A Challenge to Science

Article Outline

• Teaching Science in a Plugged-in World
• Whence the Obsession?
• Plugged in—to What?
• Coming Clean
• Must Science be Depressing?
• Forfeiting Consciousness
• Participation
• Telling the Whole Story
• Humility
• Countdown
• References
• Copyright

“The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as one harmonious being?”

—Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space¹

“A radical new view of human nature has been slowly emerging and gaining momentum, with revolutionary implications for the way we understand and organize our economic, social and environmental relations in the centuries to come. We have discovered Homo empathicus.”

—Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization^2(p43)

It is no longer news that Americans are not very literate in science. Recent surveys are embarrassing. They show that one in five Americans thinks the sun revolves around the earth, a belief that was abandoned centuries ago. Fewer than a third know that DNA is a key to heredity. Americans in general do not know what molecules are, except that they are tiny. Only around 10% know what radiation is.³ Sixty-eight percent of us believe in the devil, 69% believe in hell,⁴ and about a third believe the Bible is literally true.⁵ Only four in 10 believe in Darwinian evolution.⁶ In fact, 34% of Americans cannot name the scientific theory with which Darwin's name is associated.⁶ Almost half of Americans believe God created human beings pretty much in their present form during the past 10,000 years.⁷

Geographic literacy, a close cousin of scientific literacy, is also dismal, particularly among young Americans. According to a 2002 National Geographic–Roper survey of 18- to 24-year-olds in nine Western countries, 83% of Americans could not find Afghanistan on a world map and 63% could not locate Iraq. More of them knew that the island featured in the Survivor television series was in the South Pacific than could locate Israel. Three in 10 could not find the Pacific Ocean, which covers a third of the globe. Eleven percent of young Americans could not even locate the United States, and fewer than half could identify France, the United Kingdom, or Japan. Half could not locate New York or Ohio on a map of the United States. Particularly humiliating was that subjects from all other countries were better able to identify the total population of the United States than could our own young citizens. The United States scored next to last in the survey.⁸ This was an improvement compared to a similar poll in 1988, in which Americans came in last.⁹

Young Americans tend to take a “whatever” attitude toward their geographic disabilities. Only 43% think map reading is “absolutely necessary” in today's world.⁸ This is strange, since the 18- to 24-year-olds are prime warrior age at a time when wars are in progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, which eight out of 10 could not locate. As John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society, said in a whopping understatement, “If our young people can't find places on a map and lack awareness of current events, how can they understand the world's cultural, economic and natural resource issues that confront us?”¹⁰

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Teaching Science in a Plugged-in World 

Scientific organizations for years have raised the alarm over the appallingly low level of scientific literacy in the United States, but efforts to correct the situation have achieved only minimal success. Why aren't young Americans more interested in science, and why don't more of them wish to become scientists? It's obvious that science has transformed their lives—all those smartphones, video games, PCs, and TVs. Why aren't youngsters as dazzled as their elders about these contributions? Why don't they find the scientific report card more compelling? Science advocates pull their hair out over these questions.

A poster child for the problem might be Dylan, a 16-year-old boy in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, public school who is making plans for college. His father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a computer scientist. I interviewed them for this article. Dylan, they said, is a gifted student who excels in all areas. He was fascinated with science in his early teens, which delighted his parents, but his interest waned as he progressed through school. I asked why Dylan drifted away from science. His mother explained, “What happens to kids like Dylan who have an intuitive sense about the greater aspects of life is that they go elsewhere, often to religion and philosophy, to try and get a more accurate picture of reality. The narrow view taught in schools breeds distrust of everything they are taught, including science.” She describes how Dylan discovered Buddhism on his own, which, she says, “was like fresh air to him.” Dylan confirms his mom's view. He isn't sure what he'll focus on in college, but he says it won't be science (names and identities have been changed to protect privacy, personal communication to Larry Dossey, March 28, 2010).

A major problem is the way science is presented and taught in our schools, says Jeremy Rifkin, the economist, activist, and founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC. Rifkin is an advisor to heads of state and companies around the world. He is author of the just-published book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, a sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization. Rifkin examines the evolution of empathy and the profound ways it has shaped the human story. He presents compelling evidence that we are an empathic species—Homo empathicus. This has far-reaching consequences for society, he suggests, and may well determine our future survival on Earth. Rifkin believes that human empathy is increasing and is being extended globally to all life in the biosphere. But time is not on our side. He says, “The irony is that just as we are beginning to glimpse the possibility of a global empathic embrace, we find ourselves close to our own extinction. Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the devolution of civilization and save the Earth?”¹¹

Rifkin suggests that the Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy. The Age of Reason refers to the 18th-century European Enlightenment, in which reason, analysis, and science became the metrics by which all knowledge is measured. Unfortunately, Rifkin says, our educational structures and modes of teaching science remain grounded in the Age of Reason. Rote memorization of facts, competition among peers, and individual achievement are hallmarks of this approach. As Rifkin explains,

[T]he traditional classroom curriculum continues to emphasize learning as a highly personal experience designed to acquire and control knowledge by dint of competition with others. The shift into the distributed ICT [Information and Communications Technology] revolution, however, and the proliferation of social networks, and collaborative forms of engagement on the Internet are creating deep fissures in the orthodox approach to education. The result is that a growing number of educators are beginning to revise curricula by introducing distributed and collaborative learning models into the classroom. Intelligence, in the new way of thinking, is not something that is divided up among people but, rather, the field of experience that is shared between people.^2(pp604,605)

Today, young people see the world in a different way than their parents, who often cannot understand why their children are always glued to their BlackBerrys in an orgy of talking, texting, and tweeting. Whereas their parents value individualism and privacy, today's youngsters view connectivity, interaction, and collaboration as everything. And forget privacy; for them, being out of touch is a cardinal sin.

The extent of their kids' connectivity is disturbing to many adults. “If your kids are awake, they're probably online,” said a report on media use by kids in The New York Times in January 2010.¹² “The average young American now spends practically every waking minute—except for the time in school—using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device,” says The Times. The basis for these observations is a 2009 national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.”¹³ The study found that kids eight to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices. And that does not count the hour and a half that they spend texting, or the half hour they talk on their cell phones. And as a result of media multitasking, such as surfing the Internet while listening to music, they cram nearly 11 hours of media content into those seven and a half hours. The authors of the Kaiser study say they were shocked. Following a similar survey in 2005, they concluded that the use of electronic devices could not possibly grow further. Their 2009 study found several worrisome trends, such as the correlation of heavy media use with behavioral problems and lower grades. What are parents to do? Some experts suggest they simply get over it. Pediatrician Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health of Children's Hospital Boston, says that media use among kids is so pervasive that it is time to stop arguing over whether it is good or bad and accept it as part of children's environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”¹⁴

Many observers such as Rifkin believe there are positives in the desire of kids to be electronically connected all the time. Concealed in this behavior, they say, is a need for acceptance and to be liked and loved, which is a healthy desire that has always been a part of the maturational process. The obsessive reaching out via electronic media may be one remove from empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If so, could educators proactively pick up this ball and run with it? This seems to be happening. In April 2009, The New York Times, in a front-page article, reviewed the empathy revolution that is taking place in American classrooms.¹⁵ Workshops and curricula to foster core values such as empathy, respect, responsibility, and integrity now exist in 18 states. Results of these pioneering efforts are encouraging. Schools report a marked decrease in bullying, violence, aggression, and other antisocial behavior, fewer disciplinary actions, increased cooperation among students, more prosocial behavior, more focused attention in classrooms, a greater desire to learn, and improved critical thinking skills.^2(p601)

Empathy programs in schools have been criticized as artificial, hokey, and girly, and as a theft of curriculum time that could be devoted to “real” subjects. Proponents, however, see them as an indicator of a major shift in which relationships, collaboration, and networks are as important as individualism and personal achievement were to kids of prior generations.

