There is increasing awareness that our society is approaching a "turning point" (Capra 1982), a shift away from the mechanistic worldview of classical physics. The emergence of modern physics in the 20th century triggered a revolution in thinking which initiated a fundamental paradigm shift in our understanding of the nature of matter and its relation to the human mind and heralded the emergence of new forms of cultural integration. The proposed "deep science", which integrates spiritual modes of knowing with scientific empiricism, can produce a more balanced, ecological vision of the cosmos.
We live in a culture whose understanding of life, consciousness, and human affairs has been rooted for centuries in the worldview of classical physics, which describes the cosmos as a vast machine. Whitehead (1925) explains that "the mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question. The various human interests which suggest cosmologies, and are also influenced by them, are science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion? (A person's) effective outlook will be the joint production from these sources. But each age has its dominant preoccupation, and in the last three centuries the cosmology derived from science has been asserting itself at the expense of older points of view with their origins elsewhere."
The rise of classical science during the past two centuries has given rise to many benefits for mankind, including the value system of the Enlightenment and the technology of the Industrial Revolution. In the eyes of many scholars (including Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, and Ken Wilber) the essence of modernity is characterized by what Max Weber calls "the differentiation of the cultural value spheres", referring to the differentiation of art, religion, politics, and science (Wilber, 1998). Science, politics, and art were free to evolve independently without interference from religion. Scientists, philosophers, and artists could no longer be tried for treason and heresy if their views contradicted the doctrines of the established religion. The separation of church and state fostered the emergence of representational democracies. According to Ken Wilber (1998, p. 52), "liberal democracy, equality, freedom, feminism, the ecological sciences, the abolition of slavery, extraordinary medical advances, modern physics- all of these rest, in whole or part, on the differentiation of expressive-aesthetics, legal-morals, and empirical-science".
This essential differentiation, however, eventually (by the end of the eighteenth century) developed into a "pathological dissociation". Wilber (1998 p. 56) notes that "within a mere century, monological science- variously including positivism, empiric-analytic reason, dynamic process theory, systems theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, and technological modes of knowing- would completely dominate serious discourse in the Western world... The entire interior dimensions- of morals, artistic expression, introspection, spirituality, contemplative awareness, meaning and value and intentionality- were dismissed by monological science because none of them could be registered by the eye of the flesh or empirical instruments." Physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg (Heisenberg, 1958; Wilber, 1984) explains that "modern science, in its beginnings, was characterized by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of those limitation. This modesty was largely lost during the nineteenth century. Physical knowledge was considered to make assertions about nature as a whole. Physics wished to turn philosopher, and the demand was voiced from many quarters that all true philosophers must be scientific."
There is increasing awareness that our society is approaching a "turning point", a shift away from the mechanistic worldview of classical physics. Pitirim Sorokin, "the world's greatest sociologist" (Zimmerman, 1968), has characterized social dynamics in terms of the cyclical waxing and waning of two basic value systems that underlie all manifestations of a culture, which he calls the sensate and the ideational (Sorokin, 1941, 1957). The sensate value system, characteristic of scientific materialism, views matter alone as the ultimate reality, all ethical values as relative, and sensory perception as the only source of knowledge and truth. The ideational value system holds that ultimate reality lies beyond the material world in a spiritual realm, that ethics, truth, and beauty are expressions or reflections of attributes of this transcendent reality, and that knowledge may be obtained through inner experience. "We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long sensate day? The present crisis represents only a disintegration of the Sensate from of Western society and culture, to be followed by a new integration as notable in its own way as was the sensate form in the days of its glory and climax" (Sorokin 1941).
Sorokin's tremendously detailed analysis indicates that, since the dawn of history, western culture has fluctuated between sensate or ideational phases. In each of these phases, generally lasting for several centuries, one of the two value systems dominates in most aspects of human culture. He also notes that during the transition phase between predominately sensate and predominately ideational cultures, which is typically a chaotic period characterized by an increase in violence and cultural upheaval, there may arise a third phase, which he calls "idealistic". The idealist phase represents the harmonic balance of the sensate and ideational, the blossoming of human culture in the harmonious balance of opposites- inner and outer, material and spiritual, relative and absolute.
