Symposia

Science Meets Consciousness in Ancient Olympia

Profession David Fontana of the Psychology Department of Wales University and Michael George, Journalist, from London, report:

The Symposium ventured to identify areas of consensus among scientists.social scientists and spiritual teachers on the nature and scope of consciousness studies. All sessions explored methods to engage these studies to better service humankind. Eminent speakers explored ways of co-operation during the three-day session.

Two major themes arose from the first day’s session and were echoed by many speakers on subsequent days. First was the need for science to broaden its boundaries if it is effectively to study consciousness, and, secondly, the manner in which this broadening might usefully be attempted. Here follows a synopsis of the presentations which has been slightly rearranged to preserve continuity.

Professor George Sudarshan, from the Center of Particle Physics in Texas, emphasized the definition of science, namely the disciplined perception of the universe, and the ordering of this perception into a range of comprehensible laws. In using this method to study the universe, we must recognize however that we are also engaged in an act of self-transformation, in that our knowledge of these laws unavoidably influences the way in which we conceive the world and ourselves. In the interests of scientific tolerance it is important that these laws contain an interpretation of the world as ‘process’ rather than as ‘configuration’.

Professor Rajen Mishra, from the Society International Institute of Biophysics-Technology Center in Germany and also the All India Institute of Medical Science in India, suggested that as soon as the mind becomes conscious of a self (of an ‘I’), it automatically becomes conscious of a not-self (of a ‘not I’). It seems that this divergence is impossible to avoid without techniques (such as meditation) which allow the mind to examine this self of which it is conscious, and identify its illusory qualities. Professor Mishra noted that textbooks of psychology and psychiatry rarely touch on issues of this kind, and usually fail to give consciousness itself a mention.

Professor Steven Rosen presented his proposed method to achieve the transformation of consciousness through what he described as "co-operative participation in an act of self-understanding". In essence this involves the conscious retraction of attention from external circumstances and situations and turning it towards the self, cutting free from the habit of projecting onto others, even during the process of interacting with others.

Part of this ‘active self-understanding’ would need to consider physicist Dr Richard Prosser’s belief that the activity of consciousness appears to be characterized by a particular kind of chaos, a chaos which may be a factor in the generation of independent choice. Dr Prosser explained, "There are many levels of reality, but our current perception is limited to the physical level of reality. If we would see x-rays we would see a room full of skeletons, if we could see infra-red we would see many orbs of light, if we had radio sight we would see TV and radio impulses cris-crossing the room from all over the world. So our receptive apparatus selects from only the one level of activity.

In the view of Professor Charles Tart, psychologist from the University of California at Davis, mainstream psychology adheres to a mechanistic creed. However, transpersonal psychology, a newcomer to the field, does not concern itself with the higher levels of human functioning such as spirituality and mystical experience. It stresses that a widening of self-consciousness can occur, along with certain identifiable results. One such consequence is what he called "transcendent knowledge", a form of intellectual and emotional apprehension which reveals the limited nature of ordinary consciousness and the relative, rather than absolute, nature of ordinary knowing

In addition, reference by Professor Tart to the universe as a living organism suggested interesting corollaries with the argument of Georld Wald, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Harvard University, that the universe is full of life. Professor Wald insisted that there also appears to be mindfulness in the very matter from which it is composed. He noted the capacity of water, unlike all other known substances, actually to expand when cooled to 4 degrees Centigrade, a phenomenon that allows ice to float rather than to sink. Science is also prevented from directly investigating consciousness by the fact that ‘science’ is within ‘consciousness’, and not the opposite.

From the perspective of a historian of science, Dr Geoffrey Cantor of Leeds University reasoned that science ‘squeezes consciousness in around the edges’. Man is in fact the creator of science, he said, and the notion that science should be reductionist is the product of consciousness.

The idea that science is not culture-free can also be applied to consciousness, and Dr Marilyn Schlitz, from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of the Science Applications International Corp. in California, expanded on the various views of consciousness identified across different societies. Consciousness itself thus seems something of a social construction, with individual consciousness appearing to be part of the larger social and structural field in which individuals find themselves. Dr Schlitz pointed out that this was not the same thing as a theory of social determinism, but it did argue that a science of consciousness should include among other things a discourse-centered perspective in which the tools of analysis coincide with human interactions.

The presentations during the second day covered a wide range of issues converging on two important topics – the nature of the self and its transformation through appropriate practices, and the use of language as a limited, and limiting, medium to convey the true nature of reality and to describe transcendent experiences.

Dr Max Payne pushed aside his microphone and in a powerful oration defined the purpose of the gathering when he said, "The function of this symposium is to shift the world view to make the world safe for saints and holy people, so they could make the world safe for us."

Jagdish Chander, Chief Spokesman for the Brahma Kumaris, explained how consciousness is understood through the yoga systems of the East. "In every human body there is a soul, a self which has self-awareness, consciousness, will, emotion, rational sense, memory, ego, ability to experience, and this entity by its nature is metaphysical." He added that "it is not enough just to study consciousness, but there has to be an awareness that consciousness is the source of moral value if we are going to become better human beings."