There is a tendency to view kids' passionate embrace of networked relationships and connectivity as an aberration (“What is this generation coming to?”) or as a temporary event (“They'll grow out of it”). These responses may miss the larger picture. Kids' embrace of a new way of being in the world may mirror changes that have been steadily increasing in other areas of society, including science. As Rifkin says,

A new science is emerging whose operating principles and assumptions are more compatible with network ways of thinking. The old science views nature as objects; the new science views nature as relationships. The old science is characterized by detachment, expropriation, dissection, and reduction; the new science is characterized by engagement, replenishment, integration, and holism. The old science is committed to making nature productive; the new science to making nature sustainable. The old science seeks power over nature; the new science seeks partnership with nature. The old science puts a premium on autonomy from nature; the new science on reparticipation with nature.^2(p599,600)

What happens when we try to inculcate children with the scientific method, the main legacy of traditional science? Rifkin views the outcome as an educational train wreck:

[T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us … . The scientific observer is never a participant in the reality he or she observes, but only a voyeur. As for the world he or she observes, it is a cold, uncaring place, devoid of awe, compassion, or sense of purpose. Even life itself is made lifeless to better dissect its component parts. We are left with a purely material world, which is quantifiable but without quality … . The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world. It denies the relational aspect of reality, prohibits participation, and makes no room for empathic imagination. Students in effect are asked to become aliens in the world.^2(p608)

In Rifkin's view, the way science is currently defined and taught is a profound violation of how today's youngsters—and an increasing number of scientists—see the world. Although he does not use these words, the way kids are taught science these days constitutes a form of child abuse. It involves the forced infliction of a false identity. There is an unfortunate precedent—Native American children who were once forced into white-run schools and forbidden to speak their native tongue or wear native clothing. They were required to become something they were not. Many Native Americans who endured this experience were psychologically scarred. They recall their experiences as a nightmare and speak of them with deep bitterness. Similarly, many young people see themselves as foreigners in the world of science, strangers in a strange land. No wonder they do not fall in love with science and seek it as a career. The separateness, distance, and aloofness required to do science is a repudiation of the relational, embedded, networked way they view their place in the world. They simply are not psychologically geared the way their forebears were for the past 200 years, a fact which many science educators have a hard time accepting.

And not just science educators. All of us are locked into comfortable, personal learning styles that stand us in good stead over the years. We become biased: the learning style that works for me should work for you as well. I bumped into my own learning prejudice recently, while on tour for my book The Power of Premonitions.¹⁶ Following a talk at a bookstore, a woman and her teenage daughter came forward. The mom said her daughter was fascinated by premonitions and wanted to ask me a question. I listened; she was obviously very intelligent and I was pleased to have touched a young mind. There was a long line of people behind the pair, so I answered her question briefly and concluded, “Thanks! Sorry we can't talk longer, but it's all in Part One of my book.” At that point the teen gave me a look suggesting I was demented and said, “You mean like a book. Like you want me to read a book. Like a real book?” The disconnect was painful. For a moment I felt like an old fart about a thousand years old.

The prevailing image of science as an individual, solitary endeavor is largely inaccurate. In today's world, research problems are tackled by teams of scientists working collaboratively. Scientific papers commonly have dozens of authors. Yet this collaborative image does not come through to teens contemplating science, particularly young women. “Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation,” according to Jacquelynne Eccles, a senior research professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender.¹⁷ Eccles and her colleagues found that young women were more likely than young men to place a high value on occupations that permitted flexibility and did not require them to be away from their family. The young women also valued working with people. In contrast, young men were more likely to value jobs that required them to supervise others. Eccles concluded, “We as a culture do a very bad job of telling our children what scientists do. Young people have an image of scientists as eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone. Basically, they think of Einstein. We need to change that image and give our children a much richer, nuanced view of who scientists are, what scientists do and how they work.”

No wonder kids are confused about how science is done in real life. The science community seems to go out of its way to conceal the collaborative, cooperative, team approach. Nobel Prizes are given to individuals, not to teams. In medicine, we emphasize individuals—for example, Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, not the research group that helped make it a reality. It's not that individual achievement in science is bad, but that it's an incomplete view that is increasingly off-putting to a generation of young people who are more sensitive than their predecessors to mutual, shared endeavors.

Additional stereotypes prevent girls from entering science, such as the widespread belief that females don't have the innate mental abilities that boys have and therefore aren't able to compete successfully in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This is a hot-button issue because evidence suggests that if young women are told they can't hack it in science and math, the result can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.¹⁸ The belief in the inferiority of women for STEM fields is widespread, even in academia. Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, ignited a firestorm in January 2005 when he suggested that “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly the variability of aptitude” reinforced by ‘“lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination” that account for the paucity of women at the highest levels in science and math.¹⁹, ²⁰ The respondents in the Bayer Facts of Science Education XIV survey, which polled 1,226 female and minority chemists and chemical engineers in 2010, gave the US K-12 education system a “D” for the job it does to encourage minorities to study STEM subjects and a “D+” grade for encouraging girls.²¹ Mae C. Jemison, a chemical engineer and the first African American female astronaut, who works with Bayer's science literacy project, says, “My professors were not that excited to see me in their classes. When I would ask a question, they would just look at me like, ‘Why are you asking that?’ But when a white boy down the row would ask the same question, they'd say ‘astute observation.'”²² Gender disparities are glaring at the upper academic levels of science and math. Commenting on a 2010 report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women,²³ Nancy Hopkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biology professor, said, “Harvard just tenured its first female [math professor], after 375 years.”²⁴

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Whence the Obsession? 

What's the main force that is driving kids toward such fanatical networking? There is increasing evidence that more is involved than smart phones, PCs, and other technological marvels. Hidden factors rooted in our genetic heritage may be at work. “Humans form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs,” says Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School. Christakis and James Fowler, associate professor at University of California, San Diego, in the Department of Political Science, are coauthors of the recent book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.²⁵ They have shown that cooperative behavior is contagious, and that it spreads downstream from a single individual in a cascade of influence that involves dozens more individuals, reaching at least “three degrees of separation.” Their research shows that the initiating influence can involve a variety of behaviors, emotions, and ideas, including kindness, happiness, and generosity.²⁶

Seen from this perspective, it isn't the electronic gizmos and doodads that have caused an obsession with networking in our kids; rather, the gadgets may simply make it possible for them to live out their underlying genetic predispositions for cooperation and empathy.

The ultimate incentive for kids' interconnected, empathic way of relating to one another may be that it, well, feels good. Beginning in the late 1980s, reports of the “helper's high” began to surface—a feeling, following selfless service to others, of exhilaration and a burst of energy followed by a period of calm and serenity.²⁷, ²⁸ The feeling was similar to that following intense physical exercise. Researcher Allan Luks studied over 3,000 Americans involved in volunteer services and found that the feeling lasted several weeks, and that the euphoric sensation returned when they remembered the action.²⁹ The helper's high is accompanied by positive changes in the body's immune function and a lower level of stress hormones. As Ralph Chislett, a 16-year-old whose volunteerism involved delivering supplies to a post-ER recovery unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, said, “Volunteering helps you become a better person. You get a good feeling when you're helping people because you're making a difference in their lives.” Steve Culbertson, president of Youth Service America, a volunteer resource center in Washington, DC, said, “It gets under your skin. The real big secret to service to others is the majority of the benefits accrue to you. It just becomes who you are. It's not something you pick or choose; it's just part of your nature and makeup.”³⁰

Although not all teen volunteerism is altruistic—some schools make volunteer work a requirement for graduation—today's teens are nonetheless volunteering more than any other generation in history. According to Independent Sector, a coalition of not-for-profit organizations and foundations based in Washington, DC, 59% of teens volunteer an average of 3.5 hours per week. Annually, that's 13.3 million volunteers totaling 2.4 billion hours, at a total economic value of $7.7 billion.³¹

It may be no accident that the most plugged-in generation in history is also the most volunteer prone. The empathic urge may underlie both areas of behavior. In fact, electronic connectivity and volunteerism have proved to be inseparable. Disaster relief efforts following the Haitian earthquake in January 2010 were largely made possible by an unprecedented mobile electronic communications effort. When one clinic texted that it needed fuel for its generator, the Red Cross responded in 20 minutes. Translators volunteered their efforts electronically from faraway locations without ever setting sight on Haiti. Within a few days, a map was constructed via satellite pictures by a firm in Southhampton, UK, showing every one of the 5,000 collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. A craigslist-style “we need, we have” Web site was set up to help anyone who needed services, and an online database was constructed to monitor the capacity of hospitals in real time. The Haitian tragedy showed that empathy, charity, and electronic communications are natural allies.³²

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Plugged in—to What? 

For decades a realization has been growing, fed from a variety of sources, that there may be a collective level of intelligence that transcends individual minds. This idea is rooted in antiquity. The Upanishads, India's sacred scriptures that date to the middle of the first millennium bce, proclaim tat tvam asi, “thou art that”: the human and the divine are one. Similarly from the Christian tradition, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21, KJV). The esoteric sides of all the major religions recognize that the individual consciousness is subsumed and nourished by an infinite, absolute, divine, or cosmic source, and is ultimately one with it—the scala naturae or the Great Chain of Being.³³ It follows that, at some level, all individual minds are united and one within the boundless All. The goal within the great wisdom traditions is to realize our essential unity with one another, and our inner divinity or cosmic consciousness, and to permit this awareness to make a difference in how we live our life.