The twentieth century has seen beginnings of the decline of sensate culture. In Sorokin's analysis, our current cultural upheavals can be viewed as symptoms of this cultural transformation. The shift from sensate/materialistic to ideational/idealist worldview is evidenced -in addition to the multitude of cultural factors analyzed by Sorokin- in the transition from classical to modern physics. In the eyes of the vast majority of the dozen of so scientific pioneers responsible for the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory, modern physics has dealt a death blow to the sensate worldview (i.e. scientific materialism). These scientists were united in the belief that, at the most fundamental level, the basic "substance" of the cosmos is not material particles but a form of mind or spirit that includes consciousness as an elemental attribute (Wilber, 1984). They have stressed the importance of transrational experience in the formation of our "pre-analytic vision", our perceptual filters and conceptual constructs which largely determine our worldview. The following sections examine some of the aspects of this cultural transformation which may contribute to the emergence of an ecological worldview.
The emergence of modern physics in the 20th century triggered a revolution in thinking which initiated a fundamental paradigm shift in our understanding of the nature of matter and its relation to the human mind (Kafatos & Nadeau, 2000; Capra, 1982, 1996, 2000) and heralded the transition from sensate to idealistic culture. In the face of the inscrutable mysteries of the atomic and subatomic world, physicists came to the realization that their basic concepts, language, and pre-analytic vision were inadequate for understanding the implications of their experimental results. Physicist Sir James Jeans (Jeans, 1931; Wilber, 1984) summarizes this new understanding: "All the pictures which science now draws of nature are mathematical pictures... They are nothing more then pictures fictions if you like, if by fiction you mean that science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality. Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the most outstanding achievement of 20th century physics... is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality. We are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall."
In the view of physicist and Noble laureate Erwin Schrodinger (Schrodinger , 1964; Wilber, 1984, p. 81) "the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to out heart, that really matters to us? we do not belong to the material world the science constructs for us". Schrodinger asserts that we lie outside of the scientific picture of the world; we only think we belong to it because our bodies are in it. Physicist and philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington (Eddington, 1929; Wilber, 1984) asserts that the business of science is to "study the linkage of pointer readings with pointer readings". Science has nothing to say regarding the intrinsic/essential nature of its objects of study. In the words of Ken Wilber (1998 p. 56), "the language of science is only an "it-language, with no conscious, no interiors, no values, no meaning, no depth, and no Divinity".
Numerous contemporary physicists and philosophers (Bohm, 1982; Kafatos et. al., 2000; Harris, 1988; Laszlo, 1995, 1999), in an attempt to develop a worldview that is consistent with the modern understanding of the nature of matter and energy, have converged on a view of the universe that is fundamentally holistic. In this view the essential nature of the universe is unbroken wholeness, and that "ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order". Kafatous & Nadeau (2000) explain that "the whole whose existence is inferred in experiments testing Bells' theorem cannot be fully disclosed or described by physical theory and that the parts exist in some sense within this whole? we are confronted with a fundamental reality that exists completely outside the domain of physics." Moreover, this holism is not simply referring to a network of external relationships; the unbroken wholeness is reflected in the fundamental "internal" nature of each entity. Bohm (1987) emphasizes that "the dynamic activity - internal and external - which is fundamental to what each part is, is based on its enfoldment of all the rest, including the whole universe? each part is in a fundamental sense internally related in its basic activities to the whole and to all the other parts" (p. 12). In this interpretation of quantum mechanics, each quantum of "explicate" space-time emerges from a vast, unmanifest whole or "implicate order".
These physicists and philosophers have suggested that life and consciousness should be viewed as grounded in the whole rather then the parts. Bohm has proposed that consciousness be viewed as a fundamental aspect of the "holomovement", i.e. the dynamics of the implicate order. In this context, individual consciousness can be viewed as a manifestation of the universal consciousness, and evolution can be seen as a creative process of progressive manifestation of the attributes of universal consciousness in the form of life and mind. Since human consciousness is the most fully articulated expression of universal consciousness, Kafatous & Nadeau (2000), following Harris (1988), have suggested that. "human consciousness may fold within itself the fundamental logical principle of the conscious universe".
