
Prof Ravi Ravindra

visiting from Canada
23-25 April 2010

The Friars, Aylesford, Kent
For further information, please contact:
connect@wrekinforum.org or 0845 017 9029
Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
The Scientific and Medical Network is a leading international forum for

people engaged in creating a new worldview for the 21st century. The
Network brings together scientists, doctors, psychologists, engineers,
philosophers, complementary practitioners and other professionals, and
has Members in more than thirty countries. The Network is a charity
which was founded in 1973 and became a company limited by guarantee
at the beginning of 2004.
The Network aims to:
Network Conferences
n challenge the adequacy of scientific

materialism as an exclusive basis
for knowledge and values.
n Open to new observations and

insights;
The Networks annual programme of

events includes:
n Three annual residential
conferences (The Annual Gathering,
Mystics and Scientists and Beyond
the Brain alternating with The Body
and Beyond)
n Annual residential conference in a
Continental European country
n An open day of dialogues on a
topical subject
n Evening lectures and specialist
seminars
n Special Interest Group meetings
on themes related to science,
consciousness and spiritual traditions
n Student concessionary rates and
some bursaies available
n Rigorous in evaluating evidence

and ideas;
Joining the Network
n provide a safe forum for the critical

and open minded discussion of
ideas that go beyond reductionist
science.
n integrate intuitive insights with
rational analysis.
n encourage a respect for Earth and
Community which emphasises a
spiritual and holistic approach.
In asking searching questions about
the nature of life and the role of the
human being, the Network is:
n Responsible in maintaining the

highest scientific and ethical
standards;
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viewpoints
Network Services
n Network Review, published three
times a year
n Monthly e-newsletter for members
with email
n Promotion of contacts between
leading thinkers in our fields of
interest
n A blog discussing current and
controversial topics and science,
medicine and spirituality
(http://scimednet.blogspot.com)
n A website with a special area
for Members including
discussion groups
n Regional groups which organise
local meetings
n Downloadable MP3s from our
conferences
Membership of the Network is open to

anyone who wishes to explore some
of the most difficult questions of our
time in concert with a community of
like minds. Student members must
be studying towards a first degree
engaged in full-time study.
Subscription Rates
Membership of the Networks costs
40. Please contact the office for
further details.
Student Membership for full-time
first degree students: 15
Membership Applications
To request a membership application
form, please contact:
The Network Manager,
The Scientific and Medical Network,
PO Box 11, Moreton-in-Marsh,
Glos. GL56 0ZF, England
Tel: +44 (0) 01608 652000
Fax: +44 (0) 1608 652001

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ISSN 1362-1211 | No 101 | Winter 2009/10

Network Calendar 2009/10

(updates in email newsletter)

Please check email newsletter and website in case dates change.

Network Review Winter 2009/10

All proposed contributions should

3 The Divided Brain and the Making of the

2. By post on CD as a Word or PDF

Scientific and Medical Network

7 Reclaiming a Life of Quality Brian Goodwin

Company limited by guarantee,

Network Manager: Charla Devereux

37 LOCAL GROUP NEWS

ISSN 1362-1211 | No 101 | Winter 2009/10

2 Network Review Winter 2009/10

Time to Raise our Game

xploring beyond the materialist

Nevertheless I believe we have an

 balanced approach, which both

Network Review Winter 2009/10