For a century we have witnessed a steady outpouring of books that, in one way or another, affirm the recognition that consciousness is larger than the individual mind. Examples include pioneering works such as Richard M. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness,³⁴ Emerson's essays on the oversoul and transcendentalism,³⁵ William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience,³⁶ Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being,³³ and Carl G. Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.³⁷ More recent contributions include Erwin Schrödinger's My View of the World⁵³ and What Is Life? and Mind and Matter,³⁸ Ken Wilbur's The Spectrum of Consciousness,³⁹ Peter Russell's The Global Brain,⁴⁰ Nick Herbert's Elemental Mind,⁴¹ Huston Smith's Beyond the Post-Modern Mind,⁴² David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order,⁴³ and David Darling's Soul Search.⁴⁴

An overlooked influence in the recognition of collective consciousness is the development within the social sciences of dialogue and group process as ways of promoting consensus, creativity, and problem solving. A variety of terms are being used to describe these exercises—“developing group synergy,” “unleashing collective creativity,” and “developing team coordination.”⁴⁵ Organizations are discovering that when individuals unite in a shared intention, something mysterious happens: a group intelligence emerges that transcends that of the individuals involved, a theme developed by James Surowiecki in his courageous book The Wisdom of Crowds.⁴⁶ As psychologist and entrepreneur Carol Frenier says,

In these group experiences, people have access to a kind of knowing that's bigger than what we normally experience with each other. You feel the presence of the sacred, and you sense that everybody else in the group is also feeling that. There's a sense of openness and awareness of something larger than yourself. Your ability to communicate seems broader. What is astounding to people is how much creativity comes forth in a setting like that. You have a sense that the whole group is creating together, and you don't quite exactly know how.⁴⁷

The experience of a larger mind has been there all along, and people have stumbled onto it with regularity. As writer Craig Hamilton says, “Indeed, rescue crews, sports teams, dance troupes, and music ensembles have for years been reporting remarkable experiences of team synergy or group flow that have lifted them up to undreamt-of heights of coordination and effectiveness.”⁴⁵ I've often had this experience during CPR events on hospitals wards and in emergency rooms, when the entire resuscitation team functions almost wordlessly and effortlessly in total synchrony. This experience is also common in combat, which is one reason why war has been so devilishly difficult to eradicate throughout human history.⁴⁸

Expanded views of consciousness are being taken seriously in the down-to-earth, highly practical business world. In a seminal paper entitled “The Power of Mind: What If the Game Is Bigger Than We Think?” published in the Journal of Management Inquiry in 2004,⁴⁹ management specialists C. Marlene Fiol and Edward J. O'Conner, of the University of Colorado at Denver, suggest that our current ideas about the human mind and its supposed limitations may themselves be limited. They ask, “What if organizational realities were more malleable than we believe? What if organizational members could alter their physical surroundings even just occasionally through focused mental attention?” They review evidence from numerous fields suggesting that the human mind may be capable of affecting physical reality from a distance and into the past and the future. They conclude, “[T]he evidence for the impact of focused mental attention is sufficiently compelling and the potential implications sufficiently important that we believe it is time to explicitly examine the organizational implications of the power of the human mind.”

A generation ago, academic talk of group intelligence and the possibility that mind might modify its environment directly, unrestrained by space and time, would have been considered professional suicide.

Today's youngsters—the so-called Millennials, Net Generation, Generation Y, Digital Natives, or whatever we call the cohort of young people born between 1980 and 2000—seem to embrace the ideas of collective consciousness and extended mind more effortlessly than any previous generation. Being online with others nearly all their waking hours provides them a direct experience of a kind of group intelligence. Linked continually via their electronic appendages with their peers, they are practically the one mind come to life. Will the gadgets make it easier for these kids to take the next step and grok the deep oneness of consciousness of which the great traditions have spoken for millennia?

Lest the idea of a unitary, group, or universal mind be dismissed as new-age woo-woo, we should note that some of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century have endorsed this perspective. The renowned physicist David Bohm said, “Each person enfolds something of the spirit of the other in his consciousness. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty … and if we don't see this it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.”⁵⁰ Anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson: “The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system … .”⁵¹ Physicist Henry Margenau: “There is a physical reality that is in essence the same for all … . [This] oneness of the all implies the universality of mind … . ^52(p111) If my conclusions are correct, each individual is part of God or part of the Universal Mind.”^52(p20) Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger also believed that minds are united and one. He said, “To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless.⁵³ There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness … . [I]n truth there is only one mind.”^38(p139)

In his book Infinity and the Mind, mathematician and author Rudy Rucker relates a telephone interview with Kurt Gödel, the author of the famous theorem that bears his name, and who is widely regarded as the greatest logician of the 20th century.⁵⁴ Rucker had been puzzling over the nature of consciousness and whether machines can think. He asked Gödel if he believed whether “there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world.” He reports, “[Gödel] replied that, yes, the Mind exists independently of its individual properties.” Rucker then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to its being localized in the brains of people. Gödel replied, “Of course.”⁵⁴

These world-renowned scientists and thinkers did not arrive at their conclusions about the nature of consciousness in fever dreams, but by a careful analysis of evidence and experience. Yet there is a near-total blackout within current science toward these views and the abundant evidence supporting them. In its failure to acknowledge the unitary, collective, and fundamental nature of consciousness, science has set itself against the experience of many of today's brightest kids. This is a profound contradiction from which science is suffering, evidenced in its failure to attract and retain youngsters whose sense of being in the world does not resonate with the brain-based, isolated, individual, limited views that have been deified during the 20th century.

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Coming Clean 

Science educators often skim off the top, as it were. They regale young minds with the marvels of science while remaining silent about the problems to which it has contributed.

When I was in grade school as a member of a different younger generation, we had routine drills in which we took cover under our desks. This was to prepare us to act quickly in case the Russians decided to nuke our playground. No one ever explained how this pathetic maneuver would save us, but it seemed to make the teachers feel better. Today's youngsters are treated to a different menu of menaces. Their nuclear hazard is more likely to come in the form of a dirty nuclear device detonated by a terrorist instead of from a Russian plane or missile. Then there is global warming; nuclear waste; environmental degradation; polluted air, water, and soil; acidified oceans; melting polar ice; oceanic dead zones; dying coral reefs; vanishing species; on and on, all of which are due in some measure to the downside of science and technology. The mantra that only science can save us from these perils rings hollow to many youngsters, since it was largely science and technology that bequeathed them in the first place. As anthropologist and educator Loren Eiseley put it,

We have lived to see the technological progress that was hailed in one age as the savior of man become the horror of the next. We have observed that the same able and energetic minds which built lights, steamships, and telephones turn with equal facility to the creation of what euphemistically is termed the ‘ultimate weapon.' … It is in this reversal that the modern age comes off so badly.⁵⁵

As World War II was looming, novelist Aldous Huxley expressed a similar point of view: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”⁵⁶ Einstein reflected the same sentiment, saying, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”⁵⁷

The usual defense from the science community toward views such as Eiseley's, Huxley's, and Einstein's is to emphasize that it is technology, not science itself, that has made a mess of things. But scientists sometimes take risks in their research that appear breathtakingly irresponsible and reckless, which they usually justify in the name of pure, basic, or blue-sky science. Some of these risks are so obvious they draw fire from scientists themselves. Consider a recent editorial in the respected British publication New Scientist titled “The Scary Business of Tinkering with Life”:

By tinkering with the cell's natural machinery, … [the research team] has found a way of making proteins with entirely new properties, opening up a future of exotic designer organisms … . This is a fundamental advance that could lead to new drugs, materials and energy sources. But tampering with life's operating system will inevitably raise safety concerns—and it's true that we have no way of predicting the fallout of this work. Synthetic biologists need to confront openly and honestly public fears that they are “playing God [emphasis added].”⁵⁸, ⁵⁹

Science boosters should wake up. Kids aren't dumb. To borrow novelist Ernest Hemingway's term, they have excellent “built-in bullshit detectors.”⁶⁰ And nothing triggers the warning more than when those in charge present only one side of a story.

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Must Science be Depressing? 

Why would anyone who is psychologically healthy pick a career that demands a view of the world that is morbid, pessimistic, and depressing? That's precisely the worldview advocated by some of the most outstanding scientists of our day. This can be a turnoff to any optimistic, questing, curious, intelligent kid who stumbles onto it. Perhaps that is why the advocates of science education almost never acknowledge this prevailing view when promoting the wonders of science to youngsters.