These scientists observe that the fact that this whole cannot be a direct object of scientific inquiry or knowledge "does not mean that science invalidates the prospect that we can apprehend this wholeness on a level that is prior to conscious constructs", i.e. through spiritual experiences which involve "acts of communion with the whole" (p. 159). Although scientific knowledge allows us to infer the existence of the single significant whole, it cannot fully affirm or prove its existence. However, if these scientists are correct in asserting that human consciousness may fold within itself the fundamental logical principle of the conscious universe, then the attributes of this whole may be apprehended through a form of inner "knowledge-by-identity"i. Integrating these spiritual modes of knowing with scientific empiricism can produce a more balanced, ecological vision of the cosmos.
The biologist E.O. Wilson has attempted to develop a comprehensive ecological vision grounded in the mainstream scientific materialist paradigm, which he describes in his book On Human Nature (Wilson, 1978). This effort illustrates the problems inherent in deriving an ecological ethic from a sensate worldview. Since the scientific materialist paradigm dismisses religion and spirituality as cultural artifacts, Wilson immediately encounters the dilemma that "the human species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature" (p.3). He observes that "the danger implicit in the first dilemma is the rapid dissolution of transcendental goals toward which society can organize their energies" (p. 3). As a solution he suggests replacing these "transcendental goals", which throughout human history have been provided by the world's spiritual traditions, by a new morality based upon scientific materialism. To develop this new worldview we should "dissect the machinery of the mind and retrace its evolutionary history".
This approach leads us, as Wilson point out, to a second dilemma, "which is the choice that must be made among the ethical premises inherent in man's biological nature? We must consciously choose among the alternative emotional guides we have inherited" (p. 196). We are forced to choose between value systems that developed through a blind and irrational process of evolution over ages now long vanished. Daly and Cobb (1989), in discussing these dilemmas, pose the question: "If there is no transcendental source of value ? then to what, besides chance or whim, can one appeal in choosing how to remake human nature?" They go on to conclude that there are two alternatives: "affirm transcendental value as a reality to which we can turn for guidance, or affirm the nihilism implicit in scientific materialism and give up all claim to truth or righteousness". Einstein expressed a similar conclusion decades earlier, saying that scientific knowledge "of what is does not open the door directly to what should be". It is impossible to deduct from this knowledge "what should be the goal of our human aspirations? the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source". He referred to this "other source" as "cosmic religious feeling" (Einstein, 1954; Wilber, 1984).
Daly and Cobb (1989) advocate a faith-based, ideational approach rooted in the Christian prophetic tradition which addresses the major problems that plague Wilson's sensate approach. However, attempting to ground an ecological vision in religious doctrine suffers from the following difficulties:
In order to avoid exacerbating the fragmentation caused by religious differences and distinctions, an integrative ecological worldview should be grounded in a universal vision that encompasses all major religions. In this case, various culturally specific expressions (rooted in the specific faith traditions) can be viewed as instantiations of a single inclusive vision rather then separate competing worldviews.
Religious doctrines admit multiple interpretations. The Christian scriptures have often been (mis)interpreted to endorse environmental destruction.
Post-Kantian science and philosophy (justifiably) demand that our truth claims be empirically grounded.
This paper asserts that the problems inherent in the sensate and ideational approaches are resolved by an idealist approach which espouses a spiritual worldview grounded in spiritual experience. In the words of Carl Jung (1958), "belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace can depart equally miraculously." The world's contemplatives, i.e. those most deeply immersed in the experiential aspects of spirituality, have traditionally been the strongest advocates of the unity of spiritual ideals across the various religions (Inayat Kahn, 1979; Underhill, 1974). They have often stressed that deep understanding of the world's scriptures requires a certain degree of inner (contemplative) experience. Without this deeper level of understanding, scriptures tend to be interpreted based on the personal desires and opinions of the reader. Other papers will explore this experiential approach to spirituality, including its relationship to science and its role in supporting the emerging ecological paradigm.
i As physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1929) explains, "it is by looking into our own nature that we first discover the failure of the physical universe to be co-extensive with our experience of reality. In our own nature, or through the contact of our consciousness with a nature transcending ours, there are other things which claim the same kind of recognition- a sense of beauty, of morality, and finally, the root of all spiritual religion, an experience which we describe as the presence of God. It is the essence of religion that it presents this side of experience as a matter of everyday life. To live in it, we have to grasp it in the form of familiar recognition and not as a series of abstract scientific statements."