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, from the Sufi Order in France, also spoke of the transformation of the notion of self that comes through meditation. He pointed to the four levels of consciousness reached through meditation – the explicate, the implicate, the transcendent, and the self-transcendent. Although the implicate and the explicate retain the person self, they nevertheless allow us to experience great peacefulness and emptiness. Language limits our ability to express this experience, but active words (verbs) are more appropriate to all aspects of consciousness than are static ones (nouns), e.g. ‘thinking’ is a better representation of mind activity that ‘thought’, ‘remembering’ a better representation than ‘memory’.

The limitations of language in the context of spirituality were also outlined by Ravi Ravindra, Professor of Physics and Comparative Religion at Dalhousie University, who drew attention to agreement between the various traditions the ‘what is worth saying can’t be put into words.’ Professor Ravindra dealt in detail with the words ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’. Some languages (e.g. French) make no distinction between these terms, yet they illustrate graphically the contrasting approaches between, for example, Christianity and Hunduism or Buddhism. Christianity emphasises conscience and sees man’s problem as one of self will, the solution to which is right action (obedience to God) from which right knowledge will flow. Hinduism or Buddhism emphasizes consciousness and see the problem as one of ignorance, the solution to which is right knowledge (spiritual rather than scientific) from which right action will arise. He concluded, "only with enhanced consciousness can we achieve enhanced conscience."

Professor Ursula Kind, from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol, provided a welcome insight when she said, "the explosion of knowledge and information has resulted in a loss of wisdom." She also pointed towards the loss of the ‘feminine principle’ as a major factor behind our current anxieties and challenged the symposium organizers for including few women speakers.

Emilios Bouratinos, a retired diplomat and a scholar of Greek philosophy, related how the ancient Greeks used to perceive reality and each other. He explained that they approached consciousness through the use of myth and story-telling, leaving the interpretation of meaning entirely to the individual. "Reality for them", he explained, "was always perceived as a oneness, always complete, and concepts and ideas were not abstracted as they are today. A fragmented world did not exist in their consciousness."

On the third day participants were invited to enter into the spirit of scientific investigation in an "experiment to examine consciousness through silence." This involved two and a half hours of silence, including a long walk, inviting participants to turn the scientific method on themselves to observe individual consciousness. This was followed by lunch in silence, which created a powerful atmosphere.

Dr Brian Lancaster, from the Psychology Department of John Moores University. Liverpool, argued that it is linguistic discussion of the self that converts the self into what appears to us to be a ‘thing’. In fact the ‘self’ is, he suggested, simply a model generated anew from moment to moment in an attempt to bring coherence to what would otherwise be fragmented thoughts and perceptions.

Dr Ramakrishna Rao, Director of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in Durham, North Carolina, found a different angle, suggesting that if one assumes the existence of autonomous consciousness, then the proper method of study is to begin with this consciousness and work downwards to discover how it is involved in specific mental events. Along with speakers from the first day of the Symposium, Dr Rao insisted that consciousness needs to be studied from a first person perspective with spiritual techniques such as meditation if we are to gain an understanding of its elemental function.

Dr Rhea White, from the Parapsychology Sources of Information Centre in New York, also argued that to explore and deepen consciousness we must start from consciousness itself. In harmony with the speakers from the first day, she stressed that Western science is extroverted rather than introverted. She proposed a need to turn this kind of science back to front, and start rather than end with the generalities of religion and literature. A strategy of this nature would allow us to explore how people with deepened consciousness actually see the world. Such people, Rhea White insisted, have what she terms EHE (Exceptional Human Experience). In order to reach this level of experience, one must engage in what can be described as a form of inner Olympics, a kind of disciplined living that ultimately leads to the realization that we are at one with ourselves, with others, with the universe, and that every step of the journey through life is sacred.

B.K. Jayanti, Director of the Brahma Kumaris Centre in London, emphasizes the importance of using the mind to explore the mind, indeed that the mind itself rather than the apparatus of orthodox science is the most important tool for all self-exploration. Through such self-exploration one first attains information, then knowledge, and finally wisdom.

Criteria and Values in a Science for the Future

The short final session, affirmed that science and technology must submit to a code of ethics if humankind is to prosper.

Reference to the ‘future’ in the title for the final plenary session of the Symposium promoted Dr Oscar Olea, from the Institute Investigaciones Esteticas de la UNAM in Mexico, to examine the general concept of time. Dr Olea quoted St Augustine: "The real present has no extension because it is in a point and is indivisible." Time can only be measured as it passes, he said.

Time has no dimension of its own, and exists only in human consciousness as a collection of memories of the part, notions about a present, and expectation concerning a future. The only thing that is really before us is space itself, a space which is not empty but full of energy fields. Dr Olea suggested that an intuitive understanding of this space may have been the secret of the mysteries, and that such an understanding can help combine physics with spirituality.

The other speaker in this short plenary session was Dr Wanjiku Mwagiru, from the UNSD Regional Office in Nairobi, who began by quoting the first line from T.S. Eliot’s "The Journey of the Magi" – "A cold coming we had of it" – and developed this into an examination of the hard route by which humankind, in both scientific and social endeavors, has arrived at its present condition.

The proceedings ended with the formulation of the Olympia Declaration.