Typical of the gloomy perspective is that of Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg in his 1977 book The First Three Minutes.⁶¹ In a now-famous passage, he writes,

It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning … . It is hard to realize that this all [ie, life on Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.⁶¹

By the time Weinberg unveiled his gloomy view, the notion of a purposeless, meaningless universe was already on a roll in science. One of the most influential supporters of this perspective was the Nobel molecular biologist Jacques Monod (1910-1976), whose 1972 book Chance and Necessity powerfully influenced a generation of scientists.⁶² For Monod, purpose and meaning in nature were outlaw concepts; for a scientist to believe in them was unbecoming at best and a moral failing at worst. As he confidently proclaimed, “The cornerstone of scientific method is the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purpose.'” ^62(p21)

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University has joined the chorus of meaninglessness by dissing free will. “When we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality,” he says, “we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”⁶³

Although prevalent, this depressing verdict on the status of meaning, direction, and purpose in the world is not unanimous, and kids who intuitively reject this view have a few strong shoulders to stand on. Where Weinberg, Monod, and Dennett see pointlessness and despair, other scientists see pattern, direction, and meaning. For example, the eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler said,

Science … at first sight seems to have no special platform for man, mind, or meaning. Man? Pure biochemistry! Mind? Memory modelable by electronic circuitry! Meaning? Why ask after that puzzling and intangible commodity? … What is man that the universe should be mindful of him? … [I]s not man an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy in an unimportant region somewhere in the vastness of space? No! The philosopher of old was right! Meaning is important, even central.⁶⁴

The British physicist Paul Davies is also astounded by the sheer unlikelihood of human life, and he suggests that something else might have been going on to tip things in our favor:

The origin of life on Earth … could well have been the result of a stupendous chemical fluke. [However,] …  computing the raw odds quickly shows that even the simplest known cell is so unlikely to form by accident it wouldn't happen twice in the entire observable universe. Or in a trillion similar universes … . Perhaps life's origin wasn't a freak event after all, but the automatic outcome of inherently biofriendly laws of nature.⁶⁵

In his book The Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life,⁶⁶ Davies finds in the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears a potent metaphor for expressing the weird fit between the universe and life. The Three Bears story first appeared when the English poet Robert Southey composed it for his 1837 book The Doctor.⁶⁷ In the story, a family of three bears—mother, father, baby—live in a house in the forest. One day, having cooked porridge and waiting for it to cool, they go for a stroll in the woods. Goldilocks finds the house, enters, and meddles with things—chairs, beds, and porridge. She finds the adult bears' beds and chairs “too hard” or “too soft,” their porridge “too hot” or “too cold.” But the baby bear's bed, chair, and porridge are “just right.” The bears return and discover that Goldilocks is asleep in the baby bear's bed, after having eaten all the baby's porridge.

The parallels are telling, says Davies. The conditions that life encountered in the universe proved “just right.” If the known natural laws had been a greater or lesser value than what they are, the universe, like the porridge, would literally be either too hot or too cold to accommodate life as we know it. Or the stars would burn too brightly or not at all; or they would have collapsed rather than exploded, thus failing to scatter the chemical detritus across the universe that ultimately supported life. If the difference in mass between a proton and neutron were not exactly what it is, life-sustaining chemistry would not have been possible. If all these just-right characteristics were not present on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, we would not be here to reflect on them.⁶⁸

The distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that life is so improbable, and the physical characteristics of the universe are so finely tuned to accommodate it, that in some sense the universe “knew we were coming.”⁶⁹ As a consequence of this cosmic foreknowledge, by the time life arose, conditions in the cosmos were ready for it. The table was set; all life had to do was show up.

Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the 20th century's most respected cosmologists, seems to agree with the idea that the universe knew life was on its way. Reflecting on the fine-tuning of the conditions necessary for the universe to bring forth life, he suggested that the universe looks like a “put-up job,” as if someone had been “monkeying” with the laws of physics, getting ready in advance for the appearance of life.⁷⁰, ⁷¹

But this is a minority view within cosmology, and science in general. Most scientists believe there is no mystery that needs explaining. Life, mind, and consciousness are a big fat statistical accident. Given infinite time, the improbable is bound to occur. We're here because of pure, dumb luck. There are no patterns or meaning behind the scenes. This dour position reminds me of the puckish comment of Gertrude Stein: “There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.”⁷² Try selling that to a teenager contemplating a career in science and see what happens.

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Forfeiting Consciousness 

There's an even drearier little secret that veteran scientists never let kids in on—that if they enter science, they have to check their minds at the door. The reason is that mind, as most people think about it, does not exist in conventional science, because the expressions of consciousness, such as choice, will, emotions—and even logic—are said to be brain in disguise. As astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “[The brain's] workings—what we sometimes call mind—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.”⁷³ Nobelist Francis Crick, in his 1995 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, was equally explicit, saying, “ ‘You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.'”⁷⁴ Or, as Marvin Minsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence expert, put it more crudely, “The brain is just a computer made of meat.”⁷⁵ Crick went further. In his subsequent book Of Molecules and Men, he wrote, “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry”⁷⁶—to analyze, in other words, the meat. And lest there be no doubt about where he stands, philosopher Dennett says, “We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious.”⁷⁷

Novelist Arthur Koestler poked fun at these positions by taking aim at René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who was extraordinarily influential in establishing the notion of a mindless body. “If … Descartes … had kept a poodle, the history of philosophy would have been different,” Koestler wrote. “The poodle would have taught Descartes that contrary to his doctrine, animals are not machines, and hence the human body is not a machine, forever separated from the mind … .”⁷⁸

This morose, meaningless side of science is never openly presented to young students contemplating a lifetime in science. They usually sniff it out later on, after a career choice has been made. I know of no studies that assess the impact of these dark views on young scientists when they encounter them. Are they negatively affected? Do they adopt a chin-up attitude and soldier on, having traveled too far on the science path to turn around? Or—most commonly, I believe—do they schizophrenically partition their psychological, spiritual, and scientific lives into separate domains in a desperate attempt to find balance, silently suffering the jagged contradictions the rest of their life?

Purists insist that science is neutral on matters of meaning; the world is what it is. Whatever meaning we find in the world comes from us, not the world itself. We read meaning into the world, not from it. This sword cuts two ways; if meaning should not be imputed to the universe, neither should meaninglessness. It is a plain fact that scientists in general, peering into the same universe and aware of the same set of facts, see meaning in different ways, ways that are not part of science itself. No scientist has ever possessed a meaning meter. Therefore the proper approach, it would seem, would be to declare questions of meaning beyond the purview of science and to cease imposing one's personal view as the official way the universe should be interpreted. This would give students and young scientists a fighting chance to find their own path where meaning and purpose are concerned, and not be bullied by senior scientists who ought to know better.

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Participation 

From the very beginning of the scientific tradition in the 16th century, Rifkin relates, not everyone agreed with the notion that the secrets of nature had to be pried loose from a reluctant source.^2(pp307-309) A notable example is the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Goethe, the author of Faust and many other diverse works, was a major force; his work influenced philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Jung, and Wittgenstein. He was opposed to the scientific method of the day, which emphasized objectivity, neutrality, and remoteness. He believed the understanding of nature came through participation. To understand a plant, for example, one must enter into the life of the plant. He called his scientific approach “a delicate empiricism which in a most inward way makes itself identical with the object and thereby becomes the actual theory.”⁷⁹

It's easy to disregard Goethe as a crank who couldn't get with the scientific program, but he is not so easily dismissed. Echoes of Goethe's approach keep cropping up. An example is Nobel geneticist Barbara McClintock, who worked with genes and corn plants. She once said that her success was due to the fact that she had “a feeling for the organism.”⁸⁰ That's putting it mildly. McClintock would psychologically enter into a problem so deeply that she became the problem. She would cease to exist as a person; on emerging from contemplating the issue, she literally could not remember her name. Goethe would have understood.

As Rifkin shows, Goethe's theme of participatory science was taken up 130 years later by Heinz Kohut (1913-1981), the eminent Austrian-born American psychoanalyst. Kohut believed that conventional scientific methodology was “experience-distant,” removed from actual observation. He proposed an “experience-near” approach as an alternative, in which data could be acquired directly from empathy and introspection. Empathy was crucial, he maintained, to prevent scientific pursuits from “becoming increasingly isolated from human life.”^81(p82) Eliminating empathy from science had resulted in a cold, disinterested, and rational approach that fostered the aims of brutal totalitarian regimes and had led to “some of the most inhuman goals the world has ever known.”^81(p174) Summing up, Kohut said that the new ideal in science “can be condensed into a single evocative phrase: we must strive not only for scientific empathy but also for an empathic science.”^{2(p609),81(p707)}

American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) agreed with Kohut. He was scornful of the idea of a neutral observer who is uninvolved and removed from her object of study. He specified that the goal of an empathic approach was not to destroy conventional science, but to enlarge it.⁸²

Henry David Thoreau, an American original who loved knowledge, knew as much. “If you would learn the secrets of nature,” he insisted, “you must practice more humanity than others.”⁸³

I recall a moment of colossal confusion as a university student that might have been tempered had I known about Kohut's views. I had fallen in love with science in high school but had not yet decided on a specific career choice. One evening I attended a campus lecture by a visiting scientist eminent in his field. Someone in the audience asked whether scientists were justified in researching lethal microbes and chemical nerve agents whose sole purpose was to kill human beings. Without a nanosecond's pause, he responded enthusiastically, “Of course they should be free to research these things. You cannot rein in the human mind. It should be free to explore anything. Scientists have no responsibility for how these things are used. Politicians do that.” His imperious attitude implied that only an imbecile would ask such a question in the first place. I was gobsmacked. At the time I thought this was the most selfish, arrogant, and irresponsible comment I had ever heard. I wasn't alone. The entire audience was hushed in disbelief. I went away bewildered and perplexed. This was science? Now I know why Goethe, Kohut, and Maslow are important cairns along the path of science. They are correctives to the notion that science should ideally be done by brains on sticks—humans who honor only the intellect and are devoid of empathy, who divorce themselves totally from ethical and moral issues.

Rifkin believes that Kohut's “experience-near” approach and Maslow's notion of “caring subjectivity” in science have been influential in the more than half century since they were proposed. He observes, “A new generation of researchers, like Jane Goodall in primatology, have used the ‘experience-near,' empathic approach to scientific investigation, to elicit new discoveries and insights about the nature of nature that would have been impossible to imagine using the traditional disinterested, value-neutral, scientific method.”^2(p611)

Jane Goodall is a telling example. When her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, sent her in 1960 to study chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, she had no training as a scientist. Goodall explains, “He wanted someone whose mind was uncluttered by scientific theory because back then ethology was trying to make itself into a hard science and was very reductionistic—very reductionistic.” Her project became one of the longest continuous field studies of any animal. She produced startling discoveries of chimpanzee behavior, such as meat eating and the fashioning and use of tools. Like McClintock, Goodall intuitively understood the wisdom of an empathic approach to field research. She gave names to her subjects and became emotionally engaged with them, which horrified more than a few ethologists and evoked stern criticism. Goodall remains unapologetic. In a recent interview she stated, “There is absolutely no problem in having empathy and being objective. Empathy helps us gain an understanding at a different level that you can then test in a rigorous scientific way.”⁸⁴

Unfortunately, proponents of an empathic science must endure the perennial charge from critics that they seek to denature science, destroy its objectivity, and hold it hostage to the emotional whims of sloppy investigators. What do philosophers such as Goethe, or psychologists such as Kohut and Maslow, know about doing science? The criticism can be vehement. When the French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) proposed a teleological direction in evolutionary biology, he was attacked by his fellow countryman and Nobelist Jacques Monod, mentioned above. Monod seems to have had a hissy fit. He screeched, “For my part I am most of all struck by the intellectual spinelessness of this philosophy. In it I see more than anything else a systematic truckling, a willingness to conciliate at any price, to come to any compromise.”^62(p32) This was not exactly a memorable “Meet Mr. Wizard” moment in science, but is reminiscent of a statement by a scientist critical of parapsychology, who blathered, “This is the sort of thing I would not believe, even if it were true.”⁸⁵

Even if empathy were completely boarded up by critics as an important factor in doing science, this would not save the reputation of science as an exercise in complete objectivity. The role of the neutral observer is a goner. The death sentence for this concept has been obvious since the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. In the words of physicist Wheeler:

Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as “sitting out there,” with the observer safely separated from it … . To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word “observer,” and put in its place the new word “participator.” In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.⁸⁶

Physicist Henry P. Stapp of the University of California, Berkeley, a leading authority in the theoretical foundations of quantum physics, takes a similar view:

The new physics presents prima facie evidence that our human thoughts are linked to nature by nonlocal connections: what a person chooses to do in one region seems immediately to affect what is true elsewhere in the universe … [O]ur thoughts … DO something [his emphasis].⁸⁷

To say that the universe is participatory is to say that consciousness matters. But the conventional view, that we're just “a pack of neurons” or “computers made of meat,” or that “we're all zombies,” as Crick, Minsky, and Dennett assert, respectively, says otherwise. This view has no place for any meaningful degree of participation. This is an outdated perspective lodged in classical physics. It stems from the assumption that the brain's material particles and fields can give a full account of consciousness. But as physicist Stapp says, “This [view] … is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three quarters of a century.”⁸⁸

Young students don't have to forfeit their conscious minds and freedom of will and choice on entering science. They could be presented a hopeful, upbeat view of consciousness that is consistent with evolving science and their intuition about the nature of their own minds. But they seldom are. The issue is simply ignored by the science sellers, because most scientists remain wedded to an outdated, classical definition of how the world works that, when it comes to minds, consciousness, and brains, will brook little opposition. And when young people entering science stumble years later into the Saganesque and Crickish view of consciousness, the confrontation can be shocking.

The notion of an empathic, participatory observer may be a stretch for many conventional scientists. But today's plugged-in kids get it intuitively. They know instinctively that “everything is connected,” as they literally strive to be 24/7. For them, “participation” is not hypothetical, but a way of being. If science educators were bold enough to emphasize explicitly the connections between modern science and kids' participatory, empathic instincts, this might be a turn-on that would pivot many of them toward a fascination with science in general.

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Telling the Whole Story 

Peter A. Sturrock is distinguished emeritus professor of applied physics and emeritus director of the Center for Space Science and Astrophysics at Stanford University. In his autobiography, A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist,⁸⁹ Sturrock, a charming, brilliant, urbane Englishman, recounts a life-changing experience he had on a beautiful English summer day when he was a student studying mathematics at Cambridge University. He had cycled a few miles outside of town to a range of hills, found a clearing in the woods, and stretched out to bask in the sunshine. After a few minutes something caught his eye. A round, bright-white object, about one tenth the size of the moon, appeared near the northern horizon. It moved directly south in a perfectly straight line and disappeared at the southern horizon in less than a minute. “No doubt it was a piece of thistledown, blown in the wind, except that there were no thistles around, and there was no wind,” he said. “It was a very disturbing event—so disturbing that I told no one about it.”^89(p1)

One of Sturrock's fellow students at Cambridge was from America. “The English students loved to tease him,” Sturrock recounts. “In the autumn of 1947, it was fair game to tease him about the newest craze in America: ‘flying saucers!' People were seeing saucer-like ‘flying disks’ in the sky! The sightings were reported as coming from the western United States, so, in our ignorance, we assumed they came from California … . We knew that most Americans were a bit nutty, and that Californians were especially nutty. The idea of disks flying around in the sky was obviously complete nonsense, and we could not imagine any other part of the country where such reports would have been taken seriously.”

Sturrock realized that if he revealed what he had seen in the sky above the hills outside Cambridge, he too would have been considered California crazy. It was his first experience of politically correct science, and it “was a profound disturbance to my scientific well-being,” he says. “In the interest of self-preservation, I could tell no one about the event.” He rationalized his silence. “After all, I did not really know what I had seen. There may have been some simple explanation, although I could not think what that might have been. It was prudent to keep the event to myself. It would have been the height of folly to do otherwise.”

Years later, in 1982, when his reputation as a faculty member and scholar in astrophysics was secure—ironically at Stanford University in “nutty” California—he courageously founded the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) to explore unusual and unexplained phenomena (www.scientificexploration.org). Today the SSE has approximately 800 members drawn from 45 countries around the world. It holds annual meetings in the United States and biennial meetings in Europe. The Society publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration. Attention aspiring young scientists: students are particularly welcome in the SSE.

The year the SSE was founded, I published my first book, Space, Time & Medicine.⁹⁰ In it I explored the connections between one's worldview, physical health, and medicine. Although widely read, it was, to use Sturrock's term, non-PC, not politically correct. I found in the SSE a group of superb scientists and critical thinkers who were open to my concerns. SSE proved to be a cordial haven where edgy ideas were welcome, and it has been an inspiration to me ever since.

A 1987 survey by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) of the University of Chicago found that 67 % of adult Americans say they have had a psi experience such as telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition.⁹¹ Similar results have been found in nearly all the major countries in the world.⁹¹ In their review of these experiences, Targ et al⁹² report that they are often interpreted by those experiencing them as representing “the intrinsic oneness of all beings and matter.” This is similar to the embedded, linked, connected worldview of today's kids, and that is one reason why science should at least be open to the possibility of psi experiences and not dismiss them out of hand, because no one is likely to choose a profession that is dedicated to deriding or denouncing his or her personal worldview.

We do not know how often children have experiences such as Sturrock's on the hills outside Cambridge, because youngsters are not represented in extensive surveys such as that of NORC. But part of the lore surrounding psi is that these experiences are quite common in children, and that youngsters often extinguish them as they grow older because of social pressures. Surveys have shown, however, that the spontaneous experience of the numinous, the now-famous term of theologian Rudolph Otto for “the holy,” are common among children.⁹³ One survey of grammar school children found that 40% of boys and 61% of girls affirmed that they had had transcendent experiences akin to those celebrated by the poet Wordsworth of the interpenetration of the finite and the infinite.⁹⁴

The scientific world largely dishonors transcendent experiences of oneness and unity, let alone psi-type occurrences such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. The latest gambit is to link spiritual experiences such as transcendent oneness to a damaged brain, since these experiences are reported by some patients following surgery for brain tumors. “Thus,” says the Italian research team headed by neuroscientist Dr Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine, “dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors.”⁹⁵, ⁹⁶ Never mind the millions of healthy individuals who've experienced the same thing, who have not undergone brain surgery. The implication is that they have a subtle degree of brain dysfunction that simply is not clinically apparent. And never mind the evidence from NORC that Americans who have had transcendent experiences are, for the most part, above the norm in education and intelligence; that those who have had profoundly mystical experiences, when subjected to standard tests that measure psychological well-being, score at the top; and that no other factor has ever been found to correlate so highly with psychological balance as does mystical experience.⁹⁷

The bombast and bluster that have been expended by critics toward the field of parapsychology over the past century is disgraceful. The arguments are not a pretty sight. Most of the so-called skepticism involves uninformed criticism. Some critics admit as much. An example is Ray Hyman, a University of Oregon psychologist who is currently perhaps the best-known denouncer of psi. Hyman concedes, “The level of the debate [about psi] during the past 130 years has been an embarrassment for anyone who would like to believe that scholars and scientists adhere to standards of rationality and fair play.”⁹⁸ Or as John Beloff, the late philosopher, psychologist, and psi researcher of the University of Edinburgh, said, “One needs to remember that skepticism is not necessarily a badge of tough mindedness: it may equally be a sign of intellectual cowardice.”⁹⁹

Robert Matthews, an Oxford-trained physicist, reader in science at Aston University, and science correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, is one of the best-informed science journalists about the evidence for psi. He is fully aware of the double standard that exists toward this field, and the opprobrium that researchers risk by dabbling in it. Matthews states, “Just consider: there is no credible evidence that time travel has ever been achieved, but that has not stopped serious scientists pondering ways in which it might be. In contrast, there is now a wealth of evidence for the existence of ESP, obtained by researchers from reputable universities on a repeatable basis. Yet, any scientists who dare suggest ways in which ESP might be possible can expect a heap of ordure to be tipped on their heads by fellow academics.”¹⁰⁰

Dr Kit Pedler, the British medical scientist who for many years was head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London, expressed the frustration of many first-rate scientists toward the perennial stonewalling of uninformed critics of psi:

A scientist would have to be either massively ignorant or a confirmed bigot to deny the evidence that the human mind can make connection with space, time and matter in ways which have nothing to do with the ordinary senses. Further, he cannot deny that these connections are compatible with current thinking in physics, and may in the future become accepted as a part of an extended science in which the description “paranormal” no longer applies, and can be replaced by ‘normal.'¹⁰¹

Pedler's unambiguous view was shared by Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, who, in equally stern language, said,

And anyone who at the present day expresses confident opinions, whether positive or negative, on ostensibly paranormal phenomena, without making himself thoroughly acquainted with the main methods and results of the careful and long-continued work may be dismissed without further ceremony as a conceited ignoramus.¹⁰²

There is far more empirical evidence favoring psi than in more glamorous fields, such as string theory in modern physics, SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) in cosmology, and parallel universes in quantum-relativistic physics. Yet string theorists, SETI proponents, and parallel universe advocates are widely considered to be daring, courageous thinkers, even though many critics consider their theories untestable, whereas parapsychologists, whose claims in many instances have been tested, replicated, and validated, are widely ridiculed and scorned.

Even though sophisticated meta-analyses of certain areas in psi research reveal staggering odds against chance of millions to one, hardened skeptics turn away unconvinced, preferring imagined “explanations” of shoddy methods, slipups in statistical analyses, wishful thinking, outliers or anomalies to be ignored, hallucinations, lying, conspiracy, or fraud. Even hold-in-your-hand and see-with-your-own-eyes evidence is rejected. For example, although remote viewing has been repeatedly used to find downed airplanes,¹⁰³ sunken ships, and buried archaeological sites, even these macroscopic, practical demonstrations are brushed aside.¹⁰⁴, ¹⁰⁵ Thus Matthews concludes, “It therefore seems that all that parapsychologists can do is collect ever more evidence, in the hope of gradually persuading more scientists of the reality of ESP … . Yet the mathematics of scientific inference reveals even this to be a myth … .”¹⁰⁶

Although many scientists deride and reject phenomena such as psi-type happenings that don't fit in—Sturrock's non-PC events—truly great scientists often embrace anomalies as the lifeblood of science. As physicist Niels Bohr said, “Progress in science is impossible without a paradox,”¹⁰⁷ and as physicist Richard Feynman remarked, “The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that is most interesting.'”¹⁰⁸

There are striking parallels between the current rejection of psi events and the earlier refusal of scientists to accept the phenomenon of meteorites. The “logic” in both instances is that, because scientists know in advance that certain events can't happen, they don't happen. The illustrious French Academy of Sciences considered the notion of meteorites absurd, ruling in 1772 that “stones could not fall from the sky, hence they do not.” This prejudice led to the actual destruction of evidence. As E.M. Lindsay, the Irish astronomer, notes, “As a result of this scientific prejudice, some scientists were ashamed of dealing with the subject; the mineralogist Born, afraid of appearing silly as a collector of meteorites, had them thrown out of the Imperial Collection in Vienna; as a result, many meteorites were lost forever.”¹⁰⁹ But the French Academy could not ignore a shower of 3,000 meteorites that fell at L'Aigle, Normandy, on April 26, 1803, witnessed by countless people in broad daylight. The French Minister of the Interior dispatched the young physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate.¹¹⁰ His report prompted the august Academy to set aside its mockery and sarcasm and finally declare that stones do indeed fall from the sky.¹¹¹ Collections of meteorites came out of hiding and went back on the museum shelves, as scientists got over their embarrassment.

It is a cautionary tale that is as relevant today as in the 1700s, because the willingness to allow engrained belief to trump empirical observation is still endemic in certain areas of science. As Nobel molecular biologist Sir John Eccles said in the late 20th century,

Arrogance is one of the worst diseases of scientists and it gives rise to statements of authority and finality which are expressed usually in fields that are completely beyond the scientific competence of the dogmatist. It is important to realize that dogmatism has now become a disease of scientists rather than of theologians.¹¹²

Philosopher Chris Carter, in his book Parapsychology and the Skeptics,¹¹³ psi researcher Dean Radin, in his book Entangled Minds,¹¹⁴ Edward Kelly et al, in their book Irreducible Mind,¹¹⁵ and Charles Tart in his book, The End of Materialism,¹¹⁶ demolish two of the perennial objections of critics of parapsychology—that there are no repeatable or replicated psi experiments, and that psi experiments can't be valid because they conflict with the laws of nature—meteorites all over again. Carter, Radin, Kelly et al, and Tart show that there are thousands of experiments documenting psi, with staggering odds against chance. They concede that psi is indeed incompatible with the classical, mechanical, Newtonian view of the world, but they show that psi does not conflict with the modern, quantum-relativistic perspective, a view that is affirmed by many scientists who have thought deeply about these issues. As the eminent physicist Gerald Feinberg said, “If such [psi] phenomena indeed occur, no change in the fundamental equations of physics would be needed to describe them.¹¹⁷

Yale University physicist Henry Margenau agreed, saying,

Strangely, it does not seem possible to find the scientific laws or principles violated by the existence of [psi phenomena]. We can find contradictions between [their occurrence] and our culturally accepted view of reality—but not—as many of us have believed—between [their occurrence] and the scientific laws that have been so laboriously developed.¹¹⁸

O. Costa de Beauregard, theoretical physicist and emeritus director of research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research, concurred:

Today's physics allows for the existence of ‘paranormal’ phenomena of telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis … . The whole concept of ‘nonlocality’ in contemporary physics requires this possibility.¹¹⁹ Far from being ‘irrational,' the paranormal is postulated by today's physics [emphasis in original].¹²⁰

These views are reinforced by many books and peer-reviewed scientific papers that have appeared in recent years, most notably by psi skeptics Damien Broderick¹²¹ and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer¹²²; psi researchers Stephan Schwartz,¹⁰⁴ Dean Radin,¹¹⁴, ¹²³ Stanley Krippner,¹²⁴ Russell Targ,¹²⁵ Richard Broughton,¹²⁶ Dick Bierman,¹²⁷ Gary Schwartz,¹²⁸ Beverly Rubik,¹²⁹ Charles Tart,¹¹⁶ Robert Jahn,¹³⁰ Brenda Dunne,¹³⁰ Helmut Schmidt,¹³¹ Ed May,¹³² Hal Puthoff,¹⁰³ Harald Walach,¹³³ Roger Nelson,¹³⁴, ¹³⁵ York Dobyns,¹³⁶ Marilyn Schlitz,¹³⁷ William Braud,¹³⁷ Lynn McTaggart,¹³⁸ and Rupert Sheldrake¹³⁹; psychologists Edward Kelly et al,¹¹⁵ Etzel Cardeña et al,¹²⁴ Bernard Grad,¹⁴⁰, ¹⁴¹ Karen T. Lesniak,¹⁴² Jeanne Achterberg,¹⁴³ Leanna Standish,¹⁴⁴, ¹⁴⁵ and Lawrence LeShan¹⁴⁶; molecular and cell biologist Gloria A. Gronowicz¹⁴⁷; sociologists William Bengston¹⁴⁸ and Daryl Bem¹⁴⁹; neuropsychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell¹⁵⁰; and physicians Wayne Jonas,¹⁵¹ Daniel Benor,¹⁵² Robert S. Bobrow,¹⁵³ and Larry Dossey,¹⁶, ¹⁵⁴ and many others not mentioned for reasons of space.

Critics seldom acknowledge the generally high quality of the research in parapsychology. No other experimental discipline comes close to parapsychology in the use of blind or double-blind methodologies. In a 1999 review by Sheldrake, the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry were found to employ blind or double-blind methods in zero percent of papers published in professional journals; in the biological sciences, the comparable figure was 0.8%, in the medical sciences, 24.2%, and in parapsychology, 85.2%.¹⁵⁵

There is evidence that the opposition within science toward psi, and toward the sense of connectedness and unity felt by today's youngsters that often accompanies these experiences, may be abating. In a survey of more than 1,100 college professors in the United States, 55% of natural scientists, 66% of social scientists (not including psychologists), and 77% of academics in the arts, humanities, and education, said they believe that psi is either an established fact or a likely possibility. Psychologists, it seems, are still largely holdouts. The comparable figure for them was only 34%. Moreover, the same percentage of psychologists—34% —declared psi to be a frank impossibility, a view shared by only 2% of all other college professors.¹⁴⁹ Meteoritic thinking endures.

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Humility 

Science is the most powerful arbiter of truth in the modern world. Any individual, organization, or profession that desires respect must first establish its scientific credibility. There are excellent reasons for the elevated status of science. When we compare the lot of individuals in the developed world with the daily grind of the inhabitants of the prescientific era, it is little wonder that many persons feel a sense of adoration toward science because of the ways it has transformed our lives.

But science giveth and science taketh away. As Nobelist Eccles and Daniel N. Robinson observe,

[S]cience has gone too far in breaking down man's belief in his spiritual greatness … and has given him the belief that he is merely an insignificant animal that has arisen by chance and necessity in an insignificant planet lost in the great cosmic immensity … .¹⁵⁶

The problem with this dismal point of view is that it is mere opinion masquerading as incontrovertible science. The antidote is humility, honesty, and the willingness to admit ignorance. Unfortunately these qualities are in short supply in many areas of science. As Eccles and Robinson state,

The principal trouble with mankind today is that the intellectual leaders are too arrogant in their self-sufficiency. We must realize the great unknowns in the material makeup and operation of our brains, in the relationship of brain to mind, in our creative imagination, and in the uniqueness of the psyche. When we think of these unknowns as well as the unknown of how we come to be in the first place, we should be much more humble [emphasis in original].¹⁵⁶

Some very great scientists have not hesitated to acknowledge ignorance within science. Among them was Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, the famous British astrophysicist. In speaking of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, he said, “Something unknown is doing we don't know what”¹⁵⁷—a maxim that should be widely and humbly applied in many areas of science, but seldom is.

Humility in science involves “the preservation of an open mind toward the opinions and facts provided by others, a capacity for self-criticism, [and] a lack of proprietary feeling towards one's pet theories and precepts.”¹⁵⁸ Humility also involves the recognition that there are limits to what we can understand. As the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane put it, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”¹⁵⁹ William James, the father of American psychology, once said that, just as our pet dogs and cats walk in and out of our libraries without an inkling of the content of the books on the shelves, we too remain unaware of “the wider life of things.”¹⁶⁰ Admitting that our mental firepower is limited is not an admission of weakness or defeat, but a recognition that can help prevent hubris. As Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet advised, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”¹⁶¹

The kind of humility I have in mind is not degrading or self-abasing, but simply the recognition of limitations. Nobel physicist Richard Feynman embodied this ideal, even though he towered above most of his colleagues. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II, speaking of Feynman's status among the physicists at Los Alamos, said, “He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this.”¹⁶² In spite of such encomiums, Feynman kept his feet on the ground. “I want to maintain,” he said, “… that it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”¹⁶³ Feynman turned down honorary degrees.¹⁶⁴ He became so exasperated toward the National Academy of Sciences that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding whom to let in.¹⁶⁵ Humility seemed to run in the family. In 1979, when Omni magazine named her son the smartest man in the world, his feisty mother, Lucille Feynman, said, “If that's the world's smartest man, God help us.”¹⁶⁶

Limitations are seldom hinted at when kids are introduced to science as preteens or teenagers. They encounter lectures and demonstrations designed to show the impressive regularities of classical, Newtonian science. This creates the impression that everything is knowable in principle. This can contribute to a bloated image of what science is capable of, and eventually to a science-will-save-us outlook—that medical science will one day cure all illness and extend life indefinitely; or that scientists will eventually discover how to reverse the excesses of modern life, such as our overheated atmosphere and the pollution of our air, soil and water; or that TOEs—theories of everything—are just around the corner; or that paradise on earth is not a fantasy, but only a matter of more funding, manpower, and time.

When science discards humility, forgets its limitations, gets ahead of itself, and claims more than it can prove—when its reach exceeds its grasp—the damage to its reputation can be devastating. A sobering reminder is the scandal that erupted in November 2009, when a large stash of hacked e-mails to and from various researchers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia wound up on the Web. Although skeptics of man-made climate change took many comments out of context, the messages nonetheless appeared to indicate a willingness to exaggerate empirical findings in order to shape public and political opinion. The scientific community overnight had egg on its face, in spite of the fact that the overall pattern of evidence supporting human-fueled global warming had not changed. Climate-change skeptics charged that scientific inquiry had spiraled into political activism, and that nothing the scientists now say can be trusted. In spite of the fact that the director of the East Anglia research unit was exonerated by an investigation by the British House of Commons,¹⁶⁷ the skeptics remain in full cry; there are nearly two million Web sites devoted to “Climategate.” Politicians who are climate-change deniers are delighted. The fracas has provided them with an excuse not to take steps to reduce carbon emissions.¹⁶⁸

In a review of the incident, the conservative British magazine The Economist said, “[T]he scientists' shameful mistakes have certainly changed perceptions. They have not, however, changed the science itself … . With climate change you do not need to invent things; the truth, even with all those uncertainties and caveats, is scary enough.”¹⁶⁹ Why did the scientists do it? They surely realized, as The Economist pointed out, that, “[T]he ambiguities of science sit uncomfortably with the demands of politics. Politicians, and the voters who elect them, are more comfortable with certainty. So ‘six months to save the planet’ is more likely to garner support than ‘there is a high probability—though not by any means a certainty—that serious climate change could damage the biosphere, depending on levels of economic growth, population growth and innovation.' ”¹⁶⁹ So the climate scientists decided to borrow from the playbook of politicians, which is to simplify and exaggerate. Following the e-mail disclosures, the general consilience of the scientists' data, theory, and modeling, and the way their different arguments and datasets tend to reinforce each other, have been ignored. They profoundly miscalculated, and all of science suffered.

Ignoring limitations can lead to serious consequences, particularly in health. An example is the widespread attitude toward cardiovascular surgery. Coronary artery bypass surgery, angioplasty, and stents are seen as solutions to heart disease by many, who assume that these therapies will automatically be there when they need them. Yet these advances, marvelous though they are, have never cured a case of heart disease; they are stopgap measures of limited effectiveness. Failure to understand these limitations entices many people to ignore preventive measures and self-responsibility in avoiding heart disease in the first place. Similar patterns are found in the obesity epidemic. Why go to the trouble of eating wisely if one can have gastric bypass surgery? A few years ago, this procedure was considered radical, risky, and a last resort. Now it's seen as trivial and trendy, on the order of a tummy tuck or a facelift, although the risks and side effects remain.

Kids should be awed by science, and they should be optimistic about what science can do. But what if they were told from the beginning that science cannot do everything? What if humility and modesty were presented as important ingredients in how scientists do their work? What if science teachers said to youngsters, “Science is cool, but it has limits. No scientist can restore whales, tigers, or redwoods once they have been exterminated.” This might help create an enduring ethic of self-responsibility and stewardship toward the natural world. It might stem the arrogance and hubris through which science often becomes meddlesome.

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Countdown 

The public, like our kids, is increasingly unimpressed with the scorecard of science. Public pride in the nation's scientific achievements “fell off a cliff” during the past decade, says a recent appraisal of a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press.¹⁷⁰, ¹⁷¹ In May 1999, 47% of citizens who make their living outside of laboratories ranked scientific and medical advances among America's greatest achievements. By 2009, however, the pollsters found that only 27% said that science and technology rank among the United States' greatest achievements of the past 50 years. What do scientists think about this trend? Eighty-five percent of the scientists surveyed blamed public ignorance about science for this low opinion. Half the scientists blamed the public for expecting unrealistically quick solutions to problems. Seventy-six percent of the scientists faulted the news media for shoddy coverage of scientific accomplishments. One microbiologist summed up the situation, saying, “I feel that science education in this country is in a terrible state, particularly post-elementary education. Something is happening between grade school and junior high school where our kids are losing interest in science or their teachers are not inspiring them.”¹⁷⁰ So the scientists blamed the public, the media, and the schools. They did not entertain the possibility that science itself might be partly to blame for the dismal ratings.

“For most scientists,” writes physicist James Trefil, “the goal of general education in science is to turn out a miniature scientist, someone who can do, at some level, the kinds of things that professional scientists do. They would agree with Nobel laureate Carl Wieman when he said, ‘We want them to think like us.'”¹⁷² But most of today's plugged-in youngsters don't want to be miniature scientists, and many, on learning how scientists think, aren't particularly fond of what they see. Some science educators suggest that the problem is so intractable that there must be something wrong with the kids. The response of many educators is to modernize current instructional methods to make science more appealing to a high-tech generation of youngsters. But it is not enough to tinker with how the same science can be presented in a more alluring way. This is not a matter of window dressing.

I have tried to show that an intrinsic connectedness is a legitimate part of the modern scientific perspective, and that today's kids sense this oneness intuitively and are behaving accordingly. Unless the collaborative, cooperative, and empathic side of science is included in the educational outreach of the scientific community, we may fail to attract enough talented scientists from among the young, for whom a networked, embedded relationship with the world is central. To avoid this, science educators need to reshape the way science is perceived by this generation of youngsters, because the wonders-of-science pitch no longer sells.

Fundamental problems are being ignored and must be confronted. These involve the perceived paternalism, arrogance, dogmatism, and gender bias of science; the recklessness and destructive downsides of science and technology; the narrow attitude of conventional science toward the nature of consciousness; the role of human participation in the elaboration of perceived reality; the implacable, irrational resistance of science toward the evidence favoring consciousness-mediated psi experiences; and, in my profession, the neglect of the central role of meaning, will, intention, and learning in the prevention and treatment of illness and the maintenance of health.

Some will continue to deny the evidence supporting these assertions, in the tradition of the French Academy's dogmatic denial of meteorites. Others will consider them valid but trivial, irrelevant, or tangential to the problems at hand. Many will argue that these issues are too abstract and complex to interest youngsters, and are more appropriately introduced at the university level, if at all.

Notwithstanding these objections, there is no defense for imprisoning our kids in Galileo's world, in which they are passive bystanders, not active participants. We've substituted their brains for their minds, and in the process have created casualties of their free will and meanings. We've foisted off responsibility for the colossal global messes to which science has contributed, and which our children realize they will inherit, onto technologists and politicians. And in spite of all this, scientists and science educators often appear clueless why our kids no longer adore science as earlier generations did. If advice were limited to two words, they would have to be, “Wake up.”

Although we boast to youngsters of the marvels of science, we've kept some of the greatest wonders under wraps. The wrapping needs to be stripped away and the truly majestic findings exposed. Why not stimulate their imagination, which Einstein said is more important than knowledge, with the neglected phenomena we've addressed?¹⁷³ Hiding behind the excuse that our kids aren't equal to these insights is obfuscation. And it's bad science to boot. As quantum theorist Henry P. Stapp of the University of California-Berkeley says, “The progress of science is inhibited by imbuing young minds with an incorrect idea of the nature of reality, and the pernicious philosophical idea that man is made of classically conceived matter is not exposed as being incompatible with the empirical facts.”¹⁷⁴ Until and unless we let our kids in on these matters, “science education” will remain largely an oxymoron, and kids will continue to fall prey to unremitting boredom and disinterest instead of being awed by the way the world works.

It can be revealing simply to listen to what young students have to say about these matters. For many years I've kept a file I call “The Letter,” in which I save the written communication and e-mails I've received from premed and medical students over the years.¹⁷⁵ There is a common theme among them. They describe how the student is dissatisfied with the overwhelmingly materialistic, physically oriented educational system he or she is in. Can I suggest a medical school where a broader view is supported? Where faculty members understand and address the evidence for the role of meaning and mind-mediated effects in healing? They can't understand why their current program is a virtual blackout toward evidence they've read about on their own, such as mind-body interactions, remote healing,¹⁵¹, ¹⁵² presentiment,^{114(pp161-180)} precognition,^16(pp61-100) telesomatic events,¹⁷⁶ remote viewing,^{104(pp149-191)} mind-machine interactions,^{114(pp146-160),177} and other phenomena that are relevant to clinical outcomes and to a career in healing. Some of these students are desperate. They say they'll do anything, even attempt a transfer to a different medical school, if that's what it takes to find an institution that honors the approaches they believe are vital to their chosen profession.

This IDS—information deprivation syndrome—begins early, as soon as science is introduced to children, and it becomes progressively acute as students ascend the science ladder. It could so easily be otherwise, particularly in the critical years when kids are first introduced to science. The creativity of science educators at this level is extraordinary, and a variety of tools are already at hand to deliver the messages we've addressed. Particularly promising are Internet sites that offer unlimited flexibility, such as Cool Science for Curious Kids,¹⁷⁸ Physics 4 Kids,¹⁷⁹ and Science News for Kids.¹⁸⁰ Several books and recordings have made an admirable beginning in revealing the quantum-relativistic world to youngsters, such as Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest,¹⁸¹ The New World of Mr. Tompkins,¹⁸² and Dr Quantum Presents: A User's Guide to the Universe.¹⁸³ The creativity continues. For example, Stephen Hawking, arguably the most famous living scientist, and his daughter Lucy Hawking have begun packaging the universe for children by writing science books for kids, such as George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt.¹⁸⁴, ¹⁸⁵

Much is at stake. The realization that we are in serious jeopardy as a species is growing worldwide. The challenges we face are well known¹⁸⁶; I will not repeat them here. Our success in dealing with these problems is inextricably linked to whether we remain wedded to old science, or whether we make the leap to a new science and the empathic urge with which it is intertwined. These decisions will strongly influence the number and kind of scientists we attract from the ranks of the young and will be a key determinant of our future.

Jeremy Rifkin shares these concerns, and he sees our evolution toward empathic consciousness as a remedy to the problems we face. Since I have relied on his observations frequently, I shall give him the final word:

At some critical point, the realization will set in that we share a common planet, that we are all affected, and that our neighbors' suffering is not unlike our own. At that juncture recriminations and retributions will be of little avail in addressing the enormity of the crisis at hand. Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future. This will require a biosphere consciousness.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. We are fast extending our empathic embrace to the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the planet.^2(p616)

But will we do it in time?

—Larry Dossey, MD

Executive Editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing

Author of The Science of Premonitions

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